Author: Benjamin DeHaan
The Delta 21’s hull creaks as she slows and comes into view of the alien space bubble, a pink translucent sack hovering in outer space.
At its current rate of expansion, it will enter the stratosphere by nightfall. By next week all of Earth will be swallowed. Our team has worked around the clock studying it from the outside, but no technology nor engineer has the knowledge to understand something so exotic, so beautiful.
We can only poke at it with a stick for so much longer. We need answers now. No more meetings in which we theorize until we start laughing at how crazy our conclusions are. We need to know what will happen when our world is devoured by these visitors.
I tell the crew I am going in.
“We haven’t had pre-meeting consultations with our deputy counselors,” says Jenson, my second in command and chief of deep space navigation.
I groan.
I ignore Jenson, head to pod bay, and suit up.
I enter the pod and smile back to Jenson. Chief scientist Recker had said there is a high possibility that the bubble is a time device that goes into the future.
I don’t care. I am the captain and face to face interaction is the only way to rectify this situation.
The pink wall swallows the nose of my pod, then me.
I wake up and come to my senses. I am in loin cloth, I am on earth, and my limbs are tied to a long log.
Monkey men hoot, laugh, hiss, and growl.
I am carried to a glowing fire pit with y-shaped stakes on each side.
They lick their lips as they watch me pass by.
Bones are scattered everywhere.
And with a clink and a clank, I am set to roast.