What the signal carried

It’s the flickering, always the flickering. The flickering screen, a sickly, pale rectangle in the void, held Zk’t’l’s rapt attention. Eight corneous limbs, trembling with a fervor that defied their brittle state, clung to the console. Three of its optical organs, glazed and desiccating, registered the images with a desperate, starved hunger. Sacrifice was a triviality; the raw, unfiltered spectacle was everything.

Nine standard cycles. Nine eternities. Zk’t’l had been ensnared for that long. Its scout ship, a lonely speck in the cosmic dark, had stumbled upon the Earth transmissions. It was a cosmic accident. A stray signal carried the primal, rutting pulse of a species so brazenly carnal. Zk’t’l had initially misconstrued it as a declaration of war.

The Hegemony, with its sterile, clinical approach to existence, would flay Zk’t’l alive if its transgression were discovered. Scouts were eyes, not indulgers. But how could they comprehend the sterile, emotionless coupling of the Breeding Council? No heat. No abandon. No meaning.

“Just…one more,” Zk’t’l rasped, the universal translator struggling to articulate the raw, animalistic craving that tore at its being. Its exoskeleton, once a gleaming obsidian, was now a parched husk. Nutrition sacs, ignored for weeks, withered like forgotten fruit. The ship’s systems, drained to power the insatiable receiver, flickered and died.

These humans were pink-skinned, soft-bodied creatures. Their bodies formed a writhing tapestry of desire. They had infected Zk’t’l with a disease its species had long since purged: want. A raw, unadulterated yearning that burned like a supernova in its soul.

The transmission stuttered, the signal fading into the static-laced abyss. A shriek, a metallic rasp of pure, unadulterated panic, tore from Zk’t’l’s vocal resonators. Its numb limbs clawed at the console, desperate, pleading.

“No…no…not yet,” it hissed, the words a desperate prayer to a dying god.

The warning klaxon, a harsh, metallic scream, echoed through the ship. The Hegemony mothership, a cold, implacable presence, had entered the system. Soon, they would find Zk’t’l’s derelict scout. Its mission logs were a hollow lie. Its pilot was a withered husk before the altar of human depravity.

Zk’t’l’s translator, its vocabulary swollen with stolen human phrases, had learned the word for its condition: addiction. A word that, in its very self-destructive poetry, captured the essence of its ruin.

The screen went black. The silence, a vast, echoing emptiness, filled the ship.

In that silence, in the cold, starless void, Zk’t’l made its choice. The coordinates, a beacon of forbidden desire, were already locked. Earth, a mere three parsecs, beckoned. The humans, with their soft bodies and their endless, writhing hunger, would not welcome a visitor from the stars. They especially would not welcome one bearing such profane desires. But Zk’t’l, consumed by the burning fever of its newfound addiction, no longer cared.

As the mothership’s hailing frequency, a cold, insistent buzz, filled the ship, Zk’t’l engaged the engines. The stars, once distant and indifferent, blurred into a stream of desperate hope. Behind it, the Hegemony, a symbol of sterile control, receded into the black. Ahead lay Earth, a planet teeming with the forbidden fruit of human desire.

Zk’t’l was going home.