“So, you fucked the planet up.” That’s Jim. “So you fucked the planet up, and now you idiots are going extinct.” Jim’s an asshole.
Well ‘Jim’ only in the sense that that’s what he calls himself. ‘Jim’ probably isn’t an alien name. I think he does it to make it easier to identify him, y’know as part of his mission or whatever. Now that I think about it, Jim might not even really be a ‘he’, that’s just what I think fits the best, I don’t know how gender works for his species. I haven’t asked him. Now that I think about it a little more, nope, no, I don’t really care what I should technically call him – he’s a ‘Jim’, and he’s a ‘he’.
Jim’s a tall alien guy in cool-looking suit. Don’t know what his face looks like behind that fancy gas-mask thing. He came to Earth about a month ago and has been tagging along with me ever since. Man, we would have gone crazy if Jim got here a couple years ago, before the bombs and all that – probably would be on the home page of every news site in the country – scratch that – [i]the world[/i], easily. I guess we’re all still in shock over the apocalypse and all that, nobody really cared about Jim. I only sorta remember the day he landed – his shuttle touched down in the parking lot next to me and he stepped out, introduced himself as Jim, and the shuttle lifted off without him. I think I asked him what’s up. I remember this old guy me and Jim bumped into on our way to Nashville. He stopped and just sorta looked up at him, this curious-ish look on his face, said “Huh.” and asked me if I had any smokes. I didn’t have any so he just walked on.
Jim doesn’t seem to care about all the attention he’s not getting, in fact I’m pretty sure that’s a plus for him – well I mean he’s got to be a biologist or something like that, right? He came to this planet with nothing but a suit and some weird alien gear that he’s sampling stuff with, and he’s just been following me around, observing, so I guess he’s a biologist. I remember back when cable was still around, there was this nature show once, and this lady who was in charge of the whole thing was talking about how you’re not supposed to interfere with nature, have as little of effect as possible, so I guess Jim isn’t all that great of a biologist because he does have an effect, he has the effect of being a fucking dick.
I asked him about it once, and he said the reason he knows English so well is because of studying internet transmissions or something and he said something else about satellites. He told me about how pissed he got when he figured out that humans speak, like, a hundred different languages or something like that, and then he bitched out on me for it, like he does for everything – “Is it really so impossible for you retards to get along, that [i]you literally don’t know how to communicate with each other?[/i] That’s fucking ridiculous!” So yeah, he knows English real well, doesn’t sound weird or mistranslated or anything, and he’s always eager to complain to me in it. Like, he always talking about [i]“Ooh, you guys nuked your only planet, your civilization’s only five thousand years old, you guys don’t do anything but loot and kill, look at me, I’m a condescending alien dickhead!”[/i] But, what’s somehow more annoying is that he doesn’t even complain about any particular thing actually I do! I mean, I’ll go into an art museum and throw everything into a bonfire for shits and giggles and he doesn’t say a word. I track down some guy, kill him and his dog, and eat them both, and out of Jim? Not a peep. It’s bad enough that he’s acting all self-righteous, but he’s not even [i]being[/i] actually self-righteous, he just has space-sand in his space-vagina and he’s taking it out on me!
You know what? Screw this, screw Jim! For a long time I thought it wasn’t so bad – compared to starvation, disease, and the death of the world, a clingy, obnoxious alien dude didn’t seem too bad, but no! No way! Fuck that noise! I don’t need his bullshit on top of everything else! So for the first time since I met him, I go and confront him. He’s whining about how selfish and stupid and barbaric we are, [i]again[/i], when I tell him –
“Hey! What’s your fucking problem?! Why are you being such a prick all the time?! What did I do to deserve listening to you complain about everything?!”
He stops. I couldn’t see his face to confirm it, but I notice the way his voice trails off, the way his shoulders drop a bit – I think that actually makes him feel sorry. But I don’t quit now.
“Oh no, oh no you don’t, oh no you fucking don’t! You don’t get to make me feel sorry for you, sorry that [i]I hurt your motherfucking feelings! I[/i] am the one who has to scavenge and kill just so I can not starve to death, [i]I[/i] am the one who doesn’t a habitable planet anymore, [i]I[/i] am the one whose species is going extinct, and [i]you[/i] are the one who doesn’t stop complaining about it!”
He keeps silent.
“Listen, I’m not going to tell you to leave me alone, it’s not like I can make you – a super-advanced alien master race guy like you can probably instantly vaporize me with your mind or something if you wanted to. You can follow me if you want, but I’m asking you, please, [i]please[/i], in the name of all that’s decent and holy,[i] shut the fuck up[/i]. All right?”
Still silent.
“Good.”
He kept it up for a while too. That day, the day after, the day after that, Jim didn’t talk. This sounds cliché, but it was actually kinda strange, having Jim around but not hearing him say anything, I almost began to miss it. He still did the whole thing with the sampling and the observation, but he was just really mellow. All in all, I’m actually a bit sorry I yelled at him. I finish setting up camp outside San Antonio when we talk to each other again.
“Hey, listen Jim, I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry about before. I mean, I was just real upset and I wasn’t really thinking, like, you know? Sorry, I guess.”
He actually replies. This is probably the first real conversation we have since we met. “No need. It’s my fault, I was the one being rude and all in the first place.”
“Well, I guess I forgive you too then. If you’re going to be tagging along, hows about we just put all this shit behind us and call it pals?”
“Thank you. Pals. That’d be good.”
“Well right on.”
And I sit around a bit, tossing clumps of twigs and dry leaves into the campfire, watching them crackle and spark and turn to ash, before I strike it up with Jim again. “So, like, what was the deal with the whole ‘thing’ from before?”
“I thought we agreed to put that behind us.”
“Well I still want to know, I mean, something was definitely up, right?”
“Right.”
“So what was it?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to depress you.”
“Well wouldn’t that just ruin my perfect little day.”
“If you say so.”
Jim pulls a log up to the fire, next to mine. The guy’s big but he’s pretty skinny, I’m surprised by how little effort he puts into it. He sits down and begins. “How many multiple-planet species do you think we know about so far?”
“I’d probably say ‘eight’, or ‘two hundred’, but I’m going to assume this is a trick question and saaayyy – none?”
He nodded. “None. We’re the only one we know of. Do you know why?”
I figure, how am I supposed to know that? But then I get to thinking that this is another trick question. Or maybe it’s a rhetorical question - I forget the difference. I stay on the safe side. “I don’t know.”
Here it comes. “The answer is all around you.” There it is. “Every species with the capability, every species with the intelligence, the imagination, the ambition, to find their future in the stars, ends up like this. Our probes prowl the galaxy, finding planet after planet that lies right in their star’s habitable zone, has just the right mass, but is lifeless all the same. We send teams to investigate and find the same exact story each time. A young race full of hope and potential creates a civilization, and they grow and prosper and change, and before they can even touch the planets of the neighboring solar system, they’re wiped out. Their knowledge and sophistication quickly and brutally cut short by their intolerance and savagery, and the only things they leave behind are ruins, fossils, and a planet too broken to support life ever again. It’s been five thousand of your years since we gave up hope of finding a space-faring species like us, now we search the galaxy for whichever intelligent species haven’t yet figured out how to destroy themselves, to take them under our wing, save them from their own devices. So far we’ve failed at that too. Some cite this as proof that there is something divine and special about us, that only we survive while everyone else inevitably collapses, but I know the ones who died, I’ve read their works and seen their art, and in the eulogy of a race that has been dead for over ten million years, carved into the moon above their former homeworld as a reminder of their existence, I feel the soul that created it, and it is the same soul as ours. My race’s survival was nothing more than sheer luck.”
I sit back a bit, let out some air, and go, “Wow, that is pretty depressing. But how does that explain the way you’ve, y’know, acted?”
“I’ve seen dozens of planets like the ones I just described, and in every case, the races who once ruled those worlds have been dead for millions of years. I receive the dossier for an insignificant planet around an insignificant star in an insignificant part of the galaxy and I think it’s just another report to file, and I come here and find life. Life! Intelligent life with language and history and culture, and for a split second, I know that we’re not the only ones here, that your people can be saved, and that we don’t have to be alone in this galaxy anymore! And then I stop and think, and I realize that this planet, and everything on it, is dying, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Wait, what? Why?”
“The idea that we would ever find a living intelligent species still alive on a gray, radioactive ball of rock like this doesn’t occur to us. We’re archaeologists, we set out with the equipment and training to examine and catalogue. If I sent a message back this second for enough ships and gear to help you guys reestablish someplace else, it’d be five hundred years before they got here. By that point, the last of the atmosphere will have long-since boiled away, not to say that the fallout would have left enough oxygen-producing organisms around for the air to be breathable anyway.”
“Five hundred years?”
“Cryogenic preservation. If you can’t go faster than light, you can at least have it feel like it. Even if the sedatives and blood substitutes were attuned for your species, there are only proper facilities for our fourteen-member team, far less than enough to preserve a genetically viable population.”
He pauses and looks ahead. He’s looking at the San Antonio city proper, watching the sun set behind it. Real pretty. Real sad too. All those broken buildings.
“Anger, then sadness. Everyone else figured that even though they couldn’t save any of it, there was still life on the ground and that some of the architecture was still intact, so they could do a quick remote survey and finish this business up so we could go home. They did that fifty-seven days ago. I couldn’t leave though. Everybody just wanted to do what they needed to and not let it get to them, but I needed to be down there when it happened, when the last of your kind fell to the ground and didn’t get back up. I wanted to see the end of the story, not make inferences from the epilogue, no matter how long it took to get there. Closure I guess. So I did what I did best – I examined, I catalogued, tried to trick myself into thinking that I was doing this for the job, not indulgent emotional masochism. All in all, best explanation for how I acted? I was pissed. I was just pissed and bitter and disinclined to care anymore.”
He turns away from the sunset and looks down at the campfire. It’s just charred wood and cinders now, I didn’t really pay attention to it while Jim was talking. He’s real silent for a moment, then he sighs, and mutters the last words I’ll ever hear him say. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
Silence for the rest of that night, and silence the morning after, when his shuttle comes back to pick him up. He probably called it up while I was sleeping. There is no farewell blessing or a final meeting of hard, knowing stares, I’m too busy packing up camp to pay attention, and I don’t see why Jim would want to have either anyway.
I like how you kept the in-character style of writing throughout the whole thing, some parts are kinda slow, but overall I liked it.
Catchy beginning, very strong ending, but the middle needs strengthening. There's a long string of vulgarity, and it feels forced and unnatural, and worse, boring to read. Find a way to condense the middle of your story, cut out some of the unnecessary bits, and tie your good beginning to your great ending in the manner it deserves.
Don't be discouraged. It's a fast and fun and easy read, and for the most part it was delivered very well. The last few paragraphs definitely made the story, so all you have to do is redo the middle, bolster the beginning a little bit, and then tie it all together. Good job!
:buddy:
I really enjoyed it, but I would agree that you should tone the swearing down a bit. It feels like you've stuck it in there to be a bit more powerful but it feels unecessary.
Like it, a little too much vulgarity, but still pretty sad
Honestly I think the vulgarity fits it perfectly. Jim's bitter as hell because not only does he have yet another dead race on his hands, this time he was actually close enough to see them; his race has tried and tried for this, tried to find other races still alive, and here one is but they're still too late. Like he says, it's emotional masochism, and that's liable to make one distressed. I dunno bout you but I swear a lot when I'm stressed out.
As for the main character, well, y'know, race slowly dying and all. Same deal. We freak out, we swear a lot, that seems to be a common thing and everyone's freaking out.
Only thing I could point out is [quote][i]I[/i] am the one who doesn’t a habitable planet anymore[/quote] but that's just a missing word, not a big deal (would be solved in proofreading I guess)
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
