#also I'm aware that the proper word for mantis arms is 'pincer' not pincher

[marlynnofmany]

Irrational Attachment

I directed the delivery guy to put the last high-tech crate next to the others in our very full cargo bay, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. This was a big order. I noted the final count with a good old-fashioned Earth pencil.

The delivery guy, a fellow human much beefier than I was, smirked at the pencil and clipboard. “Really living in the space age, there,” he said. “Don’t you guys have tablets and scanners?”

“Oh sure,” I replied. “But one has a cracked screen and the other's got a faulty battery. You know how it is.”

His response was eclipsed by the arrival of the sparkly purple conglomeration of limbs that was my coworker Zhee. I was used to bug aliens by now, but I was amused to see the brawny human edge back a step.

Zhee didn’t notice. “What is ‘pack bonding’?” he demanded, clicking to a stop and looking at the two of us expectantly. “They were telling jokes that made little sense.” He waved a pincher arm over his shoulder. “Then it occurred to me that I have a pair of qualified humans here I can ask. Why do people joke about humans caring too much?”

The delivery guy straightened up, all bluster. “Oh, it’s a bunch of radiator wash, really. Lots of species are social. Really, we wouldn’t all have space ships out here if everybody couldn’t cooperate!”

“Well, sure,” I said. “But there’s a difference between cooperating and getting attached. Didn’t you have a teddy bear as a kid?”

“Yeah, as a kid,” he scoffed. “We’re talking about grownups here.”

“Grownups do it too,” I told him, barreling on as he started to object. “We give names and personalities to ships and cars and space probes. We put googly eyes on machinery, and keep pet rocks. We build people out of snow, lending them our own clothes, and we’re sad when they melt away. We have ancient history of granting a bear military rank, and recent history of doing the same to a cleaning droid. We care about things.”

He was still shaking his head and looking stubborn, so I pulled the pencil from my pocket. I held it in front of his face with an intense stare.

“I can tell you that this pencil’s name is Steven,” I said. “Then I can do this—” I snapped it in half. “—And I can watch a little bit of you die inside.”

His expression was that of a person shaken to his core. “What the f— Why would you do that??”

I looked down at the broken pencil. “You can’t tell me humans don’t care.”

Zhee clicked a pincher. “But it’s just a pencil.”

“It was,” I said. “Now it’s Steven.” I pulled a roll of tape from a different pocket. “And now I have to nurse him back to health and apologize.”

~~~

The ongoing backstory of the main character in this book. No pencils were (permanently) harmed in the creation of today's story.