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Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
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Bassoe

Well-known member
Spacebattles had a cool take on this.
Iuhnas said:
A few years from now, telescopes on and around Earth pick up a massive radiosignal - its origin nowhere near Earth. To our surprise and even shock, it's a binary S.O.S signal - and very quickly it gets triangulated - whereupon we find the heat-signature of a small craft roughly the size of a BFR shapeship. It is moving at extremely high velocity - at least 2G acceleration - and is rushing straight for Earth. Naturally, everyone goes into high alert - from military to scientists and all in and around (it doesn't stay a secret for long because virtually every radio telescope on Earth picks up the signal), and soon after, a response is transmitted to try and get into contact with the ship.

We get a reply - in the very language we transmit it in. "EMERGENCY LANDING REQUEST". The message repeats - over and over - and not long after, a site is selected where the ship can touch down. Sadly, the landing goes awry - and on final descent, the ship breaks apart, ejecting a tiny escape capsule that survives the landing ... the remainder torn into tiny pieces by the sheer impact to the ground. The capsule is taken away by P5 forces (nobody really prepared to trust the other with this kind of precious cargo so a number of backroom deals were made) - along with what appears to be a single occupant in an advanced spacesuit.

Many months and a lot of international pressure later (relatively speaking), either by intent or accident, the survivor's account is finally released to the public.

The alien survivor explains that he was a part of an expedition sent into this region of space roughly 20 of our years ago - as part of a mission to investigate what would roughly translate as "The Sphere Anomaly", meaning a 500 Light-Year Ovaloid Bubble with its rough center around where Earth is supposed to be (+- 100 Light-Years). The truth is that FTL travel is possible (it's extremely complicated - General Relativity, Einstein and basic Causality are fine and correct all the way, it's just ... complicated to explain how it works) - but any ship that has ever tried to travel through the Anomaly has ... just disappeared.

Probes? Poof. Drones? Poof. The entire Armada of the Second Empire (about 20 million multi-kilometer warships which included the Mad Emperor's own flagship - a pair of McKendree Cylinders - meant to discover the cause of the Anomaly and annex the star systems about 2,500 years ago - it should be noted this would be a bad thing for Earth because the Emperor was quite Xenocidal)?

Poof.

The truth of the matter is that the current state of the galaxy is that there are smaller "empires" - but due to the travel time of FTL (1.5x Light-speed at most), it's more loose federations where each system is its own nation by our standards. Only two, maybe three systems have reached the stage where they could produce "Clouds" (swarms of McKendree, O'Neill and Bishop Ring Habitats) due not resource shortage, but time it takes to build enough of them. The Anomaly is located between dozens of them, loosely connected and due to the fact war doesn't benefit anyone, quite friendly with one another and towards the younger civilizations on the scene (Uplifting is an extremely important affair, but it takes time and effort).

They knew there was a life-bearing world in the Anomaly - and this was the goal of the expedition that was sent. A total of 126 ships - essentially small O'Neill Cylinders, 4 kilometers in diameter and 16 kilometers in length with 8 kilometer diameter front-facing shields, all funded by three systems and lead by one of the best (AGI) Admirals known lead the expedition, consisting of a mix of many different species, including silicate life-forms were dispatched into the Anomaly - their design and cargo meant to serve an ambassadorial and (if they found proto-interplanetary life) Uplifting experts and resources.

The alien being interviewed, as far as he knows ... is the only survivor of that fleet.

The first leg of the journey went well enough - some minor issues here and there, but nothing major. Those small issues rapidly escalated, however - into the unnerving and then the horrifying.

Reactor failure destroyed one ship. A sensor malfunction allowed an asteroid to somehow slip through and gut another. A third got lost during a refuelling run and accidentially slammed into a rogue planet. A fourth had a malfunction where the atmospheric scrubbers produced chlorine-triflouride gas.

And you know what they say - once is an accident, twice a suspicion, three times a pattern. Suspecting sabotage or an external threat, the Admiral ordered lockdown on all ships and heightened security.

It didn't help. It just escalated.

Three ships crashed into one another from an engine malfunction, a dozen were lost because the AGI Captain on one of the ships went literally insane and fired in every direction before slamming into a planet at a tenth light-speed velocity; eight were lost from a freak solar storm of unusual intensity that destroyed the heat radiators; by the time they entered what we call the Local Bubble, there were only 15 ships left - a third of the original fleet having deserted in a panic with all contact lost shortly thereafter.

That was when they arrived near the edge of the Solar system, specifically the Oort Cloud. Trying to take stock, refuel and repair (it was also here that the AGIs decrypted humanity's language, at least the most common ones) - the survivor, an engineering trainee - was out with his personal ship to help out a mining crew. Shortly after arriving at the area, he lost all contact with the fleet. Then the mining hubs. Then his drone support. In a panic, he hid inside a centaur and cut all power, hoping he'd cool down enough to slip the attention of whatever was out there. Emerging a day later - barely alive - he found the fleet gone with nothing but distress beacons and some fragments of the hulls left.

You can imagine his reaction. Using what he had, he bolted on an FTL drive to his ship and plotted a course for Sol - their destination. The FTL Drive was utterly fried in the jump (it's gone, dumped into Jupiter) and he then made a 2G-burn towards Earth in the hopes of outrunning whatever was out there. The rest, well ... the rest we already know.

What alarmed him, however, was the fact that we hadn't picked up anything when we turned our telescopes towards the stars. We should already be keenly aware that there is life out there - highly focused radio signals, laser bursts and the likes were fired at Earth in an attempt to contact Earth and that's just the active attempts (the signals should have reached us in the 1930s all the way up till now). The interview ended with the question if he could help Earth technologically - to which he agreed whole-heartedly, if only hoping that we might figure out what had happened.

Two days after the interview, the high-security site at which the survivor is kept reports an unknown intrusion. The survivor is declared missing with noone able to determine where he's gone - aside from that his cell door was literally torn off its hinges from the outside, there's nothing to tell what had happened to him or who or what did it. Worse - the technological wreckage of his ship has all but vanished, though we did manage to make enough copies and scans to at least have something to go on.

In light of all this - what would the world's reasonable reaction be? What would be we do in the face of something like this ... heck - what could we do?
They Say by Lyricwritesprose said:
Listen. This isn't a story I'm supposed to tell you. This isn't a story that someone of your rank is ever supposed to hear. I'm only doing this because you stood up to the Warlord for the sake of a slave, and I still don't think I'd talk to you if he hadn't broken your cheekbone. This way, at least I know you've got reason to hate the ones in charge, and even so, I'm taking a chance. So pay attention, but don't pass any of this on or tell anyone that I told you, yeah?

They say there's a world.

They say it's an ordinary world. Main-sequence yellow star, nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, green plants, a lot of ocean, middling sort of gravity. They say the inhabitants are industrialized, but in a primitive, haphazard sort of way. No continent-spanning cities, no orbital factories. No orbital anything, not so you'd notice; maybe a comsat here or there. And a long, long way from the heart of the Shadow Proclamation, so they might go for a century without anyone looking in on them. You know the sort of place. Underdeveloped. Defenseless. Fresh meat.

They say it's somewhere on the borders of Sontaran space. So, end of that story. Yeah?

Except–it isn't. They say that on the Sontaran star maps, this world is black-tagged. Waste of resources, that means. The gravity isn't high enough to be one of their cloning-and-training planets, and it isn't strategic enough to waste soldiers on. Too insignificant to bother with.

So what? So, the Sontarans don't do that. Not when there's a resource they could exploit–like an industrial culture–and half a chance of a good fight. They should have at least planted an automated surveillance station on the moon. No, waste of resources is what Sontarans put down when they mean something else. Something they won't say, ever. There never was a Sontaran born who'd admit he was afraid–

And there's more. Lots more. Whole invasions that just didn't happen, whole fleets that never arrived. They say the Nestene went after this world once. Yeah, the Nestene, as in burn all your polymers and bomb the site from orbit. They sent a Consciousness fragment. And–nothing. It just disappeared.

It's a dangerous universe and there are a lot of places you just don't go. That's true enough. There's always something worse out there, sometimes people or ships or whole civilizations disappear, and it isn't smart to go poking into why. So there's probably something big and nasty on this little ordinary world and the smoke-age primitives are food or slaves for the real rulers. Right? It makes sense that way.

Except.

Except they say–nothing ever happens to the unarmed ones. The refugees. The riffraff. The runaway slaves. The flotsam and the jetsam and the dregs.

They say if you flee to this planet, this Dark World that eats armies, then nothing will happen to you. You land. You keep away from the natives, or pretend to be one of them. You scratch together a life and get used to the sky and raise children who'll never know what a shockstick sounds like, even if they'll be surrounded by soft-faced aliens their whole lives.

And if there are masters, if there is some fearsome, malign thing hiding underneath the local civilization, you never see it. It never comes for you. None of your family ever disappear in the night. (Unless you take to eating the locals. Then you go gone. Important to remember that bit.)

Eventually, you come to believe that everything really is what it looks like. The primitives aren't slaves or secret warriors or puppets of some transdimensional horror. They're just people. The planet isn't some sort of trap, or hellworld, or property of something unimaginable. It's just–protected.

Ridiculous, of course. Children's stories. Who are "they," anyway, and why should anyone listen to what they say?

But for some of us–the ones with nothing, the ones who don't even have families left to stand as hostages, the ones ready to die–it's worth the risk. To trust ourselves to a children's story and leap into empty space, hoping there's something out there to catch us. To die on the way to somewhere instead of rotting slowly where we stand.

Remember that, your Highness, when you lose your father's protection. When you're thrown down here with us. When you've got nowhere left to go, remember the stories.
 

Jormungandr

The Midgard Wyrm
Founder
Spacebattles had a cool take on this.
IIRC there's a bunch of HFY stories out there where Earth is the dead-center of a galactic Bermuda Triangle like thing. Anything inside it, excluding us, goes fucking insane and murders each other before they can barely leave their early Ages (stone, iron, et cetera).

When we finally reach the edge of this anomaly and make contact, we basically scare the shit out of the galaxy's entire alien roster.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
IIRC there's a bunch of HFY stories out there where Earth is the dead-center of a galactic Bermuda Triangle like thing. Anything inside it, excluding us, goes fucking insane and murders each other before they can barely leave their early Ages (stone, iron, et cetera).

When we finally reach the edge of this anomaly and make contact, we basically scare the shit out of the galaxy's entire alien roster.
Stories like Arthur C. Clark's Rescue Party?


In that one they didn't notice us until they thought it was too late only to discover that we'd saved ourselves.
 

Jormungandr

The Midgard Wyrm
Founder
Stories like Arthur C. Clark's Rescue Party?


In that one they didn't notice us until they thought it was too late only to discover that we'd saved ourselves.
Nah, it wasn't by an established author but by someone on the Internet.

IIRC, it had us coming out of this Veil in "black, foreboding ships", which terrified the small, alien service station at its outskirts.

There was a small incident, and the ship retreated back because humans were like "wtf went wrong" and the aliens were freaking out because Space Cthulhu just arrived, sent them a garbled speech-message, then shot one of their ships down in a single hit.
 

Simonbob

Well-known member
Nah, it wasn't by an established author but by someone on the Internet.

IIRC, it had us coming out of this Veil in "black, foreboding ships", which terrified the small, alien service station at its outskirts.

There was a small incident, and the ship retreated back because humans were like "wtf went wrong" and the aliens were freaking out because Space Cthulhu just arrived, sent them a garbled speech-message, then shot one of their ships down in a single hit.

There you go.

I liked it, too.
 

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