Crackle. Pond. Night. A giant frog-like creature emerged from the padded water, its long tongue zapping a firefly. Then another. Then another. With each firefly it ate, it glowed a little more.
Dr. Elk had been studying the frog for some time. You are somehow both scary and beautiful, he told it, transfixed. From first sight, the creature had captured his imagination. Eventually he could do nothing but think about it, sketch it, photograph it, and study samples of its droppings for research. His team of graduate students at the Elk Lab were also fascinated by the properties of this frog-monster. Somehow, it could capture the iridescence of fireflies - its only prey - as its own. With each meal, it would grow brighter and brighter, and the glow wouldn’t fade. It seemed to defy all logic and all science. How could this creature digest the fireflies, but preserve their light? It could only be unearthly, perhaps alien. Dr. Elk took seriously the possibly that it was alien. That it was completely otherworldly, and not of Earth at all.
The holy grail was to get a DNA sample without killing the frog-thing: and so, he tasked his youngest and most spritely graduate student, Raven, to sample it.
As the sun set on a Friday night, Raven wondered how she had gotten to the point in her life where her weekend was spent trying to seduce a frog-monster to come a little closer. She brought with her fireflies she’d collected in a jam jar, and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t nervous about a tongue piercing through the darkness and grabbing it straight from her hands. She thought of her boyfriend’s comments about how he was only a phone call away should something go wrong. But she knew that if something went wrong, a phone call wasn’t going to help.
Besides, she was nervous about using her phone near the beast - after all, it was attracted to anything that glows. Anything in her possession must melt into the darkness if she was to be safe from the giant tongue that could poke through the air at any moment, hungry and insatiable.
Not wanting to be a moving target any longer, she popped open the firefly bottle and let them go by the pond. The creature emerged from the marsh water like a ball of white, frog-shaped light and ate each firefly one by one with ease, and now it was glowing so bright it might as well have looked something like a sunken, blazing meteor. The water rippled with its reflection.
Right then, her phone rang. The screen lit up, and she could see it was her boyfriend.
“Ugh, what timing,” she whispered to herself, feeling her pockets for the phone, hoping the noise wouldn’t alarm the frog beast. She had to turn it to silent, or off—
As she pulled the phone from her pocket, she suddenly felt a tongue wrapped around her wrist, then felt herself hurtling through the air, straight into the mouth of the frog, which was headed straight towards her like an endless abyss.
She tumbled down what felt like a slime-filled corridor, losing her phone in the process. What happened next, she could scarcely understand. Somehow, she was not inside the frog - no, she felt as though she was the frog. She could see through its eyes, feel through its skin, understand the vibrations it understood, hear the ultrasonic noises her human ears had never heard, and feel the water underneath her, and the lust for firefly flesh, all at once.
And she could see her human body on the shore, collapsed, then attempting to get up, then looking at her hands, then feeling her clothes, and it dawned on her that the frog was her, too, that she and it had swapped bodies.
I zapped my tongue out at my previous body, hoping to capture her and return myself to human form. But it was too late. The new ‘Raven’, the alien creature who could wreak havoc on the world, was gone, and she looked as human as anything else.
“Babe, you look traumatized,” the boyfriend said. “What did you see out there? Are you okay?”
He gave ‘Raven’, which was now me, a hug, through which I stared blankly at him. I had run here out of sheer muscle memory, and I hope it was the right choice, hope that this body had guided me in the right direction. It felt uncomfortable to be squeezed in this way and it was unclear as to whether it was intended as a threatening action. I stiffened until he released his grip. I could not overreact, or it would blow my cover. These rituals could well be normal communication between hominids.
This human brain was difficult to use. Thoughts emerged left and right, in a tongue that still felt foreign: I missed the stillness of the pond, of speaking in vibrations and scents and ultrasonic calls. But I must do my research on human society, and what better way than to blend in?
“I am...” the words came out, seeming right to my human brain. “I am...”
“You are what?” He said, eyes wide. “Traumatized? What the hell happened?”
There was a friendly-sounding phrase humans always would say to me. I will try that.
“Hello, big guy. How’s it going?” I said, hoping the phrase would be like a lullaby that relaxes him, so that he’s not suspicious. I could not help but think that he could from my eyes that I wasn’t really her.
“Big guy? You never call me that. I’m your boyfriend. Do you remember me? Is your memory shot? Did you hit your head, at the marsh, did that thing hurt you? Oh god, give me your phone, I need to call Dr. Elk and —“
The lights in this room were so distracting. I still wanted to lick them all, swallow the big lamp especially. The vibrations, too: I couldn’t feel them as well as I could in my original form, but something inside me was still attuned to the subtle whir of the room. It was driving me mad with a destabilizing emotion that human brains can’t process or understand, but my spirit could still recall it. It is the emotion of being pulled into threads, tiny threads, very very quickly, and aching to be re-spun into one piece.
“Or...” he said. “Maybe you should sleep for a bit, actually, that might help,” he said. “I’m just glad you’re safe. Can’t believe that asshole of a professor sent you out by yourself in the middle of the night— on a weekend, too—and it’s my fault, I should’ve come with you...”
He guided me over to a structure that felt soft to the touch. My human brain suggested to me a word for it: Bed. A place where humans go to sleep.
It would be difficult to sleep without out the soothing sound of water. Where I’m from, there’s many times more water than on Earth. In fact, there’s no land mass at all. I don’t know how these terrestrials can thrive on such little water. But from being in their skin, it seems surprisingly supple, not craving of moisture. How strange, how unlike anything I’ve ever known.
A fear of drought and dryness emerged in my human brain and I realized for the first time what “fear” was. I had heard humans recoiled from certain things, driven by the risks and negative possibilities, but it had never really made sense until now. But now I thought of what-ifs, what if the water on Earth dried up, what if, what if...
“I’ll drop you off at the lab tomorrow morning, so you don’t need to walk,” he said. “Just get some sleep and let me know if you need anything, okay?”
Dr. Elk thought Raven was acting a bit strangely at the lab the next day, but he felt no guilt when he grilled on whether she’d gotten the sample.
At first she said “No.” Then, seemingly after noting and analyzing his reaction, said “Yes.” “Which is it, Raven? Do you have the sample or not?” He said. She gave him a vial that contained what appeared to be some type of a keratinous substance. Upon further inspection, he even wondered if it was a human nail clipping.
“Is this a prank, Raven?” He asked, but deep down he knew that a prank was not like her, had never been like her. She was one of the best and she hardly ever even grinned when she was deep in thought, or in work. And she wasn’t the type to submit a fake sample... was she?
Only one way to find out. They studied it under the microscope, then later extracted and isolated the DNA, and in both cases quickly found properties that would be too strange for a human fingernail. Even a step above the DNA level - on the cellular level - it just looked... strange. It must have been sampled from the monster after all. Who knew it had nails?
The human form was not to my liking. It felt cramped and small, and I also didn’t like the constant emoting - the fear, the fatigue, the — what was this? Sadness? While interesting, these Internal sensations also required a certain effort to soothe and to contain. It was much simpler in the Marsh, and on my home planet, where life was languid and slow.
My purpose for coming here, of course, was to research humanity: and I feel, from the inside, that I understand them now. I already have much to share with those at home, much they will be intrigued by. They will touch my skin and imbibe all my experiences of Earth as if it were their own.
I will study them as a human for a few hours more, but that’s all I can spare before this body-swap becomes more permanent, and who would want that? I’ll call for a retrieval ship, and it’ll arrive in just a few hours, via teleportation. One thing these humans are especially bad at, probably due to their highly emotional and warlike nature, is inventing technology. Even though we do so much less at Home, we seem to get more done... our collaboration makes it possible.
Back at the Marsh, a group of beings who looked similar to me - well, to the beast I am now, not the ‘me’ I was - appeared not too far off in the distance. At the same time, I saw my body - my former body, Raven’s body, approaching the Marsh.
“Suck me in with your tongue,” ‘Raven’ yelled, “and we will be swapped again. You will be a human again. And I will leave, as they have arrived to collect me.”
I could still understand English, but I felt it fading a little. It required some effort. It because clear to me that what had happened was the sort of swap that would become permanent if left long enough.
That meant I could become fully alien, forever, always at peace, tranquil, free of all illness or distress or suffering, free of any sort of harm. This body was impenetrable, like living within a steel fortress, and so calming that nothing could disturb me. It had become a drug. I was perhaps now an addict. And I didn’t want to leave my cocoon.
I ignored my original human body and moved towards the aliens, who I felt certain would welcome me. A light went off in my former body’s eyes as I moved towards the teleportation technology, which seemed familiar and safe. My intelligence had expanded in the past several hours in this form, while the frog-spirit’s most definitely had decreased while it became progressively more human, more ‘me’. But even he could tell I was leaving, that I would make his planet my own, that I would never, ever come back. Even the thought of my boyfriend didn’t seem to rouse the old human feelings. All I craved was home, with the same intensity that a fish stuck on land craves for water.
I tried to stop her from moving towards the others, but she was too fast, much too fast. I felt, for the first time in my life, completely terrified. I would be stranded on earth, forced to live as a human... as she disappeared into the other world, I wondered if she would pass for me, if they would notice any change. My ability to call for them had already just faded, and her abilities were surely becoming more and more like mine.
Over time, I suspected that my fear of being left behind, of being abandoned here, would perhaps turn to “anger”, and I would be nothing but a violent, fully human echo of my former self.
In the corner is exercise bike, dusty and neglected. There are two long lamps, on each side of the sofa like Greek columns. Black pleather couches and a table with a bottle of salt and pepper and a small lidded bowl full of sugar. A magnifying glass pokes up out of a container full of pens. Plastic water bottles are everywhere, half filled with water, still. From of a tomato-shaped vase pours forks and spoons, the curves shining. A torn and empty package of chocolate is on the table, next to two cough drops and a woven placemat.
It was dark now, so new-moon dark that River and I used our hands to feel along the bricks. We came back to the main road and its street lamps, we let them guide us past the Chinese food stores, past the Japanese hot pot place, past the rows of houses that all looked elegant in their dilapidation, lights still aglow as other students and their music thumped a faint beat in the background. I could see River’s hands instinctively sound out the rhythm. A few months ago, he told me that everything in life had a heartbeat, even the trees.
War has changed over the years. It used to be real people, once a long time ago, on horseback, with swords, and real wounds: and now it’s what it is. Hunks of metal, drone, robots. As we looked through the perspective of the robots we’d sent to the front line of combat, explosive sparks coming up everywhere, I saw for the first time what looked like a giant tarantula. It was the most impressive feat of engineering I’ve ever witnessed. Its legs, spiky and shining silver, sent a shudder down my spine.
Back in the day, you had to be the fittest guy or gal to be a soldier. I was shocked when I found out about all the physical requirements they had back in the early half of the 2000s and before. I mean, push-ups? Really? They were turning away so many perfectly-skilled nerds. What a mistake.
These days they seem to have it right: the army selects for the nerdiest of us. The fattest geeks with a tub of Mayo (which used to come from cow tits- nasty, right? This is why I like history... it’s just so weird), and a huge bag of ruffled chips, who have been VR gaming since we were toddlers. And so this war is all, in the end, a giant video game.
A video game we can’t afford to lose.
This tarantula thing, really, it was going to be our boss battle. I could just tell it was the boss. They had nothing else like it on the field, and I doubt they would have the funds to build two of those giant things (and if they did, we were in trouble).
I tell myself I’m fighting for the free world, but I don’t know if that’s just something they tell us in training to brainwash us, or if that’s really what this is. When you have multiple countries involved - when it’s a World War 3 - there are no easy answers. But if we lose, if we get occupied by the Russians, me and my family will be the first to be hunted.
Canada was not known to be a war-faring land, overall. I’m not saying we’re Switzerland, but we’re a far cry from the States, right? So I didn’t really see it coming. I thought, hey, I was recruited, but I’ll never need to fight. We like maple syrup and poutine, not random warfare.
Until I was called to serve.
And here we are now. We are sashaying our robots back and forth with all the skill of a pro soccer team passing a ball. We are shooting. We are dodging. But are we winning?
It’s hard to tell, with all the smoke. And the noise... oh wow, the noise. We need to hear it, though, to figure out what’s going on.
Just then, there’s a crunch. My platoon’s captain shouts out a few choice curse words.
We panic. We scramble. I look around at all the screens, trying to figure out what crunched.
More crunches.
I realize that spider’s basically stomping out every machine we throw at it.
My hands are absolutely tense, my fingers on the controller turning white.
My knuckles ache.
I can’t stop, I can’t look away.
But we must win.
Pretty soon, it was clear that it was going to be up to me. The others had lost vital parts; though ‘alive’, their avatars were barely hanging on. My robot was the only one that seemed to be fully intact as this point. I had the best shot of getting a good angle on the tarantula.
Just then, I heard a doomsday crack. I was hit, too. We were all wounded. All of us.
I thought, suddenly, of the Trojan horse. I thought of All’s Fair in Love and War. And I thought of the immortal words of Sun Tzu.
“All warfare is deception.”
I told everyone to fall down. To fake-surrender. To let them believe we were defeated.
They didn’t listen. They kept fighting.
I dropped my machine to the ground, playing dead. I watched with sadness as they all fell, one by one, ground to bits by a giant robot tarantula’s unforgiving heel.
As the tarantula walked over me, not bothering to destroy my machine as it’s took me for long-dead, I saw it’s belly, and recognized immediately that there was a tiny spot of vulnerability. A chink in the armor. Maybe the only chance we had.
I sent every weapon I had up into the abdomen of the beast. It blasted upwards, and flipped into its back.
Struggling in the belly up position, I shot at it again and again and again, until it was aflame.
I felt relieved that no real person was inside that machine, or in any machine. I couldn’t have been so ruthless if that had been the case.
It rolled over many of the enemy’s machines, and it became clear who won, now, by the sounds of the applause, the relieved cheers, the shouting on our side.
But I didn’t stop pummeling the tarantula, not until there was nothing left but scraps in every direction, not until you couldn’t see a spider at all, just molten metal and wires. And I realized then, sweat pouring down my face, that war really hasn’t changed at all.
