“They’re here to make slaves of us!” The human male on screen argued across the desk to his counterpart, his bald head glistening in the white lights, face reddening each time he slammed a fist on its surface. “It’s why they’ve disabled our weapons! Taken our skies! Stolen our children!”
“Or the aliens wish to use their superior technology to offer assistance in areas where we have failed,” replied the human female next to him, her calm, dark gaze turning directly to the viewer at home. “Poverty, war, global pandemics, climate change—”
“Climate change!” barked the father, making Terix jump from his focus. The father pushed a button on the black device in his hand and the screen powered down. “They used to call it global warming until the PR ran out!”
Terix folded his bottom two arms and tilted his head to absorb this new interaction, his glow turning a purple shade of thought.
“It’s all a marketing scheme, you know. One thing after the other. But we’ve been through it all before. Dinosaurs, then an ice age. Telling kids to be terrified because there’s no fut—” The father froze as if just realising who stood in the room with him.
“The data is correct,” Terix informed him, unable to fully read the unusual patterns of the father’s face structure at that moment. Interpretation would come in time, the elders promised. “We spent many Earth months studying your planet’s biosphere prior to our announcement and have concluded that it is indeed headed towards a…” Terix searched for the phrase he’d learned in class. “A collision course.”
The father’s mouth fell open. That was shock. Yes! Terix understood that one. Shocked was similar to the stunned expression, which both the mother and father in this family unit had expressed two Earth days prior when opening the door of their residence and allowing Terix to step through.
Now, the father only shook his head at Terix and stormed out. Yes, stormed. Terix had read that in one of the novels in Rebekah’s room whilst the parents had ‘gone out’. He liked the sound of that. A thunder of footsteps, an imagined cloud swirling around the human’s head. Their anger, a buildup of rain and wind.
Terix had been told to expect such outbursts in the first few days of transition. The human parents seemed especially attached to their offspring, and the agreed exchange weighed on them more than it ought to, given the opportunities. Terix had kept his shield up in case the outbursts turned on him, but the mother and father seemed more lost than aggressive, like a ship without navigation controls.
On the first drop of evening, Terix had overhead the mother telling the father, “He’s just a kid. Like Rebekah. He’s someone’s kid.”
“He’s the enemy as far as I’m concerned,” the father had grumbled, but Terix guessed he didn’t believe the words.
“We’ll get our daughter back,” the mother promised. “They told us we would.”
After that, all Terix overheard from Rebekah’s room—now his room—was sobbing. It soon drifted into silence, and Terix stayed perched on Rebekah’s ‘bed’, as they called it, wading through his ocular feed to learn some human recipes. He’d encountered the phrase, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”, and after determining this was a colloquialism and not a literal suggestion, he settled on a manual for ‘Mac n’ Cheese’. In the dawn of the new day, he set to work boiling the pasta and melting the cheese for what the humans called ‘breakfast’.
The mother wept often in those first days. The father didn’t speak much except for his occasional outbursts about the government, or the ‘conspiracy against humanity’, as he called it. When the mother cried, he would comfort her by patting her on the shoulder. It didn’t seem to help much. Neither did the Mac n’ Cheese, it turned out.
Then, just that morning, the mother had asked, “Why? Why are you doing this to us?”
Terix couldn’t say why these moments made him so uncomfortable. He flared green as he itched at the rainbow jumper. The elders said it would help to wear their clothes. Look like them as much as possible. Sound like them. The extra limbs couldn’t be helped, nor the hairlessness, or the lack of distinctive nasal passages. But clothes, well, those were a human comfort. Terix’s skin prickled at the rubbing of mismatched textures.
“The exchange program is an opportunity for both our species to learn from each other,” Terix told her, colouring a shade of orange to exhibit his confusion.
The elders had already explained all of this in their global broadcast after the Exchange, but Terix had quickly learned that the adult humans needed to be told something more than once for it to settle into reality.
“This is a peaceful arrangement,” he assured the mother.
“Then why weren’t we given a choice?”
“It is only temporary,” Terix promised. It wouldn’t help to tell her the truth now.
She would come around eventually. They all would.