the last of the habitats in the small specimen room and was returning to the vivarium when four of Dr. Phillips’s assistants returned, carting the alien back to its enclosure.
“Is it okay?” she whispered.
One of the assistants glared at her in irritation, but the other one at his side gave her a shy smile.
“Yeah,” the woman said, tucking glossy black hair behind her ear. “He’s big and has some sort of cybernetic tech like nothing we’ve seen before, but he’s healthy as far as we can tell. He should wake up in about twenty minutes. Just keep an eye on him and make sure that he comes out of sedation okay. We had to give him an additional dose of tranquilizers when he came close to surfacing too soon. If he doesn’t wake up in an hour, comm Dr. Phillips.”
“Okay,” Charlie said in a low voice. She twisted her fingers together uncertainly. She hated dealing with citizens. She never knew how to act around them. “If he has tech, that must mean he’s a sentient being. Why are you leaving him here?”
One of the men, the same one who had glared at her moments earlier, snorted in derision. “Typical of an uneducated non-gratas. It doesn’t mean anything except maybe another race is keeping tabs on him or his population. It is dangerous to assume that just because he has tech implanted in him and shares some characteristics with us that he’s a person any more than we should assume a tagged monkey a reasoning being.”
Charlie blushed as the others laughed behind him. The woman who had addressed her gave her a sympathetic glance as the assistants pushed their way through.
“Don’t worry. We will report our findings and further observations will reveal whether or not he is a sentient being. We just can’t rush things. We have the safety of the entire colony to consider.”
Nodding, Charlie pressed her lips together as she watched the young woman follow after the others. Charlie didn’t agree, but her opinion didn’t matter. Tucking her hands into the pockets of her tunic, she wandered back over to the glass barrier, her eyes wandering over the alien. His sides moved only slightly with his shallow breaths. He lay there for a time before suddenly his sides heaved, and he slowly roused.
Keeping an eye on him, Charlie pored over the new anatomy charts. It was the only thing she was allowed access to at her level of clearance, but she found such information about the specimens fascinating. He was so different. She dragged her fingers over the diagrams showing two large hearts and two sets of lungs, each in separate torsos.
His reproductive system was just below the humanoid upper torso with a protected genital slit behind some sort of retractable plating, and his stomach and digestive systems were in the lower torso. His stomach was huge. She clicked on a tagged note. Dr. Phillips speculated that their alien would be able to consume vast quantities of food and water so it could last for days requiring neither.
Charlie’s eyebrows rose. That was a handy ability.
Another window opened to reveal a captured image of his phallus held out in a gloved hand. Pearly in color, it had several flexible nubs that seemed to run up the sides and top of it to a thick, teardrop-shaped corona covered in more flexible spines. The note from Dr. Phillips confirmed they resembled the head of a cat’s phallus, except for the fact that the “spines” had a more rubbery texture with dull tips that seemed to be designed specifically for increasing stimulation in the female when the male was close to ejaculating, theoretically to encourage a greater chance of insemination.
She averted her eyes from the screen, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. It wasn’t right. She was sitting there, admiring the images and examining them when they had forcibly pulled his cock free from its casing without his cooperation or consent. Too close to voyeurism and sexual abuse for her comfort. That her curiosity drew her to the images just made her feel guilty and perverted. She closed the screen on her comm with a sigh and turned her attention back to the alien.
Watching the male struggle to his feet, she wrestled with the concept of sexual copulation for the quadruped. Normally, among animals, the male would have his sexual organs by his hind legs so he could mount a female. Maybe having four arms helped him to hold her against him. Charlie struggled