Orion

The year is 3020 and the only known survivor is a young girl named Orion. The only thing that Orion has left from her parents is the heart shaped locket that she keeps safely around her neck. She ponders to herself as she walks the deserted streets of what was once New York City. “How did this happen?”

Orion grew up in an extremely wealthy home with two loving parents. Named as a nod to the constellation Orion, her parents were investigative scientists. They spent their days searching for life beyond the great unknown. It wasn’t until the last few weeks that their job put them in grave danger.

Nancy, Orion’s mother, had been receiving emails from an unknown sender, warning her what would happen if she continued to pursue the signals she was receiving from a distance dwarf planet. Nancy was excited that after 30 years of research it was finally going to pay off. She and her husband were going to prove that there was life other than on earth. The signals seemed to be in some sort of alien language that Nancy was unsure how to translate. She worked with several language experts to try and decipher what the signals represented. Unfortunately, she would never know.

The attack came at night while Orion lay sleeping in her bed. She heard lasers and blasts coming from every direction. She hurried to the basement where her parents had a shelter built. Her parents were nowhere to be found. She stayed in the shelter for a week before slowly exiting to what was now an empty hole where her home should have been. She walked for what seemed like miles until she came upon the office were her parents once worked. All that was left was a bunch of rubble. As Orion sifted through the rubble she found a safe that was still intact. She knew the combination as her parents has always told her if anything happened to them to check the safe. She turned the numbers to match the digits of her birthday. Inside the safe is where she found the locket. Nothing else. She didn’t understand why the locket was of such great importance to her parents.

Orion went back to the shelter and tried to piece together what was happening. As she set there, her locket began to glow. It was as if it was some sort of tracking device allowing whomever was tracking her to find her. She believed her parents to be dead but maybe this meant they were alive and looking for her. She tried to stay in the shelter as long as she could but after another week of no one finding her she set out to find out if there were any other people that were alive.

Orion always loved living in the city but now there was barely anything left of it. As she walked closer to the empty lot where the Empire State Building once stood her locket began to make noise. As she stood staring at the ground a beam of light shot from the sky and engulfed her body. She began to feel herself rising. After what seemed like multiple hours she reached her final destination. As she looked around she became very confused as she was standing in her very own bedroom.

She sat down on her bed and tried to calm herself as she was on the verge of a panic attack. She took several deep breaths when the bedroom door opened and it was her parents. Relieved to see them she ran and gave them a big hug. Only they didn’t hug back in return. They began speaking to each other in a language that she didn’t understand. Then her mother began to speak to her. “Orion, we are glad to see you have finally joined us. We were worried when we couldn’t track the signal from your locket. Luckily, we found you when you started roaming the streets. Come with us.”

Orion couldn’t believe what was happening. As she followed what appeared to be her parents, she looked out the window and all she saw where blackness and stars. She asked her mother, “Where are we?”

Her mother and father exchanged glances with each other but didn’t answer the question. They arrived in the kitchen which also looked the same as it did in her home. The only difference was a green creature, with three eyes and an antenna was sitting at the kitchen table. Nancy turned to Orion and said “Meet the alien that will be taking your place as a human.” Orion gasped and tried to run but her parents stopped her and tied her to the kitchen table. They gave her a shot in her arm and she immediately fell asleep. When she awoke, there was device strapped to her head and also to the creature’s head and she was in some sort of lab. She looked to her right and saw two creatures that were in glass containers that looked identical to the creature that she was attached to only they were the size of her parents.

It was then she began to realize what was going on. The creatures had stolen her parents’ bodies. And now she was going to be their next victim. The creature that looked like Orion’s mother began to speak. “Your mother should have stopped trying to communicate when we sent those emails. We warned her what would happen if she continued to pursue the signals. Our kind has been trying to find a new planet to take over and begin anew. If your mother would have deciphered our language she would have known that we were planning on attacking Earth. It wasn’t our first choice but since your mother was so relentless in her quest to talk to us we figured that Earth was as good as choice as any. The day we attacked we lifted your whole house onto our space ship, along with both your parents. We knew you would be looking for the safe so we planted our own safe and with it the tracking device that you wear around our neck. We are sorry that it had to come to this but our species is dying and we need your body for our daughter.”

Orion watched as the creature that looked like her mother flipped a switch and then everything went black.