Transporter Mishap
Science Fiction Flash FictionThis making-of contains spoilers
Also titled “Alien Deceit”, because that was the title of the Indies Unlimited prompt it was based on and submitted to. That title did not make any sense whatsoever for this story, so I changed it. This was my first ever entry in the weekly Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge, back in July 2015. It got picked as a finalist, meaning people could vote what short they found best. It finished third among the five entries.
The prompt had something going wrong while being beamed down to a planet, arriving next to some kind of giant dome. It heavily implied Ensign Jeffries did it on purpose to get ahead on a promotion. That last part made no sense to me (making a deliberate error to get promoted? I do not think that will work), so I ignored it by putting Jeffries' fate unreachably into the past.
It hit me that during transport, you are likely not conscious. Any amount of time and any distance traveled is not existing to the temporarily non-existent traveler. You step into the transporter, disappear and instantly reappear somewhere else.
So, what if you happen to reappear not once, but several times? What if a lot of time passes? What if you wake up to a world populated by thousands of copies of yourself arriving before?
So I thoroughly removed mankind from the universe and then reintroduced it in the form of Ensign Samuels who just happened to have been the last piece of data in a malfunctioning transport receiving station's cache memory.
I plan to adapt and siginificantly expand on this short scene in the shape of a Visual Novel titled Planet Sarah.
Slightly expanded in late rpublication to make mention of Samuels coming from a starship for context.
July 2015
Available in:
How to Sing Butterflies
