by Eric Swanson
Kurt paused for a moment and the quiet which swept over the crowd remained. He gestured to the crowd with an open hand and continued.
“Now, when any of you are threatened by something, when any human is threatened by something, our biological responses aren’t that varied… Fight or Flight. Fighting… When your enemy is not only clearly technologically superior to you but is also gone… What does accepting the Fight response mean?” Kurt gestured to the sky again and pointed past the gate. “Does it mean that we arm ourselves and pursue these monsters to the ends of the known universe? Even if we could send millions of us to the stars to hunt these creatures… that would leave the other 12 billion members of the human race more vulnerable… And being that there are 12 billion of us, Flight was never really an option.”
Kurt turned his pointed gesture to an open hand and still looked toward the sunny sky.
“To me, the Fight response means that we ready ourselves to—” Kurt pounded the podium with each of his last few words.
Thump
“Defend—”
Thump
“Our—"
Thump
“-home.” Kurt said with a final pound.
The crowd came alive and a deafening roar washed over Kurt and the stage.
“We stay on our planet and combat the specter of the hundred thousand souls stolen from us.” Kurt straightened his back and swept a gesture over the crowd. “But… what are we now?” He closed his open hand into a white-knuckled fist.
On cue, the assembled crowd threw fists in the air and screamed: “UNITED!”
“Where we were once divided by nations…” Kurt’s voice became louder as his passion took hold. “Art?”
The crowd roared again: “UNITED!”
“Where we were once divided by what we looked like…” Kurt’s voice became louder still. “What are we now?”
The crowd cried: “UNITED!”
“Where we were once divided by gods…” Kurt pounded the podium once more. “We are—”
“UNITED!”
“Yes!” Kurt raised his hands to the sky and the crowd continued to cheer. “If they ever return—” Kurt pointed at the gate in the sky beyond the clouds. “People of Earth, we are prepared to defend our home. We are united and we…” Kurt leaned into the podium and the microphones within it. “Are. Ready.”
The gathered thousands roared once more and Kurt soaked up more adoration before he made his way off the stage. Perry leapt about the backstage area and gleefully high-fived Kurt as he moved past him.
“Perry…” Kurt yelled over the crowd noise in the background. “Get me Dr. Kennedy at TDI. As soon as possible.”
Kurt knew the importance of putting on a show and rallying people… He also knew that the call received from Kennedy five minutes prior to Kurt taking the stage was a call for Kurt to stop talking and lead.
Another World, Another Way
Flashes of bright light flooded Graham Shears’ pod-prison and blinded him. In the first few sightless, white-noise filled beats, Graham was sure this was what death sounded and felt like. He squeezed his eyes shut hard against the glow but it warmed him and bled through his eyelids, tinged red by the blood beneath his skin.
Graham always hoped he would meet death with a reserved calm, a sense of inevitability, he hoped, stripping the thing (death) of fear. In this wild moment of total, engulfing mortal dread, Graham was anything but calm. He screamed as loud and for as long as he roughed throat would allow. After a few moments of guttural cries and shallow breaths of rancid air, Graham’s voice left him entirely. As his voice faded, the light and thunder that seemed to simultaneously bathe him faded too.
Where moments earlier, before the gate, the pod’s travel took Graham backward, now it seemed to be falling toward what Graham perceived to be forward.
Forward and down.
“I’m going to burn…” Graham thought. The blinding light faded quickly and completely. Graham blinked hard to clear the afterglow from his eyes and began to see that he was falling in his pod back toward Ear—
“No.” Graham’s eyesight adjusted and he saw a world that rushed his way that wasn’t Earth. Deep reddish-brown mountain ranges broke up from dark, almost black soil. From miles above the surface of this new world, Graham saw massive, iron-soaked brown oceans which surrounded the planet’s landmasses.
The color palette of this world was darker than Earth’s, more muted. The land masses were deeper shades of brown than his home planet, the clouds angrier gray and near-black hues.
“Where…” Graham’s self-directed query stopped with another hard jolt to the pod as the speed of his descent rose.
The same hollow thud he heard earlier preceded a dull, warm pain in his forehead as Graham slammed into the front of the pod. Inertia and the beginnings of the planet’s gravity pressed Graham against the seemingly unbreakable pod and the pressure on his chest forced all the rancid, recycled air from his lungs.
The heat of atmospheric entry warmed the pod to the point when Graham felt his skin begin to redden. Out of breath and violently held against the heating surface, Graham futilely tried to push his body away from the pod wall. After a few breathless, wide-eyed moments spent watching this darker world come closer and closer to him, Graham finally lost consciousness once again.