Short Story: "The Flattered Planet"

From the book THE FLATTERED PLANET AND OTHER STORIES

I started writing stories before the age of 10. My inspiration came from the short fiction of Roald Dahl, Fredric Brown, Robert Sheckley … and other anthologized writers (in books such as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”).

My short fiction collection THE FLATTERED PLANET is available on Amazon. Here is the complete title story, for your amusement…

THE FLATTERED PLANET
by A.R.Yngve

May 14, Year One

It's too early to be sure. I told the NASA and ESA bosses it's a planet with water, and we can't explain why we haven't noticed it around Proxima Centauri before. Almost as if it didn't exist before...

Still waiting for Hubble 3 to get a fix on the planet before we break out the champagne. Another world, perhaps with life completely different from Earth... yet similar enough that we might go there.

I keep thinking it sounds too good to be true. My kids keep asking: When are they gonna talk to the aliens? What should I tell them? In a decade, in a hundred years, perhaps never?

May 21, Year One

It's confirmed! Hubble 3 is sending sharp images of the newfound planet! Earth-type, large oceans, several big continents. Been in meetings with the government all day, trying to set up a plan for communicating with it.

Better still: the Senate and Congress greenlit our funding to build Hubble 4, an orbiting telescope with many times the magnifying power. We'll be able to see details on the new planet, perhaps down to 10 meters!

Next step would be a stationary observatory on the dark side of the Moon, to get even sharper images... and a lunar radio telescope to pick up signals from the new world.

We still haven't agreed on what to name it...

June 7, Year One

It's decided: a worldwide Web vote was cast in favor of the name ”Terra Nova.” Not my favorite choice. ”New Eden” would have been better.

We are working overtime to get Hubble 4 ready. The whole space-tech sector is ballooning, sucking up talent from all over the world. Almost every day, I meet a new colleague from Russia, Japan, Scandinavia or South America.

I love my job.

August 10, Year One

Hubble 4 successfully launched! The assembly crew is so pumped, we're camping outside the mission control center. Our families come to join us.

Some loony tried to get inside. He kept yelling about bringing an ”important message to the aliens on Terra Nova.” Guards dragged him out. Typical...

August 11, Year One

Damn, damn, damn! Hubble 4 malfunctioned. We shouldn't have made such a rush job of it. NASA has to send a shuttle over and fix the fault.

The loony who pestered us last night is back: he's e-mailing everyone who works at the center with pleas to transmit his message to Terra Nova.

He's even sending us his own badly written stories about what life is like up there. Terra Nova fanfic! Dork...

August 15, Year One

Thank God, Hubble 4 is working. The first images have just arrived. Terra Nova's weather patterns are so similar to Earth, it's scary. It's even got two polar ice caps and a large island that resembles Greenland.

It has its own moon, too.

August 16, Year One

The crew is pouring over hundreds of new images, taken before Terra Nova's sun got in the way. Something's not right.

The planet is exactly the same size as Earth. It has exactly the same number of continents, nearly the same zones of green and desert territory. Its coastlines are not identical to Earth, but too similar to be coincidence.

And: its moon orbits Terra Nova at the same distance as our Moon's distance to Earth.

If that's not coincidence, what is it?

We've got to get a better telescope. At present, Hubble 4 cannot capture lights from Terra Nova's cities at night: Proxima's light blots them out.

The lunar telescope will be built. But the wait is just unbearable...

July 4, Year Two

It was too early to send a focused radio message to Terra Nova, but some IT billionaire funded it himself. The fool. He just had to grandstand for humanity, and sent a photo of himself waving to the aliens who might live there.

It should take us, at best, about a decade to find out whether his greeting was received or not.

December 25, Year Three

I thought we'd never see the first Lunar Observatory completed. So many obstacles! Moon dust is the worst problem; it ruined a mirror and crept into the electronics.

Now at last we'll see the first super-detailed images of Terra Nova.

December 26, Year Three

I'm still trying to make sense of the first images. They were much, much better than I could ever have anticipated. We can make out buildings—buildings!—and entire cities.

The continent that resembles North America has a giant city on its east coast that appears to be a metropolis. One can see a gigantic white tower, like the Washington Needle but much bigger, surrounded by five white palaces like the Capitol.

When we enlarged one of the urban images, we spotted a huge statue of what seems like a humanoid. The statue's shadow has two arms, two legs and possibly one head.

I keep thinking I'm going to wake up from a dream, and I lose sleep. The drugs help a little.

We've just got to get a better view. Fortunately, by now half of Earth's military spending has been redirected toward building new and improved space telescopes and moon bases. Never before have we had better means of watching and listening to Terra Nova.

December 31, Year Three

The divorce is final. I lose the house and custody of the kids, but it doesn't matter. Nothing's more important than Terra Nova. Nothing!

Some of the buildings on its surface resemble observatories. Maybe they are watching us. But if they've spotted us, why won't they transmit?

We've observed enormous missile launch pads, and rocket launches. Lots of them. They seem to be heading for their moon.

Their moon looks very strange. All the craters have smooth edges and are perfectly round, as if they were sculpted.

And the coastlines of Terra Nova are all curves and straight lines up close. Have they—the aliens—really been around long enough to accomplish that?

November 11, Year Four

A wonderful revelation: When we cross-checked the first images from the lunar observatory with the early Hubble 4 photos, we found no apparent signs of urban decay, ruins or large artificial fires... only the occasional volcanic eruption, forest fire or natural disaster.

We can only conclude that on Terra Nova, there are no wars. A sociobiologist friend speculates that the Terra Novans settle all conflicts with one-on-one bouts, like dueling. The presence of large arenas in every urban center, similar to the Coliseum, indicate that this might be true.

It's of course impossible to make out details of individual natives… but we think we've seen tiny parties of them fighting in the arenas, with audiences of many thousand spectators.

March 8, Year Five

Terra Nova's moon is changing. At first we thought someone had sabotaged our lunar observatory, or the crew up there was playing a prank.

Alien lettering is forming on the surface of Terra Nova's moon. To be visible in our telescopes, the letters have to be hundreds of kilometers wide—the ”paint” could be dark dust, and scattered pretty wide. (Planetary graffiti?)

Please, let it be a friendly message...

March 14, Year Five

It's English. How could the Terra Novans have learned our language so fast?

The message reads: WE SEE YOURS. YOURS IS A BAD COPY OF OUR WORLD. WHAT MADE YOURS?

April 13, Year Five

On the news from our Earth I see this: pointless wars; dimwits leading entire nations; insane mass murders; progress being beaten back by fierce resistance from fanatics, churches and tribes… the usual mess.

In the photos from Terra Nova I see only peace, order, growth... even large settlements on their moon. An impossible utopia.

They are convinced that they are the original, and we the inferior copy. If they are right, what made us this way?

A new Gnostic church is gaining a wide following. Its prophet—finally she got her comeback, after all those songs that bombed!—preaches that we're created by a mad god, and the other Earth—Terra Nova—was created by a benevolent god.

But I can't believe in that. Their world is too clean, too smoothed out to be natural. I'm going to present my hypothesis to my kids, and they will have to decide what to think:

The Terra Novans didn't learn our language in record time. They were made English-speaking.

We've been plagiarized.

We are the real, dirty, flawed original that took billions of years to form. Someone... something powerful but not too creative observed us for a very long time... and it admired the sight so much, it created its own copied version with all the flaws removed. What's it like to live over there, inside a planet-sized dollhouse? Can they sense the guiding hand of their unimaginative quasi-creator? And why did they finally decide to contact us? Did their quasi-creator allow it? Or decide it? Perhaps we'll never know.

The Terra Novans themselves probably wouldn't listen if we told them... that Terra Nova must be an Earth fanfiction, of the Mary Sue variety. And we might discover other copies around other stars—sloppier and more bizarre in their distortions, catering to every imaginable preference and obscure fixation, each copy missing the point of the original...

Today I quit my job.

I'm joining a clandestine project to build a powerful transmitter, which will beam the image of a raised middle finger into space...



”The Flattered Planet” (C) A.R.Yngve 2008. All rights reserved.
The book THE FLATTERED PLANET AND OTHER STORIES is available for purchase HERE.