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“With or without bounty hunter croutons? They’re crispy and high in protein.”
“Just the soup, please.”
“These pumpkins grow further back in the cave,” he explains. “I had seeds, and this planet has no shortage of light and water. I use ice windows to help them grow. Come and see.”
I would like to go and see, but I do not want to leave the warmth, comfort, and modesty of my blanket. “May I have some clothing?”
He looks at me. “I forgot your kind enjoys covering itself for the sake of covering itself even if you are at a comfortable ambient temperature. What do they call it again? Furshorn?”
“Fashion?”
“That’s the word,” Manik says. “You want to be fashionable.”
“Humans have a lot of dangly bits they like to cover and strap up and generally contain. We’re made weird,” I agree with him.
“I have a fabric collection from…”
He doesn’t even need to finish the sentence. I already know where his collection comes from. He saves and uses every part of the bounty hunter.
“I can make something to fit you,” he says. “It will amuse me to do so. I think you would look quite cute in pink. Yes. I am sure you would.”
I’m not a person to him, but frankly, that’s probably a good thing because Manik kills people. If I can stay in this mental box called pet, where I don't have to be objectively useful, I might just survive him.
“I like pink!”
There is a certain balance to his idea. Me pink, him blue, hunter and hunted, captor and captured all tucked up in a nice hole in the ground.
“Very good,” he says. “Soup first, and then clothes.”
Itake some time to look around while I am somewhat alone. So this is where the terrifying Manik has made his home in the most inhospitable part of the world. It’s… Well... It’s not homey. It is well ordered, and there are a lot of things here. Most of it is technical in nature. A lot of machines, not a lot of spaces for comfort, though there is a chair made to Manik’s scale next to a screen. He’s been eating snacks and watching shows. Aliens really are like us.
My bed, such as it is, is pushed up against a hearth. There’s a fire of sorts burning in it, but they’re not real flames. It’s more like a small reactor that makes spiral flames shoot up toward the top of the box, emitting a very pleasant heat.
All I have to do is sit here while he bustles around after me, this alien who has killed millions and is now very keen to get me some nice soup. I know I’m lucky to be alive. I also know that my luck could change at any moment. May as well enjoy this while it lasts. I don’t see any signs of any remnants of my uniform. I can assume that it was mostly destroyed, and what parts weren’t will soon be recycled into something else.
“Here,” he says, appearing again and bringing me a steaming bowl of hot orange soup. I am half-surprised that he has something so digestively familiar, and then I remember pumpkins are amazing. A lot of Earth food is popular among other alien species. We truly did arise in the garden of Eden.
I taste it under his expectant eye. Obviously, I am going to tell him that it is amazing no matter what it tastes like. But then it hits my tongue and a sound of real pleasure makes its way out of me, regardless.
“This is delicious!”
“Thank you. You are probably not used to real food; most of what is served in ships and ration packs is APF. It never tastes the same as the real thing.”
“APF?”
“Approximated printed food. Instead of using real ingredients to make something to eat, amino acids, proteins, vitamins. and minerals are fed into a printing machine that creates a likeness of foods that used to exist in deep history.”
“But we sell all sorts of produce from Earth.”
“You might think you are selling produce, but to reduce transport costs, all of it, no matter what it is, has to be ground into a fine powder and reduced to the sum of its parts before it can be transported. It’s then fed into a machine which turns it into a slurry which is then once again fed through ionic separation chambers…”
I could listen to Manik talk about absolutely anything, I realize suddenly. Everything he says is absolutely fascinating to me.
“So though you may be technically eating Earth-grown food, it is no different than any other slurry-based cuisine.”
“Wow,” I say, as I fill my face with real organic material grown in actual organic dirt. “You can really taste the bugs and the soil, but in a good way.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Manik says, pleased that I seem to agree with him.
