I was in a relationship with an alien part 10/??
I’ve seen some confusion in the comments around “how can you just live in constant fear of death?” regarding humans and aliens sharing Midway, and I think this is actually a nuanced topic that deserves some attention because it is informative to understand where Silk and I started from.
First of all, I didn’t go into it because I hadn’t realised others might not understand, but: obviously we’re not just walking around in a T-shirt and slippers and hoping for the best when we go into common areas. Employers universally mandate that in mixed-species work, sea urchins cork their spines and humans wear full protective clothing including gloves. This is also the recommended setup outside of work but I admit it doesn’t really work like that in practice. I guess it’s a bit like other dangerous professions: you become habituated to the low-level danger and so your calibration of reasonable precautions shift. Many humans would forego the gloves in their spare time because they are admittedly a pain in the neck if you need any fine motor skills. Or a sea urchin may cork half their spines because it’s a very time-intensive process and then just keep their uncorked half to the wall all evening. (it’s probably no surprise that Silk and I, working in Legal, always wore full protective gear) You also develop the ‘freeze instinct’. Sea urchins have an excellent sense of where they are relative to everything around them, and can sense others moving through the space (I’ve been told it’s something to do with electromagnetism? I admit I did not look into this). So between that and human sight, normally there is enough space kept between us, but if for some reason you get too close to a sea urchin he or she will loudly announce “Too close!” and it gets to a point where if you hear someone shout “Too close!” you will instantly freeze until you have assessed the situation and you and the sea urchin can move further apart without issue. I’m pretty sure for the rest of my life if someone shouts “Too close!” near me, I’ll freeze.
So Silk and I both had over a decade of experience managing close contact between species and been fine, despite a few incidents on the station in that time. Weird as it may sound, the no-touch thing was not my main objection. And I had a lot of objections. I spent that whole week fretting, and I’m sure he could tell, but he didn’t say anything and we were perfectly polite at work and didn’t do anything weird or stupid and by the time Sunday came around I was a nervous wreck because I had spent all week thinking about all the ways this was a terrible idea and I was scared.
For context, the private rooms are these bookable soundproof rooms for if you want to do anything in private that you can’t do in your own room because those are quite small. Have a private birthday party, do sports, play Twister, whatever. I had been able to book a three-hour slot that day and was there like fifteen minutes early waiting for the people already in there to pack up and leave. And then Silk also arrived early, and that was just excruciating because we were standing there making small talk about work while these people were struggling to fold up a volleyball net. But finally we could go in, lock the door, and we were alone.
We both came overprepared (professional hazard; we had made notes) and the first thing we discussed was disclosure (told you, professional hazard). We were supposed to report to HR if we became involved with a coworker but in this case I would rather have thrown myself out the nearest airlock than do that. Silk was particularly worried they would send him back to the homeworld if we disclosed which wouldn’t just, obviously, nip whatever this was in the bud but would also be very hard for him personally because he was the type of person whose sea urchin phase had driven him to space (they don’t call it ‘explorer phase’ for nothing) and he would probably be miserable on the homeworld until his metamorphosis. I’d probably get fired too if the government had evidence of the relationship which would have been hard to come by, honestly, so I was more worried about social than legal repercussions. We agreed that at the moment, there wasn’t anything to disclose yet because we weren’t actually in a relationship, we were exploring. Yes that was entirely self-serving reasoning and we knew it at the time.
We spent more time on that than we should have because it’s easier to talk about that than any of the other stuff, right? But finally we moved on to more personal topics. I think it was easier for Silk, maybe because he had that strong biological pair-bonding drive, but it took a lot of effort for me. I was exhausted after every one of these talks. I guess even though you’d think I’d have learned my lesson from previous experiences, it was still quite scary for me to choose to be vulnerable like that.
That first day we mostly just talked about what relationships (by the way, Silk kept calling it “pair-bonding” and I asked if we could please use the term relationships and finally he relented but he did sulk about it a bit because he felt it was imprecise because “relationship” could denote any type of connection between two people) even look like for humans and aliens. I actually am working on a separate post on the topic of alien sociology/relationships (thank you for all your questions!) so let me just share here what I explained to Silk rather than the other way around. The main point of surprise was the wide variety of relationship types that humans have had in different cultures and at different times. We got into a bit of a rabbit hole on the effect of culture versus interpersonal differences in human bonding styles but I have to say that “we got into a bit of a rabbit hole” could be applied to 90% of our communication so honestly that probably WAS the relationship. Anyway. If you’re thinking “you were approaching romance like a contract negotiation”… we’re both treaty law specialists, I don’t know what you were expecting.
We ran out of time to properly discuss everything we wanted to, but we did reach an agreement: we’d go for another drink twice that week. Low pressure dates, taking it slow. And then next Sunday we’d have another round of yes fine negotiations.
So this is your last chance to get your questions about aliens in before the next post, and if you already know all you need to about that I guess I’ll see you in the post after that.
Also I was told off for not telling you about alien crockery after saying I would at the end of the last post. Sorry! What I wanted to say about that is that because the body plans are so different across life phases, all food is served on large platters and everyone has a bowl that suits their body size, so that everyone can help themselves, and all the drink is served in bowls as well. But on Midway, sea urchins soon realised humans found it very uncomfortable to watch them lower themselves over a bowl of drink to ingest it and it was awkward because they would sort of disappear behind the table, and so – straws! Straws are a technological exchange between humans and aliens! Sea urchin straws are very long and bendy and it’s all still a bit awkward the first few times but you get used to it really quickly.
