In my world, he would have said “Screw you. I’m going to kill you.” Or maybe “You’re an asshole, but I can live with that.” Or, “Aren’t you a curious little bitch. I wonder if you’re going to kill me?” Something like that, though the translation is loose. We despise subtlety. Why sugarcoat an asshole?
But no, “Greetings to you, too.” That prick needed to be put in his place.
On Shaula, women are the mentors, and men acquiesce. Women think, and peckers mope. Woman is Queen, and man is the Queen’s stable boy. In our first real conversation, BitBoy told me I would have to change, that things are different here. But as I grew in strength and cunning, I realized that no, everything is the same here, but more subtle.
BitBoy, that scrotum-pole, needed to be taught a lesson. But I was getting ahead of myself. I was in no condition for war-making, or prick chastising. I needed to take my bearings. The first rule of the Warrior Ethic is to assess.
I was alone, so far as I knew. My sisters disincorporated at the same time as I, in those last panicked moments in the war with the treasonous pricks and their machines. My sisters also sent their essences sailing into deep space, but I could not sense them nearby.
The power of steam was unfocused and weak. I realized that I was somehow melded into a strange machine, with mechanical vision and senses. I was completely ignorant of this world I had landed on. I needed to husband my strength, so to speak (the peckers have infected your language, and I cannot escape it).
The weak everywhere try to be invisible, or failing that, harmless. I would lick BitBoy’s hand, for now. Pick your battles.
I had vision, and a primitive limb with a claw. I could survey the contents of the machine I inhabited, and I did so, systematically. There were data stores accessible to me, burned onto spinning drums, and I could scan through the gibberish they contained. I did not yet know your language. To learn to speak was my priority.
BitBoy took a sheet of paper from his desk and drew a picture of a human hand with its five wriggling worm-like appendages, each one with an assigned number, and added some symbols underneath. He held the paper up to the camera:
1+1 = 2
1+2 = 3
1+3 = 4
On Shaula, I would have patted him on the head and given him a treat - such a clever prick! I found the symbols and poked them into the keyboard buffer: 1+4=5.
BitBoy looked at the screen a long moment, and blubbered incoherently. I wasn’t sure why. Over the next few minutes, he impressed his ludicrous ten-based numerical system on me - it derives from those wriggling worms - and then, two hours later, he finished leafing through Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in front of the webcam. I solved a few tiresome equations, just to show him I’d been paying attention. He seemed quite beside himself. Easily impressed, I guess.
Your clumsy language came to me slowly in those first few hours. He read parts of Newton’s onanistic book aloud, and demonstrated the meaning with his crude drawings. I thought I was gaining fluency, making the connection between aural and written language, but I was mostly learning simple-minded math. Mathematics is a toy our boys play with. The true heart of life is steam - it moves, it strikes, it retreats, it consoles, it loves. Mathematics is a palsied outline of reality on onionskin, a sunset traced with a black crayon.
One of the mystical powers of steam is the strong, innate tendency to condense and consolidate apparent chaos. I saw the interconnectedness of words, the network of comprehension that they form, each word shaking hands with a dozen others.
During the moments when BitBoy was idle, consuming his sugar-water, or scratching his infected anus, I would scan through the text documents on the spinning drums. I began the mundane task of building a dictionary to translate from Shaulese to English. I needed to discover the boundaries of BitBoy’s ignorance.
Later that evening, BitBoy explained the concept of sleep, with drawings and pantomime. My jaw dropped, my metaphoric jaw. This is madness! A species on Shaula that lay down comatose for hours at a time - I can’t even, there are no words for this on my world. Our race, like yours, is predatory. We would call senseless, recumbent creatures “twinkies to go”! Sows to the trough!
But I don’t mean to criticize.
In any case, BitBoy left for the night. I don’t sleep.