Iridescent Affairs

The chronometric dissonance alarm, a sound like a badger gargling gravel, finally ceased its existential whine. Brenda sighed and adjusted her translation scarf. It was currently set to ‘mildly sarcastic mauve’. She attempted to straighten her hair. Thanks to zero-gravity and an overenthusiastic application of ‘universal frizz-defying gel’, it resembled a sentient cloud of static.

“Late again, Xylar?” she murmured, though the air shimmered with the precise, multi-tonal clicks that constituted Xylar’s affirmative.

Xylar, a being composed primarily of iridescent, self-folding geometry, oozed through the doorway of Brenda’s research pod. A faint scent of ozone and philosophical paradoxes preceded him. “Temporal anomalies, Brenda. You wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy involved in untangling a causality loop caused by a misplaced temporal comma. It involved paperwork, and a small, but very insistent, pocket dimension demanding its own tax code.”

Brenda rolled her eyes, a gesture that translated to Xylar as ‘mildly amused incredulity’. “Right. And your eight appendices were all busy filling out forms, I suppose?”

“Precisely,” Xylar’s geometry shifted, forming a shape that, to Brenda’s best approximation, represented a shrug. “And then there was the matter of the sentient quantum foam that believed it was a performance artist…”

Brenda, a xenobiologist specialising in the mating rituals of extra-dimensional invertebrates, had initially found Xylar’s elaborate excuses charming. Now, they were wearing a bit thin. Six months of surreptitious rendezvous in the abandoned hydroponics bay of the USS Bottomless had taken their toll. Her husband, Gerald, was starting to suspect something. Gerald is a meticulous taxonomist who is obsessed with cataloguing every known species of space-mould.

“Gerald’s been asking about my ‘late night research’ again,” she said, fiddling with a sample of bioluminescent slug slime. “He thinks I’m developing a deep, passionate interest in the reproductive habits of the Gloopian Snail-Equivalent. Which, frankly, is insulting. They’re dull.”

“Ah, Gerald,” Xylar’s geometry pulsed, a deep, resonant hum filling the pod. “A creature of exquisite, if somewhat beige, predictability. He reminds me of a perfectly calibrated abacus, only with more opinions on fungal morphology.”

“He’s a good man,” Brenda said. A pang of guilt momentarily interrupted her admiration for Xylar’s ability to manipulate the fourth dimension for impromptu back massages. “Just… predictable. And obsessed with space-mould.”

“Predictability is the enemy of cosmic spontaneity,” Xylar countered. His geometry shifted into a complex, tessellated pattern. Brenda found this strangely arousing. “Like a universe run by accountants. You need a little chaos, a dash of the unexpected. A being like me, for example.”

“A being who’s constantly late,” Brenda retorted. “You keep leaving iridescent glitter everywhere,” she added, pointing to a shimmering trail that snaked across the floor.

“Cosmic stardust,” Xylar corrected, his geometry forming a small, self-folding origami swan. “A byproduct of pure, unadulterated passion.”

Suddenly, the pod door hissed open. Gerald stood there, his face a shade of puce usually reserved for particularly virulent strains of space-mould. He held a small, iridescent swan.

“Brenda,” he said, his voice trembling. “I found this… this… thing in my space-mould samples. And it’s covered in… glitter.”

Brenda’s translation scarf flickered wildly, cycling through ‘panic-stricken mauve’, ‘desperate-excuse green’, and finally settling on a sickly ‘resigned beige’.

“Gerald,” she began, attempting a casual tone. “It’s… it’s a new species of… bioluminescent space-mould. It… it folds itself.”

Gerald stared at the origami swan. Then he looked at Xylar. Xylar’s geometry was now rapidly forming a complex, multi-dimensional escape route. It involved a series of nested wormholes.

“A self-folding, glitter-covered space-mould,” he repeated, his voice dangerously calm. “And it smells of… philosophical paradoxes?”

Xylar sensed the imminent collapse of interspecies diplomacy. He opened a portal to what appeared to be a dimension entirely composed of sentient, singing prime numbers. “Farewell, Brenda,” he chirped, his voice echoing from the rapidly closing portal. “Tell Gerald I said… the square root of negative one sends its regards.”

The portal winked out of existence, leaving behind a faint scent of ozone and a single, shimmering particle of cosmic stardust. Gerald looked at Brenda, his eyes narrowed.

“Space-mould,” he said, holding up the origami swan. “That folds itself. And smells like… like a sentient theorem.”

Brenda sighed. “It’s… complicated, Gerald. Very, very complicated.” She glanced at the disappearing shimmer of Xylar’s portal “And it involves a lot of paperwork, apparently.”