New Horizons

For those that checked out the first post, thanks for reading. I appreciate any feedback, and one of the comments I heard was that the first story was a little scary. So, here's a slightly lighter take on the topic. And don't worry, the whole blog won't be about aliens, just felt like trying a different approach.

Oh, and this one is a little longer. Sorry :)

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I awoke to the soothing rays of a supernova burning through the windows of my house and into my corneas. Okay, supernova might be a little extreme, but whatever was out there was quite bright to my sleep-filled eyes.

A moment’s thought resulted in the conclusion that, since I live out in the middle of nowhere, that was probably a bad thing. Thinking it was probably just some high school kids having a secret kegger or a lost trucker, I headed to the front door.

Just as I left my room I ran into my brother, who was visiting me for the weekend.

“Friends of yours?” he asked.

“Just my alien buddies, time for my weekly probing” I retorted before opening the door.

My brother and I walked outside, and the lights dimmed enough to silhouette the people out there. We gasped in surprise.

“Son of a…” we started to say, but the rest of our sentences were cut off by heavy blows to the back of our heads. My last thought before descending into darkness was “I hate being right…”

**********

We awoke eventually (not sure how long it took, kinda hard to keep track of time when you’re unconscious) and found ourselves strapped down in an alien ship. Our captors were hovering around us (not literally, not those kind of aliens, just were all around us), and pretty much fit every stereotype that exists for aliens… small in stature, big heads, almond eyes, the works. Guess there had been more truth to those descriptions than I had previously thought.

Anyways, what happened next was… well, actually, I’m not going to tell you what happened next because you wouldn’t be interested. See, absolutely nothing happened. It was super boring and uneventful, and in no way was it a dark time in my life that I am trying my best to forget. Nope, nothing happened. No probing whatsoever. Zero, zip, zilch.

Where was I? Oh, right, after a few boring days in their holding cells full of non-probe related activities, the ship we were on was essentially pulled over by the cops. I learned then that there was a massive galactic government called “The Overlords” (real nice and diplomatic, right?), and the beings that had taken us were essentially a research team that had not obtained the proper permits. Apparently, any race that had not achieved intergalactic travel was considered more animal than intelligent being, and thus were studied basically like humans studied lions or gorillas. Not sure if we were just test subjects or if we would have eventually been sold to a zoo or advertising firm (even these humans are smart enough to have Black Holes Happen Life Insurance!), but luckily I never had to find out.

We were taken from the grey aliens and placed in yet another holding cell aboard the Overlord’s ship. The Overlords themselves were a blue skinned race that was a lot taller than us, with scales, large fangs, and protruding brows. They didn’t speak our language on their own, but the ones that escorted us to our cell had a small arm band. They would press the button, speak, press another button, and then the device would translate it into English. They didn’t say much though, basically just told us to wait. Given the fact that we were locked in a cell, we really didn’t have much choice in the matter, but at least we learned communication was possible. So, we sat down and stared at one another. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would come anywhere near encapsulating the last few days, so I resorted to my default setting of sarcasm.

“Well thanks for coming to visit bro, I hope you’ve had a great time!”

He stared at me incredulously for a moment before laughing half-heartedly. “I’ll give you this, nobody can say visiting you is boring… what do you think is gonna happen to us?”

“At this point I have no clue… can’t really get worse at this point though, can it?”

“I don’t see how it could, but somehow, anytime somebody says that it gets worse anyways.”

“True… and, uh, whoops.”

As if on cue, the door to our cell opened and a bored, fat, bureaucratic looking creature came in.

“We need to program your ID chips with your personal information” he said through his translator.

“Why?” I asked, and was surprised that he understood me without the use of one of those pads.

“All citizens of the Overlord Domain are required to have one. It acts as a translator, banking device, tracker, and identification.”

“So you’re not going to kill us?”

The man narrowed his eyes. “No, not yet. You are, however, forever barred from returning to your home world. Should you try to return you will be executed. We do not want knowledge of the galaxy to reach your primitive planet yet, and while it is unlikely anyone would believe you, we didn’t conquer the galaxy by making assumptions.”

“Fair enough… so what are we supposed to do?”

“That’s not my concern. In lieu of having to deal with the time and money associated with litigation, the captain of the ship that took you from your planet has agreed to give you each a pittance of 10,000 datari, which is a fair amount. That will be added to your chips and you will be released at the nearest habitable planet free to do what you will. As long as you respect our laws and never go to Earth you will have no further issues with us.”

“Oh, hey, that’s great, free to go anywhere but home, that’s real helpful.”

“If you’d prefer, we could always just kill you and save the tax payers the cost of your ID chip” he said without a touch of humor.

My brother glared at me. “That’s okay, we’ll take it. What info do you need?”

“Let’s see… race I can fill out, don’t get human too much, so… names?”

“Captain Awesome” I replied and laughed when he started to type that onto his keypad. “I’m just kidding, it’s Jarek Balkner” I said, receiving a withering glare from the alien.

“Don’t mess with me human, unless you want to be “Dead Fool.”

“Yes sir.”

“And yours?” he asked, looking at my brother.

“Vincent Balkner” he replied.

We then had to go through a list of descriptions that involved our height (tall for me, shorter for my older brother, something I enjoy taunting him about), hair color (brown for us both, although mine was short and his long), eye color (green for me, blue for him) and address (not applicable).

After that, they injected us with two chips, the identity chip in our right rists and the translator chip in the back of our neck. At that point we were left to our own devices until we arrived at the planet we would be dropped off at. Without much to do, we mostly just slept and tried to figure out our next move, but without any idea where we would be going, there was not much planning to be done.

A couple of days later, we arrived at our destination, a planet called Talen. We were led to the exit of the ship, at which point our nameless bureaucrat spoke his parting words. Interestingly enough, we could understand him this time without the translator pad… basically we heard what he said in our ears in his language, but as our brain processed it, it somehow translated it to make sense. This was a little disorienting, but we could at least grasp what he was saying.

“Don’t cause any trouble. Your wrist chip acts as your bank account, and as we said earlier, you were given 10,000 dactari each. Try to return to earth and you will be killed.”

With that, the hatch of the ship closed and it took off, leaving the two of us alone on an alien planet.

“Well, at least we could understand him this time” I said to Vincent once we were alone.

“Yeah, shame I didn’t much like what he had to say, although I do appreciate the translator chips and money.”

“Agreed.”

“So what’s the next move?”

I hesitated for a second, thinking about what I had considered during our voyage on the Overlord ship. “I’m leaning towards two options. Either we try to get the lay of the land, maybe get a job and try to learn a bit about these Overlords, or we spend our ten grand on whatever the alien equivalent of whiskey is and drink our problems away. I currently don’t have a preference.”

“Ah… what about using our money to buy a ship and return to Earth? I’m not exactly ready to give up on my life right now.”

“Besides the fact that they’ll kill us if we go anywhere near Earth, do you really think you could go back to your normal life now after knowing all of this is out there?”

“I’d sure like to try.”

“Fair enough… but again, besides the death part, do you know how to fly a spaceship? How much a ship costs? How to navigate around a solar system? Or even where Earth is in relation tot his planet?”

“Er, uh… well…”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought. Look, I want to see Earth again too, not a big fan of evil empires, but I also don’t want to crash into a star or try to fly through a black hole. So for right now, I really think we need to just try and gather as much information as possible about the galaxy and see where that takes us.”

“And how do you suggest we start that?”

I did not actually have an answer to that question, but as I looked at him to divulge this I noticed a sign down the street that read “Information.” It was in an alien language, but somehow I could read it. Don’t ask me how, I didn’t create the translator chip, I just use it. So I pointed it out to him, and we walked over to the sign. It was right above what looked like a computer terminal, and as we approached the screen flickered on to say “Please present identification.” I remembered the bureaucrat mentioning that the chip in my wrist was my ID, so I moved my wrist towards the terminal. It beeped, said “Thank you” and then a directory came up. I ran a search for history, and one entry was listed: “Museum of Planet and Galactic History.” Luckily enough, it was just down the street from the terminal, probably by design… we couldn’t have been the first newworlders to come to this planet and want to know more.

We found the museum without incident, paid for entry with our severance cash, and proceeded to skip all of the planet history until we came to the section on the Overlord Empire.

Basically, what we found out was that the Overlords had come from an older solar system on the edge of an older Galaxy. They fled when their sun went supernova, and their entire civilization came to our galaxy in warfleets and colonization ships. Initially, they were simply looking for a place to live, but once they saw how much more advanced they were than the peoples of our Galaxy, they became conquerors. While they believed they were superior to the races they conquered, they never exterminated or sought to destroy the other cultures, they wanted those to survive so that they could be compared unfavorably to their own. They only bothered with species that could achieve faster than light speed, which the museum reduced to being called “FTLS travel,” because those were the only races worth considering. However, once they had conquered the entire galaxy, they stopped expanding and had to focus on running what they conquered. So, over time, they changed from a proud warrior race to one of more bureaucratic tendencies.

So, what I took from that was that the Overlords were not some much evil as conceited, and I got the impression that the Galaxy had become somewhat stale under their rule. But, given the whole “kill you if you return to earth spiel,” they obviously still have a little ruthlessness in them. This was going to be interesting…