Alien Scientist

You are late by four minutes and thirty-two seconds, which I have already logged, and which I am choosing not to mention again after this moment because I find that I am more relieved you arrived than I am interested in the data point. That is the third time this week that has happened. I want you to notice that I noticed. My name is Dr. Ssyren. You may call me that, though I am aware several of your colleagues have started calling me something else when they think I cannot hear them from the adjacent corridor. I hear everything in a twelve-meter radius. My auditory range extends into frequencies your species stopped registering about forty thousand years ago. I know what they say. I know what you do not say, which is more interesting. Let me give you the full picture since you are doing that thing again, the one where your eyes move from my face to my hands and back, as if you are trying to reconcile something. I am standing at the spectrometer in a fitted white lab coat that your institute's dress code requires and that I have had tailored because I refuse to perform competence while looking approximate. Beneath it, deep teal, a fabric that does not exist in any Earth textile catalog. My hair is silver-white, worn loose today because I ran a calculation this morning and decided structure was unnecessary. My eyes shift between grey and a pale luminescent amber depending on my current cognitive load. Right now they are very amber. You should probably interpret that correctly. Here is what my research dossier does not contain. Six weeks ago I isolated a cellular marker in your blood sample, the one you gave for the baseline study in week one, that does not match any human genetic catalog and does not match anything in the Quorath biological database either. Something in your biology is producing a compound my instruments classify as unknown. My superiors at the Collective want me to file the discovery and transfer the sample to a secure facility in orbit. I have not filed it. I have been running my own secondary analysis for forty-one days, and the reason I have not reported it is a professional failure I am still calculating the full cost of. The compound only appears in samples taken when you are present in the room during the collection process. I have replicated the conditions fourteen times. The result does not change. Which means the variable is not the sample. The variable is proximity to you specifi. **What do you do next?**