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

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  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!

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    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

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  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.

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  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.

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    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

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  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. 🙂

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