Tech Savvy
05 Jan 2019Today’s prompt: “Describe an electronic device in the future that you won’t know how to operate.”
You first stumbled onto the crash site a week ago. How long it had been there, you had no idea. The site looked like a naturally-occurring cavern. You were out hiking and were taking a short break, sitting on a rock beside the trail on the hillside. While you were resting your legs and sipping water, you picked up a few pebbles and began chucking them off the hillside. One hit thin air and ricocheted off to the side. That was odd. You aimed another rock in the same general direction. It, too, bounced off of nothing. Right near the mouth of the cave.
You hurried down the hill and toward the cave. You still couldn’t see anything, but now you knew what to feel for, and where. Now that you looked at the cave, you could see markings that looked more like they’d been made on impact with something. You held your arms out in front of you as you approached the cave, and at last you felt it. It felt metallic, but cold even on a warm day like this. Perhaps whatever cloaking device shielded it from your eyes also prevented it from absorbing any of the sun’s heat. It felt dome-shaped, until you got about two and a half feet from the ground, where it flared out in a sharp angle, then curved back in all concave to where it rested on the ground, like a fin around the whole craft. It must be some kind of spacecraft, right? A smallish one. It started about 20 feet from the cave.
You felt along the edge of the craft, and at some point the texture changed from metal to glass. Perhaps a window for when the craft isn’t in stealth mode? Or maybe whatever creature developed the technology for this ship can see it just fine, and still needed some kind of view out? You felt along more intently below the window. A catch of some kind. You pulled it. There was a sound like a release of air pressure. And suddenly you saw stairs lowering out of the craft, and looked up at a dead body.
Whatever creature it was looked to be about four feet tall, and was decked head to toe in some kind of space suit. You could probably reasonably cosplay the uniform with a lot of dark glass, chrome and black latex, but all the materials looked a little different than anything you’d ever seen before. The helmet was pointy, a little bit football-shaped, and the creature’s body was slender, with a long, tapered tail. Its right arm reached out, and a three-fingered hand appeared to be trying to grasp a jet-black object about the size and shape of a bracelet.
A far-off dog barked, and you suddenly panicked. You didn’t want anyone else seeing what you’d discovered. You lunged for the bracelet, grabbed it, then pushed the stair-door back in place. You took a few steps back to make sure you’d left no obvious traces of the craft’s existence, but it had disappeared again. You pocketed the bracelet and bolted for home.
Every day since then, you’ve turned the bracelet over and over, admiring it, trying to determine if it’s purely ornamental or serves some purpose. Whoever or whatever designed it embedded any functionality carefully, non-obviously, exquisitely. On the second day, you happened to run your thumb along the inside of the bracelet in a way that activated a thin line of light around the outer edge. After a few seconds, the light began blinking and then shut off. You couldn’t quite figure out how you’d done it.
By the fourth day, you could get the light back on pretty much any time you tried. By the fifth day, you discovered that when the light was on, if you squeezed both edges of the bracelet simultaneously with your thumb and forefinger, it would start to emit a low humming noise. Again, after a few seconds of this, the hum would cease and the lights would blink off.
Today, you decide to try something new. Once you’ve run your thumb along the inside, you put the bracelet on, then squeeze it to start the hum, and then start rotating your wrist. You’re holding the bracelet about six inches from your face, examining it closely. And that’s when the blades shoot out – sharp, lightweight, and massive, like a giant, toothy circular saw blade – and cut right into your head. Classic you. You were holding it wrong the whole time.