Space Affairs

Part 1: The Talk

Roman and Lisa were sitting in a bedroom. Its interior looked like a mix between a teenager’s heartfelt expression and an old wooden attic about to crumble every second now. They had agreed to come to this space, where they assumed no one would disturb them. After all, it wasn’t only forbidden to enter the room, it was also quite challenging to find it in the first place.

They were making small talk, which felt incredibly off to both. They had known each other since primary school. They had formed a band together. They had traveled together. They had cried together when one of them had their heart broken, when Lisa’s father died and when Roman found out he would never be able to follow his dream of becoming a pilot due to a chronic genetic condition. Their friendship was not superficial. But something had changed and they both knew it.

The last thing on anyone’s minds until just recently had been attraction. Jokes had been made for years among their friends about the two of them being an old couple without ever experiencing the slightest romantic feelings or sexual attraction.

Now, Roman was confused. He was noticing how he had started seeing Lisa in a different light - and how he hated it. He had tried really hard not to let it get the better of him. To do away with it lightly. It would be a short phase, he had told himself. It would pass when they spent a bit less time together. That they had been friends for about as long as he could remember and that the whole notion of attraction to her was quite hilarious and only present in the random daydreams of a chaotic mind.

None of it had helped.

At some point, he reluctantly gave in and admitted to himself that he had, indeed, developed a strong attraction to Lisa. And, as these things go, attractions that emerge from lifelong friendships are not prone to being a three-day long crush.

Lisa had observed a slight change in Roman. At first, she too had done away with the whole notion of chemistry between them as one big joke. A trick that her brain was playing on her. She would not be deceived. When the impressions didn’t leave and she dared to let her imagination play out a bit, she was terrified to find that she could barely stop herself. That she craved a different kind of connection than the friendship they had built.

Neither of them was emotionally distanced nor prone to subduing their inner stirrings. But they had created this capsule, this cave of sacred friendship that they saw as pure, uncomplicated and not to be messed with. Reality had gotten in the way of their ideas, and they were just about ready to admit it.

“… I know, Roman. I don’t want to talk about this either. I would rather have nothing changed. But we cannot force things to be the same when they clearly aren’t. I have noticed how you act strangely. Look at me different.”

Lisa paused, slightly unsure if she really wanted to continue. She gave Roman a shy look (which was very unusual for her) and he looked at her, nodding. She took a deep breath.

“I have tried to make fun of the notion of anything… more… happening between us. But that just led me to imagining things and noticing that I liked them.”

She stopped, clearly making a conscious decision to say no more. She felt like she had put herself out there a lot – but it felt easier than expected because, after all, they were used to talking about personal issues and all that made their world go round. It just rarely involved the two of them simultaneously, and never in this way.

Roman looked up at the ceiling, as if he was attentively studying the yellowed poster of an obscure Japanese metal band. In reality, he didn’t even register it. Minutes passed by before he spoke. That was testing Lisa’s patience, but she was determined to wait.

“My experience has been similar. I’ve tried to hold back, to let it go by unnoticed. To do it off as a short phase. By now, I’m pretty sure it isn’t. And holding back is exhausting. It’s a constant effort of creating an image that is further removed from reality every day. You know how we used to joke about these serious businesspeople, always putting on their meticulously crafted masks, so obviously faking their whole personality that it was hard to believe anyone would buy it? Well, I think barely anyone did. We misunderstood, at least I did. It’s a shared, silent agreement. Everyone puts masks on, follows these rules and standards. The longer people are in it, the less they buy each other’s bullsh*t. But if they stay for long enough, they don’t need to anymore. They lose all that ever was behind that mask. It scares them, when they get glimpses of how much they’ve lost themselves and so they start continuously hiding behind the mask. It has become their comfort space. Untrue to themselves, but increasingly incapable of doing it any different. Over time, the mask is all that’s left.

I don’t want to become like that. I’ve noticed how I started putting on a mask around you. At first, it was negligible. Slightly different reactions, some words exchanged and a fair number of things left unsaid. But recently, it has become more dominant. I noticed how I automatically started putting the mask on. So, I needed to take a decision. Do I become the person in the mask around you? Do I push all of what’s arisen away? Or do I accept that things have changed, that our friendship cannot continue the way it was before and that it is time to try something new?

Well, I have accepted it. No more masks.”

Roman had focused on the ceiling all throughout. Now, he redirected his gaze to look directly at her. Their eyes met. No more words. It was like they finally had permission to see each other differently.

“Can I give you a hug?”

Lisa nodded.

He slowly got up and over to her. They lay in each other’s arms for what seemed like hours. Then, just as they came out of their position, they gave up their last resistance. Roman got closer, until their lips touched – and the alarm went off.

Part 2: The Rush

Lisa jumped up and opened the door. Outside, there was tumult. People were running around. A blue-headed organism, somewhere between a tiger and a giant eagle, screamed at Lisa when he saw her.

“Get over to station A23-K, fast!”

“What’s happening?”, she responded, but he was already gone.

She looked back at Roman with sadness, acknowledging with her eyes how they had been pulled out of their moment. Then, she was back in execution mode.

“Come on, we need to go!”

Roman got up, slightly slower to cope with the change of situation.

“We need to be fast. Better morph.”

They got out of the door, and, within seconds, Lisa’s teeth had lengthened by 10 centimeters, her leg muscles had doubled so that her pants were now close to being torn apart and her hair had all but disappeared. Roman had grown 6 more legs, which practically were more like tentacles – no noticeable joints remained. His height had halved as the tentacles expanded more horizontally than vertically. Only a very minimal tether between his tentacles and his head remained.

They were now beyond words, but Roman saw a Lisa-colored thought come in.

“Let’s go, no time to be distracted now!”

Just like they usually communicated by voice, this form gave them thoughts which were transmitted on a different frequency and colored so uniquely that it was always clear who had passed them on.

It was a complete and utter chaos. Organisms resembling humans, spiders with wings, something that looked like a pig on steroids and perfect fish except they also had ten legs were mixing, running, bouncing and flying toward station A23-K. Alarms rarely went off and when they did, it usually meant something quite severe had happened or was about to. The tunnels on ship weren’t constructed for such mass movements and a couple of officers were trying hard to implement crowd control but were clearly overwhelmed.

Roman and Lisa passed through relatively smoothly, profiting from the fact that their bodies could be extended in such a way as to cover a tiny cross-section side-to-side. A couple of times, Roman (who tended to be the more careful of the two) pulled Lisa gently toward the side with one of his tentacles to avoid her crashing into someone. After a straight twenty minutes at a high pace, making their way through the maze of bodies, they arrived at A23-K. As they were among the earlier arrivals, they got quite a clear view outside.

At first, they couldn’t believe their eyes. In 97 years on board of this ship, they had never seen anything like it. Not that they usually got many glimpses of the outside atmosphere. On one hand, the ship only had few windows and on the other, there wasn’t much to see apart from darkness, the occasional far-off star and some space trash.

But here, right ahead of them, seemingly just a few hundred meters beyond the window, a planet loomed, adorned with thick, lush green forests. It was hard to tell, whether the trees were just insanely outsized or the planet was tiny, but the perspectives weren’t quite adding up. They saw organisms that looked like upgraded ants, climbing up and down the trees in a rush, seemingly without purpose or aim. Lisa figured there was probably some hidden function to this manic behavior.

A split second later, what looked like a ball of pure fire made its way from the forest planet right to where they were standing. The ship shook. Windows didn’t scatter, but they weren’t designed to withstand repeated forceful attacks. No one usually attacked peace missions. That was the one fundamental rule of Space Law that every group, coalition, even outlaw usually stuck to. But as always, there were exceptions.

The crowd was frozen and silent, save for the occasional gasp. Clearly, that’s what a collective state of shock looked like. Roman and Lisa had morphed back into their human bodies. They looked at each other and, even in this form, knew that they were sharing the same thought: was this going to mark a premature end of what had just begun between them and, potentially, to the whole mission?