No Signs in Space / Fairy tale
As quiet as a breeze, Finley left Earth for the first time in his life. He looked out the window of a little room in the back of the spaceship and saw the planet getting smaller and smaller. After a while, he was afraid to look away, because he knew that the next time he looked through the window, Earth would be too small to see.
Finley lived on a big old farm that once belonged to his grandparents. It wasn’t his plan at all to leave Earth that day. Earlier in the evening, Finley started the autumn harvest. He was halfway finished with the first row of corn when he saw something strange.
A crop circle! Finley heard people around town talking about crop circles sometimes. They said alien spaceships made the designs in fields, but Finley didn’t believe in aliens. He checked one of the paths of damaged corn and wondered what made it. Odd. He didn’t see any vehicle tracks. It was almost dark and Finley was tired, so he walked back to the house and went to bed. But he awoke suddenly in the middle of the night. Something outside was making a bizarre noise – a noise that he could feel vibrating right behind his ears. He went to investigate.
It was very dark outside, but he walked toward the noise and the sky moved a bit. He looked up. And up. And up.
And… he was moving toward the sky! Finley flew up and into a small opening on the bottom of a very big ship. Then the floor closed and he was in a little room with a window. He watched the Earth get smaller and smaller for an hour or two. When he finally looked away, he noticed that there was no door in the room, so he searched the walls for some kind of exit. He ran his hands along the smooth surface and suddenly, to his surprise, the wall opened.
Finley stepped into a huge, long room. There were several people walking around and… robots! He tried greeting some of the people, but they gave him strange looks and continued walking. None of them paid any attention to him. They were speaking a language he didn’t know. Most of them wore a curious fabric that almost glowed with color. Little machines moved quickly among the crowd, carrying drinks, snacks, boxes and lots of things Finley didn’t recognize.
It was like a shopping mall with little rooms along the walls. A lot of the rooms were crowded, but one looked almost empty. There was just a white floor with black walls and very tall person with a weird haircut sitting behind a desk. Finley stepped into the room. The person said something to him he couldn’t understand and pressed a panel behind the desk. The wall closed behind Finley. He was trapped! Four large gray robot arms dropped from the ceiling. They moved closer to him.
“Stop!” he shouted, but they kept moving closer. When one of them tried to hit him, Finley ran and jumped into a square hole in the wall…
…and fell into another room. This one was like a long tube, barely big enough for him to stand. There was nothing in the room except a little light, so Finley walked toward it. It was a blue triangle on the wall. He touched the triangle and BAM! He flew down the tube so fast that it scared him. Suddenly, there was no tube – there was no spaceship! He could see it flying farther and farther away, but he wasn’t moving at all. He couldn’t breathe and he felt pain everywhere. Then nothing.
When Finley woke up, he was floating in space, inside an unusual bubble. The spaceship was back. It pulled him in like before, into another little room with just a single window. When he was safely inside, the bubble disappeared and one of the walls opened. There were two men and a woman standing there waiting.
“What do you think you are doing?” the oldest one of them asked.
“What? I don’t understand. Where am I?” Finley replied.
The old man spoke to the others in their language, then he spoke to Finley again. “You were in the trash chute. The ship automatically noticed when you stupidly launched yourself into space. Its safety protocols protected you with that… bubble.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was just trying to escape from those machines that wanted to hurt me.” Finley told them.
The old man laughed. “I can see how our massage facilities might scare someone. You need to pay more attention to the signs.”
“What signs?”
“Ah, yes. You probably can’t even see them. Can you see those symbols above that garbage can?”
Finley looked to where the man was pointing. He saw no signs. “What?” he asked.
“Remarkable! Young man, you are on a cruise ship. We are from… well… the future, to you. I am Hubeb, professor of ancient languages.”
“Go back?” repeated Finley. He looked disappointed.
“When we do,” continued Hubeb, “we will leave you there. Until then, you are free to use the ship’s facilities, but we will have someone watching to make sure you don’t do any more damage.”
“Really?” Finley said. “But I would like to stay.”
“Who knows what the future may bring,” Hubeb replied.
So, Finley enjoyed the extraordinary cruise ship for a few more hours before returning home. Now, once a year, he draws a symbol in his cornfield and takes a vacation for a few weeks. And, because of Finley, all cruise ships from the future now have warning signs that we can read, too.