AIDAN MOVED OUTWARD from his own self, and his shape altered, became strange and hard to understand: hard to fit into your mind, because there were no containers, no boxes in there, in your mind, for him to go into, to be framed by, no references at all to pin him in place.
Part of the problem with understanding it, Emily thought, was that movies always used bits of animals to represent them: tentacles, bug eyes, that sort of thing. People could imagine only things that corresponded to their own world’s physics, its biology, its system of structures. Whereas the reality was just…was just…something that you almost couldn’t see, even, because you had never seen anything like it, were not equipped in any way to delineate it in vision.
Aidan had said, in her bedroom, soon after they met: “My real form does not fit into your ontology.”
She’d had to look that one up.
Was there an impression of a head? Eyes? It was hard to tell. She remembered his ship, how she had known right away what it was—and not because it looked like any of the photos, like any of the movies. No: she had known because its corners had been in the wrong places, its edges had not made sense.
Bob was opening and closing his mouth, and he, at least, looked like an animal, like a fish dumbly kissing water, as he scrambled backward to the edge of the shelter.
Then Aidan—the thing that had been Aidan—retracted back inward, folded, a time-lapse video of origami, into the form of a little boy again.
There was a long silence.
“What. The— H-h-he’s…an alien?” said Bob.
“Not at all,” said Aidan. “I’m me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re an alien.”
That was when Bob passed out.