I have a great story to tell you.

As the pale blue object appeared in view, everyone on the bridge knew that they had finally found it. Just like the ancient scripts had said, it was the third planet from an aging star, in a system of eight others. After a forgotten number of generations, humankind has finally returned home.

No one remembers why the species left. It was so long ago that the crew only had vague guesses at best. The atmosphere was clean and stable, the biosphere was thriving with plant and animals that have never been seen before, and radiation levels were only at a minor spike above what they were used to.

That radiation could be from anything, they thought.

So after just a single rotation around the star, the crew prepared to finally land on the planet to take a look around. It was everything they had expected; air as fresh as could be, the beaming light from the star touching upon their skin with the gentlest of warmth, and gusts of wind that brushed their hair back that felt just so natural. The crew couldn’t possibly believe why their ancestors would ever leave this planet.

Within the span of a dozen rotations, the crew was almost finished preparing for the resettling of the planet. Now that they were given a second chance, they wanted to do things right. The foundations of the eventual metropolis were placed away major fault lines and far from the coast. The energy sources were sustainable and clean, and no resources were to be removed from the planet. Their civilization had mined and destroyed many mineral rich moons and planets before, but this one was different. This was precious. This one was going to be home.

With word having arrived that the first wave of settler ships were on their way to the planet, the crew had just one last task to complete. While it was hardly a problem at all, they still wanted to investigate the source of the unusual radiation spikes they detected when they first arrived. With sensitive instruments and little bit of luck, they found the source to be near the equator of the planet, in the middle of one of the large landmasses that floated above the single ocean.

As the crew peered closer at its perfectly smooth surface, they found only a couple of markings, as if the object was trying to tell them a story.Years of peace and erosion had covered up the source and smoothed away almost all traces of the impact crater, but the crew eventually managed to dig it up for examination. As they went about their task, it was clear that they weren’t the first to uncover what hid beneath the ground. It was a solid black slab of an unknown material and mesmerized those who saw it. Too hard to be cut by any of their machines, and with angles too precise to be naturally made, the crew quickly realized it must have originated from elsewhere in the universe. The vast emptiness of space was not so empty after all.

The translations were not perfect, but even with a minor grasp of the foreign markings, the basic idea of the story was disturbingly clear. It was a story of genocide and destruction, fear and horror. It was a warning. The story ended without ever exposing where the object was from, or when the evil would come, just that it would, eventually, arrive at this planet.

Word spread quickly among the crew members as well as the settler ships. The settlers were frightened and turned back. The crew was ordered to abandon the planet and return immediately, leaving no trace behind. They were furious. They had spent their entire lives looking for this planet, preparing it to be the paradise of their civilization. “Put the object back” they demanded, “and bury the warning with it. We can still call the ships back.”

But, of course, it was too late.  For once a story is told, just like the first time the people on the planet heard the story, it cannot be called back.  Once told, it is loose in the world.

—

Simply due to convenience, my audience consisted of two friends over a Skype call. Just as the lesson had said, writing out the story was a very different experience than reading it to an audience. Throughout my entire degree, I was taught to write and speak with expert precision and focus; no frivolous or decorative words were to be included, and only the ideas that needed to be conveyed should be done so. However, as I read the story to my digital audience, I found myself adding in extra words and phrases, creating a much more robust atmosphere and setting than I had originally written. So much detail was lost between the transition of the images in my head to the words on the document, yet reading the words aloud, the orality of the whole experience, seemed to bring back some of that imagination.

Screenshot from “Battlestar Galactica”, The Colonial Fleet arriving in orbit over the Thirteenth Colony, March 2010, accessed January 2014. <http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:1stearth.jpg>