Dr. Thomas Eakran does not like visitors to his basement level office at the Institute for Brain Function, also known as the IBF. He mostly finds the other doctors at the institute annoying and undeserving of the title of doctor, and the administrator that he answers to is a tight lipped CIA agent who always seems annoyed by Dr. Eakran. It is a blessing that he is allowed to conduct his research in seclusion, away from other scientists, many of whom are expert psychologists, but even the best neuroscientists at the hospital would have been astounded by Eakran knowledge of engineering and physics. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, Eakran had traveled an unfathomable distance through the stars, from the planet Druont by decree of the Interstellar Panel and he made the trip with advanced technology to conduct an assessment of Earth populations. Eakran’s technology is decades ahead of human technology and he keeps most of his gadgets and gizmos locked behind a false wall in the closet of his IBF office. The beings on Eakran’s planet closely resemble Earthlings and many on Earth believe Eakran to be a brilliant orphan who traveled to the US from Somalia where he earned many degrees at many prestigious universities (he wears prosthetics on both hands that hide the one trait that would blow his cover; Druintes have only two fingers and a large opposable thumb).
Among the technologies Eakran brought with him to earth was the Pod Traveler (similar to a car but capable of traveling the entire circumference of the earth in about half an hour) and the Universal Translator. If the planet of Druont has an equivalent to the Earth television, it is the Universal Translator that looks similar to a handheld camera, but is capable of producing a Druinte language approximation of the interaction between beings and some seemingly inanimate objects that a Druinte would be unable to understand otherwise. So when Eakran turns the translator on, say, two turtles that he happens across while journeying to the Atlantic coast of NC, he sees something similar to a TV show playing out on the screen of the translator that is created from complex technology within the translator. The translator scans the being to be translated, records sounds the being produces, measures vital signs and compares them to a database of knowledge gathered about other sentient beings Druintes have made contact with in the past, and the translator creates an approximation of the emotions and feelings of said being based on information stored in the database. The translator is not infallible, as Eakran learned from a report by the creator of the translator, but Eakran has been working to fine tune it for the various animal species on Earth. He usually zips around the planet after work in his Pod Traveler, it has cloaking technology, turning the translator on different animals that he encounters. He has developed an obsession for the beauty of Australia and often spends time at a zoo in Queensland watching the docile koalas slowly munching and climbing around their habitat. He compares data from two koalas at the zoo with koalas in the wild and the ones in captivity seem to communicate and relate to one another similar to the way humans interact. Eakran can’t be sure if the readings from the translator are precise for the koalas, but he has plans for koala dissection to hopefully gain a more complete understanding of the brain function of those animals.
He is also kind of obsessed with two box turtles in NC and he is sure that the translator produces a good representation of the turtles because he has already performed dissection and other experiments on box turtles; he only continues to visit the turtles in NC because he learned that he had dissected the mother of one of the turtles and he found himself strangely curious about her offspring. He has gained a semblance of respect for the species through his experimentation; turtles were much more wise than humans and he figured that if they had evolved opposable thumbs they would probably be more dominate. But then it made Eakran wonder if the wise turtle chose to live in the wild as it did, then maybe the humans, and civilizations of beings like them, were idiots to think that their technologies made them somehow better or more advanced. Maybe the turtle had already evolved past the need for a spoken language and for science. But nothing in his observations of turtles revealed that to be the truth.
Currently, Eakran is working to change the setting of the translator so that if he directs the lens on himself and allows a turtle to view the screen, the turtle will be able to see a turtle translation of Eakran speaking.
In the meantime, though, Eakran shuns Earth TV for the entertainment he finds with the Universal Translator.
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