bubbled up when he considered his last Facebook fight with this father. His father was ranting about some new court decision which had made abortion easier, and Max had told him that neither of them got to have an opinion on the matter until they got pregnant. That logic had gone in an unexpected direction now.
Rick's tentacles drew up even farther. The smallest ones were like little balls of tentacle with tiny fingers undulating madly. Max was fairly sure that meant he had an unhappy tentacle monster on his hands. Too fucking bad. If Max was unhappy, he wanted to share his general state of misery, and Rick was the available victim.
He couldn’t even go grab a beer and complain with his friends. His friends. That would be a fun conversation. Hey guys, guess what? I got knocked up by a tentacle monster! Yeah, that would go over great. Only about half of Max's friends even knew he was gay. Now he was gay and pregnant. Not cool.
Suddenly all of his guilt over turning Rick's medical exam into a sexual encounter vanished. If Rick could run around shoving his offspring into other people, Max could be a pervert who turned a medical exam into a kinky fantasy that made him reconsider his position on tentacles. He was okay with that. He was just not okay with sex leading to pregnancy. That was something straight people had to deal with, not him.
“Query. Surrogate for compensation?” Rick's tentacles were still all little balls of unhappy wiggly fingers.
“Well clearly I am,” Max said dryly. This would inspire wild porn if anyone on Earth found out. “I can't say I'm happy. How soon are they going to come out?”
Rick hesitated. “Query. Remove offspring?”
Hope blossomed. “You can remove the offspring?”
Rick stared at him.
With a frustrated sigh, Max rephrased his question. “Query. Can you remove offspring?”
“Yes.”
That was rather literal. Max felt like he was having a conversation with his ninth grade English teacher who refused to let anyone use the bathroom unless they said, may I instead of can I.
“Query. Will you remove offspring?”
For several minutes, Rick did not answer. That was Max's first indication that something was wrong. Usually, Rick enjoyed conversations, even when he did not understand what Max was saying. He was a laid-back guy that way. Max frowned. Wait. Rick wasn't laid-back. He was overprotective. The fucker had been keeping track of Max because Max was pregnant with his children. Max had a moment where his brain reassembled itself, and when it was done, he liked Rick a little bit less.
“Answer. I can,” Rick finally said.
He could, but he wasn't offering to. Max was not a stupid man, and he had made a few connections.
He sat up. “Query. Can offspring come out?”
Rick turned to the hatch that Max associated with medical equipment. “Answer. Yes. No damage to Max.” Rick had retreated to a formality and simplicity in language that the translator could handle. No temporary failures and whale song or belches. Just simple, cold fact.
“Query. Damage to children?” Max asked.
Rick turned and he held a silver and blue tennis racket looking thing with one tentacle. Rick walked over to the active scanner image and used a tentacle to poke right in the middle of the figure of the tiny gymnast octopus currently trying to do somersaults in Max's gut.
“Likely to survive. Might not.” That included a number of whistle sounds the translator missed.
“Query. Will the other two survive?” Max had a horrible feeling in his gut.
“Clarification. Smaller two offspring...” The translator failed again, but Max was a bright guy. He got what Rick was trying to say.
Max hated the way he felt, and he didn't want aliens in his gut, but he didn’t want those lives gone because a fucking computer had mistranslated nanny and Rick hadn’t kept his tentacles to himself. Max gripped the edge of the med bay bed so hard that his forearms trembled. He assumed Rick felt equally bad because most of his tentacles were still drawn up tight. The whole of his walking tentacle was visible in its pale fleshy color. A hint of the orange-red showed on one side. Max looked at that rather than at the silver instrument.
After a painfully long silence, Rick asked, “Query. Remove all I offspring now?”
Max opened his mouth, but words didn't come out. He wanted to say he’d never been pregnant. He didn't want to be the cause of Rick's triplets dying. But he wanted them alive somewhere else, which