Post #4275402

For several thousand years they suspected we existed. We were in that magical life-possible distance from our star.They could see we’d popped a few things off the surface of our planet. They feared us in the way all dark forest dwellers fear the known unknowns. The Critters received a flurry of high energy signatures half a century ago—strong enough to be genuinely dangerous yet we’d managed to avoid the self-annihilation. That, of course, made them even more anxious. Their military protocol favored attacking swiftly. But they could never truly decide if they’d be walking into an ambush because a quirk of astromechanics meant they only saw our planet in darkness, a shadow crossing our star twice each year. At least we were in darkness, until Richie Rich decided to brighten up the night side with his big space flashflight. Within two or three scans of Richie’s flashlight the Critters saw all they needed: we were very much in the infancy stage of space travel. We were babes in the woods. The Critter ships arrived three years later, just after Richie Rich and his pals departed on their ill-fated trip to Mars. #microfiction