I’ve routinely been in contact with a group of extraterrestrials called Rigelians. They’re from star system Ceti Alpha Six. They chose me for trial experiments in the implantation of inter-dimensional communication devices in human brains for when they come to conquer Earth (don’t tell anyone). At first I was unwilling to have my brain experimented on but they changed my mind. Heh. Any how, I’ve gotten to know these visitors pretty well. They’re good people. One night they had me aboard their ship in geosynchronous orbit. They had let me wonder around the ship after a series of painful electro attenuation calibration checks when I happened upon a transparent aluminum window. It was the first time I saw the Earth from space.
It was pretty awe inspiring. Then the alien scientists that had conducted my brain calibrations came around to see me off to the matter teleporter for the trip home. I’ll call them Ben and Carl because their telepath names are unpronouncable.
“Yes, it is nice. We love E-arth. Seven billion humon brains ripe for scientific experimentation. We Rigelians love our work, you see.” said Carl.
“Hey Ben, how fast can this ship go?” I asked .
“10^18 times the speed of light” Ben replied telepathically.
“I like to go fast! Lets go real fast!” I said.
Ben said something about how I couldn’t because of the limits of the conscious human mind against the unbearable forces of time-space dilation and how his species had spent generations genetically engineering themselves to withstand it, or something. But I wanted to go real fast!
Later, in Warp Space…..
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhh h h h h h h h h h h ho o o o o o o o o o o o o . . . .
My disembodied consciousness became an unending torrent of insanity and fear. I swam through colors I had never seen before. I saw all creation in its unending cycle of death and rebirth. I reached a place of nothingness, profoundly vast emptiness, well beyond all human conceptualization. Once the ship came out the other side of the warp dilation’s event horizon, I opened my eyes and said “. . . . o o o o h h h h AAAAAAAA!! Oh God, yeah, wow, um, you guys were right. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“But we have to take you back” Carl said, as he re-initializing the theta matrix compositor.
“No, waiiiiii i i i i i t t t t . . . . . . . “
This was the writing assignment “Your DigiArt Tells a Story,” to use an art application like MSPaint to make some pictures and then write a story that goes along with it. I made a neat picture in Gimp of a view of the Earth from orbit with the moon and a sunset. Then I thought I’d talk about the time I was hanging out with my Rigelian friends.
I made these images mostly through Gimp. It was time consuming. I made generous use of the elliptical tool; the earth, the heads, the moon and the window were elliptical tooled with some different colors. The computer displays were made with the rectangle tool. I hand drew the bodies and Japan with the mouse. For the sunset picture I used the gradient tool to make a kind of twilight effect. Then painted some yellow and pink in one corner and smudged it around with the smudgin tool. I did that for the clouds too, I painted some white around then smudged it up. The stars are just white airbrush spots. For the window picture I copied it twice and change the text in it. For the warp picture I used Youpaint, which is a drawing program for kids that came pre-loaded on my desk top. I wish I had started with Youpaint from the beginning! I hand drew the picture, all except for the stars and space rain drops. Youpaint had a little stamp tool with some of that stuff so I threw it in there. I stole the spaceship out of Youpaint and put it in that one orbit shot that I made with Gimp. The Youpaint ship looked a lot better than the one I made on Gimp, is why.
