Space Ride
By: Sahiti Satti
Tags: Fiction, Aliens, Competition, Fiction Writing, Space

Credits — Pexels

“It doesn’t seem right to land over here,” said the blue creature to her friend.

It’s been five earth days, and COM-1 and KREI-3 are still travelling through deep space searching for the so-called “Earth.” They’ve just encountered a blue planet, but it looks very blue indeed. They could even see some faint but smudged white lines on it. What do you think it could be? Could it be the Earth? They have only enough fuel for checking out a few other planets. Why take the risk when there is no green on this planet?

We call COM-1 and KREI-3 as aliens on our planet. Wonder what they’ll call us as they are yet to find us. COM-1 is a blue creature, and she chose her lousy but smart friend KREI-3 as her partner. He is indeed brilliant but foolishly sarcastic.

COM-1 and KREI-3 had enrolled in a competition on their home planet. The competition is about finding an exoplanet. The winner gets a new rocket to travel in space. The spaceship that they possess right now is a MattWan 34. It’s 15 Earth years old. They got it for a cheap bargain. However, the new spaceship is state of the art MattWan 78, the most advanced vehicle. COM-1 has laid her eyes on it since its release, and she will do anything to win it. KREI-3 might just ruin her plans. He is a jokester, but at times, he proves himself to be extremely helpful. He won the Planetaria Award for his contribution to adding the humour element to a robot. If you were wondering, no the Planetaria Award is not equal to the Nobel Prize on the Earth. It is more like an Oscar for film critique. Yes, that Award does not exist.

KREI-3 finished eating a capsule when COM-1 finally found what they were looking for. There seemed to be a blue and green planet this time.

“We’ve found it!” exclaimed COM-1, and KREI-3 couldn’t believe his eyes.

He studied this extensive planet and said “Gosh, our planet is so much better. I feel like we can rule these Earthers.” KREI-3 was ecstatic, and he was sure that they were going to win the competition.

As they went closer to this round mass, strange metal items were visible. Here on Earth, we call them satellites and some others as space debris. They are plenty of them. On COM-1 and KREI-3’s planet, if there are metal objects around something, it is said to be infected with a computational disease. It is advised to stay away from something like that. It is their equivalent of the Earth’s viruses. It would be a massive disaster if they were to bring back disease to their home.

Now, they could not use Earth as their exoplanet discovery. This dejected COM-1 and KREI-3 to their core. They had intelligence that this planet had life, and they travelled huge distances to come over here. They only have fuel left to return now.

KREI-3 was adamant that they should go back. But COM-1 had other plans. She still insisted that they check this planet out. Something in her alien heart made her believe that they could find something here that they could take back to their home planet and win the competition. But KREI-3 thought otherwise.

He said, “But we don’t have enough capsules should something happen to us, and are put in isolation.” COM-1 felt irritated that she chose him as her partner. There is nothing else that they could do right now. It’s not worth the risk.

When they returned and reported their findings, COM-1 got a call from the superiors. She was excited. What if they had won? Both of them got down to the headquarters, but something, on the contrary, had happened. The superiors had told them that the Earth was a perfectly fine planet. The prospectus that they received had mentioned this. But who was supposed to read this part? KREI-3. And, what’s more? KREI-3 had deleted the path data to save up some space for his music. Now, they could never find the Earth again easily. That’s it. COM-1 was furious. They were forbidden to take part in any space programs or competitions for a year.

Sadly, a smart alien-like COM-1 had to suffer due to the mistakes made by the idle KREI-3. But if you think about it, they were saved from disease. I won’t say which one, because you obviously know about it. It’s still not known if it would infect them, but who knows?