Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family of the happy couple, I want to thank you all for being here on this joyous occasion. My name is Tiffany, I decided, and I just want to say a few words about the best friend I’ve ever had on this planet. Sarah and Mark are joining themselves today in what I understand is a binding contractual relationship subject to local laws and customs and which, I was informed earlier, does not involve the ceremonial exchange of the heart muscles. Apparently that is only meant metaphorically.

I met Sarah five solar Earth years ago when we were roommates in college. Sarah and I were like two peas in an escape pod. She majored in English and Philosophy, and spent her time volunteering and working to financially support her education. I killed and disposed of a young woman named Tiffany, downloaded her appearance, gender, and perky demeanor into my genetic matrix, slipped her student identification card into my lanyard wallet, and seamlessly integrated myself into the American collegiate lifestyle without being detected. Haha! Just joking! I am definitely making a joke for the sake of humor because I want to break some ice and I did not do the thing I just said I did! That would be totes cray, I probably should say!

Haha! Hahahaha! Anyway, Sarah has always been there for me. Why I remember once, if I may share an anecdotal event from our time as companions, Sarah took care of me after a party wherein males fraternize and attempt to unmetaphorically exchange tongues with females. The alcohol poison I had been consuming began reacting poorly with my complex internal system. Later, Sarah told me that the large bottles were meant for pouring into cups and drinking slowly, but I was a young carefree collegebeing, and had ingested five containers of watermelon-flavored distilled water and ethanol when I began to violently shed my exoskeleton. Sarah, in her true calm nature, quickly cleared the room while I screamed and shot large sharp flakes of dead skin across the room at extremely high velocities and jettisoned blood out of my freshly-exposed pores. Boy, did we have a good laugh about that once my naturally acidic oils ate through the linoleum and I stopped regurgitating the contents of my nutrient sacs! Even though that residence has been deemed a permanent radioactive biohazard and four humans died, I like to think the biggest lesson I learned that day was the lesson of friendship. And that watermelon alcohol is pretty dangerous! Haha! Hahahaha! Mark, you understand what I speak of!

To speak of the male companion, Sarah met Mark in an extremely conventional manner because Mark is dull and unintelligent and I have spent the better part of the last three and a half years suppressing an intense instinct to unhinge my jaw and swallow him whole, slowly digesting absorbing him at the molecular level so Sarah can be my even better best friend, but still smell his pheromones, thus satiating her love glands. But Sarah is my true friend, so when she tearfully begged me not to eat him I complied, and lobotomized the portion of my brain controlling that instinct. And I endure your company, Mark, because I secretly implanted a small computational device in your frontal lobe that is slowly overwriting your functional systems and will, in time, reprogram you into commencing Phase 1 of my species’ colonization efforts I mean because Sarah’s happiness means so much to me! Is definitely what I had intended to say! It seems we three really have matured together, except for Mark, who is still dull and unintelligent and whom I may kill later, just for sport.

I feel so honored to share in this special event, even if I have trouble understanding it, because mating rituals as I understand them entail little more than the exchange of sexual fluids and treaty enacting a thousand years of peace between the conjoined tribes signed by both parties. But I’m a hopeless romantic. Then again, it doesn’t take a compound eye made up of ten thousand photoreceptor units with directed-energy photon weaponry capability like the one attached to the proboscis atop my head to see how in love Sarah is. And next to the systematic eradication of extant life on this planet for reasons I’ve been directed not to share but which I’m sure you’ll understand, Sarah is the most important thing to me. Now if you will all raise your glasses of poison with me, we will enact a toast! To the happy couple: may they copulate, and may Sarah explode many offspring out of her reproductive cavity before they eat their way out!

–Katie Sisneros is bad at Photoshop.

Image: an unholy amalgamation of CG work by Frank Belardot and a photo by Andrew Robinson.