The Last Debrief

Again, Dan Mader's weekly flash fiction exercises provided a kickstart for another short piece last week. I had his permission to upload this clearly-longer-than-two-minutes excerpt. And I mean excerpt, as it feels like it could be a part of some vast space opera... not that I'll ever probably write it. It's like a brief farewell transmission, a threat whispered along the interstellar dust highways, something ominous lurking far beyond any conceivable future. Yet it's there.

Seriously. Go read Unemployed Imagination; follow the link above. Every Friday there are some excellent pieces of writing on there. Anyway, here's mine:

The Last Debrief

Perhaps it's because you have two of everything. Two lower appendages, two upper. Two mammaries. Gonads. Binocular vision. You are obsessed, bound and determined, to choose this over that, the far over the near, the left and the right, the up and the down, the purest dark and the damnedest light. 

And because we're many-limbed and multivisioned, a field of possibility so much more complex than your stark binaries, we don't need to make your kinds of choice, between faith and nihilism, release and execution. We can live beneath the layered greys, comforted by those rings of lambent light against charcoal backgrounds our generations have always dreamed under, a space less void than some firefly twilight.

Your rage is inevitable given you can only dwell in either the birth agony of sunfire or the raw, biting negation of interstellar cold.

In the banal, prosaic spirit of all your kind's doomed couplings, especially when one party finally grasps the pure harm they've so recently undergone, at the tail-end of a tarnished tryst, we would like to say this: we wish we'd never met you. We wish that fervently and, in terms you yourselves will understand more than most, eternally, with profound revulsion.

As we recoil from you, we realise how ironic it is the extent to which our chance encounter has unsettled and perhaps damaged our own historic, even genetic, equilibrium.

We hope and expect to recover from this after the passing of millennia. We're a long-lived people. If after eons of reflection and purification it so happens that we can't shake your taint, can't scrub away the stink of you, we will return to your skies and, from a sense of both mercy and vengeance, we will obliterate your kind from this universe, for good and for all, and most likely for the good of all.

The final appalling irony being that, in the act itself, we will ostensibly have become you.