Friday Fictioneers – Just a Small One

~ neilmacdon
ceayr-3
PHOTO PROMPT © Ceayr

When the glass shattered, everything stood still. Dad’s greenhouse!

“Joel!” Dad sounded anxious.

Joel knew soon the tone would change to anger. “It was just a pebble, Dad. A small one.”

But Dad didn’t get angry. He put his hand to his mouth and gazed at the heavens.

“Just a small one,” he said. “A one gram microsatellite. Accelerated to a quarter the speed of light.”

He whipped out his calculator, punching the keys in panic.

“Jesus Christ! There’s no way of slowing it down. Impact of a small nuclear explosion on collision. How will the aliens understand? What have we done?”

 

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

74 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Just a Small One”

    1. At those kind of speeds it depends on the projectile’s momentum. Even if the aliens are living in reinforced concrete millions of them will be annihilated

      Like

      Reply

  12. Nicely done! I like the weaving of current events and issues with everyday disasters and the realities of bigger ones many of us cannot fully comprehend. Butterfly wings and all that jazz.
    NICE!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. It would probably be too kind to him to call it a butterly effect. The butterfly effect is about unpredictable and incalculable consequences. The consequences here were entirely calculable. He just didn’t calculate them

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  24. Dad certainly knows much more that he is telling. One kilo micro satellite why would it collide with anything if it is in its orbit? Is it moving in the direction of a collision at an enormous speed? There must be a way to avoid the collision.

    Like

    Reply

  29. Now I am thinking about all the satellites orbiting our Earth, what happens to them and the collected space junk? Is there a plan? There doesn’t seemed to have been one for plastic until it is almost too late. You frightened me with this one – well done.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Spacs junk isn’t travelling fast enough to do this much damage, though it is a problem too, My micro-spacecraft here are travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light and so have much more momentum

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  35. It’s all tragic and dramatic, but what I really want to know is what drive they used to reach one quarter of the speed of light. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s