Kid Brother

As you may recall, last week I threw up a little wad of fiction in lieu of a rant, with a little intro which basically poked people for opinions. Anyway, a surprising number of you gave such an opinion, and every single one said the exact same thing. "That's a pretty good start of a story, you should write the whole thing." That's about what I was thinking about it too, so I guess it's good to know we're all on the same page.

Here's the thing though. I didn't want to hear that. I wanted either "That sucks." or "That's sorta neat, what else have you got?" either of those would let me just totally ignore that little fiction wad and concentrate on the other dozen projects I'm working on. But NOOOOOOOOOOO! You had to go and LIKE it, so now I have to beef it up into a multi-page story with a plot! Wait, you liked it, so I shouldn't be griping. ANYWAY, I'm beefing that sucker up on the side, but I'm not throwing any more of it up on this page for quite some time, because when something has a plot, you don't want to start reading it and have to deal with a cliffhanger ever 3 months due to my updating habits. So, instead of posting more of that, I'm throwing up a totally unrelated, more self-contained, and in my opinion, FAR SUCKIER vignette. If you actually dig it, I get a confidence boost which makes me write more stuff like this, and if you don't, you lose any desire to read any fiction I throw up on this page and I have no pressure to deal with. It's win-win!

Now then, story time. Again, feel free to give opinions.

"What's this do?"

"That's the engine controls. Please don't touch them."

"What's this do?"

"That's the fuel pressure gauge. The farther to the left it is, the less fuel I have left."

"What's this do?"

"That's the radio. Don't you have that sort of thing at home?"

"The same way as the radio you have at home. It picks up vibrations through a special antenna and translates them into sound."

"It can't work the same way though! The waves my radio picks up go too slow to get this far away in a short time!"

"Right. So this one sends vibrations through the ether, which is there whether there's air or not and lets them travel faster."

"OK... so how does your engine work?"

"Huh? It's an engine. You put fuel in it, and it makes the ship go."

"Yeah, but how EXACTLY does it work? I mean, in scientific terms?"

"I don't know!"

"How could you not know how your own ship works?"

"Of course I don't. Have you ever met anyone who knows exactly how every single thing they own works? I know exactly as much about my engine as I need to. I know how to refuel it, and if it breaks down, I have a general idea how to fix it. That's it."

"OK... so what's that do?"

"... That's a TOILET! I hope I don't have to explain THAT to you. Now look, if you're going to keep asking all these questions, I'm going to turn this thing around and take you home."

"Sorry. So, what do people eat where you live?"

"That does it! You're going home!"

And that is why we no longer attempt to make contact with the inhabitants of that planet. We've made other trips there every so often, but each and every one of them is such an inquisitive little twerp that they expect you to explain how the whole freaking universe works right there on the spot. Still, if you take the time to learn their languages, they've been broadcasting some pretty good fiction out to us for several decades now.