The past two summers, I challenged some of my students to help me with some columns over the break. They gave me the first and last lines of a potential fictional short story. My task was to take those lines and write the middle. It was a lot of fun, so I’ve asked my students to help me again. This week’s inspiration was provided by Conner Nelson.
As I was eating roadkill… What? Is that so wrong? Hey, I had hit the deer’s head with a glancing blow that just happened to kill it. The rest of it was just fine. Why let some good venison go to waste?
As I was saying, I was sitting down and enjoying some venison steak when the power went out. I live in a pretty secluded area about 10 miles from the nearest town. Sometimes when the wind gets blowing, the power will flicker or disappear for a few minutes. It’s no big deal since I have generators to run if it’s out too long.
I enjoy fiddling with electronics of all kinds, so my generators are souped up a bit, as is most of the wiring in my house. I used to fix televisions and radios for others, but most of the stuff that’s made today is so disposable that it’s cheaper just to buy something new than to pay for parts and labor. Not shockingly, I work as an electrician, though I started going to a four-year college to study physics before realizing my hobby with electronics would pay the bills with less schooling.
I pulled out a few candles and lit them so I could finish my supper. After a half hour had passed with no sign of electricity, I went to plug in a generator. It had been a long day, and I wanted to watch some of the news before going to bed. However, even with the generator running, the television was running nothing but static. Oh well, off to bed I went.
When I woke up the next morning, the power still hadn’t returned. I had turned the generator off overnight since there wasn’t much need for it. After grabbing a banana and a Coke, I got in my truck to head in to work.
I never made it. Once I reached the main road a couple miles from my place, there was a line of cars on it to resemble rush-hour traffic in the big city, stop and go all the way. I got out of my truck and walked up to a stopped car. “What’s going on?” I asked the lady who rolled down her window.
What followed was beyond imagining. Apparently, a large ship from space had landed near the local city where I worked. The aliens that emerged were vaguely human-like, but they had quickly shown their violent side, shutting down power in the region by targeting power plants and other sources of the electricity we so took for granted.
The military had arrived but found little they could do as force fields surrounded the ship and also the aliens themselves as they strode with purpose through the city. I was initially nonplussed by how the force fields could work, but my mind started clicking back to my days of studying physics, mixed with my electronic knowledge, and I started to formulate a theory about that. If we could break down their force fields, we might have a chance.
I thanked the woman for the information and dashed back to my truck. I knew enough back roads that I could find my way to wherever the military was stationed. Sure enough, they were out near the landfill. After explaining my credentials and ideas to about 20 people, I finally got in to see some of the top brass.
They bought in to what I was saying (What choice did they have?) and we got to work devising a contraption to defeat the invaders. Within three days, a prototype was developed to test. Finding a couple aliens patrolling the streets, some of the soldiers tried out the device successfully. We got to work on larger versions of the machine, and within a month, we launched a massive campaign to take out the aliens.
It was over quickly. I was lauded as a hero. Still, I knew that these space explorers must have technology in their ship that could fuel more discoveries and things to help the human race. Over the next year, I, along with others, took apart many areas of the huge ship and tried to match some of that tech to what we had on our planet.
I was working with the sub-light engines one day, trying to figure out how they could travel such great distances without breaking the speed of light. And then I found it. I can’t even explain quite how it works, but the gist of it is to work one of those force fields alongside an engine that could actually go faster than the speed of light, effectively stopping the flow of time for anyone in the ship while the engines hurtled through space at an unimaginable rate.
Using that, I worked with others to create a ship for humans to explore the galaxy that way. But along the way, I fiddled with a smaller version for personal use. You know, for those times you don’t quite know what to say or do and would like a chance to think about it? Yeah, I’ve got a small, pocket-sized object that will allow me that. That’s how I made a remote to pause time.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is nonplussed, which means puzzled, as in, “The boy was still nonplussed when the girl rejected him for the third time.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!