kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Aliens"

words

Aliens land and say, "Take me to your leader." We try to correct them, it's "Take 'us' to your leader," but they don't listen. They kill a bunch of people, and we take them to our leader. Our leader doesn't want to deal with aliens that kill a bunch of people, so he has their heads chopped off.

More aliens land and say, "Take me to your leader. And don't chop me up this time." We try to correct them, it's "Take 'us' to your leader, don't chop 'us' up this time," but they don't listen. They kill a bunch of people, and we take them to our leader. Our leader still doesn't want to deal with aliens that kill a bunch of people, but he's more wary this time. He has them sent away for scientific experiments.

More aliens land, and they don't say anything this time. They just kill a bunch of people, and storm up to our leader. Then they say, "Quit doing weird things to me. This is your last chance, if--", but our leader cuts them off and says, no, it's "Quit doing weird things to 'us'.", and they go crazy and kill our leader. So our new leader steps in and kills them all.

The aliens don't bother to land, this time, they just start shooting people from space, and a booming voice echoes among the crowds, "I don't like you people very much. You hurt me. I'm going to kill you all." We scramble, and our leader calls in an elite task force, which rig up thousands of speakers unbeknownst to the aliens above, and blast a defiant message, saying it's "'We' don't like you people very much. Your hurt 'us'. 'We're' going to kill you all."

That's apparently the last straw. The aliens bomb our speaker array, and kill our new leader and the task force, though they were hiding far away from the speaker array. The aliens don't say anything at all.

We hastily gather together a shoestring democracy amidst the remnants of destruction, and elect a new new leader. The new new leader orders a crack team to track down the results of the scientific studies ordered earlier, and the crack team comes back with amazing news: the aliens really are all one being, linked through something like telepathy. So the new new leader orders a new task force, and orders them to build a new speaker array.

But the aliens somehow know we're building a new speaker array, and bomb it to smithereens, along with the new new leader and the new task force. So we elect a new new new leader, and he creates a new new task force, and orders them to come up with another scheme for communicating with the aliens that are still devastating our world. The new new task force decides to rig up a giant television array to communicate with, and builds underground bunkers and moving doors and all that good stuff to hide it. Finally it's done, and we open miles of televisions hooked to each other and scroll the message, saying "Sorry, we didn't understand. We were just trying to be helpful, we didn't realize you were all part of the same being. Can we start over?"

And the aliens stop bombing us and send down a new delegation to meet with our new new new leader. But we're really angry that they'd just about destroyed our world, so we parlay with them for a while, and are careful not to correct anything they say, even when they said something stupid like "Purples are my favorite day of time," which they say once. But we don't correct them. But we're really angry, so while we parlay with them we're plotting our revenge, waiting for them to lower their shields, as it were. We're also stockpiling a new technology the new new task force combined with the strike force and the original scientific investigators had invented. We're going to shut down all of their ships, and the alien will die, every little bit of him, in the crash.

Then we turn on our weapon, and the ships crash, and the alien dies, every little bit of him, even the bits of him that were parlaying with our new new new leader. The ships crash into our new new new leader and the strike force and the new new task force and the original scientific investigation and kill them all; ships even crash into our giant television array and kill it, if you could consider several miles of televisions living.

So our makeshift democracy gets back together and elects a new new new new leader, who forms a new scientific investigating committee and a new new new task force and a new strike force. The new scientific committee is charged with refiguring out the technology we'd used to kill the alien ships; the new new new task force is charged with tracking down where the aliens had come from, and making a bunch of ships of our own, and the new strike force is charged with piloting those ships and delivering the weapon to the alien home world.

The new scientific committee figures out the technology, and helps the new new new task force to build a bunch of ships. The new new new task force figures out where the aliens had come from, and send the new strike force off in the ships. After a thousand years, the strike force arrives at the alien home planet, and they send down a delegation, and say "Take us to your leader."

But the aliens don't speak English, apparently, and they just babble and bobble and bubble, and nobody can really understand anything that's going on, so we kill a bunch of them. Then they fly at us with their fancy ships and we turn on our weapon, and all of the ships fall out of the sky, even ours, and everything dies. Even the people at home die, just because the planet had been that devastated, and then we'd put all our resources into revenge instead of getting off of the planet. Really, the people at home had been the first to die, because they hadn't had the time-distortion effects of traveling for a thousand years. And that's the end of the story.