Heevin squeezed himself into his man suit.
Every morning he had to go through the same rigorous process of dressing for work. He folded in his 8-foot tentacles, forced the air out of his thoracic bladder, and sliced off his carbon monoxide stress antenna. That part hurt a little, like breaking a nail, but it always grew back during the night.
Once he had adjusted his skin, he looked passably human. A little ungainly, but what data analyst didn’t come off as clumsy and socially inept? His discomfort was a feature, not a bug.
He slithered out to his Prius – no, wait, he forced himself to walk, in case any neighbors were looking – and made his way down to Facebook’s data center.
Mark Zuckerberg, one of Heevin’s childhood friends from Planet Zuck, had arranged for him to move to Earth for the express purpose of finding love.
No, Heevin wasn’t looking for love in the traditional sense. Instead, it was his mission to find and quantify the data set that would enable Facebook engineers to implement Phase Six of their Cosmic Domination Tour.
Frankly, it was lonely work. Only a few Zuckerines actually worked on earth; most telecommuted from home. The few female data scientists who worked in Heevin’s office were equally cold and remote, even though they were human. And while they paid lip service to love, they all spoke bitterly of men – especially on Valentine’s Day, when only the secretary got flowers.
Ugh. Valentine’s Day. A tribute to a tortured, slaughtered saint. This was passion? This was romance? Try as he might, Heevin couldn’t wrap his oversized head around the concept.
Heevin sat down at his desk and compiled the Facebook data that had come in overnight.
Six billion likes.
Three million pokes.
And seventy-eight thousand shares of an ecard that read, “Roses are red, violets are blue. I want to puke when I think of you.”
“Puke?” Heevin googled the term.
So now love was conflated with projectile vomiting.
Humans might be complex biological entities, but they certainly didn’t have the dignity and grace Spork gave one-celled organisms.
Behind him, a woman cleared her throat, shaking loose some mucous before she took a few quick puffs from her inhaler.
“Quite the Valentine, isn’t it? Six guys from high school sent it to me this morning.”
He turned to see Stephanie, a pleasingly plump middle-aged analyst from the Department of Dinner Plate Photos.
She was wearing a new Grumpy Cat sweatshirt; perhaps she was angling for a transfer to the Division of Cute Cat Videos.
Something about the cat’s scowling face, superimposed over her 44-Ds, piqued Heevin’s interest. He noticed that she smelled a little ripe, like a grocery-store peach that would go bad in one more day.
Heevin’s scientific mind began to compile a devious plan.
“Stephanie,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Do you have any plans for lunch?”
They found a table for two in a quiet corner of Facebook’s company cafeteria, a revolving restaurant at the top of Zuckerberg Towers. A tuxedo-clad waiter unfolded their napkins with a flourish, the wine steward brought them each a glass of Pinot Noir, and the chef’s personal assistant chef stopped by to tell them about the day’s special: fair-trade broiled pheasant, topped with a dollop of fresh-caught Alaskan salmon mousse, garnished with Himalayan greens, and drizzled with cold-pressed pomegranate oil.
They both agreed to sample the dish. When the chef went back to the kitchen, Stephanie sighed.
“I miss the days when Nigella cooked for us,” she said. “I feel like Rocco just phones it in.”
Heevin swallowed wrong, which started him coughing. Drinking water through his mouth always took special concentration, but Stephanie’s criticism of the Zuckerberg chef had caught him off guard. Heevin knew for a fact that Rocco personally flew to Planet Zuck every week to get live Wagyu Garlic for his Pasta alla Bolognese.
He reached for his water, but he forgot he wasn’t wearing his tentacles. Instead of finding the glass and picking it up with a slow, graceful shimmy, his thick human paws knocked it off the table.
His coughing intensified. Stephanie handed him her glass – and in the process, her fingers brushed his.
Suddenly, his coughing stopped. He had reached his objective — and the amuse bouche, a delicate ginger-sprinkled hamachi, hadn’t even been served yet!
They enjoyed their lunch immensely. The Zuckerines knew how to cook, and humans knew how to eat. You didn’t need a degree from M.I.T. to see that.
The pinot noir was a perfect complement to the paté-stuffed truffles that started every meal in the Facebook café. A bolder, richer-bodied merlot brought out the dusky undertones of the pheasant.
Despite her earlier misgivings, Stephanie agreed that Rocco had outdone himself that day.
For his part, Heevin thought Stephanie grew more beautiful with every bite. She cooed and purred all through lunch, and she giggled like a schoolgirl when Heevin made a joke about savoring the breast meat.
By the time the dessert cart arrived, Heevin and Stephanie were playing footsie under the table. She hadn’t shaved her legs in years, and the downy hair above her ankles drove him crazy with desire.
For the first time in his 18 months on Earth, Heevin knew that love wasn’t just a theory. It was a fact.
During his drive home that night, the onboard air analyzer in his Prius confirmed what Heevin already suspected: skin-to-skin contact with an ovulating human female had infected him with an invasive, parasitic virus.
A purple light flashed on his dashboard, bells began to chime, and a well-modulated robot voice advised him that his health and safety would soon be assured.
“Decontamination protocol initiating in 10 seconds.”
Heevin pressed the pause button.
Yes, he could rid himself of the virus. No Zuckerine had ever willingly submitted to an ongoing infection, so no one knew what the long-term ramifications would be. What if it led to illness or incapacitation? What if it led to marriage?
With a click, Heevin could sterilize his bloodstream and start fresh. He could wash that woman right out of his Keratin, and no one would ever be the wiser.
But he didn’t want to.
She had already invited him to her condo, for an evening of Dungeons and Dragons Super Boggle Strip Scrabble. The game was her own invention, but it sounded intriguing.
If he liked playing with her, she had suggested, they could move from the gameroom to the bedroom.
Heevin already knew he would win, whether or not he lost his shirt.
He was a scientist, after all.
He smiled, knowing that Mark Zuckerberg would soon get the data he’d been waiting for.
And Stephanie?
Heevin laughed out loud. Later that night, when he stepped out of his skin, she would get a little something, too.