IF: Getting Adjusted

[SSFSX17]

Ophraed waved his arm at the farmer in the distance. It had been so long since he had even waved an arm, but his mind remembered very quickly. The farmer waved back at him. As he stepped through the hydroponics units, he got a closer look at the farmer. He knew that the people were humanoids from his initial scan, but he didn't know that they would be so similar to humans. The farmer stopped what he was in the middle of doing and walked towards him as well.The farmer extended an empty hand sideways. Apparently a universal gesture of greeting for these people. Ophraed grabbed the farmer's hand, and they moved their hands up and down in unison. The farmer spoke, "Haoh doo yoo doo, gud serr?" Ophraed did not understand any of it. The farmer's speech was also a bit slurred, as if he was not even speaking his own language according to any strict standard of pronunciation. He was used to the formal enunciation of the alien races he had met in his previous travels, but then again, he hadn't met any commoners of those races.Ophraed put his hand on his chest and said, "Ophraed."The farmer understood and said of himself, "Eyem Darryl. Pleezde tu meechya. Wehr ya frahm." He changed his tone on that last three-word sequence, perhaps because the purpose of statements were changed more by tone than by the words themselves. The farmer looked at him for a moment, then began walking back to his house. Perhaps he was too busy with his work to be bothered by such a stranger. Or, perhaps he was inviting him to the house. Ophraed followed after him.The farmer lived in the same house as a woman and three children-aged beings, all made of entirely flesh. Curiously enough, there were no others in the house. The doors were simple sliding ones, and the walls were totally solid. Their technology had not yet reached the free conversion between energy and matter. It was highly likely, then, that the house was also mostly unchanging, and the main method through which these people adapted their homes was by physically tearing out and replacing components. It was also probable, then, that doing so was an expensive process that involved a great deal of investment.The farmer took some sort of device out of his pocket. The farmer pressed some buttons on it, making noises, and then began to speak freely into it. The woman escorted the three children away into a corridor of the house.---"Yeah, this is Darryl. I've got some weirdo who can't speak plain Kildarian, or even Shirerese. I also felt a kind of earthquake and a suspicious flash of light. Yeah, go ahead and bring whatever force you think is necessary. Yeah, he's here in the living room."Darryl looked back at the strange man. The man tried to grin comfortingly. Maybe he was some kind of immigrant looking for a quick job, but he was dressed mighty fine to be just any farmworker. There was also the fact that he had seen the fellow near the wreckage before, when he was spying on him with his binoculars. The man had what appeared to be some sort of pistol and beam saber on him, too, which meant he was serious. In fact, perhaps the man was trying to rob him!Darryl glanced back at him again. He took his shotgun off the wall and pointed it at the man. "So, do ya speak anything? Where're ya from?"---Ophraed realized that the farmer was pointing a weapon at him. He also saw that the weapon had not one but two barrels. This obviously implied that the weapon came in single-barreled varieties, and that this one was twice as deadly. Ophraed laid face-down on the floor, hands on his head, to indicate submission. The farmer took a step back and continued to point his weapon at him.This was even worse than his first meeting with the Scavengers.

[mDuo13]

(( the language should be, I think, Shirithian, not Shirerese. But that's a minor detail ))Darryl waved the shotgun a little. "Where ya from, I said? Can't you say anything?" He tried to make some gestures that would encourage this "Ophraed" guy to talk, but he was dubious of the results.---Ophraed cringed as the farmer moved the shotgun around, and reminded himself that the weapon, no matter how primitive, would certainly be just as deadly as anything else. Actually, Ophraed corrected himself, it might be some kind of non-lethal weapon, meant for incapacitating -- or inflicting pain upon -- its victim. It was impossible to tell, though, and Ophraed didn't want to take the chance, so he tried to ignore the fact that his life was in jeopardy, and pay attention to what the farmer said.He recognized the tone used when the farmer spoke this time. The farmer was making strange gestures whose intent, according to Ophraed's best guess, was to get him to do something with his mouth -- speak, perhaps? The man's eyes also seemed to be focused on him, his mouth half-open as if anticipating making a reply to what Ophraed said. These two things coupled together implied that the tone that Ophraed had just heard possessed some sort of "urging" connotation. Desparately hoping that it would dispell some of the farmer's anxiety, he spoke in his native language."I do not intend to bring injury upon you."---The man on the floor seemed to get the general idea, and said something in a language the like of which Darryl had never heard. Darryl frowned. He hoped the Guards would be here soon.

[SSFSX17]

"Alright, I see that you are already on the ground with your hands on your head. That's good." The man on the floor nodded. The officer turned to his chief, "He didn't understand a word I just said.""Indeedy he did not, Ray," replied the chief.Officer Ray pulled the man's arms back and cuffed his hands. He pulled the man to his feet. He looked into his eyes and saw all kinds of things common to immigrants: fear, confusion, disbelief, and fantasy. But he also saw something that migrant workers never had: calculation, evaluation, examination, scrutiny. "I think he's an alien from outer space, Wes."Chief Wes shuffled his feet. "He's not normal, but he don't look like no space-man to me."---Ophraed felt as if he was some kind of circus animal. He breathed into a tube to make dials and colors move on primitive display screens. He walked in a straight line. He endured needle torture and had his blood sucked right out of him once.He was sitting on a bench with his hand cuffed to a wall. The cuff was made out of a primitive metal, but the needles that the uniformed ones had stuck in him were preventing him from utilizing his body to its fullest capacity. He remembered that this metal was partially made of iron, and for a time was declared a superior form of it. A uniformed one sat across from him in a comfortable adjustable solid chair, a female. She showed him something she was carving into her writing pad: a crude representation of himself.He guessed that these were procedures that the uniformed ones were taking to identify him. Perhaps they meant to study him. Perhaps professional xenobiologists would come and look inside of him. If the past few hours were any indication, they would probably resort to killing him and cutting him open with crude metallic weapons. He desperately wanted to reveal to them the meaning of the disk he was carrying in his pocket. It was not in his pocket anymore. He feared that the uniformed ones might damage it to the point that they would be unable to read his mathematical cypher key.A straw was stuck into his mouth and he drank the unpurified water thankfully. He smiled to show his thanks, but the uniformed woman simply left.---"Look at this. It's some kind of computer code. But it doesn't work on any of our current processing cores." Ray knew that Chief Wes didn't like technobabble or being lectured to about things he did not understand, but he felt the obligation to explain precisely what was going on. He actually enjoyed reading rights to criminals. He got a thrill out of promoting public education in such a minute way and knowing precisely what the rights meant for the criminal."Can ya figure out how ta run it?" Chief Wes was walking away as he said this. He was not interested at all.Ray began, "Maybe, if I..." and realized something. He remembered a time when he was looking through the raw hexcode of the space administration's mathematical cypher key. The idea was that aliens could eventually understand it and solve the human language. "You know what? I have an idea."The data on the disk was frightenly similar to the cypher key.---What now? Ophraed was afraid to open his eyes to see what happened in front of him. He was held captive by an incredibly primitive society, and it was becoming increasingly unlikely that he could communicate with them.A large display unit was placed in front of him. It projected electrons onto a large weakglass screen. He squinted to stop some of the radiation from burning out his eyes.