Chasing Cthulhu (Urf Oomons #2)

Mandy is always doing at least five things at once. Like now, for instance, she is working on a mural. It’s a really crazy take on Dante’s Inferno. She’s got the layers of hell, right? But instead of it being all creepy and scary and torturous, it’s full of cute stuff. Minions, Baby Yoda, puppies, kittens, penguins, all of the demons and devils are unbearably cute with tiny little horns, wings, and tails. All of the lost souls are being prodded along by pitch-fork-wielding cuties. And in the center of it all, on a throne of bones and skulls is Hello Kitty. It’s all done in bright, vibrant colors that remind me of Lisa Frank trapper-keepers (no, I’m not old enough to have used a trapper-keeper, but I found a crate of them at a thrift store once).

As she’s painting this mural, she is organizing her financial empire. Apparently, she stumbled across a stash of really valuable credits. Whenever these aliens talk about credits, I think they mean imaginary money. Like how paychecks would go into my account, and I would pay for stuff with my card without ever touching any physical money. The kind of currency that never actually, physically exists. But Mandy’s credits are a rare and valuable physical currency, and she has a whole ton of them. On top of that, she really does own this ship. All three aliens were arrested at some point and when Mandy tried to get them back, the alien government gave her the ship that had been seized from Ken, Lu, and Seven. Legally, not physically. Mandy was stranded on the ship the whole time. It’s really dumb because Mandy can’t operate the ship because she doesn’t have an implant and she won’t get one.

Anyway, Mandy is loaded, and she wants to use all that money to protect Earth from Seereechees and track down and rescue enslaved/abducted humans.

So that’s something else she’s always doing, following leads to try and find humans.

But right now she’s brainstorming how to make more credits.

‘Did you know that none of these alien planets are nearly as populated as Earth?’ she asks me as she paints tiny flames dancing around a horned minion.

I shake my head.

‘Well, the average is about a hundred thousand sentients on any inhabited planet. And a lot of them are far fewer. Most of them have issues with fertility, which keeps their populations low. And every now and then a war will break out that makes it worse.’

Sipping an electrolyte drink, I’m lounging on a beanbag near Mandy as she works and thinks. She says that Ken usually fills this role, but he’s acting weird lately, so I volunteered to keep her company, chat, and bounce ideas around. She’s like a whirlwind of talk and activity and I just nod along. I’m paying attention, but I don’t really have much to add.

‘I don’t think they’ve really invented modern banking. Like, interest, bonds, investing and all that. They just trade and pay each other and the money just sits there. I’m sure loans are made, but not like they are on earth.’

‘So, what,’ I ask, ‘are you going to open an intergalactic bank?’

‘I think so.’

‘But do you know anything about starting up a bank?’

‘Nope, but I’m a learn as I go type.’

I wish I had her confidence. Imagine just deciding to start something and never even considering that you might not be good at it?

She hums as she continues painting, then says, ‘I need to set up a human sanctuary. Somewhere for people to recover from slavery and abduction and decide if they really want to go back to Earth.’

‘I sure don’t,’ I tell her. ‘I bet every single person who’s returned to Earth is being detained by one government agency or another.’

‘I think you’re right.’

She hums for a little bit as she works. This painting looks done to me, but she just keeps going.

‘So, Seven says that I could just buy a whole planet or a moon with the credit coins, to set up a reserve. It would be a bad idea to try to set it up on a planet owned by someone else. But then I’d be pretty much wiped out financially.’

‘Can you terraform a planet? Like one that can’t support life yet?’

‘Yeah, that might be cheaper. Like a fixer-upper planet.’ She grins at me.

‘Well, I think you could get one for free to terraform. Or maybe install some kind of bio-dome,’ I suggest slowly, thinking it through. ‘Then you’d only have to pay for the process of making it livable and not the planet itself.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, nobody owns Mars, do they? And you already have that defense system set up protecting the whole solar system. And I think that there are a few moons around Jupiter you could work with.’ I’m really warming to this idea. I like to think of Mandy claiming all this real estate in our solar system. Not USA, Russia, EU, but Mandy of Earth and her intergalactic refugees just taking up residence.

‘That’s true! I think this is going to work out for real, Gloria. But what I really need are a few different streams of income. If I just continue spending, eventually I’m going to run out of credits.’

‘So, banking.’

‘Yes, but I’m going to start really small and be very subtle about it. Also, I need to keep a monopoly on Earth Art and keep fueling that demand.’

I shake my head at her. ‘You need to slow your roll just a little bit, hon. You can’t own all art that every human makes.’

‘No, but now that I have the Solar-system closed off, I can control distribution. And if I rescue any artistically inclined humans, I’ll be the one showing them the ropes if they want in on this Earth-Human-Art craze.’

I laugh at her. ‘This is starting to sound less like a charitable enterprise and more like an evil capitalist empire.’

She shrugs. ‘You know, I think in order for the charitable part to succeed, the capitalist part has to work too.’

I don’t really know if that’s true. I’m kind of worried about introducing Earth-style banking and investing to an unsuspecting universe. Just because something is a fact of life on Earth doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to spread.

‘So, um, change of subject.’ She glances at me, and I nod for her to continue.

‘You know that there is video and audio surveillance in public areas of this ship,’ she says. It’s not a question.

‘Yeah,’ I agree.

‘Well, this morning I reviewed the footage from last night because I wanted to check that you made it back to your room.’

‘Okay.’

‘I was worried because I’d just left you alone and you were kind of drunk, you know?’

I nod.

‘So, I heard your conversation with Lu.’

This is embarrassing. She heard me accuse Lu of being obsessed with her. I must have sounded like some crazed, jealous girlfriend. And Lu isn’t my boyfriend. He’s an alien, for Chrissake!

‘There’s something I think you should know, and I didn’t bring it up before you came aboard because I didn’t want to scare you off. And after that there was never a good time.’

Well, that’s not ominous at all.

She looks at me for a moment then speaks, ‘Homeworlders have a really bad reputation. A long time ago, when they first left their own planet, they would kidnap other aliens, implant them with eggs, and hold them hostage until the eggs matured. That’s how they reproduced in those days, and it pissed everybody else in the universe off. Two wars were fought about it and Homeworld was poisoned and made unlivable, so all of the Homeworlders had to relocate to a different planet.’

‘Oh, wow.’ What else is there to say to something like that?

‘Yeah, and now all babies on Homeworld Two are grown in tanks. Nobody reproduces in a regular way on that planet. It’s illegal. A whole lot of things are illegal. There aren’t any families, nobody has parents—’

I hold up a hand to interrupt. ‘So the way they reproduce is so predatory and offensive to the rest of the universe that it’s now illegal?’

She nods and says, ‘Yeah. And they are so dumb about it because instead of learning from other species how to have relationships with consent and reciprocity, leaders on Homeworld were like ‘If we can’t kidnap and coerce sex partners then no sex ever again for any of us!”

She does a weird hiccupy impression, imitating Homeworlder speech that’s just goofy and not at all accurate. It makes me giggle.

She continues to explain, ‘Okay, the point of all this is that Homeworld Two is very isolated. And even Homeworlders like Seven, Lu, and Ken who were able to leave the planet are isolated because it’s illegal and socially taboo for them to live with anyone who isn’t a Homeworlder. The whole universe still remembers the wars and why they happened. Homeworlders aren’t well thought of.’

I nod because that makes sense.

‘I’m telling you all this,’ she continues, ‘so that you’ll understand that Lu doesn’t know anything about flirting, or relationships, or anything like that. He doesn’t know how to play the kind of games that humans play about sex and relationships, you know what I mean?’

I slowly nod as all of this information coalesces in my brain, but then I point out, ‘But he has been avoiding me ever since I came on the ship. Then he tells me he’s obsessed with me. And then he goes right back to avoiding me this morning.’

‘Yeah, well I think he has an explanation for it and it’s not that he’s playing games. You should let him explain.’

Mandy is a steamroller. On top of everything else she’s working on and thinking through, she’s concerning herself with mine and Lu’s conversations as if she has any business—

‘And you might want to review the security logs and check what Lu has been doing while he’s avoiding you.’

I shake my head. ‘What’s with you all telling me to watch security logs? I’m not the type to spy on people—’

‘Ugh.’ She tosses her paint-brush-like tool into the box that floats beside her when she’s painting. Then she taps the side of it, and it closes and floats to the ground. ‘Come on. This way.’

Usually, I like Mandy, but right now she’s getting on my nerves with her pushiness and nosiness. I follow her anyway.

When we get to the security alcove, Mandy gets a small tablet out of one of the folds of her wrap-skirt. The alcove is meant to interact with the neural implants the aliens have but has a work-around with the tablet. She taps at the tablet for a second and then uses voice commands to bring up the log from last night.

I’m in this video, and I’m teetering drunkenly down the hallway, singing a Rihanna song.

‘Watch,’ Mandy tells me.

Me in the video spins around and almost falls, but Lu appears out of nowhere and catches me.

‘Data,’ Mandy says (she has named the security AI Data.) ‘Switch to thermal mode, rewind three minutes, then play.’

It switches over to a kind of infrared vision and I can see now that Lu was following me very closely the whole time.

‘That creepy alien!’

‘Yeah and look at this.’ She rewinds further and we watch Lu follow me around ten more times.

‘It seems to me,’ she opines as we watch Lu sneaking behind me, ‘that he is obsessed with you, just like he said. But he’s trying to give you space for some reason.’

This should be bad news, but I can’t help a frisson of warmth that moves through me. He’s not dangerous to me. After everything that’s happened with him, I know that he’s most dangerous when he’s protecting me from something. The idea that he’s following me around makes me feel—good? Protected?

I don’t know what Mandy expects me to do with this information though.