Ben Franklin’s Quote

By: Editorial

This is a fun one! It’s like a puzzle. First, it says “charms are nonsense.” That means sometimes things that look like magic, like a lucky charm or saying a special word, aren’t actually real or helpful. They’re just pretend. BUT then it says, “…nonsense is a charm.”

This means that things that seem totally silly, weird, or like pure nonsense can actually be… well, enchanting and helpful in a surprising way! Like singing a silly song to feel brave, or having a crazy idea that somehow fixes a big problem.

So, the quote is saying: Don’t trust pretend magic stuff, but remember that sometimes the most surprising, fun, or even silly ideas are the ones that work best and make things wonderful!.

Kael Drakmo

The alarm blared, not the soft one for atmospheric entry, but the jagged, teeth-gritting kind that meant trouble. Kia jolted upright in his narrow bunk, the synthetic blanket tangled around his legs. Through the small viewscreen beside him, a blur of unnatural green filled the frame. Captain Ben’s voice, usually calm and steady as the ship’s pulse, crackled over the comm.

“Kia! Status report to the bridge, cadet! On the double!”

Panic tried to knot itself in Kia’s stomach, but he swallowed it down. Captain Ben needed him. Even if all Kia felt like was a skinny kid playing astronaut in an impossibly vast, unfriendly galaxy. They were lost. Truly, spectacularly lost, light-years from Earth after a navigational error. Now, stuck near this strange green planet, it sounded like trouble had found them.

He scrambled out of his bunk, pulling on his cadet jumpsuit. It still felt too big in places, like he hadn’t quite grown into it yet. That felt about right. He hadn’t grown into being useful, either. He wasn’t a pilot like Ben, or a mechanic, or a tech wiz. He was just… Kia. The kid who usually ended up fetching things or handing tools.

He hurried down the narrow corridor of the Illumination, its internal lights pulsing nervously, the familiar scent of recycled air and warm metal suddenly edged with something tense. He reached the bridge, a curved command centre dominated by the main viewscreen showing the green planet below, now sharper, showing vast, slow-moving shapes on its surface.

Captain Ben was hunched over the main console, his brow furrowed. The ship’s AI, Illumia, spoke in her calm, almost melodic voice from hidden speakers.

“Life forms detected, Captain. High concentration. Unclassified species. And hostile contact incoming.”

“Incoming?!” Kia yelped, sliding into his co-pilot seat, console blinking urgently.

“Confirmed,” Illumia replied. “Multiple bogeys detected. Non-organic signatures. Rapid approach.”

The main viewscreen zoomed in. Dark, angular shapes, blocky and menacing, detached from a larger, derelict-looking vessel hanging silent and low in the planet’s hazy green atmosphere. Droids. Combat droids, judging by their speed and trajectory.

“Evasive manoeuvres, Illumia,” Captain Ben ordered, his fingers dancing across the controls. “Arm basic defensive screens. Kia, patch into the planetary frequencies. See if you can make heads or tails of any signals.”

“Y-yes, Captain,” Kia stammered, hands fumbling slightly over the unfamiliar controls. He wasn’t good at this. Comms were Ben’s thing, or Illumia’s. He was better at… spotting strange shiny things on distant asteroids, or noticing when a vent made a weird squeaky noise. Useful stuff, clearly.

The Illumination pitched sharply as a laser blast zinged past. Alarms flared red on the console. Outside, one of the Droids zipped past, a blur of grey metal and blinking red lights. They were fast. Too fast.

“Shields holding at 70%,” Illumia reported coolly. “Multiple impacts.”

“Who are these guys?” Kia muttered, plugging his comms cable into the console. He spun the dial through frequencies, static, bursts of alien noise, nothing that made sense. He pulled on his headphones, focusing. All he got was… jumbled noise.

Captain Ben grimaced, steering the ship. “Unknown. These droids look like Kael Drakmor’s work, but he usually sticks to raiding cargo freighters. Never heard of him targeting a planet this… peaceful-looking.”

“Peaceful?” Kia asked, looking at the screen. Those big, slow shapes on the ground… they were HUGE. Like enormous green slugs, trailing shimmering, viscous paths behind them as they glided slowly over the verdant landscape. “What are they?”

“Unclassified, Kia. Illumia identifies them as large, mollusk-like organisms,” Ben said, eyes fixed on the dodging required. “But they appear to be radiating complex energy patterns. That’s probably what the droids are after.”

Kia adjusted his headphones, tuning the planetary receiver. Static. Then… flicker… flash… pulse… Not sound, exactly, but a pattern. Like someone blinking Morse code, but infinitely faster, using light instead of beeps. He closed his eyes, trying to filter out the ship noise, focusing only on the visual information translated into auditory clicks and shifts. It was confusing, overwhelming. Too much.

click-whirr-FLASH-bzzz-pulse-flicker… It didn’t make any sense. It was just noise. Random. Nonsense.

“Getting anything, Kia?” Ben asked, ducking another laser.

“Just… noise, Captain,” Kia sighed, feeling a familiar wave of inadequacy wash over him. “Jumbled signals. Like they’re talking too fast, or not in our language.”

“Keep trying, cadet,” Ben said, not unkindly. “Sometimes the most chaotic signal holds the most important message.”

But Kia didn’t think so. This just felt like frustrating nonsense.

The Droids focused their fire, a concentrated barrage on the Illumination’s shields. The ship shuddered violently. Red warning lights flashed everywhere.

“Shields at 30%,” Illumia announced, her voice losing a touch of its calm. “Sustaining structural damage.”

“We can’t stay here!” Ben grunted, wrestling the controls. “They’ll blow us apart!”

“But… the creatures on the planet!” Kia said, looking back at the screen. The enormous green mollusks, the Luminarians as Illumia’s scan now labelled them, were still moving slowly, unaware or unable to react to the danger closing in from above. They were defenceless.

“We need a safe place to repair and figure out what’s going on,” Ben said, steering the ship towards a small moon orbiting Lumina. “Maybe we can observe from there. I hate leaving them, but we’ll be scrap metal if we stay.”

They limped towards the moon, pursued by a few lingering droids, managing to outrun them on atmospheric entry thanks to the moon’s gravitational pull confusing the Droids’ sensors. They found a small, cratered valley to hide the Illumination.

The inside of the ship groaned with damage. Wiring sparked in the ceiling, console lights flickered, and the recycled air smelled faintly of burnt metal. Captain Ben was examining the wounded power conduits, tools scattered around him. He looked tired, a smudge of grease on his cheek.

“Structural integrity compromised,” Illumia stated. “Repair estimates are… lengthy. And we used a significant amount of power escaping. We are very much stuck, Captain.”

Kia felt a cold knot in his stomach. Stuck. On a grey, dusty moon, with dangerous droids lurking and those strange, silent creatures threatened on the planet below. He felt useless all over again.

He drifted over to the viewscreen, now showing Lumina from the moon’s perspective. It was a swirling, vibrant green sphere, beautiful and mysterious. He saw faint pulses of light shimmering from the surface, like distant fireflies. The Luminarians, communicating with each other, probably.

He put his headphones back on, tuning the comms to the planet again. The same barrage of light-signals, translated into frantic clicks, hums, whirs, flashes. He stared at the screen, then back at his console, where the visualizer tried to make sense of the signals as abstract waveforms and patterns. It just looked like meaningless scribble.

“It’s like trying to read a book written in glitter,” Kia muttered, staring at the patterns.

Ben glanced over. “Hard going, huh?”

“Yeah. Just… noise. Fast noise,” Kia sighed. “Illumia can’t translate it either. Says it doesn’t match any known linguistic patterns.”

Illumia confirmed, “Affirmative. Signal structure is highly complex, non-linear, and utilizes a frequency modulation based on light illumination patterns undetectable by standard optical-audio conversion. Requires novel decryption.”

Novel decryption. Translation: Impossible for them right now.

Kia watched the light pulses on the screen. Some were bright, fast, chaotic. Others were slower, dimmer, but still impossibly complex. He felt a strange urge to understand it, not through logic, but just… by looking.

He leaned closer, trying to focus on the flashes. When he was little, he had this weird thing where bright lights, like blinking neon signs or even sun glare, would sometimes arrange themselves into patterns in his mind, like a visual echo. He always thought it was just his eyes being strange, maybe something wrong with them. He never told anyone, embarrassed by it.

He closed his eyes again, focusing on the translated clicks and whirs coming through his headphones, letting the sounds wash over him. He pictured the flashes of light on the screen, mentally layering his own visual ‘echoes’ onto them.

Flash… pulse… rapid sequence… pause… slow thrum…

Suddenly, a sequence felt… wrong. Out of place. Like a misplaced comma in a sentence. He focused on it, rewound the recording of the signal on his console.

bzzz-click-FLASH-whirr-pause-FLASH-FLASH-pulse…

That triple-FLASH-pulse sequence. It appeared again and again. And another: rumble-hiss-click. And another: fastchirp-slowsway-pause-updown.

They weren’t random! They were repeating patterns!

Kia leaned forward, heart starting to thump. He started isolating these repeating patterns, marking them on his console, making little mental notes about when they appeared and what other patterns were near them. It was incredibly difficult, like trying to catch hummingbirds with his bare hands. His head started to ache.

“Find anything, Kia?” Ben asked, wiping grease from his hands.

“Patterns, Captain,” Kia breathed, excited despite the headache. “There are repeating ones. Like… words, maybe? Or symbols?”

Ben came over, looking at the screen where Kia had highlighted sequences. “Well done, cadet. Anything correlate to distress signals?”

Kia looked. The patterns he identified seemed to appear more frequently when the incoming Droid signals intensified on a different channel. One sequence, fastchirp-slowsway-pause-updown, was almost constant.

“This one,” Kia pointed, tracing the pattern with his finger. “It keeps repeating when the Droids get closer. I think it means… ‘danger’?”

Ben studied the screen, then Kia. “Your visual processing is identifying recurring elements in the frequency modulation that Illumia cannot functionally translate as language data,” Illumia stated.

“Your eyes picking up something the scanner missed?” Ben murmured, a glint of interest in his eyes. “Keep going, Kia. What else?”

Kia plunged back into the stream of alien light-noise. His strange ability, the thing he always thought was just annoying, letting lights leave weird trails in his vision, felt amplified here. It was tiring, focusing this hard, but also… amazing. Like suddenly being able to hear a whole new layer of sound in the world. He was seeing the structure of their ‘speech.’

He worked for what felt like hours. The smell of burnt metal in the ship faded, replaced by the smell of dust filtering in from the moon and the faintly metallic tang of his concentration. He started building a mental dictionary of the patterns. The giant slug-like Luminarians were talking about… the Droids.

Click-rumble-hiss seemed to be a reference to the Droid ships. fastchirp-slowsway-pause-updown was definitely ‘danger.’ There was one, a complex spiral-unfurl-hold, that appeared less often, usually after the ‘danger’ signal. It felt different. More… desperate? Or maybe… an instruction?

Suddenly, Illumia pinged. “Incoming transmission. Kael Drakmor.”

Captain Ben hurried back to his console. The main viewscreen flickered, then resolved into a harsh, angular face, etched with old scars. Kael Drakmor.

“Captain Ben,” Drakmor sneered, his voice gravelly. “Fancy meeting you here. Didn’t think anyone was foolish enough to nose around this sector.”

“Drakmor,” Ben replied steadily. “What are you doing? Harvesting these creatures?”

Drakmor chuckled, a dry, rasping sound. “Hardly ‘creatures,’ Ben. They’re protein blocks that happen to move. My supply lines are cut off in the Northern Cluster. My people are starving. These… gastropods are a readily available, highly nutritious resource. Why let them go to waste?” He gestured vaguely. “Besides, they just sit there. Useless. Like shiny, slow-moving rocks.”

“They’re intelligent!” Ben retorted.

“Prove it,” Drakmor challenged, smirking. “Their little light-shows mean nothing to anyone who matters. We tried communication decades ago. Jumbled patterns. Nonsense. Just like they are.” He leaned closer to the screen. “Give me the Illumination’s power core. You’ve probably got excess. It’ll power my harvesting drones through the end of the cycle. You won’t need it – you’re scrap anyway.”

“Negative,” Ben said, gripping the edge of the console.

Drakmor’s smirk vanished. “Pity. More fun blasting you, anyway. My Droids have located your little hiding spot. See you soon, Captain.” The screen went black.

“He knows where we are!” Kia exclaimed, heart pounding. “The Droids followed us!”

“Of course they did,” Ben sighed, running a hand over his face. “They’ll hit us before we can make repairs. We can try to evade again, but the damage… and he has too many droids focused now.”

“What about the Luminarians?” Kia asked. “He thinks they’re useless protein blocks! He doesn’t see… he doesn’t see their communication!”

Ben looked at the screen showing Lumina. The light patterns were frantic now, flashing like a million tiny hearts beating too fast.

“He called their signals ‘nonsense’,” Ben murmured, almost to himself. “Just like…” He looked at Kia, his gaze thoughtful.

Kia felt a jolt. Drakmor dismissed the Luminarians’ communication as nonsense. Just like he, Kia, often felt his own odd visual sensitivity was just… useless nonsense. But he was seeing patterns! He was starting to understand!

“Captain!” Kia said urgently. “The patterns! I think… I think the spiral-unfurl-hold one? The complex one? I think it means ‘move’! Or ‘hide’! They’re trying to tell each other something about avoiding the Droids!”

Ben’s eyes widened slightly. “You think? Illumia, can you cross-reference Kia’s identified pattern clusters with observable Luminarian movement patterns?”

“Processing,” Illumia responded. A moment later, “Analysis complete. Correlation detected. The spiral-unfurl-hold pattern is consistently broadcast preceding localized aggregations or slight alterations in directional velocity among clusters of Luminarians. There appears to be a causal relationship. Cadet Kia’s interpretation is statistically probable.”

Kia’s jaw dropped. He was right! His “nonsense” way of seeing things had found meaning where the advanced AI couldn’t.

“He dismisses their signals as nonsense,” Ben said, looking back at Drakmor’s blank screen, “because they don’t fit his kind of sense. He sees them as simple organisms, so he expects simple communication. He’s blind to the charm in their so-called nonsense.” He looked back at Kia, a clear admiration in his eyes. “And maybe… maybe your nonsense is the charm we need.”

Kia felt a warmth spread through him, pushing back the cold feeling of inadequacy. Maybe… maybe he wasn’t useless after all.

“Captain, the Droids are approaching the moon’s surface,” Illumia warned. “Projected interception in five minutes.”

“We can’t fight them here,” Ben said grimly. “And we can’t outrun them.” He looked at Lumina again. “We have to do something for the Luminarians, and fast. Drakmor is about to launch a full-scale harvest.”

An idea, wild and strange, popped into Kia’s head. It felt… well, nonsensical. But it sparked.

“Captain! What if… what if we don’t fight the Droids? What if we confuse them?”

“Confuse them how?” Ben asked, looking sceptical but open.

“The Luminarian signals!” Kia said excitedly. “Drakmor said they don’t make sense to him. They’re chaos. What if we use that chaos? What if we broadcast fake Luminarian signals, really chaotic, misleading ones, to send the Droids somewhere else?”

Ben blinked. “Broadcast fake… Kia, we can barely interpret their real signals. We don’t know their ‘rules.'”

“But that’s the point!” Kia insisted. “Drakmor thinks it’s all nonsense anyway. If we flood his Droids with enough more nonsense signals – patterns that look like Luminarian ones, but are completely random and contradictory – maybe it’ll jam their harvesting routines or send them on wild goose chases!”

Illumia chimed in, “Theoretical potential exists for disorientation of basic pattern-recognition algorithms in current-generation Drakmor harvesting droids if subjected to sufficient input of novel, yet structurally familiar, conflicting signal clusters.”

“They might just ignore it,” Ben cautioned.

“Or,” Kia argued, gripping his console, “it’ll be too much nonsense even for them to filter. Like static overwhelming a radio signal! And I know the patterns now! I can generate signals that look like the Luminarians’, but lead nowhere!”

It was a ridiculous plan. Using something that everyone else saw as “nonsense” to fight a military threat. But Captain Ben looked from the frantic light pulses on Lumina to Kia’s earnest face, a spark of understanding dawning in his eyes.

“It’s crazy,” Ben admitted, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. “Utterly, brilliantly nonsensical.” He clapped a hand on Kia’s shoulder. “Alright, cadet. You think you can generate these fake signals?”

Kia gulped. It was hard enough identifying them. Creating them…? He didn’t know. But the thought of those droids hurting the Luminarians, of Drakmor just taking them because he thought they were useless… it made him angry.

“I can try, Captain,” Kia said, determination hardening his voice. “I’ll need to link my console directly to the external comms array and use the visualizer feedback…”

“Illumia, patch Cadet Kia’s console to the external array,” Ben ordered. “Full power to external comms, minimal power to shields. We’re putting everything on this.”

“Risky,” Illumia stated, but complied.

A low hum filled the bridge as the comms array powered up. Kia’s console changed, displaying the pure, raw data stream needed to generate external signals. He looked at the chaotic but patterned real Luminarian signals on the main screen, then focused on his console.

He started inputting sequences, replicating the look and feel of the patterns he’d identified, but twisting them, combining the ‘danger’ signal with the ‘move’ signal, layering patterns that normally appeared miles apart on the planet. He used the raw visual data he saw in his mind from focusing on the light pulses, translating it into code input. It was frantic, intuitive work, not logical at all. It felt more like painting with light than writing code.

Outside, the first of Drakmor’s Droids screamed into the moon’s atmosphere. The ship trembled.

“Droids incoming!” Illumia announced. “Estimated time to intercept… ninety seconds.”

“Generate that nonsense, Kia!” Ben urged, standing by his side, watching the data stream on Kia’s console with a mixture of tension and hope.

Kia bent over the console, his fingers flying. He saw the patterns in his mind now, flowing and twisting. He wasn’t just typing code; he was painting the air with confused light. The air in the bridge crackled with energy, a faint smell like summer lightning filling the space.

“Forty-five seconds!”

He sent the first burst of chaotic, fake signals. It hit the external array, converting into intense, jumbled flashes of light pointed towards Lumina and the approaching Droids.

“External comms array active. Transmitting modulated frequency cascade,” Illumia reported.

“Thirty seconds!”

Kia sent another barrage. His headache was back, worse now, a throbbing behind his eyes. But he kept going, building layers of misleading, nonsensical light signals. He pictured the Droids receiving this flood of contradictory data, their simple programming trying to make sense of pure chaos.

“Fifteen seconds!”

He slammed his hand down on the final input sequence, sending the most intense, tangled burst yet.

Outside, the viewscreen showed the leading wave of Droids. And then… they hesitated. Their lights flickered erratically. One veered sharply, firing a laser blast randomly into the void. Another spiralled downwards towards Lumina at a ridiculous speed, chasing ghost signals.

“Droid trajectories becoming erratic,” Illumia stated. “Apparent system confusion. Primary attack wave diverting from moon approach, scattering across planetary surface. Estimated interception time… nullified.”

Kia slumped back in his seat, breathing heavily. He did it. His nonsense… worked.

On the main screen, the chaos was visible. Drakmor’s perfectly aligned Droid army had dissolved into a confused swarm, flying in different directions, some firing wildly, others seemingly frozen in indecision, trying to process the storm of contradictory signals flooding them from the Illumination.

A moment later, the harsh face of Kael Drakmor reappeared on the screen, furious. “What is this?!” he roared. “My droids are receiving corrupted data! Illogical patterns! It’s… it’s nonsense!”

Ben grinned, relief washing over his face. “Maybe your droids aren’t equipped to handle that kind of processing, Drakmor.”

Drakmor glared. “This changes nothing! I’ll reroute… I’ll send them manually! Don’t think this saves you, Ben!” The screen cut out again, but the Droid threat on the moon was gone, at least for now.

Kia watched the Droids, still scattering across the distant view of Lumina like confused metal insects. His plan, the utterly nonsensical idea, had saved them. It hadn’t been logic or tech; it had been embracing the ‘nonsense’ and finding its ‘charm’.

“You did it, Kia,” Captain Ben said softly, pride evident in his voice. “You understood the signal when the best tech couldn’t. You found a weapon in what everyone else dismissed.”

Kia looked at the screen showing the faint light pulses on Lumina, then back at the now-empty space where the Droids had been moments ago. He didn’t feel useless anymore. The weird way he saw light, the thing he hid, wasn’t a flaw. It was his unique charm. He saw value in something others called nonsense.

Captain Ben smiled, clapping Kia on the shoulder. “You know, cadet,” he said, looking at the confused Droid patterns on the scanner. “Sometimes the most powerful solution isn’t the obvious, logical one. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes the least sense, the thing people ignore… because that’s the thing your enemy isn’t prepared for. It’s seeing the world just a little bit differently.”

Kia nodded, a quiet understanding settling within him. He thought of the Luminarians, speaking in their rapid, shimmering light-patterns, so easily dismissed by Drakmor. Their ‘nonsense’ was their complex language. His own ‘nonsense’ was his unique vision. Both held a hidden power.

They still had to repair the ship, and Drakmor would likely be back. But for the first time since they got lost, Kia felt a sense of confidence, not fear. He had a skill. A real one. It wasn’t conventional, but it was his. And it saved them.

He looked out at the vibrant green planet, the tiny pulses of light still shimmering below. Maybe they weren’t so lost after all. Not if they kept their eyes – and their minds – open to the unexpected, the illogical, the utterly charming nonsense the galaxy had to offer.

They still had a long journey ahead, across unknown stars and strange worlds, facing challenges they couldn’t even imagine. But they had faced a Droid army with confusion and chaotic light. They had faced down a warlord with radiant ‘nonsense’. And they had won.

Perhaps being lost wasn’t just about finding a way home. Perhaps it was about finding things – and parts of yourself – you never knew existed along the way.

Until next time space cadets, stay safe.

The End

Ben-Kia.com

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