Earth Fathers Are Weird, chapter 7 (Patreon)

Max stared at the holographic image of his gut. Or more precisely, he stared at the three blobbish forms that lit up a bright white on the scan. Triplets. He was carrying triplets. Fucking aliens. Max had grown to accept many things about aliens. They were illogical. Their ships were claustrophobic. They had a bad habit of putting tentacles where tentacles shouldn't be. But this was the peak of the creepy mountain. He had baby aliens in his gut.

“Offspring difficulty moving.” Rick hovered one of his tentacles near the largest of the three white blobs. The image enlarged, and Max got his first view of the actual alien child. He had his big head pointed up, but only a couple of his short, stubby tentacles pointed down. The rest were shoved in there next to his head, and as Max watched, the offspring wiggled, struggling to get a tentacle free. At the same time, a horrible cranium nearly doubled Max over. He drew his knees up and groaned. “Oh God. Oh God. That does not feel good.”

“Offspring turning. Offspring choice for making turn poor.”

Max corrected him. “Your offspring is making a poor choice. I agree with that.” Max took a deep breath as the pain faded. “He does not have room to be doing yoga.” Max wasn’t sure he had room to breathe, not that breathing would be a good choice for a creature living in someone’s intestines.

As Max watched the screen, one of the largest tentacles finally slipped free and eased down into the intestine under the head. Max collapsed back against the bed. “Okay. We need to talk about the word nanny.”

“You nanny in return for compensation,” Rick said quickly.

Max stared at the boring ceiling. That was much better than watching the alien lifeform on the scanner. He hadn’t grown into his tentacles yet, so he was all head and eyes. If the thing were anywhere other than Max’s lower intestinal tract, he would definitely call it cute. “This is not nanny. Nanny is protecting offspring after they are born.”

Rick was silent for a long time before he said, “Query. Born?”

“Born. Clarification. Outside another’s body. Free in the world. Biologically independent.” Max was going to spend considerable time in the clarification program making sure this mistake never, ever happened again.

Max is tentacles drew up. “You nanny for compensation,” he repeated.

Max groaned as a smaller cramp rolled through him. Two more small tentacles slip free of the cramped space up by the alien head. Now that the largest tentacle was free, apparently the kid was going to go back to causing normal cramps. Normal. Max needed his head examined if he thought any of this was normal. Actually, he probably did need a good examination and a short commitment to a nice place in the country for a “rest.”

“Offspring outside is a nanny. Offspring inside is surrogate,” Max explained in the simplest terms possible.

“Query. Surrogate?”

“This.” Max pointed to his belly and then he pointed to the bright image of the largest of the three children. “This is surrogacy. Your genetic offspring inside my body. Surrogate.”

Rick’s tentacles quivered and then drew up closer to his head/body. “Query. Correlation nanny and surrogate?”

“No correlation,” Max answered firmly.  If anything, he would think that a nanny wouldn’t want to surrogate because she would want to be involved with a child she gave birth to. But what the hell did Max know. Dark laughter bubbled up when he considered his last Facebook fight with this father. His father was ranting about some new court decision that had made abortion easier, and Max had told him that neither of them got to have an opinion on the matter until they got pregnant. That logic had gone in a completely unexpected direction now.

Rick's tentacles drew up even farther. The smallest ones are now like little balls of tentacle with tiny suction cup fingers undulating madly. Max was fairly sure that meant he had an unhappy tentacle monster on his hands. Too fucking bad. If Max was going to be unhappy, he was going to share his general state of unhappiness, and right now Rick was the only person he could inflict misery on.

He couldn’t even go grab a beer and complain with his friends. His friends. Max couldn't imagine what his friends would say. Hey guys, guess what? I got knocked up by a tentacle monster! Yeah, that would go over great. Only about half of Max's friends even knew he was gay. If Max hadn't been gay, that exam might've been even more awkward. At least Max got to enjoy it. 

Suddenly all of his guilt over turning Rick's medical exam into a sexual encounter vanished. If Rick could run around shoving his offspring into other people, Max could be a pervert who turned a medical exam into sex. He was okay with that. He was just not okay with sex leading to pregnancy. That was something straight people had to deal with, not him.

“Query. Surrogate for compensation?” Rick's tentacles were still all little balls of unhappy wiggly fingers.

“Well clearly I am,” Max said dryly. He could imagine the porn this even would inspire if anyone found out about it. “I can't say I'm happy about it. How soon are they going to come out?”

Rick hesitated. “Query. Remove offspring?”

Hope blossomed. “You can remove the offspring?”

Rick just stared at him.

With a frustrated sigh, Max rephrased his question. “Query. Can you remove offspring?”

“Yes.”

That was rather literal. Max felt like he was having a conversation with his ninth grade English teacher who refused to let anyone use the bathroom unless they said, may I instead of can I.

“Query. Will you remove offspring?”

For several minutes, Rick did not answer. That was Max's first indication that something was wrong. Usually, Rick enjoyed conversations, even when he did not understand what they were saying. He was a laid-back guy that way. Max frowned. Wait. Rick wasn't laid-back. He was overprotective. The fucker was keeping track of Max because Max was pregnant with his children. Max had a moment where his brain reassembled itself a little, and when it was done, he liked Rick just a little bit less.

“Answer. I can,” Rick finally said.

He could, but he wasn't offering to. Max was not a stupid man, and he was starting to make a few connections.

He sat up. “Query. Can offspring come out?”

Rick turned to the hatch that Max associated with medical equipment. “Answer. Yes. No damage to Max.” Rick had retreated to a formality and simplicity in language that the translator could handle. No temporary failures and whale song or belches. Just simple fact.

“Query. Damage to children?” Max asked.

Rick turned and he had a silver and blue tennis racket looking thing in his hand. Rick walked over to the active scanner image and used a tentacle to poke right in the middle of the tiny gymnast octopus currently trying to do somersaults in Max's gut.

“Likely to survive. Might not.” That had come with a number of whistle sounds the translator missed.

“Query. Will the other two survive?” Max was starting to get a horrible feeling in his gut. Normally he only felt this bad when he did overnight marathons of horror movies and nacho cheese dip.

“Clarification. Smaller two offspring…” The translator failed again, but Max was a bright guy. He got what Rick was trying to say.

Max hated the way he felt, he didn't want alien in his gut, but he didn’t want those lives gone because a fucking computer mistranslated nanny and Rick didn’t keep his tentatcles to himself. Max gripped the edge of the medbay bed so hard that his forearms started to tremble from fatigue. He assumed Rick felt equally bad because most of his tentacles were still drawn up tight. The whole of his walking tentacle was visible in its pale fleshy color. A hint of the orange-red backside showed on one side. Max looked at that rather than the silver instrument in one of the few tentacles that wasn’t pulled up tight.

After a painfully long silence, Rick asked, “Query. Remove all I offspring now?”

Rick opened his mouth, but words didn't come out. What he wanted for that was for there not to be offspring in him at all. He didn't want to be the cause of Rick's triplets dying. And he had no doubt that Rick never would have put triplets in him except that he believed he had permission. But he didn't. 

And that's where Max's brain started spinning in a circle. His brain and Rick's oldest child were apparently equally fond of spinning and turning in spaces that were far too small for that. Rick inched closer with that silver instrument, and Max scooted backwards without making a conscious choice.

“I can't do this,” Max said softly.

“Understood. Removal of children is optimal.” Despite his words, Rick's tentacles were still balled up tightly and his fingers waved like leaves in a high wind. Correction, in a hurricane.

When Rick reached out a tentacle, Max slid off the far side of the table. No. I mean I can't do this now. I can't make this decision now. Max didn't have the words to explain what was going on in his head. Hell, even if he had had another English speaker in the room, he still wouldn't have the words. It would take a team of psychiatrists to drag anything coherent out of his brain. So instead, Max turned and fled from the room. His last vision on the medical scanner was of the largest offspring, slipping two more tentacles free. 

Instead of going back to his quarters, Max headed for a small compartment with all-empty hatches. Max had found it early in his explorations, and he liked the small hatch that led up into what was obviously a repair shaft. Rick was large, and Max hoped he couldn’t fit into the narrow passage. As an octopus-looking thing, he could probably squeeze himself into impossible shapes, but right now Max wanted the illusion of privacy.

So he climbed the peg ladder into the space and ignored the possibility that Rick could reach him or use the ship scanners to find him. The military was far too frugal to install internal sensors with the ability to track individuals, and Max hoped aliens had the same streak of cheap.

When he reached the first junction, he scooted around and let his legs dangle over the edge. The other possibility was that this was some sort of venting system and Max was exposing himself to alien radiation, but he didn’t worry about that too much now. If this were dangerous, Rick would have stopped him.

Fuck. 

And Max was starting to think of Rick as a friend, a lonely alien bachelor whose mate had taken off with the kids. He was an idiot. Officially.

Max leaned against the side of the shaft and rested his hand over the area where he kept getting cramps. “It was you the whole time. You think you’re Kohei Uchimura in there, don’t you?” Max asked. “Well he had an Olympic mat for his routine. You need to stop your tumbling routine in my gut, you little monster,” Max said as he rubbed his side.

“Besides, your tentacles are way too short to be a Kohei. You are going to have to grow into them if you want to look like your daddy when you grow up.”

Max frowned. If Rick was the dad, where was the mom? Maybe he was being too Earth-centric in his thinking, but he assumed complex creature needed sexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction was nature's form of cloning which would not allow adaptation. At least that's what Max had learned in his biology courses in school, not that his biology teachers had a whole lot of experience with tentacle monsters. So maybe he should just stop trying to assume he understood anything. Clearly he didn't understand the word nanny.

Another cramp hit, but Kohei had clearly gotten most of his tentacles free because it was a small one that Max would have dismissed as gas a few hours ago. Hell, he had been dismissing it as gas. “Will your siblings get this active or are you the pushy one?” Max’s mother always talked about how much easier her second pregnancy had been because Max had turned and stretched and rammed his head into her cervix and given her false labor pains and generally made her life a living horror.

Personally Max didn’t think he should pay for anything pre-birth him did, but she still sometimes brought it up when she was annoyed with him. “Don’t you even start,” she’d say. “You’ve been giving me grief since you were six months in the womb and you started head butting my cervix.”

Max wondered if he would see her again. As a realist, he knew that four years was a long time. And now that Max knew that Rick wanted him for a surrogate, it wasn’t likely this job would last that long. So his dream of getting a ticket home was just that… a dream. He would provide Rick with three offspring and then Rick would drop him off on the next planet. 

He wondered if he would rate a social worker the second time around. 

“I don’t blame you for this,” he told all three offspring as he rubbed his stomach, “but this situation really sucks. And I can’t blame your father. He’s a pretty decent guy, and he clearly loves the hell out of you three. He hovers over me like an umbrella every time I do anything physical.” Weirdly, a jab of jealousy stabbed him. 

“I should be the adult and go talk to him.” Instead Max sat in the shaft and stared at nothing. He couldn’t gather the energy for anything else.