Burst Fiction » aliens

They wanted his pinky finger at customs.

At first, he’d thought maybe they just wanted a print or a blood sample. But then, he’d seen what happened to the tentacle of the sapient in line ahead of him: It walked away with a fresh blue-weeping stump, the tip excised by the eye-blink swipe of a sterile blade.

He knew that that particular genotype could regenerate tentacle tips – but he doubted that the customs agents here knew or cared that pinkies didn’t grow back. At some passport inspection earlier, one of them must have made a mistake in classifying him and shuffled him into the wrong lane.

No one spoke English here – and why would they? He was the first human being ever to be processed by the gateway station. All he’d had going for him was the universally encoded information in his travel papers.

Alerted to the hold up in the queue as he balked at the tissue sampler, a hard-shelled uniformed agent trundled over. It squawked and helpfully directed his hand toward the machine.

by l. m. orchard

Tempest

“Oh gee, another wave.”, Captain Theurer muttered sarcastically. Swarms of the creatures were coming up towards him from the center of another wormhole.

A few days earlier, Earth’s Defender Squad had sent him to investigate a wormhole that had appeared near Titan. When he had reached it, he saw a swarm of strange creatures starting to come out of it.

The creatures were red and yellow. They appeared to crawl up the edges of the wormhole. Using his thrusters he had navigated around the edge, taking out as many as possible. When he finished battling this first wave, he got sucked down into the wormhole.

He could not pull himself out of the wormhole. At the end of the wormhole he found another. Again, more of the creatures started to rise out it.

By now, he had lost track of how many wormholes he had been through. He was firing and moving as fast as he could. He knew the button for the superzapper was nearby, in case he started to lose the battle.

Grumplers

“Well, Grumplers don’t need chairs.” Cap smiled as if he was happy about something. “Grumplers don’t have legs. They flutter around like bugs. It’s really something to see.”

“But we need a place to sit down. I’m not standing up all day. Don’t they have chairs available for guests who have legs?”

“No. Grumplers feel it is an honor to be in their home. And as honored guests, you are supposed to never sit down. To them, sitting down is a sign of disrespect.”

“Cap, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” I was beginning to regret my decision to be a part of this mission. “What about the toilet? How do I use the privy?”

Kayla

“How close?” We could be famous, and rich if we could get a good scan of the first aliens ever encountered.

“Real close. Their signal only traveled for a couple of kiloseconds.” With her head resting in her hands, and her body shifting in and out of coalescence, it looked like she was trying to hold herself physically in our time.

She paused and solidified long enough for me to hand her the cola float and then took a long drink from it. “Thanks.”

She sat down in the center of the spherical control chamber and I flipped the music pod over to her. “I got you this, too. My kids don’t need them anymore.”

She turned it over in her tiny hands. “Kind of old isn’t it?” The crooked smile reminded me of my own daughter when she was that age.

“Alright, alright. Enough with the age remarks. The aliens? Do they have something to do with the mass aberration we’re seeing? And the drive malfunction?”

“Yes. I think so.” She struggled a moment, faded out then back in. “They’ve been here for a long time.”

by Cobweb

An e-zine of one-shot short stories around 1000 characters long.

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Posts Tagged ‘aliens’

Held Up At Customs

Tempest

Grumplers

Kayla