Karla Brown didn't really believe it. She ran her fingers through her long chesnut hair and fidgeted, her leather sandals squeaking on the floor. Had she, personally, just a nobody lab assistant, made first contact with an alien race? It was staggering; beyond staggering! Until today she had never even believed that there really were alien races!
When the radio message came in, she'd dismissed it as a prank, but as she was working late and alone had played along to relieve the boredom. Extraterrestrials? Uh-huh. Ship in distress? Naturally. Of course I’ll help!
Anybody with half a brain knew that popular fiction was guff. Einstein’s laws of relativity, the most famous equation in the world, meant that it was physically impossible to cross interstellar space in anything close to a lifetime. Reality had a speed limit. Nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. And there were a lot of light years between here and there.
Karla spoke to the 'aliens' for some time learning more of their story. . They were from a starship called The Enlightenment which had run into trouble in our solar system. They claimed to be refugees from some terrible war on another world. Their solar system was home to two life bearing worlds and the other world had, motivated by religion, declared a war of genocide against them. These people, the Alieth were generally peaceful and lacked the military strength to defend themselves and consequently had been forced to evacuate, braving the dangers of space over certain death at home. To this end, millions of people were packed into crowded ships. The majority were left behind.
On Karla’s prompting, the mysterious voice on the radio explained in laymans terms how they were able to traverse the vast gaps between stars. It made little sense to her though. It seemed they got around the physical laws of the universe by leaving it! This improbable sounding feat was accomplished by the ships drive unit which projected a field around the entire craft shifting it out of synch with our reality and into synch with another, known as The Ether. There are points which intersect in both realities but the distances on either side are completely different. However navigation is extremely difficult.
It was this difficulty which led to The Enlightenment being seperated from the rest of the fleet and re-entering normal space-time in a totally unknown locale. Near Earth, as it turns out.
"Isn’t that rather a coincidense that you happened to appear near a populated planet?" Karla asked.
"No," he explained, "We were lost in the Ether and noticed a flare of activity near a crossing point between realities. We were desperate, so we headed for it.
"Bad mistake. Whatever it was crashed right into us as we were emerging causing a hull breach. That’s when we sent out the distress call. Which you somehow received on the equipment you were working on there".
"I....."
Then there was just static. The voice was gone. Karla just sat alone in the lab and wondered.
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