Shortlisted
The Rescue of the Great Wall
Walden Leung
n the middle of China, there is a city called Xi'an. In a time-worn village, a ten-year old scientist named
Jeff was zealously testing out his new invention - an extra-powerful magnifying telescope.
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Group 2: Fiction, Pui Kiu College
While wandering around the individual planets in the Galaxy, something on Neptune tickled his
osity. Jeff spotted something moving. He quickly zoomed in and gaped at the tiny creatures, jelly
ith blue skin and black dots bulging out from all over their bodies. They walked at a very fast pace. To
be precise, sliding around is a better description of those movements. Close-up the creatures were full of
wrinkles and looked like aliens in Jeff’s mind.
I
Three aliens came to a halt, and Jeff could zoom in even more. Inside the ‘aliens’ cells were symbols that
flashed out as if messages came out from computer screens. Jeff tried to jot down some of those symbols.
But then, when Jeff was investigating those symbols, he heard his mom roaring from the kitchen. “Jeffrey!
We have been sitting like statutes waiting for you. Come down and have dinner, NOW or your favourite soup
will be gone!” Jeff scooted down to join his family for dinner. The smell of Campbell Alphabet Soup was in fact
enticing.
Jeff glared at his bowl with alphabet noodles floating around. Suddenly, something struck his mind, “A
code! That’s what it is, a code!” He gulped down his soup at light speed, ran up to the attic and took down his
decipher, covered by dust.
The decipher was Jeff’s science fair project last year, which could decode secret messages from all codes,
known and unknown, including Alienish! You name it and the decipher can decode it. But the judges did not
believe that the decipher could decode Alienish. Jeff had no way to prove it either. The judges thought that Jeff
wasn’t a scientist; the classmates teased him as a big fat liar. Jeff didn’t get the prize. He was so depressed that
he threw the decipher into the attic.
“
It’s show time. The whole world should know it works,” said Jeff arrogantly.
So Jeff put in the piece of paper with the symbols and set the decipher to decode alienish into English. The
translation came out to be: “Urgh! I am sick at looking at that long Great Wall the Earth humans built. I want to
destroy it! Those humans shouldn’t have that wall when we don’t have it!”
And the machine kept on decoding: I have an idea, let’s use some of the C6H2(NO2)3CH3 plus one of our
most destructive elements – The Hekfessium to bomb that wall! As it continued: What is C6H2(NO2)3CH3?
Another alien explained, “That’s what humans call TNT, stupid!”
Jeff sat dumbfounded as the decipher kept translating.
The next day, Jeff tried to inform everyone about the wicked plan of the aliens. He first told his parents, but
his parents just laughed and told Jeff to get more sleep. Jeff told his classmates. His classmates thought that he
was crazy. He told his teacher, but his teacher thought Jeff only made that up in order to win the next science
fair with his old decipher. He told the Ministry of National Defence, but they thought Jeff only wanted to skip
school and didn’t budge.
Jeff was frustrated. But he soon found out that there was no time for complaints. He had to work out a
rescue plan on his own.
Jeff turned on his computer and looked up the element Hekfessium. He found out that Hekfussium was a
mixture of elements that did not exist on Earth. It could only be found on Neptune, which if mixed with TNT,
can increase the power of an explosion by a trillion.
Then, Jeff spent the rest of the week checking on the symbols from the aliens, using his telescope. “There is
a meeting called the G20 on the planet Earth held in 14 days near that Great Wall and all the ‘VIP’s on Earth
will be there. It is a good time for us to showcase our power!”
“
Okay, so how shall we do it?”
“
Here is my plan. We can actually place the bomb in a thing that the humans call ‘car’ and wait till the time
has come. Then we can make it explode to destroy that Great Wall”
“
How are we going to go down onto the Earth? We are so different from those humans that we’ll be really
obvious.”
“
Relax, don’t you remember we can turn ourselves into anything we like?”
“
Yes, but don’t you remember that our lips will be still blue, so we will still stand out?”