CarolJ

Destress Signal

Added 2022-12-01 07:50:58 +0000 UTC

Updated the description! Hopefully this will shed some insight onto the piece. At the very least, it'll give you a little summary to whet your appetite!

Lucas Allen and Scott Midvale are halfway through a six-month mission for the Intergalactic Alliance of Planets when they receive a distress signal from a commune located on a small planetoid. Amara of Hestia-55 is the sole member of her group capable of operating the communication array; the rest of her community has been infected by Virus X! Thankfully, a cure is easy enough to synthesize with the advanced equipment Lucas and Scott have, but... Why isn't Hestia-55 on any Alliance star charts...?

You can read Destress Signal here!

This is a rare sci-fi piece from me, but I guess that more affects the setting than it does the content, huh? Nevertheless, there's something really appealing about the kind of pulpy tone of older sci-fi stories, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about the Orion Syndicate from Star Trek: Enterprise while I wrote this particular piece.

The tone is definitely meant to invoke Star Trek: the Original Series, but unlike that coward Roddenberry, I'm more than willing to have the "heroes" of the story actually fall to the exotic wiles of the...human temptresses. No deus ex machina here, motherfucker!

...The one thing that I can definitely say about this piece that I wish I could've done better is foreshadowing the twist at the end. I tried to slip in some hints and suspicions before, but I worry the "big reveal" at the end is a bit "...Well, that escalated quickly!"

Regardless, I hope you enjoy it! As always, thank you so much for your support and for your patience!