Alien Tech Story

You know that thing where you find an alien artefact and take it home with you to see what use it is, to see what you can do with it, to see if you can ‘unlock its secrets’? You know that it’s alien tech but you don’t know what its proper function is. Eventually, after drawing a blank over and over again, you end up using it as a doorstop, and as the years go by you forget about it entirely. And yet the crunch is that this is the most stupendously powerful piece of alien technology in the whole universe! There is the deep irony to your situation and yet you never cop on! You will go to your grave not knowing about this tremendous irony…

 

So that’s the old ‘alien technology’ scenario. That’s it in a nutshell… You could spin it out and get more mileage out of it of course if that’s what you wanted, but that’s the essence of it. That’s the old ‘alien tech’ scenario and I am tempted to add ‘and we all know that one!’. Although to be perfectly honest I’m not sure if we do all know it. I’m not sure if I would be right in saying this. Now that I come to think of it, I’m not sure if it is even if it is even a ‘thing’ or not! I’m not sure if I read it somewhere – I used to read a lot of science fiction as a teenager after all. I wasn’t particularly good at socialising with my peer group (or any other group when it comes down to it) but I was very good at staying in bed reading science fiction given. I read a lot of science fiction.

 

But as I say, all of a sudden I’m not too sure that I did read it somewhere. I can’t think who could have written it – it’s one of those scenarios that would make a classic SF short story but – at the same time – I don’t think that anyone ever wrote it. Did I make it up myself, I wonder? What did I hear of it somewhere and then to get where I heard it? Or is it one of those ‘archetypal motifs’ that keeps on popping up out of the human unconscious? Like The Matrix or The Truman show? There’s a name for that one in psychiatry too, but I just can’t remember what it is. It’s a syndrome…

 

Of course the thing we really want to know is ‘what does the alien tech do’? Just what exactly is its function? Obviously we want to know this. Does it by any chance facilitate FTL travel? Is it a portal to another world or another universe? Does it cure all possible illnesses by scanning you and then injecting medical nanobots to fix all the molecular errors? Does it turn our thoughts into reality? Etc, etc, etc. All these ideas are ‘old hat’ however; there are all covered with a terribly thick blanket of dust. I can feel myself starting to sneeze already! ‘Oh no, not those hoary old ideas again’, I hear a voice deep inside myself start to groan – ‘please don’t trot those tired old ideas out again…’

 

No, it’s none of the above. That kind of stuff is trivial. You see, the thing is that our idea of what possible ‘use’ the AA might be is so ridiculously constrained by up by our invisible mental limitations, by our habitual narrow-minded pursuits. Perhaps it cures baldness, or removes wrinkles, I might think. Perhaps it challenges the visible signs of ageing? Or the signs of visible ageing. Can I use it to shine my shoes? Perhaps it peels carrots? You see what I’m saying here, of course. You see where I’m going with this…

 

‘One-track mind, don’t you know I’ve got a one-track mind? Don’t you know I’ve got a one track mind….’ Goes the song in my head. On and on it goes. It’s some kind of a pop song that no one ever wrote. A classic of its genre – catchy and yet at the same time annoyingly inane. We’ll never see it, I’m telling you that straight up. We’ll never ever guess it. We’re looking in the wrong direction. We’re just not evolved enough. We’re like amoebas– only amoebas are smarter than we are in this line. They’ve got the edge on us; they’re not looking in the wrong direction like we are. They haven’t got this ‘one-track mind’ thing going that we have. They’re on the money already! They don’t need to stretch their necks out. The further you stretch your neck out the more vulnerable you are to having your head lopped off, isn’t that right?

 

Anyway, the only thing we need to know for the purposes of this story is that the alien artefact (or alien technology) is ‘off the grid awesome’. That’s all we need to know. We couldn’t even begin to guess how amazing it is, as I have already stated. Our poor minds are too limited to grasp it, as I keep stressing. The potential locked up on this bit of alien tech is utterly astounding. Its ‘uses’ (and this is such a crappy little word) are endless, beginningless, fathomless… And yet at the same time I guess it makes a perfectly good doorstop too…

 

 

Art: Walk around the city by mittmac/absorber

 

 

 

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