The first thing that awoke her was realising she was still there. Without an alarm, she had slept in somewhat. Reaching out for her data pad, which was spinning slowly in the air where she had left it, she looked up to see the doors had long since unlocked. No imminent danger then, she recognised, smiling.
As she passed the pod, she glanced inside at the red figure which had formed within the liquid and was casually observing her. Lily screamed, threw herself back and felt adrenaline flood her system, hyperventilating.
As she did so, the figure, a humanoid shape which had risen out of the liquid, was… staring at her. It had no eyes, though. Just a shape. Still, she swore, it was staring at her.
For a while she was just frozen, staring back from the corner of the room her primitive brain had forced her to retreat into, watching for the slightest sign that her fight or flight instincts should switch from one to the other. Eventually, though, there was no sign of anything at all. It was just… there.
The liquid had settled on the ‘bottom’ of the pod. That was the first thing her rational mind noted as odd, making observations to rationalise what she saw, a defence mechanism to calm herself. There was no gravity, but the liquid had settled on the ‘floor’ of the pod. That was strange. If one considered the padded surface within the ‘floor’, and indeed that was the surface of the station that the pod was connected to, then it would have looked like someone simply standing on the ‘floor’, she supposed.
One quickly learned to abandon thoughts of ‘up and down’, ‘floor and ceiling’ in space, but it was rather grounding, if eerie, to see it made manifest by the red liquid in the pod before her.
Her heart having slowed to merely a mild panic, she approached the glass cautiously, eyes fixed on it for the slightest sign of danger. It didn't move, nor indeed make any obvious sign of awareness at all. Of course not, she reasoned. It was just a liquid.
When she got as close as she dared, she kept it in her eyeline even as she used her data pad to check the readings. It was, roughly, humanoid shaped, and proportioned. It resembled the upper half of a person, with shoulders, arms, neck, torso and head, all rising out of the pool of liquid below. Its volume was consistent with the night before, but the golden sphere was now nowhere to be seen.
Had it dissolved in the atmosphere? Was it all a single apparatus? Was this red liquid just... a different form of the gold substance? Why had it adopted a humanoid shape?
Was this thing... she finally admitted the word... alien?
Swallowing with determination, she pushed down every thought that wasn't related to the science at hand. Lily had managed to convince herself that the thing wasn't watching her, if only as it had no obvious method of observation. Though, she admitted, that was a poor rationale at best.
Was it copying her? Mirroring her appearance? How else had it replicated the shape of a humanoid? Why? Had whatever sent it known what people looked like? Or was this the shape its creators looked like?
What if this thing WAS the alien? Non-carbon life?
Lily worked, and worked, and scarcely noticed the minutes turn to hours. She told herself that this was far more important than anything else happening on the station. It was only a little over a week to go until she was relieved. They could make up for anything she neglected between now and then. This was her project. It would have her name on it. She was going to be remembered for the rest of history as the woman who made... first contact.
Slowly, as she worked, no longer watching it directly, the figure in the pod shifted, morphed, and moulded itself. When she finally came back to look at it, she got another shock. It was different now. Its form was more... rounded. It had before looked like a child's attempt to make a person out of clay, but now it looked... familiar.
She held an arm out in front of her for comparison and realized, with amazement, that it looked an awful lot like hers. No, it was her.
It COULD see her...
Her eyes drifted back to the pod, to see the arm she had been comparing it to... move.
Lily, again, backed away. She was out of the room before her brain had time to tell her it was a bad idea to run. Calming herself outside, she focused her breathing, and ashamedly crept back into the room a minute later. She was saddened to see it had reverted to its previous form. It no longer resembled her, and its arm was back down by its side.
She kicked herself. Checking the recordings she saw that she had not, in fact, imagined anything. The arm did move. It had moved to mimic hers. No... it had moved to meet hers. As her hand had reached towards the glass, so had the red figure’s done so.
Peering into the pod, she waited, hoping to see some further reaction – but nothing happened.
Time was getting away from her, and there was a limit to how much she could put off. If nothing else, a loss of food, water or air would kill her before this thing did.
Lily cursed the fact she was forced to go through the motions of maintenance, stuff which was so critical that it simply could not be automated for safety reasons and required a human input. She made sure the water was clean, that it was mixed, that it was moving correctly, sanitised... Then made sure the hydroponics were working, re-potted a few plants, trimmed a few others, and checked every spray device multiple times.
It was arduous, to do such tedious work when the most important discovery since fire lay just a few dozen metres away. At last, when she was sure the air would continue to be breathable, and she would not be dead within a week, she moved far quicker than she should have back to the research bay.
Depressingly, the liquid had reverted back to a simple pool of liquid now, with no discernible form. She began to progressively try more and more involved tests, hoping for a response, but there was simply nothing happening. If Lily hadn't had video evidence to review, she could have been convinced the whole thing had been in her imagination.
With a sigh, she rested her head on the edge of the pod and placed her fingertips on the glass, eyes screwed shut, trying to think of anything she hadn't tried.
A quiet chime repeated, over and over, and as her eyes cracked open, she saw five fingertips placed against the class – mirroring hers.
Forcing down the fear, Lily kept her fingertips glued to the glass. Slowly, a figure followed the hand, as if crawling through an airlock. A head, an arm, a shoulder, a chest... Now, from the hips up, was the full bodied figure of a woman.
This form had eyes. They were almost mirrors of her own eyes, solid black, with tiny white pinpricks for irises. They were staring right into Lily's.
“Hello...” Lily whispered.
‘HELLO’.
Its ‘mouth’ had moved as it imitated her. Pushing aside the instinctual response, that proved it. Whatever this thing was, it was designed somehow to imitate what it saw.
“What are you?” Lily whispered, and began to look all over the figure.
‘WHAT ARE YOU’ came the predictable response.
Lily was reserved. She decided she had to know for sure, and devised a simple test.
She held up a pen, and held up a single finger. The red liquid mimicked her... and indeed, it even replicated the pen. She then held up two pens in one hand, and two fingers on her other hand. Again, it mimicked her. She held up three pens in one hand, and then, with her other hand, four fingers.
The red liquid took a moment to observe her, not immediately replicating what it ‘saw’. That already sparked her interest, before she saw it mould itself to be holding up three ‘pens’... and three fingers instead.
Lily let go of the pens, and gave a shuddering gasp. Having been so convinced, she was almost unable to believe it. This thing was... no, it wasn't sentient. But it was, on some level, able to interpret data. This was not some mirroring liquid that just repeated what it saw. It was able to calculate. If it could do math, it could communicate. If it could communicate... who knew what it knew? What it could tell her? Tell everyone?
Working furiously, Lily began to put together a way to communicate.
She tried numbers, symbology, repeating patterns. The red shape in the pod responded. For hours, she worked non-stop, simply putting everything she knew into practice. It was as though a lifetime of learning had prepared her for just this moment.
However, she knew she was just one person. It took months, even years, for uncontacted cultures on Earth to be able to communicate anything beyond the most basic of meanings as they learned each other's languages.
Lily knew, deep down, that what she was doing now was irresponsible. She should be waiting for the global scientific community to use its collective ability to devise a more responsible way to perform this first communication, which was likely the most important undertaking in the history of her species.
However something, somewhere, deep down, was pushing her on. When she looked into those blank eyes, she saw something looking back at her. This was a real thing, with thoughts, with ideas, and she would not… no, could not leave it to sit alone for weeks, or months or years. It had come all this way to speak to someone, and she would not make it wait any longer.
She was no linguist, though. Lily was even by her own admission one of the most intelligent scientists on the planet, but she was almost inept when it came to something like this. How did you build a basis for communication with something that had no frame of reference or similarity to you whatsoever? This was something a socio-culturalist, or a philosopher, hell at least someone with a degree in linguistics should have been doing…
Dropping her data pad into the air and letting it spin away freely, she returned to the glass where, with what she could swear was a slight smile, the red woman stared back at her.
“Hello. I'm Lily,” she said, simply, to the glass.
It felt stupid doing it. This thing had no way to know what those sounds meant, or what the shape of her mouth meant. Hell, she had no way to know if it even understood sound. It was just mimicking what she did because it was, presumably, trying to communicate and assumed that it was being taught. The atmosphere in the pod was so thin and the glass so thick that even through the small speaker she used to project her voice through it like a prison meeting room the sound probably didn’t even travel that far.
Guiltily, she acknowledged that she could also be doing real damage by giving it the wrong ideas. Hell, there was no way to tell if this thing could even hear sound. It hadn't responded to sonic tests at all… not that it had responded to any tests, of course.
In the end, she did what every obtuse tourist did when faced with a language they didn't know. She spoke slowly, loudly, and used her hands.
“I”, she said as she pointed to herself, despite knowing pointing meant nothing to something that hadn't had hands until a few hours ago, “am”, she emphasised excessively, as if the immense concept of being could be conveyed through her movements alone, “Lily.”
For a while, the red shape just waited, smiling. It didn't mimic her, for once. It just started.
Lily smiled. Failure was not the end. Failing was part of the process. She felt bad, leaving this thing alone. It had come so far, and she had failed it, but she wasn't giving up. This wasn't the end, she would be back. For a moment she nearly said that to reassure it… but didn’t.
As she moved back through the station, Lily's head was spinning. The biggest day of her life, of the life of her species, had just happened. Yet she felt more as if she'd just gotten home from a date – butterflies flitting in her stomach, and a bit red faced from saying things she would later regret.
Squeezing into her sleeping bag, she looked to the security camera, and made a wave. It didn't move. No response from ground control. No one could see her. No one knew what was happening up here. Her discovery had not been discovered.
She grinned. Privacy. Real privacy. That meant there was no privacy curtain needed now.
Feeling the need to work off some of that tension at last, it was just one more way she felt as though she had just come home from a date. Pulling the drawstring around her neck, Lily couldn't help but feel a slight pang of guilt as fantasies came flooding back. Subconsciously, they mixed with a half-remembered dream…
Part of her wondered exactly what that red liquid felt like. It had hands… would they feel just like hers, as they snaked their way down her belly, tickling her inner thighs?
No, it was more than just a hand, it was a mass, a swarm, overwhelming, rushing over her... and touching everywhere. All of a sudden, the walls of the sleeping bag felt a lot tighter and far more erotic than they had before. Grinning inanely, she bucked her hips, surprising herself at how sensitive she was.
First her fingers just glided up and down, one on either side of her clit, riding the anticipation of pressing against her outer lips – creating a delightful pressure within her without actually penetrating yet.
Swallowing her pride, the red woman became prettier in her mind. She took on a much more humanoid form. Yet in her fantasy, she still managed to engulf her, taking her whole and beginning to caress every inch of her. Lily's mouth parted in a gasp as her fingers pinched slightly, one at her nipple and the other curling a finger inside to tease at her own entrance.
That finger moved in small circles, rubbing at the overly-sensitive inner walls, before a second finger snuck its way in and helped to make room for a third, which rubbed across her clit as it tickled at a spot that Lily had become very familiar with since she had hit puberty.
Her mouth formed a delicate 'o' as Lily thrummed her fingers to the tune of “oh, oh, oh”, which now echoed through the station. As her orgasm bubbled beneath the surface, Lily bit down on her lip, feeling the sleeping bag cling to her skin as it slicked with a mix of sweat and other moisture.
Any guilt at sexualising the first alien being ever contacted within hours of doing so was drowned under the almost overwhelming horniness which was sinking its claws into her. She had only one outlet for her stress, after all, and it had been quite a stressful last 24 hours.
Not too far away, in the research bay, as her data pad floated in the air, a security camera feed was automatically tracking her location and displaying the footage, with no other orders to follow. Even with ground control not watching, the camera feeds were still transmitting within the station.
As the datapad rotated past the pod, the red woman watched as Lily's orgasm racked her body, feeling Lily's screams resonate in the glass itself, transferring into its own form.
“Hello Lily. I'm Lola,” it mouthed, and smiled.
If you like what you read please feel free to let me know, and if you want to commission a story check the Commission info page.