Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family
rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to
write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration
(quote, website, podcast, etc) and then a thought or two that came to mind.
These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat,
irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if
anything comes of them.
SF Trope: “One Big
Lie: Authors of works in this class invent one (or, at most, a very few)
counterfactual physical laws and writes a story that explores the implications
of these principles.”
Badria Al Busaidi
shook her head and said, “If you could make one thing true about real space,
what would it be?” She squirmed in her tiny tube. The two of them were the only
ones awake in their pod and the side of the transport device pressed against
her, massaging muscles that hadn’t moved in…she stopped that line of thought.
They’d been in space ever since they left Earth. They were two among ten
thousand who were on their way to the nearest star system to the Sun, Alpha
Centauri A.
Mehrdad bin
Abdullah squirmed as well. The transport device that held each of them was only
transparent at the top. She could tell from the look on his face that he was
pre-occupied at the moment. Eyes half-closed, she sighed and turned away,
blinking up a three-dimensional image of what the ship looked like on the
outside and where they were in relation to Earth and AC-A. Lots of stars.
Boring.
Badria found
herself wishing that she could sleep the entire trip away. But the biologists
had already brought everyone on the ship as close to death as possible. If they
stayed that way, there was evidence that they would simply stay dead. After a
short pause during which Mehrdad managed to keep his breathing regular until
the very end, he said, “All right. Sorry.” She was about to tease him, but he
said instead, “The one thing I’d change is that there’d be aliens waiting for
us when we got to AC-C.”
“There ARE aliens,
Mehrdad! Haven’t you been listening to the broadcasts?”
“Not aliens just
like us! Real aliens. Something that’s different.”
“Different how?”
He shrugged and it
made a squelchy sound she could have heard from a mile away. Another thing the
ship’s captain-psychologists had made sure of is that when you were awake, you
were supposed to have every sense stimulated. She’d already experienced the
pain of a broken toe as it was set then healed. Mehrdad was nervously waiting
for what was going to happen to him to stimulate his sense of pain.
She’d been lucky
in that, though. She’d been assaulted by the smell of newly-mown hay. Mehrdad
had to endure the smell of burning Human hair. He’d also experienced another
version of things coming out of his body when he barfed not long after he’d had
his olfactory senses overloaded.
Suddenly another
voice broke into their conversation. Badria rolled her eyes and immediately
decided she wasn’t going to talk when she heard the American accented English.
She could speak English just fine – all of them could. The American could speak
Arabic as well, but the ones who’d been awake when she was usually didn’t.
Which was not exactly a bad thing – American English had absolutely no music to
it. Arabic sounded so flat and dull whenever someone else tried to speak it.
The voice said, “Hello? Anyone alive in here?”
She held her
breath, hoping that for once, Mehrdad would hold his tongue.
“We’re all alive
here, dickhead. Otherwise why would be going to AC-C?”
There was a long
pause and the American voice said, “مهلا،
أنا آسف. لم
أكن أقصد أن
تكون مهينة.” He was almost understandable and there
was a sort of cute tone to his voice as he said, “Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean
to be insulting.”
“Well, you were,”
said Mehrdad.
Badria liked to
keep her own counsel, but something compelled her today. She said in Arabic,
“You say you want to meet real aliens – but you can’t even keep a civil tongue
in your head when you talk to an American! Our civilization is twice as old as
his – ours is the one that should be graceful and forgiving. Ours is the
parent, his is the child.”
She wondered
briefly if the American was going to object or act offended or whatever she
expected a child of a self-centered, declining civilization to do. But he said
nothing. Mehrdad muttered under his breath and she was about to say something
when she abruptly felt tired. “Oh, no!” she managed before she began to drift
off into her interstellar slumber...
Names: ♀Afghan, Oman ; ♂ Afghani, Oman
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