The Incident
by Rodriac Copen
Copyright© 2025 by Rodriac Copen
Science Fiction Story: Upon arrival at Proxima Centauri, the Exodus-9 crew detects a mysterious object floating in space. They believe it is an alien threat and are panicked. What follows is a chain of absurd misunderstandings, extreme paranoia, and catastrophic decisions that almost spark an interplanetary conflict... against a piece of human junk. Only a stroke of luck prevents a thermonuclear conflict.
Tags: Science Fiction Aliens Space Futuristic AI Humor Parody
The Exodus-9 mission was nearly two centuries into its journey. The astronauts, who had recently awakened from hibernation, were ready to make history: humanity was on the verge of colonizing Proxima Centauri B.
Or at least, that’s what they thought.
As they approached their destination, the ship’s radars detected a strange object floating in the void. Small, metallic, archaic in shape. The ship’s AI, trained using paranoid protocols against any extraterrestrial contact, immediately alerted: —”Unidentified object! Potential alien threat!” —
Commander Vasquez, raised in an environment of military simulations with no contact with reality, applied standard procedure: PANIC. —”Gentlemen! This is a first contact encounter! We were trained for this!” — No one mentioned that the training had been designed by bureaucrats who had never set foot in a spaceship.
The first order was to send a friendly message using standard interstellar communication protocol. Lights were lit on the ship and a message was transmitted over the radio waves that essentially said, “Please don’t kill us.”
The object, of course, did not respond.
—“They’re ignoring us!” shouted Lieutenant Grober . “It’s a psychological domination tactic! “
Vasquez ordered the AI to do a visual inspection, after which the AI described —”The object has a plate with a schematic, the representation of a disk, the indications of some frequencies and some maps of known pulsars, Sir.”—
The commander listened in horror as he said , “These are instructions to activate an alien superweapon. They’ve probably already visited Earth and are now coming for us.”
Panic escalated. The AI proposed a more detailed analysis, but Vasquez, influenced by centuries of action movies archived in the database, decided that the best defense was a preemptive strike. He ordered a low-power torpedo to be fired to “measure the enemy’s reaction.”
The missile hit the object, which didn’t even flinch because it was basically a piece of junk with decades of cosmic dust on top of it.
The impact released a metal plate that headed directly towards Exodus-9, which was interpreted as a response to the attack.
At the same time, the missile generated an electromagnetic wave that caused the alien ship to play a message recorded on a gold disc beneath the instruction plate: a series of greetings in multiple Earth languages.
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