penthius

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They left the walls guarding the town--or the walls that used to guard the town--in ruins after they moved in. No fortifications, no rebuilding, no clearing away of the rubble. I think it is a philosophical statement of some sort, or perhaps a threat, or a reminder. Either way, it works as such. I know that they use the buildings within the walls; we can see lighted buildings and trees and the usual things a city would have. But the outer walls--remain a ruin, with a handful of their guards standing on top of the ramparts staring out into the night while the light show wraps itself around them and dances and mocks us. It is difficult sometimes to remember that these were once normal men and women, before they became entrapped. Some argue that they may still retain some memories, others say it is impossible and that they are just meat puppets with a pretty light show. I don't know, but I suppose figuring that out matters more now that one of them has walked out of the city and squatted in the road thirty feet in front of our guard post and stayed there for the last three days.

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/intipainting/10799064323/
Story potential: Medium potential
Notes: Not overtly bad or anything, there's just not a spark here. Nice light-painting in the photo, though.

You're a fool to break the rules, even if you don't understand why they're there. Especially if you don't understand why they're there. "Don't step into an elevator shaft" is a pretty straightforward rule, and we can figure out why that's a rule, and if we have climbing gear and rope, well, that's not such a disaster to break that rule. It's the rules that seem to make no sense that sometimes have the most severe consequences for those not expecting them. And sometimes, it's the rules that seem to make sense and then you realize that they existed for an entirely different reason than you thought, those are the rules you really have to watch out for. Oh, it's not like there's some great big nanny-alien who reaches down and swats your hand when you break one of these rules that are suddenly there. Nope. The rules are for our own protection, they told us on their one and only public announcement, and we were of course free to follow them or not as we liked. They did insist that we put bracelets on our children to keep them from crossing certain limits. That didn’t go over very well, and soon the bracelet rule vanished and instead people under a certain height and weight simply were unable to go past the borders without a high-pitched, annoying sound (worse by far than any of those mall alarms designed to drive off teenagers) ringing inside their head and getting steadily louder the closer they got (though without damaging them). Kids sometimes dared each other to see how far into the loud zone they could go, but they tended to crumple and pass out at a certain point, before the real danger struck, and then we would all hope that the other kids would come and get an adult.

Inspiration: "No One Knows" - Queens of the Stone Age
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like this mix of free will and alien control. And of course, the reason there are these rules is because the aliens did something else to Earth--maybe turned it into a giant alien preserve/melting pot? Regardless, they introduced a lot of other hazards. Could also play this with a fantasy spin, of course.

Another one bit the dust as she watched, and she flinched and pulled back, flattening herself against the wall. She knew what would be happening. The dust would seep through his mouth. There would be convulsions, some frothing at the mouth,, and an eerie sweat that sprang up all over his skin out of nowhere. Then he'd push himself back up, stand--and resume fighting on the opposite side. He'd be clumsy and awkward at first, like a toddler trying to walk, but the dust colonies would learn fast, and he would be capable of fighting well within about an hour. If the fight went on longer than that, he would become excellent, and if he lived longer than that, well, that's what they had the special squads for. Fortunately, the fighting knowledge only really kicked in once the colonized got in a fight, and so there was a pretty good chance that they'd hear about and take out any fighters. She’d heard that one dust-eater had been an excellent cook,and for some reason nobody noticed when he was colonized. They figured he was sick for that first evening,m when everything he cooked tasted awful, but the next day he was back to normal, and by the end of the week he was cooking dishes that could make you weep. It was a real pity that he also started spiking the meals with dust. She figured that before that, there'd been some people who would have been willing to consider making an exception--a carefully guarded exception--to the rule that no colonized could be allowed to live. Personally, she wondered what would happen if a diplomat or some other galactic bit the dust. You'd think the dust would have managed it by now, would have figured out how to communicate--but perhaps the science was right, and the dust was just all raw potential until it met the fertile human medium.

Inspiration: "Another One Bites the Dust" - Queen
Story potential: High
Notes: Okay, this could be a fun starting premise. And somehow she bites the dust but remains...herself. Or mostly herself. Or able to communicate with herself, at least.

Nobody knew where they came from, and after the initial shock and suspicion, most people didn't care. A few did, of course, researchers and government and some of the people who lost their shirts when all the stock in cellphones collapsed. There was generally a consensus that it was aliens or something like that, trying to communicate or figure out how to communicate...but they'd clearly put in the receiver backwards or forgotten the code or were trying to talk in a frequency other than ours, so why worry about it? They couldn't communicate through the device, maybe, but we sure could. Some people tried to scare everyone by pointing out that every call would be monitored by aliens, possibly the locations tracked, and who knew what else. Some people stopped using them then, but most people laughed and pointed out that the same thing had been true for at least a decade, and at least the aliens weren't likely to come down and arrest them or put them on a "no fly list," unlike the government. The night show comedians got some pretty good jokes out of the alien no fly list. The government tried to confiscate the phones, and when that didn't work because the darned things practically sprouted out of the ground, they tried a buy-back program. It might have worked better if they'd been willing to pay enough to cover the cost of a top-of-the-line smartphone and a subscription to cover its use for a year. They weren't. People were pissed off enough at their cellphone coverage companies that they didn't care if this new disruptive alien tech made them go out of business--in fact, many of them hoped so. Eventually, even the paranoid used the alien phones, popping out the battery whenever they weren't making a call in hopes that that would disable in GPS tracking in the phones, like it did in human-manufactured cells.

Inspiration: http://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2013/08/31/
Story potential: Low
Notes: Kind of a detail in some other story, maybe.

You can get a pretty screwed-up power dynamic when the whole reason that you get promoted from Hell (as I call it) to a position of power over others is by biting the hand that feeds you. Literally. You have to attack what you are told is the only source of nutrients, the only source of any medical care, the only source of warmth and heat. I think I'm not as screwed up as some of the people who got their promotions that way, but then, I did it not because I'd just finally snapped and gone crazy in the confinement. I did it because in our case, the hand that fed us was one of the ones who was too damn crazy after the way he'd been brought up. Made, I guess, is probably the closest analogy for us. Or jumped in. Something horrible and abusive from the gang culture is the closest I can get. For all I know, that's what they studied when they decided that it was possible for humans to integrate into their society. The guy who had us, he--he didn't ever stop biting hands, let's say, he just moved up to a position where he could take it out on people who he figured had less of a chance of fighting back. Us. I honestly thought he was going to kill Little One, and that was something I wasn't willing to sit still for. Little One might be six foot four and maybe that's why they took him, but the kid was only fourteen. He just happened to have a build that would have bought him a ticket into playing basketball at the pro level in a couple of years, only a few years ago, and that now bought him a ticket to Hell because they thought he qualified as physically mature. There’s a whole hell of a lot that they don't understand about us, you see. A whole hell of a lot.

Inspiration: "The Hand That Feeds" - Nine Inch Nails
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Meh. Kinda interesting, I guess, but not enough other stuff going on for me.

The pitter-patter of rain was what drew her out from under the leaves that she'd been hiding among since late that afternoon, when the ships came down low over the houses. Okay, be honest--not the pitter-patter of rain, the downright deluge of a thunderstorm pouring over her, drenching her to the skin and threatening the few valuable belongings she'd crammed in her backpack as she sprinted out of the door of her apartment and bolted to the park. That was one thing that every news broadcast had been clear on: go to the woods. Go to the woods, go to the fields, go to the prairies. The attackers would only bomb housing structures or areas that looked industrialized. Farms were not exempt--or, rather, farms *might* be exempt, but the way that exemption was discovered was so--alien--that analysts were still getting a handle on it. Farmers were advised in the meantime to evacuate their families to somewhere near fallow land and to try running to a fallow field or to a tree line in case of attack. Bunkers weren’t a good idea. The attackers seemed to specifically target them. She ran through the rain, back to her sheltered apartment. That was the other thing everyone agreed on. Nasty thunderstorms kept attacks away. It was a small mercy, and people had stopped complaining or worrying about flooding. At least it means there's rain to keep the flies off, they'd say.

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66738582@N07/9565989830/
Story potential: Medium
Notes: An okay idea for an alien invasion type, I guess, but not a story idea.

Nobody likes trees anymore. We still remember that they're necessary to clean the air and provide wood and food and shelter and all that, but nobody likes living near the trees and nobody likes going in the trees. Same thing goes for cities with skyscrapers or other tall buildings that block out the lights and leave only shadows. I think we've reverted back to the Medieval Age, when women and children were warned to stay away from the edge of the forest and where the men treaded cautiously, where half the stories around the campfire were of the bad things that could happen to people who wandered into the forest when they shouldn't. And of course, nobody would go into the woods at dawn or dusk or nighttime. Nobody goes anywhere at nighttime. We huddle inside our safe, warm, bright houses, with all the curtains pulled. Less because we don't want them to see us--what good would that do--than because we don't want to glance out on our yard and see a dark shadow scudding across it, only to look up and see a bright moonlit sky with not a cloud in sight. In addition to snow days, we now have cloud days. The weather forecast predicts how dense the shade will be, and whether it will be safe to go out and see. They're a lot more careful with their predictions these days, too, ever since that poor man in Boston walked into the studio and shot the weatherman he blamed for getting his family snatched.

Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/josepha46/9369874988/
Story potential: Medium
Notes: I like the idea of this kind of adaptation, but it's more of a setting than a story idea--the whole story would need to be something else.

The world becomes dark blue to you, as if that is all there is, the sky and the goggles darkening the unbearable brilliance of the sun to something tolerable--and keeping the alien flares from burning out your retinas or, if you're one of the unlucky ten percent, opening a pathway in your mind that lets them in and turns you into a traitor to your own kind, whether you want to be or not. Most pilots become so accustomed to wearing the goggles that they keep them on even once they've touched down again. I won't deny there's something about a steel blue, obscured gaze that all the girls seem to go for. That doesn't get me so much, since I *am* a girl, and one look from behind smoky blue goggles isn’t going to be enough to persuade your average pilot-groupie that she does like girls after all. Most of them don’t', you know, though they may have a close friend that they're willing to snuggle with a little bit to persuade the guys that they'll really be getting something special if they get her. Nah, I prefer women who know that they're women and know that they like women, without any of the dancing around and "oh I'm not really" that a pilot groupie would make necessary. They’re groupies--they're supposed to make it easy, right? Not so much for us fly gals. And there are plenty of us, given how much better we can stand up to G-forces at the rates necessary to match the alien fly--boys, I guess. Maybe they've got fly girls too. Can't say that I think much about it or that it matters.

Inspiration: A thumbnail-sized image of this: http://www.dvdklub.cz/dvd-obrazek/5611--Tmavomodry-svet.jpg though the main character looked female to me in such a small size.
Story potential: High.
Notes: Guess who's one of the 10%? And I'm thinking setting this in an equivalent time period to back when there were hidden lesbian clubs, and it was a prosecuted crime, and some of the best female jazz singers of the era flouted it, and...yeah. Jazz.

Setting up a pier market is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, and seventy percent balls-to-the-wall. You find an old pier that's disintegrating, use some C-4 or dynamite or whatever you have on hand to blow the land connection (that's the really tricky part, because it's loud enough to summon zeros from miles and miles around, and because you've got to get really close to the shore to find the right structural support to blow out, something weak enough to fall, crucial, but not that's going to take out the rest of the pier). Then you wait to see if there will be zero-swarm. Zero-sum, my navigator always says with a laugh. He likes his puns. What can I say. I tolerate them where a lot of crews wouldn't, and it's gotten me an A-class nav on a C-class ship. Hell, who'm I fooling. A D-class ship, only saved from an F-class because it's actually still floating. Never mind what all we've had to do to keep it that way. I'm past the days of making landfall in a desperate, reckless raid for machined parts or dumped engines, though. That's a game for the young and the ones with no families.

Inspiration: "Remember the Name" by Fort Minor + http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonpac/8800355855/ + Under a Graveyard Sky
Story potential: High, if only because this is the kind of story I like.
Notes: Not zombies, necessarily, but some dangerous thing that doesn't like to cross water, that has set humanity-as-we-know-it afloat. Could be aliens, or something supernatural, or plaguey, or zombies, I suppose.

Imagine the expression of a goldfish taking flight upon the instant that his safe water balloon is punctured, and you will understand what happened to modern architecture when the K'rath descended from the heavens in their ships of towers and turrets, inlaid with semi-precious gemstones in arching, recurring patterns that resembled nothing so much as a Moroccan mosque. I imagine that in the Far East, most people watching the broadcast nodded their heads in agreement that the aliens at least appeared to have good taste. Not so in the West. Instead, taste-makers (who are, by their own nature, fortune tellers of a sort)--

Inspiration: Pinterest photos of 1) a water balloon bursting with something orange coming out of it, 2) a Moroccan tiled arch, and 3) Trump tower in Dubai.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. Those I like remembering the pop culture/architecture influence as a grace note in

An auto-responder saved the world. The good Congressman from Milwaukee, who had won his election campaign on his promise to communicate openly with all his constituents, was the one and only politician whose auto-responder promised that he would read and respond to all his mail within a week. And so the alien fleet jockeyed itself into position reversed thrusters on its asteroid storm, and waited. I suppose I say an auto-responder saved the world to make you laugh, since the story that follows is, as we all know, pretty grim. Really, I think it was the astrophysics engineering student who was interning at the Congressman's office since she was wavering about whether really, all along she'd just wanted to be a communications major, and did it really matter that she loved math when all her friends made fun of her for never going to any parties? She was on wacko patrol, reading through the emails and responding with form letters where possible, a quick note and a forward to the Congressman's next-tier-up aide where not, and a forward to the "potential crazies--save for police" folder where appropriate. She almost moved the alien invasion email--

Inspiration: Doing my morning email-processing. I used to be terrible about ever responding to anything, and I've made it a point to improve.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: I don't think this is a story in and of itself, but it could be a nice grace note.

We own the sky and the cliffs. I imagine when the aliens came, they thought they were trading us a bushel of beads and blankets for all our land--yes, yes, we received the early transmissions from your civilization, we know the history. We knew they wouldn't go away without a significant gain, and we could imagine well and truly the breezes of misfortune that their passing brought to other races who were not so suspicious and so good at acting the noble savage. I said we had studied your transmissions, did I not? We are a flying race. It was easy to persuade them that there were spiritual and religious reasons that we must own the sky. I daresay they thought they were clever and outsmarting us when they insisted on certain lanes of free travel for all, without any possibility of tax or fee or obstruction, under the traffic control of an equally balanced board that would ensure fair play for all. They were not planning on giving us fair play on any of their possessions, of course, but--

Inspiration: "We Own the Sky" - M83
Story Potential: Medium? Medium-high?
Notes: I love the setting, but this isn't a story.

Amelia Earhart is well and truly dead, but her legacy lives on in us. Not that she would have known or even understood it, but I often thought that if she was possibly able to grasp it, she would have been one of the first to embrace us. She always did reach out for the boundaries and stretch herself beyond her limits. Fear was not an obstacle to her. For all I know, she would have embraced the realization that she was the mother to a new race. Of course, instead our "father" abducted her in the middle of a flight over the ocean, killed her, dissected her, brought her back to life to run various brain tests on her, killed her again, and disassembled her down to the molecular level so that he could create us. It's what scientists call a "destructive test." I won't say there's no coming back from it, but I will say that there's no coming back from it sane. Sometimes I wonder if our father's earliest attempts were what started the zombie legends. Not sure if it was because he tried to return the abductees (likely those who were buried still alive enough for his purposes), or because he imprinted the insane brain patterns on his first children. I know there were other children before us, but--

Inspiration: When I hit "I feel lucky" on a blank google box, I got this: https://www.google.com/doodles/amelia-earharts-115th-birthday
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I like the twist of "yes, she was abducted, and no, she's not alive."

Leah down at the diner is a cow-half-full sort of person. Bill is a cow-half-empty sort of person. Me, I'm a holy-hell-what-happened-to-that-cow!? sort of person. I guess you could call it a regional variation on the glass half-empty question, but somehow I think putting it on my dating profile wouldn't lead to interest of the right kind. See, either I'd scare the girls off because they thought I was a kook, or I'd attract one of those UFO kooks myself, and that is absolutely the last thing I want. If they're like that now, what would they be like after they had to deal with those bug-eyed suckers (not literally--well, mostly not literally, we only had a chupacabra once) on a personal level? I know what you're thinking. "Men in Black," right? Nope. I wish. It's more of a test case, for the aliens. Our prosperous little town is located in a valley between interstates. It's kinda off the beaten path, but we're self-sustaining. Even have our own community college! And so the aliens decided that we'd make a good test case.

Inspiration: There was this icon of a man milking the white out of a cow.

Story Potential: High.
Notes: Could be fun. The aliens need a test case to practice integrating into humanity, you see. And it fails in all sorts of fun ways. More of a setting for an anthology of stories than a novel.

You can't see the stars so much in the sky anymore, but it's not because of light pollution or smog. Nope. They've decided to come down and see what all the fuss about being human is. You've probably heard that lovely poetic quote about all of us being starstuff? Sounds fine until you see the wandering stars lighting up the eyes of what will be a human husk once its abandoned. Sounds romantic until you see the dark eye of the abyss shining out of that cop who pulled you over for a traffic stop and just seems to be far too amused about the whole process. They don't really get the human thing, you see. The stars wander around being dazzled by flesh and sensation and gravity acting upon them directly, right up until they step in front of a bus or walk into a pool and don't know how to swim or do some other incredibly foolish thing. The dark stars, though, they seem to have a bit more purpose--

Inspiration: "Wandering Star" - Kid Beyond
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Nice imagery and all, but it just doesn't make sense!

The aliens have always had black helicopters in our city, the government says. I think this is a misguided attempt to calm down "the populace," and it's pretty damn misguided. Sure, the smart guy on the corner might think, "Oh, the helicopters have always been here, and they've never really done anything, so that’s okay. Maybe they just share info with the weather channel and the traffic cam" The conspiracy theory guy might crow about all his theories being vindicated--loudly enough to not be invited to next Thanksgiving. But the average person on the street will feel a crawling sensation and wonder what the helicopters have seen or interfered in--since they've been here so long? They'll get that paranoid creeping feeling. They'll start darting around. Office workers will start packing hoodies as well as a pair of running shoes to replace their heels with. Just to be safe. Full burkas may make a fashion comeback.

Inspiration: NYT.com: "Copters in Syria May Not Be New"
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Best misspelling: plopulace. Added to dictionary: hoodies, burkas.

One more drink, before we all have to die. One for the house! I'm buying. Not that it matters, since we'll all be dead long before that credit check bounces--what? Oh, no, I didn't say anything. Sure, absolutely it will clear. Just waiting for that next account uplink from Earth. That's it. No, nothing to worry about. Make mine Rum. The best stuff you got. Naw, don't worry about mixing it with anything. It's not like we have time to spare. What? No, I didn't say you were leaving work. We're all right here, after all. Us and all the alcohol. Maybe we can burn them. Or maybe we can stay just tipsy enough to keep from getting invaded. Makes it easier for critical mistakes to happen, though.

Inspiration: "The Sunk'n Norwegian" - Alestorm
Story Potential: High
Notes: Hee! Probably too silly for me to end up writing, but could be fun. Hard to tell how much of the appeal is the first-person narrator, though.

At first we believed it was just one of those golden harvest moons that everybody gets all excited about. Some people took blankets and went outside and had moonlit picnics in the park by the golden light of the moon, and that was lovely. I'm happy for them. But then they came, articulated puppets the size of a man or slightly taller, with impassive porcelain faces and painted lips and gold-mesh patterns imprinted on their cheeks. It was like a horror movie. I figure that they chose as their sample spot Venice during Carnivale, and so they saw all the celebration and the welcome of the puppets, so they decided to dress like that since it was easier than pretending to be human. Since then, I've seen them pretending to be human, and I tell you, the puppets were better. Uncanny valley land, man.

Inspiration: A combination of the moon phenomenon that just happened, and a Flickr pic from Carnivale.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: But man, this is some gorgeous photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesfarma/7133092599/ I'm a bit embarrassed that my story idea doesn't live up to it.

The katydid sang in the grass outside the cabin, a solid whirr that soothed the inhabitants inside to sleep. When a louder song started up, imitating the katydid, and the katydid fell silent, in fear or shock, they didn’t notice. The song droned on through the night, and they slept well, but when they woke, they noticed the song that they'd been not hearing all through the night. They stepped outside and saw the insectile alien humming to the katydids and eating as much grass as a cow. They tried to talk to it, but it ignored them. They tried to move it, but it was too heavy for them. They called the military, who imported doctors and scientists and soldiers, but the katydid moved away when the doctors tried to examine it, and when the military tried to shoot it with a tranquilizer, it reared up, deflected the dart, and--

Inspiration: Boingboing articles about insect photography and alien costuming from the '80s.
Story Potential: Low. So low.
Notes: Snoooorrreee....

From a scrap of paper buried in a box of misc paperwork:
"The carcasses of their ships will make fine reefs"
(Should they be aliens whose young need reefs?)

I actually remember this idea. I think.

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penthius

January 2025

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Entries tagged with alien invasion

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Fortified: Fantasy

The Rules: Science Fiction

Biting the Dust: Science Fiction

Alienphones: Science Fiction

Bite the Hand That Feeds: Science Fiction

Hiding in the Rain: Science Fiction

Shadowed Woods: Horror

Dark Blue World: Science Fiction

Pier Market: Post-apocalyptic

Alien Architecture: Setting

Auto-Responder: Science Fiction

To Own the Sky: Science Fiction

Earhart: Science Fiction

Cow Half-Full: Science Fiction

Wandering Stars: Horror

Helicopters: Science Fiction

One More Drink: Science Fiction

Masks: Science Fiction

Katydidn't: Science Fiction

The Reefs: Science Fiction

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January 2025

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