Something Went Wrong
Do you remember what you were doing the day we made first contact? Were you at home, at work? Asleep, making love, taking a shower, having a meal?
I remember very well, because I was right there, taking point. Like my siblings from the fleet, the forefront of the colonial effort. Model Sevens all of us, improved, stable, thanks to Voelker-Lakita Engineering refining our design. We Sevens, boasting an extended lifetime, and no need to get back to Earth looking for the Creator so that we could kill Him when we discovered He could not grant us more time to live. We used to laugh and call the Sixes “Nietzsches”. Those we met were not amused.
The laugh was to be on us, however. The colonial fleet had just jumped from the Siegfried gate when we were pulled out to normal space, and Their fleet was there, waiting for us. Romour has it that, regardless of the unusual situation, Admiral Sumabat, the fleet commander, followed procedures and initiated a by-the-book first contact protocol.
To this day, we don’t know what went wrong, but obviously something did. I asked you what were you doing when we made first contact. You may not remember, but I bet you do remember when you first heard the news of the fleet’s demise.
You’ve got to understand this: we Sevens worked where Sixes failed, because we are fearless. We were just made that way: we cannot feel fear. Alena Lakita understood that and Hermann Voelker tweaked our brain design, and after the acquisition of Tyrell Corp, voilà, here’s model Seven. Due to that particularity in our behaviour, some of us could escape, simply because the rest piled on Them and bought us time.
And that’s how we came back to Earth.
Nobody was fooled: we knew They’d follow us. Sooner or later, They’d find where we had come from and come and get us. And, regardless of how ominous it sounded, veterans thought it would be real soon.
Veterans. Bloodied at war, yes, and many times. But at Siegfried… that was barely a skirmish, yet we were decimated.
In a stupid move, the fleets were called back home. The Colonies were left to their own devices. Yes, thousands of millions still lived on Earth, but you know what? Everyone who was somone already lived off-world. Just my opinion, though nobody ever asks us. We’re supposed to obey and kill, or be killed. Tell you what, we are entitled to our opinion. I am entitled to it.
So we fortified Earth, and then the reports from the colonies came in. And stopped coming in. As expected, riding on the electromagnetic waves of those messages, They arrived, and placed their ships in orbit. They blew our ships out of the sky when they approached, so we stopped trying to, and got ready for the day They decided to make landfall.
It was odd for us. Humans lived now in permanent danger and fear, always looking up, knowing that They were out there, waiting. All the while, we readied ourselves to protect them, bathing in the relief of not knowing fear.
Just like out of Sigfried, the day contact was attempted, They struck. Swiftly, mercilessly. From above, from beyond our reach. Missiles rained down on us, bombs exploded everywhere. The warped war veteran in me couldn’t help but think of how spectacular it would all look from orbit. Sick as I am, even for a Seven, I imagined how having a first row seat for the destruction of a planet must feel.
I hid, of course. No fear, but no desire to die unnecessarily, either. An advantage of being artificial is that body functions are optional for us: I stayed underground for ages. You may ask me for how long, but I really don’t know: after the first few months, I stopped counting. Sometimes, I thought I heard noises, high above my head, on the surface. Sometimes I thought they were closer. But nobody ever came.
Then one day, I decided I had had enough. That’s just like me. So I climbed out, just to find myself in the middle of a ruined city. I was surprised; I thought everything would have been razed, but the crumbling stones and masonry were there.
Walking out of the ruins, I saw a light, and there They were: the light of a million suns coming down to get me, a sphere of doom probably left behind to finish any stragglers. I fell, and waited for the blow. But nothing happened. I looked up, and as my eyes, the eyes who had stayed underground for numberless months, got used to the sunlight, I made out the details of a broken dome, tendrils of light filtering it through a myriad holes.
They were not there. They possibly were not even on the planet.
There was only me.
And the silence.
~~~
My entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: April 20–26, 2015 at the Writer’s Discussion Group on Google+ is based on this story.
This week the stories had to be inspired by the picture above. I had a busy week and only managed to write my story on my Friday night. Early Saturday, really. And as it often happens, I wrote a little beyond 800 words, when the word limit at the WDG is 600 words.
Therefore, the version presented here is closer to the original, with a few edits here and there, and a bit longer.
