The Improbable Planet

***This was a story I wrote for my freshman English class, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The class had a theme of "THE JOURNEY" and we read stuff like In Cold Blood and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I think I ended up with a B in the class, but it was one of the most fun classes I have had in college. Anyways, this is one of the few short stories I've finished. I was trying to look at Earth from the other direction - from the viewpoint of nonviolent curious aliens. I do not apologize for the obscure pop culture references. It's still amateurish, but it's not awful. Enjoy.***

Grace Ritchey
Kendra Mullison
English 109H
27 November 2013
The Improbable Planet
            It seems the most improbable planet – and yet, there it is, almost exactly where we thought it would be. It’s too far away from their star for life as we know it to exist. There’s only one moon that looks like it is always falling from the sky. It‘s covered in stuff that stays wet no matter how hot it gets – and this planet, by our standards, is cold. The creatures on it are based on the wrong elements; their food seems like poison; they actually like the wet. These dominant creatures all look the same to me – eyes of strange colors, growths coming out of their heads, strange extrusions on the ends of their limbs - but then again, they are as new to me as we are to them. It is strange to think that I was one of the first of my kind to step onto a new world. I mean, I’m pretty young – only fifty by our reckoning – and I have worked my entire life to get to this point. It was fulfilling to finally get this far – we’re light-years away from where I started. This planet just seems so wrong, so… alien. Fine time now for me to get xenophobic – I probably seem the alien to them.
            I should look at this improbable planet as a learning opportunity, an experience. I have to get past that initial revulsion that comes with seeing something completely unfamiliar and new. Just because something is improbable doesn't mean it’s impossible. The planet is amazing to look at, all white with the wet. I suppose it could be beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. I just can’t get over the fact that there should be nothing living on it – and yet there it is, teeming with the strangest kind of life.
I’m going to have to get used to it.
            I should record how we came here, just so I don’t forget, although anyone can get the exact details from the navigator’s log. I’m just the communications technician. If anyone’s listening to this, you must know at least the basics of near light-speed and hypo-space travel.         
We found out that something else alive existed “out there” about when I was born, after years and years of looking for a sign that we weren't alone in the universe, a radio signal was recovered from the cosmic background pattern. It was pretty basic – a counting pattern – 1 pulse, 2 pulse, 3, 4 and so on. We tried to send something back, a peace message. We’re still not sure if they got it. About ten years later, news came that we had received a sequence of five strange tones, repeated over and over again. There have been sporadic radio disturbances from that area of space, but nothing as clear as those two signals. We took them as invitation to come visit. That’s when I really started to delve into my studies – I wanted to be the first one to find these strange people and figure out what they were saying.
            By this point, we had developed transport that could move at near-light speeds, and a few years after the first message, hypo-space travel mechanisms had been developed (hyperspace was too hard to escape). By the time I fished my studies, the first hypo-space transport had been almost perfected, and so I signed on. I was shocked when I found out I had been picked out of what must have been thousands of candidates to be on this historic voyage. I mean, this was potentially going out of our sun’s planetary system! How amazing is that?
            And so here I am, floating, falling in orbit above this improbable planet that, frankly, I’m surprised even exists after all the hype. None of our previous probes had found it, and finding those two messages were two huge strokes of luck – chance of one in hundreds of trillions each. I’m going to get some sleep before first landing tomorrow. I’m really curious about what we’ll find. Good night (I think – or is it dawn? It’s hard to tell up here).
END LOG ENTRY

            We landed. What an experience. We landed and we came back alive. No one was sure we would come back in one piece. But here we are, back in our ship, back to falling around this improbable planet instead of tripping around on it.
            No one knew what today would bring. As we were scanning the planet, the creatures on it were definitely scanning us, detecting us somehow. I’m sure we didn't look like your typical near-miss meteoroid – our ship is too perfectly round.
            This morning, planet-time, me and a few of the guys took the shuttle down through the atmosphere. I’m sure every defense mechanism on the planet was aimed at us. I know that if I were at home, every possible destructive machine would be aimed any unfamiliar object falling from the sky, like we so gracefully were. All systems held up on the way down, and for that, we all relieved.
            So we landed in the middle of what seemed to be desert, pretty similar to home, actually, and grabbed our radio devices (since we knew we could communicate through radio to an extent), and hopped out of the shuttle. The first thing I noticed was that despite the space suit, it was cold, much colder than I’m used to – the kind of cold that should prevent life from existing. The second thing was the vehicle with two natives in the front seat coming up towards us. The vehicle was bristling with what looked like artillery at first, but might have been communication devices. Maybe they’re the same thing. This improbable planet was getting stranger and stranger.
            In a panic, I hurriedly broadcast the five tones we had heard years before, the tones we had all memorized, heard in our dreams. One of the creatures in the vehicle turned toward his companion with a funny look on what I guessed was its face, and started making rasping noises, completely unlike the tones. We stepped out into the open and moved our limbs like we had seen the creatures do when we had scanned the planet earlier.
The vehicle stopped. The creatures stared. I hate to admit it, but we quite rudely stared back. They seemed so fragile, so squishy, and a bit disgusting.  The vehicle backed, turned, and hightailed it the way it came, but as it left, our radios picked up some frantic sounding rasping and gasping.
            We stayed below and looked around for a while.  We tagged some smaller creatures and some plants for bio-examination and picked up some rocks – souvenirs for back home. We determined that, although the life here was made of the wrong elements, the air was not, so space suits were largely unnecessary. We still needed them to communicate and stay in contact with the ship. By this time, the suits were running out of power and gas, so we headed back towards the shuttle and headed back up to the ship.
            The ride up was just worse than the ride down. This improbable planet has an improbably thick atmosphere, and I hurt from the ride, and I’m tired from my shore excursion. We’ll have to spend a few days repairing the shuttle’s heat shield from the beating it took.
            Maybe I’ll go down again later. I hope I do. It will be interesting to see what the things on the planet do next – if they aren't trying to kill us. I don’t want to scare them, but they still scare me a little.
END OF LOG

It’s been a few days on the improbable planet since we last went down. We've had to completely repair the shuttle-craft and refit the heat shields to compensate for the thicker atmosphere of the planet below. It’s a wonder we didn't burn up in the first place.
We keep receiving radio messages from the planet below – more rasping, gasping noises. If we look, search the whole spectrum of radio waves, we can find more tones layered over each other, lots of different patterns, lots of feelings. We haven’t figured out how the creatures we've seen usually communicate, but I’m working on that now – it’s my job to figure out how to say hello. This is going to be tough – I’m going to need to find out what the main language actually is, and then find out how to speak it.
We haven’t been blasted out of their sky yet, though, so I assume that they must be as curious about us as we are about them – or just as scared.
We’re definitely going down tomorrow – this time to a population center. I think I can have some of the basics figured out by then, if I can get enough signals. These days are abnormally long, though. I’m going to have to get used to that, too. No sleep tonight!
END LOG ENTRY

            We did go down today – and how. The repairs to the shuttle were apparently not enough.
            Today, since we thought we had got ourselves acclimatized a bit by the first shore excursion, and I thought I had figured out how to talk to the creatures, we decided to go to where there were more strange of them – a major population center with tall temple-like buildings and fake rock on the ground and millions of the creatures scurrying around in metal bugs. We were all excited and a bit apprehensive, but we all agreed that the best way to get to know the creatures was to go where there was most of them.
 As soon as we started going through the atmosphere, the heat shields started sloughing off. We’re used to heat, but the inside got so hot, I thought we were going to die. Fortunately, we were still on trajectory and managed to land in what seemed to be a dry canal. We all barely got out before the fuel ignited and what was left of our sad little landing craft exploded.
            Once we recovered a bit, we saw that the creatures were much more prepared for us than last time. This time, we had a combination of what was definitely artillery and one large screen flashing colors in a pattern of five pointed at us. We looked around and saw a few of the creatures gathered around equipment. They moved first, playing the five-tone sequence we had heard first – first slowly then faster, lights blinking in time.
            This was my chance to try what I thought was their language. Fortunately, I saved my radio device from the explosion, and I started broadcasting what I thought was a message of peace and love – minor arpeggios in sequence, followed by a major chord. The creatures just looked strangely at each other and started rasping. I realized that I had been paying attention to the wrong frequencies – the rasping was their primary method of communication, not the tones. My whole language, my whole method of communication, my reason for not sleeping for a long time – it was all wrong. I had let down my team. Not only were we now stranded on an alien planet, we had no way of talking to the aliens themselves.
            At least they didn't shoot us down. Yet.
            Right now, I’m in one of those sky-scraping temples, a room with a soft sleeping-place and a place where I can get all the wet stuff I want (One of our guys is a chemist by trade – he says that the wet is dihydrogen monoxide and only dangerous in large amounts). I’m working on figuring out the rasping, and I think I can almost say hello. I’ll see if I can work out a deal with the creatures tomorrow.
In the meantime, we’ll try to repair the shuttle.
END LOG ENTRY
            It’s day two on the surface of the improbable planet.
            I’m cold, but the space suit does its best to keep me warm.
            While I work on the language, the scientists (I assume) from the planet and I have worked out a combination of drawing and pointing to at least communicate what we want. They now know where we’re from, and they seem to be close to making super-light speed travel vehicles.
            One of the scientist creatures, who seems a little older, but very kind, took me in his transport to a building guarded by statues and suns where the written word of his kind was kept. It was amazingly huge inside – I could spend weeks in here. This is where I’m going to spend a lot of time while I try to figure out more about these creatures and how to talk to them.
            The rest of the guys will keep working on the shuttle craft and finding out more about what makes up this planet and how it works. I've promised no abductions unless voluntary – that seemed to be one of the things the creatures are most scared about.
END LOG ENTRY

We've been down here for a few days, a spectacle for the creatures, and they, a spectacle for us. I've figured out how to say hello, communicate with basic drawings, simple words. Today one of the creatures who was there when we landed took us in one of their transports (which was terrifying) to another big building. He took us inside. As we walked through, we could see that this building contained the history of the creatures – some of their art, their bodies, their world as they understood it.
We followed the creature through the buildings, him taking all the while, until he led us to – a shuttle! We all looked at it in awe.
The creature pointed at it, and said, “Endeavor.”
“To try to achieve something,” I hesitantly replied. I had been doing my research in the building with the written words guarded by lions. “That is what we are doing. We endeavor to understand.”
“We do too,” replied the creature. “Humans aren't all bad.”
“We also endeavor to share with our people,” I replied. “Can you help us get there?”
His bright blue eyes looked into mine. “Yes. I promise. Only, can I go too?”
I looked at him, his “hair,” his “fingers,” his bright blue eyes, and replied, “Yes. We need to understand each other.”
“We can have it up and running in a few weeks. Then we’ll be off to the stars, right?” he replied. “To the most improbable planet that ever existed.”
“Look at your own,” I replied. “Ours is normal.”
Now we wait for the refitting of the shuttle to get us back up to our own planet – as improbable as this one. And we will know we aren't alone in the universe anymore.
END OF LOG


This transcript in regards to the excursion to Outer Arm 5.1 Sol 3 (known to its residents as Earth) is property of the Unified Government of Voca and is confidential until the sanity of Maggi Uhure Laya Rous of clan Rauca has been tested and the transcript has been read, certified, and released to the press. All quotes or references must be cited and approved by the Unified Government of Voca before release. 

No comments:

Post a Comment