[Fiction] On Europa [first draft]

It was answering the call, the call that had roused it from a million years of slumber beneath the icy crust of this lonely little world under the watchful red glare of the massive orb in the sky.

So close, so close to the source of the call that woke It from its dreams on the ocean floor…

Several structures, far too regular in shape, marred the ice fields of Its home. The call, whatever it was, emanated from there, and was more than a little…annoying?

The sound grated on Its ears, or what passed for them, as close to the source as It was…

A nearby structure beneath Its feet was crushed in an audible groan of steel and plasticrete and sparks flew in the wreckage as power cables snapped and arced madly, several hundred tiny…things…four-pronged creatures of some sort scurried about, seeking to avoid Its massive bulk.

For such annoying little things, they were almost worthy of concern. But only almost.

It stepped on them.

They felt oddly squishy beneath Its feet. It moved on.

Its eyes, or similar organs, darted about, Its ears attempting to find the source of the keening wail.

There.

The odd construct, disturbingly geometrical in shape, a cylinder, if It had known what one was, was being used to drill into the ice.

The noise was even louder now, enraging It, and It reacted by swiping at the irritant with a chitinous paw, satisfied after several attempts when the noise finally ceased with a loud…Crunch!

Hmmm? What’s this? Something there, not moving, just standing there, at Its feet.

One of the tiny four-pronged creatures.

Its eyes, and the eyes of the tiny thing met…the eyes of a mite scarcely bigger than one of Its claw digits.

It knew. It recognized this tiny thing from Its dreams across time, this one, with its defiant gaze, mouthing sounds It did not, could not understand, but It knew. The tiny thing stood there, as if resigned to its fate, but doom would have to wait.

Not now.

The annoyance had passed, and now It was feeling a bit sorry for the mites, alien though they were. They were such small things, and as It looked into the sky, to see the red glare of the banded orb dominating the horizon, it thought of how small It may be to things larger still.

Shifting Its bulk, It turned around, away from all this. Another call, the call to sleep for another million years, as It knew years, drew It away from this odd blighted place of strange structures and tiny, defiant creatures.

The call to home.

So It left, and as It did so, the thought of finding a quieter resting spot came upon it.

A good idea, as It knew ideas with Its massive but ponderous mind, and one well worth the thinking.

Human Curiosity: It’s crucial to our survival.

Intellectual curiosity is worth much more than many Conservatives credit it for being, allegedly deceased cats notwithstanding.

It got us out of the caves, to the farthest reaches of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and within a relatively short time, to the Americas…

…and now it impels us to reach for the stars.

Some would have us return to the caves, but our course was set when we chose to spread across the globe in small bands of hunter-gatherers, even before the age of Colonialism, even before we had advanced beyond stone tools and fire making.

You can’t stop the future, not without serious consequences, and from here, it’s either go forward or die, no matter how much you may dislike and oppose change and rail against the forces of historical progress.

Curiosity, through its instrument, the methods and tools of science has despite our missteps, shortsightedness, and occasional obstructionist pigheadedness benefited our lot as a species immensely.

We’re at a point in our evolution during which we can do no good for ourselves by rejecting its help because of our own mistakes in applying it.

The problems of misused knowledge cannot and will not be combated by ignorance, willful or otherwise, only by a wiser application of knowledge.

We can go onward and outward to a glorious destiny in the stars, or we may suffer a meek, whimpering, ignoble fate rotting on a poisoned, dying, overpopulated planet killing each other over petty differences and blinded by our ideologies, greed, selfishness and ancient hatreds.

For myself, I much prefer the one, and the other I find rather worrying.

What about you?