The Sound of Gravity
It was an honest mistake on our parts. How were we to know that life elsewhere didn’t speak through sound? How were we to know that we were the odd ones out, instead of them?
It happened on the seventeenth of December, 2987. We had tested warp drives for a decade at that point, and were ready to embark on our first journey between star systems. We were ready to see what was out there beyond our humble little ring of planets.
A crew of ten went aboard, just enough to keep the systems running and report any anomalies with them on our way out. They were brave, and bold, and the best of the best at what they did.
We weren’t expecting to find life out there. For almost a millennium, everywhere we’d tuned our satellites was dead silent. There was no sign that any advanced life lived anywhere beyond our solar system. We assumed that we would find planets teeming with simple life, or perhaps even mindless animals.
When that ship arrived to its destination planet, an earth-like orbiting around Kepler, we knew our theories were wrong. The crew reported satellites orbiting the planet that matched no design philosophies we’d ever seen. They numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands, and were spaced out exactly as ours were to provide coverage across the entire planet.
That was the first anomaly. The second anomaly happened mere seconds after dropping from warp speed. Satellites careened into one another, smashing apart into flaming balls of wreckage or dropping suddenly through the atmosphere to burn up.
The crew watched, horrified, scrambling to discover if this was their fault. If, somehow, they had disengaged the warp drive too close to the planet’s gravitational field.
Nevertheless, once they had switched to main engines, they began their descent. They remained on edge as the atmosphere ablated away heat shielding, but never once showed true fear. They held trust in our engineering advances, remaining steadfast as they saw extraterrestrial life for the first time.
It was beautiful, with verdant forests comprised of trees they never once could’ve imagined, or oceans that shimmered an almost-violet instead of the blues they were familiar with.
The animals, however, were odd. Strange, ray-like birds soared through the air, but without any of the grace that could be expected from an animal that’d evolved such a body plan. Ground scans revealed legged animals lying on the ground, convulsing, as if in a horrible seizure.
When the first cities rose above the horizon, great, shimmering metropolises of crystal and glass, the crew was ecstatic. They took pictures and captured videos, prepared to show the scientists at home all the data they’d accrued.
Until they touched down at the edge of the city and ventured in. Yes, they found life. Yes, they assumed it was intelligent. But no, no one greeted them.
Everywhere they looked, they saw individuals with two legs and four arms, and a chitinous exterior similar to the insects on Earth. They had mandibles and compound eyes, and antennae that seemed to twitch in an endless wave.
And every single one of them was captured in the throes of a heavy seizure, and within the hour, an entire city was found to have perished.
We only realized when we visited the second planet orbiting Kepler, when we disengaged the warp drive again, and when we touched down in another city.
We only realized that gravity was the medium through which every other language spoke, and when we used our warp drives to bend that medium to our will, we were sending a destructive wave ahead of us.
Single-handedly, we were ruining entire civilizations. Single-handedly, we were ending lives in minutes. Single-handedly, we had become the monsters we swore we would never become again after the Sixth Great War.
And so I, single-handedly, initiated the self-destruct sequence on our only warp-capable ship, stranding our crew on an alien planet for the rest of their lives.
