Earth Fathers are Weird, chapter 8 (Patreon)

After an hour of staring at a computer that kept screeching for attention when Max didn’t answer translation questions, Max gave up and headed for the swimming room. Rick had been so insistent that swimming was healthy. That should have been some sort of sign, but no. Max had just assumed that Rick wanted to be helpful.

Helpful like shoving his baby-making tentacle up Max’s ass. Max wasn’t particularly body-conscious, but as he stripped out of his clothes, he ran a hand over his stomach. He could feel the slight bulge where Kohei was hiding. “If you hadn’t tried to do summersaults, who knows how long it would have taken me to figure this out.” Too damn long.

Max slipped into the water, shivering at the cold before swimming toward the tiny water circulation islands where he could swim without getting hypothermia.  Max was still swimming an hour or so later when Rick slipped into the room and hovered near the door. If Max were mature, he would swim over and have an adult conversation with the tentacle monster who knocked him up. He would. However, he felt like sulking.

Rick slid forward, strangely graceful on his single central leg. At the edge of the pool, he stopped, and his tentacle spasmed. “Query,” Rick and then the translator failed, leaving a series of whale songs and whistles that Max would not have even recognized as a language before leaving earth. 

Clearly they were going to have this conversation whether Max wanted it or not, but at least Rick was polite enough to keep a distance. Max caught the edge of one of the islands and propped his elbows on it so he could watch Rick. “Translation matrix fail.”

“Query….” For a second time the translator failed.

Max figured he had to take control of the conversation or Rick was going to break the translator with all the untranslatable phrases. Max assumed the big dork was trying to talk about feelings. And normally Max was in favor of that. He avoided embracing the stereotype of repressed military man who killed himself by drinking his emotions. Sadly he’d seen friends do that after leaving combat.

But right now Max couldn’t handle getting in touch with his emotions, in part because he didn't know what he was feeling. Maybe women imagined themselves pregnant—he’d never asked. But he hadn’t. He’d had fantasies about winning the lottery and nightmares about getting shot down behind enemy lines and surviving long enough to get captured. He’d mentally rehearsed pickup lines and wondered what it would feel like if his little brother died. That last one was sort of shitty, but in his defense, Rex was a pain in his ass. Generally, these sorts of morbid thoughts let him to some intense discomfort followed by immense gratitude that he didn't actually have to deal with them.

He’d even developed elaborate murder plots for his ex-boyfriend—he who shall not be named. The little troll deserved a good killing, but Max valued his freedom too much to do it, and maybe there was a little nagging thought of the immorality of murder holding him back as well. Just a little one.

However, he had never indulged in a pregnancy fantasy—not in a dream or a nightmare. Not unless he counted the nightmares after watching Alien for the first time, but Max seriously hoped that didn’t count. Rick seemed fairly sure that being a surrogate wouldn’t harm Max, and the social worker would have stopped him from signing up for a suicide job. Hopefully. Shit. Now Max’s imagination was circling an unhappy place.

“Query. Will being the surrogate harm my health?” Max asked.

Rick's tentacles quivered and then drew up. “Provide discomfort…. Stretching of skin… and muscles. Well within tolerances.” A few descriptions in the middle failed to make it through the translator, but Max got the general idea. Being pregnant wouldn’t kill him. Honestly, Max was surprised the kids were able to survive because intestines seemed like a particularly inhospitable place to grow. Rick slid forward and gave another long string of untranslatable words; the translator only caught “offspring” and “remove.”

If Max’s kids were in some woman considering abortion, he would probably feel something, too. Of course he would avoid getting someone pregnant if he didn’t speak the same language, and being gay, that was a bit of a moot point. Gay couples had to jump through more hoops to get kids. Only hets produced sentient life by accident.

“I will be surrogate in return for compensation,” Max finally said. Rick’s tentacles uncurled and two actually waved. He had one hell of a bad poker face. Or poker extremities, anyway.

“Query. Time given for surrogate in return for compensation?”

Oh Lord. Here they went again with time. Max had no idea how the aliens captured television broadcasts and military chatter and never managed to define a single unit of time. Hell, when he did an audio search for “seconds,” he got television broadcasts where people said, “Wait a second” or “Do you want seconds”. Minutes and hours had been equally as unhelpful. He frowned. Wait. The ground had been counting down to a Patriot missile launch. The mission had been to keep the ships away from the populated areas until the SAM system was in place.

Max did a fast breaststroke toward the edge of the pool, and Rick retreated damn fast for an octopus with one leg. He even got a couple of his longer tentacles involved, but Max ignored him. He grabbed clothes on the way past, and dried himself with them as he ran bare assed naked toward the translation room.

Rick probably had another name for the computer cubby, but Max had taken the space over for his translation work, and Rick hadn’t seemed to care much.

“Computer,” Max said as he slapped his wet hand down on the identification screen. “Search Earth broadcasts for phrase ‘T-minus.’” Max struggled into his pants. The fabric clung to his wet skin, and Max shook his leg to get it to slide into the pants. He then had to hop as he switched feet.

The computer speaker immediate broadcast the audio Max remembered. He’d been in his jet, focused on the ship in front of him. If the Patriot missile took him down, he wouldn’t care as long as it destroyed the aliens. The memory of that helpless rage swelled up as he listened to the recording of the controller’s voice. “T-minus 45… 44… 43… 42…” The voice got to twenty-three before Max said, “Stop!” The countdown had been somewhere around eight or ten when Max had lost consciousness, and he wondered if they had fired the missile. 

And the whole damn alien invasion had been nothing more than a police chase that had gone off onto the dirt road where Earth lay. How many people had died from the battle debris falling to the ground? Max wondered if his own plane or that Patriot missile had fallen to Earth and killed more. Rage swelled, and Max’s stomach cramped as Kohei did something unfortunately athletic.

“Right, right. No upsetting the babies.” Max rubbed his side and sat on the stool. He wondered if Kohei had the ability to sense emotion through some chemical in Max’s body or if the movement had been a coincidence. It would help if he understood alien biology, but at this point, Max would settle for sorting out the time issue. He still couldn’t figure out why Rick’s computer didn’t understand time because the computers at the port had. It suggested that the main computer system and Rick’s computers were not great at sharing information. Yet the raw transmissions from the government’s fly past of Earth were all available. Max suspected politics were involved. But he couldn’t worry about that right now. Hell, he couldn’t even figure out if aliens used towels or where they might hide them. He used his shirt to scrub his shaggy hair.

A squelch announced Rick’s arrival. Any time he got his walking tentacle wet, it made unfortunate noises against the padded floor. Max ignored it because the one question they each wanted answered required the computer to sort out time markers.

“Computer, mark the sequence of numbers.”

“Marked.”

“The speaker is counting down seconds. Use the time intervals between T-minus 45 and T-minus 15 to define thirty seconds.” Max pulled the damn shirt over his head.

Maybe it was Max’s imagination, but the computer seemed to take more time that appropriate, as if it was as frustrated with Max’s faulty ability to tell time as the rest of them. “30 seconds, confirm. Require secondary confirmation.”

“Use the length of time between T-minus 40 and T-minus 10.”

Again, the computer paused. Every other time they had attempted to define time, this was where the computer basically called him an idiot because his first time interval didn’t match his second. This time the computer said, “Deviation within acceptable error. External source required for confirmation.”

Fuck. If Max tried to do the one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi thing again, he was going to screw it up and then they were going to be back at square zero. He rubbed his stomach absentmindedly. Thirty seconds. He needed something that would correlate to thirty seconds. He smiled. “Check the entertainment broadcasts. They are interrupted by persuasive and informational transmissions. Traditionally, those interrupting transmissions are either thirty or sixty seconds.”

“Confirm correlation between persuasive and informational transmissions and commercials,” the computer asked.

“High correlation,” Max said. The computer began running through commercials so quickly that Max could barely recognize a few famous jingles played at supersonic speeds. Then the computer went silent. “Unit one second confirmed,” the computer said. Max almost wept in joy. Embarrassingly enough, his eyes grew warm. He pushed the emotions aside and focused on using that one unit to explain English time units to the computer. Sixty seconds in a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days in a year.  One-twelfth of a year in a month. Max stopped there. If he needed to count time on a spaceship or the length of a pregnancy in anything longer than a year, he was throwing himself out an airlock. Just as soon as he found one.

The computer tried to restart a number of time-related questions regarding human lifespan and development, but Max slapped his hand on the master control to shut it down in the middle of a word. Then he turned around to face Rick.

“Query. Remaining time for surrogacy of offspring.”

Rick inched closer. “Clarify. Minimum time of survival, optimal time of survival, required time for compensation or average time based on biological precedent?”

That was an excellent question. Well Max had never done a job half-assed in his life, at least not after that one summer when he’d been stupid enough to think that a lawn-mowing job in the summer heat was a good idea. “Optimal time of survival,” Max said.

Rick relaxed so much that he actually got a couple of inches shorter as his central tentacle sagged. This time when Rick gave his whale song, the translator offered, “Six and three quarter months.”

Max rubbed his stomach. “Query. Will all offspring come out at once?” It sure seemed like Kohei was more developed than his siblings.

Rick rotated clockwise a half turn. “If large offspring must pass smaller offspring, then smaller offspring are pushed out.”

That meant that they might appear at different times. Max was still a little worried about what happened when the offspring were large enough to create a blockage, but for now, he would assume that if Rick’s species went around shoving eggs up other creature’s asses they knew how to do it without causing harm.

“Query.” Rick said slowly. The translator might use a constant speed, but the belch Rick used for that word was cartoonish in length. “Surrogate for compensation?”

“Yes,” Max said. “Surrogate for compensation. I should make you drive me home afterward.”

“Clarify. Home.”

Max almost cried. Some sadistic part of him wanted to confuse Rick by defining it as the place Max would never see again. It would be like the liar’s paradox during the episode I, Mudd. One of the crew, either Spock or Kirk, had told an android that Mudd could only tell lies. Mudd then announced, “I am lying.” Max wondered if it would sent Rick into the same sort of tailspin if Max told him to take Max home and then defined home as a place he would never see. A little sadistic part of him wanted to try it and see. However, the more logical part of him knew that Rick had never meant to lie to Max or even confuse him. In his alien octopussy way, he’d been as honest as he could. 

“It’s a place where a person belongs,” Max said. He didn’t know if that would translate, but clearly Rick had understood some part of it.

Rick rushed to say, “Agreed. I will return you to Central Trading City Nineteen-Sector Twelve.”

Max blinked. Rick’s offer was perverse. Well-intentioned, but no less painful for all his altruism. At least Max knew there would be computers he could use and a central government organized enough to send out social workers for randomly kidnapped members of pre-space flight civilizations. “Okay.” Max stared at Rick, not sure what to say after that. For the first time since he came on the ship, he felt like an employee or maybe just a junior officer trapped in a room with a general.

Rick did another quarter turn. “Query. Correlation humans and willingness to surrogate for compensation.”

Max leaned against the computer. None of the stools had backs, so they weren’t comfortable, but he didn’t want to stand as if Rick were a superior office. Nope. He wasn’t. He was just Max’s boss… and the father of the children Max was carrying. He was so going to need boatloads of therapy. Big old super freighters full of the stuff. “It’s not common, but some human females cannot carry their own young and others will carry the child for them.”

“Query. Surrogate for compensation?”

“Some of them, yes.”

“Query. Correlate surrogate and female?”

Max almost laughed. Until two hours ago, he would have said there was a one hundred percent correlation, but apparently not. “Human females carry offspring. Human males do not.”

“Query. Max male or female?”

Max sighed. “Don’t emasculate me anymore than you already have. I’m a male.” Max figured the translator was going to miss most of that, and he didn’t want the translator to serve up all of Max’s feelings on a silver platter. Sometimes Max needed to complain out loud without running the risk of pissing off his boss. On the good side, he couldn’t exactly get fired.

“Query,” Max asked. “Do all offspring of your species grow in animals of other species?”

“Yes. Carrying offspring is biologically wearying.”

That was a properly logical answer. Max was surprised Vulcans hadn’t come up with the solution, although that would have made the Star Trek universe weirdly kinky. Max wasn’t sure the 1960 had been ready for that. And if Rick’s two younger kids took after their big brother in the athletics department, wearying would be a bit of an understatement.

“Clarify. Regret translation matrix failure,” Rick said.

Regret. That was the one emotion Max had managed to get the translation computer to understand. When something broke, the response was regret. If something tasted bad, it created regret. If an alien accidentally knocked up a male of another species without warning, apparently that was regret as well. 

And it was still the nicest apology Max had gotten in a while.