The following story was inspired by this drawing by @FacelessFuckers on Twitter.
(Image used with permission of the creator)
"Hmmm...another one," he thought as he dimly looked on at the latest arrival to the station. It was only three months into the job and he was already tired of all the primates zipping around space. He had always assumed that most other species would be canines like his own.
He had never seen a sentient being quite like them prior to leaving his home planet. Sure, there was the odd feline or reptilian that had come through their system, even the occasional equine but they were even more rare. Primates, on the other paw, were completely unheard of. His homeworld was something of a backwater, tucked way off to one side of the galaxy, and he had quickly learned how much of the universe he was naïve of.
He had asked one of the other officers, a reptilian, what they were when he first saw the hairless mass of limbs. In fact, they were like limbs on limbs on limbs, nothing but lengths seemingly without termination pigmented nearly uniformly across the entire body and he had initially thought they might be some sort of land adaptation to an aquatic species, perhaps an evolutionary line similar to his own planet’s squids or jellyfish.
“Ape?!” he could still remember how he sounded: a combination of shock and astonishment. Apes hadn’t survived the prehistory of his planet and he had only ever seen them as fossils in museums. It was even more astonishing just how many there were.
He had thought that they were a rarity, a singular species called “primates,” and it wasn’t until he saw the constant flow of them into and out of the station and discovered how many different species they were comprised of that he realized that, if anything, they were the norm for the galaxy.
The average reptillian branch from a particular galaxy - by far the most diverse of all the species groups - was made up of about ten sentient species. So far, Lawrence had encountered primates that had independently evolved on over three-dozen unique planets and some of the lifers that had put in multiple tours of duty had mentioned that there were at least four hundred more spread across the entirety of The Seventeen Galaxy Alliance.
“Hey man, where’s the ‘Dock Six Café?’” a slow drawl he assumed was directed at him came from his left.
A long, low growl began to emanate from his throat and he had to suppress his initial instinct to simply raise his arm, squeeze the muscles within, and fire the laser pistol strapped to the top of his paw directly into the thing that was staring at him. It was all arms, gangly and short with a hunched gait that made its already comically long upper limbs very nearly touch the elbows of its lower ones. It seemed to be a particularly poor evolution of primate, even relative to the others.
He had been told that the species that made up the primates generally bred with whoever was compatible with little regard for lineages, a practice that seemed at best ineffective and at worst prone to disaster. His own species tracked family lines aggressively and arranged matings for the maximum diversity. Purebreds were a liability to the species, too often leading to inbreds.
It wore a laser pistol at its hip, leaving its “fingers” - as he had been told the tiny claw-less arms at the end of its longer arms were called - free for other tasks. He could see what value these little appendages had every time he saw one of the primates grasp something, as they seemed so fond of doing as they ran around the station grabbing this and that, but relative to the availability of a paw-mounted pistol their preferred weapons seemed to put them at a definitive disadvantage in combat. Still, he had been the recipient of a drunk one’s “punch” more than a few times and he could say first-hand that it was a more effective tool than his own clawing, though their underdeveloped teeth were laughably ineffective for biting compared to his own.
He pushed both the urge and the growl down. He had discovered during his time here that both he and his species at large were surprisingly xenophobic, perhaps a side-effect of their isolation, and that he would need to learn to be more cosmopolitan if he was going to flourish here.
“Certainly, sir, if you look at the signs there you’ll see that it’s just two doors down,” he stated as politely as he could while he attempted to pull his face into something like a smile. The muscles weren’t entirely made for it, but he was able to approximate it by baring his teeth, widening his eyes, and raising his eyebrows up high. Some of the felines could manage the little eye trick that the primates did to complete the effect, and some of his fellow canines would open their mouths and stick out their tongues in a gesture that the primates apparently found extremely pleasant, but he wasn’t ready to sacrifice his dignity to that extent just yet.
The thing looked up at the signs for a moment before nodding its head and stating “Oh, cool, thanks man” without taking the adequate time to actually read them. He wasn’t sure if the being was even literate, many of them weren’t.
It started to reach up for his head, but he quickly put his paw out to gently push the hand back down. “No,” he stated as kindly as he could before pointing towards the café, “move along please.”
“Yeah, okay man, sorry,” the primate stated with a hint of both defeat and apology before he started down the corridor. It never seemed to dawn on them before attempting that petting an Officer of the Peace was highly inappropriate. Some of the other canines allowed it with resignation, and most of the felines seemed to actively enjoy it, but he shared the reptilians’ outlook that it was both an unwarranted and unwanted intrusion on his personal space.
“Hey Lawrence,” a pleasant feminine voice nearly cooed from behind him as he found a hand suddenly scratching the back of his ear.
“Ahhhh,” he moaned against the near-expert manipulation of his skin before pushing the hand away. “Knock it off Jenkins.”
She giggled to herself as she bound forward into his field of view. “Sorry! You’re just soooo soft!”
She was tall and thin with bumps at both her chest and ass that for some reason that he couldn’t quite articulate he found extremely interesting. His species didn’t have them and so far he had only seen them on a handful of the primates he had met. She had short hair that one of the captains - a strange lobster-like creature that could see in spectrums of light he would never even understand - had told him was a shade of brown and she wore a slightly tighter version of the same outfit he was in.
“Human” was apparently her variant of primate, a species that was one of the first to begin exploring space and had grown rare in the time since, their DNA melting into the lineages of other primates from planets distant from their own.
As she munched on the last few remaining bites of an apple, he momentarily reflected on how he had found that she was one of the good ones among the primates over the course of the past few months, despite her constant need to always have something to either eat or drink in her right hand. Not that only having one hand available at any given time seemed to affect her much; she had proven to be capable of performing nearly all of her duties one-handed from shooting to fighting to typing. In fact, when she was actively drinking she fell into a strange, wobbly fighting stance that seemed even more effective than her normal one. He had asked about it once and was told that it was called “Drunken Monkey” and was apparently one of the few parts of her species’ culture that had survived their long journey from their home.
“You keep up like this and I’m gonna think this is part of your mating practice,” he continued as he straightened the whispy hairs behind his ear.
“Hmmm, we can only hope,” she stated with a smile as she expertly tossed the apple core over her shoulder and into a nearby “Organic Waste Matter” receptacle before licking her fingers at him seductively. He thought it was seductive, anyway, he had been told that most primates licked things to seduce prospective mates.
His species didn’t do anything of the sort. If a male desired a female, he would sniff around her to check for fresh mating pheromones to gauge interest. If he found any, he would bend down, stick his face in her ass, and take a long, deep sniff. If the female was receptive, she would stay and allow him to sniff more, and if not she would simply walk away without comment. Generally, the mating act itself would then occur as soon as they had completed either a lineage investigation or received temporary sterilization injections.
The process was largely the same for same-sex couples, though if a female desired a male that hadn’t made the necessary overtures, she could indicate her interest by bending at the waist near him so that her ass pointed towards him. If he was receptive, he would then go in for a sniff. To eliminate confusion, people not interested in mating took significant care to ensure their backs weren’t pointed towards anyone in particular prior to bending over to pick anything up.
He could feel himself reddening under his fur and he couldn’t help but wonder if they were genetically compatible. He knew they were physically compatible, the majority of species actually were with most possessing penises and vaginas or something very similar to one or the other. A litter of interspecies offspring and the huge increase in genetic diversity they would carry would be a significant boon to his pack. Did humans have litters? He would have to ask the station’s doctor later.
“How much longer you got?” she asked after she had rubbed her saliva-wet fingers on her pants.
“Four hours,” he replied. The shift was already half-over. They always seemed to go fast thanks to the wealth of different cultures available for study every day. Though he hadn’t yet shaken himself of the instinctual urge to distrust everyone who wasn’t a canine, on an intellectual level he found many of these beings deeply fascinating.
“Me too,” she stated with another smile. “Wanna grab a drink afterwards?”
“Sure,” he stated as his face pulled into the closest he could manage to a genuine smile while he continued “beer?” He liked beer. His planet didn’t have it. Most food was edible to their systems long after it had “rotted” by the standards of other species and it had never occurred to them to invent fermentation, or any form of food preservation for that matter. He had experimented with other preserved foods, but he found that neither salt nor any of the multitude of synthetic preservatives available entirely agreed with him.
“Anything you want, cutie,” she said with a sly smile and something of a back and forth gesture with her body as she bent slightly in a way that somehow showed off the enlarged mammary glands at her chest despite the fact that they were fully covered by her uniform. He thought the gesture might be intended as flirtatious. She liked beer too, and he had found that she could drink quite a lot of it.
“Oh, look alive,” she said quickly as she pulled herself into a more official pose next to him. “More coming.”
He looked up towards the airlock to see a small bunch of new primates exiting a freshly docked ship. These ones were extremely tall with very long lower arms and extremely short upper ones.
“Oh for fuck’s sakes,” he stated outloud despite himself. He just hoped these ones could at least read.