Today we are in 1st person. I’ll be using Rory’s Story Cubes again. I’ll roll three cubes. and assign them to character, plot, outcome.
Word (Theme): Sarcophagus
Character: Alien
Plot: Key
Outcome: Bridge
Return
Humans are desperate little creatures. They strive and strive for recognition, power, comfort, and never consider the larger context of these things. Their writers construct tales of humor and woe. Their actors wear the faces of pride and pretend that caring is the central unit of the human being. It is not. I spent three hundred human years here walking amongst them. They did not notice me. There were times when some drew near, fearing that prickle at the base of their neck. Some drew me. A precious few that I interacted with spoke of me, but their stories became lost in the chorus of fiction. No matter. My purpose was not to be known. My time here was to find what another before me lost; what humans would call a key.
It took me longer than expected. In my understanding of time I was here for 6 cycles. In three of those cycles I was forced to sleep. Once I slept to acclimate to this place. A second cycle was spent sleeping through their many great wars. It was between that second cycle and now that I found the key. It was buried deep in a collection of sounds they call language. A pattern of such, applied properly and at the correct tones and spacing is that key. Once I heard it, I knew that the one who’d lost it had not in fact lost it but had given it to the humans as a way to bridge their potential. They could have crossed that space from a species of self worth to one of collective value.
It did not work. As I sleep in this third cycle, preparing for transit back to the existence I call home, I can note that these humans have evolved very little. They do not grasp the idea of growth and change and cycle. They do not process the concept of mutually assured evolution only that of destruction. I have what I came for. I have no more value for them. I wonder if they will survive another 6 cycles?