Flash Fiction Friday: “First and Final Contact”
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to find the time to write for Flash Fiction Friday, but I managed this week. Here’s my entry, drawing upon Casey Morgan’s challenging wildcards: “bow”, “not licensed”, and “alarming”. For those who are counting, note that it fits within the 250-word limit as long as you don’t count the footnotes. It’s not nearly as dark and/or twisted as usual, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.
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First and Final Contact
The S.S. Craptastic had made port in the backwater Gamma Cancri system, and thus far Cap’n Horatio Smalling III was unimpressed. The crew had been waiting for clearance from spacedock for seventeen hours. They wanted to drop their cargo and get back to the Civilized Systems. Instead, they’d been thwarted by the infamous Cancrian bureaucracy, which had developed into an art form on the system’s only lifebearing planet, Ushqarë’atykimewaala (1).
“One hour,” said Smalling. “If we’re not docked by then—”
“Captain!” interrupted First Mate James Mister.
“Yes, Mr. Mister?”
“Spacedock is hailing us.”
“Onscreen.”
On the viewscreen, the face of Marcus Lee, Bureaucratic Attaché to the Gamma Cancri system, replaced the scenic view of the spacedock orbiting the planet below, with the blazing light of Gamma Cancri, which the natives called Herpes (2), in the background.
“Greetings,” he said, giving a ritualistic bow.
Smalling snarled. “Listen here—”
Lee nodded. “You are Smalling, Cap’n Horatio?”
“The third,” Smalling added.
“Cap’n is your given name?” Lee looked incredulous.
“Yes, it’s a long story.”
“Hmm. And your cargo?”
“One dozen self-replicating replicators, to increase food production after the recent famine. I hear Cancrians are dying at an alarming rate. They want help, right?”
“Well, of course. Unfortunately, your ship is not licensed for trade in this system. We’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“What? Just like that? After seventeen hours? With the emergency supplies?!”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Whatever. Helm, get us the hell out of here.”
And with that, the Craptastic sped away. (3)
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1. Literally, this translates into English as “Who the fuck are you guys?”, which is how the natives responded when the first Terran explorers suddenly appeared and demanded to know the planet’s name.
2. An unfortunate example of an alien word sounding like a completely different word in a human language. The star’s name, Herpes, has nothing to do with sexually transmitted infections; rather it is an example of the Cancrian grammatical phenomenon known to linguists as “complex morphological co-compounding”, in this case deriving from the words heru, meaning “bright”, and mansaarawe’iikasqazhjuu, meaning “light.”
3. So ends the tale of the encounter between the crew of the Craptastic and the people of the Gamma Cancri system. Once they had returned to the Civilized Systems, the crew of the Craptastic transferred their cargo to a vessel licensed for trade in the Gamma Cancri system. Unfortunately, by the time the new ship arrived with the gross of self-replicating replicators (which had, obviously, self-replicated in the intervening period), most of the population had died from starvation. The remaining few quickly formed a committee to research the possibility of instituting bureaucracy reform policies that would make sure such fatal events never occurred again. Fifteen years have passed, and the committee is still debating the possibility.
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