A Bit of Sci-Fi

A Mettallum Afternoon *Space Opera entry*

"You don't love me anymore"

 "Honey you know that is not true..."

 The woman turned away from her husband in bed, offering her back as proof of her anger.

 "I don't know anything anymore, all I know is it is different."

 The man sighed silently to himself, searching his mental files for an escape route. After several tense minutes, he leaned over her stiff body, burying his face in the crook of her neck.

 "What are you doing?" She asked tentatively.

 "I'm showing you how much I love you."

 "With sex?" She screeched.

"Wait, what is sex?"

"It was their form of reproducing."

"Oh." Aurum braced himself on the fishing stick, dropping his line silently in hopes it would not disturb the pisces that floated in abundance beneath them. "And this was something the breeders did not enjoy?"

"I think they did, for there were many of the humans originally, but it was a chemical reaction that drove them to argue constantly."

"So this occurred often? These arguments?"

"It seems to be a form of communication for them from what we had observed."

"And always about this sex?"

"No." Ferrum shook his head, rattling just slightly as he dropped his fishing line alongside Aurum's. "The humans had many of these 'emotions', it caused them to react much more than a common species, most reactions extreme and uncontrollable."

"Fascinating, they had reactions, as in physical reactions, not just chemical then?"

"It was the chemical reaction that caused the physical reaction. It was an anomaly at first, when they originally landed they seemed to only walk about with their mouths agape, we learned later upon study that that reaction was called wonderment, and in some cases, confusion."

Aurum turned his head upward, wincing at the light breaking through the sparse clouds. "I remember that day clearly, reports had come that a large ship of antique design had broken through the planet's atmosphere."

Ferrum followed Aurum's gaze, remembering the dark ship's slow descent through their atmosphere, hundreds of lights blinking, signifying the life inside its massive hull. "Lofty dreadful thing, it resembled a floating skybox. Pieced together with some sort of primitive construction, and running on toxic gases that propelled it slower than a moon's rotation. The humans seemed to revel in their cleverness."

"Another 'emotional' reaction?"

"We deduced so, it landed off the greens, carrying several hundred of them. When they disembarked we couldn't tell they were so small because they were adorned head to toe in a shimmery skin." Ferrum rotated his cuff, the gears squeaking slightly as he adjusted himself on the staff protruding from the water.

"Shimmery skin? Like they were trying to blend with the Mettallum?"

"No, they were not mimicking us, it was how they survived without their planet's atmosphere. They are an organic compound, a component of their own planets eco system, in order to travel from their own atmosphere they needed to be covered in protection."

"They sound fragile, why would they leave their home planet if it was harmful for them to travel?"

Ferrum rotated his metal shoulders forward, mimicking something he had seen the humans do when they seemed too perplexed to answer. "We have questioned the ones they identified as most dominant. They stated their planet was no longer able to sustain them, so a colony was formed to seek out new compatible planets. The humans saw the blue aqua formations from space and decided to venture here."