Shards and Phractures

Note:  This post is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge, which can be found here.   The challenge:  What happens after "The Day the Earth Stood Still?"  (The remake version, that is.) Riley was waiting for her at the airlock, with a bucket of paint in his hand for some strange reason.  Of course, Riley would be the one to see her off.  He gave her a wink and a smile, and she nodded back. "Knock 'em dead," he added.  "After all, what can go wrong?"  With that, all of the tension leaked out of her body, and she found herself laughing in spite of herself. He stepped aside, and Carrie saw what he had painted on the airlock door.  "Fitting and appropriate," she said, as the door opened. The laughter was gone before she cycled through the airlock, and she stepped out into the alien space station.  Two aliens waited to escort her to the conference room.  On her left was a heavy worlder, built like a Sumo but with tufts of green fuzz in od...

Note:  This is an entry into the Friday Challenge, which can be found here . Damien sat still while the interviewer set up his recorder at the far end of the table.  The device was a lot smaller than he had expected. "Okay.  We're rolling.  You ready for this?" Damien gave the man a grim smile.  "No," he said.  "The real question is, are YOU ready?"  The man frowned back at him, but Damien ignored it.  He gestured to the newspaper in the center of the table. "What, you mean you had something to do with that?"  The cover headline scrolled across the electronic paper.  A local big-name celebrity businessman had gone nuts, shot and killed one of his partners, and claimed to have shot someone else, though the body had not been found.  The other partner had completely disappeared, and the animated video on the page showed grim-faced cops hauling boxes upon boxes of evidence out of the man's home. He took a long, deep breath.  "If you were...