And now for something completely different… Inspired by this week’s 2-Minutes-Go.

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The Object

The object, as I have come to call it, has been under quarantine ever since it splintered the roof of a nearby home. At least the owner had the good sense to call it in. Who knows how many valuable asteroids and such have been lost to science forever, because the residents wanted to keep the pretty rock or polish it up, hoping to sell it to collectors and scoundrels?

But this is no asteroid. My team had been monitoring the anomaly for quite some time, and nearly all of our projection models showed it striking the planet or at least whizzing closely by. One hates to say a direct hit is “lucky,” or see it do property damage or gods forbid hurt anyone, but in the name of science? We were all quite excited.

Now the two of us are alone, in the quarantine bay of the observatory. It sits in a sealed, coffin-shaped container of thick glass, atop a sturdy pedestal table. I watch; I take notes; I check readings. Nothing has changed. In my singular fascination, and to pass the time between the monitoring of temperature, radiation, a myriad of other quantifiables, I make sketches of it from different angles. It’s really quite beautiful. Its surface, a shade of grayish blue, is smooth. Half mythical creature, half like a shiny pebble one might find near the ocean. Not merely polished by erosion or forged in fire, but of a texture and substance I can’t identify. It is not uniformly round, but a kind of squashed, ovoid shape. Markings spaced in a uniform pattern intrigue me. I can’t tell if they are part of an intentional design or the random scars of traveling through our atmosphere.

No one has yet dared to touch it, myself included. The homeowner, perhaps with a sense of propriety, and of scientific value, for he was often a visitor to the observatory, marshalled his curious neighbors away from it until my team arrived.

And now here it sits. I don’t have the instrumentation to determine if this object that hurtled through space is safe to examine further, so I wait for the big guns to arrive. I wait and I stare. I stare and I wait. I imagine where it might have come from. It’s late and my imagination wanders, swirling in fatigue, and my sketches drift into the realm of science fiction from my childhood—odd beings with symmetrical features, stepping out of wild-looking spacecraft.

Preposterous.

I shake some sense back into my head, take another reading. Radiation—no change. Temperature—no change. I tick all the boxes and return to my chair. I flip back through my sketches. Odd. I don’t have one from the bottom, and, eyeballing the distance from the glass box to the floor, it looks like I can slip easily beneath.

A gasp escapes me. Something…appears to be written there. It’s a form of glyph I’m not familiar with, but the strokes are even and regular and some repeat. I sketch furiously, feeling each marking as if the repetition of each can etch its way into my brain, and the discovery sends my hearts racing. My scales tingle in anticipation; my imagination soars. Could it be possible…could it be possible that we’re not alone?