Sometimes the universe does something and you say to yourself, ‘Well, that’s weird.’ Case in point: the image below.
This is a crater a composite image of the Occator crater on Ceres taken by the Dawn spacecraft. If you click on the picture, NASA will explain how the image was created. It shows some odd ‘bright spots’ which have been causing some consternation: no one know what they are, though there are a number of theories.
So, why do I find this odd? Well, back in 2010 when Dawn was somewhere between Mars and the asteroid Vesta, I wrote a short story called The Flowers of Ceres. It’s a moderately classic, closed-environment, suspense/horror story like Alien or The Thing. I wrote it for one of my City of Heroes characters, Gunwitch, who was sent out to a secret space station in the asteroid belt where the government was conducting experiments into gamma-ray lasers and various scientists were surveying the nearby Ceres. They find an unusual crystal formation in one of the craters on the asteroid and accidentally bring back an alien, crystalline life form which proceeds to turn almost everyone into space zombies.
Now, when I wrote this, I didn’t know about Dawn and I figured it would be quite a while before anyone went out to Ceres and proved there were no crystalline creatures waiting to replace people’s nervous systems with silica. I was almost disappointed in April when NASA began showing us pictures of the surface of this tiny little world out in the suburbs of our solar system. And then the ‘bright spots’ turned up…
Obviously, I’m not saying that those bright spots are a strange alien species. I mean, that would be silly. Totally silly. Ridiculous, in fact.
But… space zombies…
Witches and Ray-Guns 