First rule of xeno-anthropology: don’t get too close to your subjects. Easy to say if you’re observing them from what I understand used to be called an Unidentified Flying Object but has now been re-designated an ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon’. Not so much when you’ve shape-shifted into their morphological type, organs included. If form follows function, well, I can now attest that engagement, of the close kind, follows form. Indeed, since I looked like them and acted like them it should not come as any great surprise that I would end up becoming entwined with them. Well, one of them anyway. Literally as it turned out.

Not that it happened immediately. Or even, in my defence, that quickly. I had prepared—of course I had. Thoroughly and carefully. Especially when it came to social interactions, where I absolutely followed Garvel and Hanslethk’s standard protocols for participant observation. At least at the beginning.

Indeed, in my case I was completely comfortable with the persona of someone who was aloof, unsociable without being unfriendly, an observer sitting on the margins of whatever was happening around them. Which is exactly what I was, making notes and keeping records of all kinds of social interactions, across a variety of previously scoped environments.

And those included, of course, mating and pre-mating interactions in an assortment of eating and drinking establishments. So it was, with all due regard to the risks involved, that I found myself regularly attending what was known in this particular locale as a ‘pub’, observing the multifarious exchanges between the other clientele and noting their directionality, modality and degree of intimacy according to the  Xeldon-Traag matrix.

I’d been doing this for quite some time, building up what I felt was a detailed picture of this particular milieu, when all my painstakingly created social distance went out the window, as they say, along with my objectivity. As much as I would have preferred to have just sat quietly, making my observations, the local social protocols dictated that I purchase the occasional drink. And it was while I was doing this, having successfully engaged the bar-person in an exchange of electronic credit for a fermented beverage, that I made my crucial error. As much as I thought otherwise, I was in fact still not fully comfortable in this particular social setting, and so when someone behind me suddenly leaned forward and shouted out their order, I jumped and spilled my own drink on the arm of the person standing next to me.

I know I should have just followed protocol again, simply apologising whilst offering to make appropriate reparations and then departing as quickly as socially permissible, but when he smiled and looking directly into my eyes, told me not to worry about it, I found myself inexplicably unable to comply with what was laid down in the handbook. As I said, form can determine behaviour and in that moment I ceased being an anthropologist apart. Even so, I had plenty of opportunities to remove myself from the interaction. I could have just turned and walked away, for example, out of the establishment and beyond any further contact with the individual concerned. Which might have violated the relevant social conventions but any resulting awkwardness or more importantly, loss of further observational data, would have weighed far less than the burden I’m now carrying.

But I didn’t. Instead, I found myself smiling in return and I allowed ‘Daniel’, or so this person had introduced himself, to buy me a fresh drink and accompany me to a table. I honestly don’t know why I persisted in behaving the way I did. Maybe after all this time, I was simply tired of being the scientist and for once just wanted to relate to another sentient creature on some sort of par. Or perhaps there was some other, deeper reason. I was, after all, a long way from home and despite everything, I missed the intimacy of my own kind. This was different of course, but it functioned as something approaching an acceptable substitute.

I have tried to rationalise what happened next, telling myself that I was simply engaging in further exploration of human interactions, still operating in my role as an anthropologist, but that wasn’t true. This body reacted as those it was modelled on had evolved to do, which meant I felt what is universally experienced as desire and I could see from Daniel’s reactions that he felt it too. And so, in time honoured fashion, we ended up copulating. Even there, you see, I’m using a particular term in an effort to distance myself from the act. And the next morning I did indeed distance myself from both Daniel and, to my chagrin, the project more generally. At least as far as my further involvement was concerned.

So now I am on my way home. I can feel what had been my human skin hardening, becoming the protective carapace in which I will undergo the metamorphosis back into my original form. For of course, just as in the case of certain Earth insect species, shape shifting for my kind involves the breaking down into their chemical components of whatever organs have been constructed and then rebuilding them according to the dictates of my kind’s particular imaginal cells.

In order to direct the change, these must remain separate from the general dissolution but now, unfortunately, there is additional DNA in the mix, literally. How that will affect ‘my’ transformation, I simply do not know. It is not unusual for our anthropologists to return from the field psychologically altered by the experience, sometimes even physically affected as well. But I believe this will be the first time one of us has emerged chimerically changed in this manner. How that will be received by my compatriots remains to be seen but as my ship physically travels between the stars, so I find myself, as a scientist, eager to learn what my own biological destination will be.