Originally Written 2019
Warn: [ lite horror ]
Prompt:The laws of the universe may be bent, but will not be denied. Time debt must be paid. After developing an FTL drive and traveling to the stars, an excited humanity has made first contact. The aliens are horrified at what we've done.
Submitted to r/WritingPrompts by u/lehren
Note: this one is kinda poorly written, just warnin ya
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In the year 2032 the first theoretical FTL drive was mathematically proven, the answer was simple, spherically compress the higs field and like magic, at the center the field would become weak enough that space time could be warped. This allowed slight shifting of the time vector, but even that slight shift allowed almost 2000x light speed travel. There was just one problem. This was only possible at a very specific higs field density. To obtain this density the distortion had to be just over 9000 miles wide. At the time, the best they could do was a few hundred feet. It was not until 2176, 144 years later that a break threw was achieved. A more efficient means of distorting the higs field was discovered and the first break-point drive was made.
A crew was launched and went towards the closest discovered alien plant. At around 1000 light years away it would take just 6 months, they would finally be able to make contact. Instead of just staring and dreaming from far away. It was a pivotal moment for man kind. Mankind was united to watch the launch.
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After six moths the crew was excited to arrive. They stopped just a few thousand miles away from the surface. John, an engineer, looked from the window. Brown and read read cities dotted the plant, little dots shining on the surface, slowly growing bigger "growing bigger? OH SHIT!" he immediately alerted the captain, something was flying at the ship. The 3d scanners showed it was missiles, well that was the best approximation. They quickly turned and avoided them, as another set was flying at them. What ever aliens lived there definitely were not friendly. Freaked out the captain made a decision, they would skip this plant and move onto the next one, and so they left. Onto the next one, strangely enough the next civilization was hostile to. And the next and the next, after a long 7 years and 27 civilizations they turned around, to go back home, the mission was a resounding failure.
They headed home, soon enough they arrived, the plant was different, patches of barren brown, grey, and blue. There was no heat signature. as the scanner did every planet they came across, it took readings. one such reading was radiation, the data was strange, many radioactive elements were missing. A crew meeting was called and they all talked about what could have happened. John looked at the numbers, for all of the radioactive elements to have decayed at least 100 billion years must have passed. The crew was shook. It could not have been the FTL drive could it have been? On they way out of the system they passed mars, checking on it to confirm there suspicions. they found something strange, around 2/3 of the plant were similar to earth, missing many isotopes. The 2/3 of the planet that had passed threw the distortion when they left
The crew sat in silence as the horror set in. All the planets were hostile, because they knew what would happen, that the distortion spelled absolute doom. How may planets, civilizations, had died off because of them? And so the last human in the universe sat alone in a room and wept.