In April 2021, I submitted five entries to a postcard story (500 words or less) writing contest by Geist magazine. One got short-listed, but not this one. Still, I enjoyed the thinking and writing process, and wanted to share it with you. The picture is the image of the postcard I chose to go with the postcard story. I hope you’ll like it.

If you liked these postcard stories and wanted to see others I had submitted, please click here.

Utopia

They finally came. Unexpectedly, but predictably. They were superior. Expectedly, and predictably. Aliens! Late 2021.

Softly glowing yellow balls of energy, they floated everywhere as they appeared around the world. They were omniscient and invincible. Yet, they wanted to help us, not harm us as we would have in their place, immediately or inevitably.

They gave us one wish, a day to decide by majority, and the temporary ability to know what everyone thought to do this. Immediately, there was chaos as everyone pitched their ideas. Then widespread fear among Caucasians upon the first vote as they finally realized their minority population share meaningfully! Even universally good sounding ideas like “fairness” and “happiness” failed. Apparently, our individual ideas of both ultimately involved some degree of the opposite to some other people.

After almost a day of futile debating, Greta Thunberg astutely noted that a much cleaner planet was the only thing everybody would support, from what she had sensed. Sure enough, within five minutes, the world’s majority was with her!

Suddenly, a neurotic voice that had nonsensically yelled all day finally yelled something that caught people’s attention. Shockingly, Donald Trump agreed with Greta Thunberg! Expectedly, though, he mocked her English and intelligence, before proposing perfection over improvement by turning Earth into Utopia.

Given Trump’s suggestion was only a linguistic variation of Greta’s idea, within a minute, the world majority was with him. Greta objected, though, for the same reasons the “fairness” and “happiness” wishes failed. Realizing this truth, but needing to be right, Trump recommended the aliens decide since they were smartest here.

With the world agreeing by gut, but still mulling by brain, Trump self-proclaimed to speak for the world and asked the aliens to turn Earth into Utopia. Feeling it was too late to pull back Trump’s reasonable sounding wish for deliberation, most people agreed to some extent, and the aliens granted us our wish!

Immediately, the Earth started transforming science fictionally as we all watched in wonder! Vegetation grew like animation, some from bare ground! Air pollution faded! Animals appeared! Trash disintegrated! Land and sea saturated with colour! Magical was the only way to describe it, as we cheered louder with each change!

Next to disintegrate were our creations, replaced by more nature! This quickly silenced our still opened mouths!

Then painlessly, from the bottom up, we began to disintegrate! Now, our still opened mouths shrieked at volumes never before heard globally! Soon enough, though, natural sounds dominated again as our mouths disintegrated with the rest of our bodies.

What happened next is hard to say. We found ourselves materialized again in a moon-sized disc of a spaceship city! Looking up, we saw our beautiful Utopia slowly recede in space as we headed off somewhere.

“Hey!” Trump roared fiercely to speak for humanity again. “Why aren’t we on Utopia?”

Soothingly, the aliens replied for all to hear. “It wouldn’t be Utopia with you imperfect humans there.”

And that was the last we saw of Earth, or them.