The Planet 8.2

8.2 L 391

There I was seated on the flooring with my focus on Dusty. It had reformed into its larger head and body frame; probably it’s only impression of us. Dusty took on its task to explain the situation to me.

Dusty was kind to adjust the temperature so that I can adjust to with having to strip down to my ‘hello, I am Jeeves’ shorts. Okay, Jeeves survived the times. For those of you who do not know Jeeves, he’s the butler in everyone’s mansion. Oops, they replaced Jeeves with the maid model named Akimo in a mechanical frame complete with the apron. She was designed by the Eastern engineers; and yes, they only dressed it with the only wearable apron. Don’t ask me why; I could not hire a living maid let alone owned one.

I did however invited Francois over once; she worked in a French Café. We did it with her uniform on. And it was cold like the section we were in. That was odd but we do live in a world filled with oddities. So was Francois. She liken our sex life to “Tu as été merveilleuse, mon petit chou.” In English, it should come out as “you were wonderful, my little cabbage”. Well, syntheses version of that cabbage. I doubt a cabbage would do for what a carrot may suffice. Who cares, it was a fuck then.

“We are a race which took residence here on the planet. We arrived here eons ago when the planet was futile with organic growths and thriving creatures. It was providing us with its nutrients and we were contributing it back towards them with our decaying shell when our life form had served its purpose.” It sounded like a replay of my own planet but that was also centuries ago. Maybe we will turn into the same form like Dusty eventually; manner of speech. Don’t say I was mocking the earthlings; we were all jelly substance that was once a goop in form. Evolution made us.

“We were soon running low on resources, and then our survival instinct took over. We evolved with the planet.”

“You could leave. I am sure with the eons of time your race may have advanced in some fields like space travels. I meant you have evolved which we did but we also advanced in the other fields.” I had to draw my assumption that all race including those in the outer reaches of space will have the same cognitive development.

“Yes, we did also eons ago.” I laughed out loudly. I was right. All things being equal; we are the same in the universal term but being reduced to dust cringed on my mind. I kicked dust every time I see it. Okay, they don’t hit back like bullies.

“We traversed the galaxies including yours. We were there your planet had huge creatures and volatile atmospheres. We left it alone for it was not our intention to colonize every lump of asteroids we discovered.” Dusty had the serious tone there. I almost believed it then. “Yours was too young.”

“So we were the immature babes then but how did you became….” I could not find the words to tell the dusts there that it was dust to me. Sentimental I may have been then.

“We became too powerful and with ample resources from the other planets, but we could not stem evolution. It was more than the body that was susceptible but the mind also underwent reshaping. We have developed the abilities to assimilate with anything of mineral based like the droids. Your electronic consoles were no different. We merged into the circuitries and then the electronic codes. We were able to reprogram them to our workings. That was how we took over the plant. We were the advanced race here. We had been for centuries, and with it, we had successfully conquered a number of galaxies. We were the Masters of the Universe as in your common analogy for it.”

“In our prime time, we have over twenty five galaxies in our control. Of which some were habitable by life forms. We conquered and imprisoned or eliminated them to dust.” I may hear it wrong then but Dusty had used the last word with a tinge of sarcasm.

“You could….” I intervened then with my curiosity. Dusty was uncomfortable.

“Yes, save them?” Dusty replied.”Okay, let me re-phrase it. With the conquests, we were removing other inhabitants. We were selfish to stand alone.”

“Others? You meant to say that there were others.” I intervened on that. Dusty could be telling me more than we ever knew. “We never met any. Not for the last generations.”

“With our conquest, we became powerful for others but soon we turned inward. We began to lose our focus and infighting occurred. Our empire soon broke up into factions. There were wars and soon we crumbled as an empire. Planets and even galaxies were destroyed with our war.” I smiled at those words then. It was gentlemanly named as revolution or in some nastier terms; civil war. We were reliving those moments then in our own empire.

“You mean you turned to become what we termed as humanity.” There had to be a smarter person inside me.

“Yes, you could say that was the conclusive evidence except humanity was not the term we used here.” Dusty continued on. “We called ours in a term which could not be pronounced in your limited vocabulary.”

Dusty hit a nerve there then. I did mention we have hit space conquest but we never encountered any alien as yet. Regardless of the thousands of probe sent out; garlanded with our data including the music scores of the ancient centuries, we never got any confirmation of another race out there. So we never knew if they understand us or to them if they were to stumble on us. After all music to them may be equivalent to inaudible noise to us. Or our funny caricatures of the ancient times may be termed as hostile; we could be drawing them in the correct dimensions. Thankfully, we never got those lessons on advanced 101 communications our retained forms were already confusing with all the available communication forms used since the birth of mankind.  My second ex-wife would attest to that; I asked for a fuck and not a full symphony recitals of Beethoven. The difference was the time it took to complete; the later a long time. And she will be late for her work appointment.

“You have named us as one with the terminology L 391.” Dusty motioned with his right arm to his face. “The ones that attacked you were L 391. We are L 391-1.”