Stranded

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must contain the words: message, broken, drop

Stranded

Well that’s the end of that, Tangeron thought to himself.

In his hands were the fried remains of his backup de-randomizer chipset. Its broken predecessor was still warm from its own demise only hours earlier. Without at least one of these chips, his vessel’s probability drive would slowly begin to choose more and more unlikely outcomes. His ship’s Artificial Intelligence would become increasingly confused. It would only be a matter of time before he would find himself trying to re-assimilate inside of a star or some other equally uninviting location.

Quickly, he set about sending out a distress signal. Once his ship realized it was going insane, it would automatically drop out of Null-Space. Any message sent after that would be subject to light speed limitations. It would take forever for anyone to find him then.

The tingling sensation in his head told him he was too late. He’d phase-shifted into real time before he could call for help.

“Ship, where are we?” he thought.

“Assessing…” the ship thought back.

Tangeron could physically feel the numerous gravity wells. That was good news. It meant he was probably in a star system. If that were true, he may find locals able to lend him a hand.

Soon, the ship thought, “Location is determined to be a minor, unnamed spiral galaxy. The nearest likely source of assistance is located next to a yellow dwarf star approximately thirty light minutes distant from our present location.”

He sent a distress thought out to the local solar system. There was no answer.

“What’s the local sentience level?”

“Three”

That’s just great, Tangeron thought. Fossil fuel barbarians at best.

“Ship, what is the most likely means of successful communication?”

“Radio waves.”

“Send a message using radio waves; whatever those are. Let’s hope someone’s listening.”

Word count 300