Skip to main content

An Alien Prison Tale

I'm at Fort Dix, New Jersey, preparing for yet another deployment with the Army Reserve.  Fort Dix has a Federal Penitentiary on its grounds and in the process of moving from one point to another on my first day here, I found I had accidentally wandered up a service road for the prison.

I was surrounded by barracks buildings much like the rest of Fort Dix but encircled by tall fences topped by concertina wire.  A voice blared over a loudspeaker in a rumble of words I could barely understand, but eventually said something about "Last call for chow line."  I realized with a shock that I wasn't near  the prison as I first thought, but actually on  the grounds of the penitentiary (please note that tall fences and concertina wire is all it seemed to take to transform Army barracks into prison barracks).  With further horror, I realized the people I'd seen working out in a ball field I'd passed, who wore gray uniforms I first had thought must be some kind of new military uniform, were wearing prison  uniforms.

I propelled myself out of that area at a fast walk, briefly seized not only by the shock of realization but also by the unreasonable fear that I'd be thrown in the Federal pen for transgressing its grounds.  At most, of course, I would have been chewed out for being someplace I wasn't supposed to be.

But as I walked, my mind generated a science fiction story out of the experience.  I imagined a human military liaison officer appointed to an alien world, a world where he does not speak the dominant language, who decides to stroll on his own to perhaps a park in the alien capital.  Finding he failed to correctly read the map-made-by-non-human-hands in front of him, he realizes with horror he has wandered onto the grounds of an alien prison.  And unlike me, when the guards see him, they grab him and throw him inside.

As the story progresses, the only human in the prison manages to survive and gradually learns to do better than bare survival, finding a fellow prisoner with whom he shares a language in common...but also, one of the guards shows signs of understanding him, though never openly saying so.  He eventually comes to understand his capture was no accident, but part of a nefarious plot to imprison the Earth ambassador, a plot he has to escape from prison to undo...

ttp

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Peter Jackson's Ring of Power

As Gandalf famously stated in the Fellowship of the Ring, the Ring of Power appealed to the good-hearted and heroic wizard, giving him a desire to use it for good. But in fact, as every LOTR fan knows, it   cannot   be done. The Ring of Power will eventually corrupt every person who attempts to use it into an evil being. Watching the Fellowship of the Ring movie last night reminded me of this principle. The fact that evil   cannot  be used for good is one of the things I love most about The Lord of the Rings. It’s a powerful statement about the attempt human beings make over and over again to gain power supposedly for good—which simply cannot be done by evil means. Not without   becoming   evil. By the way, back when it was first released, I strenuously objected to the plot changes Peter Jackson put into the Fellowship of the Ring. No, for me, the original story was quite good enough and didn’t need to be streamlined or “Hollywoodized” or anything of the sort. When Frodo s

7 Ways to Deal with the Problem Magic Poses Christian Fantasy Writers

First off, what is the problem with magic for Christians? Or sorcery? Or witchcraft? (Are all of those things even the same?) An entire book could be written on this topic (perhaps I'll do that someday) but to keep this as brief as possible, the short reason this is a problem is the Bible has nothing good to say about the practice of magic (neither does extra-Biblical Christian tradition). No translation of Scripture will record the 12 Disciples watching Jesus walk on the water and say, "Wow, that was magical!" Nor is the mana falling from heaven in Israel's wilderness wanderings described as some kind of powerful spell that Moses used, nor even is his rod described as "magic," even though Moses had the power granted to him by God to turn it into a serpent at whatever time he chose. No, the Bible describes events like these as "miracles," or "signs," or "wonders." On the other hand, when the Bible talks about "mag

Nanite Infested Aliens

Inspired by the history of Europeans coming to the New World carrying bacteria to which the native inhabitants had little to no immunity, I thought: "What if aliens visiting Earth carried their own sort of infection or infestation, to which we humans had no immunity?" Sort of a War of the Worlds scenario in reverse... But I'm sure that sort of thing has already been done by someone, aliens carrying virulent disease(s) humans don't carry. So what if the infestation were of nanites--what  if nanites become a standard part of healthcare for any advanced technological species? (Just as hand washing and sterilization of medical instruments become standard at a certain point of development--once bacteria are discovered and found to be potentially harmful.) So that nanites are literally crawling all over (and inside) the bodies of high-tech aliens (or perhaps time travelers from Earth's distant future). What if these nanites potentially posed a risk to the human race?