The thing has no name

A thriller-type short story set in the future. When things start going wrong in a moon colony, a young security officer decides to take matters into her own hands.

With it being my first day on the job and all, I was nervous as hell. Now let's get this straight, I was not a total newbie at this point, I had been working in the security department for a couple of years. As someone who as neither born nor raised on earth, the best comparison I have for you is to get promoted from cop to detective. Not a perfect comparison, but it will do. 

Anyways, it was the very first day working after being promoted and I was about to report to my commander to be given an assignment. See, this was a colony on the moon inhabited by only experts dedicated to getting the colony to continue to function and their offspring, so not as much crime happened here as there would be happening on earth, so I was not expecting to be given something too difficult. That's when I noticed my friend Haven, who usually waited for me just outside the entrance to the security quarters with a morning coffee, was not there. It wasn't like her to miss my big day, but she did have night patrol yesterday, so I figured she'd just overslept. 

The commander is who put me up to this, if it weren't for him, I would have never investigated. See, he explained to me that my first task would be to investigate missing equipment in the greenhouse. Our whole colony depends on that greenhouse, so the sheer possibility of someone sabotaging it is a threat we had to take incredibly serious. My commander, Castor Jones (or Commander Jones, to me), explained to me that over the past couple of months there have been the odd reports of petty theft and things going missing. He had sent other Security Officers to investigate, with each investigation turning up empty. So whilst he was leading a larger investigation to see if and how this recent development was connected, I got to do the busy work of leading an already doomed investigation. His leading theory he shared with me: he believed that there was an individual working from within the colony to destabilize it and ultimately cause its collapse. He believed this individual could either be someone who had been on board for ages and had somehow been corrupted by the Deniers' propaganda, or (and he considered this to be more likely) it could be an actual Denier who had somehow snuck aboard the last delivery and was now hiding somewhere within the colony, perhaps even in plain sight. The Deniers is the collective name we have assigned to those who believe humankind should not venture into space. They fear various different negative consequences; some fear divine intervention, others fear encountering an alien race or some horrible virus. One thing they all have in common is they are convinced that colonizing outer space will mean the end of humanity. Since they have been proven wrong by The Argonaut-IV, my colony, successfully operating on the moon for some eighty odd years now, their numbers have been dwindling. Some of them have turned to radicalism and sometimes terrorism to prove their point, but largely The Deniers are not considered to be a threat. Given this context, Commander Jones' theory was not wholly unlikely and perhaps even very solid, and I do not blame him for what ensued. No one could have known or even guessed the scale of what we were up against. Had he at that point theorized roughly what would be the truth, I would have likely went straight to his supervisor to ask he be sent to Earth for psychiatric evaluation. 

Commander Jones knew me well, though evidently not well enough to predict that having knowledge of this larger theory I would not sit idly by and do my silly little busywork investigation. I have always been the kind of person that wants to achieve great things and will meddle in affairs I am not asked to meddle in to pursue this goal. Naturally, I had to know more about the cases that have been stacking up for the past months, so I went to the archives. It did not take long for me to discover that what Commander Jones had shared with me was not the whole story. Not only were there increased missing items reported, but four people had also disappeared. All on patrol. In addition to this, most of the items that disappeared were either being transported outside the colony or had been very close to the outside walls. This meant to me, and I'm assuming you've also connected the dots by now, that the perpetrator could not have been someone operating from inside, but rather someone swooping in from the outside and taking things. Well, not could not have been so much as probably wasn't, but that is the path I decided to follow. 

There was no real rhyme or reason to the pattern regarding the stolen items, so I decided to follow the pattern of the stolen people instead. The problem here was that the stolen men and women had been on outer patrol when they disappeared, and there is no real telling where exactly they walked and thus where exactly they disappeared.  My best shot at figuring out what had happened was to walk the route myself, try to find some clue or another. So that is what I did. That very night I went on patrol. It was Haven's shift, actually. I waited for her at the station, but it seemed she was late to her shift and not wanting to wait any longer, I just left her a note saying I took her shift for her, and she could just go back home. 

Now, patrol was not a good shift to have, and night patrol sucked especially hard. It was cold and dark, obviously, and the suits were downright uncomfortable. Walking around the entire perimeter of the colony took a long time, I'm talking hours. And really, you're supposed to venture quite a bit away from the colony too, to get a better overview of the barren landscape. Over the hill, preferably, so you can look into the moon crater. I know not many of us actually do that though, so I decided for my thorough investigation I'd actually do it. I would even go into the crater, just to make sure I did not miss anything. 

Like I’ve done every time I told you I would do something, I followed through. And I hated every second of it, don’t get me wrong. Every step I could feel blisters forming all over my body, I created puddles of sweat so big I could actually hear my footsteps becoming more squishy whiting the heavily padded boots. Cold sweat is honestly one of the worst feelings in the world, f*****g freezing to death whilst wet? No thanks. Every second of that misery made me thankful I never got sorted into the guarding division of the security department, for it is hell on earth. Or moon, actually. I digress, for I’m sure you’re not all that interested in my sweaty a*s crack, but rather in what I found in the crater. And by all deities you can possibly worship, I’d never have guessed in a million years. 

At first, I saw nothing. I climbed all the way to the very edge of the crater, to discover nothing but dust in the thing. Not even boot prints. I decide beforehand to climb into the thing too, just to be as thorough as I could, so I did. Except I didn’t climb in so much as I fell over the ledge and rolled in. At first nothing significantly changed, but a couple of seconds in my surroundings became covered in dark purple light. As I got up I saw a massive thing standing in front of me, looking at me like it was studying me. When I say massive, I mean massive. The creature was at least trice my size, it glowed a dark purple light, which lit up the crater around us. Now I could see so many of the stolen items, and I recognized Haven's and others' clothes scattered around the crater. This massive thing had a serpent shaped body, but this did not stop it from looming over me. I could not look at it’s face because the light shone brightest there. ‘What are you?’ I asked. I’ll summarize the answer, because the thing was quite a talker.

The answers I got from the things is that it has no name, for it is the only of its kind. It has no beginning and consequently no end, for it is eternal. What it wants is a peaceful existence and solitude, which is why it inhabits the moon. The problem with this is that humans have woken it from it’s slumber. The thing has no name, but we may call it doom, death or despair, whichever we prefer, for that is what it will bring us.

Author's Note

This is a new genre for me, I would love to know what you guys think. What went well, what can I improve? As always please ignore spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes I made.

Reviews

[JayG]

First, the story: It needs work.

1. You have someone in a high-tech situation walking a fair distance on the moon in a space suit. They don’t have vehicles? Even the moon landings had them. So, this makes no sense.
2. You have the protagonist talk to the creature? How? Sorry, but there's no air on the moon, so that’s impossible. And given that it’s “huge” how did it get inside the stations airlock to take things?
3. Given it has no hands how did it carry the things it stole? And why would an intelligent alien built like a serpant take clothing? You can't have it be like an animal and also intelligent enough to converse.
4. Given that it’s ancient, and “woke from slumber,” how can the protagonist hold a conversation with someone who speaks no English?

In short, you can’t just make things up and have them happen because you want them to. The events must make sense to the reader.

That doesn’t say that you can’t write. In fact, I encourage it. The world needs more crazies who can be staring at nothing, and when asked what they’re doing can honestly say, “working.”

In this, start to finish, you’re telling the reader a story by transcribing yourself as if telling it to an audience, It’s how we’re taught to write, and it worked for the reports and essays you were assigned. But the goal of a report is to inform. And isn’t that what you’re doing? You begin with 1218 words of explanation and overview in which nothing happens as-we-read. That’s four standard manuscript pages of the narrator talking TO the reader, providing secondhand information the reader has not been made to want to know.

It works for you, because you already know the story, so the narrator’s voice — your voice — contains the emotion that the reader cannot know to place there. You also have backstory and intent supplying context. And since your goal is to explain the situation to the reader, it reads exactly as you expect it to.

But, when you read fiction, is it to learn the details of what happened? Or do you want the writing to make it so real that you feel as if you’re living the events in real time?

See the problem? It’s not a matter of talent, it’s that the skills used to write fiction are very different in their approach from those used on the job — which is what school is preparing us for. The skills of professions, like Commercial Fiction Writing, are acquired in addition to those school-day skills.

So, while there’s no reason you can’t grab them, too, they’re not optional.

That’s the bad news. The good? You’ll enjoy the learning, and you’ll be amazed at how much more fun writing will become when as part of it, you literally live the events as-the-protagonist, thinking as that character does, and taking everything into account he or she would as they lived the events. And THAT’S where the true joy of writing lies.

So, two suggestions. First, as an orientation, and to get a feel for what you need, you might try some of my articles and YouTube Videos.

Then, grab a copy of Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict and try a few chapters for fit. You’ll be amazed at how obvious most of it is once pointed out.
https://archive.org/details/goal.motivation.conflictdebradixon/page/n5/mode/2up

So...after all the work you’ve done, this is far from what you hoped to hear. But on the other hand, since you’ll not address the problems you don’t see as being problems, I thought you might want to know.

The trap you’ve fallen into is the single most common one in writing, which means you have a LOT of company. So, don’t let it throw you. Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

----------
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain