I like him.
Kaden sighed. “Me too. Thank you for not talking in my head while I was chatting to him. I needed to concentrate. So what did you mean about me remembering all of that diary?”
You just will. Everything you read or watch while I’m inside you, you’ll remember, assuming you want to. I can be useful. The sooner I increase my knowledge base, the sooner I can quit your body.
Kaden thought about that. “Would you like to go to the library? There are shelves full of books on all sorts of subjects. You can pick what you’d like to know about. It might be easier than me suggesting topics to look up on the computer.”
Yes. There’s so much I want to know. The human body. This world. Your seas. Your poles…
It sounded as if Joe knew a lot already but Kaden went to Canning Town library, answered more questions on the way, then spent the next three hours in a semi-daze while Joe sucked up information at…superhuman speed. Kaden had turned the pages far too quickly for him to read more than a few words but he could feel the information building in his head. He had a slight wobble over whether it was a good thing to be giving an alien access to so much data, but it wasn’t as if any of it was a secret. This was a public library! And if Joe had managed to get to this planet in a spacecraft, his race was already far more advanced than humans were. If they wanted to invade, they would. Except they had to be really tiny.
Learning about different types of volcanoes isn’tgoing to lead to an alien invasion.
Kaden felt his cheeks heat.
Why have your cheeks warmed up?
Kaden looked around to check no one would see him talking to himself, though the assumption would be that he was on the phone. “Embarrassment. I’ve had enough now. Can we leave?”
Yes. I checked your temperature because I thought you might be ill.
“No, not ill.” Kaden put the books they’d been reading back on the shelves. “Were you looking for planets to colonise?” He should have asked that question sooner.
When Joe didn’t answer straightaway, Kaden wondered if he was going to lie. How would he know?
I won’t lie to you. First and foremost, we were looking for resources. We’d been to five planets before we saw the Earth and had sent back many transporters with material. As we approached the Earth, our craft lost power and guidance, which led to us being captured by this planet’s gravity and dragged down to the surface. I think the captain and chief engineer managed to reduce our speed a little, but not enough to save the craft.
Kaden shouldered his backpack and left the library.“Why hasn’t that been in the news? I know you’re little, but you must have made a big hole. How did anyone survive?”
Those who did survive were in the control room, the most protected part of the ship. Each important crew member had someone like me assigned to them. I was a protector and supposed to bond with Lanu, a hunter as well as being the chief engineer. But the ship yawed and I was pulled away from him. We crashed before we merged.
“Where did you crash? How did you end up in the tank in Lixian?”
The ship hit the ground at the edge of a place where vehicles were parked. I know now that it was Lixian’s car park. It was nighttime. We waited until it was just light, then flew to the coat of one of the employees as he exited his vehicle, and hid under his collar. Then we flew into the tank when he took the lid off to add material. The captain thought we’d be able to get out but once we were inside and the lid was on, we were trapped.
“You flew? And how small are you? I mean, the blue stuff was a culture medium, right? And there were archaea in there too.”
We’re naturally small, much smaller than humans, but we miniaturise for travel because smaller objects require less energy to accelerate. Also, we age more slowly. But our ability to travel at extreme speed is critical. Faster than the speed of light. It’s beyond the current technology of Earth.
“Would you share your scientific knowledge with this world?”
The answer didn’t come immediately.
If I felt it would be of benefit.
“What happened after you ended up in the tank?”
We were able to hide inside the archaea, absorb some of the culture medium and became blobs, as you called us. Be careful!
Kaden had almost forgotten to look when he crossed the road. He waited for a gap in the traffic and then crossed.
“Were the others trying to hurt you? That’s what I thought when I saw you, that you were trying to get away from them.”
They wanted to use me to benefit themselves. My job was to protect and serve, but only one of them, not all of them. Lanu was furious that our bond hadn’t completed as we fell. He linked to another just before the crash. If he hadn’t, he would have died. He was angry with me and convinced the rest I’d deliberately evaded him.
“Did you?”
Yes.
