I'd began walking to the Observatory, taking a detour through the hydroponics bay when there was an awful lurch as the ground moved out from underneath me. As the lights flickered and the emergency siren screamed, I fell and hit my head against one of the hydroponics units with a solid thump and hissed in pain.

I pulled myself to my feet and touched my fingers gingerly to me scalp pulling them back red and dripping. The hydroponics unit was showing a jagged crack splayed out across the glass where my head had impacted. The shaking died down and soon I was left alone with my headache and the blaring of the sirens.

I was particularly disturbed by the shaking. Being in a spacestation meant that there would be no such thing as earthquakes, the only thing that could cause that was either an explosion or an impact with a foreign body. More disturbing was the fact that if I felt it at all it meant the force had exceeded what the inertial dampening systems could compensate for, which must have meant what ever happened had done so with considerable force indeed.

"What happened?" I yelled out.

Static. The wormhole link just exploded. I managed to funnel most of the explosion away from us but... Static.

"What the fu-? It exploded!? What the hell is happening?"

Unknown. As I was saying, I redirected most of the force of the explosion but there was no time. The planet was in the redirection path at the time.

I felt sick. "Crap..."

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A man alone on a space station monitoring an alien race. Or is he? Themes to explore are loneliness and isolation and the effect it has (or has already had) on the protagonists mind. The rudimentary AI (it's smart enough to hold realistic human-like conversations but it isn't really sentient and can't think outside it's limited programming) is ripe for taking down a HAL9000 route, though I'd try and avoid that clich if possible. The aliens are really only a reason for him being there, but feel free to take things further and make something bigger out of them.

updated Sep 22 '08 by darkliquid