We Hire Humans, Chapter 4

Chapter 4

My life settled into something of a routine. I saw two, sometimes three clients in my personal 24-hour day, made a few tech credits from time to time by repeat customers who wanted to jump the line, and spent the rest of my time studying. Some of the clients were friendly, but none of them became friends.

In retrospect, Sara had told me it wasn’t an easy life, but I had been so focused on the awesomeness of going to space and getting to meet all these xenos, that I hadn’t paid attention to the downside. Lonely? How could I be lonely on a ship full of amazing folks? I was learning the answer to that firsthand.

It didn’t help that the food was pretty much the same day after day. When I asked about other flavors, Our Friend told me that he was able to synthesize pretty much any organic chemical I wanted to flavor my food—if I knew the chemical structure. Needless to say a xenoanthropology major like me didn’t know the chemical structure of much of anything besides water. I tried sniffing the foods Our Friend grew for some of the other xenos to see if they had anything I could adopt, but most of them didn’t smell like anything I would want to eat, and anyways I couldn’t be sure they didn’t have anything in them that would make me sick.

Studying became my second full time job. I was interested in xenos...