Title: An Out Of This World Zoo
Author: BedHead
Summary: An alien intelligence wants Earth females for zoological research, but they might be lacking some important understanding. Not that this is much comfort to the Earth females in question!
Chapter 2 — An Intimate Interface
Frida was, indeed, in no position to summon help for Sofia and Maja—or even for herself. She had woken to find herself very naked, and very firmly strapped into position on a metal table.
When she had finally tried to call out for help, there was a burst of high pitched music, and two small figures—similar to that which had found her in the forest—arrived at the side of the table to peer over her.
Unlike Maja, Frida was not a great consumer of science fiction stories and films, but she still recognized an alien abduction when she saw it—or, indeed, was actively participating in it. She tried to rally herself, fighting off the terror of the unknown, but could still feel tears of fear burning at the corners of her eyes.
“I come in peace,” she said, looking for a reaction from the two pairs of all-blue eyes, but seeing none. “Do you speak Norwegian? English? French?...” Her voice tailed off as it was clear that no communication was forthcoming.
Professor Mifa was pleased to have secured—temporarily—this particular specimen for her own laboratory. Along with her chief laboratory assistant Lati, her research to date had indicated that it might be possible to interface directly to the human female brain, avoiding all the tedious and inefficient vocal communication that the species used. She had promised the zoo to return the specimen to them, but first there was some improvement work to do on it.
Frida felt the table start to rise, bringing her to a vertical position in the center of some kind of scaffolding. Its purpose became clear when one of the figures ascended to the top, its head now on a level with Frida’s own. However, with a metal frame securing her head to the table, she was only able to follow the figure with her eyes.
Lati inspected the specimen’s head, already carefully shaved bald so that every bump and vein was visible. Professor Mifa had been adamant that they weren’t going to try to work around the creature’s fur, and if the zoo subsequently objected, they could always get the specimen a wig.
“We’re in business,” she called down to the Professor who was working at a console. “The specimen is ready when you are.”
“Excellent.” Mifa entered a series of commands, and spindly robotic arms unfolded behind Frida’s head.
All Frida could feel was a sharp sting, then a numbness which quickly encomed her whole head. It was a very strange situation, not being to feel your own nose, but it wasn’t unpleasant, so she decided to be patient and wait for something to happen. At least, she wasn’t being anally probed, which contemporary s suggested was remarkably common in such scenarios.
Had she been able to see the back of her head, she would have been less sanguine. The skin was peeled back, parts of several plates of her skull were no longer present, and the gray-white cauliflower of her brain and cranial nerves were fully exposed.
“Not dissimilar to our own,” Lati observed. “Though, of course, less sophisticated.” She watched closely as a small, but incredibly complex object was eased into position just above the brain stem. “I’m going to watch the reaction to the interface.”
“Go ahead.” Mifa was deep in her console, absorbing rapidly scrolling streams of information as the interface started to embed itself into Frida’s cerebellum.
Lati walked around to the front of the scaffolding, watching curiously the specimen’s facial expressions. She could see the weird multi-colored eyes track her. They, along with the vestigial furry ridges above them, were remarkably expressive.
“A shame that we don’t—yet—know what you’re thinking,” Lati mused. “Such an interesting creature. So big and dangerous, so primitive, but still a fascinating variety of behaviors.”
Suddenly, the eyes closed tight, and the mouth opened wide in a soundless scream.
“You just enabled it, didn’t you?” Lati called down. Mifa nodded, still deep in her work.
The eyes opened, and—to Lati’s relief—the gaping maw closed. Those rows of sharp white bones would haunt her dreams tonight. That said, the incredible length of the creature’s muscular tongue did have Lati giggling to herself at the possibilities.
“Interface is fully established,” Mifa called out. “Why don’t we give her the first run on the Orgasmatron to get a signal correlation?”
That wasn’t the device’s real name, of course. Originally invented to stimulate muscles and nerves directly when illness or injury compromised normal operation, it used to have a long and boring name, and hard-to- abbreviation. However, once a particular programming mode had been created by an adventurous graduate student, it was only ever known as the Orgasmatron thereafter.
Frida had seen her vision suddenly white out, with a sensation as if her whole head had been subjected to an electric jolt. She wasn’t sure how long it had gone on, but when she cautiously re-opened her eyes, everything seemed to be the same as before. Her face still felt numb, and the figure in front of her was now climbing down the scaffolding.
It stopped halfway, and produced a heart-shaped metallic device from a container. It apparently needed both hands to carry the object properly. As Frida realized that its gaze was fixated on the gap between her legs, it carefully placed the device over her sex, curving it to sit flush with her skin. She felt a weird tingling around its edges.
“What are you doing?” She couldn’t really see what was going on down there, just the top of the figure’s bald head. “Stop! Don’t touch me there! That’s my no-no square!”
The figure moved away, apparently satisfied, and the tingling started to get stronger.
“Oh, no....” She struggled to free her arms, with no effect.
“Don’t do this!” Being naked on a table in front of aliens was one thing, but being led down the path to orgasm was quite another, for what dignity she had left.
The device now felt as if it were pulsing, pushing increasingly strong currents of pleasure into her. It felt good—it felt really good—but not what she wanted right now.
“How’s that looking?” Lati enquired, reing the Professor and peering over her shoulder at the screen.
“It’s a good start,” Mifa itted. “Here’s the O-tron signal channel, and here we have the specimen’s currently unmapped pathways. I think you’ll agree, it’s not hard to see which ones are being activated.”
Lati nodded, noting the time shift between the different views. “I didn’t realize the lag would be so great.”
“They haven’t made the genetic engineering leap to toroplasmic nerve sheathing,” Mifa pointed out. “They still use myelin, and even then, only sparingly.”
“Are we ready for phase two? Or, do you want to have food first?” Even after genetic engineering to slow their metabolism, the small frame of the aliens needed sustenance every few hours.
“Sure.” Mifa pushed back from the table. “Let’s leave our specimen to enjoy herself.”
Frida heard none of this. While the robotic arms silently re-sealed her brain, she rode a tsunami of sexual stimulation, pulling her into a hallucinatory world. Emil was there, smiling as he worked her towards climax. The weird little alien from the forest visited, warbling musically while they danced in front of her...
Now sated, Mifa and Lati returned to the lab to find Frida still quivering in her restraints, eyes tightly closed and perspiration running down her face.
“I’ll cool her off,” said Lati, helpfully. She took a spray and climbed the scaffolding, then let loose a gentle mist of cold water in the specimen’s face.
The human’s eyes snapped open, and she fixed Lati with a desperate stare, her mouth working, but no sound coming out.
“Can you check the settings, Lati?” Mifa asked, raising her head from the console. “I’m not seeing any signs of climax from the historical readings.”
“Hmm.” Lati descended to the mid level, and inspected the glowing O-tron. “Oh! My bad, I didn’t save the climax timer value.” She manipulated the device briefly. “Shouldn’t be long now.” She chuckled. “Silly me.”
Sure enough, a wave of heat blew through Frida, and she felt the path to orgasm suddenly open up. After being left hanging on the edge for longer than she could ever have conceived, it took very little of the new stimulation to push her over, and she came like a train, screaming loud enough to wake the dead, and causing the laboratory table to creak alarmingly as she pulled away from it. Lati took an involuntary step back, and nearly fell off the platform, as she watched the impressive performance.
Finally, Frida subsided into a gasping recovery, and Lati lowered the table back to horizontal before reing her boss.
“Did you get that?” she enquired.
“And how!” The Professor superimposed the signals, and it was easy to see the climatic event from the O-tron matching up to the brain signals sparking off like a fireworks display.
“Well, I think she’s had enough excitement for one day, don’t you?” Mifa remarked, finally. “Put her out, and we’ll start working through the concept translation tomorrow.
Frida understood none of this; she just saw the figure lean over her, and press a stick to her neck, before everything went black again...
Maja was working out on the exercise bike, and Sofia was doing slow laps in the pool, when there was a high pitched chiming from the ceiling.
“Oh, here we go,” Maja said grimly, letting her pedals slow down. “It’s showtime!”
The opaque black glass on both sides of the living area seemed to ripple, then suddenly it was transparent. Sofia came to a stop at the end of her lap, staring out.
Many deep blue eyes were staring in.
Maybe thirty of the aliens were observing them, some in groups, others alone. Sofia was immediately conscious of her total lack of clothing, and the fact that the aliens wore none either was not particularly helpful. She gripped the edge of the pool, carefully keeping everything below her neck submerged.
“That’s not going to help,” said Maja. “Look underwater.”
Sofia ducked her head under the surface, and immediately saw what Maja meant. The transparent wall continued below the surface, and several alien faces were pressed up against the glass, staring at her. She scowled at them, and surfaced.
“It’s like being in a zoo,” she groused, pulling herself out of the pool and wrapping herself as best she could in one of the inconveniently small fabric sheets that appeared to be the best they were going to get for towels.
“Why do you think that we aren’t?” Maja asked, wryly. “Come and see the Earthlings! This week only, 25% off entry prices. Kids’ merchandise now available!”
Despite herself, Sofia laughed. She looked down at the aliens, and observed that there did appear to be family groups—one or two regular sized aliens, closely accompanied by several much smaller versions.
“At least, it’s not the circus,” she muttered.
Another chime, and a small portal in the white wall swung open. Maja had clearly been expecting it, and retrieved two trays from it, placing them on the table.
“Feeding time!” she chirped. “At least it’s not like the zoo, where the lions get thrown raw meat.”
Sofia ed her, probing at her tray with the plastic spoon provided. “I don’t know; right now, I’d kill for some real meat.” She nibbled at a brown-green slab that reminded her of vegetarian meatloaf. “I hope they fully understand our dietary needs; if we start suffering from vitamin deficiency, we’re sunk. I mean, how the heck do we tell them ‘more vitamin D, please, we don’t want rickets’?”
Maja gave a sudden gasp, staring behind Sofia. Sofia reflexively swiveled on her bench, and came face to face—or rather, chest-to-face—with a solemn-looking alien, wearing familiar metallic clothing.
“What do we do?” Maja hissed.
“Hold on...” Sofia stared at the alien, recognizing some of the patterns on her—its?—skin. Slowly, she lowered her head, then leaned forward.
Tido was one of Professor Mifa’s students and, following the highly interesting hands-on lesson yesterday, had decided to take her offspring to the enclosure so they could see what their mother was learning about.
“She’s going to get eaten,” #1 announced, with a certain amount of glee in her voice. “That armor isn’t going to even slow down a creature that big and strong. She’ll swallow the Keeper whole, and excrete the armor a couple of hours later. Ow!”
“You read too much trash science,” Tido said, reprovingly, withdrawing her finger from her offspring’s ear. “Keeper Faso knows what she’s doing.”
“She’s very brave,” said #3, iringly. “I want to be a Keeper when I reach maturity.”
“It’s good to be thinking about career choices,” itted Tido, “but it’s not all glamour. Just think about all the cleaning up they have to do, and keeping the specimens sanitary.”
Faso couldn’t hear the debate about her fate, but in any case was focused on her charge. Now free of the restraint harness, the blonde-furred human’s musculature was even more apparent and impressive. She had watched from outside as the blonde had powered up and down the pool, legs and arms working to drive her at an unbelievable speed through the water.
She locked eyes with the female, as best she could, and held a hand to her chest. “Fa ... So.” She dropped her voice to the bottom of her range, and slowed down her speech to what would be considered comical levels. “Fa... So.”
There was comprehension in the blonde’s eyes; she turned to her partner and growled something, before turning back to Faso. She contorted her face and neck, then forced out two awkward chords that were just recognizable as an imitation of Faso’s performance.
Relieved, Faso slipped her hand into the pouch at her side, and retrieved two brown squares. Instead of inserting them into the human’s mouth, however, she carefully balanced them on her palm, and lifted it up in front of the human.
Tido and her offspring couldn’t hear the communication between the blonde and the Keeper, but they saw Faso’s hand rise, bearing the strange brown blocks, and understood her intent.
“Say goodbye to your hand for a while, Keeper,” #1 said. ”Ow!”
“Watch!” commanded Tido.
Sofia had easily understood Faso’s intent, and even realized that the alien was deliberately distorting her own name—label? role?—to make it more pronounceable. She had sung alto in her home town church choir, and her range was just high enough to allow her to emulate the notes that the alien had warbled.
She delicately reached out for the chocolate squares, lifting them off the alien’s hand, then handed one to Maja and chewed down on the other, making happy sounds of mastication.
Once digested, she pointed at herself, and sang “So-fi-a!” as high as she could, twice, then turned to Maja and raised her eyebrows. Maja obligingly followed, her soprano voice much less strained.
The alien regarded them for a moment, then sung back: “Ma-ya!” A pause, as she pointed back at Sofia. “So-ee-ai!”
“Close enough,” Sofia agreed. She turned to her friend. “I’m fairly sure that I was with this one earlier. I’m wide open to suggestions about what to do now, though.”
“How much does it trust us?” Maja asked.
“Well, it’s here alone, and we must each outweigh it by a factor of ten, so I think we can assume a certain degree of trust,” Sofia said, wryly. “Is there anything we want?”
“Other than ‘freedom’?” Maja said, pointedly. “Well, how about something to write with? That might make future communication easier.”
Faso watched patiently as the two humans slowly conferred. Professor Mifa had been correct—it felt like a week had ed before the rumbling communication stopped, and the blonde turned back to her.
Faso saw a moment of uncertainty in the human’s eyes, quickly replaced by resolution. She stood up from the table, and walked to the pool; scooping up some water in her palm, she moved to the glass wall, and used the water to draw a three sided figure, making tally marks by each side.
Faso took a moment to interpret the diagram, but then sighed in disappointment.
“We know that you understand basic math,” she said, aware that she was essentially talking to herself. “You didn’t need to tell me that.”
She paused, realizing something.
“You want to communicate by drawing! I’m so sorry. Yes, we can install a drawing frame.” She thought for a moment, then used her small finger to draw a square in the air, and made a writing gesture within it.
Pleased with herself, she turned to go.
Sofia took heart at Faso’s apparent understanding of her request. As the little alien turned to go, she took a breath and sang “faaar-vellll!” at the top of her range, slowly waving her hand.
The alien turned back to them, regarded them for a moment, then warbled something impossibly high, while holding her hand up towards them. Then she walked to a portal that had silently opened in the wall, and disappeared.
“That was interesting,” Sofia said, thoughtfully. “What do you think, Maja?” There was no reply, so she turned to look at her friend. “Maja? What’s wrong?”
Maja’s face was significantly more pink than normal, and she was perspiring. “I think... there was something in our food,” she managed to gasp. “Can you feel it?”
“Can I ... oh, my.” Sofia could feel heat building inside her. “Yes, I can. Definitely. Very, very definitely...”
Maja looked over at the alien faces through the glass. “Damned if I’m doing this in front of these little bastards.” She struggled to her feet. “Let’s get to the bedroom.”
The two girls disappeared from the living space, as the alien audience sighed in disappointment. They staggered into the bedroom and collapsed on top of the satin sheets.
“It’s an aphrodisiac, isn’t it?” Sofia groaned. “Oh, my aching puss! What did they want us to do, bring ourselves off in front of the audience?”
“Well, we’re in the right place for it now,” Maja managed to gasp, gesturing around them at the stripper’s palace. “Oh my, oh goodness.” Her fingers thrust into her now slick and hot slit. “Holy alpaca! Don’t mind me, Sof...”
“Likewise...”
Professor Mifa watched the holographic image with a combination of scientific fascination, and amusement. The two humans were frantically pleasuring themselves, and the audio left nothing to the imagination with the growls of satisfaction, and sharper barks of pleasure.
“I wouldn’t want to get in the middle of that,” Lati offered, fascinated by the scene. “They’d tear me apart, and wouldn’t even notice.”
“Tifa mentioned that you’d been speculating about their tongues,” Mifa said, archly.
The alien body didn’t blush, but Lati got very close to it. “In a spirit of scientific enquiry...”
Mifa tapped her fingers on the console. “How are we doing with the conceptual map on the one in our lab?”
“We’re about halfway through the list,” Lati confirmed. “She can’t take more than about an hour before her nervous system overloads, and we have to take a break. It’s not like we’re working with equiv-braintech here.”
“All right, let’s complete the schedule, and get her back to the zoo space as quick as we can.” Mifa returned her focus to the image.
Frida had no idea where she was. She had woken to a white light in her vision—to her concern, it didn’t go away at all when she closed her eyes. Her body still appeared to be immobile, so all she could do was stare into the whiteness and wonder what had happened.
Then, a quick cycling of colors, and—of all things—a naked woman appeared, facing her.
“Hello?” she said, uncertainly. But even as she did so, the woman vanished, and a tree appeared. Then three black dots suspended in space took the tree’s place. Then a red sphere... Each object was in her vision no more than a couple of seconds, just long enough for her to recognize it, before being replaced.
The rapid cycling, and complete lack of any context for the images, eventually took its toll, and her head started to hurt. However, something must have been monitoring her, because her vision faded to gray, and the avalanche of images stopped. She sighed in relief, and tried to relax, while wondering what was going on.
After a while, the grayness brightened to white, and the sequence continued. She watched the parade of images march by, and tried to hold on to her sanity.
Then, something was lifted off her eyes, and her vision returned. She was lying on a table like before, but now it was in a small room with no-one else around. As she took in the new sights, the restraints silently opened, and she took the opportunity to scramble off the table.
A hum from behind her, and she turned to see a door open into a much larger room.
“Frida!” Maja ran over and grabbed the confused girl’s arm. “They got you too? What happened to your hair?”
Frida tentatively touched the top of her head, and her shock at finding smooth skin there was evident on her face. Maja hugged her.
“We’re just glad you’re okay. Have you seen... ‘them’, the aliens?”
“I’ve been in their lab,” Frida confirmed, shivering at the memory. “They’ve been doing something with my head, and more recently feeding images into my brain.” She decided to omit her of the more intimate experimentation. “What have they done with you two?“
“Nothing really with me,” said Maja, “unless you count lacing our food with aphrodisiacs. Sofia was apparently some kind of lecture exhibit for a while, but no harm done... Are you okay?” She saw that Frida was gently squeezing her left boob with a puzzled expression on her face.
“It’s weird... I had a lump here,” Frida said, pointing. “I was going to get a mammogram to get it checked out. But... I think it has gone. You’re a physician’s aide, Maja, could you check?”
Maja gently squeezed around her friend’s boob, and nodded. “Nothing there.”
“Weird...” Frida turned to Sofia. “What happens now?”
Sofia sighed. “We’re in an alien zoo, Frida. We’re the damn exhibits. I get the feeling that we’re going to be here a while—and I’m not sure that we’re ever going to be ‘released into the wild’. I wish I had better news.”
“Sofia has made a friend, at least,” Maja noted. “She is—well, ‘they are’—something like the zookeeper. They seem to like her.” She made a wry face. “We even got chocolate from them!”
“Come on Frida,” Sofia said, taking her friend by the hand. “Let me show you the bordello.”
Mifa and Lati pored over the data cube views from the experiment, selecting and annotating streams.
“How close are we to a basis of command vectors?” Mifa asked.
Lati consulted the cumulative view. “We’ve got all the downstream; there’s no problem with generating willingness. As you’d expect, it’s the task comprehension that’s still the problem. We have basic coverage, but are quite weak on confidence for individual directions.”
Mifa reached over, and spun the data cube around, probing into the structure and expanding sections. She tickled the frenulum between her large eyes, a particular tic that Lati recognized as indicating that she was coming to a decision.
“There’s no realistic prospect of any more specimens in the next six months?” she asked.
“We’ve hit quota,” Lati confirmed. “The environmentalists are already complaining about disturbance of the social ecosystem.”
“The environmentalists are always complaining about something,” Mifa snapped. “They can stick their concerns in their ears.“
Lati suppressed a laugh, mostly successfully. “Speaking of which, Keeper Faso found out about our little stimulation test, and she’s pissed. She made comments about feeding me to the Terran wolverines if I messed with her charges’ feed again without telling her.”
“She’s probably just jealous that she missed the show,” Mifa said, dismissively. “After all, it was quite... stimulating.” Now, Lati couldn’t hold back her giggles.
“Can’t we get her out of the way for a bit?” Mifa asked. “This is important research. We can’t form the basis for a societal evolution without a lot more access to the specimens.”
“That’s a thought,” said Mifa. She reached for her personal communicator. “I know someone in Terran observation—I’ll see if she can bring Keeper Faso along with her on the next trip.