A Fighting Chance
Of all the First Contact situations that speculative authors had imagined, ours was unexpected. Or not really: we did have the alien transmissions arriving to us before them. As should be, according to the laws of physics, since signals travel at the speed of light. But everybody knows that.
Can you imagine the exhilaration? Finally knowing we’re not alone?
What we couldn’t know was whether there really was some kind of hyperspace, warp drive or however you want to call it, in short, a faster than light engine, and if they had it. Would they come soon? We thought not, because as soon as their signals reached us, ours reached them: if they had faster than light, they’d come. When they didn’t come, we brought our conclusions.
But maybe we were wrong. We couldn’t know. Not at first.
But then we broke into their transmissions. They broadcast differently, using techniques not like our own, but we managed to. We even made progress understanding their languages, or the equivalent terms. We saw how they were, how they acted.
It took us years, because there were years of ordered transmissions before we detected it, but we found what we feared. They had progressed into space travel really fast. They had spread out. There was no faster than light, but they could indeed move at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
And they were a conquering race. So proud of it they broadcast their conquests.
We saw, and this we understood: we had nothing that could stop them.
Our society had taken a different path. Where they had taken to space, we had chosen our own planet. There was no way we could escape if they came for us.
Not if. When. When they came for us.
But we had a chance.
Genetic engineering.
So it started: the sprint to better our race. To improve us, to give us powers beyond anything imaginable, so that we could save ourselves when the enemy came.
We took the best of the best. We held contests to choose them. Sports, science. We wanted volunteers from the winners, we subjected them to tests. We treated them.
Many died. Martyrs for science and for our race. We wept for each one of them. Some of us felt we were condemning ourselves.
But what could we do? Wait and do nothing until they came and conquered us? Expect mercy and hope they didn’t exterminate us?
No. We had to fight. Or, at the very least, we had to try and give ourselves a fighting chance.
And what a chance we gave us.
Eventually the enemy arrived. It took them so long that people had to be constantly reminded they were coming; their transmissions were constantly decoded and broadcast so our population knew what to expect.
But we were ready.
The war raged for so long. Millions died on the surface; many of the alien weapons were too deadly and penetrated our defences. We had some success with our ground-based weaponry; after all, we had a planet to stand on, and they had ships. You can always build a bigger cannon on land that on a ship.
But above all, we had our superpowered army. They were glorious, they were amazing. They did what we normals could not do: they took the war to the enemy. The aliens were broken, their ships shot down. Their armada fallen forever.
And we made sure to broadcast it all back to their homeworlds.
We sent them a clear message: the line has been drawn here. You shall not pass. Leave us alone or else.
How could we know what would come next?
We had been fools.
Our army, our own superpowered children, turned on us. They declared themselves superior, the next step in the evolution of our race, no matter that such evolution had been artificially induced. They stole the aliens’ technology and our own genetic knowledge. They built a ship for themselves and proclaimed themselves free from any obligation to us.
And they flew off.
Leaving us here, stranded.
With our messages of defiance sent to the aliens, and some time in our hands.
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This is my accompanying entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: December 12–18, 2016 on the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+. I am responsible for creating the prompts for the Exercise, so I don’t take part, but I still like to write a story each week.
This story is strange. I had decided I was going to use some kind of Virtual Reality approach, but minutes before actually sitting down to write I had a different idea, and developed it as I wrote.
I like the end result.
