Curate, connect, and discover
[This idea has been rattling in my brain and I had to share it.]
I know we all love the ‘humans are space orcs’ concept… but imagine, onboard the new ship they’ve been assigned to, the human meets an actual space orc. A massive monster… fangs and tusks and scars and a battle-hardened stare, looming over all the other life forms on the ship in its thick indestructible armour it refuses to remove. It barely drinks, it doesn’t need sleep, its massive shoulders are heavy with the terrible things it has experienced. Compared to the squishy & delicate human body, this thing is a walking tank.
… Except instead of hating/ignoring one another, the human and the monster start bonding over both coming from death planets. The human is excited to find a life form who doesn’t quiver with fear at the vague description of a jellyfish and the monster is ecstatic to meet someone who understands the feeling of being bitten by a qua’lem (cats are pretty close). They sit together and compare dangerous animals and locations as the other aliens look on in confusion and fear… oh, you also have dense jungles of deadly hidden predators, boiling acid lakes, tamed predatory killers, and areas with horrendously high and low temperatures? Sick!!
It doesn’t take long before the two of them become totally inseparable. The human loves not feeling like some kind of crazy outsider and the monster is overjoyed they’ve finally found an equal in this unkillable marshmallow.
Monster: When I was a youngling, a grol-lik stung straight through my armour. The pain lasted for approximately 16 human hours. Human: Oh yeah man, I get that. As a kid I got a wasp stuck in my shirt. It stung me like four times, it was awful, and all my cousins just laughed at me… Monster: [using their arm screen to research human courting methods] I see.
You know what kills me? Artificial flavors. The notion that somewhere, sometime, there was a rogue blue raspberry. I’ve never seen this fictitious blue raspberry. I have no idea what a blue raspberry should taste like. I know what blue raspberry candy tastes like.
How about apple? Watermelon? Grape? Grape flavored cough syrup? More like fake Concord grape abomination. Yet we accept that this is what they represent. No one believes that watermelon candy actually tastes like watermelon, but if you blindfolded someone and had them eat some, they’d say it was watermelon.
H O W ? ? ?
“Hey, Menah-Tal, I got some candy in a package from home. Do you want to try some?”
Menah-Tal took the bright yellow wrapped candy from Brett. He started to put it in his mouth before Brett stopped him.
“Unwrap it first. There’s a joke on here too - eh, it wouldn’t make sense.”
Menah-Tal gingerly “unwrapped” the candy and took the sticky substance out. These humans. How do they tell what is edible and what isn’t? Menah-Tal watched wistfully as Brett put the tasty-looking wrapper in garbage receptacle. Menah-Tal put the candy in his mouth and sucked on it thoughtfully.
“What is this supposed to taste like on your world, Brett?”
“Banana.”
“Ah.” Menah-Tal continued to suck sagely. “So that’s what ‘banana’ tastes like.”
“Well, it doesn’t actually taste like banana.”
Menah-Tal blinked his three eyes slowly. Why. Why is everything so complicated.
“We had a banana crisis back in the fifties. The banana flavor you’re tasting is modeled after an extinct variety. The only kind we have now doesn’t taste much like that at all.”
Menah-Tal struggled to open his mouth now that the candy had cemented itself around his teeth.
“So your kind has a sweet substance that they eat for enjoyment that is flavored to taste like an extinct fruit?”
Brett shrugged.
“Yup.”
Menah-Tal licked his finger.
“Sounds about right.”
It’s kind of amusing to hear all this talk about humans being an apex predator species - I mean, I love it, but technically, by our own standards of rating predators, we aren’t, because we still have animals around on Earth that will munch us down if push comes to shove. We’re not like bears or wolves or any of the really big members of the big cat family - yes, we can and do hunt, but as often as not we foraged.
Heck, we still do that in many ways, even in the urban environments we have made for ourselves. We are the species that will stare you in the eye as we steal the food off your plate, then add insult to injury by checking to make sure it’s clean enough, get everywhere we’re not supposed to because we are cunning little buggers that are hard to keep out, will hoard shiny things even though we know they aren’t useful because they are shiny, okay, and then we’ll go and do something adorable so that you love us anyway, at least until you notice that we’ve just scuttled off with half your wiring because we needed it for something important.
Humans aren’t the wolves or tigers or bears of the universe.
We’re the raccoons.