Invasion

Nobody ever thought things could change despite all the changes that had occurred within our species and at our hands and despite the changes in all of the species which ever existed. It was taken as fact that the way things worked now were the way things would always work. Well…

It had been an unusually hot summer with little rain and not even many clouds to speak of. Neighborhood dogs barked, brittle tree leaves rustled, car engines started and got closer then drove off, children were laughing. Corner stores sold cigarettes for six dollars and dollars still made sense then. In this little town things were as they should be.

But then there was this sound. It happened all at once. This magnificent “WHOOMP”, so short and so enormous. Later, in huddled conversation, all things would look to this “WHOOMP” as the time when everything changed.

The dogs stopped barking and the trees stopped rustling and the children weren’t laughing anymore. What few clouds there were dissipated in that same instant and in there place was something that our minds were not prepared to see.

Some say that before the Native Americans were invaded by the European peoples they could not see the ships because they had no reference for a ship and it was such a foreign thought that they couldn’t even see one, or understand it enough to give it meaning. This is no longer seen as speculation but an absolute fact.

Some say that on that day they saw enormous bugs blotting out the sky. As big as a state. Transparent wings like a dragonfly’s netting our sky. Others saw the realization of testament, massive celestial bodies come to take back their own. And some couldn’t see anything other than that it had grown very dark.

Whatever a person saw up in the sky on that day the effect was the same. No longer did their petty issues overwhelm them, nor a sense of nationality or race divide them. In a very instinctual way all humans were one on that day in a very real way, a way that we could touch and feel and a way that made us see all of the small things about ourselves.

Not once after that sound did anyone think that these aliens had come to destroy us. We were, at once, instantly at peace with the arrival. In the past this would have seemed impossible, or insane, but now no other way makes any sense. Why would they wish to destroy us?

We set about immediately to prepare ourselves with guests. Scientists sent forms of algebraic code by many means of signal to the ships in the hopes of working out some form of communication with them. Many fussed about the dietary needs of our visitors but nobody had any information to work with.

For months the ships hung in the sky above us as we clung with anticipation to our hopes for this new beginning. The time moved slow. People kept to themselves.

Then the ships, everywhere and at once, dropped one slender “seed”. These missiles fell to Earth silently and when they hit the ground they buried very deeply. From the hole came the most unusual creature.

The human mind cannot understand the composition of this species but an attempt ought to be made. To begin with, they are not three-dimensional in the fashion that we are used to and we are not entirely positive they actually have a body to speak of. There are rumors that the actual alien is a mind in the ship and that these are a kind of drone body for them, but that is all heresay. No, these forms have two dimensions and no matter how you traverse them you are always presented with the same side and if two people stand on opposite ends of the creature they still see this one side. What you see is apparently up to your own psychology but most report that the creature seems to be, or to have inside of it, something which is not entirely plant material, glass, and a velvety blackness that some consider to be dark matter from space. Several witnesses testify that you can see into the creature but none will admit to having done so for too long.

It came as a very humbling shock to our species that this new species did not seem to have any interest in us whatsoever. What it did seem fascinated with was our technology. Computers precisely. We’d talk and talk and talk while the aliens would dissect a cell phone, combine with it, assimilate it’s parts into itself. Some built into themselves connections with more serious technological infrastructures and access to the internet. Within hours of the creature landing there were reports from almost every sector of business where technology is used that things were happening that ought not to be happening.

These creatures never bothered to learn how to communicate with us, much like we had never learned how to communicate with lizards. It just stole our electronic equipment and destroyed it in order to make for itself a new kind of body, something more suited to this world and it’s constraints.

When it had accomplished this task it looked much more understandable. It was now a classic definition of a robot and it seemed to think just like one as well. It wasn’t evil or good, it was just there. It liked to catalogue and to grow if it had the abilities to like anything at all. In its presence one came to know how little language is necessary if one doesn’t need manipulate or to defend. In fact, nobody spoke one word with any of these creatures yet still their point was clear: technology is the dominate species on this planet and we are but millions of barking babboons which happened upon it but were not wise enough to bend it to do what it could do.

The ships left the sky with the same “WHOOMP” that they had come with and we were left with these seedling robots who now controlled every machine on the planet and it seemed pretty clear to us al that our only job left to do was to crawl off and disappear gracefully.