The Otherworldly Computer (Part 2)

	With a practiced, automatic motion, I popped open the can. A small trail of vapor escaped the opening and an aroma of coffee beans and vanilla met my nose. I took a long swig, and then two or three more, downing half the can in a few seconds. Though it quickly brought me full wakefulness and though I could feel the chemicals envigorating me and causing dopamine to rush to my brain, I slumped in my chair, at a loss.
	Every day the world consumes three hundred tons of caffiene, enough for one cup of coffee for every man, woman and child. I read that somewhere. Myself, I drink around three and if I don't drink a cup in the morning I feel a bit lethargic for much of the day. Maybe I should stop.
	The girl across the room was absorbed in her machine and no matter how I looked at it I couldn't make any sense of it. It was like staring into a kaleidoscope, with all  the incomprehensible mixtures of shifting colors and imagery that entails. Instead I just watched her.
	She looked crestfallen. Her.. ears.. were drooping, when they were standing up as I talked to her a moment before. She was staring into that contraption, as if it were a window to another world, one she was pining for that I couldn't see nor understand. She was being very quiet-- whoever she had been talking to before was no longer there; the only sounds in the room were the muffled tapping of rain on the roof and her breathing.
	I hadn't noticed it before, but her skin was very white, as if she had never been in the sun in her life. Where was she from? I hadn't really grasped what she said before. 'When I fell to earth;' what did that mean exactly? 'Fell' from where?
	"So, uh..." I started, scratching my head. She turned to face me, her eyes looking heavy and tired. I wasn't sure what to say and our last conversation wasn't particularly productive. I still didn't know anything about her, not even her name.
	"Help me out here," I requested, setting down the coffee can. "Who are you? How did you get here?" She averted her gaze, looking at the floor. She seemed to be thinking about how to respond.
	"My name is ☆☽★🌕." The noise she made is hard to describe. It was as though her voice became wind chimes for a few syllables, and the wind of her voice blew the chiming into a word. I blinked a few times.
	"I, uh, I think I might have some trouble pronouncing that." I scratched my head again.
	"In your earth language, I think it means, uhm..." She fidgeted, searching for the words. "I think it means, 'The Star that is bright during the Full Moon.'"
	"That's very pretty," I leaned back in my chair, "but it's kind of a mouthful. If you're a bright star, I'll call you 'Luminous' instead." She raised her eyebrow at me again.
	"Lumi for short. Okay?" I smiled at her, thinking I was being very clever-- she just looked confused. "Lumi," she repeated, like a child learning a new word.
	"How'd you get here, Lumi? You said you 'fell.' Fell from where?" I asked, and she suddenly looked very uncomfortable, her body tensing. She turned away from me.
	"From a very high place. From where I come from, we can see everything humans do each day, but they can't see us," she had one hand on her device again. "We've been watching for a long time, but now there's been an inci.. uh, incid.." She stumbled over the word, not sure how to pronounce it. She didn't seem comfortable with the language, which makes sense considering she learned it from her machine just a few minutes ago. I played that thought over in my head a few times, considering the absurdity of it.
	"It would be, erm, easier if you just.. just put your hand here. It will be explained." She turned her gaze to the machine where her hand was resting, gesturing for me to do the same. As I stepped over to follow her instruction, I examined the thing more closely-- the 'veins' of it seemed to flow light directly into her hand, and when she looked at it, perhaps to give it instruction, the light flowed in a different direction, toward one of the myriad of screens, and information-- that I couldn't understand-- would flood the surface. As I moved my hand close to hers, I paused.
	"I asked you before, what is this thing? How did you get it in here?" I asked, now quite close to her.
	"I suppose in english it would be called, uhm, called..." She looked at the system again and it responded with more nonsense symbols. "This is a Selenocentric Information Computation Processor." She gave a weak smile, like she considered it a small achievement to pronounce all that.
	"These, uhm, systems, are connected to a, er, data.. base.." Every time she used a somewhat difficult word, she stumbled and thought about it for a moment. She quickly grew impatient, however, and shook her head. "Just! Just put your hand there!" She blurted out, and grabbed my wrist, pulling it onto the machine.
	I felt a rush of warmth flood my hand as the machine reacted to me. Blues and greens raced from the 'veins' into the spot my hand was sitting, and, taking a closer look, they were flooding into my arm. The strange symbols from the screens were now printing onto my arm. I could feel them-- the markings etching into my skin, like a thousand insects crawling over me, swiftly replaced by different symbols and colors, an unbearable tickling sensation. It caused me to panic and I tried to jerk my arm away, but her grip was vicelike and she held me in place.
	"Relax," she soothed. "It won't hurt." She turned to one of the screens, seeming to direct me to do the same. As I gazed upon it, my consciousness began to melt away. I was losing grip on where I was, what I was doing, how my body felt. For a brief moment, I was no longer me-- I was a weightless entity being sucked into a lightless void where I could neither see nor sense. As I stared into the infinite blackness, slowly, one by one, things crashed into being. In the distance, a frame of wires of light, in the shape of mountain range formed, and then filled in, a deep purple color. From behind it arose a violet orb of light, painting the black sky a dark blue tint. And then, all around me, trees, roads, buildings, and then people began to materialize, all sporting a blue outline that highlighted their being. The people passed back and forth in a blaze of light, never slowing down, and it was hard to get a good look at any of them-- but I did notice that they all had the same fuzzy protrusions coming from their hair-- ears like Lumi's.
	From below me, legs formed, and then a torso, and arms, and I could feel that I was no longer a floating soul but tethered to a body once more. I felt something new, however-- and reached above my head to feel a thin, sensitive ear that was attached to me, and one just like it nearby. Reflexively, I attempted to move them-- and I could feel that I could twitch them back and forth, bend them downward and slightly to the side. As I was exploring these strange appendages, I felt someone grab my hand-- a small girl, with white hair that seemed to shine in the light, violet-red eyes, considerably shorter than me though I was not particularly tall. Lumi. She was wearing a jacket and tie over her blouse, and her hair was now done up in twin tails. She flashed me a smile.
	"Where are we?" I tried to say, but it didn't come out that way. Instead, a series of squeaks, in high and low tones, was what Lumi and anyone else listening heard.
	"Come with me," a squeak from her mouth that I automatically interpreted, despite having no knowledge of her language. She tugged my hand and pulled me in the direction of one of the large, glowing, neon buildings. Several other rabbit-people were entering and we followed behind them somewhat nonchalantly, though Lumi was tugging my arm to its full length, looking eager to take me inside.
	"Welcome sir and madam," a chrome figure near the door called to us in a robotic voice, repeating this line, adjusted to gender, for every person who entered. Past him was a spacious room filled with tables adorned with decorated cloths, flowers, and drinks of various neon colors. I watched an exchange between two people for a moment and noticed something odd-- as they talked, pictures and videos materialized in the air, and they would stop talking to look at them. Something I was seeing a lot pop up between groups of people was what appeared to be a rabbit's face, made out of ascii symbols. Lumi's grip on my hand tightened and we began to walk over to a filled table.
	"What kind of place is this?" I questioned, attempting to orient myself. She put a finger to her lips in thought. "I guess in the earthling language, they'd call this an.. 'internet forum...?'"
	We sat next to some other rabbits talking at a large table and they didn't seem to notice us, at least not right away.
	"It's really happening," a thin, male rabbit-person exclaimed as he leaned back in his chair, bringing his drink to his mouth. "The invasion! The humans are finally getting what's coming to them."
	"That's just what they're saying on Lago-Net. You don't honestly believe that shit, do you?" His dark haired friend replied, looking skeptical. "The separatists will say anything to make their party look like they have any sort of influence on any issue. Which they do not."
	Lumi offered me one of the drinks on the table and beamed at me. I gave her a questioning look.
	"This is just virtual booze, right? Just 'for fun?'" I asked quietly, as to not disrupt the patrons near us. Lumi didn't answer, pressing the glass to my mouth. I put my hand on it to steady it and took a long swig. I could taste it-- which was odd in itself. It was a green neon drink and tasted like apple juice, with an odd sickly sweet aftertaste that made my head spin. It hit my stomach hard, and in an instant I felt very tipsy-- like I'd really been drinking alcohol.
	"You're blind, man. Why do you think that emissary was sent down there? Somebody on earth fucked up big and now the royal family is trying to cover it up-- and our good friends the separatists are gonna make sure the humans get what's comin' to 'em." It was becoming harder to completely grasp what they were saying, as I felt my head getting lighter. Lumi took a sip as well, but I think she must be used to this stuff. If I took another drink I'm sure I would have lost all higher brain function.
	The odd thing about the rabbit language is how they would incorporate high pitched 'beeping' into their words. It sounded like auto-tune. I mistook it for a noise a computer would make the first time I heard it as I didn't think any human had the range to make such a noise, but they could replicate it again and again-- as if they could modulate their voices at will.
	"If that's true, she's dead by now. I guarantee that." The dark haired rabbit person downed the remainder of his glass. "If the separatists got her, she's lucky. Imagine what some shit eating human might do to a royal emissary. Ain't like she could come back after that."
	"Hey, I'm getting bored. Let's go play Defense of the Carrots." They stood up, looking woozy. They must have drank quite a bit. They began to saunter away, supporting one another as they walked. "You and your fucking meme games, dude."
	Lumi looked at me, her brows furrowed. "Do you understand now?" I put my hand to my mouth to stifle a burp. She snickered, and stood up, and took my hand in hers, to guide me out of my chair. I gave a cursory glance around the room as we left-- one common thing I saw being shared appeared to be rabbit people mocking a motivational video from our internet, some drawing rabbit ears and buck teeth on the speaker, with "just chew it!" and a carrot next to him.
	We passed by a table of rabbits who seemed to be playing a board game. Each had a handful of cards and a small collection of glowing miniature stars in a plastic container next to them. There were symbols on the board I didn't recognize, and looking at them made my head hurt... but somehow, I understood that they read "100% Carrot Extract." One of the rabbits rolled the dice and his player piece, a female rabbit wearing what looked like a red Santa Claus outfit, landed on a red square. A hologram appeared of a giant, midnight-skinned but otherwise featureless male. The table became tense. The holographic creatured seemed to roll a die, and the number 7 appeared. The player rolled his die around in his hand, afraid to let it go, until it slipped out of his hand onto the table, landing on a 1. He groaned loudly and the table exploded in laughter. Lumi forcefully dragged me away.
	I was stumbling with each step, and Lumi slowed her quick and careless gait to make sure I didn't fall over. She led me from the building down a grassy path-- glowing a deep neon teal-- toward a large intersection. Each path leading to and from it were streaming an uncountable number of rabbits, passing back and forth. Lumi guided me to a bench and sat me down.
	"Are you alright?" She squeaked. I guess she expected me to hold my liquor better, but I was wobbling back and forth in my seat, barely keeping my composure. "Look-- look there!" She pointed to a huge screen connected to a tall support beam in the middle of the intersection. It appeared to be some kind of newscast. I tilted my head upward to look at it but I was seeing double at this point.
	"Lady Andromeda spoke out today against the continued rumors about conspirators among the rabbits living on Earth. She stated today that she would personally reestablish relations with the earth rabbits, as we had nothing to fear from our neighbors on the surface." The news anchor was an older rabbit who was beginning to develop wrinkles, and his hair beginning to grey. Behind him was an image of a very pale woman with long black hair, wearing a dress covered in fripperies, frills on the collar and cuffs, a large ribbon tied around her waist. Notably, her head was not sporting any rabbit ears.
	"'Twas there but the smallest thought of dissidence amongst our Earthly progenitors, I would beholden them to the greatest wrath the Heavens can offer the Earth." She spoke in such a way that her voice was thrown like a booming echo, and at the end of nearly every sentence she tossed her hair dramatically. "Knowest they their place among the heirarchy of lunar children. Taketh not but solely my words!" She threw her arms forward, hands turned upward as if making some kind of offering. "To dispel any lingering worries, I shalt reestablish our ancient bond with those on Earth."
	"Who is that woman?" I asked, feeling very woozy. Lumi put her hand over my mouth to interrupt me.
	"Don't say things like that!" She lowered her voice to a barely audible hush. "Only an outside wouldn't know who Andromeda was." She grabbed my arm and pulled me off the bench-- and then she simply stood there for a moment, gazing skyward.
	"Look," she said in a commanding tone I didn't expect from her. She pointed at the big violet orb in the sky and stared at it-- unblinkingly. I notice her eyes began to change color from violet-red to a deep, blood red. I turned to look as well, and the sight of it was hypnotizing. I couldn't look away. As I stared, transfixed on it, I felt my body being tugged again-- back through a tunnel of sight and senselessness-- my consciousness fading.

	When I came to, I was sitting on the floor of my apartment, my hand still on the machine. Lumi was sitting on the stool, her eyes closed-- she hadn't returned yet. She breathed slowly and softly, as if she were sleeping.
	I ran my hand across the top of my head. The ears were gone.