MICRO FICTION

Delirium Tremens Pink Elephant*

INFANA KOLONIA

The aliens visited yesterday, and they left artefacts. These were clues, a kind of test for the resident population of the planet. And so began a paradox.

Since then, and for thousands of years, the extraterrestrials have observed our Earth as human science has evolved.

Today humanity has the technology to detect the visitors, even communicate, but they’re using it instead to observe, control and destroy their own kind.

Such an inward-looking, short-termist species is not what the aliens were looking for, a primitive ant nest, unaware of its observers or hive mind.

And so they resigned themselves to never visit again, leaving an entire species to spend its formative years debating about who they might have been. So long and thanks for all the animals who developed telepathy, rather than different languages.

They called it religion, and concluded that humans were an insular race who’d probably never work out anything beyond themselves. And so a paradox was perpetuated.

It was only one planet. The visitors moved on to the next. A different tomorrow.

© Steve Laker, 2019.

*An image search for ‘Infana Kolonia’ (Esperanto for ‘Infant colony’) leads to my upcoming (in 2021) sci-fi soap space opera; either a 1000-page single volume, or more likely a series of books. The flash fiction here is just a synopsis of a synopsis of the first chapter. Google has a sub-section for Infana Kolonia, ‘Delirium Tremens,’ which is the name of this blog of course. The two search terms together lead to a beer, which is ironic for an alcoholic, especially one who’s also a writer often finding themselves the elephant in the room. It’s all quite poetic when the universe connects. When galaxies collide, you can hear the music.

Suggested reading: Master Yehudi’s Flying Circus.