“SPACE IT!” “BURN IT!” “We’ll compromise. LAUNCH IT INTO THE SUN!”
“What is it?” asked M'ri.
“I think it’s a human artefact,” Chobb turned the object over in her hands. It was roughly spherical, and featured false fur in lurid colours. There were comical parodies of eyes above a birdlike pointed beak. Yet it had mammalian ears and ducklike feet. “I think it might be a platypus…”
M'ri ran her scanner over it. “There’s mechanisms inside it. Is it meant to do something?”
“Earth mechanicals run on primitive chemical reactions. The ones inside this were removed for safety,” Chobb reassured her. “Such an odd thing to leave in a grab-box. If we want to find out what it does, we’d have to create a new power cell for it.”
M'ri pried open the power compartment in its lurid plastic base. The compartment was empty of everything but the metal contacts. “Two pointy tents?”
“Earth symbolism,” Chobb dismissed. She put it down on the workbench. “We’d have to unriddle the meaning if we want it to be functional.”
And then the eyes moved. Focussed on them. The beak opened and closed as it said. “U nye boh do?”
M'ri had no memory of moving, but she and her business partner Chobb found themselves clinging to each other at the opposite end of the room to the artificial beast as it oscillated pointlessly in its place. Both cogniscents were trying to burrow through the bulkhead with their spines.
“…it has no power,” Chobb whispered. “How can it possibly…?”
“Wee tah kah wee loo,” said the beast.
“This is why the box was so cheap,” said M'ri. “The merchant was seeking to be rid of that thing. Before it killed him.”
“I say we space it.”
“I think we should burn it.”
“U nye loo lay doo?” said the beast.
“We compromise,” said M'ri. “We drop it into a star.”
Tales were told after the fact, of course. And the Galactic Alliance spread horror stories of the Earth machine known as Phur-bii.
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