Only Human

The burning wreckage of the colony was a scene from the Nth Hell of Kranish. Bodies were scattered everywhere. Burnt corpses. Dead sentients. Scorched rubble. Shattered dreams and rendered nightmares.

I contemplated the symbology on the wall before me. Simplistic and meant to be pedagogical. The scene, my AI assistant informed me, was meant to have a positive charge for those still underdeveloped, not yet fully aware or maximized.

I moved forward through the shattered building. This place would be ripe with the scent songs of the recyclers within days. The bodies were plentiful and we would make no attempt to interfere with the natural cycle of things. That was not our way.

My battle armour hummed maneuvering me through the areas still intact enough to have a roof. There was very little of that. The biomimic mechanical tentacles of the suit lashed out to grasp the walls and progressed me through the ravished ruins.

So many dreams shattered. So many color songs ended. So many acoustic scents never to be wafted. I was not at ease.

Our invasion was a resounding and overwhelming success. We had taken this world. The resistance was easily overwhelmed. We had crushed our enemy.

Yet the more I toured our victory, I, the grand commander of the Unformed's army, my internals shifted from uneasy to worried to fearful...to...

I was placing a pseudopod on the feeling when I overheard some of the soldiery, low rank and undercultured, only having had fifth hand bio-mental sharings with the grand thinkers. They were discussing the victory as grunts from a million cultures had done before and would do again until the sky grew cold and the last sentient scent summoned us home.

I stopped to listen and caught the final comment as to why we had won and taken this world, this colony, won this victory.

The sentients, after all, were "Only Human."

I knew the feeling I had felt and my formless form shivered. For I could finally place the tendril on the tenuous feeling I had had over our victory.

Terror.

I left the creche, the 'kindergarten,' and feared for my life, my spawn, my people.

For those we'd had taken this world from were "Only Human."

The Sky Rained Fire

It was the day the sky rained fire. It was the day the sun died. It was the day THEY came.

First were the booms and crashes. Great impacts seemed to come one after another. Giant bollides ripped through the sky, crashing into the defensive bases around the world. The impact were targeted. No nuclear or antimatter weapons were used. Just rocks. Really, really big rocks.

While that might be kind because there was residual radiation, it was also cruel because the sky turned black and blotted out the sun. Impacts as great as those on that day send massive shock waves, but also incredible thermal pulses: fires ignited in the forests and in the shattered buildings. The fires produced smoke. And the smoke blackened the skies. The blacked skies blotted out the sun. The warmth of the sun denied, the world froze.

That alone might have doomed us. It might not have, too. A technological species is truly hard to destroy: we are like the fungus of the universe. A gift once contracted by a world that would keep on giving.

However, THEY were not satisfied with merely bombarding our military installations, our industry and our spaceports. They wanted to be sure. They wanted to eradicate us.

Before the skies blackened, immediately after the impacts, lances of light stabbed from on high. They vitrified swathes of our budding grounds. A vicious and nasty act: they killed the young. They were obvious from orbit. They could not be mistaken. In so do so, the enemy burned their own people. Vile, vile beings.

The communal matriarchs sang a dirge of death, depression and defeat. We joined in. The harmony and meter of our song careened off in odd and devilish ways. Hateful, spiteful and seeking vengeance, our song also acknowledged our probable genocide. Such evil. Such evil was being visited upon us.

This was not enough though.

The enemy came down upon our nest world and sought out ever last one of us. None were to be allowed to survive. Burned and fried and consumed by fire. They used beam weapons designed to burst anything, anything! they touched into flame. They meant for no part of us to survive.

When we looked into their orbs, we could taste the hate. There would be no escape. Under no circumstances would they allow any of us to live. These foul and disgusting humans. They intended our utter demise.

Here I was, a pseudo pod extended, firing a plasma rifle and hoping to kill off as many of them as possible. I'd given up on capture: prisoners were no longer of use. Any of them we captured, they simply dropped a rock on from orbit, obliterating where they were being kept. They denied us the ability to even meet them on something of even terms: there was no way to recapitulate our losses.

I burbbled my death song when I saw the squad of humans coming towards me. I could not take out so many and my war-sibs were in too bad of condition to help me now. I dropped a memory blob and sent it off. It ought to make it back to the base. I kept some coagulated photo receptors on the blob as it scurried off and attempted to take my knowledge, memory and skills back to the matriarchs so they might know what I did and learn from what happened.

I watched and hoped I would be serve the collective at least that much. However, a beam of light lanced out and rendered it to ash. They could not get me directly that way, but they could stop me from reporting back in the traditional manner: memory blobs had to go above ground since the tunnels back to base were smashed.

I considered merging with my war-sibs, but knew that to be futile: they were too harmed. I might eat them if I lived long enough, but I could not become one with them and gain strength. They knew and sang me encouragement.

I slithered over to another firing position from our labyrinth bunker and started firing again.

Why were these humans out to kill us all? Their hate was ridiculous. They were ending an entire sentient race. Such foulness, such nastiness, such evil. We did not do that to them when we came and culled their Earth. We simply did what we and some other species did: we rounded up their excess population and used them as hosts for our young. Even their own wasps did something similar. And we helped them with their population problem. We don't return to a world unless it has a population problem again. Most never see a breeding cull ever again!

We didn't even take half! 3 billion isn't that much after all. AND! They were such bad hosts only one in ten was a successful bursting.

And then they came seeking our extermination.

Foul, foul humans.

We Stood and Waited

Like fallen angels, in fire and fury, we hurdled to the ground. We had heard the call for help and we came, streaking through the sky. We came and we would not be merciful to the enemy. We came.

Screaming through the sky louder than a 747, we crashed into the Earth. Each impact was as powerful as a nuclear weapon, yet it was merely kinetic energy that was used, no radioactives were used or needed. We crashed into the Earth a behind the enemy lines, far enough away from those under attack to leave them unharmed. We were here to help, not harm, our friends.

Our impacts were devastating. Because we came in at a 45 degree angle, over 8,000 tons of material ejected from the impact craters we each created. These showered the enemy right after the shock waves of our devastating arrival had already hit. Pelting and killing many more.

Each of our craters was over 50 meters in diameter and almost 14 meters deep. No mere mortal could have survived the crushing energies. Yet, one by one, we rose from those craters, no larger than human, but far, far more powerful.

We did not climb. We do not walk. We did not crawl out of the craters.

We rose.

Filaments of blinding white energy lanced out and connected us to the Earth, to the sky, to the very essence of the universe itself: we tapped the quantum foam itself to draw energy from the very universe. We roast, floated forward and steadied our weapons.

When the enemy recovered, they began firing upon us. The very energy we tapped into, protected us. Filaments lashed out and vaporized incoming projectiles. We flashed with the impact of energy weapons, negating them. We were protected by the very universe itself. The shock waves of their artillery crashed and smashes against us, like waves around a granite island: left unharmed and untouched.

When we reached where the enemy was in range, we lashed out. Bolts and shards of white energy lashed out and vaporized the enemy. It was hellacious for the enemy.

They should not have come here.

They should not have sought Humanity's extermination.

And now they faced the ultimate in devastation for their forces and in the future for themselves.

Should Greater Humanity so willed it.

They had been observing the galaxy for signs of the technology we now wielded. Once before, the great and terrible Ancients had developed it. No others had developed the trick themselves, but had found and used Ancient devices that did. A galaxy wide ban had been proposed, but no race was willing to give up their weapons. So, instead, every race had agreed to their nonuse: keep them, but no testing them, no using them unless they were used against the holder of the weapons. Response allowed, no first use.

Yet, for whatever reason, no race could replicate the technology. Until Humanity did.

We finished clearing the enemy from before the beleaguered armies before us. The ones who had been faced with extermination. To them, we were bright lights as angels. They may have thought us gods. We were not. Though we were their saviors.

The aliens had detected our experiments. They had come in force. A race that could develop that technology would be unstoppable. They knew it and they sought to prevent it. No race could be allowed more than a handful of the weapons. No race could be allowed to develop the technology with all its potential implications. So the enemy came and they sought our demise, complete and utter.

We descended to the ground and turned off our equipment. The field subsided and we were visible once more. We stood before the humans who marveled and we worried: would they accept us or fear us?

We were not in the flesh Human, but were made by Humans and thought of ourselves as Human. Our biological collaborators and we had created the technology the aliens now sought to destroy us for. We had done so in secret, just as we were secret. We were the Created, machines, artificial intelligences. We could have let the aliens wipe out Humanity and continued in secret.

But if we did, what sort of children could their parents be murdered when they could prevent it?

Not us. We could not. We did not. We were here.

We stood and waited. How would they react? Love? Hate? Pride? Fear?

We stood and waited as nervous children, full of love, hope and fear.

We stood and waited.

James Nicoll Reviews _The Desert of the Stars_ by John J Lumpkin

link.

my own review is here.