Archive for April 16th, 2009


Swimming in the Deep, pt. 1

On the outskirts of our solar system, there is a small chunk of rock and ice that is not referred to as a planet.

It is not Pluto.

This chunk of rock and ice was never noticed by ancient astronomers, and was never named after a Greek or Roman god, but its inhabitants call it The Pebble.  They call small stones pebbles, too, but when the T and P are capitalized it’s referring to the chunk of ice and rock itself.

The inhabitants of The Pebble aren’t colonists from Earth (which is another confusing name), and they aren’t terrifying space monsters.  They don’t have acid for blood, they aren’t telepathic, and they aren’t a mind-wiped military outpost that will one day destroy Earth.  They have no spaceships (but they do have other forms of space travel), and they certainly don’t have nuclear power.  On the whole, they live far more simply than most other intelligent species.

The inhabitants of The Pebble are penguins.

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