To a lecture

"I'm sure you want to know what you're doing here." It continued. I nodded, my mouth felt like it had stopped working.

"Allow me to explain. We are the Shiith. We are immortal, technologically advanced to the point where there's pretty much nothing left to research so we've swapped over into creating art and pleasure. Our minds are more open and retentive than humans, more easily able to absorb information and hold onto it once it's in there. Oh, and we've also gotten over the whole 'homophobia' thing humanity does. There's just one problem. We're sterile."

I stare at it, wondering why they don't just fix it if they've got such advanced technology.

"The problem lies in gender balance. Our race was always skewed more in favour of males than females, and as we got more technologically advanced it only got more skewed. You see, unlike your race, we actually have differences between the genders. Females of our species were stronger, but mentally slower, and as technology took the place of raw strength, genetics inclined our species towards producing more males. It went on that way until eventually there were no females left.

Luckily, by that point, we had figured out immortality, so our race didn't die out. But we were left with the problem of a stagnant population. We tried cloning, but that simply created monstrosities. In the end, we accepted that we would be forever in population stasis, neither growing nor shrinking.

Then we invented two things. First, the Cythsyth scoop. A device - in fact, the device you're lying on now - that acts as an attractor for multiversally displaced things."

I stared at him blankly.

"It attracts things that have been thrown out of their usual time and space. Such as yourself. It has the side effect of limiting movement for a while in living creatures that it caught, making the captured being incapable of making complex movement, such as fine motor control or speech, or demanding movement, such as walking, but such things are trivial compared to the connection it gives us with the multiverse.

Inevitably, sentient beings would occasionally appear in our scoops. And at this point, the second invention comes into play."

He produced from an inside pocket something that looks very much like a raygun.

"Sass'sah's Transformer. It transforms a sentient being - only a sentient being, and it works best on hominids - into one of us. It allowed us a measure of population growth - as long as the scoop brought in sentient beings, and the transformations worked, we could grow our numbers via transformation."

He pointed it at me.

"Well? Want immortality, a better mind, and pleasure far beyond what you'd get back on Earth? Nod for yes, shake your head for no."