The Code

Photo by Harry Shelton on Unsplash

One evening, all the bulbs in the village started to flicker simultaneously. Manoj, the only electrician in the village, suggested that it must be due to the fluctuation of voltage in the cranky old transformer.

Suman, the eight-year-old daughter of the postmaster, had recently learned to decode Morse Code from YouTube. And she naively went on decoding everything that she thought could be decoded — blinks of her mother’s eyelids, bells of the temple, and so on.

This evening, she decoded the flickering of the bulbs too.

It said, “ SURRENDER OR DIE. WE ARE COMING.”

Then within an hour, they were all over the place. Aliens.