The emerald pyramid was starting to glow as the sun went down. It had that eerie unavoidable quality. I suppose like the way that flies are drawn to one of those blue ring things in the bakery. The whole pyramid was glowing various colours of green.
But the top of the pyramid, the peak was glowing the brighest. The emerald was almost translucent.
The top then lifted off as a kind of mini-pyramid. Then out of the hole emerged a 1960s Apollo-missions rocket, with the Space shuttle on its back. We had a short countdown of T-minus-5... 3, 2, 1 and then the thrusters coughed big bellows of smoke. The momentum built and this great hulk of primative spaceshippery was taken into the atmosphere and into orbit.
Out it went, through the clouds all the cumuluses, and nimbuses, and the cumulus nimbus clouds and then it started entering the dark. The great vacuum that is space. To the sides the sky was becoming a fainter and fainter shade of blue. The orbital equivalent of flicking through the catalogue of paint samples in a builders merchants. And out they went into the great orbit of the planet they'd always called home.
Many Earthlings imagined the orbit of this world to be empty. The vacuum. But it was here in the sun beyond the edge of the Earth's shadow where there were Chinese dragons. Sent up long ago by the early wide-narrow-eyed cultures of what is modern day China. Thousands of years ago these beasts were sent to guard the planet from any untoward extraterrestrials.
They were fiercesome but weren't particularly interested in the astronauts who were visiting them. Round and around they flailed. Moving, rotating in the richest deepest red and gold swirls. And then one of them emerged from behind a TV satellite and let out a growl in front of the Shuttle which was now settled into the gravitation orbit.
The astronauts were startled but not too alarmed. They had been warned in top-secret, eyes-only, need-to-know dossiers that had circulated between only those who had top-secret, eyes-only, need-to-know clearance that these beings were lurking in the upper atmosphere. The way to charm these beasts was to play their game. They had big swirling eyes, intended to scare any unprepared travellers and beings. But if you sent benevolent intentions and waited long enough they would calm down and get on your side and even become rather friendly. They would send one large fortune cookie for every astronaut into the air-lock valve, once opened. This would inform them of the great cosmic weather and the prognosis for their journey.
It was a slightly more hightech and personalised version of the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast.
Then the three passengers waited. Maria Brogowski, the most junior of the crew was unbuckled and floated her way to the airlock. She gathered the three fortune cookies in her hands and then gradually floated back to her seat.
Ground Control was asking for a mission report, where a gallery of screens and jittery energy-drink-fueled technicians had live webcam footage and sound feeds from the craft's artificial atmosphere. Generals with headsets and suits with ostentatious numbers of medals watched eagerly from some non-descript corner of the Mojave desert.
"Anything that requires thoroughness you do very well" Maria read aloud from the fortune cookie. The generals took a moment to register the words through the crackling signal. But then they cheered! Of course they'd prepared wonderfully well for this mision. Every part, every crank, every screen, every miniscule piece of software had been masterfully built and tested, prototyped, re-prototyped. Sent under water for the most intensive terrestrial-based testing. And then built 1000 times the number of required pieces in case of repairs or faults from wear and tear.
Bert Hummer, the most senior of the astronauts then cracked open the next cookie.
"Anything that requires thoroughness you do very well" he read from his own cookie in his gravelly tones. The astronauts looked at each other and laughed, and this cued the ground team to laugh too. There was one older lady at the back of the control hall who was slightly unnerved. Maybe this meant they think we are not thorough. Maybe we got it all wrong. But then again she was prone to this sense of impending disaster and had not progressed sufficiently through the endlessly stratospheric hierarchy of the spacemilitary complex to feel like her opinions and gut instinct would be taken seriously. She was more afraid of falsely crying wolf than having something go wrong and dealing with her portion of it later. It was only a job after all.
The two astronauts who'd had their turn were munching through the stale crackers, crumbs floating in multiple directions through the gravityless container.
Then Alexander Constantinova, a Greek astronaut that had been sent with the EU's budget for space exploration that had been granted in the EU's final days, cracked open his fortune cookie. He could never understand why they were called fortune cookies. An American cookie was a cookie, like what the British called a biscuit. This was like some dry piece of paper contorted into some peculiar geometric shape one of his former Math professors could name.
He opened up his cracker and the message written on space-kelp papyrus flicked out. He grabbed it, turned it upside down and then read out:
"With your personality you will never get old." He chuckled. Alas, he wouldn't and he gave the two broken pieces of crackers to his colleagues.
"You eat this sawdust."
The dragon accosting the spaceship winked, gave a growl reminiscent of the MGM tiger in old films. The creature then disappeared off to deal with a few stray oversized comets and some rather satanic-looking goats that were intending to incarnate on earth.
The craft had been given some upgrades since it's last publicly recorded usage. A hyperdrive had been installed allowing the the shuttle to visit places at beyond light speed. One of the most intriguing places of all was Genetitania. Not to be confused with Genetitalia - the planet of mutated genitals. It was in this corner of the cosmos that it was known that Genetitania contained all strands of genetic spaghetti that were supposedly roped together and catalysed by the Gods and then sent to the rest of the cosmos for petri-dish type experiments. The former astronauts who'd been there had regarded these genetic artists as Gods, but they could be, some senior Earthbound technician's wondered - just another set of beings in the vast endless ever expanding-emptiness of space who had developed some skills well beyond what humans were capable of understanding with their current cognitive capacity.
After a short and long journey depending on the perspective of the creature watching, the hyperspace drive announced "You have arrived at your destination. All around you."
The craft was then entangled in ropes and swirls. Endless patterns and swirling moving patterns of stringiness that all hung vertically.
"They call this the Spaghetti Curtain, hold on tight" Bert Hummer grabbed hold of the thruster and seeing a gap between the strands went full speed ahead. They did endless loop the loops through fractal-like patterns and then... then they were in a place with a murky green sky. A kind of ASDA uniform green that had faded after many washes and years of obesity sweat. There was some kind of Colliseum-type building that had two big orbs with cackling electricity rising around them in rings. The creatures that were here were eeking slowly along the ground and seemed rather pedestrian compared to the technology the three humanoids had.
The craft hovered just above the roof. There was the image of halloween-ghoul sprayed on the arena's earth. And then out came two slugs from either side of the colliseum. The great Slug announcer was calling out names in a language of round globular sounds that the humans couldn't fathom. The slugs then raised a little sharp twig aiming towards each other and charged towards each other.
Although it didn't appear to be that way. They were inching towards each other so gently, so slowly, so inch-by-painful-inch slowly, that this jousting match would take the equivalent of human decades to finish. Maybe this was some kind of survival of the fittest. Played over achingly-long timescales, with various intermittent "jousts" between different breeds, types and species - that eventually a certain type of slug would win. Then it would be sent to some corner of the cosmos, possibly somewhere like Earth - where in due course it would become the scourge of allotment holders and gardeners. They'd chomp through lettuces, and avoid the pellets the humanoids would put down to kill them. They'd be quite groggily merry until a nice blackbird would peck them to pieces and they would return to some kind of experimental ether of Genetitania.
In any case, this voyage wouldn't seem particularly important or influential to the technicians. So they slowed down the hyperdrive, tapped the "Home" button, pressed go. And within the time it took them to say "are we nearly there yet" they were swirling past the Chinese dragons and hurtling into the ozone layer. It got a bit heated inside the capsule, but they sent a quick message to the ground control team who were dispatching boats towards their estimated arrival zone in the Eastern Pacific ocean.
They splashed and sploshed on impact in the sea and watched a nearby containership gradually change it's course as it saw them coming. The craft floated and bobbled up and down and now it was time to wait for the boats that would take them back to their home and families.
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