Winning Idea

“Get out of here you creep, and take your shitty muzak with you!” yelled the coffee shop owner, hurling a stack of CD’s at the retreating barista. One rolled under the bench where Brett was sitting. But by the time he’d grabbed it, the guy was disappearing out the door. She walked over to his table.

“You probably want to get rid of that. I found out he works at the college, he’s been putting some kind of subliminal programming into the music.” She said.  “Said he wanted to ‘study the effects of brilliance on idiots’.” Brett froze in shock as the woman walked away. Up until a year ago, he’d been one of those idiots. Despite his passion for knowledge, especially science, he’d struggled with even the simplest chemistry. Now he was the front-runner in a contest to design an extra-solar rocket for NASA.

Brett glanced up at the clock a couple of days later. He’d spent all night at the lab. Again. He could feel the understanding he’d had draining away. The chemistry he’d thought was so basic a short week ago, now felt like an insurmountable obstacle. He stared at the CD in his hand. If he put it in the player and it worked, he’d secretly know he was a failure despite his success in other fields. Glancing again at the countdown clock on the wall of the lab, he sighed and pushed it into the player. The soothing strains of muzak filled the room. He only had one more day, and when this project was over he swore he’d throw the damn thing away.

After a quick shower, Brett hurried back to the lab. He was on the final run of his project and still had a few simple bugs to work out with the physics. Turning on the radio, his ears were assaulted by a wave of death metal. “God Dammit, Jason!” he cursed. Jason was known for two things, his love of death metal and losing things. It took almost 20 minutes to find where the CD had rolled under a cabinet of drying glassware. Brett dragged it out, and almost cried when he saw the giant scratch across the middle of the disk. “No. No. No!” he whispered, wiping it off and putting it into the player. “You have to work!” he muttered desperately. But it wouldn’t even play. After convincing the owner of the coffee shop to give him the guy’s name and address, Brett raced out there. But there was nothing, only an empty warehouse. He even drove out to the university looking for the guy, but no one there had heard of him either. The mysterious barista had vanished

The NASA contest was being judged tonight somewhere across town, but there was no longer any reason for Brett to show up. He hummed quietly to himself as the linked wormholes began to take shape in front of him. Thanks to his bugged rocket, he’d discovered something far more interesting.

Mothership

He’d only meant to poke the damn thing, he hadn’t expected it to… swallow him? Whatever it did, now he was stuck inside with that weird metallic smell and those glistening sticky walls. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before, sitting alone in their cornfield outside of Vicksburg. Dave’s younger brother had said it was an alien spaceship, and he’d know if anyone did. Having a nerd for a younger brother meant he got told all kinds of crazy things, but right now he just wished Josh was here to tell him how to escape this mess.

Poking at the wall, Dave noticed a slight rumbling in the soles of his feet. The walls began oozing some kind of mucous and Dave was suddenly thrown to his knees as the ship lurched. It was taking off! He had to get out of here! Slipping on the gooey floor he ran through the twisting hallways, trying to find the entrance. Heading towards a light, he found an empty control room with a large window on one side. The slimyness was getting worse, oozing from the walls and slowly filling the ship. Dave was wading knee-deep through the stuff by now. Looking out the window of the craft he saw it was too late, they were already leaving Earth’s atmosphere.

“HAVE YOU COME TO JOIN ONE?” said a pleasant, echoing voice.

“No. Please, let me out. I need to go home!” called Dave, looking around wildly for the aliens. “I didn’t mean to mess with your spaceship, I’m sorry! Please let me go?”

“THERE IS NO SHIP. THERE IS ONLY ONE.” The voice rumbled.

“What? You’re… the ship… is alive?” wailed Dave with a sinking feeling. He realized that he was inside an alien creature. The slime was almost up to his chest now. “Please, I need to get out. I’m going to drown in this stuff!”

“NO. YOU WILL NOT… DROWN. POSSIBILITY: YOU WILL BECOME A PART OF ONE.”

“You’re gonna EAT me?!” screamed Dave. He waded toward the window, pounding his fists against it in terror, desperate to escape. “Lemme out!”

“ONE CAN NOT LET YOU OUT: UNDESIRABLE OUTCOME. DO YOU NOT WISH TO BECOME ONE?”

“Noooo!” howled Dave, desperately struggling to keep his head above the slime.

“THEN YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME INSIDE.” said the pleasant voice as the slime filled the room, closing over Dave’s head.

Dave awoke inside a warm slime-filled capsule, floating in space. He could somehow breathe the slime, and he felt a wave of relief wash over him. He was safe, it had let him go. Through the transparent walls of the capsule Dave could see several other capsules floating with him around the ship. One twitched and burst, and he saw a tiny new ship erupting into space. Unnoticed, the parasitic larva attached to Dave’s back waited, soon the mother ship would no longer be alone.