Annual Galactic Speech
Midweek Pick-Me-Up #3, prompted by a celebrity tweet
If I die under mysterious circumstances, it’s been nice knowin ya, he said in his annual galactic speech. He had prepared another opening, but that morning, after a vivid dream with dragons fireballing him, while dwarves hacked at his achilles' heel, he was convinced his plan to endorse aliens living on Earth was in jeopardy. His impromptu opening loosened the tension and signaled to his opponents: Death was his mistress. In fact, some of the yellow press asserted the next day, he had solved the question of death, totally missing the point of his paramount speech. We have made contact, he continued and repeated his famous words from a decade earlier, We have made contact, but with contact comes great responsibility. Today, the dawn of making a choice is upon us.
Why should aliens and humans share resources? There are those of us who say we have enough trouble of our own to open up Earth's bosom to aliens. But I say to such pessimism, Imagine how much we would learn from observation alone? For wasn’t it our space observatory that first spotted the aliens? And wasn’t it by observing the pattern of their flight that we calculated how to get their attention? Will aliens take on bread and wine with the same reverence we do? I am curious to know. Aren’t you? How will they adapt to gravity, gold and the drama of the human soul? How will they relate to our forests, religion and the myths? We could learn more than we can fathom, yet there are those in the counsel who oppose such joint exploration. We don’t have ships, they cry. We can’t travel to their planet! What’s in it for us?
'Us' has been shattered, for 'Us' has expanded to include three more inhabited planets. (The audience gasped, they knew of only one so far.) We’re working hard to solve traveling in their spaceships, but rest assured we will not stop there. Inviting aliens to build alongside us will open up a horizon of innovation. To those who say aliens will dilute the pool of the human genome, for they so cunningly take on our appearance, I say, Goodwill speaks louder than looks.
Let us not judge the Unknown, for the Hereafter uses the same thoughts we use on each other.
His speech lasted another hour and was received with a standing ovation. That night he dreamt of giants and his favorite flower.
P.S. The prompt is a Tweet by Elon Musk.
You have just read the series Midweek Pick-Me-Up. Always on Wednesdays. Always written to a prompt or a tweet (in bold), in 5 minutes or else the screen goes blurry. An edit here, an edit there, and now it’s yours to share.