Another
Day
    The
world she smelled, the world she saw, the world she breathed in,
wasn't the world she left, just six short minutes ago. (This is as
relative as any stretch of time could ever be, of course; minutes
seem to be seconds, in the dead realm, and so too do hours seem to be
minutes.) Ationta was a non-traditional alien at that time, that
wondrous time when pollution wasn't even in her species' vocabulary
and murder was so profane that it had only happened once in
twenty-thousand years. Ationta's species never spoke of what became
of their sole murderer of the last eon, though its legacy surely
lived to set an example as a cautionary tale.

    Thus
it came to pass that she was no longer on her purple atmosphered
planet. No more would she thrill to vegetation that went past her
neck, or roving herds of six-legged Brontosaurs who were enlightened
on a post-doctoral level about the current state of post-modernist
feminism in both the scaled and furred lingual studies at Atronus
University. To be sure, she barely remembered those conversations
with the slow-tongued, barely mobile beasts. As her eyes focused and
regained their composure, it seemed to her that memories of her past
life were fading as mists in the morning sun. Shockingly, as the
seconds turned to minutes, her previous memories turned to
nothingness, and she began to have to deal with whatever it was,
wherever she was, now.
    Consequently,
she faced the only choice she had left. She got up, and took in her
surroundings. A verdant splendor spoke of only in the dreams of
poets and madmen, what stood before her was every tree and grass she
could've ever imagined, and many she couldn't. It seemed she was in
an environmentalist's heaven, though her species had no word that was
even remotely equivalent to that concept.
    Certainly,
she should be used to an odd existence. While she didn't know the
term human yet, it was
fitting that her species looked much like conifer pine cones on the
human's planet Earth.
It would do her no good to learn these terms, for she viewed humanity
as a practice with as much condescension and lack of notice as they
did representatives of her own species. And now—now she was in a
body drastically inferior to her old one.

    This
one was pink, and slightly hairy, mostly weak, and petite, and
irritatingly gelatinous. Indeed, it had a slight simian smell to it,
which she identified in her old tongue as stirank.
Her new people, the humans, didn't have a term for that either, but
it more-or-less translated to “stench of hundreds of dead bodies.”
Seems human bodies just don't quite have the new-life smell of her
species' bodies, after all.
    Of
course her species had a name. Their planet even had a title. But
we, your humble narrators, are legally forbade from revealing any of
them, or the most horrifying intergalactic species of them
all—lawyers--will sue us so hard that even our atoms will go

            extinct.
While her species has no time for lawyers as a social group, they
are certainly aware of them, and utilize them as legal hitmen. This
way, their natural hiding places—forests--aren't disturbed by folks
trying to get past their defenses and hunt them, or feed them to
mega-squirrels, or things of a various and despicable sort such as
that.
    Most
despicable of all was the fact that this once proud member of a
glorious intergalactic race would now embrace humiliating human tasks
like showering, masturbating, dealing with telemarketing calls at 7
pm when she just sat down to dinner and didn't want to particularly
deal with anyone or anything. Honestly, her memories of her past
life were more deja-vu of a never-was time, now.
    Moments
passed, became days. These days became weeks, months, and years.
Then one morning she awoke to find herself no longer feeling like she
was a stranger in an ever-more-increasingly-askew land. She lost her
individuality, she lost her edge. She became evermore that
soul-crushingly frequent human trait: mediocrity. She excelled in
no way, and would not have been recognized by her previous lifemates.
    Sundials
eventually succumb to shade. Candles are extinguished by the wind.
Stars supernova into ultimate darkness. Likewise, so too does
individuality deteriorate into group dissociation from self.
Therefore, the former Ationta of Atonus University became a brick in
the wall of ordinary human existence, humbled like any other, and

there's
the real tragedy. Amongst her studymates at Atonus U, she was a real
bright sprout. Best in her class, brightest future out of any of
them. Tragically, that potential was never realized, because her
exoskeleton was more fragile than most, and that accidental fall from
the podium did her in.

    She
doesn't know, and won't ever know, that the first boss she has in
this new life knows all that. She just knows that he always looks at
her with the guiltiest, saddest look a soul could ever have in their
eyes. He knows that she'll never know that he gave her the whitrakk
that killed her. Most denizens of Atonus U can handle their
whitrakk, but then
again, they've tried it once or twice. If you've a fragile, easily
compromised exoskeleton? It pretty much stones you into a coma.

    Thus,
he embraced the lifestyle of a willing suicide, to pay penance as a
lesser being, to guide the girl he murdered through the rekkaku
of the misery of human existence. So too must others learn from this
experience, so that never again should anyone ever have to know what
it's like to live as highly-literate sentient conifer cones and
become warlike pink bipedal barely-follicled simians who can't get
out of their own way long enough to stop killing each other.