Prompt Lost – something like “coffee is an intense stimulant to most galactic species, on par with meth.”
Chasing The Dragon
Kor nervously touched the camo dongle hooked onto his shirt. From his perspective he was using his third and central arm to worry at an object pinned to the place in his torso directly below his neckless mouth. From the perspective of the nearby humans he was just an ordinary fellow toying anxiously with a button on his flannel shirt.
All the guide books said humans loved this material, flannel, usually but not always made of natural fibers and colored red with stripes or striations. It was all the same to Kor as he wasn’t actually wearing any human materials. His shirt was synthetic Dothweave, the same texture as Dothorian bloom silk but without all the mutilated Dothorians.
The hologram camo was also an absolute must according to the Lolloth travel agent Kor had used. Human’s were not yet used to off world tourists – rumor was most of them had no idea they weren’t alone in the universe. A rudimentary human centric monotheism still reigned on their backward planet by all accounts, something Kor found unbelievable.
In fact, the human’s blithe naivete seemed to know no bounds. Kor had landed in a cloaked ship on the outskirts of one of the largest towns, a place called Brooklyn, and no one had so much as noticed. On any other developed planet in the galaxy the orbital shield would have shredded Kor to pieces long before he made it to the surface.
But not Earth. The humans rested on the laurels of their unbelievable habits, unknowingly secured by the galaxies shared amazement of the human’s prodigious, species wide addiction.
Which was why Kor came in the first place. He was one of a growing number of young chemical adventure tourists searching the known galaxy for the most incredible, reality shattering highs. He kept a blog on the datasphere – not super popular, but lucrative enough to keep him moving from planet to planet – and by far the most requested location was Earth.
The humans had a wide array of chemicals they used to get high, but by far the most amazing, the most intense, by orders of magnitude, was their reckless use of the substance they called coffee – or more specifically the active ingredient referred to as caffeine.
This stuff was mind blowing. By a sheer quirk of genetic luck the Earth was awash in the substance naturally, which made the human’s quite adept at producing the material synthetically as well.
In the rest of the galaxy, however, evolution utterly failed to produce caffeine. Not a single other identified planet has the substance in its vegetation. It was only by the secreting of caffeine off the Earth, by means of smuggling and psuedo-scientific forays, that the galaxy was introduced to the chemical, and it made a mark.
It turned out caffeine was the most potent stimulant in the known galaxy for the majority of organisms, and of course they all went absolutely mad for the stuff. A blackmarket started almost immediately and caffeine went for exorbitant prices. It was still, in most places, extraordinarily expensive and now largely shunned as a particularly dangerous and destructive drug.
But not on Earth. Not in this town called Brooklyn. Kor had heard stories of shop after shop devoted to the ingestion of gargantuan quantities of the chemical, and he needed to see it for himself, and document it for his audience.
With a jingle of a little bell the door to the coffee shop called “Colombia” opened wide and immediately the air was awash in the odoriferous melange of caffeine heavy roasted coffee bean. In some parts of the galaxy the smell alone was banned as a mind altering substance. Kor took a deep breath and felt both his hearts begin to race feverishly.
There was a small line of humans waiting patiently for their hit, and a number of others sitting around quietly sipping their coffees. Sipping them! On Zantax 5 a small blackmarket shipment of coffee beans resulted in a two day planet wide riot with thousands of casualties, yet here these humans were quietly enjoying almost universally fatal doses like it was nothing.
Kor was gaping wildly at his surroundings when the barrista, the peddler’s title here on Earth, called him forward.
“Sir?”
Moment of truth – the first use of a vocal modulator was always nerve racking. Kor cleared his chest.
“Yes…barrista…I will have coffee please.”
Something about this order must have been wrong, maybe the tambor of his words, as the barrista gave a little look. “How do you want it?”
Kor was not prepared for this question. He heard rumors of multiple preparations for the substance coffee, but specific information on the subject was scarce abroad. He looked up at the menu and was confused even more.
“I would like the smallest bioactive serving available. For please.”
Again the barrista gave him a strange look, and Kor worried that he was giving away the game. But apparently the visual camo was holding up, because the barrista continued with the sale.
“One espresso then. That’ll be three dollars.”
Kor produced a piece human currency and handed it to the barrista.
“You don’t have anything smaller than a hundred?”
Kor did not understand the question. The whole notion of a paper currency was alien to him and most of the galaxy. He tried to imitate a human shrug and failed awkwardly. Time for an ice breaking joke. “Money, you know. Am I right friend?”
The barrista stared for a moment and then got Kor his change. “Name?”
Kor responded without thinking and then regretted it. “Kor.”
The barrista didn’t even flinch, just wrote the name on the small cup and called the next patron forward.
Kor waited expectantly for the espresso to come, and while he did he watched as the humans collected their insane dosages of caffeine. In most of the universe even dilute caffeine in the form of black market coffee solution is sold in milliliters. A heroic dose of coffee, one likely to result in long term brain damage, amounted to a large pipette’s worth, perhaps 15ml.
The humans here were ordering hundreds or thousands of of milliliters worth of coffee at a time! Giant, gaping cups of coffee, and then just drinking the whole damn thing with no ill effect. One man was downing a particularly large cup and quietly reading a book of all things. For any other species in the galaxy that much coffee would result in a psychotic break with reality and an almost certain cerebral edema.
“Kor?”
The young man behind the counter called out the name with disinterest and placed a relatively small, but still impressively sized cup on the counter. Kor reached over and picked it up nervously, and it was filled with a condensate of black, aromatic coffee.
The moment of truth. Kor took a whiff of the stuff and his head swam behind his four eyes. It was extraordinarily energy rich and caffeine hit his nostrils as a vapor from the heat. Even that touch was more than Kor normally did recreationally.
Suddenly Kor began to worry this was a bad idea. His live stream was playing and the blogosphere was watching his every move. If he didn’t drink this cup of espresso he would lose all credibility, and yet he was seriously worried if he did drink this much pure coffee that he might actually die.
He had no choice. He brought the cup up to his lips and took the smallest initial sip.
“Ohhhhhh fuck!!!!”
His hands began shaking feverishly immediately, so intensely that the rest of the coffee shook out of the cup all over the floor. His exclamation had been entirely outside his control and the equivalent of a human train car passing at speed in volume. The whole coffee shop was staring in confusion and fear at him as he twitched and shook violently.
Overcome by the sheer chemical intensity of the situation, Kor dropped his camo, to the collective gasps and screams of the human locals, and pointed his three gittery hands accusingly at them all.
“You’re all insane! Fuck this place!”
Then Kor stormed out of the shop towards his ship, his feet jerkily coming into contact with the ground, certain his two hearts were going to burst right out of his chest. He made a promise to himself never to have coffee ever again.
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