Chatterbox

Chatterbox

by Steve Levandoski

Steve Levandoski’s writing has been featured in The Oddville Press, Microfiction Monday, The Writing Disorder, Sci-Fi Lampoon, Flash Fiction Magazine, the Grim and Gilded, The Pink Hydra, and the Coffin Bell and came in third for short scripts at the 2025 Scriptapalooza and first place in the Sunday Shorts Festival. He’s the big cheese at Next In Line Magazine. Described as “interestingly off-putting,” Steve lives in an underground bunker somewhere in Philadelphia with his better half Lisa and their pug Phil Collins. 

 

Most of my colleagues would have given their left antenna to make their subjects talk. I couldn’t get mine to shut up.

His name was Rob. A human, he was a prisoner of war residing in Cell Block Seven, the division reserved for military males of low importance. Separating genders was archaic to say the least, but the humans requested it, so management acquiesced.

An unenlightened specimen, Rob came to our attention after we observed him cornering other prisoners, continuing to conversate long after his victim’s nonverbals indicated that they’d lost interest. Because the risk of rumination was too great, Rob couldn’t bear silence, so he crammed every void with idle chit-chat or inane jokes about his supposed sexual liaisons with his fellow POW’s mothers.   

Now, don’t get me wrong. To my experience, the human military personnel are some of the most gallant fighting forces in what they adorably nicknamed the Milky Way. While reviewing battle simulation videos, I witnessed countless soldiers jumping on top of what they thought were real explosives, convinced they were sacrificing their lives for their comrades. If I had eyes installed at the time, I’d have cried watching it. While lovable in his own misguided way, Rob was on the bottom tier of the valor department. 

#

Rob’s former cellmate shot me a look of relief mixed with pity as we passed in the hallway, hugging our cranial support pillows and personal sanitation kits. Management had upgraded the poor man to the peace and quiet of a private cell. 

Avoiding eye contact, I entered my new sleeping chambers and returned Rob’s warm greetings with a terse grunt, then I unpacked my tooth laser and spare clothing as though I was the only person inside our cell. Unused to human form, I scurried up onto the top bunk and accidentally banged my new testicles, the stupidest evolution I had ever experienced of any species whose form I had appropriated.  

“Not much of a talker eh, buddy?” Rob said. The smile on his face waned. 

 I shook my head, pretending to read a magazine. To cope, Rob spoke to himself, narrating his every step from the sink to the toilet room and back, sometimes arguing with himself and always losing. To ramp up his anxiety, I openly engaged the other prisoners right in front of him at lunch, until cell block gossip confirmed that Rob was concerned that I didn’t like him. 

#

With precious little time, I could not delay much longer.In order to stop an impending nuclear retaliation, management would soon need to deploy drones armed with real weapons.I needed to move cautiously without dawdling. Billions of human lives would be at stake if I, to borrow a human colloquialism, “screwed the pooch” on this mission.

On the third sleep cycle, I finally dropped the silent treatment.

I said, “The Mandarin Garden.”  

“Huh?” Rob’s head darted out from under my bed to meet my gaze on the top bunk. His nonverbals communicated that he could not be any more interested in conversing. As I had learned in psyche training, I mimicked Rob’s body language to make myself more amiable to his subconscious. 

I said, “At the cafeteria, you told Kyle and Rasheed that they served the best fucking orange beef that you’ve had since the Mandarin Garden in Columbus, Indiana.” 

“So?” 

“I used to party with a chick that lived next to it, on Cherry street, near McKinley. Until it…” 

He cut me off. “Burnt down in 2003? Hold up one goddamn minute! Are you shitting me? You’re from Columbus? Well Shit, brother!” (Once I heard Rob speak for two minutes straight uttering only three words that weren’t curses; however, he was still above par compared to most human military personnel I had encountered.) 

 I said, “No dude. I grew up in Camden. When my folks split, my pops ran away as far away as he could from my mom. He had a trailer not too far from Columbus, in Stony Lonesome. I used to live with him during summer vacation. That place did have the best fucking orange beef. Goddamn! Fuck me!”  

Rob was out of his bed by now, standing in his underwear and leaning on my bunk with his legs casually crossed. I looked deep into his eyes and held contact to exhibit trust. He was smiling so hard that his moustache pointed upwards. 

I said, “Sorry bud. I don’t know who to trust in this shithole.” 

“What the fuck are you talking about, dude?” said Rob, his head turned quizzically, like a dog. 

I looked over my shoulder and whispered, “I thought you might be one of them.” 

Rob’s mouth dropped. “YOU THOUGHT I WAS —sorry— you thought I was a fucking alien? This guy? Does my ass look purple to you, numbnuts?” 

I shrugged. “I’m just stressed the fuck out. I didn’t know who to trust.” 

While safeguarding my testes, I hopped down from my bunk and extended my hand out to him, palm facing sideways, fingers together. He grabbed my fingers and we squeezed for a second, briskly moving our conjoined hands up and down. Most human greeting rituals involve human contact. Small wonder why they suffer so many pandemics.

He pulled me in. After we performed the bro-hug ceremony, Rob smacked me on the back with an open hand, a macho sign of endearment. “It’s all good, hombre. I don’t think we officially met. Private Robert Evans. Call me Rob.” 

“You got it, Rob. John Cairncross.”  

I apologized again for not speaking to him earlier, saying it was because “for all us humans knew,” the aliens could replicate human form, but I assured him that his knowledge of the obscure restaurant earned my trust and we were now “cool.”  

He laughed off my feigned suspicions but spent the next three hours proving his humanity to me anyway. I sat through all the minutiae of his life: childhood experiments with explosions, his gastric distress from dining at A&W Burger, and how wearing a jersey with the number eighteen stitched on it aided his precious Indiana Colts to victory. We broadcasted every sports game for the prisoner’s entertainment on wall screens. They loved it!

#

At the end of a sleep cycle, after lights out, I tearfully confided to Rob that I participated in “waterboarding”, a torture that simulated death by fluid inhalation, during my fictional tour of duty. I shared my fear that our captures would use similar bestial techniques on us utilizing advanced alien technology. 

Looking uncomfortable, he gingerly patted me on the shoulder. “Look-it, I’ve been here for six fucking months now, and I ain’t heard dick about any fucking torture, not at Cell Block Seven anyway. We are too fucking low on the totem pole. Those purple douche bagsdon’t give two shits about us. But yeah— fucking— besides the boredom and lack of real ladies, it’s actually not too bad in this shithole. You get three squares and your own private bathroom to jag off in. I really can’t complain about a goddamn thing. I don’t know what these mattresses are made of, but —fuck’ina!—they are softer than baby shit. I’m out like a light as soon as my head hits the motherfucker. And you tasted the food? God-damn, huh? I eat nothing but fake burgers every day for every meal, and I’ve lost weight. They taste better than the real thing and they’re super healthy apparently and got vitamins and vegetables in them. I’ve had nothing but solid shits since I got here, which is a motherfucking record for me. And don’t get me started on those toilets that squirt water. Jesus Christ. Like an angel kissing your cornhole.” 

This stellar review made me involuntarily smile. Before this mission, I was part of the team that ensured our containment facilities were consistently more comfortable than their own barracks at home, closer to what they refer to as “military leave.” Happy humans are chatty humans. Their own military genius, Sun Tzu, condemned torture thousands of earth years ago in The Art of War. Even though the book was taught in every major military academy, its advice was routinely ignored after capturing the first POW with a secret.

Rob placed his hand over his mouth, as though he knew we were being recorded. “Dude. You know the exercise simulation room? Fuckin’ a. Do yourself a favor. Check out the porn section; it’s buried deep in the submenu it’s under “other,” right after “curling.” Fucking fantastic. You can bang any porn star you ever heard of! They got Riley Reid, Honey Gold, Bonnie Rotten, or you can go old school with Linda Lovelace or Traci Lords!” 

I feigned admonishment. “But those fucking things can read your fucking mind, dickhead! What are you? Stupid? Letting aliens hook probes straight into your head and shit?” 

Rob became indignant. “Shut the fuck up, dude! They can’t read your fucking mind, that’s straight-up bullshit!” 

For once, Rob was correct. That was all “bullshit.” Exercise simulators with brain scanning capabilities wouldn’t be the norm for another two generations of models. They are what put my colleagues and me out of business. 

He unconsciously wrapped his arms around himself in a self-soothing manner as he defended himself. “And even if they could, who fucking cares? What secrets are they going to get out of me? How to do the hokey pokey?”

(I would later allow him to “convince” me to give the machine a try and thank him endlessly. Ugh. So many fluids.) 

Before changing the subject to sports, I repeated human military propaganda to stir the pot one last time. “But how can you trust these purple motherfuckers? They just sat around and waited for the day when we would become smart enough to make good slaves.” 

Snickering dismissively, Rob shook his head. “I dunno man, I’ve been here a lot longer than you and they haven’t asked me to do a goddamn thing damn thing except eat, shit, and spank it. Settle down, Beavis. You’re killing the vibe with your lame-ass, boy scout shit, bro-heim.” 

The irony was that humans would make the worst slaves at any level of development. Our kind made machines our slaves millennia ago. Imagine a human trying to program even a basic CRV epoxy applicator without blowing themselves to Alpha Centauri. Laughable. This adorable naivety is why humans make the perfect solstice present for loved ones. Who wouldn’t want a water planet full of them building their quant little cities,dancing to K-pop, and filming their baking contests? Just take away their weapons and cell phones every couple of millennia, and they can pretty much sustain life on their own, with minimal genocides. 

#

It didn’t take long for me to become Rob’s “right-hand man.”The only words I needed to prod Rob along were uh-huh, really, and no way.   

He’d say, “JC, I like you because you know how to have a fucking conversation. You gotta watch out because there are a lot of boring-ass motherfuckers in here. You hear the same fucking stories from the same dicks over and over, and each time they tell it, they doggy pile more shit on top just to spice it up. 

Prime example: fucking Rasheed. When he first got here, he told any asshole with ears that he pushed a guard on the way in for looking at him funny. Two years later and here’s Rasheed talking about how he was dragged kicking and screaming by four guards, wrapped up like a burrito in their nasty-ass tentacles. What a lying sack of shit. Fuck Rasheed.” 

“Uh huh,” I said, recalling the previous sleep cycle, when Rob lost to Rasheed in a gambling game played with paper stock depicting ancient royalty.

“And he cheats at cards,” said Rob.

“Really?” I said, feigning shock.

“That’s the word on the street.”

“No way!” 

What made Rob so special to us was that in his youth he shared a religious congregation, Saint Bartholomew’s Cathedral, with another one of our prisoners. Rob didn’t know we had his nation’s second-in-command housed within walking distance of him. Our principal concern was the nation’s nuclear arsenal which made humanity–to borrow an Earthling expression– a “monkey with a gun.” We needed to take that gun away before those idiots hurt themselves, fouling up their whole solar system in the process. 

The second-in-command was not the most captivating fellow. Our replication of him didn’t raise suspicions with his colleagues, coworkers, or his intermediate family. Even with minimal back-story, the simbot’s validity was never questioned the entire time we had the real second-in-command in custody. After earning our prisoner’s trust, our agent could use basic mentalism tricks to extract the launch codes without him noticing. To accomplish this end, we needed trivia too obscure for human search engines. That is where our Rob came in. 

The trick was that Rob had to bring Saint Bartholomew’s church up on his own. If I tried to steer the conversation, I risked arousing suspicions that could derail the whole mission. It was like what earthlings call “fishing,” Rob’s favorite exercise simulation beyond pornography. 

I endured tedium supreme as I listened to how Rob stood by his flat earth theory, even though he could see the globe from our porthole. (“It’s an optical illusion just to fuck with us.”) How his neighbor was violating his basic human rights for throwing his dog’s wrapped excrement into Rob’s personal garbage bin. (“He’s goddamn snowflake, too!”) Also, his objections to learning new languages. (“Fuck-em, we have the most motherfucking bombs, so their lazy asses can learn fucking English like every other asshole on the planet!”)

#

Adrenaline almost betrayed me when Rob finally brought up the church. We were both sitting alone at the lunch table. I was fighting the urge to scratch those damnable, perennially-itchy testes because Rob protested loudly the last time I did so in front of him.

I forget what subject led to its mention, but Rob said, “Dude, that reminds me of an even better story. I had the fucking funniest shit happen at a funeral when I was an altar boy. I’ll never forget. It was at this church older than God, Saint Bartholomew’s…” 

“Saint Bartholomew’s!” I shouted the words like an overeager game show contestant.

Oh no! All would be lost! 

Startled by the outburst, Rob looked at me sideways. “Yeah, Saint Barts. So? You alright there, buddy?” 

I was losing him!

 I needed to think fast. “Um… My cousin was an altar boy there, too” 

Rob eyed me suspiciously. Even he could pick up on my shady nonverbals like my perspiration and shaking hands. 

“No shit,” he said, lighting a prosthetic cigarette. “Small fucking world. What was his name? I’m sure I knew your cousin. I knew everyone.” 

I blurted the first human name I could think of. “Scott.”

  I felt my face get hot and sweat was beading.  

His eyebrow shot up. “Not Marchlinski? ” 

I went with it. “Yeah, Scott Marchlinski.” 

Rob shook his head, staring downward. I couldn’t draw a bead on his reaction, until he whimsically slapped his knee and looked up. “No fucking way! He was a ginger-balls, right? I kinda knew Scott. He didn’t last long there. He seemed like a cool-ass dude though.” 

I gave Rob a playful elbow to his lower ribs. “He was another fucking army brat like us; that’s why he moved. Cheers, broself.” 

We clicked our frosted mugs of lager together, in the customary manner. Providing unlimited alcoholic beverages and marijuana for inmates was a fantastic idea. I wish it had been mine. 

While I silently performed breathing exercises to mask my increased heart rate, Rob told the tale that allowed us to conquer mankind once and for all. 

His eyes twinkled at the memory. “I think this happened after Scott left, you’ll have to ask the dude after we get out of here. But anyhoo, some old rich biddy kicked it, and her worthless junkie son shocked the ever-loving shit out of everyone by showing up to her viewing, even though she didn’t leave him a pot to piss in. When the lowlife kissed his mommy on her forehead, Father Baker saw the asshole slipping the wedding ring off her finger. 

Well, Father Baker grew up in Detroit, son! He didn’t take no shit. He grabbed the prick by the collar, slapped him upside the head, snatched the ring back, and then chicken-winged him out to the parking lot. Everyone laughed their fucking asses off. What an asshole!” 

His laughter triggered a coughing fit, and Rob had to wipe the tears from his eyes by the end of his saga. It turned out that this story was unscribed legend at the church.

Rob went on to fill up an octillion gig hard drive with banal stories of smokingcigarettes in the confessional booth, stealing pencils from the unattended desks of catholic school kids, and sneaking gulps of sacramental wine before it was blessed.

#

Four sleep cycles later, I received the news from the guards that I was “being transferred to another cell block”— code meaning that my mission was over and I could finally sleep in my own pod again, away from snoring human noses. 

  Crestfallen by the news, Rob forced me to imbibe small vessels of concentrated alcohol called “shots” for old times’ sake on our last day together. When the guard came to retrieve me, I was inebriated. As I staggered away, I gave Rob’s new cellmate a look of relief mixed with pity.  I could already tell by the excited waggling of my guard’s antennae that our mission was a success.   

When we were out of the range of human hearing he whispered, “Agent Xretrieved the launch codes from the second. Guess what they were.” 

“What?” I said, too weary to play games. 

He leaned in close. “1-2-3-4-5-6.” 

“Pffffft,” I said, “That’s so human. You don’t even know how much I want to slip out of these fucking testicles.” 

  The guard’s antennae dipped in pity. “I could not even imagine.” 

Long after all the human prisoners were released, I just had to sneak one last peek at Rob’s file. It was justbefore our division was closed for good due to the improvementsin brain scanning technologyTo make busywork for our interns, we had them visit the earth a couple times a year to keep tabs on Rob and another human of interest, Tom Delonge.  

Rob had married twice and raised three children, two were biologically his. (The middle child’s DNA told us that the father was a close relation of Rob’s.) Since we decided to allow Earthlings to believe they won the war, Rob was regaled as a hero, a prisoner of war who could never bring himself to speak of the atrocities he endured at our cruel purple tentacles. He never realized that his loose lips saved his kind from extinction.