Star Side

Chapter 5

The 'turd' turned out to be a body.

A tiny, alien baby body, but a body nonetheless. Anything counted as monumental in this particular ring of hell.

"Look at its head!" said Joshua. "It's huge in proportion to its body, it's got to be a baby, and the material wrapped about it," he pulled up something that looked like yellow, dried-out seaweed. "That's weaving right there. WEAVING."

"It looks like a mushed-up prune," I said. "With a tail."

Levi grunted from his chair. He'd fallen into it and man spread the moment he walked in. His dark eyes took in the projected hologram floating above the CT's main body, which held the 'turd.' The whole room had been donned in black which contrasted with the white paneled bodies of all the different scanners and propped-up drones that had seen better days.

Naomi, who sat on one of these dirt-speckled drones, yawned.

Joshua looked at us all in utter disbelief.

"What is wrong with you people? I just said weaving, did you not know what weaving is?"

"Spider's weave webs, beavers weave damns," I started.

"Nothing makes cloth!" He swung around with vigor enough to tear the dried seaweed something and flung it at my face. Not very scientist-like if you asked me. Smelled like carrot puke too.

Levi chuckled low in his throat as I peeled the actually slightly damp evidence from my face.

"Why are you throwing this at me?"

"Because you're the one with a doctorate in theoretical math and physics, you should be able to see at a glance that that's not natural."

"All sorts of things float in the galaxy that are plenty natural and plenty square," I said, even as I humored him enough to squint for said 'weaving.'

Oh, it was there. Crooked, crisscrossing fibers that looked to have swollen with moisture at some point and mashed together at other points. I wouldn't go so far as to call it cloth, but it did have a sort of mesh-like quality.

I dropped it on Levi's head for laughing at me and looked more closely at the smashed prune hologram. If it had been a fetus once, it'd been smashed into oblivion. One could say the pieces did make a circle form and then a sort of spine, as though it had been curled in on itself.

"So, you found a dead, wrapped up creature in your probe, and because it was wrapped up in this mesh you think that means, what..." I glanced at Naomi because Levi sure as hell wouldn't back me up. "Intelligent life?"

"Pseudo-intelligent life, at least," said Joshua, hunching from delight, eyes sparkling. "Self-aware, perhaps?"

"It could be a fossil," said Naomi, much more gently than I'd been.

"A fossil of intelligent life is still intelligent life!"

I clapped my hands. "Cool. So send it to Earth for a second opinion. In about, hmm, maybe a year we'll finally know, huh? Levi, that's gross, man."

Levi, leaning back onto the back legs of his chair, had made himself a fu man chu mustache out of the seaweed/burial wrappings.

Joshua crossed the space to swipe it from his face.

"Disrespectful," he breathed. "Honestly?"

"You threw it at her face," said Levi, having not even flinched.

"To—to express the magnitude of this discovery, to which you lot still don't seem to feel!"

"Maybe that's because you're a botanist, this is a mossy leaf, and that's a turd," said Levi.