denim

I'm looking for critique here. Feel free to tear into it. I recently put it into a professional slush pile and got no comments at all, which says that it's not good enough to bother commenting on, but I'm hoping people here will do so.


So Dense
Howard S Shubs
23 July 2005

This is more of a letter than a story, but I think it's worth a shot.



We saw you, you know.

Your probe came crashing into one of our nature preserves. We were all around, watching, but you never saw us. All you saw were a single species of grazer and a single species of predator. You never wondered why, in such a large biota as our planet, why you only saw the two, paired, species. You simply decided that, because our kind of critter isn’t as dense as yours, that we could never get anywhere.

So you went away again.

It wasn’t the first time you’d been to visit, either. Previously, you’d dropped probes right through our industrial waste sites, and poked holes in them too, but you weren’t looking where you were going, now were you? No, too busy, too busy getting gas samples before your probe was crushed by our planet’s nature.
You didn’t think too much about it. You just crashed on through. You’d never think to make a properly buoyant probe, no. Why should you bother trying to stick around for a while, and see what you could have seen of our civilization? You might have noticed, then, the massive habitats around the nature preserve. You must have thought them as important as most of your clouds. Hard to miss, but you didn’t notice them.

We’d been watching you for quite some time by then, set up in a few of “your” clouds.

Curious about what you call “liquid”, we’d come and set up a nicely buoyant tended probe of our own in an appropriate place to our nature in your upper atmosphere. You never saw us.

You certainly saw our effects, though!

We created twin towers of water, one coming to us, and one returning to your “ocean”. We made a mistake, we admit that freely. We soon discovered that after we got some specimens from various places on your planet.

We played with them. We observed. From what we’d learned about liquid and from our tests of previous specimens, we were able to form “food” for those in our “goldfish bowl” lab. We made the food and water globules from previous specimens. Your creatures ate them without trouble.

But they didn’t live long, regardless. What finally stopped us from proceeding was the communication one of them made, on its surface. It proved to us that you were not just some mindless animals, unlike most other creatures we had encountered on both our worlds. You were sophants, like us. We stopped sampling on your world, though we maintained a watch in orbit.

We saw your probes leave your planet, we saw you crash them into your one noticeable moon. A year or two later, we saw your fly probes through the solar system. Then you crashed a probe into our planet!

Keeping in mind our own mistakes, we wrote it off as a learning experience for you. After all, we weren’t innocent of such errors. The fact that you killed hundreds of us on the way through our environment had to be understood as “expected”, given your lack of experience.

Not many years after that though, we found out that we’d seriously misjudged your technological level! Oh, yes we did. Apparently, in order to try to help the animals on one of our moons, you collapsed our world into a little star, killing all but a few of us who happened to be off-world at the time.
We’d seen your probe before, sitting in high orbit. We knew it was there. We figured it was just an observation post, until it came into our environment and started multiplying! It sucked up our pleasant volumes of gas, and reproduced wildly. It increased our planet’s density far beyond what was normal and decent.

The survivors required a few years to breed up to a useful level, and a few more to build the necessary equipment. But we did it. Now we’re coming for your planet.

If you think what we did before was unpleasant, you’re definitely not going to like what we do this time. Instead of making our fountains on the water, we’re going to do it on the solid surface. We made a deal, you see, with those even denser creatures who live beneath you. They want access to space, but they can’t get through your planet’s crust.

So we’ll remove it for them. Don’t worry, it won’t inconvenience you for long. Just ignore the yellow “ships” we created for appearances, and it’ll be over soon.