I have a lot of ideas for stories. Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all. I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them. I’ll just never get a chance to. So, I give them to the world. If you can make something of these, go right ahead. And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.
To start, I don’t really
have a title for this story. For my
records I labeled it “Lost Wallet” for reasons which will be explained. The idea as I have it would work as a
novella, but if you can think of more material to add it could be a novel, or
even a series.
There are over a hundred
spacefaring civilizations around the galaxy.
They fall into basically four groups.
There are the ones that have been around for tens or hundreds of thousands
of years and have technology that basically make them gods. They are around, but nobody really knows what
they are doing and they play no part in the story. The second group – of a dozen or so species –
have been around for maybe ten thousand years and are extremely powerful. They are well on their way to being in the
god tier, and the lesser species just hope not to be noticed by them. The third group have only been around for a
few thousand years, and are still figuring out the galaxy. There are fifty or so species in this group. They are the main movers and shakers in the
galaxy. There are trading stations every
few hundred lightyears all over the galaxy – some have been around for
thousands of years and nobody really knows who first built them – and most of
the business done on them is handled by this third group. And the fourth group are the newbies, and
they are another fifty or so species. They
know of the larger picture in the galaxy, but they usually stay within tens of
lightyears from their homeworld. They
maybe stick with just one or two of these trading stations.
Humans, are sort of a
fifth group. The story is, that an
object was detected entering our solar system.
The more telescopes that looked at it, the odder it seemed, until the
most likely explanation was that it was an alien spacecraft. A probe was thrown together and sent, and it indeed
was a damaged, alien ship. It was
recovered and scientists took it – and what was left of the crew – apart and
figured out all the technology, including the warp drive, or whatever. So Humans built a ship and went out to meet the
galaxy. But things didn’t go well. Turns out, desecrating the remains of someone’s
dead isn’t a great opening move. The way
I thought of it was humans found a wallet on the street. We looked in it and saw the person lived a
few blocks away. But instead of walking
it back to them, we took the money out of it and hired a limo to take us the
few blocks. And while we did return the
wallet, we took all the photos and credit cards out and photocopied them. Fortunately, for us, the ship was from a
civilization in the fourth group who didn’t really have the clout to do
anything about it. If it had been a ship
from the second group, they probably would have just wiped us out. So Humans are out exploring the galaxy, but
there is the feeling that we hadn’t “earned” the right to be out there so few
species wish to deal with us.
That’s the backstory, but
what’s the actually story? To try to
give Humans a better name, several ships are sent far across the galaxy with
samples of art. There is music and
sculptures, but the main thing are books translated into several of the bigger
languages. The story basically follows a
trader trying to sell Shakespeare to aliens.
The version I came up
with had a father set out with his young daughter to spread the “Humans aren’t
all bad” message. So the daughter grew
up interacting more with aliens than Humans.
And after her father died – probably just some accident – she
continued. It may have been twenty years
since she’s left Earth, and over a decade since she’s spoken with a Human, but
she’s still on the mission because it was important to her dad. Her father was something of a poet, and after
he died she started including his work in the sample of great Human
artists. Which means that at some point,
hundreds of years later, when people finally reach this area of space, some of
the aliens might want more work from this great Human artist, and the people
won’t know who they’re talking about.
But what’s the meat of
the story? I don’t know. Maybe some other Human comes looking for her. Maybe they had a similar origin story and
they’ve gone looking for other orphans among the stars because they haven’t had
Human contact for years either. The bland
story would be the two would fall in love and have a child to carry on the
mission for a homeworld they’ve never seen.
But something different would probably be better.
Or, maybe it’s a deep
dive on what does it mean to be Human. Like
she’s spent so much time with aliens she’s more comfortable with them. Maybe on the other side of the galaxy, she
comes across members of a Fourth Group species that – from a distance – look
Human, and she freaks out. She is so accustomed
to “alien” that something “humanoid” disturbs her.