I’m offering 3 prizes for the October Contest. Learn all about the contest here.
The winner of the contest gets the first pick. And the other two prizes are available for the top two finalists.
I wanted to share 3 more story endings from the September Contest. These excellent writers came up with their own fascinating and fun endings.
But first, the October Contest has just begun. The deadline is October 15, 2020, so you have plenty of time to read the story and write your own ending in 500 words or less. It’s lots of fun and if you enter, you may win a prize!
Also, in honor of Halloween, I wrote a story beginning that’s a little bit scary, in a very Sci Fi way. Hope it gives you spooky chills and Sci Fi thrills!
In the meantime, let’s get back to the September Contest finalists.
If you have not read the original story beginning, read it here first!
If you have already read the story beginning or the winning version of the story with a beginning and ending, then you’re ready to read these 3 different endings by different writers. Remember, here’s where we left Jess:
So it was merely by luck that he was sitting on the back deck after graduation, drinking a beer and peering up into the sky, that he saw it.
by Emae Church
At first, he thought it was a firefly, glowing in the dark above him.
But this burning object was growing.
As if on cue, the crickets hushed and the wind held its breath.
Jess’s eyes filled with a burning glow, reflecting the pending doom racing towards him.
He should have scrambled for cover, screaming for his life; his safety.
But he didn’t.
The scorching rock arrested any thoughts to flee. You won’t escape me, it taunted through Jess’s mind.
Even as the heat evaporated the tears and sweat from his face, Jess had a final thought…
Graduate killed by comet…
This is sure to hit global press…
Everyone will remember me.
by Ava Chisling
A light blinked back at him. Jess froze. He closed his eyes tight and then opened them slowly. He wasn’t a big beer drinker–or any kind of drinker, really–and so he wondered if he was imagining things.
The lights blinked again. Three short bursts. Jess leaped out of his chair to find his phone. Where is it? He had to record this.
He pushed everything off the patio table. Nothing. Patted his pockets. Empty. The lights blink again.
He panicked. He wanted to ask his roommate for help but couldn’t. He was already considered a bit of an outcast on campus, and blinking alien lights wasn’t going to help.
Jess gave up on his phone, grabbed a pen from his backpack, and held it above a soiled beer coaster. He leaned all the way forward, so as not to miss the order of the lights–or the coaster.
He waited. Nothing. He waited some more. Nothing. The pen shook in his hand. He bent over further, his nose practically touching the screen.
“WTF?” he exclaimed out loud. “Come ON!”
Nothing.
“BLINK!!”
After 15 minutes that felt like 94, Jess threw the pen so it slid off the table and he sat up.
“EFF!” he said. “Just EFF.”
Jess was just about to close the screen when the lights flashed again. This time three long blinks.
“WOAH!!”
Just what IS this? Jess thought to himself.
He knew first hand that hacking was a thing in college. And while intercepting laser light communications may not be the most popular activity for students–finding sexy selfies wins that prize, obviously–the fact was, he was in a science program and perhaps someone was having a laugh at his expense. Maybe he was being live-streamed right then and people were crushing him with comments.
Or worse. He was a meme. And he’d gone viral.
Or maybe it was nothing. A reflection. Or a nerd like him in another country, on another continent, also trying to “reach out.”
It all sounded so stupid. Maybe it was.
He sighed and turned off his screen. Dejected, Jess headed back into his flat, sipping his half-empty warm beer. He entered the living room and said goodnight to his flatmate who didn’t look up from his ipad. Jess headed down the hall into his room and closed the door quietly behind him.
He slipped into bed fully dressed, wondering what in the world happened, if anything at all.
On the patio, the lights blinked again. Three. Short. Spurts.
by Jim Hamilton
A pale white dot in the blackness that turned out to be much closer than it initially appeared. A moment later, it hovered right in front of him, a glowing sphere about the size of a softball.
Jess dropped his beer in surprise as the ball orbited around him, turning his head to follow its trajectory.
“Hold still while we scan you!” commanded a voice in his head.
Instinctively, he froze and held still as the orb circled his body several times.
“Now think a happy thought!”
Jess remembered the smell and taste of the warm apple pies that his Mom used to bake.
“Now think a sad thought!”
In spite of himself, his Mom’s passing and her funeral caused tears to well up in his eyes. He tried to ask a question, but discovered that he couldn’t move his lips.
“What do you fear most?”
He pictured himself dying—his biggest fear of all, of course. The glowing ball shot upwards and receded from sight, leaving Jess alone on the deck again.
He shook his head, thinking that he must have dozed off. He leaned down to pick up his fallen beer and went into the house to get another one.
After clearing the atmosphere, the probe jumped home to Tau Ceti, where the scans it had collected were analyzed.
“Looks like we have a winner here,” said Krexx.
Jaylee nodded. “Their needs are simple and their primitive brains are easily controlled.”
Krexx opened a comlink to their sector chief and her holographic image appeared before them.
“We’ve got nearly eight billion air breathers, Mum. They’re a ninety-eight percent match to our optimum profile.”
“Ninety-eight percent? That’s some prime stock, you know.” She grinned. “At a thousand credits a head, I don’t need to tell you what that means for us.”
Krexx returned the grin. “Just remember whose idea it was to check out the source of those light bursts.”
“Don’t worry, Krexx, you’ll get your usual bounty.” With a final wave, she cut the connection.
Jaylee opened a link to their Chief of Collections. “Hi there, Jemal. We’ve got a new job for your team. I’m sending you the coordinates now.” He smiled. “There’s nearly eight billion of them, so make sure that you take enough arks.”
“Got it!” replied Jemal. “I’ll let you know when we’ve finished collecting them.” He dropped the call.
“Pay up, Krexx,” said Jaylee. “I told you that those laser bursts meant something.”
“That you did,” said Krexx, as he handed over a ten-credit note. “That you did.”
Please post your comments below. I’m sure these excellent writers would love to hear some kind words.
Be stellar!
Matthew Cross
Here I reveal some behind-the-scenes secrets of the September Contest story “Hello, Universe!”
But first, the October Contest has just begun. The deadline is October 15, 2020, so you have plenty of time to read the story and write your own ending in 500 words or less. It’s lots of fun and if you enter, you may win a prize!
You can also read contest rules here.
1) The Story Origin–I wrote the beginning of the September Contest story “Hello, Universe!” in early August, when my Sci Fi blog and my website were barely a month old. By that time, I had already decided to start a story contest where I write the beginning of the story and the contestants finish the story in 500 words or less. I also had in mind a concept for the first story–a concept still unfinished today–when this one came to me.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I listened to Beatles music wafting from the smart speaker in the living room. I love the Beatles, but I don’t know all their songs. A song I don’t know very well, “Across the Universe,” began to play. If you have read the story, then you know this song is featured in my story beginning and in the contest-winning ending. (If you have not read it, then read it now. It’s fun! And besides, this post has spoilers!)
I looked out the bay window to my deck and the yard beyond. The song and the smart speaker made it into the story. The deck, the blue Adirondack chair on the deck, and the suburban location of our house also all made it into the story. When the story opens, Jess, our hero, sits in a child’s Adirondack chair to watch stars from his back deck.
2) Bringing the Elements Together–Long, long ago, I read that good stories are often the combination of two unrelated ideas, facts, or concepts that the writer blends together to create something new. Since then, I have made it a writing strategy to combine two or more unrelated concepts to create an original story idea.
Here, I began daydreaming with these lyrics:
Words are flowing out like
Endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
That got me thinking about sending messages across space. And the dreamy quality of the music helped put me in (and keep me in) a Sci Fi space-themed mood, too! (I’m humming it right now.) I dreamed up Jess sending messages into the night sky using a flashlight, but I had to figure out why he was doing it. Who was he trying to reach?
It occurred to me that the beams of light shooting into space could last forever, traveling at the speed of light in the vacuum of space, unless they hit something like a star, a planet, or rocks or dust in space. (Read more about asteroids here.) By then, my mind was really racing! So many possibilities!
That’s when I hit on the idea that Jess was not trying to reach anyone. He was simply trying to leave a mark on the universe that time could not erase. That idea really wowed me. To think that Jess, or any of us, could create something that would outlive the Great Pyramids, Shakespeare’s masterworks, and even the Solar System itself–well, it was one of those mind-shifting ideas that we find in Science Fiction. One reason I love Sci Fi so much!
So, to me, “Hello, Universe!” is a combination of the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” human fear of mortality, and sending messages into space. And to my surprise and delight, it set up a fun story beginning that Frasier Armitage–the contest winner–so artfully completed.
You can read some of my thoughts on why Frasier’s entry shone above all the rest. (It’s stellar!)
3) The Story Title–When I finished my first draft, I struggled to find a good title. I was toying with a couple of different names. I don’t even remember what the others were. They were that boring.
I wanted a title that did not limit the endings the contestants could write. For my contest, it’s important to write an open-ended story and an open-ended title. That focused my attention on the very beginning of the story, where Jess sends his first messages into the sky using just a penlight.
“Hello, _________,” I thought. Hello, what? Hello, Galaxy? No, that’s ridiculous!
Eventually, I landed on “Hello, Universe!” I probably got the word “universe” from “Across the Universe.” Or maybe because Jess was beaming his messages in every direction, it just made the most sense.
For a while, I thought of it as a working title. I thought it was funny and upbeat but kind of cheesy. And I was not sure that the title tone matched the tone of the story, which starts when Jess is thinking deeply about life and death. But then I decided to use the story for my first contest for a number of reasons:
a) It’s approachable and relatable to a wide audience, including adults and teens and maybe even people who don’t read Sci Fi.
b) It has a hard science core to it, but it allowed contestants to go in any direction they chose.
c) It was done.
I had been writing blog posts for 2-3 months before I even made my website public. Then I spent a month madly polishing them, adding images, and posting them. The website was public, but it still felt a bit like a harried dress rehearsal.
The launch of the Matthew Cross Flash Fiction Collaboration Contest at the end of August really felt like I was announcing myself to the world. And so the story title, which still felt a little cheesy, served as both Jess’s shout-out to the universe and my own greeting to all you great readers and supporters of my blog and website.
Hi
I am here
My name is Jess
And now, looking back, I’ve changed my mind about the title. When Jess sent his messages of light out among the stars, he really was saying, whether joyfully or desperately, “Hello, Universe!”
Please post your comments below.
Be stellar!
Matthew Cross
This is a finish-my-story contest where all you have to do is write the ending in 500 words or less.
For the October Contest, I’m offering 3 prizes, including the aqua narwhal shown below. You can see all 3 prizes here.
October Contest: All submissions are due by midnight October 17, 2020.
I look over my shoulder in search of the dark, floating shapes. I stumble and fall face first into the crusty topsoil between rows of soybeans. It’s almost harvest time, so the plants are half a meter. Not tall, like corn, which can hide you. I groan and roll over, looking up at the pure, blue sky. No dark triangles up there.
I groan and make myself stand, even though my legs feel like jelly. My joints ache, my head aches, and I shiver. It’s the Vere. I caught it either on the DR. ERNESTO GUEVARA, which everyone calls the “Che,” or on Mars. Mars was already rife with the Vere, so it was not our fault. And Earth had it before that, so I’m not the first to bring it here, either. I’m just trying to survive it.
My facemask clouds with my breath. I’m still wearing my entire suit because I don’t want to infect anyone else. If not for my mask, I would be spitting dark, Indiana loam out of my mouth.
From behind the Old Barn and the windmill, a thin plume of smoke rises from the crash. The old, decrepit windmill still pumps the water for our irrigation. In a state full of wind turbines, the old windmill really stands out. People still use it to give directions by. It’s how I found home.
I stole a local trader on Mars. The owners didn’t need it any more. I had to pull them from the seats, but I lay them respectfully beneath a nearby ship. The trader was not made for interplanetary trips. It did not have the fuel reserves for a fast shot between two planets. But if you set your navigation correctly, you can save all your fuel for takeoff and reentry. It’s a long, slow trip—weeks—but you can make it.
I made it, but just barely. On Mars, a cop was cruising the abandoned spacefield. My takeoff was too quick. I was nervous and I’m not a pilot, so I burned a little extra fuel. Precious fuel needed for landing in Earth’s stronger gravity. But I survived the crash. If I can get more fuel, I can probably get the ship working again. I’m no pilot, but I’m a great engineer.
Still no triangles in the sky! I should be glad, but instead I shudder, a cold spike running down my spine. Is it so bad on Earth? I push myself into a run to the farmhouse. I still think of it as Granddad’s house. We lived here with Granddad, until he passed away, and then it became Mom’s. Like the generations before, we continued to farm the family land. I did my share of chores, monitoring the cultivators and irrigators at the control board while I did my homework. Once I learned some electrical, I even fixed a few machines for Dad. And, yes, I drove a John Deere harvester every fall. But once I reached midgrades, I realized I didn’t want to be a farmer like Mom and Dad. I wanted to go to space.
Still no triangles in the sky! I should be glad, but instead I shudder, a cold spike running down my spine. Is it so bad on Earth?
I stumble through the soybeans. The rows are too tall to climb over, especially in my condition. I’m forced to follow the diagonal row instead of heading straight towards the house. It’s still 100 meters away and I begin to wonder if I will make it, even without pursuers. My legs are shaking so bad. I slept the entire trip to Earth with autonav on. I ran out of food three days ago, so there was not much else to do. Between hunger, muscle stiffness and the Vere, I’m in pretty bad shape.
I focus on the white house, on Home, as I fight dizzyness and nausea. My aching muscles, atrophied for two weeks, don’t want to move. And when they move, they scream. So I don’t mind getting all nostalgic. I’m glad of the distraction, and my fuzzy brain is going there anyway. I remember telling my parents I wanted to study engineering and not FarmAg at college. It broke their hearts. They had trouble conceiving me, and I was their only child. And Granddad’s only grandchild. Once I left, there was no future generation to take over the farm.
It may not matter, now that we have the Vere. It’s sweeping across Mars, Jupiter’s moons, and Earth.
It may not matter, now that we have the Vere. It’s sweeping across Mars, Jupiter’s moons, and Earth. If it gets really bad—worst-case scenario, they say on news feeds—the remote asteroid colonies might be mankind’s only hope.
I need to get to the house. I need to get inside. Granddad was not exactly a Prepper, but he’d lived through two wars, and the basement was always stocked for the family to ride out three months. And in flush years, Dad had always made a few upgrades to the security systems. You know, just in case.
I have not heard from Mom or Dad in several weeks. Mostly because I never check in. But at the very least Mom sends me a weekly vid with any news and asks for a call back. I never call back. Only for Mother’s Day or one of their birthdays. Or Granddad’s birthday, which is kind of like MLK Day, a day to be somber and proud at the same time. But no messages from Mom for weeks.
I need to get inside. But I’m also afraid of what I might find.
My left leg suddenly gives out just shy of the end of the row. I take another tumble and this time it takes longer to stand up. My vision is going red, but my mind is so foggy, it just seems whimsical, not scary. Red. The farmhouse looks red, like it’s on Mars. I giggle.
That’s not good, says a voice in the back of my brain. You’re losing it. I giggle at the voice.
I shamble across the green dooryard, skirting Mom’s giant sunflowers. They wave joyfully in a light breeze. I wave back. When did this yard get so big? I thought things were supposed to look smaller when you went back home. The five steps to the wide porch are the hardest. I have to drag my left leg behind me, and I trip over the top step. I flail and stumble my way to the screen door. It opens with my voice authorization.
I limp to the kitchen as the house system greets me. “Welcome home, Cass! It’s good . . . .”
“Shut it!” I say.
“OK! You have messages. One from your parents to all employees. One to you from Mom and one to you from Dad.”
“Play the first one,” I say.
I hear Mom’s voice, weak but trying to be cheerful. She says they are OK but they are showing symptoms. They are headed into town to see the doctor. It’s a couple week old, but I sigh with relief. They might be OK. They might just be in the hospital.
I peek out the window and I finally see them. Just two tiny triangles, but one is already veering off to the left. I think maybe it’s headed to another farm, but it just keeps going down at a diagonal until it crashes in a field of wind turbines. The lead ship comes straight ahead, following my smoke plume.
I can’t wait to see your story endings! Don’t forget to read the contest rules.
Please post your story endings below. And if you just want to leave a comment, that would be great, too!
Be stellar!
Matthew Cross
The winner of the Matthew Cross Flash Fiction Collaboration Contest is Frasier Armitage!
Frasier wins a $25 Amazon gift certificate and the narwhal amigurumi collectible shown below.
I received so many great entries, and I’ll share some more of them later this week. You can read some of my thoughts on why Frasier’s entry shone above all the rest. (It’s stellar!)
October Contest: I’ll be announcing the October contest soon! (Probably next Monday.)
I started the story below, and see how seamlessly Frasier picked it up after the red line and gave it his own twist!
But this is Frasier’s moment, so enjoy the story!
Jess leaned back in the blue, plastic Adirondack chair on the back deck. It was a kids chair and he had almost outgrown it. But it was the only chair that allowed him to tilt his head back to look at the stars.
Tunes from the 1960s purred from the outdoor speaker. His Mom kept the family speakers on a steady rotation of “decades” music going back seventy years.
They lived in the suburbs. With light pollution, Jess knew he wasn’t even seeing half the stars up there. But this summer, with all the bad news online, he found himself escaping to the quiet of the back deck and looking at the starry sky.
In school, he had read about the Civil War and the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement and a bunch of other depressing stuff. And then his grandfather had died. Jess and his grandfather were not close, but everyone went to the funeral and everyone cried. Even Jess cried.
Sometime that summer, Jess realized everyone else in his family would die. Not anytime soon. Probably not, anyway. But, eventually, his parents would grow old and die. And, eventually, Jess would also grow old and die. And if he ever had kids, they would grow old and die. Someday, everyone Jess knew would be dead.
It sucked.
Staring up at the night sky made him feel small and a little scared. It never used to before. But when he was little, he didn’t know how much empty space was really up there. And how tiny the Earth really was.
Last week and the week before he had stared up at the stars.
Maybe, he had thought, it would be OK to die as long as I’m remembered. Maybe I could get famous like Elvis or Beyonce. So famous that no one would ever forget me.
Jess had thought about that for a couple of weeks. He would have to be really famous to be remembered in two million years. Like Hitler famous. And he didn’t want to be evil. He remembered seeing photos of the gas chambers and shuddered.
In two million years, the wind might even wear down the Great Pyramids and the even the pharaohs of Egypt would be forgotten.
Words floated from the speaker on the dark, night air.
Words are flowing out like
Endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
It was “Across the Universe” by the Beatles. His Dad loved the Beatles. All of the Beatles were dead.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy
Are drifting through my opened mind
And that’s when the idea struck Jess. He rummaged through the junk drawer and found a penlight. He sat back in the kid-size Adirondack and shone the light into the sky.
Dad was an engineer and he knew lots of science. He said light beams were made of photons. In space, photons just keep traveling forever–travel at the speed of light, Dad said–unless they hit something. Like a planet or a star.
Jess sent the weak beam of light into space. He clicked the light on and off. If he knew Morse Code, he could send a message on a stream of photons into space. And if that beam never ran into a star or a planet, it would travel forever. Unlike the pyramids, it would never be worn down by wind or time.
The next day Jess bought a brand new flashlight–the most powerful one he could afford at the big box hardware store. That night on the deck, he sent coded messages into space. He looked up Morse code on his phone and shot off the messages in different directions into the sky.
Hi
I am here
My name is Jess
Im alive
I dont want to die
Never forget me
. . .
Halfway through high school, Jess had learned enough about lasers to build his own high-powered laser from a kit. He even got his Dad to help mount it on the roof. Mom thought he was crazy, but Dad was into science stuff and thought it was a cool project.
Jess studied star charts and learned how to aim his laser using the computer in his room. He sent coded messages into the night sky almost every night. He aimed the laser into the empty stretches between stars, nebulae, and galaxies to give his messages the best chance of flying forever through space.
No human would ever see them. Racing at the speed of light away from the Earth, no human could ever catch up with them to capture the light and decode it.
And what alien would ever know how to decode Morse code? Or care to try?
But Jess knew that his coded messages racing through space would last longer than even the Earth itself. Eventually, the sun would supernova and the Earth and the Moon and every human landmark in the Solar System would be absorbed, melted, obliterated. But Jess’s small, silent, staggered rays of light would live on.
Forever.
. . .
In college, he studied engineering and physics, trying to decide which way to go. Both were incredibly tough. Jess had programmed the computer in his bedroom at home to aim the roof-mounted laser at the emptiest reaches of space. He had saved hundreds of different coded messages and each night, his computer sent the messages into space.
He was so busy at school, he forgot about the laser most of the time. And, miracle of miracles, he finally had a girlfriend!
But when he came home on breaks, he checked the laser on the roof. He cleared the dead leaves away, wiped the lens, applied another coat of water proofing. He checked his sky maps and scheduled some new programs to run when he was away. At night, sitting on the deck, he thought up new messages to send.
Hi
I am Jess
This message will outlast everyone
The pharaohs
The presidents
Taylor Swift
BTS
Remember me
Jess was not trying to reach anyone out there. He never thought to try to look for replies to his messages. Besides, detecting a laser reply from space would be quite a trick. That would take more physics, engineering and money than he had.
So it was merely by luck that he was sitting on the back deck after graduation, drinking a beer and peering up into the sky, that he saw it.
A single star blinked a rhythm of dots and dashes, over and over, like ocean waves. Jess’s beer crashed on the deck, spilling between the planks. He scrambled for his phone and recorded a video, pointing to the heavens, and muttering the words that flickered in clumsy Morse.
Hi Jess
Its grandpa
Dont worry
Everything will be alright
Jess staggered backwards and flipped his camera. He garbled something about his grandfather’s funeral and uploaded it to the Web.
Twenty likes.
Fifty likes.
Three hundred.
Eight thousand.
Within ten minutes, more than a million views ticked across the screen.
Was this really happening?
All he could think about were the lyrics to that Beatles song, stuck on repeat.
Images of broken light
Which dance before me like a million eyes
They call me on and on across the universe
His phone shuddered. Unknown number.
Jai Guru Deva, Om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my . . .
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Jess Dawson?” A voice sharp as gravel crunched down the earpiece.
“Who are you?”
“Name’s Grant Knox, FBI. We’re sending a chopper for you.”
In the distance, a low rumble carried across the sky. Jess shook his head. “A chopper? Why?”
“For your protection, Jess. We saw your video. Half the world’s seen it by now. You’ve no idea how long we’ve been trying to make contact.”
“Contact? With who?”
“You’d best pack some things. We need to get you secure.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re about to go down in history, Jess. People will be talking about this forever.”
“About what?” Jess looked at the sky. The flashing dots.
Dont worry
Everything will be alright
I hope you enjoyed this piece of flash fiction that Matthew and Frasier wrote together. It was a fun collaboration!
For more fun endings to this story, look for some honorable mention finalists in a separate blog post later this week. And next week, we’ll reveal the October Contest story beginning and the new prize!
Finally, if you enjoyed Frasier’s prize-winning ending, please make sure to share some kind comments below.
Be stellar!
Matthew Cross and Frasier Armitage