Wonderland 2024

A-4. Shutting Up Like A Telescope

PROMPT ▼

A new planet has just been discovered...by you! Describe this planet, its inhabitants, and what life would be like over there. Be careful now, as Dinah the Cat must approve. (<1000 words)

The problem with Golden Keys1 is that, like all keys, they have a tendency to get left laying around. And the problem with temporal Golden Keys specifically is that when someone sees a key made of literal gold with moving bits of stardust mixed in, they tend to get noticed, picked up, and not returned to the nearest lost and found. People tend to hold onto them. Some even manage to figure out how they work.

That's how an orthodontist named Doug from Schenectady, New York managed to destroy an entire civilization on Elurun Prime2.

For most of its history, Elurun Prime had been an entirely unremarkable frontier planet at the very edge of known space. It wasn't good for much more than exploiting for its limited natural resources, until a rebel faction led by General Mirax Vel took a liking to its out of the way location and started building infrastructure. The indigenous peoples of the planet were mostly indifferent to the newcomers, although they were more than happy to take advantage of the new economy that was raising up around them. The atmosphere wasn't particularly hospitable, but once the arcology structures had been built, it was easier to create comfortable, habitable areas on the surface of the planet. Despite the technological superiority of the inner worlds' advanced civilizations, the plan actually worked and General Vel's rebels thrived on Elurun Prime.

That is, until Ortho Doug from Schenectady got his hands on that Golden Key.

No one's quite sure how Doug got his hands on one, but that's kind of how those keys tend to work; they're in someone's possession until they aren't anymore. However he came by it, the even more surprising thing was that Doug actually stumbled across the correct way to use it. And, for his first several uses, he did the usual things like quick weekend getaways to Hawaii. But eventually he developed a taste for intergalactic travel and started visiting other planets. One of them happened to be Elurun Prime and Doug was so impressed with what they had built he couldn't help but snap a few photos with his iPhone ... which ended up being of great interest to the security services on the inner world planet he visited next.

These days, Doug has a fascinating Wikipedia page that correctly attributes him as the first human to achieve intergalactic travel and conact with sentient alien life. Of course, under the "controversy" header, it also lists him as the inadvertent architect of a galaxy-wide genocide that raged for generations. He's also now the most famous Schenectady orthodontist by a wide margin, and the second most popular on Yelp, after his rival who lets clients stay at his beachfront timeshare if they give him a five-star review.


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(438 words)

Footnotes
1  "A-3. The Golden Key" 
2  "A-2. The Antipathies"