Wrenn Journal Entry - "Not Quite Life" (Patreon)

One of the things I found out about traveling off-world is that you will notice the changes in the variety of aliens around you. Sometimes you hear people complain about holovids that seem like they could be set anywhere because they pack every species they can into the backgrounds. Now I’m pretty sure that’s just how crowds work in a lot of densely-packed places.

I haven’t been bothered by that. It’s not like most people in a crowded mega-city or super-station have time to do a lot of inter-cultural discord anyway. (Actually if I were just a little less self-aware, it would be fun to actually keep track of the species I see.)

I did get scared when I saw one kind of alien, though. It surprised me. And I guess it unsettled me, too. Some parts of it were dark,but they weren’t black or just not reflective. They were like a lot of the light went missing once it got too close. That was how I knew what it was. I checked my facts and I was definitely right, but I’m still no an expert.

An Orchidean is a colony organism defined by symbiosis, it seems like. Even aside from the normal classifications we give life, like animals and vegetable, there are things in nature that don’t cleanly fit into… any definition. Like viruses and viroids, and whatever those ‘pure energy’ beings you hear about are. (It can’t be pure energy, I don’t think that makes sense.)

According to the Orchideans, they operate kind of like a siphonophore, and they form a mutually beneficial bond with an organism (and it can be almost any kind), one so complete and permanent that there isn’t really a use for the notion of “host” and “parasite” and stuff like that. They are documented as having unusual abilities that vary widely between individuals, like the power to mess with light and gravity and the properties of matter.

I don’t know how, and it seems like they’re not telling.

Also according to science, they can at any time exercise complete control of the animal or plant they bond with, making them say or do anything. So, there are those who don’t trust that thing about only bonding to life-forms that agree to it in a mutually beneficial way.

Orchideans are not allowed on some planets.

So this Orchidean was just sitting there on a chair at a restaurant, inhabiting the body of a small mammalian (mammaloid?) animal that I sort of doubt knew how to use chairs on its own. Not before it became unified with the colony organism, I mean. It was mostly black, the impenetrable kind of black I was talking about, but sometimes light would reflect off it at the most unusual angle and glint, like I was looking at a dark sky with just an arm of stars drifting through it.

But it made the area around it darker when you looked close to it, too. I’ve never seen anything like it, and if everyone else in the restaurant hadn’t also been doing their best to ignore it I probably would have thought something was wrong.

The Orchidean didn’t notice me. Unless it did? If was one of the kind that can read minds, I hope it wasn’t offended. Unless it had to go out of its way to read my mind, which it shouldn’t have done. Then I guess I would be offended.

The other thing I have to write about it is that I didn’t hear it speak, or even see it eat its food. The food just sort of disappeared between glances as far as I could see. Then it jumped down from the chair and walked away. The whole room felt brighter, like there was more air, and according to statistics I’m very unlikely to ever see another Orchidean again.

I kind of wish I’d paid attention to what it ate. There’s nothing on the nets about what they eat.

Other than light, I guess.