New Edge
Science Fiction Short StoryAnother response to an Indies Unlimited prompt, this one had a character named Tom hearing a loud noise behind him while escaping corporate life in the wildest woods he could find. When he turned around, his jaw dropped.
My idea there was him seeing literally nothing. Because the world was gone behind him. Half the world being shrunk was done because I had to have a somewhat plausible way this could happen without the other half of the world collapsing. So, aliens. Super-advanced ones trying to reverse entropy in the universe itself, shrinking it in the process, because the universe's expansion is being reset as well.
I do understand now that is not how universal expansion works, simply because the expansion only affects macroscopic distances between objects within the universe, but I did not when I wrote this piece.
Aliens advanced way past our understanding of the world is a topic of science fiction I am very fond of. In this instance, those aliens using their technology to stop or at least postpone the eventual dissipation of the universe itself does have a literary inspiration. I took the basic idea from (Warning: major plot spoiler!) Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia, where attempts of self-preservation by intelligent life just before the end of the universe resulted in earth's very history changing into parts of the planet becoming an alien world from 1912 on.
I might one day revisit this idea of mankind suddenly being parted by a wall of physics, effectively splitting it into two neighboring but separate space age civilizations for more than two centuries. Although I am just now realizing I have no idea what happened to the moon in all this. Yeah, the moon might become a problem to at least one half of the planet. I can't have it on the shrunk side or it would slam into the other side, obliterating earth. I can't really have it unshrunk because that would fling the moon out of orbit and into space. I guess the aliens have to engineer something within half a month, tops. This is not helped by them clearly being on the shrunk side. Huh.
September 2015
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How to Sing Butterflies
