Second Arrival

Sandbox Earth #2

INDEX| Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3

Another Visitor

“Mr. Delacruz, what did you do in the days following the arrival of that ship?”

“Oh, normal days. I worked—I needed money, of course, as did everyone in those days. There was one meeting of the Free Radicals, I don’t remember much of what we discussed. It was hard, in those days, to organize at all, you see. Journalists were being assassinated with alarming frequency—much of it unreported to the rest of the world, you see. So any meeting could be our last—any one of us could be rounded up and shot without warning. Meetings were somber events for that reason, you see. But—we were passionate. We organized. We wanted change. We wanted to unshackle Cuba and her beautiful, hard working people and set them loose on the world. We knew the Iron Yoke was death, and we were suffocating under it’s weight. So something had to be done, danger or no.

“In fact, it might have been that very night, when I was walking home, that I saw a flash of lightning even though the skies were perfectly clear. I didn’t know what it was—I have learned since that it was the arrival of the second ship.”

“How did you learn of the second ship?”

“I saw it, with my own eyes! It was like a star near the moon, and seemed to follow the moon until it got bigger and bigger. It took a day or two, but it eventually ended up in orbit same as the first ship, and my wife and I would sit out some nights and watch it drift across the sky. These ships were massive, I cannot impress upon you enough how enormous they were. I would get vertigo—like that feeling when you look up from the base of a tall building; or look down from a high place. My stomach would drop and my legs would get weak. That is why my wife and I would sit down—it was like watching mountains flying across our field of view. It felt like the end times, you see. It was great and terrible all at the same time. My son—he had a big imagination. He immediately thought there were superheroes or villains fighting somewhere. He felt like he was in a movie. He never lost his wonder for the things, God rest his soul. He always wanted to see them up close.

“Imagine, for a moment, the mind of a child. One moment, aliens are a work of fiction. The next moment, aliens are real and on your doorstep. We are on the cusp of contact with an advanced, spacefaring civilization for the first time ever. Such a moment has not happened since Columbus landed in my beloved Cuba—yet he at least had his humanity in common with the natives. We had no idea what kind of beings were looking down at us, or if they even saw us at all. We had no idea what kind of world they were from, what kind of life they lived. Did they have families? Did they even have a word for family? And then! And then, you see, a few days later, a second alien ship arrives on your doorstep! The Universe has become crowded, yes? One visitor is an accident but two feels like it is on purpose. My son, he understood this innately—in a way his mother and I had to reason our way into. He knew more than any of us what was going on, even though news took ever so long to reach our home.

“You see, our son, Marcos was his name, he came out to my wife and I as we were sitting there, watching, one night, and he said— ‘Do you think they are friends?’

“My wife and I looked at each other—the thought hadn’t occurred to us. ‘What do you mean, Marcos?’ I asked him.

“ ‘The second ship is different. Do you think they are friends with the first ship?’

“Sure enough, he was right—where the first ship was all angles, hard edges, straight lines; the second ship was all rounded edges, curves, sweeping strokes. Marcos understood that the two came from different places. We adults, now, we could barely get our heads on straight. Astronomers have a funny standard for knowledge, you see. They won’t make inferences. They will tell you straight what they can see. If you ask an astronomer where the two ships are from they will say, the material is such and such, the design is such and such, the signals are such and such, so the ships had to be built in a place where such and such material is plentiful or easily manufactured. That is a very long way of saying ‘I don’t know’, you see?

“And yet—the imagination of the world was captured by these two ships. And the second seemed to be inching ever closer to the first. It was trailing it in orbit, but every day they arrived a little closer together. It was maybe three more days after that, that the two ships were right next to each other. I don’t know what Westerners thought would happen. Maybe they expected a delegation to come down? Maybe they expected they would be able to send a delegation to them? All we had ever known from our books and movies was directly hostile invaders, or explorers come to learn our mysterious ways. We’ve never liked feeling ignored. All I knew was that it was completely, absolutely, out of my hands.”

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Thank You For Reading!

My prequel series continues! I hope you are enjoying. I am very excited to be bringing this series of deep lore from the Adventures of Tylus Worran to you, and I hope you are enjoying it. It tells the story of the infancy of humanity’s life among the stars.

Thank you for reading, and God Bless you!