The ship, Conradomo, was making good time. In fact, it was a long way ahead of its schedule. If it wasn’t, perhaps its passengers wouldn’t have stopped to answer the distress call. Perhaps they would have just carried on. Perhaps none of this would have happened if only they had been slightly less efficient or had just taken one more break at work. But the fact of the matter is that none of those things happened and the crew did indeed answer the distress call. In the civilized world we live in, kindness should be rewarded. The only problem? There are things beyond our civilized world.

Conradomo docked with the other ship. The captain gave the go ahead and the other two members of the crew went searching for the source of the distress signal.

They came back with a creature they couldn’t really identify. The captain looked at the creature too, unsure of what to make of it. It looked quite unlike anything he had ever seen. But still. He was the captain and he had to do the right thing. He would save this alien’s life.

The alien itself was barely coherent, slipping in and out of consciousness.

The captain looked at their techie. “We need to understand what it is saying. Can we figure it out?”

“It is a language I have never heard. As long as the alien is out of consciousness, I can map its mind, allowing our bafis translators to upload the most common words it can trigger into our databases.”

The doctor chimed in. “Actually, it might be just for the best if we make the alien unconscious for a while. The constant changes in its central thought unit might not be good for it if it is anything similar to us in physiology.”

The captain nodded. “Let’s do that. To help it, we need to understand it. That’s the basic first step. In the meantime, I’ll try to reach out to others to see if someone recognizes this… thing.”

The doctor got to work, moving the bed where the alien was currently passed out, to the infirmary. The alien was then placed on the cryo table.

The techie walked in and placed a device on the alien’s head. “You gonna freeze it?”

“It doesn’t look like freezing would help. I’ll use medication to keep it unconscious for a while. How long will it take for babfis system to map the common words? It looks rough. But since I’m not familiar with its physiology I’m not comfortable with any treatment options I could use.”

“Not a lot.” The techie pointed to the device. “Built a handy timer for you.”

The doctor smiled. “Smart. I’ll probably take a bit longer just to let it recover a bit more.”

They sat with the captain on the bridge when the transmission came in.

“Come in Conradomo. Come in. Code 6,28.”

The captain sat up straight. Code 6,28? That was only for the most serious of situations.

“This is the captain speaking.”

“Did you sent out the image of the alien you have onboard?”

“Yes.”

“This alien is not allowed in the galactic zone. I repeat. This alien is banned from the galactic zone. You need to get rid of it right now. If not, you will be charged with assisting a fugitive.”

“A fugitive? What is this thing?”

“It belongs to a species called Humans. They used to be part of the federation a long long time ago. However they proved to be unstable and dangerous. We banished them to a galaxy far far away. We reset their scientific evidences and quarantined them.”

“Well they obviously suck at quarantining since we found it well within the range.”

“Be that as may. You are to get rid of the human right now.”

“Its ship is blown to smithereens. It will not survive.”

“That is not your problem. In fact that would be the best possible solution. Please put it back on its ship and get out of there. If that doesn’t work, put it in the airlock and just throw it into space. Anything as long as it is not on your ship.”

“Yes sir.”

Unbeknownst to them, the human in the ship had caught the conversation. The babfis hadn't translated all of what had been said, it had translated enough. The human quietly got up and went towards the cargo area.

“Captain. I’m a doctor. I cannot stand by and let it die.”

“I’m with the doc, captain.” The techie spoke up.

The captain looked at his crew and then towards the radio and nodded. “We saved its life. I won’t let it die that easy. Let’s try to do what we can. You go and see if you can repair its ship. Doc, you go and try to talk to him and fix him up the best as you can. Now that I know what it is, I’ll try to find everything about it. I’ll beam what I find to your bab devices. Unfortunately since this communication already happened and the code got called they will be sending some ships to us to check on things soon. Let’s try to get both it and its ship working by then.”

The crew all touched their left shoulder with their right hand, nodded and walked off to their respective tasks.

The techie went to what seemed like the central command of the human ship. After playing around with the controls for a while, a video appeared on a small screen. It was weirdly two dimensional and the techie had to wait while his eyes adjusted.

The babfis device which worked both ways, allowed the techie to understand a bit of what was on the video. The videos were logs of the last few days of the ship’s crew. The techie continued watching feeling more uneasy as things became clearer.

The techie rushed back to the Conradomo before the last video even finished.

The doc looked for the patient in the infirmary but it wasn’t there. Where could the human be and why had it left?

The doc called out, hoping the translation was enough to allow communication.

The doc entered the cargo area. “Human? Where are you?”

The doc felt a sharp pain in the bottom extremities. The human came out of the hiding spot, holding a knife it had stolen from the infirmary. It bared its teeth, and pounced.

The captain poured over the records. The more the captain went over the records the worst the situation seemed. The human files all contained some of the worst crimes the captain had ever seen. The captain wondered if all of this was exaggerated. Surely no species would be so destructive? Surely no species could be so easily prone to violence. Maybe they should all have listened to the…

The captain felt a wetness on the throat followed by a sharp pain. Green blood poured over the captain’s shirt covering the federation’s logo. The captain raised the paw towards the human. The human just stood there, smiling.

The hemispherical planetarium was empty except for one man in his late 20s who wore a thick pair of glasses that continuously beeped. Sri lay down in a reclining chair and pressed a button on his glasses. He had been running some experiments in the planetarium, developing a new form of display called Quark Gas Array (QGA). As soon as the display started, the planetarium lit up and a holographic movie played, making him feel as if he was floating in space.

He made himself comfortable and took a sip of his cold latte while the computer on his electronic glasses did quadrillions of calculations a second analysing the response of the display. He put the cup on the armrest and shifted his gaze to one of the information boxes being projected on his retina. He nearly choked on the gulp.

He stood up and hurried to his lab. On his desktop, he brought up a recent news article which was titled “Mysterious patterns observed in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)”

The article had a projection of the CMB with anomalous patterns highlighted. Sri brought up his own image of the snapshot of QGA. He applied some frequency filters to the image.

Adrenaline rushed through him and he banged his desk in an epiphany, the patterns from QGA had matched.

Years later in another galaxy, some trillions of light years away from the earth, a woman, who didn’t look anything like a human, was listening to the inter-stellar radio. The inter-stellar radio permeated some hundreds of galaxies in this buzzing part of the universe. If you were a living creature in the universe, this was the cluster you’d want to be in.

There was an interruption as her nearly-sentient radio, which was instructed to play “something interesting”, automatically tuned to another frequency which had a lot of static with hints of recognisable sounds.

The woman, who was one of the sharpest minds of her race, suddenly got up as if she heard a ghost. Her heart started beating faster.

“Songbirds,” she muttered to herself. There were plenty of those on her planet, so it wasn’t listening to the Songbirds that made her terrified. The sound then changed.

“The roar of lions.” She hadn’t seen lions in a long time but there were some zoos in nearby galaxies which she was sure had some.

There were more animal sounds that followed.

The diversity and pointlessness of the voices were indicative of only one thing.

First contact, She thought to herself, Aliens.

Although, aliens didn’t frighten her either. It was the thought of who those aliens could be that was making her guts wrench.

The sound was getting clearer each second.

Suddenly her suspicions were confirmed. What she heard made her jump from her seat –

“I love you”

It wasn’t that she didn’t know English. In fact, it was the language of multiple galaxies, a gift from the colonizers who were long gone for millennia by then. The voice wasn’t too different from her own voice either.

It was the words that had dug through her heart. “Love” was the word that preceded destruction and demise. It was the signature word used by the parasites, which called themselves the Humans. They were eradicated long back. If they returned, it’d be war.

She quickly sent this information to the federation. She immediately got a call back from the Chancellor.

“It’s impossible. We had erased their memory and destroyed their ships”

“I know Sir, but you can hear it for yourself.” She turned up the volume.

“Good god. Where’s it coming from?”

“I don’t know, but they are getting closer. The signal is getting stronger.”

“Did they break it? The barrier?”

“It looks like they have. They’ve broken the CMB.” the woman said, feeling a sense of personal defeat. The CMB was created by one of her ancestors.

“I’ll get the space force ready.”

“President Ma’am, why are you risking your life,” the pilot of the ship said while attending to his computer in front. The ship was thousands of times farther away from the earth than the, previously thought, radius of the observable universe.

“I’m a leader, officer. I should be the one to lead humanity to a new era. If we come across other civilisations, it’s very necessary that they talk to somebody who represents the voice of people.”

“I know, but it’s the first expedition.”

“My husband died while searching for the AI particle. We shouldn’t be afraid of risking our lives for doing what we must.”

“He was a great man. How many people can boast of discovering something as significant as the CMB barrier.”

The president felt a sense of pride as she replayed the events in her mind. They had discovered that CMB was just a façade, thanks to her husband - Sri. It also allowed humans to observe the universe which occupied the space beyond the CMB.

The new observations led to the unification of all the fundamental laws into one. More importantly, the new law predicted the presence of a new fundamental particle, the AI particle.

Soon the government funded a solar-scale particle accelerator. It was during its first operation that there was a catastrophic mishap which took Sri’s life. However, his death was not in vain, as the experiments confirmed the existence of the particle.

In the coming years, humanity engineered the AI particle to create a ship able to transport them billions of light-years in a very short time.

The ship was consistently beaming out a message which contained the knowledge of the Earth and its children, as an introductory message to aliens. Multiple giant antennas protruded from the moon-sized ship that the president was captaining.

One moment the president was reminiscing her past. The next moment there was a loud bang, followed by multiple bursts of light all around her. There were figures all around the president surrounding her, and pointing at her, what seemed like weapons.

The president was restrained to her chair with an invisible force. She could only see guns around her. Behind the guns were alien faces glaring at her, ready to shoot her at any moment.

Between those faces, a relatively calm but strange face appeared. He seemed almost like an earth man but not quite.

“Scoundrels. How dare you come back here. Filthy parasites leeching off precious nature.” the man had agony in his voice. He pointed a gun at her heart.

“You’ve misunderstood.”

“Have I? Is it not true, you’ve come from, what you call, Earth?”

“Yes”

“Do you not kill other beings? Do you not enslave, even your own kind, for your pleasure? Have you not polluted your air and land killing millions?” said the man almost stabbing her with his gun.

“All of that is in our past. We realised our mistakes. We come in peace.”

The man drew back a little but didn’t say anything.

She continued, feeling hopeful.

“I thought we’d have a better introduction. Should we?”

The man pulled the gun back. His expression didn't change. It was again she who spoke

“My name’s Jade Thunberg. I’m from Earth. We love all living beings.”

Love.

A gust of anger surged up from deep within his gut, as agony and fear shook him to his core. He clutched the gun tighter and his fingers reached the trigger.

It was bad. Real bad. A pack of humans? A group of humans? A Rave of humans. Yes that's the word. A rave of humans kicked open the doors to the Intergalactic Federation senate. The entire senate turned to see what the commotion was. They had a dude carrying a boombox on his shoulder and it was playing Rick Astley. Loud.

"Order! Order in the Senate!" The speaker tried to shout over the horrific racket. The humans ignored the command and approached the podium. Only upon reaching it did they turn down the volume and switch to a kareoke machine. They started with What's Up by 4 Non Blondes. He-man dance remix.

Yeah. Once the guards threw them out again, this time they were banished to their own alternate reality universe where life could never evolve. They were DONE with humanity. Transported the entire planet, just pushed it through the Tannhäuser Gate. Nobody deserved neighbors like them. Memory wiped them AGAIN for good measure.

In near future, humanity names were know as great parasite or biological parasites of space. Those names were true, because humans saw other planets as only material. The Intergalactic Federation decided to exile humans from their universe to another . Federation decided to do that, because humans started war, but for Federation they lost, but it was a close. Original humans were slaughter by Federation ,only left their DNA. They found perfect place to leave human DNA, it was a small solar system, that had 9 planets and 1 sun. After 4 and 9 planets, has asteroid belt, it will block their communications and ability to leave solar system. Some time pass and Federation forgotten humanity presents and war they started, but for humanity, they almost extincted couple times, from asteroids of solar flares, but they managed to survive. Couple milenia pass and humanity colonized their solar system. After that humans quickly colonized part of their universe. In progress they met Intergalactic Federation. At first humans and federation were cautious about each other, but then slowly started improving their friendship. Until one day, one candidate suggest humans letting in. 78% agreed, others didn't. But there was 1 person, named xenco. He was responsible for federation history and data sector. In that day when voting started to let humans into Federation, he saw 1 folder, that name was ,,parasitic nature of humans".

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We were born in the Intergalactic Federation. Nurtured along by the scientists who created us from what everyone else considered the least feasible line of sentience. We were thin-skinned (never mind that it healed rapidly), weak-boned (the same, and yet easily able to grow to support nearly any weight), overly aggressive (when you don't have armor for skin, an uncompromising attack is the only choice in many situations), and worst of all, we bred like bacteria (fast that is, not by cellular division. No one had heard of rabbits yet.)

Having proved their point, the scientists announced us to the I.F., arranged for us to have our own world, patted us on the head, and went to accept their new prestigious positions, awards, and careers.

We didn't waste any time either and got busy doing what we were made to do. Survive anything and breed.

Earth I

"Eve? I think we have a problem."

"Adam, we most certainly do! Give us a thousand years and we will have filled this planet several times over. We need more room."

"That is one solution. There are others, like population control."

"We are not going to have a death cult!"

"Eve? Did I even say that? No, I did not. Our scientists think we might be able to fool the body with hormone therapy. The surgeons are certain we can make men infertile without disturbing their hormone balance and are reasonably certain they can do it for women too."

"No man will agree to snip snip."

"Eve, we've had ten children. I've had mine snipped."

"You... You did it without asking me?"

"I felt I had to be the first. Leading the way for our people. I also knew you had said you didn't want more children."

"I see. I can hardly do less, then, can I?"

"Eve, part of the reason I did not ask was that I wanted your choice to be yours. It's your body, I have no right to tell you what to do with it."

"Logical, and I appreciate it, but I am also a leader and must make a good example."

> Adam & Eve Say > No More Children!

How can she possibly do that!? I'm sure Adam forced her to do it! He won't ever get snipped!

How could he let her talk him into that? I don't know, but I'm not following either of them anymore!

"As we clearly stated in the original announcement, each of us made our choices independent of the other. We had already decided that we had enough children, but neither of us had any right to tell the other how to treat their body..."

Doctor Spock stated, "With the method used in both, there is no change in the hormone balance. Each will remain who and what they are..."

Economist Buffet explained that "at the present growth rate we will fill this planet in less than 100 years. Every year after that, we will experience a reduction in the quality of life planet-wide. The prudent thing to do is reduce the population growth to buy time for our scientists to develop our FTL Drive." It is well known that our revered creators do not favor allowing us access to FTL travel.

...

((continued))

Rows and rows of croppers yanked fresh, ruby fruit from the wet soil. Others, with baskets, walked alongside the croppers, placing the fruit into a neat pile. Once a basket was full, it was rushed to the processing tent at the edge of the field. Ruby fruit had been an expensive delicacy at Federation gatherings for centuries, but there was no desire in the croppers' hearts to steal. No basket-wielding servant ever pocketed a single fruit. They starved and often died in those fields, never wishing to flee despite the endless and bountiful forest just on the other side of the road from the field they worked. Their rotting flesh fertilized the fruits that their children would pick.

No one wept for the fallen. They continued the cycle of birth, growth, and death alongside the crops they tended to. The Federation was content to enjoy their delicacies and the rest of the galaxies continued in much the same way. Order, progress, and reason were the only pillars that guided the Federation.

A challenge to this status quo had not been conceived since the former revolt was banished. There were no more uprisings. The tumor had been cut off and left to die, alone, in a place that no one would stumble upon. Progress continued. Cures to diseases and normalized luxuries and endless peacetime were known throughout all the cooperating galaxies. What was there to challenge?

A female cropper fell as she carried a basket filled with ruby fruit. Overloaded and underfed, her unconscious body sunk half an inch into the soil, pushed further by the trampling footsteps of her friends and family. A male cropper stopped and was run into by a cropper behind him and another behind them, but the male refused to move. He shoved backwards with an elbow, not strong enough to create space, but enough to halt any further momentum. He knelt down beside the fallen cropper, testing her abdomen for a pulse. Her shoulders rose slowly with each breath, barely visible under the glaring suns.

It spread like a contagion. The rows of croppers, frozen as they waited, suddenly snapped into action, as though woken from a dreamless sleep. They began to fan her and push others away to create space. In time, an entire section of the field had given up their duties to help carry a single woman to the roadside. Some were crying, but others grew angry. How long had they - and the rest of the galaxies - gone on this way without realizing that they had lost something very important.

Federation Enforcement arrived too late to stop the spread of the contagion. The field was in near silence, waiting to see if their friend could be revived by two of the only other croppers who knew basic aid. Ruby fruits were drying out in baskets, left out in the sun on a whim. There was no way to tell who may have seen what happened. No way to know who had succumbed to the illness. Federation Enforcement left, dropping bombs across the field that would leave it barren and lifeless for the rest of time. The ruby fruit would be extinct and a Federation tradition was ended, but Humanity would not spread across the Federation again. Order, progress, and reason would prevail.

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* No AI-generated reponses 🤖 >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [RF] and [SP] for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

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