Counting Down From Seven

boardwalk

PHOTO PROMPT © Peter Abbey

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

How did I get to be so old? No, don’t answer that. Maybe I’ll just sit on a bench here on the pier. That’s better. Only us retirees out on a Wednesday. What time is it? Says nearly 9:15 a.m. on this funky handheld the alien gave me.

Well, he said he was an alien. Looked human to me when he accosted me in the Safeway parking lot last week. Countdown says seven minutes as of now. I wonder if I should have warned someone like he said? Too late now. Asteroid’s going to hit dead center of this pier.

It’s Wednesday again and time for another adventure with Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

I finally visited a doctor last Friday and I have some darn infection. Nothing super serious, but it is annoying and uncomfortable. I’m on meds, but they take a while to kick in, so I’m still not feeling great.

I’m sure that’s what slanted my story in this particular direction. Oh, don’t worry. The asteroid in question never hit the Earth, and if it had, it’s “only” about the Empire State Building. It would cause a lot of trouble, but not like a global extinction event.

Yes, my old man is grumpy and not feeling a zest for life anymore. I guess he could have tried to warn someone but who would believe him?

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

43 thoughts on “Counting Down From Seven”

  1. In “The Wizard of Oz”, dropping a wooden farmhouse on someone didn’t seem to produce any collateral damage to the surroundings. Dropping a rock the size of the Empire State Building could be expected to do much worse, especially if it’s carrying the energy supplied by gravitational acceleration and astronomical velocity. Think of a mass extinction-level event like the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period are deemed to have suffered. At that level, one need not even specify dropping it on their favorite target, like the UN, or Iran, or Wuhan, China. But what would anyone be able to do with only a week’s notice of the asteroid’s arrival? Science fiction has suggested launching nukes into space or a mission to land on the asteroid and drill holes in it to plant nukes inside to blow it apart and divert the pieces in other directions. But that’s highly unlikely to be possible even with the much longer lead time that astronomers might provide by noticing the object much earlier. Consequently, your hypothetical alien visitor with his warning and countdown timer is essentially a cruel joker adding insult to injury. You didn’t have him offer to rescue anyone or to provide assistance to divert the rock. In “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951 version), Klatu made it clear that Gort’s ship had the power to reduce the earth to a burnt-out cinder. That suggests sufficient power to disintegrate a mere asteroid. Now that’s the kind of alien one wants to be friendly with, from whom a little favor like saving one’s home planet from destruction could be a worthwhile request.

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    • After about five minutes of research, I determined that the “Empire State Building” sized asteroid, even given gravitational acceleration and accounting for some burn off from friction, wouldn’t trigger an extinction level event. Therefore, even a week’s warning might have given some people time to get to a minimum safe distance. That said, and as I already suggested, convincing anyone of this might be a hard sell. Of course, he could offer up the alien device for examination and astronomers could look in the area of the sky were the asteroid was supposed to be found.

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  4. Werner Herzog, was involved in an emergency commercial plane landing, he refused to assume the brace position as he wanted to see what was coming. If he died, then so be it, at least he’d see it coming, but if he survived then wouldn’t it be awesome to see how he avoided death. Needless to say the plane landed without wheels and he survived, the commercial airline banned him for life, only to go bust a handful of years later.

    Good stuff

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  12. There’s something very interesting about a character who has the power to (maybe?) change the future and decides to just pack it in along with everyone else. The ultimate anti-hero?

    I hope you’re feeling better soon.

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  16. I’m reminded of a movie (the name escapes me). The end is inevitable; an older man and his once-estranged adult daughter stand on the beach, arm in arm, awaiting the oncoming tsunami, accepting their fate and at peace now that they have reconciled.

    A wonderful write, James.

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