I was in a relationship with an alien part 3/??
Welcome back, like I said in the previous post, today I’ll mostly be talking about metamorphosis.
I expect a lot of people are interested in the whole metamorphosis aspect and continuity of self, which of course had a huge impact on our relationship, so I wanted to take the time to go in depth on that. I’ll do my best to explain it the way I came to understand it over time.
Aliens are hatched as brood, which are non-sapient, and the best comparison I was given was with kangaroos. You know how tiny kangaroos (and I guess all marsupials?) crawl into the pouch and then have to stay there to grow into a proper baby? We wouldn’t really say the jelly bean that crawls into the pouch is sentient, would we, but clearly it turns into a baby kangaroo that is. Alien brood are a bit like that. So they really don’t have a concept of ‘self’ until they metamorphose into children. From that point forward they do have a self that persists across metamorphoses, but each life phase has different instincts and body plans. So a specific alien may have a character trait that persists across life phases but expresses itself differently in each phase. They carry forward memories (after the brood phase, though Silk claimed he did vaguely remember what it was like to be aquatic, he said it was peaceful to always be floating), but the emotional attachment to the memories isn’t really there. I think the closest thing may be remembering what you were like as a teenager, and remembering you were a bit of a disaster but being able to look back and say “well, I was a bundle of hormones and anxieties then, I wasn’t really the same person.” You can remember that, I don’t know, not being invited to a concert you didn’t want to go to in the first place felt like the end of the world, and you can understand why it felt like that, but you also know you’d never feel like that now. It’s not the same of course but it’s the closest example I’ve been able to think of.
Silk’s dislike of wet feet was one of these things that was already present in childhood and, I’m sure, is still present now that he’s a parent. The other kids used to make fun of him for it. He was a bit reluctant to tell me about it at first, I think, but I wasn’t very good yet at picking up on his cues. But me blundering into that topic led to our first real conversation. I didn’t really have alien friends, though over the years there were coworkers or other station residents that I was friendly with. There was usually more interspecies contact among the scientists. They even had a regular mixed-species pub quiz night, but because of course we have no cultural knowledge or history in common it was almost all abstract science questions and I never participated. So this was really the first time I talked with one of them about the metamorphosis in depth. It always seemed a very private topic to me but Silk quickly set me straight on that. He clearly (or, well, clear to me now) felt much more awkward about the wet feet thing than about discussing metamorphosis with me and was relieved to change the topic. So I asked him what I’d really been wanting to ask an alien pretty much from the moment I got to Midway but had never dared: isn’t it terrifying to suddenly go blind?
He told me that this was something most alien children are worried about. Parents always say it’s okay, they won’t mind, it won’t be scary, but how can it not be scary, right? And children often try to prepare for it by playing games with blindfolds and stuff but that’s not the same because they’re meant to have vision, so being blind as a child is something completely different from being a sea urchin who is meant to only have light/dark photoreceptive cells. But then when he had gone through the metamorphosis, it just felt right. There is an adjustment period where they learn to use their new body but he said the parents were right, it was never scary. I also asked if it was weird to think that one day he would have sight again, and he said it didn’t feel weird and he was looking forward to it, but that it would probably be weird not to taste things anymore. He meant the chemical receptors, not all taste, obviously they can still taste food and things as parents.
I had already been a bit pushy I think so I didn’t ask any more, but I remember that conversation really well because it finally answered some things I had been wondering about for a while. Like I said earlier, this wasn’t some whirlwind romance so after this conversation it still took, I don’t know, another four months? Something like that, before I started to feel something was different. But I don’t want to mix too many topics here because I think there may be some questions regarding the whole metamorphosis thing and I’d like to focus on those in the comments instead of muddling everything together.
