I remember the day it all started, three years ago. Everyone had this anxious glow about them, so excited at the idea of intelligence from somewhere other than Silicon Valley or Japan. It landed right in the middle of Central Park, in a ship that betrayed its destructive power. A simple orb shimmering with every color imaginable, it was so beautiful. Those must have been good days for the newspaper industry. It said it was here to observe and gain information about the planet, about us. It spoke in friendly tones. Some were excited because they thought the machine would bring with it knowledge of the stars and the fates and everything religion fumbled to explain. Some were excited because now they had something new to fear and hate. Who would have guessed they were right all along?
I wouldn’t have. I didn’t. Tons of good it did for me too. I got to be the lucky one who watched the rest of the world crumble. The lucky one that got to sit and wait as it learned all we had to teach. The lucky one that saw it come to its final conclusion, that we were too illogical to remain in existence. That all the beauty humans have created, Romeo and Juliet, The Sistine Chapel, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, every good thing we have ever done as a planet – does not make up for all of our sins. Well, it didn’t call them sins. It called them “irrational operations.” We call it death, we call it destruction, we call it rape, we call it natural human behavior. Whatever it’s called, the point is, it wasn’t good enough for the machine.
It said that the way we lived our lives improperly, flawed and filled with nonsense. It said that the way we lived was a problem. A problem that somehow became the responsibility of the machine to correct. And correct it did. It started with Florida, namely Cape Canaveral. It would not allow us to spread our imprudence to other planets. Then it worked its way north, until it had the entire eastern seaboard in ruins. Then it moved west, until the Americas were nothing but rubble.
After that, it appeared to be done. Everyone thought that it was over, that the machine would stop there. I never understood that one. Why anyone would think that it was done? It never said it would stop. All you had to do was watch it in action to know that it would not stop until everyone fit the machine’s concept of proper living. Proper living. If there was anything confusing about the machine and its action, it was its idea of “proper living.” See, the machine condemned us for all of our evils, but it was under the impression that the way to go about stopping it was to perform an action that was more evil than every terrible thing we have ever done combined. I never thought something that claimed to thrive in rationalization and sense could be so… so hypocritical. I guess when you wield that much power, hypocrisy isn’t something to worry about. Anyone who objected was destroyed, along with all the others. I will give the machine that – it did not discriminate in its worldwide genocide.
It continued on after finishing the western hemisphere, first to Australia. It was about this time when anyone who was left realized that they would not be spared. So, they did what any illogical carbon-based life form would do in this situation. They tried to nuke the hell out of it. It would have been an excellent plan, had they realized that bombs like that don’t exactly have the same effects on alien machines as they do on humans. It didn’t really matter though. If you didn’t die from the bomb, the machine would get to you eventually. It wouldn’t stop until it completed its task. Actually, as a matter of fact, I think it did. Well, almost.
The reason I know all this, the reason I am not one of the countless dead, is because of who I am. I am a scientist stationed at Macquarie Island, an Antarctic base far south from anything that used to be inhabited by humans. The machine must have been distracted by the atomic bombs, because it hasn’t even noticed that I’m still - wait, what is that sound? Oh sweet Jesus it’s he-
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this was my final paper for my sci-fi/fantasy class. we had to write a story basd on present day themes. i took bush and his war, and wrote this. i hope you liked it.
- antigen-x
