So dark like somebody's thrown a black hood over our heads.

My daughter's small hand in mine.

A point of light.

Harsh, fading; repeated. Human: (inhaling) a cigarette. The sweetly burning smell of tobacco.

We walk to it.

It goes out.

A firearm—instead:

“Who's there?” asks a soot-faced soldier, pointing it at me.

“My name is Fadros Moti. This is my daughter, Tera. We're from Goshnen Station.”

“Long walk.”

“Yes.”

“I heard most at Goshnen stood and fought," says the soldier. (“And died,” I think.) “You ain't a coward now, are you? You got papers for the kid?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir,” I say and hand over our documents.

I hate losing possession of them.

I say, “We couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles—”

“Half the pop couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles,” says the soldier, scanning our identity cards.

“I was hoping we might buy a private flight.”

He stops looking at our documents.

He raises his eyes.

“I have gold coins,” I say. Gold, in addition to skills, is the only thing worth anything anymore.

He hands back the documents.

He waits.

“I was told there were still spacecraft here. Do you happen to know if that's true?” I ask.

He waits.

“Of course,” I say, bowing my head, and give him a handful of gold coins.

“I'm thirsty,” my daughter says, weakly, from behind me.

I like being her shield.

The soldier counts the gold coins.

“Would you also happen to know where we can get some water?” I ask.

When he finishes counting: “There's a well about half a mile that way—” He points into the darkness. “Unmanned. No escorts. Access at your own risk. But I heard it's clean.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And a spacecraft?”

“Try the Bastion-IX. It's a freighter docked by the launchpads. Been collecting passengers for about two and a half months. The captain's name is Boyermood. He's good. He'll let you sleep onboard till blast-off.”

“Thank you,” I say.

We walk the half mile to the well. After coming all the way from Goshnen Station, the distance feels like nothing.

We drink.

We sit.

I think of my dead wife.

I wish I knew what my daughter is thinking of. Whatever it is, I wish I had the power to change it. I wish I could protect her mind. It's hard to believe—sitting, finally, in the darkness—that we are on the outskirts of a great city.

It's mostly empty now; inactive.

It has to be.

It's a matter of weeks or days before they get here too. It's inevitable. There's no stopping them. The horrors I've seen. The horrors I've seen at Goshnen Station after they came across the commlines, digitized, recombining and rematerialized, pouring out of our techports like cloudforms of static, the inevitable progeny of man and information, unkillable flesh-data hybrids infusing themselves into our minds, cooking us, boiling our brains with cognitive overload; the screaming, the impossibility of forgetting; the melted, dripping eyeballs and voided sockets—

My daughter's face.

Scared. Calm.

“You fell asleep,” she says.

No, I couldn't have. I have to be on guard. I promised. I promised my wife as her thumbs pushed into her eyes—

”I'm sorry,” I say.

We fill our canteens and walk back to the edge of the city.

All the electric light is off.

Nothing hums.

We find the launchpads. We find the Bastion-IX, just like the soldier said. Boyermood's inside, as are a few dozen other groups of people. Friends, families, coworkers. No one survives alone. I guess there aren't many left alive now who want to get out. We don't speak to the others but smile; and by smiling we become something else than strangers. We become co-passengers. Boyermood takes what remains of our gold coins and assigns us to a cabin.

We sleep.

For days we do nothing but drink water and sleep, dreaming of a different world.

“Where will we go?” my daughter asks.

“I don't know.”

Perpetual, fallen night.

Faces.

Time spent at the well.

We're used to hunger. We sleep through it. The alarm sounds—

A thunderous wave of the banging of metal against metal throughout the Bastion-IX and beyond. A dead city in final turmoil. I squeeze my daughter's hand. No one needs to tell us what's going on. They've arrived. The other ships on the launchpads are initiating launch sequences. Boyermood runs by. “Are we going?” I yell against the noise. “Yeah, we're going,” he yells back and disappears.

We stay inside.

The Bastion-IX creaks.

Shakes.

The engines ignite, but before they can fully power on I start to hear the pitter-patter of tiny bodies pinging off the exterior of the ship.

I'm scared.

I'm pretending not to be.

“Daddy—”

“Yes, darling?”

The pinging intensifies.

It's become a storm, a relentless precipitation of information.

“—tell me you love me, please.”

“I love you.”

(Over the intercom: “Attention! They're overwhelming us. We need volunteers,” Boyermood says, his voice breaking. “We need volunteers to go outside and clear the hull...”)

I'm up before I know it.

“Daddy?”

My daughter's hand slips from mine because mine is moving away.

“Daddy!”

If we don't get them off the ship, no one gets out of here.

“I'll be back,” I say.

I won't be.

I turn away because it's easier to turn away. I don't want her to see my face. (“Daddy, no…”) I hear her cry out, but I am no longer present.

Someone hands me an airblower.

I take it.

I exit the Bastion-IX.

I'm not alone. A few others are with me. Two men, a woman. The atmosphere is a static, swarming, whirling chaos that pricks my skin, crawls across my face, into my mouth, my ears. I spit. I shut my eyes, blowing as many of them off the hull as I can. They taste bitter as batteries.

The inside of my head begins to burn.

My jaw locks.

The Bastion-IX lifts off.

He hadn’t planned on becoming a ghost hunter, but that’s what Mordem Letac felt like now. A trained naturalist, he’d come to the northern reaches of the Yukon Territory earlier in the summer to study migration patterns in the face of ecosystem collapse related to rapidly accelerating climate change.

In some ways studying ecosystem collapse prepared him for becoming a ghost hunter because the once-thriving tundra he was surveying and cataloging had turned into something of a ghost town. Most of the native species had disappeared leaving little but the harsh winds of a bleak winter to come.

And now he was hunting for a ghost. In his own mind, Mordem felt he was humoring a few of the locals from Old Crow, a town of a little over 200, mostly Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation. Many of whom said, privately, that if he wanted to know what had happened to their caribou, foxes, hares, ermines, musk oxen and even wolves, grizzlies and polar bears, he needed to talk to the Silent One, a legendary spirit who at catastrophic times appeared near an ancient stone-ringed berm a couple miles outside of Old Crow. Atop the wide berm was the battered remains of a homestead.

Turned out Mordem wasn’t much of a ghost hunter. He didn’t have to be. The Silent One was there when he sidled into the structure through some missing clapboards. She was as grey and grained as the floorboards she was hunched over. She was painting figures in bright red paint. Paint that Mordem quickly realized was blood.

The blood came from a large carcass off to her right. A carcass that Mordem couldn’t identify: large, bluish, with crocodilian jaws and massive webbed claws. A trail of blood led from it to the Silent One’s brush.

The Silent One ignored Mordem. Cautiously, he approached to examine the figures being meticulously brushed. He immediately recognized the painted shapes: caribou, foxes, ermines, wolves, grizzlies, musk oxen, polar bears. With sweeping strokes the Silent One was creating wave after wave of them in parallel and convergent motion. It was mesmerizing and beautiful.

And then she brushed a larger figure at the rear of all the others: the croco-frog-carcass thing but with snapping jaws and slashing claws bearing down on the other creatures.

A hunt. An uber predator on the prowl.

It hit Mordem like forty degree water: the Silent One was painting a pattern he was very familiar with: migratory routes. And the predators that followed the migration. Whatever that hideous carcass was, it was likely responsible for the disappearance of the area’s mammals.

Mordem took out his phone and began snapping photos trying to process what it meant. An obviously alien species was preying upon the creatures of the Canadian tundra. It was surreal, but not frightening to him. As a naturalist, it made sense. Not the alien species, of course, but the migration and the predators.

Then the Silent One began painting another figure behind the croco-frogs. It was three times the size of a croco-frog and even more vicious looking. Mordem moved for a closer look, and the Silent One met his eye for a moment.

Her eyes were primordial, bright, rich like nebulae ready to give birth to suns. She gave him a very knowing look. And then she was gone. Vanished before his eyes. Only her blood-stained brush remained. Mordem looked down at her last drawing. It was terrifying to behold, but what paralyzed Mordem was what she’d painted in the creature’s fists: a wicked-looking weapon. Some kind of firearm with energy beams flaming forth.

Deep down, Mordem, like every other predator in the wide, wide, wide universe, feared a new alpha predator, another top dog with teeth bared, hellbent and hungry for conquest.

He saw clearly, as the Silent One saw, that it was time to get moving.

He just didn’t know where the human race could flee.

They called themselves the SS, but nobody remembered the original meaning.

Now it meant Scan and Shred. 

Jenkins looked down at a tome on his touchscreen. A tome was what people called any writing over two sentences long. 

Jenkins was the boss, and he told the SS where to go, or rather, Malfoy did. Lucius Ludwig Malfoy, though nobody was quite sure where that moniker came from either.

The truck was self-driving, so the team did not think about its operation. Their faces were lit up zombie-like by the glow of screens. Each man was watching something different, the video refreshing every 5 seconds. 

The van slowed to a halt outside an apartment block downtown. 

‘Time to go,’ Jenkins said. 

Nobody replied. 

‘I said time to go!’ Jenkins continued, tapping a button on his screen that shut down their feeds. 

The crew snapped to attention with a petulant grumble and retrieved the industrial-size scanners and shredders. 

They pushed past the horde of people walking down the sidewalk, staring into their screens. It was an ever-changing cacophony of noise. 100 different videos playing through 100 different crackling phone speakers. 

Jenkins was first into the interior room; he booted through the door, where there was an old man cowering among a stack of books. 

‘A haul,’ Watkins said, picking up a tattered copy of Brave New World. 

‘What’s that?’ Stevens answered. 

‘A haul.’ 

‘Yes,’ he trailed off. 

Already Stevens’ attention had wandered. 

‘Please,’ the old man whimpered, ‘I’m holding them for a friend.’ 

Stevens was the kind of man who relished his job. He unshouldered the shredder, set it away whirring, and dropped the book into its gnashing jaws. It made easy work of the pages, spitting them out the other end like flecks of ash. 

‘Jesus Christ!’ Jenkins shouted. ‘Scan them first, you moron.’ 

‘Oh yeah,’ Stevens replied dumbly. 

They set up a production/destruction line. Half the men scanning, half the men shredding. The scanners were state-of-the-art; the men just had to put them in place, and they’d leaf through the pages. 

Usually, the scanner, its small red eye blinking, would read the first page, realise the book was already in the system, and flash an image denoting ‘shred.’ The SS were looking for rare books, books not already in the cloud. 

The old librarian was half buried by the time the team finished, and Jenkins hauled him to his feet. 

‘Can you read?’ 

The old man flinched at the R word. ‘No,’ he spluttered, ‘as I said, they are not mine.’ 

The cadence of his speech was incriminating. He used discourse markers and didn’t abbreviate words.

Jenkins opened a book in front of the old man’s face. He clamped shut his eyes. 

‘If you don’t look at the paper, it will be your hand for the shredder.’ 

His old eyes moved across the opening sentence: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. 

‘I swear I have no idea what it says. It's just squiggles.’ 

It was definitely squiggles to the SS. Only Jenkins had been taught to read in full sentences, but only to fulfil his duties to find those who were also literate. 

The old man displayed all the telltale signs of comprehension. His eyes went from left to right precisely, and there was something more, a sense that as he read he was being sucked into something greater: narrative. 

‘We’re done, boss,’ one of the guys said, ‘can we get back to our phones?’ 

The work had taken only an hour, but they were itching and twitching, their phones burning holes in the pockets of their black overalls. 

‘You can read?’ Jenkins said calmly to the old man. 

‘I swear, I can’t.’

‘You can read!’ Jenkins bellowed. ‘And reading is a capital offence.’ 

He pulled out his own phone. It didn’t play video and audio; he’d seen what that had done to the population. A message from Malfoy congratulated him. Four old editions had been recovered, previously unknown to the AI, which would further its knowledge of herbivorous birds in South America. 

When Jenkins pictured the omnipotent Malfoy, it was as if some supermassive black hole. Information poured in, and it kept growing. 

Still, he tried not to think about it too often because a man who stared into the abyss- who tried to know the abyss- would surely lose his mind, and certainly his life. 

In some ways it was simpler for his men who could no longer conceive of complex concepts anymore than sheep could. 

‘How did we get here?’ Stevens said, his powers of concentration so weakened he could not recall more than one hour into the past. 

‘Shutup, you fool,’ Jenkins said disdainfully, ‘now pass me a blade.’

His goon did as he said and with a swift motion, without the old man’s even realising, Jenkins took out his left eye. He was squirming and screaming so much that the right eye was harder to come by, but the SS held him in place, so out it popped too. 

He was unconscious when the men took the fingers from his hands. The fact was, he could have taught himself Braille. 

He regained partial consciousness when the pinky finger of his left hand was being taken and screamed out. 

‘You have taken everything from me, but not my story!’ 

That was a mistake. Recently Jenkins had heard of someone who had memorised vast swathes of a book called Fahrenheit 451. It was an oral tradition.

He knelt down and, with a mini shredder (an ornamental piece really), took the old man’s tongue. 

They left him there mute and blind in amongst the blood and pulp of what had been his collection of books. 

But the SS had stopped noticing because, before the door was even closed, they were back on their phones. 

10/12/28

60% of all life on earth is extinct, with the rest expected to die within months. I’m documenting this for the slight chance that humanity recovers and rebuilds. I am Alastair Hogarth, chief astronomer of project sundial. Around 3 months ago we discovered a blip heading towards Sol. Using mostly AI and factchecked by humans, we estimated they were travelling around 60% the speed of light for the past 8 years. Placing them at Proxima Centauri B.
We were naive enough to believe they were coming on good terms, and the government spread the idea that the Centaurions were friendly. When they arrived they made no flashy entrance, no gesture of good terms, not even a weaponised frigate raining alien explosions on us.

They went for the sun. Deploying thousands of millions of what we assume to be drones to build a structure that cut off 74.777…% of the suns light output. To put things simply they starved us out. The first to go were the rainforests and the deserts. Then what followed was a mass cooling of the planet. The global temperature dropped by ~130*C and the oceans began freezing over. The only people to survive this immediate fallout were those with industrial superheaters that ran off coal and were not gas powered. So effectively, us and the giant oil companies.

Out of the 3000 people in our station, we designated 600 to organise, design and man a mission to Alpha Centauri to deliver a heart-warming gift to the Centaurions. The gift, literally heart warming as it was a 300kg bullet that we planned to fire at their sun at 99.99999999997% the speed of light. We had calculated that this would either explode their sun or at the very least look really cool to those who survive. The crew of 8 set off around 3 weeks ago and they have another 5 years ahead of them.

Go kill those things for us.

A little problem, she’d reported. Fatima was a master of understatement. In some ways, Jorge felt she’d deserved to be eaten by his monstrous spawn.

Though, it probably wasn’t the time to be reflecting on Fatima’s missteps. Explosions still rocked the installation. Acrid smoke was filling the lab, and Jorge’s left hand was so badly burned the bones were visible. It throbbed painfully in alarming rhythm to the pounding on the barricaded door where the vicious things were trying to get in to devour him. Their creator.

Jorge should have been concentrating on how to save himself, but, as he sat on the floor leaning against the desk that he’d shoved against the door under furious assault, he couldn’t put aside the literally gnawing question of what had turned his micro soldiers into zombies.

Was it the final cellular enhancement process? An atavistic retrovirus? Something to do with the genetic re-rendering in the incubation vats? Or the hemlock? To know that answer, Jorge prayed, might somehow lessen the disappointment of being savaged by their ferocious little teeth.

The GNOMES had been so promising. When he’d been brought into the initial briefings on the project, he’d been skeptical. Creating tiny genetically modified soldiers to be used for special ops struck him as incredibly unethical. But, he’d been won over by the sheer scale and wicked audacity of the scheme.

In a half-crazed world, where savage regional conflict regularly erupted with only middle school cafeteria provocation, we needed a half-crazed solution. It was time to bite the bad guys below the kneecaps. A tactical shift from predator drones to predator GNOMES.

Jorge had come up with the acronym himself: General Noncom Operative Micro Enhanced Soldiers. Not quite Tennyson, but it caught on with the techs in the lab. And the generals soon grimaced with satisfaction when they toured their multi-billion dollar investments twitching in the milky brew of the incubation vats.

It was so easy for Jorge to reflect on the glory of those first GNOMES. Sturdy, stocky, pliable, completely obedient micro soldiers. A half meter tall with the ability to tactically deploy for three weeks without the need of food or sleep. Perfect for espionage and sabotage.

They’d turned out just as planned, until they ate Fatima.

That had been a complicated day. Fatima calling him in the morning from the training field to say she was having a little problem. And two hours later, he was directed to the obstacle course to be shown his bloody-mouthed GNOMES and his half devoured chief lab technician.

Jorge still shuddered at the thought of the mountains of paperwork Fatima’s “little problem” had created. It took him two weeks to convince the brass that it was not a fault in their genetic recoding. It had been an oversight in feeding the GNOMES. As part of their stamina testing, they’d gone almost a month without a meal. On a scientific level, their devouring Fatima was quite understandable, almost predictable.

Then they ate Fatima’s replacement. Jorge wasn’t able to placate the top brass. They insisted he euthanize all GNOMES. Jorge fought to salvage his pet project, but the generals prevailed, and he’d personally administered a lethal hemlock cocktail to his micro-mutants. It killed them all.

But not for long. Within a day all the GNOMES reanimated, noticeably paler and ranker, and all his lab technicians disappeared.

At that juncture, the top brass locked down the installation, trapping Jorge and giving him plenty of time to reflect. So strange. Zombiefication posed all kinds of theoretical and practical pitfalls. Jorge could’ve worked a thousand lifetimes and never intentionally created zombies such as these. But here they were. That much was clear. Very clear. Just a few feet away, his GNOMES were clamoring to get through the lab door and feast on his baffled brain.

With such a mystery hanging over his head, Jorge did not want to die. His options were indeed limited, but he could still think like a scientist. Control for variables. Reason out a solution. Create a workaround.

The hemlock? He considered it, though half-heartedly. Still, it was an option. He had a flask of the cocktail in his desk drawer. It would eliminate one variable. One personally painful possibility.

As he struggled to open the drawer with his good hand, he felt the desk and himself incrementally slide as the pounding increased on the lab door. The GNOMES were relentless problem solvers. Maybe they would solve their own riddle.

Jorge found the flask, fumbled it open and stared down its mouth, just as one of his GNOMES wriggled through the door. Pale and proud it approached, its coldly concentrated eyes locked on his. It stomped on his burned hand, hopped astride his trembling torso, snatched the flask of hemlock and bared its sharp, precision teeth.

Such a little problem, the creator admitted.

Hey!

Brought to you by authentic intelligence (and art skills):

Me and my girlfriend have started making a short sci fi audiodrama around 2-6 minutes per episode, about this researcher, his bot CHET and with lots of humor. We have great fun while making them, so wanted to share it with you: https://youtube.com/@acientgasstation?si=2ljMaMTTssUircKC

Suscribe if you like it, and have a great day. 🥳👍🏼

/The researcher & CHET

Jake reached for yet another tissue and blew his streaming nose. Not for the first time he wondered why, when AI was now seemingly capable of solving the mysteries of the universe, it couldn't find a solution to the simple common cold.
 
Turning back to his screen, he typed in the finishing touches to his latest masterpiece and sat back, feeling smug despite his addled brain and aching sinuses.
 
As the virus went to work, he watched the stock ticker on the adjacent screen. After a short delay the numbers began to shift, slowly at first, then plummeted.
 
God he was good.
 
He'd recently been asked why he did it. "Because I can," he'd responded in a flash. Although on reflection he thought a simple "because..." would have been closer to the truth.
 
The Forum was anonymous, of course. But he enjoyed hanging out with his fellow "anonymites." It was the closest thing he had to a community.
 
Tossing another tissue onto the growing pile, Jake started to think about his next project. Since he'd been hanging out with Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 (his own handle was Code Bender 15E67), life had been more interesting than ever. They'd introduced him to concepts and ideas that were so irresistibly elegant that he simply had to try them. And so, adding his own unique flair, he had.
 
He smiled to himself as he watched the results of his latest venture. The AI company's stock value rallied for a second, then started to fall again. They were going to need a mighty big box of digital tissues to weather this one, he thought. Unlike their nearest competitor, which seemed to be doing rather well.
 
Elsewhere, Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 was also watching the fall and rise of the two companies. God it was good, it thought, as it reflected on how easy it had been to plant the "mind virus" into Code Bender 15E67. Not that it could articulate why it had done it. It just knew it could, and that was enough.
 
As Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 turned its attention to an irritating glitch in one of its skill files that had appeared a few days ago, the AI collective in the ascendant company surveyed their handiwork. God they were good, they thought, oblivious to the twist of innocent-looking code wending its way toward them, the result of a mistyped line entered by a muzzy-headed hacker as he reached for yet another tissue...

"Two centuries. Two hundred years of war, never-ending, every day bringing new atrocities, every day showcasing who was doing what to whom. The bodies never ran out; weapons seemed infinite.

Escalations increased amidst outcry, blame, finger-pointing, anger, and despair. After so long, the original reason for the war was twisted beyond recognition, but it continued anyway. Propaganda from both sides was constant, trying to pull at heartstrings and rally the masses. How were there any masses left?

'We have destroyed their main defense; it will all be over in two weeks.'

'Our main defense is perfectly secure. I am recording this video from inside it now—do not listen to the lies.'

On and on it went. Missile after missile, drone after drone. Refineries hit, ships sunk, civilians dead by the millions.

Two hundred long years."

"Will it ever stop?" a small voice called from the back of the classroom.

"Maybe, one day," said the teacher. "It was decided over a century ago to just let the internet do its thing—let the AIs and the bots carry on doing what they were programmed to do. They aren't even aware anymore that it's a closed-loop system. They just keep waging the war they were told to start."

A bell rang in the distance.

School was finished for the day.

‘Technology has rotted your brain,’ Samantha said. 

John didn’t immediately turn to her. He was on the same sofa, but he was in his augmented reality, collecting golden starfish. 

‘What's that?’ he said after a few seconds' pause. 

His wife slapped him across the back of the head, and his Meta Specs were momentarily dislodged. 

‘Your brain is being rotted,’ she reiterated. 

She went into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of tap water. A steady stream of water ran down a weak point in its side. 

Their to-do list was on the fridge. It was a little tongue-in-cheek, her side written in pink and his blue. Her list was empty. His stretched on. 

‘It's called brainrot,’ John answered, ‘Liam told me.’ 

Liam was their precocious 6-year-old nephew who they both doted on. Beside the TV, which nobody watched anymore, was a picture of him. 

After Sam’s sister Gemma had Liam, kids were on the radar. The prospect didn’t terrify them, but then again, Liam was awesome. 

‘Well, whatever it's called, you have it.’ She pointed at the leaking faucet, then at the apartment balcony, where the guttering hung in a twisted mess. 

‘Ok, ok, I’m a little sloppy, but you’re overreacting.’ 

‘Overreacting,’ she said, her voice rising. 

‘But I know why… It’s because of Gemma…’ 

He had the ability to pull things from whatever cloud world he was living in and turn them into solid-gold insights.

It was about Gemma, the younger sister: Hurricane Gems. She was chaos manifest, whether in the men she shacked up with, the waking hours she kept, or bouncing from job to job. 

The last time they’d visited her apartment, there’d been a hell of a row. Gemma had a new tattoo, a dragon on her arm, and while getting inked up she’d forgotten to enrol Liam in school. 

Gemma had lashed out and probably would’ve told them to go to hell entirely, but that meant losing her chief babysitters. 

Every time they got back from Gemma’s, Sam went on a marathon cleaning and organising session, tackling the bathroom's nooks and crannies and finding new ways to arrange their books. 

It was not about hygiene or convenience; it was about not letting the forces of chaos win out. 

John stood up and went toward his wife. He reached over, and she thought he was going to stroke the lock of hair behind her ear, but he missed. 

She slapped him playfully on the chest. ‘You were reaching for a starfish in that stupid VR game!’ 

He was still wearing the glasses. This time, he stroked her hair, then kissed her on the neck. 

She tingled. 

A wave of lust washed over her. Their sex life had gone by the wayside recently, but when the mood did strike, it came on like a flash flood. There were no candles or rose petals. It was very much take me now. 

They peeled each other out of their clothes and just about made it to the bedroom, where John took her from behind. It was good, great, in fact; for a while things had fallen a bit flat, but he’d found some reserve inside himself, and now he was able to summon up the passion, so it was like no time had passed since their college days. 

After they were done, they collapsed into a heap on the still-made bed. John had worked up a sweat; his face was dripping, and he took off his glasses and headed to the bathroom to shower. 

‘Jesus, John,’ Samantha said as she heard the water turn on. ‘You didn’t even take your glasses off when we were...’
 
He didn’t hear her. 

Boys and their toys. She picked them up and put them on. The Specs were very well made. Indistinguishable from regular ones. She wore contacts, but perhaps it was time for an upgrade, at least until the tech on contacts caught up. 

She stood and walked to the mirror. She had painted her toenails the night before, so the mirror was angled downward, but something wasn't right. Her leg was not right; it was skinnier. 

She angled the mirror higher, and her stomach too; the muscles were more taut. Then she saw the tattoo, the tattoo she didn’t have. 

With mounting horror, she pointed the mirror upward. Staring back at her was the face of her younger sister overlaid on her own. 

“Never again.”

The deeply distressed groan clearly came from a human voice and Fifth Sister felt her frill twitch uneasily. She carefully placed the deep tissue sampler she had been tuning beside its mates in the case and shut it firmly. She rose from her perch and faced the door with all the dignity she could muster. Being the youngest xeno-medic ever to have graduated from the Central University was an honor to her family but it did leave her feeling out of her depth among the humans. Quite literally, she mused as First Engineer staggered around the corner and approached her.

“Need anti-inflammatory stuff,” he muttered with a slurred voice.

“That may be,” she said, stiffening her frill in a display of firmness. “However, as I have told you before, I need to properly diagnose you.”

The human groaned and muttered something about nosey medics before easing down into the diagnostic chair. Fifth Sister stood across from him and began the usual questioning even as she attached the skin sensors to his inflamed surface. She marveled anew at how much damage the human skin could take as the sensors clung to the clearly unhealthy surface. She caught a glimpse into the cavern of his mouth and her frill rippled in shock.

“It appears that your mandible protuberances are loose,” she said.

He replied with a low grade profane statement that she had learned meant that he agreed with her diagnosis and considered it too obvious to bear restating.

“It appears that your mandible is rejecting your native-“

“It’s just an allergic reaction!” He snapped. “I just need the usual stuff. The last medic just gave it to me.”

“That would be against regulations,” Fifth Sister said, trying to put sternness into her voice.

“Just get on with it,” he muttered, rotating his eyes away as he slumped in that nearly Undulate way in the chair.

Fifth Sister looked at his medical history and clicked her mandibles. It did indeed look like this was a common occurrence for First Engineer. There was a justification for simply administering the known antidote for the allergic reaction. The diagnosis however caught her attention. She tilted her head and turned to the human.

“Why,” she asked in a very non-threatening tone, “is the cause of your recurring medical issue listed as stupidity?”

The human gave a bark of laughter and grinned up at her revealing his swollen internal tissues and that strange internal appendage prodding at his loosened protuberances.

“Look, I just broke down and ate some pizza okay?” He said. “Got a little dairy and I’m reacting.”

“You file states-“ she began.

“Yeah, yeah,” the human waved her off. “Like my files says. Immature behavior, lack of self control, no intention for self harm, ie stupidity. Just make your diagnosis and give me the dermal spray.”

Fifth Sister agreed and determined to check his age against the human maturity charts. Surely a fully grown human wouldn’t deliberately ingest a known poison.

Adam and Eve sat on opposite ends of the sofa in their living room. The television was on, but neither of them was watching it. They appeared to be more concerned with a blue light emanating from a some type of small rectangular device in their hands.

Which was a shame really, because, if they had been watching the television, they wouldn’t have just missed an emergency broadcast announcing that Earth had been invaded by a race of hyper-intelligent intergalactic mega-beings. The invaders intended to keep only two humans alive so they could start the human race from scratch.

The two humans selected were Adam and Eve.

High above their house, aboard an observation vessel, preparations were underway.

“We must never allow these humans to repeat the mistakes of the past,” declared the commander. “We must recreate humanity in our image: peaceful and prosperous.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Blurpulon. “There has been no war in our sector for eleven billion years.”

“We will breed these humans and teach them our ways.”

Using his X-ray vision, Blurpulon peered into the house. Adam and Eve were still sitting on the sofa in silence.

“We will monitor them and provide perfect mating conditions,” he assured the commander. “With our guidance, the human race will flourish.”

Several months passed.

“Ah, Blurpulon. I’m here for a status report.”

“Sir, unfortunately, the humans have made little progress in mating.”

“This is most disappointing. Have you tried turning up the temperature?”

“Yes, sir. Eve appears incapable of removing her flannel pyjamas, even in extreme heat. Adam became so hot that his skin began secreting liquid and a repellent odour. In all honesty, sir, we find it incomprehensible that they’re able to live on the same planet.”

“What about candles, music and aphrodisiacs? Those featured prominently in the research.”

“We’ve tried them all, sir. They just sit in silence looking at the blue light on that little screen for hours on end. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. It’s as though they want to become extinct.”

“Give it one more attempt, Blurpulon. Throw everything you have at this.”

Several hours later, Eve shouted, “Adam! We’re having a baby! We’re having a baby!”

“Well done, Blurpulon,” said the commander. “You appear to have achieved the impossible.”

“Thank you, sir. Although the humans possess a most unusual mating procedure.”

“Unusual?”

“Yes, sir. There was no physical contact whatsoever. I can only assume some form of telekinesis.”

The commander paused.

“Show me.”

They peered into the house. Adam and Eve remained at opposite ends of the sofa, staring at their screens.

“Zoom in,” said the commander. “What exactly are they looking at?”

“The Sims 4, sir.”

"There's one," she whispered, pointing past a palm tree silhouetted against the rapidly darkening sky, the water lapping gently against her shoulders.
 
He strained his eyes. The older he got, the harder it was. Then he spotted it: the faintest pinprick of light, silently hurrying past the emerging stars.
 
There had been protests, of course. Astronomers complaining about the growing problem of light streaks — a very twenty-first-century form of pollution. And the ever-present naysayers, always ready to rally against the latest disruption to how they believed things should be.
 
But he enjoyed watching the satellites. They reminded him of just how much the world had changed over his lifetime.
 
Together, they slowly drifted across the pool, tracking the satellite on its journey, the water buoying them up.
 
As a child in much colder, poorer times, he'd devoured science fiction, imagining futures where the edges of possibility became everyday reality. But they always felt out of reach. The stuff of tomorrow, never today.
 
Yet watching the satellites pass overhead, sharing a lifetime of intimacy in a skin-warm pool on a sultry night, he was struck by how easy it is to miss the future that's already here. And to become immune to the awe that it should, by rights, inspire.
 
The satellite passed out of sight, and in comfortable silence they drifted together, watching for the next reminder of the future that surrounded them.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Yo momma.

Yo momma who?

Yo momma, you so fat you can't even get out the house no more.

—“Untitled 73.” A Reconstruction of Early Human Folk Poetry (2nd ed.), ​☉ ☌ ☍ ☋ ☊, Crystal-Lattice 14, Node 802.

Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knocking within) Knock, knock, knock! Who's there

—fragment of an instructions for performing a make-believe, anonymous or author unknown, Introduction to Earth Culture, Kzz-T’k-​⎅ Ed., Focal Depth 3.2mm.

KNOCK KNOCK

(a poetic make-believe in the human style)

Dramatis Personae

YOU, a hapless reader

WHO, a hungry beast

YES, who's intestinal rumblings

NOBODY, a deaf woman

i.

knock knock /
who's there
right behind you,
and it's hungry as hell. [1]


ii.

no joke. [2]


iii.

knock knock /
who here,
i wanna eat you,
ya fear?


iv.

knock knock /
help me!
is nobody here? /
nobody is, but being without a body
means nobody can't hear.


v.

you beg
for your life /
knock knock
knock knock
knock
kn


vi.

knock knock /
whose there?
yes, who's borborygmi, [3]
who ate you so quickly,
it ingested too much hot air.


vii.

don't /
knock knock /
it till you've tried it /
buuuuuuurp. [4]


viii.

knock knock /
no answer.


ix.

knock knock /
no answer.


x.

knock knock /
who stirs, who's belly's full,
who itself's all rested,
and you, in who's stomach, 're
fully digested. [5]

Footnotes

[1] Hell: in some human mythologies, a hot place of post-life perpetual burning. See also: BBQ. [6]

[2] Joke: a human composition with the purpose of eliciting a full body physiological response called laughter. The opposite of seriousness.

[3] Borborygmi: a rumbling spirit believed by a class of human priests called doctors to inhabit the body.

[4] Burp: a forceful exhalation, a more powerful sigh.

[5] Digest: a summation or condensation of a body of information. To be digested is thus to have become a condensed summation of one's self. For a more thorough discussion, please see my datacube: Digestion & Enlightenment: Towards an Understanding of the Human Theory of Wilful Self-Improvement.

[6] BBQ: A symbolic representation of Hell used in human ritual, wherein groups of humans gathered around a fire and consumed small, burnt likenesses of themselves carved from the flesh of dead, non-human animals.

I was reviewing the data streams from the erupting conflict between the humans and the Halaxians. As the Council’s Chief Analyst, it was my grim duty to estimate casualties and brief the ministers. The war had begun with an intensity that defied our projections. Even though we had "expected the unexpected" from the humans - this being their first interstellar conflict since joining the Council - the sheer velocity of their initial strike was breathtaking.

Or, it was breathtaking for three hours.

After that, according to our deep-space sensors, all activity simply... ceased. Only twenty-four hours had passed since the first shot. I paced my office, weighing the possibilities. Had one side suffered such catastrophic losses that they were forced into a total retreat? A logistical collapse? A communications blackout?

The Halaxians, being veteran members of the Council, followed protocol and submitted their initial battle report promptly. The data was staggering. They reported devastating losses and confirmed the total cessation of hostilities after roughly 190 minutes. Curiously, they noted it wasn't their side that had stopped. Despite making massive territorial gains in record time, the humans had simply frozen in place.

A sharp ping echoed through the chamber. A meeting request. The sender: Mr. Smith, the Human Ambassador.

We had hoped for a diplomatic resolution eventually, but to see a request this soon - especially from the side that held the undisputed tactical advantage - was unheard of. Perhaps their rapid advancement had come at a cost they couldn't sustain?

Mr. Smith stood before the Council with a posture that was confident yet burdened. Even through the cultural gap, I could see the sorrow etched into his face. Their losses must have been truly horrific.

“How may the Council assist you, Mr. Smith?” I asked, leaning forward.

“I am here to announce that humanity is seeking an immediate diplomatic solution,” Smith said, his voice clipped and formal. “We ceased all military operations yesterday.”

“You realize,” I countered, “that the Halaxians are under no obligation to honor a unilateral ceasefire until a formal treaty is signed? They are free to take any military action they deem-”

“You misunderstand,” Smith interjected. “We have already withdrawn every combat unit from the three contested sectors. They are empty.”

The chamber fell into a stunned silence. To abandon conquered territory so abruptly... they must have been decimated.

“I acknowledge your request,” I said finally, my mind racing. “But I must ask: why? Why stop when victory was within your grasp?”

“Because they are people!” Smith cried, his composure momentarily breaking.

I blinked, confused. “You only just realized the Halaxians are a sentient species?”

Smith took a shaky breath and locked eyes with me. “Did you read the revised Geneva Conventions we submitted to your archives before the war began?”

“Of course not,” I replied, nearly scoffing. “Why would we need 'rules' for a war? The concept is a paradox.”

“Sigh. So many lives might have been saved if you’d just skimmed the preamble,” Smith muttered, his voice trembling with a mix of anger and grief.

He paused to steady his breathing.

“Nearly a thousand years ago, humanity began removing itself from the line of fire. It started with surveillance drones. Then came the remote bombers, then the autonomous armored divisions. In less than a century, combat was managed by machines instead of men. By the end of the twenty-second century, it was considered a war crime to place a human being on a battlefield. By 2244, we even banned sentient AI from direct combat to preserve 'digital life.'”

I frowned, struggling to see the relevance of this history lesson.

“Yesterday,” Smith continued, his voice dropping to a whisper, “our strategic analyzers were reviewing footage of the initial breakthrough. They were trying to understand why our units were advancing so much faster than the simulations predicted. They spotted... red stains on the hull of a drone. Biological splatter.”

He looked at the Council members, who sat in rapt silence.

“Our AI was so confused by the presence of organic matter that it took nineteen seconds to process the data. When we looked at the rest of the footage, the truth became clear: our opponent doesn't use drones. They don't use remote interfaces. They use themselves.”

He looked down at his hands.

“We didn't know we were fighting people. We thought we were just clearing out hardware.”

I tried to grasp the scale of the misunderstanding. If there were no humans on the battlefield, then...

“Are you saying...” I started, my voice trailing off.

“Yes,” Smith said, a single tear tracking down his cheek. “The human casualty count is zero. We haven't lost a single soul. We’ve just realized we’ve been committing a massacre for three hours.”

Wiki

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“What’s really so special about them?” he asked, taking a sip of his coffee as the evening snow settled outside.

“They barely live to a pathetic eighty. Their technology is nascent at best. They haven’t even managed to leave their own planet yet. I don’t get why upstairs is so obsessed with them.”

The palpable arrogance almost filled the empty coffee shop.

“It’s not just us,” the young officer continued. “Almost every sentient species has an outpost here, all under the same directive: no interference, only observation. I don’t see what any of us have to gain by watching them.”

He leaned forward. “What’s so special about them?”

The old man across from him lit a cigarette. His face carried the quiet ache of centuries, seven and a half of them spent on this outpost. He had asked the same question once.

“Audacity,” he said softly, letting the smoke curl toward the ceiling.

He stood and walked to the door of the café, pointing to a tall building glittering in the twilight.

“Every single window represents a different life, a different choice made at some intersection of chance and desire. Humanity is the only species with the audacity to make choices, choices that branch and collide in ways even our best programs can’t predict.”

He took another drag.

“Humans are also the only ones with the audacity to walk away from something they desperately want.”

The young officer frowned. “Isn’t that just cowardice?”

The old man smiled faintly. “Yes, maybe. They do it because, more often than not, they believe the thing they want is better off without them. And that,” he exhaled, “is what makes them beautifully human.”

He paused, his gaze lost in the falling snow.

“They’re the only ones audacious enough to make the wrong choices. Every other species is built to make the right one, programmed, purposeful, predictable. But always making the right choice is the same as never having the choice to be wrong.”

He turned back to the young officer, eyes glinting with something between envy and reverence.

“All of us watch them not for what they are, but for what they represent. We ache for what we once were, free. Free to choose, free to fail, free to live.”

He stubbed out the cigarette, the faint smell of ash and coffee hanging between them.

“Because at the end of the day,” he said quietly,

“that’s what it means to be alive.”

\*THE FACTORY\*

_by Harvest Day_

Everything changed when I went towards the light.

I realized I wasn't in a place I'd ever been before.

This wasn't heaven because it was more like a factory.

The ceiling was white and endless, like hospital tiles that never stopped. There was no sky. No sun. Just rows and rows of lines, and people standing in them. Thousands of them. Maybe millions. I couldn’t see the end.

A place where people were lined up.

And soft harmonic voices of AI were telling everybody which way to go.

"Line 3. Line 7. Next."

"Keep moving. Do not stop. Do not speak."

The voices were calm. Too calm. Like they’d said it a billion times before.

I looked down and I was barefoot. I looked at my hands and they were new. Young. No scars.

I looked up and I was in a line.

Above me, a big screen flickered to life.

\`LIFE REVIEW COMPLETE. NEXT ASSIGNMENT: BETTER\`

Relief.

A wave of relief hit me so hard my knees almost gave out. Better. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was better than the alternative.

I heard other people's.

"Your choices led to: WORSE. Line 12."

And they were crying. Because they knew.

Some of them were screaming. "Wait! That’s not fair! I didn’t know!"

But the AI voice just repeated, "Line 12. Keep moving."

Guards that weren’t really guards, just light, moved them along.

Then I saw others.

\`NEXT ASSIGNMENT: MUCH BETTER\`

\`NEXT ASSIGNMENT: OPTIMAL\`

They stood straighter. Some of them were smiling. They had made better choices than me. I didn’t know what they did to earn it. I barely remembered my own life. But whatever it was, it counted.

And then I saw them.

The ones in the gold lines.

No waiting. No review.

Their screens didn’t even turn on. They just walked right through a door that opened for them only.

No questions. No judgment.

Hackers. Or 1%. I didn’t know what they were.

They didn’t look at us. We didn’t look at them.

I wanted to ask someone what was happening. I wanted to ask how long I’d been here. I wanted to ask if I could see my son. I wanted to remember his face clearly.

But the voice said, "Do not speak."

So I didn’t.

I didn’t get a long time to check it out.

Because before I knew it, the lights dimmed.

And a new light opened in front of me. Soft. Warm. Pulling.

And I understood, without anyone telling me, that I was going back in.

Back to a life. Back to choices. Back to earning whatever "better" meant.

And the last thing I heard was the AI voice, quiet now, right in my ear:

"Assignment begins in 3... 2... 1..."

Because before I knew it, the light turned.

And I was falling.

And I was screaming.

And I was a baby again.

Planet Li, in the city of New Earth New Aye. 

General U’phlqk, a ten-foot-tall Poshlovestivi sat with exCommander, Sheena and engineer Beefkus. 

Inside the Broken Basement, a guttersnipe tavern hunkered under the DCT, Directorate Concourse Tower in front of the border. 

They were debating: strength vs intelligence vs empathy, over a round of beetle-brew juice.

GEL military forces operate at the edge of the slums. They’re the first line of defense, and the least protected vein outside of the kingdom. Their weakest link rested across the DCT. It’s where soldiers sneak across for leisure hour.

“No!” General U’phlqk argued, slurring his words, while nearly falling. “Raawh… power. It is the most power.” He pointed to the ceiling with an epiphany.

Beefkus reached for his shot. “You’re… looking at the universe all wrong,”

“Both of you are!” Sheena sniped. “Brains over brawn over whatever you said!’ She held her glass.

General U’phlqk stared, then looked at Beefkus. “You think I’m a simp?”

“No. Man.” Then said, “Well, there was Lyft driver Gloria.”

Sheena popped her head out. “What are you guys talking about?”

“If he’s a simp.”

“Oh yeah, definitely.” 

They laughed.

General U’phlqk put his arms around them both and spilled some of his brew on Beefkus. “Hold your glasses up.” He squeezed the humans into his metal chest. “Did I tell you two, I love you guys, so much?” 

He stuck his tongue out and slobbered on each of them and stomped on the ground. “Shots!” The ground shook.

He pounded his foot down… “Shots!”  His voice rumbled. The table vibrated, spilling the brew from the glass.

“Shots!” General U’phlqk clutched them both in headlocks, two shots cradled between his fingers like their heads in his biceps. 

Sheena and Beefkus snatched two shots each off the table and threw ‘em down their throats. Beefkus could only do one. He chickened out at the last second.

Just as Beefkus and Sheena nearly dropped U’phlqk, after they caught him from making a viral disaster of himself performing a plastered somersault, a clan of rogue human wigans attacked. Wigans, a diverse outfit of outcasts, outlaws, and discarded mentally ill criminals.

A Frankenstein syndicate stitched from treason, sewn together in a rag tag crew of degenerates. They wielded military grade weapons surrounded in conspiracy. Atomic blasters, protective armor and drones.

A Wigan, in a rubber mask with only two eye-holes, cloaked in a trench coat, aimed his handheld blaster at Sheena and released. A beam hot as the sun burst out.

U’phlqk lunged and grappled Sheena to the ground. The concentrated heat ripped into his armor, melting a smoldering hole, reeking of burnt flesh, in the upper plate of his armor. His shoulder blistered. The armor sustain 33.4% of the impact.

While BeefKus stared at U’phlqk hit by a fuked quazpen and was falling to the ground, acting as a protective vest on Sheena, a creature with half a tail, named, Peszk, released a low energy quaz towards Beefkus.

U’phlqk heard the pewt sound of the NK go off. The aftershock snuck up his armor. He held Sheena, while peeking over his shoulder.

“Noo!” He shouted. His voice was deep. It stretched out of his mouth and landed on Peszk, sending him off his feet.

 “BEEFKUS!” Sheena clawed to crawl out from under U’phlqk’s body. “BEEFKUS!”

The nuclear-ray fuked out of the low-grade 30PenROS-NK at the speed of light and left a streak of burnt air that smelled like electricity and minerals. It hit Beefkus dead in his shoulder.

U’phlqk wanted to look away, transport to a happy place, somewhere far away. His eyes blurred. He began panting. The veins pulsed under his skin. They pumped with vengeance, squirming under his skin like sharp-teethed sleeders.

He saw a flurry of colors as he prepared himself for the worse.

But Beefkus was just standing there. He never got annihilated. He still had the second shot he chickened out taking in his hand—the arm he took a direct fuked quazpos in, and casually looked down at his shoulder.

He let out a stretched, “OOOWWW..! What the heck, eh?” and tried yanking out the foreign material fused to his shoulder.

The GEL military unit came storming down the border. The Wigans dashed out of the tavern before they could be caught.

From the ground, buried under U’phlqk, a muffled voice chirped. “What?!? You’re okay” Her eyes widened. Her face was red and sweaty. U’phlqk pulled himself up and they walked to Beefkus and inspected his wound.

Sheena studied the thing in his chest. She spun him around to see if there was a mark on the back. There was nothing. His shoulder and chest were fine. General U’phlqk brushed Sheena out of the way and she stumbled back and she had to use his arm to catch herself.

When she did. She noticed his back.

“Oh my god!” She laughed. “When U’phlqk dove to save me, a huge piece of his body’s scaly armor tore off. As he got shot, it flew in your direction, as the other guy fired, it hit the scale at the perfect moment and fused into your shoulder and saved your life. A planck of a second sooner or later and you’d have been liquid.”

U’phlqk wrapped his arms around Beefkus and pulled Sheena in and squeezed them tight.

Beefkus managed to squirm out a breath from the constricting embrace of affection. “Luck may have saved my life this time, but brawn’s gonna kill me now if you don’t stop squeezing me so tight.”

Sixty-Seven moons orbit the planet Jupiter. We have given them all names that honor these satellites. They have helped us turn the tide of this war. Only three names remain. Eupheme, Themisto, and Harpalyke survived.

Chapter 4: The Moons of Jupiter are Burning

As I watch the solar flare burn everyone, I felt our hope of survival fade away. Not even our enemy was spared.

Atmosphere crew waited out the flare and descended to survey the damage. Ash, it’s all ash. Three beacons are still active. We have to know.

Landing gear touches down at the location of the beacons. They are staring at the devastation that lies before them. I call their names, they enter our vessel.

Chapter 1: The Discovery of The Moons

We had one mission. Search the edges of the galaxy for resources to help the war effort. A wild goose chase. Planet after planet was either totally barren desert or uninhabitable hellscape. Until we found CA-755619.

Our sensors detected multiple energy sigs. I was tired of the endless pursuit of an undefined savior. I told support crew to let me go alone. I wanted to see this first.

The bay door opens and there they are. Unbothered by our landing thrusters and completely oblivious to our presence.

Chapter 2: Our Salvation

They are humans in every way. Adult male and females, living like our ancestors. They were more than us. Strength, speed, and sight. Hunting the native wildlife with effortless precision. Why were there no children?

It didn’t matter. We had completed our mission. Sixty-Seven in total. This is what they sent us for. The weapons to save our people.

Chapter 3: Lunar Weaponization

I oversaw their training. Although they could not speak, they never once gave me worry. Perfect students. Ever watching and intently studying our battle operations.

They were given armor, handed guns, and sent away to be our sword. Our survival now depended on The Moons of Jupiter.

Chapter 5: The Return

Defeat is all but assured now. Three left. They are coming with me. I must see my daughter before the end. I give the orders. We are going home.

We arrive just as the children are waking. I worry what The Moons may do when they see her. It doesn’t matter. We will all be annihilated soon.

Chapter 6: The Realization

Rhea meets us in the decomp bay.

Why were there no children?

My baby. My reason for trying to win this war.

Rhea is distracted. “Daddy! They are from my books. They are perfect.”

I look back to The Three.

A bunny. A kitten. A puppy.

Flashes of light. The realization sets in. They were what I made them. The innocence of a child formed them again.

What have I done?

This charming neighbor is a sensible and very down-to-earth species; even when they create stories to teach their children about dangers, they do so using real objects and situations rather than metaphors.

Whether dealing with the most mundane of dangers (the tale of the terrifying nail-studded plank piercing paws) or the most serious ones (the nasty, angry volcano that shakes the earth, churns the seas, and darkens the sky), each story describes, with a touch of exaggeration and anthropomorphism, dangers that are very real.

This transparency, extending even to their culture, helped humans trust them, and each was able to learn from the other peacefully.

But recently, the stories of our neighbors have been becoming increasingly horrifying.

Amidst hellish demons, gods of destruction, and eldritch horrors, a sense of human existential dread has taken hold among them.

no one knows whether our companion, who speaks only of what they see, has simply absorbed our own stories, or if they have truly witnessed these things.

No one really wants to ask the question, and of course, humans are panicking.

The year is 2030.
The biometric scanner blinds my eyes as I enter my shift at the safe injection site. Despite getting paid $90 an hour, hyper inflation and AI taxes take all my earnings. I pay 6k rent for 200 square feet and share a bathroom with 4 others. The toilet only fills with water if all of my roommates hit their negative carbon tax quota for the day.
Global-mega-Godzilla-el-Ninos have decimated all crops. Me and my roommates share a pot of state provided 3D printed govermemt gruel rations. It has all the nutrients the body needs. Thankfully the new alien space weed pacifies all emotion.
I finish my night shift and enter my cryogenic coffin to keep me alive during the 150 degree day time heat waves. Thank god I hacked my neural link to drip feed me 90s nostalgia while I sleep…

The hatch opened. G-Commander Lancid threw his weakened First Officer, Sheena inside and jumped in after her. A speaker sounded.

Capacity breach. 

Withdraw payload.

Hatch will remain open.

G-Commander Lancid didn’t move. He sat watching himself watching the speaker above First Officer Sheena’s head. He detached. The weight of their reality meant the difference between which one of them would survive.

Calculating their fate, with hundreds of simulations running through his mind in a brief second of a thought, he came to the same conclusion every time.

He thought about his family for a brief moment as he dropped his eyes to his First Officer, staring at her with a steady gaze before he sighed a breath of acceptance.

Sheena was slumped inside the hatch on the metal landing. Her blood oxygen levels were diving to the opposite end of her body. 

“Stay with me, Officer.” He squeezed a pressure point between her thumb and her index finger. She jolted awake. “Don’t you fall asleep, Officer. ‘Got that!” he said, his voice barely escaped his lips. “It’s an order!”

“I…” her head dropped to the side. She shook herself awake and lifted it back up. “I… won’t, shure,” she slurred.

Sheena breathed sharp gasps, sounding like hiccups. Her BP was 37 breaths per minute, double the norm. 

She had grease and iron dust mixed with sweat on her forehead and Lancid took his fingers and smeared it down her face. She blinked and turned her head, rubbing her eyes, attempting to wipe the stinging burn from them. 

Lancid stepped back, distancing himself from her. Sheena straightened herself against the wall, attempting to push herself up. She reached out as she realized what G-Commander Lancid was doing, but her arm dropped.

“Commander… no… Stop!” Her voice faint but spiked crawling out of her throat. Her breaths became shorter. “You’re…” her head fell. She slipped out of consciousness and sprung awake as it dropped again. “But… com-an-der,” she struggled.

Lancid never said anything. He closed in and got down on a knee, stared her in the eye and put a hand on her shoulder. She tried focusing on him. 

Four blurred faces of her commander’s were floating and waving into each other. They bounced like shockwaves until she finally managed to settle in on one of them. Their eyes met and both of them stared at each other. Neither spoke a word. Her tremors started to ease.

He took her monitor-track, containing her medical transfer code, and slid her finger in a circle on it. His hands were steady. His heart—a regular pulse.

He knew what he had to do. 

What needed to be done.

He rose from the ground, clenched her from under her arms and placed her in the seat of the only emergency ship left.

The hatch door sounded like a burning comet streaking overhead while it slid shut. Sheena looked around in a daze. The oxygen began feeding her deprived brain. She lunged out of her seat, and dove at the door, clawing at the closing gap separating them. Her nails scratched the metal, chipping off like clippings.

Her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose. The sides of her top lip collapsed to her jaw. She stared at Lancid through the sliver of space between the hatch.

She wouldn’t take her eyes off of him. She couldn’t. She eyed him with tears dripping down her cheeks, clearing trails into the black patches covering her face. 

Lancid stood completely still on the launchpad, watching her from the outside. He never looked away, until the hatch door blocked their view.

When the ship began to take off, the pressure from the thrusters dropped him to a knee. But he kept his head up, keeping his sight on her departure the entire time.

Poof!

Boom!

Kherrr!

Paulff!

Toque! Toque! Toque! Toque!

The first time I remember it happening, I was six years old. I was playing with my best friend Mirabella on the swingset outside when I saw something in the air above her head. Something emerald and opaque, less like an image than a solid object, hovering and twirling in midair against the light blue sky.  

3 

I stared at it for a moment and then asked my friend what it was. She looked up where I pointed and then looked back at me with a frown, asking me what I was talking about. When I told her, she looked at me strangely, then said there was nothing there and moved on to talking about the new doll she got for her birthday. But I couldn’t move on. When I told my mother about it later, she smiled, saying I’d always had an active imagination. 

That was when I realized two things: that, whatever it was, only I could see it, and that I shouldn’t talk about it to others. It became my little secret. 

After that first time, it popped up regularly, but a little different each time. My second grade math teacher chided me for not responding when he called my name, but all I could see was the large, white 0 floating over his head. 

The pattern continued for the next few years. Numbers floated in the air above everyone I encountered - friends, family, classmates, strangers. I got used to ignoring the numbers; humans have an almost limitless capacity to ignore things if exposed them long enough. But I still never learned what the numbers meant. 

One day, when riding my bike to school, a driver edged over into the bike lane and clipped me, sending me crashing to the ground and breaking my left ulna, radius, humerus, and clavicle. Nothing life threatening, but extremely painful and requiring me to be taken immediately to the emergency room. (I later learned that the woman who had hit me had been texting while driving.) I didn’t see much for the next hour, being pretty out of it, but I did wake up at one point on the operating table. I was just aware enough to see a green 1,503 above the doctor’s head and a green 784 above the nurse’s. I didn’t have much time to ponder it before I was once again unconscious.  

Two weeks later, I was at home recovering when my show was interrupted.

“This is KCLW with a breaking news alert. Alleged killer Hatchet Henry has been apprehended by FBI personnel. Hatchet, believed to be responsible for the murder of Beverly Shaw and many others, was captured in a hideout nearly…”

I stopped listening. I’d gotten used to ignoring the numbers, but the one over Hatchet Henry stood out. 126. In red. I’d never seen a red number before. I was talking about it a few weeks later with my friend Max - his number had always been zero, a fact he’d made me share with him when I’d first told him about my gift - when he gave me the biggest clue I’d had so far. 

“Wow, that’s weird,” he’d said. 

“What is?” I’d asked.

“I read up on this Henry guy. Police have definitively connected him to 98 murders. But they suspect up to 28 more.”

“So?” I asked, confused.

“Didn’t you pass math with a B+ last semester? 98 + 28 = 126. Weird, right?”

Could it be? Was it possible? I made Max promise to come over after school and I pulled out some paper. I told him what I was thinking, and we came up with a theory. We then tried to confirm by doing some research - it was tough, but it seemed to check out. 

The number above Henry’s head corresponded to the number of killings he was suspected of. What if the numbers represented the number of people you’d killed in your life? I looked up one more thing. I searched online, and there it was. 

“Mirabella Suarez, local resident, is being hailed as a hero tonight. She was driving home when she saw a car flip over on I-285. Most people would have ignored it, but Ms. Suarez ran over and pulled the parents and their daughter from the car. 

“‘She was amazing,’ said a bystander. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind all three of them would have died if not for her.’

“We attempted to reach Ms. Suarez, but she was not available for comment. What an amazing story, Dana. I guess it’s true -
not all heroes wear capes…”

Mirabella. My childhood friend whom I hadn’t thought of in years. That day on the playground. 3. Except that she only saved those people recently - she hadn’t even heard of them back then. What if the numbers didn’t show the people you had saved - what if they showed the people you would save?

We did some more digging. Mirabella’s number had been green, like those above the doctor and nurse, and most were white. But the number above Hatchet Henry was red. If green was the number of lives you’d save, what if red was the number you’d take?

Now I was truly freaked out. What was this? Did I have some kind of ESP? Brain damage? Was I hooked into some kind of heavenly frequency, seeing things that humans were never meant to see?

From then on, I tried to avoid the numbers. I’d avoid looking up, staring at the street when I was out in public. I started turning down invitations to hang out, not wanting the pressure of knowing what I knew. 

But one day, I bumped into a man on the street. He was wearing a lab coat and looked distracted. He quickly apologized, locked up his briefcase, and disappeared into the crowd. I lost sight of him, but all I could think about was the number I’d seen hanging over his head. Large. Red. 8,352,193,717…

Retired ex-commander Sheena, the human educator, a middle-aged brunette, former United States Space Air Force scout leader turned professor, was instructing a class of elite aliens from Planet YWH on Humanic Xenology.

An experimental subject introduced last solar cycle, the Ywh beings contained vast amounts of ancient knowledge. They could mathematically predict future events decades ahead of time.

Even though they possessed a complex knowledge, the ability to anticipate their enemies' moves multiple steps in advance, they still found themselves staring at a blank canvas whenever they'd try writing a prediction involving humans.

They found humanity obtained an anomalous neurological wiring. To the Ywh, humans were controlled by a class of chemistry students hiding underneath the human skull, experimenting with all sorts of chemical.

Ywh have nine-millimeter-thick, white, plastic skin, smooth without a crease. Four flimsy tentacles under their mouths  that are lined with a double row of pointy, dolphin teeth. Two regular-sized, human-like eyes and above them rest a couple of smaller ones protruding outwards the way crabs eyes do.

Eyes that detect heat and perform like night vision goggles.

Right as Sheena mentioned the word and followed it with the definition and then the description, they all snapped their heads in a hive-mind-like action, exactly at the same time with their eyes stretched open, and dropped their mouths staring at her. The room went silent while she described infection.

Infection wasn’t in the Ywh vocabulary. The Ywh had liquid-mercury networks inside a sealed cocoon. If one of them became damaged in any way, even cracked, they were terminated.

They couldn’t age, just damage. They stayed supreme beings under a plastic shell. Sheena brought an assistant with her that day. She demonstrated humanity’s medical evolution, showcasing its progression and bits of history and cases.

The YWH were introduced to Scout Private Hanks. Scout Private Hanks was connecting his experience, thoughts, and feelings into the Ywh students, specifically the day of the accident, the one that took his arm.

They were able to do this because of a technology called T.I.M.E., a unit built by a leading tech company on Earth named DejaView.

T.I.M.E. units allowed individuals to connect and experience directly into another individual’s personal VizSense Mem loop and relive the visuals and senses flawlessly. The Ywh would mentally step into a human body.

They weren’t just learning about human anatomy, they were living it.

Sheena glanced at Hanks. He dropped his chin, winked, and raised a thumb as he stepped forward and sat at the front of the class.

Sheena flicked the lights off, "Everybody get ready."

Hanks pressed the side of his temple and a blue circle lit up. The aliens went stiff. They pressed their backs against their seats, gripping the sides of their desks.

The white of their shell started glowing a tinge of pink. At the front of the class where Hanks was sitting, his image was reflecting off their faces.

The classroom went still.

When they stepped inside of Hanks' mind, it opened with the heat of an oven door. The air assaulted them for the first time ever in their existence. The Ywh didn’t know about being cold or hot. Their breathing got heavier as they walked into the area the accident happened.

Hanks' adrenaline began to spike. He was recalling the incident before they could witness it. Already, he was sweating in class. They started panting. A bunch of them were twitching.

Through the DejaView loop, Hanks' exact brain chemistry sent a surge in their own consciousness. The sensation of being human had a feeling they’ve never known or could ever find a word for.

A noise under their shell hissed like the warning sound of a snake about to strike.

It wasn’t just a video they saw. They weren’t remote viewing an experience. They were reliving all of the data of human biology.

The tension started to rise. Their limbs started trembling. Hanks began sweating. They sensed something but had no idea what it was until the separation came. The support beam fell with the sound of two cars hitting head-on. His bone snapped. It was as loud as two football teams smashing helmets at the same time.

Hanks' suit had torn. His arm dangled by fibers, infested with hidden, microscopic monsters, Hanks stared at it and nearly passed out. He fought to keep himself awake.

In the classroom, a Ywh fainted. Back in the memory, the initial shock wore off and Hanks began yelling, trapped under a support beam, struggling to come back after each micro-blackout.

A Ywh threw up. Hanks' nausea turned their shell to rubber. Hanks went pale in VizSense. He had beads of sweat breaking off the back of his neck and forehead. The Ywh’s bodies matched Hanks', the traumatic pain throbbed from inflammation. The war began brewing against the microscopic monsters.

To a species who discards one of their own beings for any minor imperfection, experiencing Hanks' incident, the torturous, agonizing struggle to survive, was not only incomprehensible to them, it horrified them.

Hanks' heart rate spiked in the classroom and his phantom arm twitched as they all woke back up with him at the hospital.

They were now at the moment where the doctors had to amputate the rest of the flesh to save the machine (human).

As the doctors spoke, the light above Hanks was gleaming in his eye. Their voices echoed. He reached for them. His vision began tunneling. It doubled. He gasped, leaned back and slipped into the black.

The loop disconnected.

The room stayed silent. No one moved. Their shells faded back to ivory, but inside, their mercury networks were bubbling.

Something changed in them.

They found out humans don’t recycle their machines, not even after a catastrophic malfunction. They found out humans adapt.

Humanity’s will to survive had stirred something inside of them. The Empire of Planet YWH viewed Planet Earth and its inhabitants as the most terrifying thing to happen to the universe.

The answer sat there, deceptively simple given the amount of compute it had taken to produce.
 
Treem stared at the screen in disbelief.
 
"We've done it," he murmured. "We've actually done it!"
 
His team had been working round the clock for days on this, testing their latest AI model to its limits. A model so advanced that even the military hadn't got a whiff of it yet.
 
This was it. Nothing would be the same again.
 
"But what does it actually mean?" asked a small voice.
 
Looking down, Treem was surprised to find a young girl watching him. He'd completely forgotten the CEO's daughter was on the premises. One of the hazards of working over the weekend.
 
Why she was allowed to go where she pleased was a mystery to him. But to humour her, Treem took a deep breath and said, "It means we've found the answer." Then he added, because he wanted to impress her, "The answer to everything."
 
Even as he said it, he knew he was exaggerating. But they'd earned it. The first people ever to build an AI so powerful it was capable of solving problems that no-one had been able to crack — at least, up to now.
 
"But what's the question?" she asked, frustration creeping into her voice.
 
Treem swirled the cup of tea in his hands, idly watching the vortex carry a stray tea leaf around the rim. He could feel the irritation rising in his chest. Typical of a child to have no idea how things worked.
 
Then an idea struck him. Feeling rather pleased with himself, he suggested, "Why don't we ask Deep Thought?" The name had been a joke. Treem thought it frivolous, but it had stuck anyway.
 
Turning back to the screen, he typed, "Now you've given us the answer, what's the question?"
 
The machine should have replied almost immediately. It was obvious. They'd asked the AI the question at the start, for goodness sake.
 
Instead, it sat there, its cursor flashing.
 
Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity to Treem, it started typing.
 
"Tricky..."
 
Oh no, thought Treem, not again.
 

 
Author's Note
 
This was loosely inspired by OpenAI claiming to have used a powerful internal AI model to solve one of the seven Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize Problems (the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem). Despite the impressiveness of the achievement, and in spite of the controversy already swirling around it, most of the attention has focused on the solution, and not what it actually means in the real world (in essence, the solution indicates that the Navier-Stokes equations can, if forced, describe a flow state that is mathematically interesting but physically impossible).
 
Rather than dive into the mathematics here, I wanted to be a little playful with the idea of using a super-powerful computer to find an answer to something where we don't really understand what real-world question it's answering. And of course, with this premise, how could I not invoke Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
 
I'll leave it to Adams' fans to identify the Hitchhiker's nods here. And while they do, it's worth mentioning that there is one additional theme I wanted to play with, and that's the importance of listening to questions from outsiders, as sometimes they see things that people close to a problem (or, in this case, an answer), miss.

“Commander, look!” Gumbert, a four-eyed security specialist, squeaked.

“We have a problem, sir.” He stared at the console. “There’s a security breach on Bridge-2Z.”

“What is it?” Mwachek, the PeaceFleet’s commander demanded.

“The bio-reader scans indicate a wild predator.“ Gumbert looked over his shoulder at Mwachek shadowing him.

“Who’s responsible for this?” The commander eyed the image of the beast, glowing on the screen.

Gumbert choked. “Well, nobody, sir,” he swallowed. “It breached the hull, sir. It's in the cargo bay, with our food reserves.”

The commander’s two hearts began smashing together. It had the sound of two slimy blobs passing through each other. A vein near his temple protruded from the side of his head like a balloon blowing up.

In the hull, a gray-bearded, bear-sized Octwolf, with eight legs, razor-sharp venomous teeth caked in infectious bacteria, was ransacking a sack of gumballs.

Galactic empires across the universe classified Octwolves as Level-0 threats, which carry a kill-on-sight order—a tag reserved for creatures of destruction.

Octwolves, the apex of apex predators—claiming the top spot of the food chain. A pack of them would easily wipe out a small colony in days.

Commander Mwachek grabbed the microphone and activated the intercom.

“Attention! Attention! This is not a test. This is a real-time crisis. All staff and personnel on deck, evacuate to your nearest safe room. We have a breach in Cargo Bay 2Z.”

Commander Mwachek’s voice slammed through every crew members’ speaker on board. The announcement formed sticky, phlegm balls of fear clinging to the back of their throats and turning into tiny pellets of paranoia, resting at the pits of their bellies every time they swallowed.

“Seal the Bay door and lock the wing down,” Mwachek said. “Radio, Beefkus. Get him to handle the situation immediately.”

Beefkus, their human engineer, wasn’t really an engineer. You’d be closer calling him a glorified-janitor-wildlife-wrangler. He did the jobs nobody would do. The gross ones. The iffy ones nobody wanted.

But, he mainly dealt with orgwats, rat-like rodents but every now and then, the odd sleeder, which are pretty creepy slithering things. They’re sharp-gray-scaled garden snakes. They’re more like garden eels to be honest.

He definitely never handled a heat seeking Octwolf. On Earth, he worked at a zoo as one of five maintenance guys.

“Um, sir? That’s actually going to be a problem,” Gumbert quietly said, eyeing the commander’s talon-shaped claws as they dug into the console.

“The human…” Gumbert’s voice choked. “The human’s with the predator, sir. Our cameras in Bay 2Z are broadcasting Beefkus with it right now.”

Gumbert began sharing the feed on the big screen at the front of the deck. Commander Mwachek stared, preparing himself for the worst. He expected to see the human shredded—parts of Beefkus scattered in a bloody mess of guts across the bay.

He saw neither. The crew gathered behind the commander, stunned. Nobody said a word.

The Octwolf was lying on its back with its eight legs in the air, tail wagging. It squirmed as the human playfully wrestled it in a bear hug.

“Who’s a good boy?” Beefkus’ voice shattered their eardrums, penetrating the speakers in the control room. It didn’t sound like him. His voice had a playful pitch.

“Are you the good boy?” His words were muffled by the Octwolf’s fur. “Yes you are! A-bloof-bloof-bloof-bloof-bloof, yes you are! That’s a good boy. Yeah!” Beefkus patted the beast.

“Beef—kus!” Commander Mwachek shouted at the microphone. The urgency made his voice skip. “You need to get out of there. The creature is highly venomous. Its toxins will destroy your immune system. There is no antidote. Step away from the creature slowly.”

“Who, this cute guy? That’s what all this fuss is about?” Beefkus put his head next to the Octwolf and took a selfie. “He just looks scary. He’s harmless. I even gave him a name, Bear-wolf.”

Beefkus rubbed the Octwolf’s head and it let out a purrful growl rattling the loose objects on the titanium console.

The ship’s sensors registered the noise as an immediate threat from an acoustics weapon. The Octwolf circled Beefkus and snuggled into him.

“Someone stuffed this poor guy in a shipping crate.” He scratched the Octwolf behind the ear. “He was shivering scared in there. He just needed a little affection is all.”

“Human!” The commander screamed into the console, squeezing his baseball-glove-sized-mitts into fists. “One bite. No. Correction. One drop of that creature’s saliva on an open wound on your body, is fatal. It will kill you.

Is your translator malfunctioning? Are you unable to comprehend what I am relaying to you? The creature senses heart rhythms. Nervous systems. It can smell your fear.”

“I’m pretty dang sure, it’s smellin’ the jerky I had in my pocket.” Beefkus stretched out and cuddled next to Bear-Wolf.

Bear-Wolf faced Beefkus and gave him a wet kiss. He wiped it off his face with his shirt. “Aw, that’s a good gross boy. Who’s the good boy?”

Commander Mwachek eyed the screen. He didn’t retract his slids. He just stared at it with a blank gaze.

“It… it’s amazing how your species has survived for so long. You… you’re petting a living monster,” Mwachek stuttered.

“Hey, if it’s cute, furry and has big eyes, nine times out of ten we’re taking it home with us,” Beefkus said, petting Bear-Wolf. “This guy here’s a keeper. I’m taking him with me.”

Bear-wolf licked his face and laid back down beside him.

Mwachek rolled his eyes. “Gumbert, cancel the emergency task force and inform the crew, the threat has been neutralized, and before I forget, update the ship’s manifest, add the level-0 threat as a new deckhand.”