Kitties!
Zoro and Sanji chillin’ like villains on a villain blanket
…Time for this week’s story…
Space Tourists
Oh how the mighty lust for knowledge and adventure enraptures beings throughout the universe. How many cats have dared one too many times? How many sailors never again saw their homelands? Even super intelligent beings like those who crashed at Roswell flew too close to the sun.
Of course, stories abound to explain what happens to those who vanish. Some will believe the cat ran out of lives, or that Neptune smote the sailor’s ship. The more imaginative will claim the government intentionally disrupted a spaceship’s advanced technology with radar to bring it down, as if that were possible. Regardless of how or why, the warnings are always there, whether we heed them or not.
With or without these intrepid individuals, time marches on. The world turns, bringing with it new days, new adventures, and new worlds as technology advances. Perhaps due to a crashed spaceship, or the clever genius of highly motivated humans, but it didn't take long for adventurous humans to reach the stars. From wooden boats to steel, from the skies to the stars, humans created microchips, advanced propulsion systems, and artificial gravity within a few hundred years of finding that poor ship of crashed aliens. The pace was truly remarkable, although surely unrelated.
Humans eagerly jettisoned themselves into the stars seeking new adventures. To their surprise, they found a universe teeming with life. It was as if humans had lived in a tiny valley their whole lives and never considered that the rest of the world could be just as alive.
In the beginning, they could only gaze from afar. They didn't want to disrupt the delicate evolution of any world, no matter how fascinating it was. Over the years, humans crept closer. Eventually, a company called Space Liners created cloaking technology, mysteriously akin to the one from that ship which crashed on Earth many years ago. It didn't just make them invisible, it took them slightly out of sync with the physical world. This made Humans undetectable and untouchable, so they felt comfortable getting close. Space Liners began offering tours to Allen worlds.
Sometimes a concerned passenger would ask, “What's that wobbling sound?”
“Don't worry,” the tour guide would tell them. “That's just the cloaking device. It isn't dangerous or perceptible to anything in physical space.” It always seemed to put them at ease, then they would launch into the stars, leaving Earth far behind as a tiny speck within seconds.
The cutting edge of technology, Space Liner ships could shoot into space as easily as they dove into deep oceans. Untethered from the material world, no physical boundary could stop them. For the first time, humans beheld some of the most magical places to ever exist.
Most popular was a spectacular underwater civilization of fish-like humanoids with cities made of carefully nurtured coral. The seafloor and buildings were covered in bioluminescent algae, plants and flowers. Human tourists would press themselves against the thick glass to capture the serene beauty.
Most embarrassing for humans was a lush planet with a terrestrial civilization which resembled indigenous tribes on Earth. The intelligent species that inhabited it lived in complete harmony with their environment. Not advanced technologically, they had many adroit solutions to problems. Without industrialization, they lived in a state of homeostasis that humans were still working to achieve. Regardless, it left all who saw it in wondrous awe.
The world best understood by human scientists was a planet with equal parts land and fresh water. It was home to a terrestrial civilization with a culture humans could easily study and understand. The species was a bipedal humanoid with oddly proportioned heads, eyes, and limbs. Humans had studied them heavily, and tours would regularly linger on that world. Oftentimes, the aliens engaged in similar customs as on Earth, and the Humans would watch, faces and cameras pressed against the glass.
“These two, for example,” one tour guide began. “It looks like they're consuming a fungus with psychedelic properties, much like we have at home.”
The aliens gesticulated as they talked until the sitting alien pointed at its ear, then at the invisible Human ship. The other alien looked, but saw nothing. It turned back to the sitting one, who pointed to the ship again and wobbled its hand in the air. The other alien turned to the ship and yelled.
“Does it hear the wobble?” a concerned passenger asked.
“Uh…that shouldn't be possible, but let's move along anyway.” Unnerved tour guides would always report seemingly random incidents like that, but they were generally disregarded.
Scientists would take their own crafts to worlds and scout them out before allowing the tours. Once a world was declared safe, that's all there was to it. Tour groups were allowed to visit freely.
The newest world Humans had found was like looking in a mirror. They were in the middle of an industrial revolution, experimenting with machines and electricity like humans did. A team of scientists excitedly explored this wondrous new world. As they flew over a beautiful landscape, all the screens glitched and the lights flickered. The wobbling noise stopped and so did the ship’s propulsion. Their stomachs shot into their throats and the scientists rode the ship down to a crash landing.
Badly injured, they lay in their battered ship until some locals pulled them out. They experienced glimpses of being dragged out of the wreckage and taken away with a military escort. Aliens in medical garb tried to care for them, but knew nothing about human anatomy.
One by one, the humans died. Their bodies were autopsied. The ship was studied for decades to come and accelerated the advance of the aliens’s technology, although their government would forever deny it. One scientist survived long enough to try communicating, but was unsuccessful. All those reports of possible detections swam through his mind on a loop. The aliens weren't hostile, but even as he drew his final breaths, he couldn't shake the feeling that their crash landing wasn't an accident.