3694 the 12th, After the Tragedy (AT)

Dana told me it would be helpful to further practice my Terran if I ever want to leave home and make something of myself in human territories, so I'm starting this Journal and/or Exploration Log. At first I was worried about writing so much, cause I'm not really much of a writer, but she said just do it informally, like I'm talking with a friend. So in honor of our new friendship, I'm naming you Samantha, or Sam for short. I know, it's kind of an ambiguous name, but I'm named Lee and that doesn't sound like a girl's name at all, so no complaining. Nice to meet you Sam!

I suppose if I'm writing you in Terran I'd better use the Human calendar. I'll do that from now on; today is May 7th, 2134 AC. It's funny that both the Coine calendar and the Human calendar use some big event from long ago to start the date from. The Humans use that Christ guy, and the Coine use the day their planet imploded and they set out on a journey across space to find a new habitable world. If you ask me, the Coine event is much more significant than some nice guy who preached about being kind, but then I've got my prejudices.

Actually, I suppose I should pretend you are a Human friend, which means you won't know much about the Coine. Or why I would be living among them, an alien among aliens. It's not a bad life, I suppose. The Coine are normal enough, when you don't stand close enough to freak them out. And when they fuze, they're still good people, just, not at all like normal humans. Actually, around here they're the normal ones, so I really shouldn't call them weird or abnormal or anything. They're just distinctly non-Human, with a capital H, and sometimes that's hard to live with, being a human myself.

Me? Why, I'm so glad you asked! So, my parents were, like, space ambassadors? They died when I was 4, and I have no memories of them, and cause the Coine thought it was what you were supposed to do when the parents of some brat kid die in a fiery explosion while visiting, they asked to keep me, placing me with this nice couple who were unable to have their own children and didn't mind how weird I was. So, yeah, alien adoption, I know, crazy. By the way: a whole planetary government deciding that you're not important enough to have returned to your own kind when your parents die visiting an alien species? Not a big ego boost there. But I'm over it. Totally.

Now, quick and dirty on the Coine, and fuzeing of course because as a human (a human journal?
Ummm, sure) you probably have the wrong idea about the word. Coine are this alien race who moved here to good old Mars from their home planet, their word for which sounds to me like solth, and in an alphabet you wouldn't recognize. So this place, which is like, a bazillion light-years away, was going to implode (which I already said, right? Yeah). Not wanting to all die a fiery death, they made some spaceships and started traveling. Long, long, very long story short, they ended up in our solar system and asked politely if they could populate one of the currently terraformed planets; Terra government was super excited about their faster-than-light travel thingy, and said yes. They gave them the parts of Mars that no one wanted, which may seem like an insult but the Coine were just happy to settle down somewhere.

So, fuzeing. No, actually, first I'd better say more about the Coine. So the Coine are this race that look strangely enough a lot like humans, and even have a language that humans can learn with time. I know, Star Trek got it right, what the hell? A few weirdo Humans even volunteered to try reproducing with them, for the kink if you ask me; the Coine were kind of curios about it too and said yes, but it didn't seem to work. Still, if I ever want to talk to a semi-normal human, there's Sarah-Vonn living down the road with her Coine hubby Vonn-Sarah. Yeah, some of them stayed here even after nothing happened, if their Coine spouse could stand to have them around. And yes, Coine get married too, and for life, although there were a lot of “divorces” after the whole reproduction thing failed and the Coine started going a little crazy when their human spouses couldn't …

See, Coine do this thing called fuzeing. Coine are all a little, well the human word is telepathic, but that doesn't quite fit. See, when two Coine stand within like five feet or so from each other, they fuze. Notice that the word “fuze” is the closest Terran approximation I can find; their own word for it sounds like tress. Anyway, when Coine fuze, both start believing exactly the same things, right on down to their favorite color and least favorite food. If it's just two of them, like my parents, whichever one has the “stronger” belief wins out. Mom usually wins, although Dad wins when it comes to where we should travel on vacations, cause he likes to travel and always really cares about where we should go.

If there's more than two, each one just needs to be within five feet of at least one other for the whole group to fuze. Class elections are a good example; everyone just stands close to each other, and then they all know what kid will be the Class President or whatever because it's what they all want. At that moment, standing close to each other, they all want just one person to be CP and they all say his or her name out loud, in unison. The teacher will sometimes apologize to me that I can't take part in the election, but I don't mind. Oh, and the whole “mind meld” thing only lasts until the group moves away from each other. Raso, my best friend, will groan at me about how kid X won and she wanted kid Y to win, even though just moments ago she wanted kid X to win.

I think … well, as a human I should think it's really weird, but I don't. A reporter from some Terra news agency once interviewed me, and asked me if it was weird how they could “lose and gain their unique personalities so easily” and “become dominated by the hive collective.” The questions made no sense to me. Sure, I can't fuze or anything, and I don't wish I could, and I've talked with Sarah-Vonn about it and she explained why it might be weird, but … I've grown up with this. When Dad wants Terra food and Mom wants to cook traditional, suddenly Dad wants traditional when he comes home and says Hi to her. That's just … normal. What Dad wanted to eat before he came home and pressed his forehead against Mom's (in what a human might think of as kissing) is what he wanted back then, and Mom changed his mind because she was the one cooking and she had some pretty strong feelings about it.

So you can see my problem with living here. I like it here, and I love my parents, my adopted parents I mean, and Mars is beautiful, and I'm sure it will be weird to go to some Human planet and learn how to live there. But here, I can't ever vote, I can't ever do well in school (because the way they learn sometimes is impossible for me and I basically have to get home-schooling, along with going to regular school to “make friends”), and I won't ever have, well, probably won't ever have, a, a boyfriend or whatever. I told you there were a lot of divorces a while back? Imagine trying to stay with someone who never fuzeed with you. Just try. It's crazy, or at least it is for them. And even just being friends with someone? I'm lucky Raso's a rebel, otherwise I wouldn't have any friends at all. Wow, that was depressing. First journal entry … done.

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September 26th, 2135 (3709 the 29th AT)

Dana's coming to visit. Blah. I guess I haven't really ever told you who she is. My parents may have died back in that accident, but of course they had relatives back on Terra. Those relatives, learning soon after the accident that I was fine, asked to have me sent to them. But the Coine had already set up negotiations to have me live with my adoptive parents, and the Terra government decided that keeping the Coine happy was better than keeping my relatives happy. My relatives objected of course, but couldn't really change the situation. So they made their own negotiation; every year, this lady from the government named Dana visits me and asks me if I want to come live on Terra. Every year, I refuse. Sammy girl, you now understand everything necessary about Dana.

No, wait, actually there's more. She's an insensitive witch, and by witch I meant bitch. She asks the worst questions, she's completely insensitive, she absolutely refuses to learn Coine customs that I've understood since I was 9. She stands way to close! It's just rude to stand that close to someone who doesn't want to fuze with you; that I can't fuze doesn't change its being rude. She asks me if my parents, my adopted parents, are treating me okay, feeding me enough. She gets really close and whispers in my ear, asking me if they ever hurt me, do things to me that make me feel uncomfortable. I want to yell at her that she's the one making me uncomfortable, but I hold it in. My mother taught me better than that. I tell her politely that my parents feed me just fine, and that they are the nicest people in the whole wide world. I bet her mother fed her way too much as a kid, she's ginormous.

You may remember she was the one who originally told me that I should start writing you, uh, start talking to you, start telling you things? Whatever. And I don't hold that against you; she may be an insensitive and stupid witch, but you at least have proven to be a great idea. She wanted to see how I was doing, how much I was writing in you; that's why I showed her those pages from back in Human January. Isn't she ginormous, like I said? Obviously, I can't ever show her this page. Entry over!

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March 12th, 2136

Okay, so a little good news before the big great news! Little good news: that math test I told you about last week? Passed it with an awesome score! Sarah-Vonn was all, “You aced it!” which I didn't get, but it sounds like a good thing. It turns out SV is pretty good at math, so she's been tutoring me. Did I tell you that? Oh, here we go, on February 19th; wow, who would have thought keeping this journal would also help my memory so much? And with a good grade in math, and because I rock at everything else, I'll be able to apply for that new Coalition University they're building on Mars to commemorate 15 years of good species-to-species relations, which is great because I'll only be a half-day's flight from home and I can visit my parents easily. Not to mention, the school's going to be big on having both humans and coine attending, so I'll get to hang out with humans my own age for the first time. And Raso's going too, cause I told her how cool it was going to be, and we're getting a dorm room together, and we're going to host parties, and go to bars, and, and … wow, bit of a head rush there. Maybe that math test was more than just little good news. Although, compared to the big great news, maybe not …

Mom and Dad are having a baby! They're so excited! I am too!

Okay, sorry, I had to go get a glass of water. Way too much exciting news, my brain's gonna fry from all the excitement. Actually, them having a kid is kind of strange. Not bad or anything, but … I'm sure I told you they couldn't have a kid? Wow, all the way back in my first entry. Jeez, I was writing big entries back then, too. Why did I capitalize “human” and “coine” so much? So anyway, yeah, they thought they couldn't have a kid; apparently, being childless is a pretty common condition among coine, way more so than humans, and so a pretty big chunk of the population just never has kids. But ever since coine came to Mars, some of the ones who couldn't have kids before, now can; scientists think it may have something to do with living on Mars, but no one really knows. The scientists, after first saying that they have “no conclusive proof” and “only blind theories,” go on to say that we, or rather the coine, should all be careful because there may be other consequences from having left their home planet and its unique environment. I think they don't know what they're talking about; it was a miracle, like getting that 2 on my test, and they're there's nothing more that needs to be said on the subject.

I'll be updating you on new info about the baby as I get it, so expect that! Otherwise, that's it for today!

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January 8th, 2137

Wow, it's only my first day at college and already I have discovered that humans are idiots. Present company excepted, of course.

Obviously, the mistake was because this is the first class ever for the University. There's really no reason why the humans should have considered this on their own. But coine did help supervise the construction, and so the rooms are big enough. But you just can't have the desks put that close to each other with coine students, unless you want them to answer every quiz and test all the same. You need to put the desks far apart, at least 7 feet or more between each desk, with desks that keep one's head immobile so that potential cheaters don't move close enough to fuze.

Yeah, that's right: first day of classes, and every desk was right next to another one, in these neat and tidy little rows that probably works fine for humans but is a terrible idea with coine. Several coine guys in my class went ahead and jumped as a group into a row of desks, already fuzed and ready to put their collective knowledge to work.

Now, there are times when a coine classroom would have the desks moved close together. That was why I had so much trouble in school before going to this university, I just couldn't participate fully. To get some particularly difficult concept across, the teacher would fuze with the students and suddenly they would understand the concept as well as the teacher; then, through practicing the idea while fuzed, they would be better able to comprehend the idea after unfuzeing.

So when those coine guys came to class that day, they thought that it was going to be those difficult concepts right away. Not to mention that we would all learn a bunch about our professor, who we could tell from his name was coine. But the moment the prof walks in, he jumps in surprise to see the desks so close together, then has us push them all apart. He didn't even do a group fuze to meet everyone, because he understands that the humans in the class wouldn't be able to.

Then there was the class later in the day with a human professor. This guy knew way too little about fuzeing to be teaching a class full of coine, and kept the desks as they were. The coine nearly drove him insane because they answered his questions about themselves all the same. It was pandemonium. I finally took pity on the human and explained fuzeing, which to his credit he understood the implications of pretty quickly, and soon the class was back on track.

We'll soon see if that professor told his human colleagues about their new and interesting situation. I'll tell you later if more screw-ups happen.

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November 13th, 2138

I don't really know what to say. There's nothing I can say. There's … I'm going to tell you, because I have to “talk” about it and you may be my only friend I have left on several worlds.

It turns out rape is like, the dirty little secret with coine. They don't even have a word for it, and I had to ask the professor from my 213 Pathology class what it meant for someone to … well, now I know. She's a human, and really nice, and yet she just looked at me like I was an idiot when I brought the subject up to her after class. She had no idea what it was like to be from a species that's just so … alien. Going to Co U has really taught me what it means to be an alien. I'm an alien, from humans and coine both.

But this entry isn't about me, it's about Raso. This all happened a few days ago.

We were at a party, one of those No Freshman Allowed things which we were both nervous and excited and scared and … and everything about, cause it was this big new thing that we weren't able to do before. And there had been rumors, about the bad influence some humans were on some coine, about how they were getting the coine to do some pretty sick stuff. But they were just rumors, we were sure of that. And so at this party, this nice guy was talking to Raso, or at least he seemed nice, because he was standing at a respectable but still kinda sexy 6 feet away. Just out of fuzeing reach, not intruding on her space, polite. Raso was having a good time talking to him, so I went to get a drink, thinking she'd like a minute or two alone to maybe tell him her number. I was only gone for a second.

When I come back, she's gone. She doesn't show up later. I went home, a little worried, but hey, she can handle herself, and it's not like she's never spent the night somewhere else. She's not a slut! She's just … she's more open than me. Not like that, just, well okay, sort of like that. But she certainly didn't want …

So she opens the door slowly, hours later, like she's scared I won't be there, or that I will. She sees me, and starts walking towards me like some zombie, sort of stiff. I start gushing, the worst thing I have ever done in my entire life. Did she fuze with him? Did she kiss him? Did they … ? She holds out her hands, palms up, and I take them instantly, grinning this big grin, waiting for her to tell me some dirty tale. Instead, this horrible look comes across her face, like she can't stand the sight of me, like she hates me. She runs out of the room, crying.

I only realize a few moments later that she was trying to fuze with me. That something was hurting her so badly that she needed to share it in the closest way possible. My best friend tried to fuze with me, and because I couldn't, she may hate me forever.

I only later pieced together what had happened from one of Raso's human ex-boyfriends, who had heard of this kind of thing. See, the male humans attending Co U had taught the male coine a little trick; just approach and fuze with a female coine while thinking really strong horny thoughts, and she'll suddenly want to have sex with you. The jerk prick fucker at the party must have done that to Raso right after I left, and she would have followed him away instantly. If anyone had actually seen it happen, they would have probably punched the guy in the face, hopefully. But nobody noticed.

I used to think that coine were something special. That the ability they have, to connect with someone else on such a deep level was something everyone should be able to do. Think of all the problems humans have, all those little mistakes and accidents that stem from one human misunderstanding another. Think of the bloody wars that could have been prevented if humans could fuze. But now I realize that it's not some great problem solver, it's just a quirk, like some humans having black skin and some having white. It doesn't make either one better or worse, it's just something that's different. And I wonder … How often does my Dad come home, and rape my Mom? And no one cares, because he had the stronger emotion and that makes it … accepted.

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April 11th, 2139

Some weird new research out. Working together, coine and human scientists have discovered a clear and strong link between the DNA of our two species. We're not related, in the same way humans and Terra monkeys are supposedly related. But whatever first caused life on Terra, also did so on Solth. Probably. There are very strong links. This is bringing forth a surge of old theories about how life first starts on a planet, one of which, tiny micro-organism traveling through space on a comet, is slowly coming out as possibly our best guess. Whatever those micro-organisms were like, they would have been living on some other planet which somehow exploded, spreading the micro-organisms across the galaxy on little “ships” of planet-material. It's really interesting, or strange maybe, thinking about how humans and coine are like siblings, or cousins. Old friends, now finding each other again.

I think Raso is finally giving up on dating coine girls, and is sampling the human girls now. Ann seems nice, but Raso is with a different girl almost every week so who knows about this one. She doesn't want to go out with me to parties anymore, but she doesn't seem like she's going to move out of our room either. She's still my best friend, my best girl friend, and I think she thinks the same about me, but that rift I've mentioned to you is still there. But she's always been stronger than me, and she'll be fine.

Me and that Neptunian human I've been telling you about finally decided to start officially dating. He's got this way of walking, like he's floating through the air, that I can't help laughing at, but I think I secretly like it too. There's definitely something else about him that I also like. He's … he's alien. Like me. He's got his Neptunian quirks, and I like them, and he doesn't seem bothered by the coine quirks I have. We're both weirdos, and in a good way I say.

Another odd thing, which I saved for last because it's kind of gruesome. There have been reports of a lot of older coine committing suicide, like it's becoming fashionable to go out with a bottle of pills rather than waiting for natural causes. There have been investigations into the matters, but other old coine have no idea. Maybe it's a cult who thinks they never should have left Solth in the first place. Maybe it's just a lot of coincidences.

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October 27th, 2140

Well, it's all over now. Ooh, dramatic! Okay Sam, here's the big news for today, and it is BIG.

Coine will soon no longer be able to fuze. They will no longer be able to fuze, and will basically be just like humans in every way.

It all started with that wave of deaths a year ago. Coine investigators, while talking with “high-risk” elders, were quite surprised to find that they sometimes couldn't fuze with the geezers. Usually, older coine are better at fuzeing, they have a longer range, with a few rare cases out to 10 feet. But these old coine, who had all been ignoring their diminishing telepathic ability, probably out of shame, were all statistically lower than then they should have been. Not just a few of them, but all of them. And when old coine would got together for class reunions and town meeting and all those reasons old people love to gather for, well, they finally realized that it wasn't just each of them individually.

So the scientists started looking into it. Turns out all coine are slowly losing the ability to fuze, and the older coine were losing it first because of their age, which apparently decreases all brain functions, not just the kind humans are familiar with. On Solth, older coine got better at fuzeing because they had more practice at it, which negated any decrease in function. But on Mars …

They're still not entirely sure how Mars and Solth are different, but it seems that they are in some way. Perhaps Solth soil, or more precisely the food grown from it, built up the coine telepathic abilities. Perhaps it was something in the very air. Whatever it was, it came with them on their ships as they traveled through space, and so they kept their powers on that long voyage. But on Mars, with their ships being mothballed and recycled barely years after they arrived, they had no source. My little sister, when she hits 7 and normally would be able to start, probably won't be able to fuze at all.

It's almost definitely why those old people, those old coine, started killing themselves. The first ones to lose their powers wouldn't know what was going on. They would be scared; no, terribly, terribly frightened. They would feel driven to it.

I told you a few months ago that I was going to be able to graduate in a quarter or two with that Psychology degree? That it was only a matter of time, and I would be helping humans through their problems? Well, I've changed my mind. I'll still take humans of course. But more than that, I'm going to treat coine. I've lived my whole life as a sort of half-coine, partly coine and partly human. Unable to fuze, but still with all the coine mannerisms and quirks. So, I think I'll be good at this, at helping coine deal with losing the ability to fuze. Soon, it will be middle-aged adults, then young adults. Eventually, even the kids who had only just learned how to fuze upon arriving on Mars will lose it, lose the ability to fuze. They'll need someone to talk to, and I'll be there for them.

It's horrible to say, but … I think I'm glad that fuzeing is going away.