You are a space traveler from Earth. One day you land on a seemingly advanced planet where the aliens are friendly. You decide to live there and learn their language, and with their technology it takes barely a day. However, you soon offend the wrong person by accident and become arrested. It is decided that your punishment is death, and you are brought a vial of liquid that you are told is of the deadliest kind. Terrified, you drink it only to find out it’s water. Turns out that the very substance keeping you alive is deadly to these creatures. Write what happens following this discovery.
Explorer’s log. Cycle thirty, Day 12, 0800 hours by Earth time.
Today, I was scheduled for execution in the high court for something I have not been told. As far as I can figure, I must have insulted a very important person in the Kathraxian society. Unlike Earth or any Earth -order planets, this population is a kind of hive with a strict hierarchy. I wasn’t given a trial, just escorted into the chamber before a row of judges, made to sit, and then given one of their liquid containment spheres. Unlike the normal ones which are colored depending on what hyper-concentrated gaseous element they used in making it– I was a bit alarmed as I’ve only seen them use it for industrial chemicals and rocket fuel– this one was clear.
“Drink!” the honor guard holding my chains commanded. I took notice that they were each a good two meters away from me, rubbing their mandibles together nervously This was going to be how I died then.
With my heart thundering in my ears, I bit lightly at the membrane of the pliable sphere, sucking at the section between my teeth until it burst. I jolted when it hit my tongue. Instead of burning acids or bitter base fluids that might have seriously harmed or killed me, the flavor was neutral, cool and clear and familiar. My body knew even if my anxiety drowned mind didn’t; this liquid wasn’t harmful. I drained the whole container until the sphere was only a deflated plastic-like skin between my fingers. My thirst only partially quenched from three days in confinement; I was severely dehydrated and sleep deprived.
While the sudden quart of water rushing into my stomach did make me a bit nauseous, I was able to stay seated and observe the nervous looks around me. They were waiting for something.
We all sat in silence for nearly twenty minutes before one of the judges hissed, her frill fanning out in frustration. “Guard, how could you fail to bring the correct poison?!”
“Your eminence,” he clicked in alarm, “I swear by the great queen I have brought the dihydrogen-monoxide distilled, as you asked!”
I laughed. What should have been an intimidating display was hilarious to my addled mind, my wits slowly returning to me. “Water? You gave me water?” I grinned through my laughter momentarily forgetting that baring teeth was considered a threat in most of the universe, I was well out of it. “Water!” I howled at the closest guard as if it was the funniest thing in the galaxy, and for me at the moment, it was.
“Terran!” the judge boomed ”I demand you explain this outrageous behavior this instant!”
As my giggles subsided, and with the thin atmosphere finally passing through my lungs enough to get the proper amount of oxygen to my brain, I coughed and stood. The guards moved back, abandoning the chains, which I now realized were made out of a hardened crystal like salt. With a quick tap on my wrist mounted relay, my retinal scan implant informed me that this was indeed a sodium chloride crystal array. If I twisted my writs around like so- and they were broken right off with ease.
“My dear matriarch, you are the paragons of an advanced collective, but in your advancement, you have not studied the other races around you. My world and my people are suffused with water. We inhale oxygen regularly and water vapor is in our breath. Earth,” at this point the reader in my artificial eye created a hologram with a live feed from one of the older space stations back home, “is a blue planet. What you call poison, we call necessary for biological life.” I couldn’t hide the smug look on my face any more than I could hide my obvious survival.
She clicked in alarm, frills flattening to the sides of her wide head. In a quiet voice, she hissed, “What are you, foul creature?”
I assumed the typical space federation stance I had seen in so many movies since the explorations core began. “A Human, your eminence, habitant of the third planet from Sol. Designated: Explorer One of the United Earth Celestial Forces, Explorations Core.”
“There are more of you?” her disgust was palpable. I resisted the urge to damage any further interracial relations.
“Approximately twelve billion including the Venus and Mars colony efforts. If successful, our scientist project our numbers to rise into the triple-digit billions by the next millennia.”
There was a moment were they debated among themselves in High Speech, not something I could mimic with ease, nor was permitted to learn. It seemed really heated, though I did catch words like “War” and “Foolish” in the same sentence, so I only hope they wouldn’t try to wipe us out. They might have advanced technology, but they weren’t a warrior race so weapons technology wasn’t that far ahead of Earths, nor did they seem to focus on projectiles so much as heat weapons. If they tried deploying water as a weapon, or if they were counting on it as their version of the H-bomb, well…
“Terran,” she finally broke up the argument among her fellows, rising from her seat on four of her six limbs. “You are to leave this planet immediately and inform your people’s queen that we would like to negotiate a treaty of nonaggression with your race in exchange for a pact of minimal contact. The facts remain that your very presence on our world is a bio-hazard and we will not jeopardize the safety of our hives any further.”
I nodded, was escorted back to my ship, and given fuel to leave. Their scientists had been waiting for my execution to reverse engineer my ship, staring at the readings for oxygen levels in pure horror as I walked by. Once cleared for takeoff, I radioed my satellite jump station in the planetary orbit. As soon as the AI returned signal I knew I could leave safely. It’s a bit odd they didn’t try to confiscate the data I collected during my stay or any of the tech they’d gifted me while in the three months on their world, but I wasn’t complaining. I wondered what the other explorers had found on their trips while entering hyperspace.
Worth the read!
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