“Uh...I think we have a problem here, Jill,” said Jack. Her expression was sour, annoyed, and just a tad anxious.

“Er...Yeah, I can see that,” I said. Looking down at the sea of fearful faces that looked up at Jack and I, as we’d descended into our latest target sphere in forms that greatly resembled a cross between the giant mecha of our favorite old-world cartoons and comics, and the myriad jellyfish-like eldritch horrors that we’d consumed during our years in the chaotic sea.

Sometimes it takes a contrast for one to realize how much one has changed. Today, Jack and I had our first run-in with “normal” life since..., I don’t know how long. I realize that I’ve used that phrase quite a lot, but I’m not being hyperbolic when I do so. I literally do not know how much time is passing for Jack and me.

Which is actually a little alarming considering that part of my new functions and abilities “should” include an absolute awareness of the passage of time. A little feature I gained after I absorbed the clock and calendar functions of my system.

Yet, there were days that would last for months in the Chaotic Sea, and months that would go by in minutes, and centuries that happened in a blink of an eye. Based on the information available to me, thanks to my empty-archive, I’m pretty sure this all has something to do with the fact that time doesn’t really exist in a concrete sense in the great nebula.

The chaotic sea was a realm born from a meeting of the great nebula and our shattered realm. The nebula was born from the eternal churning of the foundational levels of all the reality and unreality of the cosmos. Thus time here alternated between being sticky, gooey, and hard to remember.

Anyway, today, Jack and I had our first run in with normal, or rather “mortal”, life. I’m embarrassed to say that even with our sensory abilities and my nigh-omniscience, it still took us a second for us to realize that this was what we were dealing with. We’d torn our way into this sphere and found what looks like the ruins of a city. The buildings were crumbling, and it was clear from all the trees, ivies, and wild grass everywhere, that nature was swiftly retaking her own. There were a bunch of these metal, ant-like, creatures crawling around.

Fortunately, for everyone involved they weren’t immediately aggressive and we weren’t overly trigger happy…today. A few seconds later, this larger ant with a whole lot of missile and artillery mounted on its back, popped out. It was backed by a bunch of slightly smaller, but still heavily-armed big-ants. Then a hatch opened on the head of that largest ant, and out came a person. A female, largely humanoid in feature, save for the pair of quivering antennae on her head.

I’d like to say, that seeing that there was a tiny humanoid inside the mecha-ants was enough to kill our murder boner, but the chaotic sea was just that weird a place, with all sorts of oddities living in it. So, we ended up taking a wait and see approach, still largely clueless as to what we were looking at. Until, a few seconds passed by and my data-analysis informed me that these people were indeed people.

They were more-or-less humans based on our Shattered World’s highly loose standards for the term. They were “human”, albeit highly mutated, with some strong ant-like influences in their biology and culture. Jack and I were just operating at a level that, from our point of view, their reactions, and behavioral patterns, had made us skeptical of their sapience.

In our defense, I wasn’t joking when I said that we’d seen some really weird stuff in the chaotic sea. There were plenty of spheres filled with things that looked like people, until you tried to talk to one and found out that it was the tendril of a giant, sea anemone-like, creature that was using a bunch of corpses to make a puppet show for itself.

Also, if we’d thought interacting with, and relating to, regular people as primordials was tough, interacting with people now was a bit like an energy-based entity that descended from the artificial intelligences of an alien race, trying to communicate with the primitive seaborn vertebrate that would eventually become the lunged-fish that might one day evolve to become a cave person. Sapience seems like the threshold for being a superior lifeform, until you’ve become an actual superior lifeform and you find yourself thinking “oh, cool, this bug has aspirations...now, what do I do with that information? Nothing? Okay, whatever then...”

Then you realize that just because a thing is a person, doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically be able to interact with it right off the bat. From the perspective of a human, would we really be able to treat the ants with hopes and dreams, differently from the ones that just move based on rote instinct and biological imperative. Or wouldn’t it take a bit of extra effort to empathize with our new formic-friends.

Fortunately, the problem was part of the solution and it was a solution we’d half-way worked through thanks to our experiences back home. It also probably helped that Jack and I had once been a similar sort of person as these new people were, both in terms of biology and general culture. Once we recognized them as people, I just needed to use my data-analysis, and the culture and language data stored within the empty-archive, so that we could understand these people.

The final step was Jack and I, having to create a partition of our minds that would operate on these people’s level. Which, stupidly enough, was the point where we actually realized that in between almost dying, coming back, and then wandering through the chaotic sea as voracious devourers of what were essentially small worlds, we’d turned into very different entities than what we’d been before.

*************************************************************************************************************

A little later, one of the antennaed-humans, and two twelve-to-fourteen-foot-tall tentacled, metallic, entities sat in a tent outside of the city, drinking tea.

“Er, sorry about all that…” said the smaller and paler of the two strange life forms that had descended into the Harvester Colony.

“No...It is fine. Our explorers have gathered enough data for us to be aware that viewed from the outside, there would have been little to no way for you to know that there was anyone living here...This is doubly-so, due to our efforts to camouflage ourselves due to the presence of creatures, that other visitors such as yourselves have warned us about...Creatures that specifically hunger for the souls and minds of sapient species,” said Kalpana Third, the Harvester War-Princess for Settlement-Three of the Harvester Colony.

“Uh, well, still...Thanks for being so understanding,” said the small lifeform.

Kalpana observed the creature whilst smiling politely, and emitting a mellow, sweet-smelling, psychic scent meant to indicate her peaceful attentions. Kalpana couldn’t help noticing that this strange lifeform lacked any antenna, but she’d found that many of the visitors that passed through their colony were able to still somewhat pick up the psychic emanations that their harvester race made.

However, Kalpana had still been surprised when the larger of the strangers had even been able to emit a forceful psychic-scent of his own, indicating his lack of ill-intent and his confusion at their presence in the colony.

“So, now, I can’t help wondering why you asked us to stay?” said the small one.

“Ah, well...Hiding as we are. Our colony does not get many visitors...and even fewer are completely non-hostile in their intentions...So, I suppose the answer would be...Curiosity,” said Kalpana.

“Curiosity?” said the small one.

“Yes, Curiosity, and perhaps a hope of friendship,” said Kalpana. Emitting a scent that would convey her sincerity due to the difficulty that came with making a psychic-scent that potent.