His Little Earthling

by Katie Douglas

  “I guess. It wouldn’t be real, though,” Sarah said, shaking her head doubtfully.

  Ral sighed. He wished he could give her what she wanted but it wasn’t possible.

  * * *

  “Sir? They’re here, now.” Ral’s temporary assistant stood nervously at the entrance to the boardroom at Ral’s offices, where Ral stood beside an image that was being projected from the back of his tablet.

  “Good, show them in.” He wanted the whole galaxy to see this. An assortment of journalists from the press offices of large and small news outlets filed into Ral’s boardroom. He waited for them all to seat themselves and begin making their recordings and, in the case of the Minos Kerala Evening Chronicle, their live broadcast.

  “This device was found on Martina, a moon in the Toluene system. It appeared to have been deposited there after a long journey through space. When the device was connected to a tablet, it made the following announcement.” He pressed the buttons Sarah had told him to press to get the silver device to deliver its message.

  When it stopped, he was inundated with questions.

  “How do you know the device is genuine?”

  “I have 3D scanned the device, and I compared it to other technology in my database. So far, I have eliminated connections with all twelve major cultures across the galaxy, and thirty or forty minor ones. The rest didn’t have space travel, meaning that unless one of those societies has regressed from some ancient advanced state that we don’t know about, they couldn’t have sent this object into space. That means the probability of it being a hoax is 0.01.”

  “What will happen to life as we know it if we start having contact with Artificial Intelligence?”

  “I wouldn’t care to speculate. I’m an archaeologist. I have studied the device, but the consequences arising from its existence are beyond my expertise.”

  “Have Prime government been made aware of this?”

  “I didn’t have their telephone number.” Ral winked at the journalist as he said it. “In all seriousness, though, this is a discovery that affects the whole galaxy. I thought the galaxy should, therefore, be the first to know about it.”

  “The device mentioned an AI planet, Spheron. Have you seen the directions to the planet inside the device?”

  “No, I’m an archaeologist; I don’t know how to get at that information inside the device. My guess is that someone will find that out whenever this gets commandeered by Prime government on Nidia. Whether they share that with the rest of us is anybody’s guess.” Ral had decided it was best to leave Sarah out of all the reports about this device, to avoid drawing attention to her remarkable abilities with technology. He didn’t want Prime government to commandeer her.

  When the press conference was over, Ral was very pleased with himself that he’d done the right thing. Prime government couldn’t hide this discovery now. He went to lunch at a local pavement café and enjoyed the sunny afternoon.

  * * *

  Shortly after lunch, there was a knock at the door. Not expecting any visitors, Sarah went to the peephole and saw two serious-looking men in black suits standing in the hallway. Cautiously, she opened the letterbox.

  “Yeah?”

  “Interplanetary Law Enforcement, ma’am.”

  “There’s no such thing,” Sarah replied with certainty.

  “Ma’am, we usually only concern ourselves with keeping order on the Prime planets, but these are special circumstances.” The men wore uniforms and shiny badges.

  “Prove who you are.” She wasn’t going to open the door to strangers on a quiet Saturday afternoon when her daddy was at work.

  “Ma’am, if you do not open the door, we will charge you with obstruction of a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. Since there’s two of us here, we’ll charge you with it twice. That’d be a mighty long jail term for a pretty little thing such as yourself.”

  “Pretty? You don’t even know what I look like!”

  “Yes, we do. We got special dispensation to use tax records on this case.”

  “Am I in trouble?” Sarah was suddenly worried that this was to do with the fact she’d hacked into Desinnovate to make her Innovation Suite programs.

  “Not yet. Just you open the door, nice and easy, and let us search the property.”

  Scared, Sarah dropped the letterbox and ran for her tablet.

  “Daddy, there’s two scary cops outside the apartment and they want to search the place!” she wailed as soon as Ral answered her call.

  “I’ll be right there. Don’t let them in until I arrive. They need to follow due process.”

  The officers kept banging on the door until, several minutes later, they abruptly stopped. Sarah cautiously went to the door, where she saw Ral standing in the hallway speaking to the cops. She opened the door. They rounded on her.

  “Ma’am, we are here for the device that is in your possession. You have been warned about obstructing a law enforcement officer…” one of them began, but Ral stepped in front of her and the cops stopped talking. Sarah had never appreciated Ral’s size as much as she did at that moment.

  “If you want the device, you’re not gonna even think about charging my fiancée with any crimes. She’s an adult little girl, which, when it comes to felonies, makes her a minor in the eyes of the council here on Minos Kerala, and since they’re the ones who prosecute any major crimes brought before them in the civil courts, you would have a hard time making anything stick.” Ral didn’t look intimidated by the two officers.

  One of the officers eyed her neck. “She’s not collared. She can’t be tried as a minor unless she’s collared.”

  “There are two ways this can go,” Ral said testily. “Either stop threatening Sarah or I smash the device. Would you be law enforcement officers for very much longer if your boss found out you lost the most important item in the universe?”

  “Hand over the device, sir.”

  Ral entered the apartment. Sarah stood near the doorway, stunned that there even was any law enforcement after everything she’d seen. They must be very selective about what they prosecuted, she decided, since Ral hadn’t even been able to get them to charge Vartuk with attempted murder. Ral retrieved the device and was about to hand it over when he paused. Sarah wanted to close her eyes until this was all over.

  “Naturally, I will need a receipt to prove I handed it over,” Ral said, and Sarah thought the cops were going to try to arrest him; they looked furious.

  “We’re not in the habit of issuing—”

  “It’s in your regulations. I have to get a receipt. Standard procedure.” Ral held out his empty hand. “I’m not paying capital gains tax on this, it’s priceless, so naturally I’d have to inform the tax office of where the device went, if it wasn’t correctly recorded by yourselves. You wouldn’t want your department to get audited, would you?” Sarah realized that tax enforcement was the only thing these cops seemed concerned about, as their attitude immediately changed.

  “One moment, please.” One of the officers tapped something on their tablet. Ral’s own tablet vibrated a couple of seconds later, and he nodded in satisfaction.

  “That appears to be in order. Here you go. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. I’d hate to have to pay to get it repaired.” He handed over the device and loomed over the cops until they left, then he turned to Sarah.

  “You okay, little one?” He put his arms around her and she felt safe.

  “I am now, Daddy. I was scared though.” She snuggled up to his chest.

  “It’s all over now, and I would be surprised if we heard anything more about this.”

  * * *

  It was two weeks later, and Ral was checking his bank statements while Sarah was flopped on a beanbag playing a new game on her tablet.

  “Sarah, you sold any commissions for a six-figure sum, lately?”

  She raised her eyebrows then shook her head. Where had that money come from, then?

  “What’s up?” She put her
tablet aside and he frowned.

  “We’ve been given three hundred thousand credits from an unknown source,” he said.

  “All payments are electronic these days, aren’t they? Can’t the bank track down the electronic footprint of whoever sent it?”

  “Maybe. I’ll go talk to them.” He went to their bedroom and contacted the bank. When he returned, he sat down on a beanbag.

  “What? What is it?” Sarah’s interest was piqued.

  “We got a reward from Nidia for handing over the device.” Ral’s shocked tone summed up how Sarah felt about the news, too.

  “Wait, so we’ve suddenly got a bunch of money?” she giggled.

  “Yeah. Which means you can have your wedding after all.”

  “Really? Truly? We’re getting married?” Sarah hardly believed it.

  “If you still want to,” Ral said. Sarah leapt at him and nearly knocked him off his beanbag as she put her arms around his neck and held him tightly.

  “Of course I want to, Daddy!” she replied. “The only thing I can’t find is a place to have the ceremony.”

  “I’ve been doing some work for a company in the city, and I think I might have found the perfect place.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “So, let me get this straight, you want a ring and a collar?” Betsy, the collaring ceremony planner, had mostly figured out the details of this wedding, but she was still getting stuck on some of the finer details. She had tapped away at her tablet through the entire meeting in Sarah’s living room.

  “Yes. I want a ring for the wedding, and a collar to wear as well as my wedding ring afterwards, because no one here understands the concept of a wedding ring and I want everyone to know that I’m spoken for.”

  “Sure you do. It’s your special moment. Okay, there’s a few jewelers in the city, I’ll message you a list; get Ral to take you to one of them and buy you a nice collar. He’s a man so he might not know, but collars come in different sizes, so make sure you try it on before he pays for it.” Betsy stopped tapping to look up at Sarah, who nodded weakly.

  “Uh… sure. I have to go to the bathroom, I’ll be back in two seconds.” Sarah hurried to the bathroom and locked the door behind her, then leaned on it as she tried to figure out her emotions.

  At her last wedding, after waiting several years for her fiancé to get his act together, Sarah took matters into her own hands. She paid for every single thing, she planned it all, she cooked the food and printed her own invites. She hadn’t minded that. But when she bought a secondhand wedding ring online and put it on her credit card, it was a step too far.

  At the time, she did it because she worried about not being able to choose the thing she wanted if her out-of-work husband was paying for it. She felt bad for even thinking about asking him to spend so much money on her. As time went on, however, it became part of the growing sense that their relationship wasn’t real. That he hadn’t cared about her happiness unless she was loud enough to get his attention over the top of whatever video game he was playing.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have planned a wedding at all, then maybe their relationship would have fizzled out much sooner and she could have been settled with someone. Sarah realized then that she was still angry with her first husband; angry at losing the time they had spent together instead of being with other people.

  Would she still be the same person, if she had married someone else? What about Liam, her son? Surely, if she’d married someone else, the children would have been different? Would Basil exist? Would AIDS have been cured? She took a deep breath. Would she have been working on that project for FarTech? Would she even be here, now, or would she have stayed in the twenty-first century? With a sharp twinge in her heart, she realized that if she’d not had that experience, she never would have met Ral.

  A line from a song drifted into her thoughts. Your love is one in a million; You couldn’t buy it at any price; But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves; Statistically, some of them would be equally nice. She didn’t believe it for a second, though. It couldn’t be a coincidence that she’d traveled all this way through time and space, and met the one man who was perfect for her, who cared about her enough to let her be herself in every way she needed, who knew what she needed, better than she knew herself, and who wouldn’t flinch at giving that to her, regardless of what it was or whether she thought she wanted it at the time or not. They must have been destined for one another. She knew, rationally, that such things were unlikely, but her heart told her otherwise, and she couldn’t find any other explanation for why things had turned out this way. Logic explained so many things, but it couldn’t provide an explanation for this.

  If that was the case, then Ral and she were clearly meant to be together. This wedding seemed like such a big deal, but it was because she cared about him so much that this time, everything had to be perfect. Ral was a perfectionist, although he was so good at it that he made it look like he was just super laid-back and competent; he would understand why she wanted this all to be exactly right. He would probably share her excitement about going jewelry shopping, rather than seeing it as a huge inconvenience.

  With that settled, the bubble in her chest got smaller, then she took a deep breath and returned to the living room, where the ceremony planner was tapping away at her tablet.

  “You put down that you wanted a wedding cake. What is that?” Betsy asked her.

  Sarah was taken aback, so she tried to explain it.

  “It’s a big cake so everyone gets a slice. And, uh… it’s pretty.” What else described wedding cakes? They were usually unique, weren’t they? Her mom had made her last one, and Sarah hadn’t exactly paid attention to the process. Cooking had never been her thing.

  “Do you have any pictures or recipes?”

  “No, but let me show you one, give me a moment.” Sarah picked up her tablet and very quickly produced a model of a wedding cake, with three tiers.

  “The surface is made of frosting. It’s the best I can do quickly.”

  “Like a cupcake?”

  “Sorta. Only bigger.” They were getting somewhere.

  * * *

  In the morning before the wedding, Sarah awoke to a knock at the door. She went to answer it in a robe and nearly got bowled over by an excited Laila.

  “Hi! We’re here for the wedding party!” Laila pulled on a party popper and it exploded confetti all over Sarah, who giggled.

  “I tried to explain that we are the wedding party.” Riela rearranged a strand of her purple hair, which was perfectly coiffed as usual.

  “It’s a big party where she’s getting collared with a ring on her finger. We are in the wedding party, because we get to party the longest and she’s having a wedding party until the cake is cut, when we depart,” Laila said.

  “I can’t be a party to this madness anymore,” Riela muttered.

  “Maybe you two should part ways from the party for a little while so you can partake in the rest of the day without needing to petition people to be partisan to the correct meaning of the word ‘party.’” Sarah couldn’t help herself. The pressure had finally gotten to her and now she was making puns. Instead of groaning, Laila and Riela giggled.

  “Anyway, I need to party. Flin has parted with his other slave because she wasn’t fitting in. She’s moved out of our apartment. I guess he wasn’t that partial to her,” Laila said. Sarah was pleased that things had worked out for her friend. It went unsaid, but they all knew it was a matter of time before Flin brought someone else home. Sarah hoped Laila liked the next slave better than the last one.

  “When you put it like that, I don’t see how we can partition our wedding party,” Riela added. Several seconds later, when the giggling had subsided, they unfastened the plastic on the dresses and Laila gasped in amazement.

  “It’s so beautiful! I love yellow! How did you know?” She looked at Sarah with tears in her eyes, and then Sarah was misty-eyed as well. She hugged her friend. Riela hung back but Sa
rah dragged her into the hug.

  “I guess we’d better get the tears out of the way now, so we don’t ruin our makeup later,” Sarah said. Riela gasped in horror, like that would be the end of the world. Sarah knew Riela was very particular about her makeup, and she’d never seen her without it, but was it really that important to her? She didn’t say anything, however, as it seemed mean-spirited.

  When they’d finished hugging, Sarah left Laila and Riela sitting on her bed talking about shoes while she went to have a shower. In the hot jets of water, she realized the next time she did this, she would be married to the most wonderful man in the universe. A buzz of excitement ran through her tummy, and she thought for a moment about the idea of being married. It would be forever this time, she just knew it, and she couldn’t imagine spending that length of time with anyone else. When she was old and… wait, that didn’t happen anymore, did it? When she was older, and sitting on her porch in a space rocking chair or whatever fancy things people had nowadays, Sarah knew she only wanted Ral beside her.

  The warm water drizzled deliciously against her skin, and she poured some rose-scented body oil into the diffuser reservoir of the drying machine before standing in it, to ensure her skin didn’t look dehydrated on her big day. Standing in the gentle gusts of air as they dried every inch of her body, she wondered how Ral intended to consummate their marriage. He had been acting a little secretive about something for a couple of days, and she was sure he had something up his sleeve. Was it rope, or a paddle, or something she couldn’t even imagine? Sarah couldn’t wait to find out.

  There was hammering on the bathroom door, followed by Laila’s plaintive voice. “C’mon! Time is marching on and on!”

  “Two seconds!” Sarah shook her hair out and got the last wetness out of it. She lunged for a towel and wrapped herself up in it as the bathroom door began to open.