Aliens are awesome. Some are so huge, 50,000 beings could fit on their pinkie fingertips. Some are so tiny, several trillion of them could live on the head of a pin. There is a theory, however, that the Universe itself is a massive alien; the stars and planets are merely pores on its skin. In fact, every species there is might be a separate Universe.

A sign on Jasper Nordin’s door during a writing session.
A sign on Jasper Nordin’s door during a writing session.
Lisa Bergh

NEAR PLUTO, 2082

The space shuttle landed on the newly discovered moon of the moon of the moon of Pluto. It was a barren place, mostly just rock and mountains and few cacti, and other plants. I kept walking forward, the rest of the exploration squad ahead of me. The notification on the my space helmet’s interactive CPU read that my oxygen supply was slowly dwindling, meaning the moon had no atmosphere, unlike the other two moons of Pluto. There were four other members of the squad, all under 30. The ground shook, creating a crack that swallowed up a crew member at the front. We dashed forward, hoping to outrun it. I turned around and saw another member, with a claw protruding from his forehead. I kept running, nearing a huge cliff. I saw a giant asteroid overhead that crashed into the ground.

I awoke under a pile of rock. I pushed the top off and fell down the small hill of rock on the surface. A few meters away, I saw the last remaining member the squad, or least his arm sticking out of a rock pile. I reached up to my face. The glass on my helmet was shattered. I gave a small gasp of surprise and fell over, unconscious.

I awoke again in a small tube of glass. It rose higher and higher into the stars. All the stars coalesced into a single circle of light in an empty black ocean. To my surprise, billions and billions of other circles of light appeared around me. I rose even higher as the blackness slowly became more of an apricot color. I got a very huge shock: the entire UNIVERSE was a giant alien. The alien looked like a human. It looked suspiciously like me when I was in school. Then I realized that the space I was looking at WAS a school. Other aliens, much bigger than him, pushed and shoved him. Didn’t the kid realize he was the Universe? I imagined that maybe every other person in the school were other Universes. I wished I could help the kid.

Then, as if something had heard me, a control panel of some sort appeared in the tube. I used it to pilot myself into the ear of the Universe, which was actually quite big. I found the brain, and landed inside the neo-cortex. Once there, I was able to control the brain and make him walk up to the kid that was shoving him. I made him shove the other kid really hard, and that bully fell over into a trash can. I flew out. Somehow, even though I was barely as big as his fingernail, the kid I was controlling found me, and grabbed me. He threw me across the hall and into a wall like I was a bug. The glass tube shattered and I fell toward the floor.

The moment before I hit the ground, thousands of images flooded my vision. They were all of aliens. Some had purple skin and too many tentacles to count. Others were absolutely huge, they made entire galaxies look puny. I was a millimeter above the ground. Then I realized: the kid was me. I was the Universe.

My eyes opened. I was back on the moon. I was under the rock pile. I tried pushing them off, like I did before. They were way too heavy. I remembered that I was the Universe. I gave my body a little shake. Did that mean that right now, I was sitting on some unimportant microbe on my body? I willed the rocks to be gone. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, they WERE gone. I pushed my finger down on one of my pores. Out of nowhere, in the sky of space, an absolutely huge finger crushed a mountain. I took my finger off the pore. The huge finger I was looking at was gone, somewhere up there in the depths of the cosmos.

I held out my hand, hoping to give the moon some life. A single tree burst the ground, a tiny sapling. I swirled my hands again and again, and grass and lakes and hills and animals sprung out of the ground. I swished my hand toward the sky, and an atmosphere formed. I walked over to a small alcove and made a city. A single city. I willed myself to fly, and I did. I flew across an ocean, and made another city, with a small village beside it. I made more and more until the entire moon was covered in humanity’s natural habitat. I made thousands of people, men, women, and children. I made a face appear in the clouds above every city I made, where all could see it.

“I am your creator,” I said, and I could hear the faces say it too.

“I do not require you to worship me. That is your decision. I will come back here in 200,000 years, when I shall have a different face.”

My descendant, in 200,000 years, whoever he or she might be, will come here. I will allow the civilization I made to develop, and my descendant will appear to them.

200,000 YEARS LATER

The year is 202,086. A very long time ago, one of my forefathers discovered he was the Universe. The moment he died, he passed on the gift to his son, who did the same, and this went on for 200,000 years, until my father gave it to me. He told me with his dying breath to travel to the moon of the moon of the moon of Pluto. There was a large civilization there, as advanced as humans were in 2014 on Earth. I landed there, paid the taxi driver, and stood in a small swamp. I willed myself to appear to all the citizens, who were waiting to see their creator.

“I told you 200,000 years ago that I would come to you with a different face. I have come now. You are a great and powerful civilization, with much wonderment of the Universe around you. Yet you wonder if you are alone. Today, I bring you the answer.”

I willed every single Earth craft in existence to teleport above every city on the moon of the moon of the moon of Pluto.

“You call yourselves humanity. You are not. I am. I am just another human in a population of 700 billion on the planet Earth. I bring you the original Human Empire. You are not humans. You never were. You may have the same genetic structure, but you are not humans. I gave you one difference: you have one less DNA strand than humans do. That is enough to make you a different species. Do not ask me what species you are; that is for you to decide, and choose. I present to you the human race.”

At that moment, every person from the ships stepped out to greet the civilization my ancestor made.
They are coming along nicely, I thought. They make a much more productive species than humans. In many ways, there are so much better.