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| Star Wars: Galactic Encounters; It was just a movie... until the Rebels came to Earth | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 23 2010, 03:18 AM (1,275 Views) | |
| Baikonur Jedi | Nov 10 2010, 01:42 AM Post #21 |
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Delusions, Part 3 "... JUST HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS!" The shout startled Ricardo, nearly causing him to drop his tools. He looked up to see where it had come from. Somewhere above his position on the scaffolding around the orbiter... "Who said that? Johnny, you back yet?" He called, looking around. The shout seemed to have come from the catwalk on the other side of the room, and sure enough, he could make out some momentary movement there. There was no response. Ricardo looked again, but the movement seemed to have stopped, and now the movement seemed to have stopped. "Johnny?" He called again. His friend had a thing for practical jokes, so Ricardo wouldn't have put it past him to climb up to the catwalk and have done the shouting. Although such behavior really wasn't dignified given the sort of project they were working on... "Yeah? I got the guide!" Ricardo heard Johnny's voice shout back. From behind him. Ricardo turned to see Johnny at the base of the scaffolding, waving the TV Guide over his head. Johnny's triumphant smile faded as he noticed his friend's puzzled expression. "But if you're down there, then who was shouting up... there?" He pointed at the catwalk, where he caught a glimpse of another movement in the shadows. "That is weird, we're supposed to be the only ones in here tonight..." Johnny said, surprised, but not worried. He wasn't the only joker at the plant, and he had a pretty good idea of what was going on. "Look, whoever's up there, you're not scaring anybody and we know you're there, so just come out! Come out and talk to us!" They heard some angry but indistinct chatter, with the only clearly audible phrase being "son of a bantha!" "What's a bantha?" "I dunno, maybe-" Johnny stopped his guess as he saw the two other men stepping out of the shadows on the upper catwalk. The taller man was muscular, with silver hair and a look of intense displeasure on his face. His companion, on the other hand, was shorter and rather skinny, with limp blond hair. He smiled widely, and his eyes bore a look of great excitement, like a little boy with an allowance in his pocket at the carnival on opening day. The two men were dressed in what appeared to be some sort of military uniform. Both wore knee-high brown leather boots, gray trousers with several pockets along the calf, and black vests over pale blue shirts. The taller man had a small silver badge on his vest marked with a red insignia that neither Johnny nor Ricardo could recognize. However, the uniforms themselves definitely looked familiar to Ricardo, and he was trying to process where he'd seen them before as he looked at the men's belts. It wasn't so much their belts that caught his attention, those were rather thick and made of some sort of brown leather. Rather, it was the fact that each belt held a holster and both men seemed to be armed. This would have been highly suspicious and quite alarming given the plant's security level, if not for the fact that both he and Johnny had seen that sort of gun before... Both Rockwell technicians immediately collapsed into spasms of laughter. "Wa-HA! Wahahahahahahaha! HAhahahahahahahahaha!" Johnny was bent over, laughing loudly. "Perry? Max? Is that you guys? I've got to hand it to you, those uniforms look authentic! What'd you do, steal them from the Fox studio?" The two uniformed men looked puzzled. "I'm afraid I don't follow- you're familiar with our uniforms?" The skinnier man asked, sounding surprised. "And you're in-character, too? Oh, that's great! That's great! You look just like the soldiers in the movie. How long have you guys been planning this?" Johnny and Ricardo both laughed again. Ricardo regained composure first, and examined the faces of the two men. Now he returned their puzzled expression, before frowning. "Either you guys also stole some makeup and wigs from the studio, or you're not Max and Perry. Are you those new guys from Lockheed they said were coming in?" "Lockheed? Is that on Chalacta?" The gray-haired man asked his companion. "Chalacta? Was that the big, hairy guy?" Ricardo asked, scratching his head. "No, Ric, that was the Wookiee. Chewbacca." Johnny corrected him. "Hold it, you know what a Wookiee is?" The taller man suddenly glared at Johnny. He reached for his blaster. It was a trap, he'd been right all along, Earth was not what it seemed... The shorter man held out a hand to stop him. "Forgive my friend, he is terribly uncouth and-" the man stopped to glare at his compatriot while lowering his voice "-somewhat paranoid. We were under the impression that only one resident of this planet was aware of the wider Galaxy and its inhabitants, and it was actually him that we were trying to contact. A Mr. George Lucas-" Ricardo and Johnny broke into laughter again. "You know- ha ha- that's actually a pretty clever plot. Hahahaha. The aliens came and told George Lucas everything and then he wrote it down and passed it off as fiction and made the movie... That's like a sci-fi story all by itself!" Johnny said, wiping away tears of laughter. The blond-haired man appeared to be in deep thought. "So, you're saying... there's a popular fictional... movie-" he chewed over the word as if was an exotic and unfamiliar term that he delighted in using "-created by George Lucas that features... Wookies, and the Rebel Alliance, including soliders who dress in uniforms similar to our own... and you think we're imitating this... movie?" He asked. Ricardo smirked. "Yeah, that would be it, pretty much." He'd play along if these guys were really so dedicated to a prank. "Perhaps you'd like to see proof that we're not from Earth?" "Sure. Of course we would. Right, Ric?" Johnny asked, trying not to giggle. These guys were good enough for Saturday Night Live... "Well, then..." The short man pulled out a small object, about the size of a composition notebook, from his pack. It was flat and streamlined, a metallic blue color with various apertures and slots along the side that neither of the two Rockwell technicians could fathom the purpose of. A dark blue screen dominated the object's surface, and the man turned it so that both of them could see the screen clearly. "This is a MicroData Scientific Versafunction 97 Datapad. I sound a bit like a commercial, there... no matter. I use it to record and store information about the cultures I visit on my various missions as an anthropologist." The man pressed a button on the datapad's side with a skinny finger. The screen lit up, dark red circular shapes and other icons rapidly appearing, then disappearing. Strange hieroglyphic text labeled the various icons, using angular, pointed letters that looked nothing like any language the two had ever seen before. "Here's where you live-" The man touched several icons, prompting more rapid changes before the red icons all vanished. A view of a barred spiral galaxy replaced it, clearer and more colorful than any photo, but far more realistic and detailed than any painting or computerized artwork. The view zoomed in seamlessly, to a single spiral arm, two-thirds of the way out from the galactic core. Stars flew by the screen, until one filled the field of view. Now a planet of swirling clouds that Johnny and Ricardo could recognize as Jupiter flew by, clearly the planet they knew from photographs, but in resolution a thousand times clearer than the images they'd seen from the Voyager and Pioneer probes. This was no photo, this was a view as if one was actually there. The two technicians knew computers very well, something that still could not be said by much of the population at that time. They had seen some of the very latest in their line of work, played their share of Pong and Space Invaders on the weekends, but at the sight of the detailed, rapidly changing planetary graphics on the datapad, their eyes grew wide and their faces drained of color. "Oh... my... god. You really are from space!" "So you made these two 'aliens' some coffee and showed the shuttle to them, but then they left, saying they'd return?" The boss asked, repeating what Johnny and Ricardo had just finished telling him. "That's right, sir. They said that Princess Leia would be landing in a few days to talk to our world's leaders." Johnny said. "And that's the whole story?" Their supervisor asked, gently. "That's the whole story, sir." Ricardo affirmed. The supervisor was silent for a few moments. "Would you boys like to know what I think of your story?" He asked, in a quiet voice. "Um, okay, sir." "I think that your story is complete and total HOGWASH! It's just about the craziest thing I've ever heard. You say there are aliens, okay. You say they look exactly like us and speak perfect English?" "They called it Basic..." Ricardo tried to explain. "Why in the world would an advanced civilization with 'hyperdrive' and 'repulsorlift' give a rat's [DELETED] about the shuttle?" "They were anthropologists, y'know, like the Leakeys-" " 'Like the Leakeys'... would either of you like to tell me a different story? About what really happened?" Their supervisor glared at them with a look that could ignite nuclear fusion. Both men were silent. "The Shuttle program is extremely important to our nation's future as a technological leader. In case you gentlemen haven't noticed, it's been three years since our country has put a human in space, and it's going to be a few more before we're ready to do it again. Russia and the other powers would like nothing more than to fill that gap. And yet I find my trusted employees tasked with constructing the shuttle goofing off and telling whacko stories about Star Wars!" He paused again. "That sort of behavior is not tolerated around here, gentlemen. Rockwell takes this contract very seriously." More silence. "That's it? Nothing?" "Nothing, sir." Ricardo said. "Very well, then, go back to work." The supervisor waved them out of his office door. After the two had filed out dejectedly, he sat down again. "God, the things I hear..." He pulled out a pen and began writing a memo. "I would like to recommend these two men for immediate psychiatric evaluation. They suffer from delusions and genuinely appear to believe that they have been contacted-" Screams from outside the building caused the supervisor to stop writing. "What is it? What's happened now?" He asked, loudly, as he got to his feet. "Sir, I think you should come look at this!" He heard his secretary shout, sounding panicked. The supervisor rushed to the window, pushing back the venetian blinds with a clatter. Sunlight was thrown onto the photographs that hung on the far wall, but his attention was strictly focused on what was happening outside. In the open area between hangars, engineers and technicians were standing rooted to the spot, looking up into the sky. He followed their gaze upward... A large object, metal and scarred, was hanging overhead, descending towards Palmdale. The supervisor was far from what anyone would call hip, but he had seen the movie all the same, and he knew very well where he had seen all of this before... It was a familiar shape, a shape most of the country could recognize, a disk with two prongs jutting out- The unmistakable outline of the Millenium Falcon. "Mary, Jesus, and Joseph!" He whispered. "This all occurred. I saw it with my own eyes... in our peculiar time, the era in which fairy-tales come true." - Hans Christian Anderson |
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