She should have thought about this before taking an interstellar
detour. She shouldn’t be blamed, though. It is only recently that she was
elevated from a Power to the Higher Power. Earlier she was never far away from
a meaty planet or even simmering hot delicious Sun. But no, she had to become a
Higher Power and go inter-stellar. And now there she is… stuck in empty
interstellar space, light-years from the nearest sun.
She looks left, right, front, back, up and down. The tiny dots
of light don’t evolve into any familiar pattern. She is truly lost in an unknown
part of the galaxy.
She shouldn’t have answered that last Prayer. She thought
she can outshine other Higher Powers by answering and saving that species, even
though their planet was outside her jurisdiction. And didn’t she feel good when
they considered her a goddess? She did. Very much. Well, thanks to that
adventure now she is the one in the need of saving.
‘Shall I call upon the Highest Powers?’ She thinks. ‘They
can show up here at the speed of thought. But it will look bad on me for
miscalculating on my very first millennia as a Higher Power.
Garbled Galaxies! Now my multiple bio-circuits are shutting
down along the 36-km body. Need to start the back-up energy source. What should I do? What should I do?’
She prepares to call the highest power from her Ansible -- faster-than-light
communication channel. Before she does, a tiny globule appears in the periphery
of her multi-frequency vision. Curious, she quickly jumps next to it.
‘It looks amazing,’ she says. ‘Definitely created by a
space-faring civilization. Some kind of derelict vessel for space exploration.
For now, it will have to do as a quick snack. It is mostly hollow from inside
but still bigger than an asteroid. It should give me enough energy to reach the
next star.’
As she prepares her orifices to ingest the vessel, a warning
sign lights up somewhere within her.
‘What now?’
She sees within and realizes that her snack is not derelict
after all. It has about a million specimens from the space-faring civilization.
They all are looking at her in awe. She is now torn about eating it. Rules don’t
say anything about not ingesting the species, but it is frowned upon. Anyway…
there are probably billions more where this one came from.
‘Got to check nevertheless.’
She lets out a sigh and uses a part of her remaining energy
to boot Backward Projection Device. Her addendum vision changes and the
derelict… no… the image of the derelict moves backward in time. It traverses
back towards a mid-sized sun, past a beautiful ringed planet and other gas giants.
Pause.
It stops near a blue planet, the third one from its Sun.
Play.
There are four other derelicts -- just like this one -- about to escape the
planet each with millions of specimens of a species called ‘humans’.
‘Well, the other three ships are there, so I might as well
eat this one.’ He orifices dilate again to ingest the vessel as addendum vision
continues to play the projection. Missiles from the blue planet gallop towards
the four vessels. Three of them find their target but the fourth one misses by
hair. Not long after, a large explosion jolts her vision as the blue planet
goes up in smoke.
‘Shivering Supernova!’ she exclaims.
The last vessel is almost ingested. She spits it out and
looks down upon the vessel. She can get into trouble if she ingested the last
specimen of a species. She turns around and looks at the neighborhood again.
Left, right, forward, backward, up, down. Absolutely
nothing. Just the darkness of space.
Her circuits grumble again with hunger.
She looks back at the human vessel that is now running away.
‘Ah, well. Highest Powers won’t find it out.’
She makes a jump and gobbles it up in one bite.
###
