June 30, 2020

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 452


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.


Wokie Cooper stared at her best friend and said, “That’s the best you can do?”

Abas Bashir’s lips thinned as he looked down at her, “It is not ‘the best I can do’ – because it’s not fake.”

Wokie laughed and slugged his shoulder. Unmoved, he continued glaring down at her. She leaned back and scowled. Finally she said, “So, you think it’s real…”

“I don’t ‘think it’s real’, it’s a recording of the landing of six alien spacecraft in northern Minnesota.”

She shook her head, sighed, and sat down on the lab-stool-at-the-coffee-bar. PC’s – Professor Caffeine’s – was their favorite spot. Fitted out like a cross between a chemistry lab and a morgue with a projection of posters from cheesy and not-so-cheesy scifi movies from the early 21st and late 20th Centuries. Currently projecting was an exploding White House from the movie “Independence Day”. She leaned forward, swiped through the 3D projection hovering over his tablet, laying it out as an old-fashioned computer screen, albeit with a .6 meter diagonal. She said, “Look closely and tell me what you see.” She pulled up an image on her own tablet then posted it at a 90 degree angle to to his image. “So, why do your supposed ‘alien invaders’ spaceships look like this?”  https://scifanworld.com/assets/photos/original/64/5e/2c/303-the-invaders-88-1368976996.jpg


“They aren’t space ships,” he said.

Wokis sniffed, “What are they, then?”

Abas shook his head, “With that kind of prejudicial attitude, I might as well not even bother.” He reached for his tablet.

She put her hand over his, trying to sound more sincere than irritated. She succeeded as she said, “All right. I will suspend judgement until you’ve presented your case.”

He pursed his lips, rolled his eyes, and smiled a bit. “Fine. I know exactly how I sound. I know I’ve got every hokey scifi media presentation from “The Man From Planet X” to “Invasion” – you know, the Russian one…”

“You have to see it with the original Russian soundtrack to really get it, though.”

He gave her a dirty look. “I’ve got better things to occupy my mind…”

“What? Making up alien invasion conspiracy th…”

“The ships aren’t space ships. They’re a sort of…do you remember when we went to that STAR TREK marathon and the episode called ‘Discovery’ used something called a ‘pattern enhancer’ for their transporter system?”

She wanted to say that that was ridiculous, but instead, said, “Yeah, I do!”

“They act as enhancers for a sort of gate.”

“You mean, like the TV show STARGATE?”

He gasped, held his breath and let it out slowly. “The Stargate was a portal that would enable rapid transportation to other stargates located cosmic distances away. This is sort of like that. I need to get instrumentation to detect superstrings because a ‘tame’ superstring is the only object in the universe that could generate the energy necessary to…”

“…make the jump from some other planet or galaxy to ours.” She frowned, adding, “How would they be able to target Earth?”

His eyes grew wide…

Names: American/Liberian; American/Somalian
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