​     10K.

     Starving Skip had a couple bowls of something on his plate. 

     Now he needed a place to sit down.

​     Or did he?

​     "You know," he said. "I've got my tray. I could just stand here and munch."

     "Sit down," Claudia said. "I'm still collecting information, and I'm going to be a minute. I'll know if you sense trouble."

​     "I sense trouble right now."

     "I mean real trouble, real danger. Stop dithering. You've got an invisible protective shield around you at all times, Skip, and that shield is me. Now sit."

     "Even the smallest person at that table is bigger than me."

     "And they all have mouths, which means they're all capable of talking, which means that you should be able to talk to them, get to know them a little. That'll help me figure out where we are immensely."

     "You sure? I..."

     "Sit ​down."

     There was exactly one place to sit down with the humans, between a guy who weighed at least six hundred pounds and someone half-human, half-android. After each bite, the android/human would drink from this glass of something that looked a lot like motor oil. In front of the man mountain to Skip's left, Skip saw twelve different bowls. The human concentrated on what was in one bowl at a time, contemplating it before wolfing it down. Then, on to the next bowl. Gobble. Gobble.

     "​Can I even talk to them?" Skip asked. "Language must have changed a lot over eight thousand years." 

     "I'll translate. You won't even know I'm doing it. I've been doing that ever since we got here, really. You just haven't noticed."

     "Uh...Uh...Hey...Uh...Hi," Skip said as he sat down. "I'm new here. What's good?" He pointed to what he had on his own plate. "Did I grab anything worth eating?"

     The man mountain took a quick look at Skip's tray. As he did, he jammed a wriggling, hamster-like mammal into his mouth. He then swallowed down a couple gulps of something that looked a lot, to Skip, like frothy ale.

     That reminded him. He hadn't grabbed anything to drink himself. Where was the water, the cola, the beer?

     The big guy pointed to the bready brown stuff on Skip's plate.

     "That's shit," he said.

     "It's got everything in it to keep you alive, though," the half-android, half-human said. "If you don't have money for anything else, you can always live off sleb. Kloval, though..."

     "I'm sorry. I don't understand the language as well as I..."

     "That's the best food you can eat. Kloval."

     "That so?" Skip took another bite from the leaf he'd pulled. It still tasted like a leaf.

     "Whoever lived on nothing but kloval would have money for little else," the man mountain said as he belched.   

     "Yet there are those who attempt it," the android/human replied. "Kloval is that good."

     "My name is Parp, by the way," the man said.

     "I'm Skip," Skip said.

     "I would shake your hand, but I am a very sweaty man, and I don't want to disgust you."

     Skip extended his own hand.

     "That wouldn't disgust me at all," he said.

     They shook.

     Parp smiled.

     He pointed again to the lump on Skip's tray.

     "That really is shit," he said. "Real shit."

     Skip paled.

     "Not human shit," the android/human added, "and my name, should you ask, is Ges-E."

     "I am pleased to meet you, Ges-E, and my name is..."

     "Skip. As you just stated."

     "Yeah, right, Skip. You want to shake, Ges-E?"

     "I do not. What is in the bowl before you is, indeed, pure excrement, but what that species excretes is of tremendous nutritional value."

     "It still tastes like shit, though," Parp said.

     Skip pushed the sleb away from him.

     "I'm starving," he said. "Isn't there anything in this cafeteria that doesn't taste like either shit for a leaf?"

​     "Kloval," Ges-E replied. 

CONTINUE