Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

New Anatomy

Time dilation was an absolute bitch. You would think with his job as a spaceship captain for the past, almost decade that the concept would be familiar to him but honestly, that wasn't the case. Once warp drives were created the need for E=MC ^2 Calculations in the context of spaceships was discarded almost completely. Of course, it had to be taken into consideration when calculating for satellite movement yes yes, but on a large scale it was mostly ignored. Not to mention that all his favorite science fiction films and movies practically ignored the issue of time dilation all together. Star Trek, and Star Wars never mentioned it. Neither did Firefly. There were a few notable exceptions, Interstellar and Project Hail Mary.

However, when science fiction did bother to include time dilation, there was one thing that everyone could agree on.

Time dilation sucks.

Everything had changed. Only two years and he felt like he was walking into a whole new world. Two years and somehow, he was a man out of time. What made it worse is that his experience of time dilation was stupid anyway, since the math didn't even add up. The mass of the creature that caused the time dilation was not proportional to the amount of gravitational time dilation that he experienced .

Not only was time dilation stupid, but he had experienced stupid time dilation.

He sat in the hospital waiting room, and tried to keep his head over a tide of worries and stress. He had left and come back the same man, but when he came back everything else was different, and he was sort of just expected to adjust. The politics on his planet were different, and he didn't understand them at all. They had alliances and friendships that he knew nothing about and had no control over. There were laws passed that he hadn't heard of incidents that he wasn't involved in. They had a burgeoning intelligence agency and a spy network.

They were a legitimate government now, not just his fun little playground where he could house all of his cool animal friends.

He turned his head slightly, discretely.

His planet wasn't the only thing that had changed.

Sunny sat next to him, flipping through a weapons catalogue which had been left sitting on one of the waiting room side tables.

Ok, perhaps she hadn't changed a lot, but it had certainly been noticeable. Not like he was complaining, obviously, he couldn't expect her to be the same person but there was a part of him that felt like.... A child in comparison to her. Two years she had slowly come to terms with the idea of having a child of her own, learned and grown with the idea, matured with the idea. She had a well of patience that he just could not fathom that she certainly hadn't had before, and she had a side of her that was...

A responsible adult?

It was strange.

And now here he was, thrown into the deep end, a father on day one learning as he went, and struggling to figure it out. While also trying to catch up with everything in the universe that had decided to change while he was away.

Leave things alone for five minutes and it all falls to pieces.

He leaned over to see what Sunny was looking at, some kind of rotating plasma cannon with Kelvin cooling rings.

"Is this what I'm getting you for Christmas?"

"Who said there needed to be a holiday for you to spoil me." She turned the page.

On his lap Kay squirmed and growled deep in his throat. The sound was oddly disconcerting coming from a baby, or a toddler? Adam wasn't sure when the cutoff was, Kay was a year and three months old, and Adam was duly informed that he was reaching all of the required developmental milestones. Kay could walk quite well for his age, though Sunny informed him Drev babies walk earlier than humans so that might have soemthing to do with it. He loved talking even though it was mostly just random noise with the occasional attempted parroting of words back at them, rather unsuccessful at this point but getting there. There was no evidence of developmental delays which was good, but they were also mostly guessing at this point since he was the first natural born hybrid of his kind.