Week 10 Planning: Desolation

Andromeda Galaxy (Wikipedia)

The story takes place in the distant future, told from the perspective of the lead pilot of a transport convoy taking a shipment of goods to another galaxy. They're travelling through space at thousands of times light speed but it's been 4 days of constant travel already. The pilot makes calculations based on fuel remaining and figures that they can switch the compression device (a device that crumples space around the ship to travel faster than light) to overdrive to more quickly compress space, burning off extra fuel and making it there faster. Though dangerous as the ships carry a lot of momentum, the pilot trusts the autopilot systems to calculate hazard trajectories and navigate them out of harms way. Activating the device, the pilot sits back for a few minutes until the ship strikes an object, knocking the pilot out.

The pilot wakes up to the red flashing of error lights, messages and beeps and sirens going off indicating a multitude of failures across the ship's systems. He checks his navigation terminal and finds that the ship overshot the galaxy by some 36,000 light years. He worriedly checks for the closest outpost and finds that it's over 10,000 light years away. He switches his destination to the outpost and attempts to activate the compression device. It fails as he realizes the ship used up all its main fuel while he was passed out, aimlessly travelling at max speed. He only has enough fuel to sustain life support for 2 weeks. Despite knowing the futility of it, he broadcasts an SOS message out into the void as he stares at the galaxy behind him, which seems so close that he could touch the stars in it.

Bibliography: The Sandy Road from The Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt

Week 7 Story Planning: Oasis

Oasis (Wikipedia)

Thinking over it, I think I can do a story about a group of men wandering the desert who get lost in a sandstorm, happening upon an oasis. I think I'd have it in the late 1800s, with one of the men armed with a lever action rifle. during the sandstorm they lose a lot of their supplies which ends up making them go two days without water. In the distance of the endless dunes that make up the landscape, they see a small patch of greenery and conclude that it must be an oasis. The men are tired and slow, so they elect the least tired man to go over there and fetch water for the rest. The man who's elected heads towards the oasis while the others wait. He gets to the oasis, which shines a brilliant blue in the desert heat. Eager to quench his thirst, he gets ready to drink out of it when he hears a commanding voice that seems to come from inside his head. The voice tells him not to drink because answering its questions, but he discounts this as a hallucination from thirst and drinks anyways. He dies. The group grows impatient as in the original story and send another man out, figuring the first guy was just drinking water until now. He finds a corpse but is so taken by thirst that he doesn't think about it before the water in front of him, he ignores the voice too. The rifle wielding man then goes over and finds his friends dead. He hears the voice and fires his gun wildly into the air out of anger for his fallen comrades. He angrily drinks the water and dies. The last one heads over after hearing gunshots and he's asked questions. The questions are similar in that they're riddles, but they're more familiar to a western audience (What gets wetter as it dries? What's black and white and red all over?) He answers thousands of questions and just before the man passes out, the voice manifests as a djinn from the oasis. He congratulates the man for his perseverance and resurrects his fallen friends. After this he gifts the men with the boon of unrecognizability, as in the original. Though in this ending, the men think to themselves what use it would be to them, and conclude it's more of a curse.


Bibliography: The Mahabharata by R. K. Narayan