[https://pixabay.com/photos/space-moon-stars-planet-science-624054/]space background [https://pixabay.com/photos/space-moon-stars-planet-science-624054/]

"You there, hold it right there criminal scum." The alien commander of the fifth fleet said. There was no reply by the dream-walking alien. He was one of the orderly's from the kitchen and condiments division of the space ship -- as the insignia on his uniform showed.

The dream-walking alien made to go down unconsciously the rest of the hallway before finally the alien commander took his Palladium walking stick -- an item of extreme designation of the upper echelons of Markovian society -- and whacked the dreaming orderly with it.

"AWWOOUHHH!" A few blinks of their alien eye which swirled shut like a camera shutter for each blink. "Where...where...where am I?" Then "Oh sire, your excellency. How do you do?" The orderly alien said shaking in fear. It was the fear of being in pain in front of an authority figure rather than simply being afraid of the alien commander. The Markovian alien's were very sensitive creatures and their feelings and perceptions lasted long after they experienced them. They in fact became their own, ephemeral, world.

The alien commander sighed. "Another one caught daydreaming?"

"Sir?"

"You were dreaming of vivid landscapes again weren't you?" The alien nodded, regaining his senses further of time and space.

"Was...was...I? Is this the plague sir?"

"Indeed it is cadet."

"The HUMAN plague sir? The one in the notice sent out by Command." The orderly said with gasp, the word human echoed through the hallway.

The alien commander of the fifth fleet shook his head. Things were getting grim: since the aliens had passed by with their reconnaissance of the human homeworld, which they had labeled Labia-Titana, there had been a plague spreading through the fifth fleet. Every day aliens were being filled and entranced with thoughts of imagination. Some were daydreaming, others were writing creatively on the walls.

The aliens of Markovia were a very gentle race, not only in physical nature but also in mental stature. They didn't aspire to much mentally because the background environment of their homeworld did not demand it. The alien's evolution designated them with some a form of a mental apparatus that was able to receive images but not self-generate them.

As a result the aliens never learned to come into relationship to the visual images that touched their mind. Because it was rare and few when it did happen, and they were told to just follow orders from the higher up echelons -- which of course they did. This all created a race of aliens that were very susceptible to the imagination.

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The reconnaissance space plane had brought back the infected crew and the "virus" quickly spread. More and more aliens were imagining things and seeing beautiful visual landscapes like none they had ever seen before.

Of course the higher ups, who were not dimwits, knew what this could mean for their ranked society. Not only the issue that distracted aliens are unproductive but if dreaming of new landscapes can suggest the idea of novelty to the lower classes. What other new ideas might they encounter? Perhaps a changing of the social order itself, so the alien commander himself had been briefed in a private communication from the Mother-Queen.

"Off to the medical bay with you," the alien commander said at once.

"But sir, but sir."

"That's an order cadet!"

The orderly had wanted to tell the alien commander about these beautiful green and brown landscapes he had seen. The terrain was uneven and there were these brown cylindrical objects, almost like pillars, with many pointed-jagged little green beasts on them. It was as if the green beasts were growing from the brown cylinders. The alien didin't know how else to describe it, what's more is that there were dozens and dozens of green beasts covering one cylinder and there were several such brown pillars across the terrain. Sometimes the green beasts seemed to bob up and down uniformly, and make a uniform sound like that of the engine of their space ship. The beasts were small and paper-like with many folds on them. One of the mystical creatures the alien saw in their vision kept making weird animal noises: "Trees, leaves, wind."

That evening the cadet did go to the medical bay where they were implanted with a chip that resisted the human imagination waves.

You see what had actually happened was that it wasn't a virus that had spread. It was the contamination of the alien's with a layer of reality they had previously not known before. When the imagination of one alien was activated, it spread by cultural osmosis to the next and so on and so forth. What this means, practically speaking, is that each imagining "daydreaming" alien amplified the imagination realm further and further beyond Labia-Titana.

It was just chance that there was enough "amplifying power" of the reconnaissance crew to extend the imaginative field to the area of space where the fifth division was docked. This was how the "plague" spread back to the mainship of the fifth division.

The medical staff of the crew soon realized the dynamics at place and that it wasn't in fact a virus -- though culturally speaking it still was in a manner of speaking -- and they developed a chip to suppress the aliens internal systems from picking up and transmitting the imaginative layer they had encountered in that foreign world.

However the upper echelon had a new problem. The imagination layer had been transmitted far past their current post so outrunning it was not an easy tactical answer as one might expect. The second issue was that the medical staff was only able to chip alien's that were actively imagining. It served no purpose to preemptively chip regular aliens. Therefore command was in a situation of playing whac-a-mole would the would-be alien amplifiers. Further making ending the "human imagination plague" a lot more difficult than one might expect."

END

- F.P.

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Image source:

alien space background

jordygoovaerts0 - from Pixabay

https://pixabay.com/photos/space-moon-stars-planet-science-624054/