Come for the Atmosphere, Stay for the Food

Humans are dense. And I mean that both ways: they’re stupid and they’re a lot of calories for their size.

(Although, I guess the word ‘dense’ can also refer to population. But not for humans anymore, am I right? Ha ha!)

They’re so stupid, you guys. You would have heard plenty of examples by now, like how we thought they must have cloaked their orbital defence matrix, but it just turned out they didn’t have an orbital defence matrix?

That still gets me every time I think about it. But this might be my new favourite.

You know how seventy percent of the planet is water? Guess what the planet is called? Water Planet? Nope! Earth! As in... the dry stuff! They named it after the thirty percent bit! Like, what?

Oof. I feel like I’m gonna cover seventy percent of the planet if I don’t stop swallowing these guys ten at a time. Not that they’d call the place G’norgnax. They’d probably name it after N’nuktar, knowing them. I swear, this dude eats twice as many humans as me and his thorax is still flat as a board. I’m so jelly. I also mean that both ways: I’m jealous of him and also I have increased my gelatinous body mass by a huge amount because of these tasty, tasty bipeds.

Oh, this is English by the way, one of the Earth languages. No doubt you’ve picked it up from these few sentences already. It only took me an hour to get the hang of it. It’s ‘easy peasy lemon squeezy’, as some of them say. (By the way, you have to try human with lemon juice! It’s the best.)

English is just words. For everything! You don’t have to do the smells! Sure, complex ideas are a little more work to communicate, but I just think of it as a fun little puzzle. I’m going to use it for all my transmissions from now on because I only need one mouth to speak it, leaving the other one free to horf down this truck full of army men.

Sorry for eating on mic by the way! I know Commander Tr’buftok has a thing about that.

(I’m actually not sorry at all. See how I’m rolling my eye? That’s a thing the humans do to help them express sarcasm, seeing as they can’t just lift up a flap and blast out a quick little irony cloud.)

I’ll tell you what’s really funny about them, though.

Even after naming their planet after the wrong bit…

Even after surrounding that planet with communication satellites instead of photon turrets...

Even after using those satellites to send inane little messages to humans in the same room instead of simply secreting an odour and turning on a fan...

Even after all that, here’s the funniest part: when they do have a good idea, they mess it up with their emotions!

What do I mean?

Okay, story time.

This happened yesterday.

I’d just begun my daily sweep, and I thought: time to hit up that little corner cafe I’ve been meaning to check out. You know me first thing in the morning: ‘don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee shop full of terrified humans!’

So I busted through the boarded up window, and there was a six-pack of them cowering behind the counter. As if I can’t see through solid objects.

Anyway, they scattered, like always, and I’m like, ‘uh, extendible tendrils, dummies! Ever heard of them?’ I’ve got so much mass at this point that I could chase them down for miles before the tendrils got too thin.

So I sent a half a dozen limbs after them, left and right and up the stairs and down into the basement. But get this: I couldn’t get a hold of any of these guys. The wetsuits I expected— none of them wore baggy clothes. Too grabbable. But normally my suckers would attach to the fabric. Not this time. Okay, I think to myself, no biggie. I’ll try the old wrap-and-squeeze method. Nope! The slippery little wrigglers just squirmed their way out the top of my fists and kept running. What was happening?

Okay. So. You know that smell that means ‘I want to have children one day— to love and be loved— but at the same time I’m afraid that I’m not ready for the responsibility and what if I turn out just like my father?’

Well, here that means ‘someone just cooked a bunch of bacon.’

I walked into the kitchen and saw a ton of meat on the grill, all uneaten. And then it hit me. They’ve gone and covered themselves head to toe in grease! So there’s me, standing in a busted up coffee shop, appendages all over the place, suddenly wondering: are humans intelligent?

Ha ha! Nope! As soon as I thought that, tendril number five grabbed a hold of something. Jackpot! I reeled in the human.

A necklace? She was wearing this chunky silver chain around her neck, loose enough for me to slip a tendril under but strong enough that it didn’t simply break as I slid her back down the stairs and into the kitchen. If she just had melted it down for bullets like the other humans, she would have gotten away, but nope! This bozo kept it around her neck like she was a bag of people take-out and this trinket was the handle.

I would have eaten her straight away if I hadn’t noticed the locket. I recognised the shape— it was a human heart symbol, even though their hearts look nothing like that. But they can’t turn themselves inside out like us, so I’m not surprised they don’t know how their internal organs look.

I let go of the chain so she could speak and I wrapped a tendril around her. She was too tired by now to wriggle out of my grip, but she kept trying. I assigned a couple more tendrils just in case.

I asked her about the locket. I don’t always enjoy conversation with dinner but I wanted to practice English. The humans are often happy to ramble on, it keeps them alive longer. This one was also talkative, but she wasn’t afraid. She was angry. Her dark eyes were full of hate. Her teeth were gritted and she growled her words through them. Her head had been recently shaved. They all shave their heads. Hair is super grabbable. So you can see why I was curious about the necklace. Why risk it?

‘My grandparents,’ she said, out of breath, ‘they’re dead. Their pictures... in the locket.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘what did they look like? Maybe I ate them!’ (I love life’s little coincidences and I’m always on the lookout for them. I think of them like little nods from the universe, as if to say ‘you’re on the right track! Keep going!’)

She shook her head, and scowled. ‘Not you. Natural causes.’

‘I am natural!’ I said. She must have thought I had filler injections, but believe it or not, I was born with these pouty mandibles.

‘No,’ she snarled at me. ‘I mean, old age! They lived long, happy lives! A lot of people did before you monsters came and started devouring everyone.’

‘Why keep the pictures?’ I asked. ‘Why not reabsorb their corpses so they’re always with you?’

‘We don’t do that,’ she replied. ‘We buried them. In the ground.’

‘Ooh! Where?’ I asked. ‘Would they still be fresh?’

This upset her for some reason.

‘You’re monsters! All of you!’ she screamed. ‘Go back to your own planet and leave us alone!’

‘Okay, you’re right. We’ll leave,’ I said, and then I did the eye-roll thing. That’s what they call it, by the way: an ‘eye-roll’. Even though they have two eyes! They should call it ‘eyes-roll’ but like I’ve been saying, they’re stupid.

She didn’t compliment me on my expert use of sarcasm so I kept talking.

‘We can’t go back,’ I explained, ‘our atmosphere isn’t breathable anymore because of all the gases we use to communicate. So we’re moving here. We’re all moving here.’

‘How many?’ she said, struggling less. ‘How many of you are coming?’

‘Oh, trillions!’ I said. ‘Yeah, we’re super dense, population-wise. They should be here next week!’

‘There’s… there’s nothing we can do,’ she said. She went limp. ‘We’re doomed.’

Then she took a deep breath and screamed the last words she’d ever say, and I learned some new English swears and then I ate her and I even found a lemon in the fridge.

Anyway, my point is that she might have lived one more day if she’d been more of a thinker and less of a feeler, because that grease thing wasn’t bad!

Speaking of feelers, mine are picking up some more military chatter. The humans are planning another attack. It sounds like a big one so I’ll wrap up.

They’re still far away but I need to start now if I’m going to get out of tank range. I can’t move very quickly because of all this jelly and I’m still sleepy from the last wave. It was a big meal.

I suppose I could shuffle off some of this mass into a few new entities. That would make me much lighter and instantly increase our numbers. But, you know: bacon smell.

I’ll check in again one hour from now. Can’t wait for you guys to get here! We’ll try to save you some humans, but no guarantees! Ha ha!

G’norgnax out!