Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Fiction Contest

I entered a short piece for a 100 word flash-fiction contest over on Boing Boing. The theme was, "Found in space." I'm putting my entry here for, uh, posterity.
What astonished them was the sheer lack of anything worth finding in space; for thousands of years, they probed and mined, sent out satellites and men, and waited in anticipation for progressively more complicated sorts of waves to relay news to their home planet. But that news was always the same: we cannot condense and harvest this cloud, nor can we extract enough water for this planet to be at all useful. Still, they expanded, spread out like a cancer in the dark, always searching for a new sector of space that they might be able to feed on.