Today we start a new venture called Tease Me Thursday! When it's not quite Friday yet, and you're feeling like some fun from your favorite authors and authors you haven't met yet. Come on in, have a seat, and most of all... have fun! For this hop
you post 7 paragraphs or 7 sentences or 7 words. It can be from a WIP or
something published.
For
this week, I thought I’d do something from my Storm Moon release, The Harvest: Taken.
* * * *
It was in the year 2050 when humanity found out that
it was, indeed, not alone in the universe. They appeared without warning above
the capitals of all major nations. The huge, menacing, and completely
unresponsive space ships dominated the skies, sending the media into a complete
tailspin. The governments of our world argued back and forth on what to do.
But, in the end, they did nothing.
First contact came within hours of the sightings.
The question of what these aliens wanted prompted emergency closed-door meetings
in Norway, held by NATO. Meetings were held by the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations, the Union of South American Nations, the African Union and the
UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, among others. The media speculated
endlessly. The talks lasted for two days, while the world waited and watched.
Early on the morning of the third day, a news conference was held and details
were finally released to the public.
The name of their planet was Tah’Nar—and it was
dying. Originally, the Tah’Narians were an intersexed warrior race. Chemical
warfare had essentially rendered them sterile. Many scientists, from all over
the world, eagerly volunteered their assistance to aid the alien race. The
benefits to our own world hovered foremost in the mind of every government
official present at the meeting. The Tah’Narians required DNA for their
harvesting program. Since we couldn’t duplicate their technology, those males
who were to participate had to be transported to their world, which, of course,
triggered all sorts of questions from people. If these aliens were so advanced,
why couldn’t they extract the needed DNA? Why did humans have to be taken
off-world? The story had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
After about a week of this, a press release from our
government stated that the two strands of DNA were too fragile to be frozen and
transported through space. The release
claimed that the nucleobases—the four molecules
that form the genetic building blocks of DNA—would be damaged and might
even disintegrate once the alien starships jumped to star drive, the method
used to travel through time and space so quickly. People, however, could be protected in ways
that extracted DNA couldn’t.
Agreements were reached with each government—and
boy, didn’t that take a while—that these men would be returned to Earth once
the program was completed. Here in the
United States a lottery system was set up, and each young man between the ages
of twenty-three and twenty-eight was assigned a number. Once a year, for the
next five years, numbers would be drawn and a new set of one thousand men would
be collected and escorted to holding centers. Medical and psychological tests
would be run on the subjects, and, if they passed the tests, they’d be
transported to waiting spaceships. Other industrialized nations followed our
example and set up their own lottery systems. Word soon leaked that only gay
men were being targeted, but our government vehemently denied this accusation.
The media coined the expression ‘The Harvest’ for
the times when the Tah’Narians would return to collect these young men. I was
seventeen when the aliens first appeared, so my parents assumed I was safe. The
final collection would be done before I turned twenty-three. I didn’t fall
within the guidelines the aliens had established, so I thought I had nothing to
fear.
I was wrong.
