The Kid Who Came From Space. Ross Welford

      We are like you in many, many ways. For a start, we look quite like you. Not exactly like you, but still rather similar.

      I have two legs, two arms and a head, and I walk upright. I also have a tail, but that is not really important.

      It is hard, however, not to focus on the ways we are different.

      So let us get the basics out of the way, shall we?

      I suppose the main thing is that we are much, much more intelligent than you are. I am sorry if that seems rude, but it is a fact, and facts are important. To us, you are about as intelligent as Iggy’s pet chicken. That is why most people think it is all right to keep you in a zoo.

      My home – my planet – is so far away from you that if I were to write out the number of kilometres it would take the rest of this page. Starting with 950 and following it with zero after zero, like this:

      950,000,000,000,000,000,000 …

      … and so on to the end of the page and maybe beyond. Of course, writing it out implies that there is only distance between us, but we do not calculate it like that. We measure both distance and time (they are related, as your Albert Einstein pointed out more than a hundred years go), plus a quantum-dimensional shift that enables us to ‘travel faster than the speed of light’, although we do not, not really. It is a dimension thing that, so far, is beyond your understanding. To be honest, I am not completely certain I understand it myself, although I do not usually admit this.

      Think of it like this: can you explain to me how your ‘televisions’ work? I thought not. Intra-universal Shift is like that to me. I am happy to accept that it works, and to use it, without knowing all of the details.

      Our world is clean. We have access to limitless energy that does not pollute.

      It is conflict-free. We fight no wars because we have everything we want, and the Advisor makes all the decisions on behalf of everyone.

      It is disease-free – and has been even since before the Big Burn, the planet-wide fire that raged for decades and killed almost everything.

      We are the only creatures that inhabit it: the last ‘animals’ were almost all successfully eradicated centuries ago and those that were not perished in the Big Burn. The functions that some lower creatures performed (such as digesting waste products or enabling crop growth) have since been carried out efficiently, safely and hygienically by synthetic robots.

      Compared with you, we are short-lived (thirty years, as defined by the revolution of your Earth around your sun, is very old, and is the practical limit of our bodies).

      At eleven years old, then, I have lived about a third of my life. I finished school at seven, and I live independently.

      So, at eleven years old, I am really – as you would say – ‘grown up’.

      It was as a ‘grown-up’, then, that I found myself coming to your planet. To a small settlement on an island called Britain.

      This was a dangerous idea. Not because of the Intra-universal Shift (what I believe you call ‘space travel’). That is unremarkable although prohibited by the Advisor. No, it is the reason I was coming that was dangerous.

      You see, I had what you would call a ‘mission’.

      A highly risky mission to rescue a girl from a human zoo on my planet, a gazillion-illion miles from Earth (that is a number made up by Iggy) and take her home.

      If I failed – that is, if I was caught – I would be put to sleep for most of the rest of my life. Not only that, but the human being, in her miserable enclosure, would die in misery, and her parents and brother would live in misery, and that was not something I was willing to let happen.

      And it was all because I have a heart: a heart which gives me feelings.

      All of which makes it a shame that I did fail to rescue the girl, and ended up travelling to Earth alone.

      You see, my mission did not get off to a good start …