Messages

 

The grass grew quickly under her feet. If she stood too long in one spot it almost hurt – tiny blades pressing upward insistently. “They shouldn’t have messed with it.” she thought, reflecting on the choice to engineer the grass for quick spread and coverage.

The overall effect wasn’t unpleasant though and they were trying to find means of taking advantage of the quick growth. That was why she was here at the Starry Sea.

There was something about the waters that often took boats to similar waters on distant planets. She wondered if it worked for smaller things as well. She carefully tossed a bottle in the water – inside of it a note. Coordinates for the planet – in case they didn’t want to chance the random teleports - and a message about the grass problem.

Reports suggested that at this time of the year most of the water’s spacewarping destinations would be planets with intelligent herbivores. Which ones and how far they were a mystery. Then again, the key might be the clouds. She used her remote and shaped the nearby ones to resemble cows.

It seemed like the bottle must have been duplicated somehow, as the next morning six bottles appeared on the shore – identical to the one she sent out.

The first complained about the coordinate system, showing several attempts to make sense of it. It seemed her planets organization of that differed too greatly from others. At the bottom was single line in large font – language was universal at least – it read “I give up.”

The second promised a ship within the hour. She was excited. But when the hour passed and nothing happened she realized it was an empty promise. Despite the short turn around, she felt let down.

The third bottle again promised an answer, but they would have to visit a number of different locations first. From the wording it seemed unlikely to bear fruit.

The forth message was sad, explaining that they would love to take advantage of the invitation, but their family had died. Despite not knowing the person beyond the note – she cried.

The fifth message was puzzling. It simply read “Goodbye”. Which seemed odd as they had never met.

The sixth said they were from the same planet and it gave a name and address. She looked it up quickly and found it was false. Again, even though it was a random message, it hurt.

Knowing that bottles sent back in the water often returned to their origin, she made a point of answering each one.

The next morning something strange happened. Unlike the day before there was only one bottle returned. It seemed to have received all six other messages, and had it’s own reply in a new hand. It read:

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you, never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.”