Plot of the Retro Bimbo Aliens, Log Theta

Log Theta

Andrea had been practically silent through the entire process of...whatever that was.  Even after the transmission was over, she mostly just stood there watching to see what I would do.  Eventually, I guess I had to be the one to speak up.  It took me a while to think of how to start, so of course what I came up with was just as useful as you'd expect.

"...so?"

Andrea turned to me, taking a step closer to my chair before answering back analytically.  "That wasn't really a bad idea, stalling a ridiculous plot by coming up with an even more ridiculous one.  I'm impressed at how you were able to think on your feet.  I'm curious, though, what's your angle?"

"My angle?"  The question left me reeling.  "What do you mean?  My angle was to get her off my back until that Morgan girl contacts me again.  I'm just going to tell her that we found a guy, interrogated him, and got nothing.  That should work, right?"

"I don't think so, Commander."  Andrea placed one hand on her hip and gestured with the other, slowly shifting from side to side on her hips.  "First off, even if there is some internal contact, and that's great if there is, we don't know for absolute certain that you can trust her yet, or that she's still alive.  Getting found and executed is something that saboteurs are really, really good at, and duplicity's an integral part of their game.  She could be using you to foment some coup scheme or something equally unhelpful for our business of saving the Earth.  If she shows back up, use her help as much as you can, but make sure that whatever help she offers is going to be to our advantage."

I hadn't thought of that.  "I hadn't thought of that," I told her, candidly.  It was true, though.  Morgan had saved my life, or at least my brain, so I owed her the benefit of the doubt, but as weird as the Gynarians were, the idea of them being controlled by a conspiratorial force that kept them in the dark did have the alternate explanation that the Gynarians were just that gullible, since they believed all that they'd been told about our planet.  At least, that's how it seemed in my head.  It all seemed complicated and a bit confusing to me.  "Okay, then.  You seem to have a grasp on what's going on.  What do you recommend?"

"Stalling is good, but stalling, misinforming, and getting on the Matron's good side is better.  You have to convince them that things are even more complicated than they already think, and that you need more power at your disposal to deal with it before their invasion plan can be set into motion.  If you get high enough in rank and influence, you'll be able to start revealing more of the truth about earth, and hopefully avert the war altogether.  If we decide by then that that's not possible, you'll still have a big enough fleet of your own to maybe help the Earth repel them."

"That sounds like a good idea," I replied, "it sounds like you've been thinking about this for a while."  I wasn't honestly sure how she did it.  Maybe it was because her transformation set her at ease somehow, and I was still letting mine make me into a nervous wreck, or maybe it was just the burden of command weighing down on me, even though my only other crewmate was clearly competent enough that I had nothing to worry about.

"To be fair, I've had years to think about some aspects of it."  Andrea tapped a few buttons on my command console, showing off a map of the ship.  With a few more presses, she had all of the crew quarters blinking in a soft glow.  "Our ship is set up to have an eventual total crew of twelve.  Assuming they want you to have a few more out as infiltration agents, and how often she expects you to convert a new crew member, you have probably three months, maybe four, to present something to her that serves as proof that there's something deeper with the patriarchal conspiracy and that you're the one for the job."

"Okay, I got it."  I didn't really have it, but I was hoping that she would elaborate unquestioningly if I just seemed receptive enough to the idea.  "How exactly do I do that, then?"

"You already came up with a solution for that.  Just what you told the Matron.  You have to find a male human, collect evidence of his implication in the patriarchy, then lure him to someplace where we can abduct and interrogate him."

"Eww.  That's pretty much a date.  I'm not into guys, even if I--" I wiggled my hands up and down my body.  "I'm not going to be all cutey-datey with a guy.  Not entering into the picture.  Out of the question.  How about you do it instead?"

"That's no good.  The Matron needs to see you doing everything right, and taking the initiative.  I can help you out in any way you need, but you're going to have to be the one disguised down there and flirting with him."  Andrea had taken a stern tone with me, and upon realizing she had done so, she quickly added, "Commander."

I sighed, and thought about it for a minute.  Okay, the footage's chronometer says that I thought about it for eight minutes and fifteen seconds.  In any case, after I was done thinking about it, I looked back up to Andrea.  "Alright, fine.  I'll be in disguise anyways, so it's not like I'll have to worry about anyone recognizing me, either as my old self or as this.  So how does this work?  Should we just log on to a dating site and put up some disguised pics and see who bites?"

"It can't be just anyone.  Remember, we have to have our captive say something that gives us more to work on.  Any average Human male would just be confused and not give us anything.  It needs to be someone who thinks that there's some actual patriarchal conspiracy and that it's working against him.  Plus, unless you want to try over and over until we score a hit, we need someone that we know is going to open the door for you and pull out the chair and generally act all polite and chivalrous.  This might be a little hard to accept, but..."

"Please don't say it," I pleaded.

"You're going to need to find a nice guy."

I cringed as images of poorly-kempt neck hair flooded my mind.  I was going to need another eight minutes and fifteen seconds.  I ordered Andrea to do a keyword search on all of the Internet's dating sites and compare them against which ones had photos where the guy was decked in a fedora.  Then I went to my bedroom to check beforehand and see if my ultrasonic showerhead had a more powerful scrubbing setting.

--------------------------------------------

A few hours later, I was ready.  I'm not sure what sort of messages Andrea had sent the guy to get him to agree to go to a place so quickly, and I really didn't want to know.  In fact, I explicitly remember telling her not to give me any details about the guy except what I needed to identify him.  She said something about keeping it a surprise, like a birthday present, and I considered looking up how to demote her.  Instead, I had her show me how to work the holographic projector.  It's not that difficult once it has a disguise programmed into it, you just press the big button on it to turn it on and tap it twice quickly to turn it off, to make sure that it's not just turned off accidentally.  Once it's on, it looks really, really convincing.  Thankfully, Andrea didn't go overboard with her disguise, and I looked like a fairly average girl.  Brown hair, straight, down just past my shoulders, hazel eyes, a face that looks kind of like my old one, but with all of the features feminized.  Not too thin, not especially thick, maybe the sort of body that would earn me a TV role as a spunky sidekick for the leading lady.  For clothing she'd picked a pair of black capri pants, a thin white top with an undershirt thing, and some sensible-looking shoes.  Of course, in actuality, I was still wearing the Gynarian uniform, but the projection's fabrics creased and crumpled with each movement in a perfectly convincing manner.  Looking in the ship's main screen, which was acting as a mirror, I felt more comfortable somehow, as if I was actually human again.

That illusion was shattered pretty quickly, however, when I turned around and slammed my now-invisible tail into my seat.  It took us a few seconds to realize that this was going to make the planned dinner and movie date impossible unless we found a solution, and a few minutes to figure out what to do.  My first thought was to hope that those parts were somehow detachable, but I was informed that they're grafted directly to the proper bones.  I needed to take a break to shiver that out of my system.  Later, remembering that I also had a pair of tentacles, I pulled my surprisingly flexible tail up to my back and held it there by wrapping my tentacles completely around my body.  I double-tapped the holographic projector to confirm that it looked as ridiculous as it felt.  It was.  I tapped the projector back on and tried to take a pose that looked more relaxed.  The best I could manage was one with my shoulders thrown back, but it would have to do.

I hadn't thought to ask exactly how it was that I was going to get down to Earth, and it was only once I was ready that I stopped to make sure Andrea wasn't just going to throw the abduction beam in reverse.  Thankfully, we've got platform pods, about four feet around, that look like little more than large pizza trays until they're activated by the ship's computers.  After it's activated, a bubble shield forms around you that stop stuff from getting in or out.  The first time on one is more than a little scary.  They fire downward through the Earth's atmosphere, and from inside it you can see the flames warping around the bottom of the platform.  There's some sort of gravity control inside, though, so it didn't really feel like freefalling, and even though I was constantly worrying that it would start tumbling, that never happened either.  Once it was close enough to the ground that it needed to decelerate,a neon green glow appeared underneath and it rapidly decelerated.  It touched down softly on the ground, and I was given a reminder, spoken in Gynarian on the machine but translated by Andrea through the radio attached to my earhole to be a reminder to pack up the pod and either take it with me or dispose of it to avoid discovery by humans.  The moment I stepped off, it pulled in on itself and shrunk down to a two-foot pizza slice that I picked up and looked for a place to ditch.  I ended up shoving it behind a trash can.  Anyone who picked it up isn't likely to know what it is, as the charred-looking bottom was folded over to the top during its compression.  I wonder how many more of those things have been sent to the landfill by unknowing garbagemen.

Seeing as how I'd begged Andrea to reveal as few details as possible about the upcoming date, I wasn't exactly sure where I was, though I got to looking down enough during my journey there to narrow it down to southern California.  My platform was parked behind a bush blocking off a one-way alleyway, a place out of the way enough that it wasn't likely anyone see me landing, and the bubble shield around it also likely serves as some sort of cloak.  

Thinking about all of the tech that I've had to use just over the last few days has gotten me thinking, though.  I really need to find a way to 'lose' some of these devices in such a way that some of Earth's engineers can take them apart and figure out how they work.  Maybe that'll be part of the defense plan or something.  I'll ask our science officer about it once she's ready.

It was a short walk out from the alleyway to the restaurant that I'd apparently agreed to meet the guy.  While not quite a fast food restaurant, it was one of those chain restaurants where they fill the walls with local tchotchkies but all the food tastes the same so the effect of it having any actual character is lost.  Andrea came through the radio again, explaining that the target was waiting at the entryway and would be wearing a red carnation on his lapel.  What she didn't explain, however, was that the lapel in question wasn't attached to a proper suit jacket, but a trench coat.

Until I saw it, I hadn't thought to consider the weather around me.  My Gynarian body is more resistant to extreme temperatures and that makes it a little hard to gauge just how warm or cold it is, but I remembered that at least in the northern hemisphere where I lived and was now staring at the fate that awaited me, it was late spring, and looking up at the clear skies and the sun nowhere close to setting yet, I have no idea why he would have thought that a black trench coat was climate-appropriate.  His shoes and pants matched, which is to say that they were black as well, but his shirt was a little less so.  While the base of the t-shirt was black, the part that was visible was a mishmash of colors that, upon closer inspection, which I should mention was a pretty terrifying proposition, looked to be in the vague shape of a kitten that I seem to remember having seen in passing on the internet playing the piano.  Or maybe it was an accordion.  The artsy effect on the shirt made it a bit hard to distinguish.  These were the positive parts of his appearance.

I haven't mentioned this yet, but the guy was, like, triple my size.  That's including the weight of my tail and tentacles, which put him somewhere over the 350 pound mark.  I think the trench coat was meant to hide that, but instead it sort of bell-flared out at the bottom.  Most of the weight was around his midsection, too.  Again, the trench coat at the time made it a little hard to tell if he had much muscle on him, but the way his pants flapped around his legs implied that they were too spindly for his frame.  His face was pretty much half hair, half piercing.  I'm sure that in his mind, he had styled his facial hair out to look like some sort of lumberjack, but it was pretty apparent that it had other designs in mind.  His unkempt beard hair extended down his neck farther than I knew it could grow, and yet left his cheeks almost completely bare and pasty.  To be fair to his neck hair, he didn't exactly have a proper chin, so it's understandable that it wouldn't know where to stop.  His mustache hair was twirled around on either side, like a cartoon villain's.  He had piercings on either side of his lower lip, small silver rings, as well as matching studs where his dimples would have normally been.  He had another silver ring at the outer edge of his eye socket, half-obscured by his black-rimmed glasses.  It wasn't too hard to tell by the complete lack of refraction that the lenses were fake, even though the frames themselves had been taped back together, or at least had masking tape wrapped around the bridge.  Both of his ears were pierced, along the top rather than in the normal spot and had those tunnel plug things that were maybe a quarter of an inch wide, one with what looked like a class ring dangling through it.  I had to stop myself from laughing imagining it serving like a cat's bell to warn other girls that he was near.  I'd describe his hair in more detail, but thanks to the trilby hat he was wearing, dark gray with a band above the brim covered in Chinese characters, all I could make out at the time was that one side of the hair above his ears was completely shaven off and the other side had a shock of magenta hair brushed to the side and squished under the hat's brim.  Walking over to greet him was one of the most difficult things I've yet had to do.

I opened my mouth to call his name out, then remembered that I hadn't asked for it.  Under my breath, I whispered, "Name?  Also-why-would-you-do-this-to-me-I-thought-we-were-supposed-to-be-friends!"

"Steven.  Or Stephen.  Or Steffan.  He's got it spelled weird.  I'm sorry, he matches the criteria perfectly!  Just try to survive past the dinner and the movie and then we can do the abducting thing.  If you need me to come up with a line for you, just clear your throat."  There was a pause as I tried to take another step toward him.  "It looks like your eye is twitching.  You probably shouldn't do that.  I'll have the hologram correct it.  And maybe do something about that smile..."

I finally worked up the nerve to speak up.  "Steven?"  I asked, toward his general direction.  "It's me, Susan."

He smiled brightly, backed up to the door and pushed it open, keeping his eyes on me then making a flourishing motion with his other hand to direct me in.  "Ah, Milady!  I am glad that you made the decision to honor our agreement to attend this mutual potentially-romantic engagement.  Please, enter."

"If I throw up," I whispered to Andrea, "Can you edit that out of the hologram too?"