Image thanks to NASA.gov

More figurative pen to paper. If you want to be a beta-reader, please send me an email or leave me a comment and I’ll share the rest of the story.

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Then Maybe We’re Broken

This is the story of how we ended conquest, war, hunger, and disease. This is how we ended it all. Some of the events will be familiar to you. They’re well documented. You’ve seen the VRs or read the news. But how they happened, who drove them, now that’s another story. Emma’s story, and mine.

My name is Aiden Smith. At my age, I should have a couple dozen great grandchildren. But I was never so lucky. Something about my genetics, irreversible even now, despite the billions spent on genetic research. But I had a long and fulfilling life, and I have no regrets. The same cannot be said about my twin sister, Emma, though. She was the one that delivered the demise of our particular four horses.

Emma was the best of us, from the time she was born less than a year before me– Irish twins if you hadn’t figured it out– from an American WASP family, born in Boston. There were a lot of babies born that year. It was like a post war baby boom, we were so happy to discover that the Keplers weren’t going to serve us up for dinner. Instead, they let us serve ourselves.

The Keplers came a year before Emma did. Their planet, Kepler 186f, was named and numbered after the space telescope that found it in the skies, four hundred ninety light years away. When the media reported the assumed origin of the aliens, the public didn’t hear the 186, the number of the star discovered by the Kepler telescope. The just heard “Kepler”, and who cares if the “f” made it the sixth planet, slightly larger and colder than ours. Almost immediately the name had stuck. They were the Keplers…