Into the Light

Prologue

In the Earth year 2019, tens of billions of miles away from our planet, an ancient being stirs from its long slumber. A strange feeling has come over it, one that it remembers from a time long past. Solar radiation. This being is the lone occupant of a planet without a home, a "rogue planet," and it is nearing a star.

As the radiation grows stronger, closer, the being detects a disturbance. Colossal torpedoes of space rock are bombarding the rogue planet. The being is saddened, knowing it may not survive the trip to the star, the only entertainment it has had in millennia.

It gathers all its strength and propels a piece of itself, a blob of biological ooze, towards the source of the radiation. The meteorites continue pelting the planet as this new, seperate being moves toward the star.

This new life-form, a small piece of the behemoth ancient that resided on the rogue planet, has no memories, no thoughts. It simply floats through space. As it draws near the star, it starts recieving signals. It doesn't understand them at first, but slowly, over a few decades, it begins to comprehend. It is learning and becoming able to process thought. The radio waves it is recieving become stronger suddenly, and it feels particles moving past at an alarming speed. And then, all at once, its body hits something hard, and it goes unconscious.

It lay like that, a puddle of goo not really dead and not really alive, for days. When its energy reserves have almost been depleted, and all seems to be lost, a flash of electricity shoots throughout its body.

It can move on its own, now, and sense the area around it. Waves of sound reverberate in its mind, and it can tell when and where the waves bounce off of things. A method of sight. It slides across the ground and sees a group of large boxes clumped together, and strange forms moving in between them. As it glides across the ground towards them, they stop moving. And then each one lets loose a burst of sound directed at the being and moves swiftly away.

The being is angered. It sees that they were like him in ways, in that they can move, and make sound. "They should accept me as one of them!" it thinks. "We are not so different."

It moves a few feet away from the clump of boxes and lurks, waiting for one of the other beings to find it. After a few minutes, one moves toward it. "What are you?!" it yells.

"I am one of you. A 'human'."

The old man speaking to the strange, gray ooze is stunned. "It cannot be! You know our language, and claim to be one of us, yet it's obviously not true!"

"Then make it true. We are no so different, you and I. We speak. We move. We think. What more do I have to change?" The ooze reassembles itself so it is the same height as the man.

"Well, come inside. For one thing, people who converse with goo, even animate, talking goo, are not generally accepted here." The man picks up his cane and knocks the tree that the ooze is standing under. "Let's go."

The blob slides into the doorway that the man has just opened and, hearing it shut behind him, says, "How can I become one of you?"