When first creating this short story, I knew I wanted to incorporate space. I have always been fascinated by space and astrology. However, after reading Little Brother and Neuromancer, I was inspired. From those works, I knew I wanted my main character to be a prodigy of sorts, a complete expert in her field. I chose for my main character to be a female because it's rare to see a lead female character in genera's relating to science and technology. Sure, Case had his Molly and Marcus had Angela, but they weren't the leading character. Plus, a part of me wishes I was as intelligent as Astrid is, to be asked to work on a top-secret space mission. I knew from the beginning that I wanted this story to be formatted in entries. Mostly because it gives me room to build what I want to build and leave the reader questioning the details, and formulating their own conspiracies about those details. I did debate about having an entry of Astrid after her meeting with the board and going into depth about what all they explained to her. Giving the reader some background knowledge about when and why Project XTRL first started. It was going to be a page and a half, but I ultimately decided against it. I decided to under-explain rather than over-explain, much like how the author of Neuromancer did. It leaves a lot of questions and forces the audience to come up with their own narrative. To me, when it comes to horror movies or thrillers, the suspense is what gets peoples scared.
Once you see the monster, the killer, sure it might still be scary, but I don't think it has the same effect. I've always believed that a person's imagination is the strongest character of all. Leave it up to the imagination to create the most horrific image tailored to each individual. When creating this story, I didn't want the reader to know what the real threat was. Was it the people alluded to as "They" or was it what was on the other side of the black hole? Was it nothing and Astrid just went crazy? Or was it all three? Either one can be made an argument, and so each person who reads this might have a different experience based on their imagination. As for some other aspects of this story, I was playing with the idea of "They" and "We". I have always found it interesting when a story has a character that refuses to give in to the inevitable. Astrid doesn't see herself as "them", just someone working for "them". But then as the story progresses, and she believes that what she is working on is advantageous, she unintentionally starts seeing herself as "them", and soon, "we". However, as the story progresses, she snaps back to her hesitation towards "them". I think that it's important to note as much as Astrid wants to be the good guy, the one who wakes up and realizes that they shouldn't be doing this, it was her and her alone that got them to that point. Since she in this story is the only character allowed to translate code. Astrid then tries to correct her mistakes by shutting everything down. However, I left the story sort of at a cliffhanger. The reader doesn't know if Project XTRL just found someone to take her place, if they had a third satellite, if they might have harmed Astrid in any way, or if whatever was on the other side of the wormhole found a way to get through despite Astrid's attempt to stop them. One story that we covered in class that helped inspire this, along with my stories emphasis on how insignificant human life is, was At The Mountain of Madness. Lovecraft's ability to keep things from his audience and make them guess what exactly they saw that caused for one character to go crazy and the other to swear to never go back, is incorporated into my story a little bit. When Astrid reads the codes, supposedly a language created by other beings, she translates messages that scared her so much that it caused her to try and destroy Project XTRL before they could further research. The movie The Arrival also inspired my connection to language for this short story. In that movie, the main character is asked to translate the alien's language into something they can communicate. However, their language allows them to see the future. I wanted to hint at a language that was so advanced and developed that as a single human, by reading it, caused a fearful reaction.
The thing about space and time, when a human brain tries to comprehend concepts such as infinity or traveling at the speed of light, we simply fall apart. And for some people, myself included, trying to comprehend infinity scares them. For Astrid to be the only human to have come in contact with a language from another entity who is extremely evolved would no doubt strike a chord. Some other parts I'd like to highlight in this work are the names that I used. I chose the name to be Astrid Galilei because I wanted a name that just by hearing it you would know what her destiny would be. Astrid short for an asteroid, and Galilei, the last name of the famous astronomer, who everyone thought was crazy for his time yet utterly brilliant, Galileo Galilei. Project XTRL is my attempt at wordplay on "extraterrestrial". Space Oddity is a David Bowie song, about a ship, sent far off into space, ground control eventually loses contact with the ship caption, Major Tom, and it's unclear about what happens to him. This is somewhat mirrored in my story, ground control sends out a satellite, loses contact with it, and it's unclear about what happens to it or what happens next. I also made sure to include facts, to make this story somewhat believable. V616 Monocerotis is the nearest black hole in our galaxy, except if someone tried to send a satellite there it would take 3,457 light-years. Also, the Einstein-Rosen bridge theory is a real theory about wormholes. Part of me wanted to take this deep, and mess around with the concept of time and the thought of infinite realities, and that the codes Astrid was translating were codes she sent, but just from another time and a different dimension, much like the movie Interstellar. But the more I thought about putting that into words, and only have 15 pages to do so hurt my head. So, I stuck with aliens. Overall, I enjoyed creating this short story and exploring a plotline dedicated to space.
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