Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

There’s a star on the horizon, and it’s golden, not white. Tasmisa is what the people who live there call it.
They spent thirty-eight years developing the world-shifting technology that allowed them to escape the destruction of their world by a colossal asteroid. An offshoot of that technology let them deliver a warning to us, along with all their research, and a library of wonders to support it.
When their desperate transition ended, there were problems. Atmospheric bleed and tectonic instability being the most obvious. A year after their arrival they had recovered enough to assess their state. What they found was a horrific irony.
In escaping their doom from an asteroid, they’d made themselves the doom for us both. Their rogue planet will collide with Earth in four years’ time. There’s nothing they can do. It took every resource they had for them to leap from their distant star system to ours. They admit they don’t even know if they originate from our reality. Certain crippling changes to what were their accepted laws of physics makes them think so.
Frustrated by this quirk of fate, they decided to tell us, and give us knowledge. We’re ‘quite advanced’ from their perspective. Most importantly, we have the resources to create the solution to the problem, possibly even saving ourselves and the Tasmisians.
They might think us quite advanced, but as I listen to the news drone on about another theatre of war opening in the global conflict over control of Tasmisian technology, I think we’re still stone-throwing savages who are going to die fighting over who gets to be the boss of saving us.