Welcome to Town
Aliens conquered Earth 15 years ago, and for the last half decade, one of them had kept Demeter Agatha Woods as a pet. Of course, nobody called her by that name anymore. Her alien owner called her C₉H₁₆O₃. This was a cute name in its pheromone-based language; it translated to something like “little climber” and had connotations of care and love. The humans in Town called her Dee.
“Town” was how the humans referred to the boarding facility where they were cared for while their alien owners were at work or otherwise away. Roughly the size of an American football field, it had 97 consistent, but not constant, residents. Nothing in Town was artificial, but everything was fake, designed to emulate the aliens’ idea of a small human town using only extraterrestrial materials. The grass was a shaggy moss; the walkways a hard silicon that imitated cement and regrew itself when broken. A smooth wall of pseudo stone 30 feet high formed the perimeter of Town, and the entire structure was covered by a semi-transparent lid that shed large sheets of keratin-like material whenever it was moved.
The humans in Town wanted for nothing, except freedom, autonomy, and the Internet.
Dee was in the schoolhouse teaching astronomy and desperately missing the last of the above when the removal of the lid interrupted her lesson. Pulling the lid away generated an upward rush of air that could snatch the breath from one’s lungs, like sticking your head out the window of a moving car. Only the most dedicated pupils had remained in class for the astronomy lesson, but missing the events of a lid removal was too much even for them. They ran from the room, letting loose high pitched whoops and screams in their excitement to see who was coming or going.
Dee closed the astronomy book with reverential care. Not only was it the last known book on Earth, it had also belonged to her daughter and therefore had value to Dee far beyond that of the knowledge it contained. She put the book in her bag and walked around the room cleaning up used sky shards and scratchers, oblivious that her escape had just parked in his house-carrier.
“Found you!” Gabby called through the doorway. She ran up to Dee, grabbed her hand, and pulled.
Gabby would be twelve years old in two weeks, though nobody alive knew that, not even Gabby. She was at that stage of development all kids reach where it’s impossible to tell how old they are just by looking. Her chest had started to grow and a few thin dark hairs had appeared on her pubis, prompting the women in Town to encourage Gabby to start wearing clothes. She had been generally resistant to this idea, as were most of the so-called “squid kids”, and tugged at Dee’s hand now wearing nothing but her unevenly sheared brown hair and a bright smile.
The subject of human clothing was hotly debated in alien circles. Scientists, pet owners, and the initial colonizers all had different ideas. It was universally recognized that nearly all wild humans chose to cover their bodies with some form of clothing or adornment. However, domesticated humans who had never been wild veered almost exclusively in the opposite direction, rejecting clothes and seeming just as happy for it. The advice to pet owners, mainly pushed by the manufacturers of cute pet outfits, was to provide one’s human with a variety of clothing options and allow them to choose what, if anything, to wear.
Dee’s alien owner, while caring, was not a slave to the whims of alien capitalism. It had purchased the Clothing Basic Pack, which came with two shift dresses, two t-shirts, two pairs of pants, and no undergarments. The pants did not stay up, so Dee had repurposed one pair into a bag, belt, and breast support. She wore the last now over top one of the shift dresses.
“What is it?” Dee asked Gabby. “Is there someone new?”
Gabby nodded her head and tugged at Dee’s hand again.
She was a squid kid, a human child raised by an alien and starved of human language or contact from infancy. After birth, her first encounter with other humans had been when she initially arrived in Town two years ago. She had learned much, but still had few words and even less syntax.
Dee took a moment to grab a fresh sky shard and scratcher then allowed Gabby to lead her to Town Center, where all the important Town events took place.
***
If Town had had a mayor, it would’ve been Russ. He was a large man with a deep, calming voice that he’d used to great effect as a pastor, back when he’d still believed in God. He saw it now as his responsibility to be the first to greet any newcomers in Town, lest they have ill intentions. The squid kids were especially vulnerable, and Russ had set himself as their protector. He was not a violent man; he relied on the size of his body and voice to keep the peace. Usually, they were enough.
Town rarely had new residents. This enclosure had been at full capacity for more than a year. A little over a week ago, the boarding facility had been informed that one of their alien clients had moved back to the alien home world and had taken its human with it, a squid kid who went by C₉H₁₄N₂O₂ or Wendy. This left a vacancy in town that the boarding facility immediately sold to a busy businessalien who had only bought its pet three weeks prior. Best practice recommended a full month of contact with a new human pet in order to get maximum effect from the bonding hormones, but those rules for were for less busy aliens with less important alien business deals to finalize. And so Taliesin Rhys Morgan, also called C₁₁H₁₈N₂O₃, came to Town from above in a house that dangled on the tentacle of an alien.
The house he was in was, to his alien owner, a carrier with a handle on top. To alien eyes, it resembled a small house that a human might live in, with a pointed top and a central chimney which could conveniently be used as a carrying handle. There were several chambers inside with protrusions for sitting and laying and staring, all activities humans were known to enjoy. There was even a chamber that handled waste output. Every part of the house-carrier made perfect, intuitive sense to Taliesin’s alien owner.
To Taliesin, the house was a grotesque deformation of skin and chitin pruned into a low-res facsimile of normal human life. And he couldn’t figure out how to open the door.
Russ knocked from outside. “Hello?”
Taliesin knocked back. “Hello!”
Both Russ and Taliesin’s internal organs were bathed in C₉H₁₃NO₃, which left them feeling excited and scared about the unknown person on the other side of the door.
“You can come out,” Russ said. “It’s safe.”
“I can’t, mind. I don’t know the trick to the door.”
With some instruction from Russ, Taliesin found the pink sac hanging limply on the wall next to the door. He touched it and the sac filled with gas and stiffened like a balloon. Following Russ’s guidance, he squeezed the sac and it expelled a gas laced with pheromones which interacted with the door’s receptors and signaled for it to open. The details of this were lost on Taliesin, however, who only experienced a faint scent of saltwater and sulfur on the released puff of air before the door slid open.
Taliesin was 22, from Wales, and black. This last surprised Russ who had formed a very incorrect mental picture of the young man based on his voice and accent. They made quick introductions and Russ told Taliesin what was known and suspected about their lives as pets while they walked toward Town Center.
“Time is the most important thing,” Russ stressed to the young man. “Ain’t got no way of timekeeping that’s for certain. Can’t see the sky. Don’t know if the day night cycles they give us are accurate. Can’t tell for sure how long we’ve been gone if all the timekeepers are at home.”
They arrived at Town Center a few minutes after Dee and Gabby. Based on the idea of a small downtown park, the misunderstanding of a central fountain had been repurposed into a stage for public meetings. The civilized Town residents sat in expectant twos and threes encircled by the running, whooping, naked squid kids. Russ led Taliesin through the mob of excited children and ushered him onstage. Seated beside Gabby on the side of a mossy mound, Dee carved “DAY E-1304” at the top of her sky shard.
“We have a new resident,” Russ announced. “Please welcome Tally-- Sorry-- Taliesin.”
Everyone clapped, the squid kids most of all. They fed on energy like it was food pellets.
“Taliesin tells me he’s been Outside until very recently. I’m sure he has a tale to tell. Let’s all sit quiet and listen to him tell it. After, well, I’m sure we’ll all have some questions.” He stepped back, allowing the younger man to take the floor.
The last time Taliesin had spoken for an audience of more than a few people had been during Eisteddfod Ysgol in Year 2. He’d sung “Ar Lan y Môr” and won his class. He wasn’t certain what to say now, so he took Russ’s advice and started with his name, age, and what he knew about time. Dee filled her sky shard with scratches indicating dates and places as he spoke.
“I think it was about two weeks ago that I was taken,” Taliesin concluded. “I was making for Rosegold with a group from British Columbia when... Well, anyway.”
His group had been trapped inside an abandoned building in the outskirts of Seattle. It had been Taliesin, his mam, and three others. They had scattered through the building in an effort to confuse the squid hunting them, but it had locked onto him. Taliesin’s mam had thrown herself at the squid from a third-story window, teeth- and knives-first, in a suicidal bid to distract the alien from her son. They had been fighting the aliens for years and she knew to attack the pulsing secretion points on its bulbous body. The dead alien collapsed into the building, toppling part of it and crushing two of the humans in Taliesin’s group. The third escaped, though Taliesin believed her dead with the others.
When they came to investigate their fallen compatriot, the aliens found Taliesin holding his mother.
He had been taken into custody, immunized against disease and parasites, and put up for sale. That was ten weeks ago. It felt like only two weeks to Taliesin due to the mind distorting effects of alien handling. As the old saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun, and nobody has as much fun as a mammal bathing in alien hormone secretions.
Russ opened the meeting for questions and Taliesin answered what he could, most of it correct. It had been September when the aliens nabbed him and there weren’t any surviving human governments. He also told them Rosegold was safe from alien interference, which wasn’t completely accurate, though he would never know it.
