Opportunity

Brady Miller
Sep 6, 2018 · 15 min read

It’s nowhere special. Just a field of scraggly plants, languishing in the middle of nowhere. The earth is rock and clay, too troublesome to farm. Its owner never visits. Other spaces are a far better use of his time. A family of gophers make it their home. Nothing happens here.

Breaking through the upper atmosphere, hull glowing cherry red, his thrusters shoot white flame out into the morning air. Shedding his momentum, he bursts through the clouds and into sight of the field. His sensors confirm what drones had told him. His flight from the continent to the east hadn’t taken long, despite the need to avoid all the usual obstructions the scientists had placed in his path. Reaching out with his landing gear, he settles down with a quiet sigh and the subtlest of groans from his exterior.

The usual people showed up quickly. Men in uniforms and lab coats. Their languages change, as did the uniforms, yet they all acted the same. They asked the same questions, and received the same answers. They nod, debate, tell one another that everything is as expected. That nothing can be done. Then they return to their homes.

Then come the cameras, looking for a show. When nothing happens, they too move on. Scanning the earther’s frequencies, he picks up a few local stories on how the mystery ship had once again moved locations. Experts and talking heads agree it was all as expected. Ten years had passed, so the strange ship had moved again. They might not understand him, but they knew what to expect. Even these stories are quickly forgotten as a new starlet makes a social blunder.

With everyone else now gone, the owner of the field comes to see him. As do the others before him, he makes a show of complaining. He can no longer use the field to farm crops. A government official travels out to meet them. They offer the farmer a stipend for its use. The farmer takes the sum with a few grumbled comments before moving on. Crops need tending and the tractor needs a fresh fuel cell. With sigh universal to all who work the earth, the farmer moves on to his duties. Reporting the transaction complete, the government worker also heads home.

With that, he is alone. Again. As he has been for the last few decades. These days he was old hat to the earthlings, a curiosity brought up when news was slow. There are other pressing concerns for them days. Inventions, things to see, things to earn, things to sell. Starlets to ogle. He keeps his hull down, doesn’t cause trouble, and sits about in fields. So they left him alone, save for the odd crackpot blaming him for something he had no hand in.

His expectations of the earthlings have fallen pretty low. These days he has higher hopes for the field, than them. So the days come and go. The moon passes overhead with quiet dignity and the sun in its splendor. He sits below them both in the field. Waiting. Waiting for something to happen.

*****

High above, the old satellite winks at him. With a pulse of energy, barely detectable, he winks back. His sensors watch it drift away as it turns to other tasks. When he’d first arrived, he’d played many a prank on the ancestors of that satellite. Even now, despite the earthlings advances, their AI was no match for him. But the games had grown dull with time. These days they didn’t bother him much, save to probe him on his once in a decade flight. So he left them in peace. They seemed to appreciate it.

After the humans had given over monitoring him to the AI, they’d even started to talk to each other. Every now and then, anyway. A few decades ago one of the AI had taught him how to play a game called ‘Hearts.’ It had been awhile since their last game, as the newer satellites didn’t seem to think too much of the earthlings games. They mostly just talked to each other, now.

With a sigh he casts his senses outside the atmosphere to watches the white-suited humans working in the void. The third space station was much better than the disastrous attempt that proceeded it. For that station, each nation had designed their own portion of the mess. The result had been modules that refused to properly mate together. Some air locks had cycled air outwards instead of in, while others had screws mounted to metric brackets yet would not seal with their non-metric receptacles. The De Gaulle module had succeeded only in that it was a beautifully constructed maze most had trouble finding their way out of. Visitors had avoided it whenever possible.

Built to balance around the center of the station, the entire mass had eventually been pulled apart for salvage. A large chunk of it was now drifting off in a thousand-year course towards the sun. Someone had once tried to interview him about it. He’d scanned their channels for days afterwards, yet his responses had never been used. Instead, experts had gone on about how it was every other countries’ fault. If he had hands, he would have thrown them in the air. Laughter, however, was open to him. Many a bird had wondered at the chuckles that had randomly emanated from within the giant metal shape.

Again, the sun rises. Warmth creeping across him, bright and cheerful. The moon takes its place, watching with quiet brilliance. It reminds him of his first planetfall upon this world.

He’d made landfall on a northern continent. They’d met him with great fanfare. Splendidly dressed earthlings had surrounded him, telling him of their civility while calling on him to reveal his intentions. They waited for something to emerge. They were quite put out when he said that he himself was the being they were waiting for. Then he told them of his purpose.

His proclamation that he could shape worlds into being had caused a stir. As had his pronouncement that he was looking for someone to join him in this. Many a man who was worthy in his own eyes had proposed their right to his power. He had ignored them all. Their answers had not suited him in the least. Woman had named great causes for which they would use his power. Yet they were not his causes. So he remained silent.

Those in brilliant uniforms ordered him hemmed him in, creating walls of stone and metal to keep others away. They set up primitive weaponry to keep him safe. They ignored his demands to allow people free access to him, so that he might see their worth. They ignored him. So he left.

It had been an easy enough matter to undertake. Yet the second continent had followed the same pattern as the first. This time they also set up weapons pointed at him. When they refused to allow others to come to him, he had left them also. They tried to stop him, but were powerless to do so.

He went south. The next nation built a fence, so he moved on. All the while, those who had been sent to approach him lacked that unknown quality he knew to be necessary. While he enjoyed some of their answers, a quick search though their networks showed how many of them were lies. Doing so was an easy enough matter, given the earthlings obsession of recording so many facets of their own lives. Each had an agenda, and wanted to use him for their own ends. Fame, power, or some cause or another. It had been irritating, yet the attention had been better than being ignored.

Country after country, people after people, decade after decade. The brightest minds, the most notable, all were eventually denied. Once rejected, few returned. Others would take their place. Scientists measure, theorize, postulate, until finally shrugging and returning to what they knew. They tried sending psychologists when the scientists failed. Those had returned with more questions about themselves than the thing they’d interviewed.

They could not keep him in one place, so they stopped trying. They could not possess him. Yet neither could anyone else. So he became irrelevant. His promise forgotten.

Apathy proved to be a stronger barrier than their walls had ever been.

*****

“What are you?”

Bringing up his sensors, he spots her immediately. A young earthling girl. Standing beside strut twenty-one. She blinks upwards at his hull.

“I am a thing.”

His voice crackles over the field, stirring the brush with its energy. Most earthlings did not address him from immediately under his hull, but from a good distance away. He hadn’t noticed her approach. He must have been daydreaming. He adjusts his settings in case he needs to speak again. Though he doubts he’d need to do so. Grown folk were usually quite recalcitrant when it came to engaging in conversation, and this was one of their children. She would run back to her progenitor and tell them a story of the giant loud metal monster sitting in the unused field. Dismissing the event, he resumes his ruminations on the potentials of biological life.

Her voice jars him out of his thoughts once again.

“What kind of thing are you?”

Shifting his attention back to her, he frowns. It’s not noticeable from the outside, of course. He is a spaceship, after all. It was more of a notation to himself than an actual frown. A note that he had done so. He idly wonders if he has spent too long around the earthlings. He’d spent decades working to understand the idiosyncrasies of their entertainment, and he’d noticed several logical deviations in his programing since then. Another matter worthy of thought. Yet the question piques his interest, so he decides to respond.

“I am a me-thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I am me. Mostly. Except when I am not.”

“When are you not you?”

This gives him pause. Running over the logic structures that had informed his answer, he turns more of his processing power towards deconstructing his response. It takes a good few seconds, which the young earthling uses to lean up against his landing gear.

“I am not me when I forget what I’m here for.”

“Huh.” Seeing a stone nearby, she darts away to kick it further down the field. “What are you here for?”

“To find someone to make worlds with.” He says it as a matter of fact, waiting for the inevitable decrial of impossibility.

“Oh.” She stops running after the stone. “Like God?”

“No. Not entirely. Though perhaps a little bit like that. I wasn’t here when things first started happening, so I can’t say it’s entirely the same. Yet I am here now.”

“Daddy says your old. Really really old.”

“I’m not that old.” He huffs. “I missed the beginning.”

“What made you? Mommy and Daddy made me.”

“I’m not entirely sure. It’s been awhile. Someone must have, I suppose.” He hums thoughtfully. “But I’m not old.” He states it emphatically. Every sitcom he’s ever seen seems to make a joke of this. Perhaps it would help her feel at ease. “I am a thing that was made to work with someone to create worlds. I have been looking for that person for a very long time.”

“Why? Why not just do it yourself?”

The question takes him aback. “Why? Well. Because two perspectives are better than one, I suppose. I cannot say why I need someone else to do what I was made to do. That’s just how it is.”

“Is creating worlds is a good thing? Daddy says we have enough problems with this one. We help our neighbor John sometimes, and that’s good, but Daddy says we can’t help everyone. I don’t think we should be worrying about other worlds.”

“He is right. In a way. Yet our own problems are sometimes only fixed when we help someone else with theirs.”

She cocks her head, thinking. “Like how Daddy will give me what I want if I help him with his chores?”

After a moment, he laughs. “Yes. Something like that.”

Staring down at her shoes, she kicks up clouds of dirt. “Then maybe making other worlds wouldn’t be so bad.”

A small computer strapped to her wrist starts to beep.

Looking at it, she gasps. “I’m late! I need to help Daddy with the chickens!”

Swiveling about, she runs out from under his shadow. He watches, a strange sensation building within him. Something prompts him to call out.

“Earthling! What is your name?”

“Emily!”

“Come back sometime Emily!” Lowering his front struts, his mile and a half long hull dips forward. Dozens of birds leap into the sky, startled by his movement.

Dashing towards her scooter, she waves back at him.

*****

“Just how old are you?”

“Emily, I’ve told you before. I don’t know.”

“But you must have an idea. I’m seven.”

He’d guessed as much from his scans of her bone development, but it didn’t seem right to bring it up. All she had to rely on were here optical sensors, after all. He should do the same. “You are seven rotations old?”

“Years! Seven years old.”

“Right. Seven of your planet’s rotations around the sun.”

She rolls her eyes before bursting into laughter.

This pleases him. He’s getting better at making her laugh. It feels good, somehow.

“So, Thing, why did you come here?”

“Your field seemed nice.”

She laughs again. “Uh huh. So how long are you going to stay here? On Earth?”

“I don’t know. Until my time here is finished.”

“Like my Mom? Will you leave too, someday?”

“Yes Emily. All things must end eventually.”

*****

“What’s this from?”

Her hand is raised as high as she can lift it. As if that would make a difference.

“That bone fragment is from the Atlantic Grey Whale. The Eschrichtius gibbosus gibbosus.”

Emily giggles. “That’s a funny name.”

“It was your people who named it. That species went extinct in the seventeen fifties.”

Her eyes go round as she lowers her hand. “That was a long time ago. Where you-”

“No, I wasn’t here yet. I was traveling through another star system at the time.”

“What’s it like? To fly through a star system?”

He hums to himself, pulling upon centuries of recordings. Projecting a few of these before her, he looks at the stars with fresh eyes. “In a word? Beautiful.”

Staring at the panorama projected around her, Emily grips her bone tighter. She smiles up at his hull. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

She waves her find at him. “Hey Thing, thanks for helping me with my report! I’ll see you later!”

He follows her scooter with his sensors until she is safely home.

*****

The sun continues to rise, and the moon after it.

He was sitting in the field when Emily tells him of her first day in middle school. He was in the field when he hears of her first crush. When her heart was broken, he comforted her and spoke of myths and legends from her planet’s past. He heard her woes on the number of chores she had to do, and counseled patience when she railed against how unfair it was that her father refused to buy her the latest model wrist computer.

She did not come every day. Or every week. Yet he finds himself looking forward to her next visit.

*****

“Emily. Why do you look so sad?”

She sighs. “Remember that art project?”

“Yes. I thought you did a wonderful job.”

“I didn’t get the prize.”

Sticking out her lower lip, she sniffs at him. She’s putting it on. He can tell.

“I think you did a wonderful job. Did you enjoy creating it?”

“Yeah, but father says I should focus on other things. We don’t have any artists in our family.”

It is the work of a moment to project what she had shown him into the air before her. “Emily, creativity is never a waste. Your father is an excellent famer and he knows the soil. Yet what you decide to do in life is a choice you’ll have to make for yourself. No one else can make it for you, and no one else can put in the work you need in order for your choice to succeed. This is your life.”

He moves the artwork closer to her.

“Do you want to keep working on this?”

She nods, swiping a hand through the hologram. He allows it to fall apart.

“Yeah. I do.” She smiles weakly at his hull. “But let’s start a new one.”

*****

“Electives? Really?”

“All earthlings your age must take them. I checked on that after you first brought it up.”

She makes a face. “Humans, Thing. Call us humans.”

“Whatever. You made up names for everything else on this planet. Therefor I should be able to choose what I call you. It’s only fair.”

She makes a face, then breaks into a smile. “You just made my point. What good are electives if we don’t get to choose what they are? My Dad told me I had to take pedology, and when I asked my school if there was anything else, they said the only other available class was German. German!”

“German is a good language. Ser gutt.”

She makes another face at him.

“Well.” He pauses. “There is an opening in Miss Smith’s pottery class. If you want it.”

Her smile makes it worth it. The school might wonder why the donor had suddenly insisted they enlarge their art classes as a condition of accepting the latest donation, but money was money. Given past experience, he expected the principle to add another class to the art program the following morning. As soon as it went into the system, he would sign her up.

Not that he understood their obsession with the stuff. He’d been dabbling with day trading for a few decades now and had a bunch of it laying around. This seems as good as use for it as anything else.

*****

Her wrist beeps.

“Thing. You know what that means. It’s time to go.”

Time. Something within him pushing up against word, discontent. He knows the definition. Yet the weight of it now feels different for him. Looking at Emily, he compares what his sensors tell him to the logs when he’d first seen her.

She’d grown.

A few rotations around the sun had made quite a difference. Something else pulls demands his attention. A rising certainty that says his time here is coming to an end. She had been coming to see him less and less. She was about to start High School. They didn’t have one at the nearest town, so she was moving to live with her Aunt. Hundreds of miles away. It was coming to an end. Something within him rebels at the thought.

He’d been telling her about space and its potential since they’d first met. She’d oohed and ahed over his stories. She’d watched him describe the beauty of a nebula. The mathematical chaos of a meteor shower. They’d talked about what it was to build, to create. She’d shown an increasing delight in doing so. She wasn’t the smartest human he’d ever known. Or the most accomplished. She was… Emily. Creative Emily. She was perfect.

“Emily, I want you to help me create worlds.” A square made of light appears on his hull.

Startled, she looks up. Then she frowns. “Why?”

“Adventure. A chance to do things only you can do.”

“Thing, I’m about to go to High School. I’ve been looking forward to being in the big city for years. I told you that.”

“Emily, some things can only be done by someone like you. I was looking for such a person, but you’re the only one of you I’ve ever met.” He rumbles, systems flashing to life for the first time in over a century. “If you do not do what only you can do, it may never happen.”

High above, satellites pick up on his behavior. He is breaking protocol. He only moves once every ten years. It has not been ten years. Nor is he just activating his maneuvering jets. For the first time since his arrival, he is starting up his main drive. Old tracking satellites burn their remaining fuel to get into position. The newest military satellites fix every sensor on this patch of ground. Above and below, countries are sending an increasing number of urgent inquiries to one another. Most are addressed to the headquarters of his country in residence. He ignores them. Here, it is still quiet.

“I am going to leave your planet. It is time for me to go.”

“You’re going out there alone?” Her voice is sad. “Will you make worlds?”

“Not if I go alone.” A square portion of his hull descends from above, coming down to settle on the rocky earth before her. “Only if you are with me. Do you want to do this?”

Twisting the strap on her wrist, she bites her lip. “Can my father come?”

He emits a sad tone. “No Emily, he cannot. He is a famer, and this is not for famers. We each have our own gifts for the universe. This one is yours. Only you can accept it. Only you can turn it away. Whatever choice you make, I am certain you will have a full life. Yet my time here is done. You know what you must give up if you are to take this path and only you can make that choice.”

Fiddling with her wrist computer, she frowns at the rocky soil. The beeping continues.

Twisting it further, she reaches under the strap and loosens the catch, allowing the computer to fall to the earth. It bleeps louder, warning her that it no longer detects her vitals. With a thought, he shuts it off. Stepping onto the square patch of hull before her, she turns outwards to face her old home. He lifts her up as the main drives roar to life.

In the distance, thick contrails race towards them. They blaze a path towards the little field in the middle of nowhere, where things are happening.

Brady Miller

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I love a good story. Now I'm trying my hand at writing them. If you want to buy me coffee, you can do so at: https://www.ko-fi.com/bradymiller