Iron Planet

A Ship of Light 2050

To Ashalynn the world ending seemed a fair and just finale of the story of man and she was expecting to see one last demonstration of man's monumental stupidity within the next few hours. Every nation wanted to see an end to the constant posturing and just all out mean back and forth between the countries of the Americas. For once the rest of the world wasn't getting bombed or otherwise terrorized... and all eyes were on the States... the United States and their intolerance of all things not within their borders.

Ha. Here I am about to get blown up and it's not even my business! I'm just here following orders. I'm just supposed to be observing on this damn base. I'm not fucking involved!!! Lor' help me! She screamed in her head. Her Scots-Irish face turning bright red and her staff staring at her in alarm. The vein hopping in her head seemed to be reminding her she was easily read from any distance by anyone and she needed to hide it! Grabbing some water she headed for a corner away from most lines of sight and watched the monitor out of the corner of her eye. She was good at this. Her peripheral vision was exceptional. So much so she had earned the nickname of Medusa, partly because of her dreads but mostly because of the sense she had a head full of snakes that watched all around her constantly.

Here we are waiting for someone to make a counter move after that idiot General "accidentally" blew up some Canadian troops as well as the South border waiting for a match that was already lit and in the hands of the biggest contingent of border units the States had ever had. But I'd forgotten about the pollution and then the UN alerting us of the final levels reached in the twenty hotspots in Europe and the chain reaction of what the media were calling super toxins causing nearly half a billion people to pretty much just drop dead! Yeah, it won't be long now.

And then the shit really happened.

Before the alarms started screaming and the shouting started erupting, everyone was pulled inexorably to look outside. A ghostly need, a phantom longing to view the sky. Irresistible and unstoppable  we all marched or ran to look up. From hundreds of miles away the light could be seen and only a little closer and you could tell it was a ship. So bright and glowing that you had to shield your eyes but you couldn't stop looking. A yearning to be there, to know, to worship was all you could think about.

As it's position stabilized these effects started to lesson for most, but some were permanently enamored and a lot died in their attempt to be with these messengers of light as they called them. The strange poisoning wasn't realized for another ten years and prior to that all attempts to reach the ship were utter failures. For the first time the American continents were united in their intention to either defeat or benefit from this otherworldly occurrence and it saved billions of lives or so we thought.

In the strangest twist it was this single minded nationalism that was their undoing as the aliens started sending emissaries to the other side of the world in an attempt to explain and communicate. All because of one message that had been sent out to the stars many decades before. London knew this was a golden opportunity to get a jump on the rest of the world and they took it. They had been working on deciphering the messages for fifty years and now were handed the key point blank. Finally someone could communicate with these strange beings from across the galaxy.

Why were they here? Little did we know that we never would be told and that we didn't really want to know. They convinced us that they needed us and we needed them. And just like that humanity accepted their terms and the beginnings of peace were forged.

As Ashlynn lay in her hospital bed in Michigan feverishly fighting to stay conscious and aware, word came around they were landing. They were visiting the cities of the sick. She had been part of the last wave of those to succumb to the effects of the ships emergence, (as they had learned it was called). She wondered, Why now? Why has it been ten years before they took responsibility? If they could have cured us wouldn't they have done it? Like when they were curing all known diseases in the rest of the world?

We didn't know yet they had gotten paid for that. We didn't know yet that the "cure" for our poisoning wasn't really a cure but just a way to postpone our inevitable deaths.