Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2011-06-20 12:01 pm
ptahrrific) wrote2011-06-20 12:01 pm
Entry tags:
Fake News: It Came From Beyond The Stars And Stripes, part 1
Title: It Came From Beyond The Stars And Stripes (1/4?)
Characters/Pairings: Jon/"Stephen", Olivia, the WØRD
Rating: R
Warnings: Alien!sex, tentacles, mpreg. Eventually: (skip) abortion, imprisonment, threatened brainwashing, mortal peril, aliens shaped like celery.
Disclaimer: #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. The Report characters and their universe are property of Stephen Colbert, the other Report writers, and Viacom. The real person(s) are used in a fictional parody context.
Beginning of the expanded version of the alien!"Stephen"/pregnant!Jon ficlet. A draft of this languished on my hard drive for almost two years, until I finally realized what it was missing: secret agent Olivia.
~*~
The nice thing about having a completely absurd truth was that you didn't have to worry about your cover story.
"I'm carrying Stephen Colbert's alien love child," said Jon to anyone who asked why he was so touchy lately. They invariably apologized for asking at a bad time.
~*~
In retrospect, there were a lot of things that probably should have tipped Jon off. Starting with the way Stephen flinched at the chaste brush of their lips.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What kind of ##*!* do you think I am? At least take me out to dinner first!"
Jon had trained his ear to recognize eight or nine separate words in Stephen's language, although his vocal cords weren't capable of mimicking most of the clicks, and Stephen gave him The Eyebrows whenever he tried. This one, however, was not in his repertoire. "What kind of, uh, what?"
"It doesn't translate," said Stephen crossly, leaning back against the railing. The balcony overlooked one of the improbably beautiful techno-vistas contained within Stephen's desk. (The desk was, according to Stephen, a top-secret outpost using the most advanced technology in all the United Planets for clandestine observation of the human species. None of this had been enough to stop Starbucks from installing two stores.) "It's the socially dominant gender in !'^''*' society. Let's get back to dinner. Will there be lobster?"
"There can be. You like lobster?"
"No. Looks too much like my old astrophysics professor. I like steak."
"If you're the socially dominant gender, why can't you buy your own steak?"
Stephen broke into a dazzling grin. "You're such a kidder sometimes, Jon."
A red neon tube flickered into life somewhere off to the left, casting warm shadows across his face and turning his shirt a pale lavender. Jon thought he could see glints of Stephen's real eyes under his white-and-brown hominid contacts, although he was more distracted by the tongue now running slowly over Stephen's extra-pink lips.
He paid for steak. He made an emergency detour on the way home when Stephen freaked out about having forgotten mouthwash, and paid for that too. He even waited alone, on his own couch, for a good quarter of an hour, while Stephen gargled enough minty freshness to frost a cake.
He was in the middle of picking at a profoundly boring loose thread on the edge of one of the throw pillows when Stephen pushed him over and kissed him.
Again, he should have been tipped off when Stephen's tongue started sliding farther down his throat than he had been prepared for. But by now Jon was too distracted to stop for anything short of poison fangs, which Stephen had sworn weren't normal for !'^''*'.
With an inarticulate groan he fumbled with the tiny buttons on Stephen's shirt, trying to rock against him and return the kiss all at once. Ignoring these efforts—not fighting them, just not noticing them, as if the idea of their getting naked weren't even on his radar screen—Stephen tangled frenzied fingers in Jon's hair, nipped at his lips, and very nearly made him gag even while driving him wild.
Just when Jon thought he might actually throw up, Stephen slid languidly out of his mouth and flopped down, half on top of him, one arm slung across his chest, warm wet tongue draped along his neck. The tip stroked gently down the line of his collarbones, while Stephen clicked softly at him.
"A-are you done?" stammered Jon, breathless and dizzy and achingly hard.
"'Ey! Ah've haah—" Stephen sucked his tongue back into his own throat and tried again. "I'll have you know I've had hundreds of mating partners! And they all agreed I was a very considerate lover. It's not my fault you were born without %%(!*!) ridges."
While Jon was trying to figure this out, Stephen nudged his erection with...oh, hell, was that a tentacle? "By the way, you really should get this engorged tissue looked at."
~*~
After a couple of lessons on human erogenous zones, the sex got a lot better. The only casualty was the tosses between their shows. Stephen insisted it would look suspicious if he stopped sucking on pens at every opportunity, and Jon was too self-conscious to watch his secret boyfriend stroke himself off in front of an audience.
His loss.
"At least you did enough research to know not to wave that thing around in public," said Jon, when Stephen paused during a promising makeout session to unstrap his tentacle. It was short by !'^''*' standards; he hadn't mentioned this to Jon, who never seemed able to keep his eyes off it. "You could probably get clear up into my intestines with that."
Stephen whipped it over to the coffee table, unearthed his field datapad from beneath Jon's discarded T-shirt, and double-clicked the note-taking function. "Is that a common human desire?"
"No! No, it really isn't. Did you do any research on sex before you got here?"
"Preliminary research didn't turn up much on the mechanics. Just that there was only one acceptable position, and you were supposed to feel deeply ashamed afterward."
Jon made a face which suggested he was too polite to say exactly what he thought about Stephen's preliminary research. Or that all this talk of shame was turning him on. Stephen still wasn't great with expressions.
He hadn't wanted this job in the first place. UP observers had an underground betting pool on which pre-FTL sentient species would blow themselves up next; Earth was at the top of the list. Stephen had spent months hoping the assignment would be canceled, until it became clear that he was going to need a personality transplant ready the next morning and hadn't done any of the prep work.
One all-nighter later, he had staggered into the lab with a personality matrix cobbled together from clips of television pundits. It was a brilliant strategy when you thought about it, though Stephen hadn't. Talking heads got the chance to have contact with all kinds of pivotal figures in Terran society, but didn't have the kind of meaningful effect on events that could have skewed his report. And if the narcissism levels were registering a bit high by UP standards, well, that was probably a cultural thing. Not their place to judge.
After a decade of observation and no emergency pullout due to iminent nuclear holocaust, Stephen's computer had taken to prodding him at every opportunity about his lack of curiosity. He was only too glad to ignore it. He had his own TV show; what else mattered?
Now, a few more years down the road, he revised his opinion. When Jon ran his hands along the rough skin of Stephen's tentacle, then offered to show him a new sexual position that would stimulate his mouth much more effectively than a stubby human tongue...that mattered too.
~*~
Olivia poked her head into makeup to find Jody halfway through working whatever magic it was that kept Jon's natural pallor from showing through on-air. "Hey, Jody, can I cut in?"
"Olivia? You're not on until the second act. There's no rush."
"It's not that. I just wanted to borrow the boss for a minute."
"I'm listening," said the man in the chair, trying to catch Olivia's eyes in the mirror. "Jody hasn't even started teasing my hair yet, so you've got plenty of time."
"I meant alone," said Olivia, still talking directly to Jody. Had to recognize her authority and defer to it, make her feel like she was doing Olivia a favor rather than being kicked out. "You know how it is, new girl on set, not great for the insecurity." Bright smile, self-deprecating head-tilt, hand on arm. "It'll only take a second, you'll have plenty of time to finish, I swear." Steering her toward the door. "Thank you so much, this is so gracious, you have no idea what this means to me—" Close, lock, spin, draw. "—who are you and what have you done with Jon Stewart?"
The person who looked like Jon stared. "Wha?"
"You better not have killed him," added Olivia, the phaser humming unsteadily in her grip. "I didn't know him that long, but he really seemed like a nice guy, you know? Ohgawd, you're not the kind that rips off his skin and wears it, are you? Please say that's not his skin, because that would be so gross."
"Olivia—if I turn around, will you hold off on shooting?—thank you—I don't know what you're talking about," stammered pseudo-Jon, hands raised, pushing at the floor with his toes until the chair had spun to face her. "Of course it's my skin. It's me. Why wouldn't it be?"
"What, you mean aside from all the sudden-onset quirks? The drowsiness, the fact that you're scratching ten times as much, the new office-wide ban on onions?"
"I'm spread kind of thin right now, my dermatologist swears that'll clear up if I use this lotion, and sometimes allergies develop late in life. What sinister backdrop is any of that supposed to have?"
"The kind where you're scanning as alien now, when you registered as 100% human before the show went off for Christmas!"
Jon's expression of baffled panic slid sideways and crashed.
~*~
"You didn't tell her about me, did you?"
"Not in so many words," said Jon testily, following Stephen through the halls of glittering circuit boards and pulsing columns of fluid. "But there are only so many potential candidates for giving me a sexually transmitted flesh-eating alien fungus."
"Don't be absurd," scoffed Stephen. "That can't be what her scanners picked up. My planet doesn't even have fungi."
"Yeah, well, you also said your planet didn't have a local equivalent of Baconnaise," grumbled Jon.
"If you were the sole representative of your planet to an alien species, would you admit that it has Baconnaise?"
"Yeah, okay, that's fair."
Stephen's contacts were already out, red compound eyes glittering in the fractured light. He submitted one of these to a retinal scan, and with a friendly chime the door of the medical bay slid open.
The room was full of little screens quietly scrolling through unfamiliar script, in between racks of strangely curved implements, some with unnerving blades. Jon stretched out on the narrow white table where Stephen directed and fought the urge to just let go and nap. "Uh, you're not going to be cutting chunks out of me in here or anything, are you?"
There was a soft whirring sound as one of the larger wallscreens came to life. Of Course Not, it printed, in large, friendly letters. That's My Job.
Several cheek swabs, finger pricks, and various increasingly intimate pokes and prods later, Jon had tested negative for every common infection on Stephen's planet, on the United Planets capitol world, and at the hyperspace drive-through where the ship had stopped on the trip over when Stephen got a craving for something he had described as "like your chicken fingers, if chickens were more like leopards with eyestalks."
"Computer, can we get a basic full-body scan?" asked Stephen, with a note in his voice that Jon was trying very hard to pretend wasn't desperation.
Sure Thing, printed the computer, then displayed two options in an unfamiliar script. Stephen clicked at it, and the table beneath Jon set into a pleasant hum.
He was dozing off in earnest with the impromptu massage when Stephen leaped up. "Computer! Zoom in — there!"
Turning his head ever so slightly to get a view of the monitor, Jon was treated to a false-color view of his innards, as seen from the back. The colors must have been set to !'^''*' standards: his muscles were blue, his blood pumping green, and what looked like fat deposits glowed an uncomfortable neon orange.
Yes, I See, flashed the computer on a smaller screen, while the main one beside it dove in on Jon's torso.
In spite of the dizzying coloring, Jon was pretty sure he could spot the more popular organs. Kidneys. Stomach. Intestines.
And there, curled up next to the intestines, something small and squiggly and pale.
Jon made a face. "Oh, ew, what's that?"
Stephen didn't say anything. He was gaping at the display with...well, frankly, Jon couldn't tell what emotion. His eyes were glittering, but with the contacts off, his eyes always glittered.
"Is it a tapeworm?" demanded Jon, wide awake now. "Please tell me you didn't give me an extraterrestrial tapeworm."
You Should Be So Lucky, printed the computer.
"You shut up," Stephen snapped at it. "Don't listen to it, Jon. This is a beautiful, natural, healthy thing."
Jon sent up a desperate prayer that that didn't mean what it sounded like it meant.
~*~
"Stephen...I don't know if I can do this."
"Sure you can!" answered Stephen from the top of a ladder. "Just because there's never been a human-!'^''*' pregnancy in the recorded history of the galaxy, that's no reason we can't pull it off. Ah, here it is!"
He shimmied down the ladder, clutching a bottle of pills and trying to look encouraging and upbeat and not in the least terrified. He had laid and it had taken and he was going to be a mother, and all he had to do was make sure Jon's body didn't switch gears and reject the baby later. Easy! He had the finest government-issue ship the UP had to offer. Okay, that still made it government-issue, but—finest!
"Potassium," he explained, shoving the bottle onto the counter next to a row of others. "You'll be needing this. I don't mean to brag, but my species kicks your species' ass when it comes to using potassium."
"That isn't exactly what I meant," said Jon. He still hadn't moved from the scanning table.
The UP was going to kill Stephen if they found out. Or at least, hit him with enough convictions to lock him up for a couple of geologic ages.
Well, he was just going to have to make sure they didn't find out. If anything was worth lying to the government over, it was this.
Plastering on a broad grin, Stephen skipped over to Jon and clasped the man's warm, lightly furred hand. "Jon. There's absolutely nothing to worry about. Just give me a couple of hours, and I'll have all those pesky side effects nailed down. You won't even know she's there." He paused. "Until her spines start growing, at least."
"Her wh—? But—you don't have spines!"
"And you don't have a tail," said Stephen. "Aren't fetuses cool?"
~*~
Olivia laughed for about five minutes straight.
Jon hung his head as low as possible, hoping the baseball cap and the restaurant's dark corner would keep him invisible. "I appreciate the hilarity of this whole thing, and I'm sure there's a fascinating feminist karmic moral in here somewhere, but it would really help if you could pretend to be a trusted confidant for a while."
"Hey, I can be an awesome trusted confidant," protested Olivia. "I can even give you awesome advice. Not that growing up with two different human cultures is exacty like growing up with one human and one alien, but at least I have an in. Okay, first off: do Stephen's people have universal translators, or are you going to need to start working on the language?"
"I can't. I mean, I'm not sure what their translators are like, but human throats can't make the sounds."
"Ooh, that's no good. How is Stephen at explaining things in English? I don't mean technical stuff, but, like...let's say religion. Do they have religion?"
"He, uh, tries to keep up the human act as much as possible," said Jon. He hadn't mentioned the personality transplant to Olivia, figuring it would bring up questions he wanted to deal with even less. "So he only talks about Catholicism."
"Well, you're gonna have to figure out the details sooner or later. Even if you don't buy it, you'll need to know when not to laugh in front of his parents. What do you know about his culture? Let's start with that."
"Um," said Jon.
Olivia looked like she couldn't decide whether he was being adorable or ridiculous. "I sure hope the sex is good."
"His tongue is fourteen inches long and prehensile."
"That would do it."
Jon shuffled his French fries along the rim of the plate, a cluster of salt-strewn asteroids in orbit around his bacon cheeseburger. "Seriously, the conversation is fine, but it's all about Earth things. I kind of hoping your people could fill me in. Uh, that is, the people you work for. I mean, other than me...and NBC...you know what I mean! The Men in Black."
"The Agency isn't the Men in Black, Jon."
"Sorry. Men and Women in Black."
"Men or women or whatever, we're still not like those movies."
"Ah." Jon paused. "Then why did you ask if I was one of the aliens that steals people's—"
"I panicked, okay? So sue me." Olivia stole one of his fries. "Why would you rather talk to us than Stephen anyway? You're having his baby, you ought to be able to ask what holidays he celebrates."
"It's tricky, all right? Humans aren't technically recognized as a civilized species yet, so the UP has him under some pretty heavy orders of secrecy...."
"The who?"
"The, um." Jon bit his lip. "You don't know about the United Planets."
Olivia's eyes widened. "What? Of course we do! I'm just surprised you know. So, uh, what else do you know about their government? Just to be clear."
"You know diddly-squat, don't you."
"Hey, I resent that. We know a buttload of stuff about using salvaged alien weapons. Besides, I only got into this business hoping I could figure out how to reverse-engineer a hoverboard. It's not like I'm ever planning to have sex with one. Although if I did? I would totally use a condom."
Jon groaned. "Next time I bang an alien who as far as I know is the same sex as myself, I'll keep that in mind."
"Good."
After a long pause, he added, "You know, it's too bad about the Agency. Because if they were like the movies, you could go around telling people that you're a Munn in bl—"
Olivia tipped her daquiri glass at him. "Just because this is delicious doesn't mean I won't throw it on you."
Characters/Pairings: Jon/"Stephen", Olivia, the WØRD
Rating: R
Warnings: Alien!sex, tentacles, mpreg. Eventually: (skip) abortion, imprisonment, threatened brainwashing, mortal peril, aliens shaped like celery.
Disclaimer: #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. The Report characters and their universe are property of Stephen Colbert, the other Report writers, and Viacom. The real person(s) are used in a fictional parody context.
Beginning of the expanded version of the alien!"Stephen"/pregnant!Jon ficlet. A draft of this languished on my hard drive for almost two years, until I finally realized what it was missing: secret agent Olivia.
The nice thing about having a completely absurd truth was that you didn't have to worry about your cover story.
"I'm carrying Stephen Colbert's alien love child," said Jon to anyone who asked why he was so touchy lately. They invariably apologized for asking at a bad time.
In retrospect, there were a lot of things that probably should have tipped Jon off. Starting with the way Stephen flinched at the chaste brush of their lips.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What kind of ##*!* do you think I am? At least take me out to dinner first!"
Jon had trained his ear to recognize eight or nine separate words in Stephen's language, although his vocal cords weren't capable of mimicking most of the clicks, and Stephen gave him The Eyebrows whenever he tried. This one, however, was not in his repertoire. "What kind of, uh, what?"
"It doesn't translate," said Stephen crossly, leaning back against the railing. The balcony overlooked one of the improbably beautiful techno-vistas contained within Stephen's desk. (The desk was, according to Stephen, a top-secret outpost using the most advanced technology in all the United Planets for clandestine observation of the human species. None of this had been enough to stop Starbucks from installing two stores.) "It's the socially dominant gender in !'^''*' society. Let's get back to dinner. Will there be lobster?"
"There can be. You like lobster?"
"No. Looks too much like my old astrophysics professor. I like steak."
"If you're the socially dominant gender, why can't you buy your own steak?"
Stephen broke into a dazzling grin. "You're such a kidder sometimes, Jon."
A red neon tube flickered into life somewhere off to the left, casting warm shadows across his face and turning his shirt a pale lavender. Jon thought he could see glints of Stephen's real eyes under his white-and-brown hominid contacts, although he was more distracted by the tongue now running slowly over Stephen's extra-pink lips.
He paid for steak. He made an emergency detour on the way home when Stephen freaked out about having forgotten mouthwash, and paid for that too. He even waited alone, on his own couch, for a good quarter of an hour, while Stephen gargled enough minty freshness to frost a cake.
He was in the middle of picking at a profoundly boring loose thread on the edge of one of the throw pillows when Stephen pushed him over and kissed him.
Again, he should have been tipped off when Stephen's tongue started sliding farther down his throat than he had been prepared for. But by now Jon was too distracted to stop for anything short of poison fangs, which Stephen had sworn weren't normal for !'^''*'.
With an inarticulate groan he fumbled with the tiny buttons on Stephen's shirt, trying to rock against him and return the kiss all at once. Ignoring these efforts—not fighting them, just not noticing them, as if the idea of their getting naked weren't even on his radar screen—Stephen tangled frenzied fingers in Jon's hair, nipped at his lips, and very nearly made him gag even while driving him wild.
Just when Jon thought he might actually throw up, Stephen slid languidly out of his mouth and flopped down, half on top of him, one arm slung across his chest, warm wet tongue draped along his neck. The tip stroked gently down the line of his collarbones, while Stephen clicked softly at him.
"A-are you done?" stammered Jon, breathless and dizzy and achingly hard.
"'Ey! Ah've haah—" Stephen sucked his tongue back into his own throat and tried again. "I'll have you know I've had hundreds of mating partners! And they all agreed I was a very considerate lover. It's not my fault you were born without %%(!*!) ridges."
While Jon was trying to figure this out, Stephen nudged his erection with...oh, hell, was that a tentacle? "By the way, you really should get this engorged tissue looked at."
After a couple of lessons on human erogenous zones, the sex got a lot better. The only casualty was the tosses between their shows. Stephen insisted it would look suspicious if he stopped sucking on pens at every opportunity, and Jon was too self-conscious to watch his secret boyfriend stroke himself off in front of an audience.
His loss.
"At least you did enough research to know not to wave that thing around in public," said Jon, when Stephen paused during a promising makeout session to unstrap his tentacle. It was short by !'^''*' standards; he hadn't mentioned this to Jon, who never seemed able to keep his eyes off it. "You could probably get clear up into my intestines with that."
Stephen whipped it over to the coffee table, unearthed his field datapad from beneath Jon's discarded T-shirt, and double-clicked the note-taking function. "Is that a common human desire?"
"No! No, it really isn't. Did you do any research on sex before you got here?"
"Preliminary research didn't turn up much on the mechanics. Just that there was only one acceptable position, and you were supposed to feel deeply ashamed afterward."
Jon made a face which suggested he was too polite to say exactly what he thought about Stephen's preliminary research. Or that all this talk of shame was turning him on. Stephen still wasn't great with expressions.
He hadn't wanted this job in the first place. UP observers had an underground betting pool on which pre-FTL sentient species would blow themselves up next; Earth was at the top of the list. Stephen had spent months hoping the assignment would be canceled, until it became clear that he was going to need a personality transplant ready the next morning and hadn't done any of the prep work.
One all-nighter later, he had staggered into the lab with a personality matrix cobbled together from clips of television pundits. It was a brilliant strategy when you thought about it, though Stephen hadn't. Talking heads got the chance to have contact with all kinds of pivotal figures in Terran society, but didn't have the kind of meaningful effect on events that could have skewed his report. And if the narcissism levels were registering a bit high by UP standards, well, that was probably a cultural thing. Not their place to judge.
After a decade of observation and no emergency pullout due to iminent nuclear holocaust, Stephen's computer had taken to prodding him at every opportunity about his lack of curiosity. He was only too glad to ignore it. He had his own TV show; what else mattered?
Now, a few more years down the road, he revised his opinion. When Jon ran his hands along the rough skin of Stephen's tentacle, then offered to show him a new sexual position that would stimulate his mouth much more effectively than a stubby human tongue...that mattered too.
Olivia poked her head into makeup to find Jody halfway through working whatever magic it was that kept Jon's natural pallor from showing through on-air. "Hey, Jody, can I cut in?"
"Olivia? You're not on until the second act. There's no rush."
"It's not that. I just wanted to borrow the boss for a minute."
"I'm listening," said the man in the chair, trying to catch Olivia's eyes in the mirror. "Jody hasn't even started teasing my hair yet, so you've got plenty of time."
"I meant alone," said Olivia, still talking directly to Jody. Had to recognize her authority and defer to it, make her feel like she was doing Olivia a favor rather than being kicked out. "You know how it is, new girl on set, not great for the insecurity." Bright smile, self-deprecating head-tilt, hand on arm. "It'll only take a second, you'll have plenty of time to finish, I swear." Steering her toward the door. "Thank you so much, this is so gracious, you have no idea what this means to me—" Close, lock, spin, draw. "—who are you and what have you done with Jon Stewart?"
The person who looked like Jon stared. "Wha?"
"You better not have killed him," added Olivia, the phaser humming unsteadily in her grip. "I didn't know him that long, but he really seemed like a nice guy, you know? Ohgawd, you're not the kind that rips off his skin and wears it, are you? Please say that's not his skin, because that would be so gross."
"Olivia—if I turn around, will you hold off on shooting?—thank you—I don't know what you're talking about," stammered pseudo-Jon, hands raised, pushing at the floor with his toes until the chair had spun to face her. "Of course it's my skin. It's me. Why wouldn't it be?"
"What, you mean aside from all the sudden-onset quirks? The drowsiness, the fact that you're scratching ten times as much, the new office-wide ban on onions?"
"I'm spread kind of thin right now, my dermatologist swears that'll clear up if I use this lotion, and sometimes allergies develop late in life. What sinister backdrop is any of that supposed to have?"
"The kind where you're scanning as alien now, when you registered as 100% human before the show went off for Christmas!"
Jon's expression of baffled panic slid sideways and crashed.
"You didn't tell her about me, did you?"
"Not in so many words," said Jon testily, following Stephen through the halls of glittering circuit boards and pulsing columns of fluid. "But there are only so many potential candidates for giving me a sexually transmitted flesh-eating alien fungus."
"Don't be absurd," scoffed Stephen. "That can't be what her scanners picked up. My planet doesn't even have fungi."
"Yeah, well, you also said your planet didn't have a local equivalent of Baconnaise," grumbled Jon.
"If you were the sole representative of your planet to an alien species, would you admit that it has Baconnaise?"
"Yeah, okay, that's fair."
Stephen's contacts were already out, red compound eyes glittering in the fractured light. He submitted one of these to a retinal scan, and with a friendly chime the door of the medical bay slid open.
The room was full of little screens quietly scrolling through unfamiliar script, in between racks of strangely curved implements, some with unnerving blades. Jon stretched out on the narrow white table where Stephen directed and fought the urge to just let go and nap. "Uh, you're not going to be cutting chunks out of me in here or anything, are you?"
There was a soft whirring sound as one of the larger wallscreens came to life. Of Course Not, it printed, in large, friendly letters. That's My Job.
Several cheek swabs, finger pricks, and various increasingly intimate pokes and prods later, Jon had tested negative for every common infection on Stephen's planet, on the United Planets capitol world, and at the hyperspace drive-through where the ship had stopped on the trip over when Stephen got a craving for something he had described as "like your chicken fingers, if chickens were more like leopards with eyestalks."
"Computer, can we get a basic full-body scan?" asked Stephen, with a note in his voice that Jon was trying very hard to pretend wasn't desperation.
Sure Thing, printed the computer, then displayed two options in an unfamiliar script. Stephen clicked at it, and the table beneath Jon set into a pleasant hum.
He was dozing off in earnest with the impromptu massage when Stephen leaped up. "Computer! Zoom in — there!"
Turning his head ever so slightly to get a view of the monitor, Jon was treated to a false-color view of his innards, as seen from the back. The colors must have been set to !'^''*' standards: his muscles were blue, his blood pumping green, and what looked like fat deposits glowed an uncomfortable neon orange.
Yes, I See, flashed the computer on a smaller screen, while the main one beside it dove in on Jon's torso.
In spite of the dizzying coloring, Jon was pretty sure he could spot the more popular organs. Kidneys. Stomach. Intestines.
And there, curled up next to the intestines, something small and squiggly and pale.
Jon made a face. "Oh, ew, what's that?"
Stephen didn't say anything. He was gaping at the display with...well, frankly, Jon couldn't tell what emotion. His eyes were glittering, but with the contacts off, his eyes always glittered.
"Is it a tapeworm?" demanded Jon, wide awake now. "Please tell me you didn't give me an extraterrestrial tapeworm."
You Should Be So Lucky, printed the computer.
"You shut up," Stephen snapped at it. "Don't listen to it, Jon. This is a beautiful, natural, healthy thing."
Jon sent up a desperate prayer that that didn't mean what it sounded like it meant.
"Stephen...I don't know if I can do this."
"Sure you can!" answered Stephen from the top of a ladder. "Just because there's never been a human-!'^''*' pregnancy in the recorded history of the galaxy, that's no reason we can't pull it off. Ah, here it is!"
He shimmied down the ladder, clutching a bottle of pills and trying to look encouraging and upbeat and not in the least terrified. He had laid and it had taken and he was going to be a mother, and all he had to do was make sure Jon's body didn't switch gears and reject the baby later. Easy! He had the finest government-issue ship the UP had to offer. Okay, that still made it government-issue, but—finest!
"Potassium," he explained, shoving the bottle onto the counter next to a row of others. "You'll be needing this. I don't mean to brag, but my species kicks your species' ass when it comes to using potassium."
"That isn't exactly what I meant," said Jon. He still hadn't moved from the scanning table.
The UP was going to kill Stephen if they found out. Or at least, hit him with enough convictions to lock him up for a couple of geologic ages.
Well, he was just going to have to make sure they didn't find out. If anything was worth lying to the government over, it was this.
Plastering on a broad grin, Stephen skipped over to Jon and clasped the man's warm, lightly furred hand. "Jon. There's absolutely nothing to worry about. Just give me a couple of hours, and I'll have all those pesky side effects nailed down. You won't even know she's there." He paused. "Until her spines start growing, at least."
"Her wh—? But—you don't have spines!"
"And you don't have a tail," said Stephen. "Aren't fetuses cool?"
Olivia laughed for about five minutes straight.
Jon hung his head as low as possible, hoping the baseball cap and the restaurant's dark corner would keep him invisible. "I appreciate the hilarity of this whole thing, and I'm sure there's a fascinating feminist karmic moral in here somewhere, but it would really help if you could pretend to be a trusted confidant for a while."
"Hey, I can be an awesome trusted confidant," protested Olivia. "I can even give you awesome advice. Not that growing up with two different human cultures is exacty like growing up with one human and one alien, but at least I have an in. Okay, first off: do Stephen's people have universal translators, or are you going to need to start working on the language?"
"I can't. I mean, I'm not sure what their translators are like, but human throats can't make the sounds."
"Ooh, that's no good. How is Stephen at explaining things in English? I don't mean technical stuff, but, like...let's say religion. Do they have religion?"
"He, uh, tries to keep up the human act as much as possible," said Jon. He hadn't mentioned the personality transplant to Olivia, figuring it would bring up questions he wanted to deal with even less. "So he only talks about Catholicism."
"Well, you're gonna have to figure out the details sooner or later. Even if you don't buy it, you'll need to know when not to laugh in front of his parents. What do you know about his culture? Let's start with that."
"Um," said Jon.
Olivia looked like she couldn't decide whether he was being adorable or ridiculous. "I sure hope the sex is good."
"His tongue is fourteen inches long and prehensile."
"That would do it."
Jon shuffled his French fries along the rim of the plate, a cluster of salt-strewn asteroids in orbit around his bacon cheeseburger. "Seriously, the conversation is fine, but it's all about Earth things. I kind of hoping your people could fill me in. Uh, that is, the people you work for. I mean, other than me...and NBC...you know what I mean! The Men in Black."
"The Agency isn't the Men in Black, Jon."
"Sorry. Men and Women in Black."
"Men or women or whatever, we're still not like those movies."
"Ah." Jon paused. "Then why did you ask if I was one of the aliens that steals people's—"
"I panicked, okay? So sue me." Olivia stole one of his fries. "Why would you rather talk to us than Stephen anyway? You're having his baby, you ought to be able to ask what holidays he celebrates."
"It's tricky, all right? Humans aren't technically recognized as a civilized species yet, so the UP has him under some pretty heavy orders of secrecy...."
"The who?"
"The, um." Jon bit his lip. "You don't know about the United Planets."
Olivia's eyes widened. "What? Of course we do! I'm just surprised you know. So, uh, what else do you know about their government? Just to be clear."
"You know diddly-squat, don't you."
"Hey, I resent that. We know a buttload of stuff about using salvaged alien weapons. Besides, I only got into this business hoping I could figure out how to reverse-engineer a hoverboard. It's not like I'm ever planning to have sex with one. Although if I did? I would totally use a condom."
Jon groaned. "Next time I bang an alien who as far as I know is the same sex as myself, I'll keep that in mind."
"Good."
After a long pause, he added, "You know, it's too bad about the Agency. Because if they were like the movies, you could go around telling people that you're a Munn in bl—"
Olivia tipped her daquiri glass at him. "Just because this is delicious doesn't mean I won't throw it on you."
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Glad you like!
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