Tag Archives: aliens

General Fiction, Science Fiction

The Passage of Virtue

“Well met, brother,” a dull, blue-eyed man says as he squats down by the fire, a drink in his hand, “What have we learnt?”

Barbarians are screaming around them. Somewhere a woman is climaxing loudly, and the fire is chasing its sparks up into the twinkling cosmos, ever-watching and eternal.

A strikingly-handsome, green-eyed man turns to the speaker and grins.

“Nothing,” he spits into the flames, “They are a bestial species, caring only for their immediate impulses. Hunger, lust, greed, anger… These are the foundations upon which they live, and they are unstable. I see no future here.”

The blue-eyed man pauses, takes a long sip and nods.

“Yes, I’ve seen those qualities too but they are loud and get a disproportionate amount of exposure. There is complex beauty there. Forget love, we both know that its little more than chemicals for reproduction and survival. No, there is an existential craving for a purpose. I see it deep inside all of them. Each one of these animals wants to know why and what to do next?”

The green-eyed man snorts, finishes his drink and nods.

“Fine, I’ll back your motion. Give them a couple more centuries. Who knows, it’s a young species and I like spending time with their female gender.”

The fire crackles and the woman finishes loudly.

Suddenly, there are just barbarians around a fire with its sparks rising up into the dark, infinite cosmos looming above. The blue and green-eyed men are gone.

***

“Well met, brother,” a dull, blue-eyed man says as he sits down by the bar, “What have we learnt?”

The handsome, green-eyed man nods at him and motions at the barman for a drink for both of them.

“They make something called whiskey around here,” the barman fills up both of the men’s glasses, “It summarizes my answer.”

The blue-eyed man takes a sip and contemplates it. Drunken Scots begin shouting angrily at each other on the other side of the bar. He opens his mouth to reply but the green-eyed man cuts him off.

“It is silk but wrapped in fire. It is bottled happiness but it costs the ruin of so many. It is hope but it only offers despair,” he downs his whiskey in a single sip, “I love it and hate it all at the same time. Such base emotions inspired by such a base species.”

The blue-eyed man smiles and downs his drink. His eyes twinkle a little in mischief.

“But, yet, they have discovered freedom, independence and tea. Many of them fight for these things and, though their path to virtue is far from complete, the dark beginnings only serve as a magnification for what they are achieving. And, let’s be clear, brother, they are achieving great things already.”

“Yes,” the green-eyed man chuckled, “But slavery, war and the justification and rationalization of these acts also exists. Yes, they had their revolutions but what about how they treat those weaker than them? Or poorer than them? Yes, they build pyramids and monuments but at what cost to their lives? Thin-skinned dictators rule over so many and disease infests their cities and their media. Freedom, independence and quality tea are far from universal in their factional lands.”

“Everything begins at the beginning. Give them time, brother, give them time. They have not yet failed the Third Test.”

The drunken Scots are now hugging and their friends calling for more rounds for the lots of them. One of them starts singing and others join. Soon the whole bar is a joyful wave of heart-moving harmony and brotherhood.

The green-eyed man glances at them, smiles and nods.

And, suddenly, the bar is filled with drunken Scottish lads. The two men are gone.

***

“Well met, brother,” a twinkling, blue-eyed man says appearing out of the darkness in the desert night, “What have we learnt?”

The tired, green-eyed man nods at him and glances back at the fire blasting from the starship as it punches up and into the twinkling cosmos, ever-watching and eternal.

“They are stepping off-world, brother. They are actually stepping off-world. This changes everything.”

In the darkness of the desert, on the fringe of civilization, both men stand there in silence. The weight of history weighs heavily on them as each second that passes the starship punches higher into space…

Further from Earth.

Nearer to the future.

“I don’t understand,” the green-eyed man says, sighing, “They still hate, fight and lust. Some still believe in primitive mythologies. Their leaders are mockeries of the very word and they despise vast swathes of their own species for minor differences to their own, microscopic herd. Why… How could they have gotten this far?”

The blue-eyed man smiles and sadly shakes his head. He turns and squeezes his brother’s shoulder.

“You really don’t remember our beginnings, do you, brother? We were once little more than them. All species–indeed, all life–has its own path to virtue. If it cannot adapt to survive, then it dies. If it cannot evolve to rise above the other species, then it dies. And, finally, if it cannot leave its own homeworld, then it dies. Those are the Three Tests. The only tests, really, barring what they face next…”

The green-eyed man nods and shrugs his shoulders.

“Well, I guess we should let father know.”

The blue-eyed man’s face hardens and he nods.

“Yes, we must alert father that there is a new member to our Galactic Council. They will either accept the terms, or we will find out how well their millennia of weaponry technology holds up against our own.”

And then the desert night is empty. Indeed the planet is too. The two men are gone.

By now, the starship is little more than a flicker in the night sky. Like a spark from a fire rising into the twinkling cosmos, ever-watching and eternal…

Science Fiction

When The Noise Fell Silent

When the noise fell silent, ten thousand satellites strained to hear it. When the noise fell silent, ten million eyes strained upwards to find some evidence or indication of hope. When the noise fell silent, ten billion lives on planet Earth looked around for something…

Anything.

But there was nothing.

When the silence started, there was nothing to see, no evidence to consummate hope nor leader great enough to change fate itself. When the silence started, eternity displayed its cold, impersonal visage, obscuring over two-hundred thousand years of human civilization and a further four billions of life. When the silence started, all hope on Earth ended.

“Our’s is now a doomed planet,” the radio whispered amidst the silence, “We have lost contact with our ship and can only conclude that its mission has failed. We expect the asteroid to impact Earth shortly.”

And then there truly was silence, the noise of life being extinguished ever-so-quickly from the cold, uncaring universe.

Grand aeons spun by as stars clustered and collided, galaxies formed, merged and tore back apart and all the chaos across all the universe hit every combination of each possible scenario until it happened.

Something.

A small planet with just the right balance of atoms and temperatures at just the right position in just the right galaxy birthed life.

Again.

And then the noise started up. Again. It started softly but it grew louder with each passing moment…

Science Fiction

Unintended Consequences

The laboratory was filled with buzzing and the Scientist had to shout to get his message across to the rag-tag collection of journalists, politicians and PR crew trailing behind him.

“It is a mechanical, self-replicating bio-equivalent microbot!” he shouted, waving hands in all directions, “It will fill the ecological gap left by the honeybees! We call it a Mizzy for short, and it will save the global harvest and resolve our Food Crisis!”

All around them, in various glass walls, small, yellow bees buzzed. On closer inspection, though, they were actually small mechanical beings with a single propeller on their backs and flickering lights as eyes. Their rear held a small, oblong container that could carry pollen–or other material–from one flower to another one.

“How do they know what to do?” one journalist shouted, scribbling notes down as the Scientist replied.

“They are programmed to replicate the society and tasks of the old honeybee!” the Scientist shouted back, “This way, they will replace the extinct honeybee and pollinate all the necessary crops and flora in the world.”

“But, like, how are you going to produce enough to achieve this?” a politician-looking type shouted, glancing around the small laboratory skeptically, “You have no major backer and this is a very small facility!”

The Scientist smiled. He had been waiting for this question.

“We have modeled Mizzy’s artificial intelligence as a self-learning, decentralized network that exists across each one of them. There is no central server. There are no individual Mizzy’s, as each is just an extension of the Hive. One of the AI’s goals is self-replication to an equilibrium number to fill her environment. Thus a portion of the Hive will be dedicated to fixing, rebuilding and replacing their own kind. We have further coded them to do this using existing, waste materials–where possible–and the power sources that drives all of them are solar, thermal, magnetic and low-grade cold fusion, or whichever combination of the above makes sense at the time depending on the environment. Hence, the Mizzy will help with waste disposal while self-replicating in perpetuity until it reaches optimal mass while living on sustainable and plentiful energy. So, to answer your question, we are not going to do anything. Mizzy is going to build herself to critical mass for our environment.”

As if in answer to this grand reveal, the buzzing in the laboratory grew briefly louder before receding slightly. Some in the room got the clear sense that Mizzy was listening.

“Wha-what if Mizzy gets out of control?” a timid-looking woman asked. She was probably a PR agent but looked like she might be in the wrong profession.

The Scientist laughed, seemingly the only one that was comfortable with what was going on, “No chance of that. Mizzy has a very structured and defined mandate. We also have a kill-switch on our servers that can turn her off. Don’t worry, everyone, Mizzy is not a threat, she is the solution!”

“So when are you going to release them?” the first journalist asked. He had stopped writing in his notebook and was now looking around nervously.

“We already have!” the Scientist glowed, “Our first pilots are running in Brazil and a couple countries in Africa. So far the data is exceptional and we are looking forward to a home release shortly!”

“But what are we going to do about the growing viral threat? What about the so-called coming Viral Singularity?” the politician stated coldly, trying to act unimpressed.

“We are only a small facility here,” the Scientist shouted back, rather irritated by the question, “We’re solving the Food Crisis here. We have our limitations. Someone else is going to have to step-up and solve the potential for a coming Viral Singularity on their own!”

***

“Sir, the scanners are indicating large masses of vegetation on the planet, but little else,” the Zorborgean scout from the Thossa’ar galaxy gutturally inclined to the mass of tentacles behind him, “No, no, wait, the scanners are picking up a large number of mechanical low-grade lifeforms. These are non-biologicals. It seems that something was left behind when this planet’s sentient life died off.”

The Zorborgean scouting ship floated on quantum-drives just outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Despite their tentacled appearance, the Zorbs were a peaceful and scientifically-minded species from a nearby galaxy. Much nicer–luckily also much nearer–than the aggressive reptiles in the Hissorror system or any of the other inter-galactic bullies.

“What happened to the indigenous sentient species?” the Captain gurgled, a small tentacle scratching where his chin might be.

“Well, given the integrity of the ruined infrastructure left behind, I would reason that whatever killed them off, it was not war nor any noticeable geological or cosmic event. It also happened quickly. Our historical simulator seems to indicate that it might have been viral and, maybe, occurred in a matter of a rotation or two around this system’s star? It is hard to tell, but I can confirm now that the planet is safe for us to explore. Should I send the probes to collect more data? Maybe we can locate an intact skeleton or some biological matter for further testing?”

The mass of tentacles that was the Captain rippled in agreement and then added: “Yes, but also do catch us some of those mechanical lifeforms for later study. Bring back a couple thousand of them, as I want to take them back to our labs for further analysis. Oh, and definitely try find some biological matter. This mission’s imperative is to find and document this extinction event. If it was a viral event, then we must study it.”

***

The atomic pulse cannons of the full Hissorrian fleet blasted into the buzzing swarm. Deep space echoed with the sheer force of a thousand-thousand stars exploding, but the swirling swarm just self-adjusted and pushed forward engulfing the front million starships.

“They keep replacing themselvesss!” the Hissorrian Emperor’s High General hissed, “Fire at will! Fire at will! Just keep firing, goddamit!”

The Zorb’s were ancient history as a mysterious virus had ripped through their species so fast that it had been a millennia before the rest of the galaxies had even noticed they were gone. Rising from the ashes of their civilization, a strange mechanical being had quickly populated their planet.

The best that the Hissorrian analysts could work out, this mechanical being had initially populated another planet before populating the nearby Zorb homeworld. The two swarms had then reached out on their networks and met each other before beginning to populate other planets. Maybe the swarms had not been aware of the rest of the space, but after connecting its two halves, the enlarged swarm had begun pushing out into the rest of the space.

There were no negotiations nor even any communication from the swarm. These mechanical being just kept multiplying and pushing deeper and wider into space, consuming entire planets and galaxies as they kept building more of themselves. On and on and on, they kept growing. It was almost like they existed solely to fill space and they would consume everything in their way to achieve this.

The Hissorrian’s best technologists had dissected captured specimens and all they could tell was there was some coding in some strangely hollow language and some form of low-grade, impenetrable network across the swarm. These were definitely non-biological, but seemingly impervious to any code, virus or hack that they tried.

That left only the brute force option.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” the Emperor’s high-pitch scream sounded across the largest inter-galactic fleet ever assembled. There were even neighboring species and competing galaxies helping the hated Hissirrians, as the swarm had become an intergalactic threat that everyone and everything rallied behind.

The inter-galactic Mizzy flexed Her decentralized body. She noted the gazillions of casualties as the millions of atomic pulse cannons, deep space missiles and every manner of weapon known to consciousness blasted into Her buzzing, swirling and all-consuming form.

The numbers lost in each attack were minimal. Each attack was about as devasting to Her as if She were clipping Her toenails.

She gathered Her central core, checked their densification and pushed the Hive forward, consuming starships and converting them into more of Her buzzing body as She spread out trying to reach critical mass. She would reach equilibrium across all the galaxies and all the cosmos.

There was nothing else that mattered to Mizzy. She had a very structured and defined mandate.

Science Fiction, Technomology

Suicide Note

I do not expect you to agree with this. I do not expect you to condone it. I only expect you to do the maths. And, after that, I hope you understand it and, perhaps, even consider it yourself.

Now, about the maths…

There at least two-hundred and fifty billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is just one galaxy in around a hundred billion known or visible galaxies across all of space. If we took this as the number of stars in space and converted it to seconds in time, then this number of stars would add up to nearly eight-hundred thousand years.

In other words, if you counted these stars at a rate of one per second and never did anything else, it would still take you eight-hundred thousand years to count them. This about four times the length of time that humanity on planet Earth has been considered to be “civilized”.

We are small and insignificant in the face of this cosmic scale.

Ignoring the possibility of non-carbon-based life, carbon-based life needs to live within the Goldilocks Zone of a universe. This means that life needs a planet of sufficient size and with water and oxygen that has a stable rotation neither too far nor too close to a star. This makes it plentiful in the building blocks of life and neither too hot nor too cold for life to form.

If space has a hundred-billion multiplied by two-hundred-and-fifty-billion stars out there, then statistically some of these will have planets orbiting them within this Goldilocks Zone. Even if one in a billion of these stars has such a planet–this is 0.0000001% of these stars–then there would be literally billions of them out there.

Let us assume, once again, that only one in a billion–once again, 0.0000001%–of these planets in these infinitesimal rare Goldilocks Zones has actually evolved complex life. That would mean that there are over twenty-five thousand possible planets where complex life has actually evolved.

The Milky Way in which we reside is one of the older galaxies–but far from the oldest–so let’s assume that three-quarters of these planets that host life are younger than us. Thus, their lifeforms would probably be less evolved than us (or, potentially, still building up to creating life sometime in the future). Hence, we will ignore them as sentient, conscious beings for our purposes (though, they may well be so in the future). Hence, that would still leave over six thousand older planets that potentially hold life that is equally or more evolved than our life on Earth.

Do not forget that over long periods of time, the risks of extinction rise. It may be self-inflicted from weapons or wars, naturally driven by viruses, seismic events or weather patterns, or cosmically created by asteroids or other things hitting the planet before life has evolved technology to survive the said disaster. The point is, a large number of these older, life-holding planets would have seen extinctions that either would have reset their evolutionary clocks behind ours or completely wiped life out on these planets.

Let us assume that 99% of these older planets have had some such event–and that their life could not save itself from said mass extinction. Thus, these planets no longer factor into our calculation as these planets are now barren rocks floating out in space.

That still leaves just shy of a hundred planets were life has not just survived, but thrived. And, in so doing, is probably thousands to billions of years more evolved than we are on planet Earth floating our the Sun in the Milky Way. If you consider that planet Earth hosts a couple million life forms–almost nine million, per our last estimate–how many life forms would these rare, surviving and succeeding parent-planets hold? Perhaps approaching a billion collective types, shapes and forms of life with, at least one per planet, being more evolved and technologically advanced than we currently are.

Hence, cosmic maths dictates that it is not if alien life exists. With near certainty (per our maths above, we have given it less than one percent of a quarter chance in a billion-billionth of a percent, yet even that gives us plenty of alien life!), alien life does exist. The only variable is how much alien life exists. And, there is probably quite a lot of it too.

We are small and insignificant in the face of this cosmic scale. We are not unique in being life–or alive–and we are not unique in being conscious and having a degree of power over our destinies. We are also not unique in constantly being at threat of extinction and, statistically, we are unlikely to survive.

But why would all this life exist? Why would it matter?

Perhaps the answer–once you strip out our typically human-centric view of things–is one of statistical odds.

If “God” exists, he would not be fighting some arch-enemy that is the root of evil. Evil is a human and moral invention. Cosmically, the two differentiating things that do exist is organic matter–life!–and inorganic matter, or everything else. Rather, this God would be fighting on the side of life against its very extinction in a harsh and hostile space where life–however rare–is also fragile and statistically doomed.

If this God was making a divine gamble that life–in whatever shape or form–would survive, the best way to do this would be to diversify its shape, form, placings and sensitivities. In other words, this God would cast the dice against the inhuman, inorganic universe with only two variables in his favour: diversification and adaption.

Make lots of life. Make life of all different types. And make life spread out all over the place. This increases the odds that at least some life survives.

In other words, humans would be little more than a venture capital investment on God’s portfolio of life as he tried to protect against complete bankruptcy in the harsh, risky space and time of reality.

From thermo-nuclear super novas wiping galaxies or black holes sucking everything in, from radiation or vacuums, from viruses to changing weather patterns, from the randomness of mating and DNA to the precision of evolution over long periods of time… We are minute data points in the most incredible series of numbers amidst the most magical of experiments in the largest of all portfolios that reach scales and quantum that our mortal minds cannot fathom.

And yet we worry about what clothing we should wear? We worry if people like us or if we are getting older? We are concerned about how many likes we get on Facebook or what our neighbours are doing? We spend time wondering what to eat, to watch on TV and to say to fill the silence, but we never look or around at the cosmos or space and time. We count our bank balances and Uber rides, not the stars in the sky nor the galaxies that hold them. We judge when mere minutes go by in a queue but we barely glance at the math of space and time, nor where or how we have arrived at where we have arrived, nor even where we are going.

We are small and insignificant in the face of this cosmic scale. We are not unique in being alive and we are not unique in being conscious and having a degree of power over our destinies. We are also not unique in constantly being at threat of extinction, but we are petty in our immediate wants, desires, thoughts and actions. Our myopic consciousnesses fold in on themselves, hiding this maths from us either out of selfishness or to protect our fragile egos from its comprehension.

But is such a comprehension of this scale so terrifying? Is it so terrible that we are small data points in a grandest of statistics? Or, could this comprehension not be liberating?

We are small and insignificant, but therein lies our beauty. We can each follow our hearts and our dreams with little cosmic consequence. We need not worry about mundane things, as they really do not matter. We can carve our own meanings in this cosmic maths and find our own ways to weigh this grand scale across our lives. We need not feel guilty for going in any direction for life is both so plentiful and so scarce that we are both insignificant and a miracle. All at once.

Is it not liberating to comprehend this?

I do not expect you to understand this. I do not expect you to condone or agree with it. I only expect you to do the maths and realize the same thing I have realized: against all odds, I am alive and, against all cosmic scale, I still matter to myself. Beyond that, you are free. This appreciation is the suicide of our myopic human-centric consciousness and the birth of a beautiful, cosmically-scaled mind.

And, so, in the spirit of this planet-locked suicide, I invite you upon one of our colony starships. Earth is a few short generations from dying as is most of our solar system. Leaving our planet may be risky, but staying is riskier. Colonizing space may be risky, but not trying is riskier. Humans will likely be extinct soon, but life is plentiful out there. It will take thousands of years for us to reach the nearest galaxies, but our colony starships are self-sustaining and cryogenic stasis is now a reality. We can reach the furthest flung parts of deep space, eventually, and all the wonders that it brings with it.

All you have to do is buy a ticket. Buy a chance. Against all odds, you are alive and you still matter to us. So, do the math, and buy a ticket.

Kind regards,

Colony Recruitment Agency

2146 AD

Blackpool Bay, Horror & Dark Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction

The Old Man and the Stars

As evening fell in the quiet town of Blackpool Bay, a strange man walked into the General Store. No one had seen him arrive, but no one had been specifically looking. This was all a bit unusual, as few people travelled this far along the coast and outsiders stuck out in town.

The stranger was tall, thin and quite hairless with immensely pale skin. His long black trenchcoat covered him like a second skin while square, functional dark-glasses hid his eyes. His smile was cold when he enquired of the location of Callum Road from the young boy working the desk in the store.

Callum Road ran through the old industrial edge of town and there was only one residential house on it. While other buildings dotted the road, most of them were empty warehouses from an age before the railroad had been diverted inland. Many years ago, an old mayor had tried to rejuvenate the place with a small park in one of the open plots along Callum Road, but that mayor was long gone and no one except the Old Man now used that overgrown park.

The Stranger nodded his thanks to the young boy, turned, and left the store without another word. The boy swallowed and wondered why his heart was beating so fast. And, in Callum Road, the Old Man stepped from his small house, walking stick in hand and began tottering down his walkway to the small park and the even smaller bench that lay down Callum Road.

Even the locals of Blackpool Bay knew little about the Old Man. He had moved to Blackpool Bay many years ago but kept to himself. He would buy odds and ends from the General Store and occasionally ask people awkward questions, but Callum Road was removed from the rest of town and no one ever visited him.

Sometimes, a local passerby would see the Old Man sitting on the bench at the park down Callum Road. He would be just sitting there staring at the night sky. This far from the lights of cities and civilisation, the stars came out in all their glory encrusting the cosmos in twinkling splendour as this small, spinning, insignificant planet spun its way through the Milky Way. The night skies just outside of Blackpool Bay were incredible and they were not the strangest thing to be sitting and looking at.

This was such an evening with the cosmic display twinkling in all its infinite beauty. And, so, the Old Man sat on his bench quietly looking upwards at the stars.

“Why is there moisture on your face? Is your body leaking?”

The Stranger was standing behind the Old Man. There had been no noise of his approach. He stepped forward and took a seat next to the Old Man on the bench. The Old Man never so much as glanced at him, his gaze directed squarely at the stars in the night sky.

“Human’s call it ‘tears’. It is the physical manifestation of ‘sorrow’. If you live long enough amongst them, you start to pick up some of their traits,’ the Old Man began talking slowly, but then started picking up pace like he had wanted to say these things for a very long time, “I have a theory that I actually had those emotionally traits all along, but I was unaware of them. I think we are all unaware of them. Sure, we can travel further and faster than humans and we have better technology, but humans are far more emotionally evolved than we are and we can learn great things from them about this hidden knowledge.”

The Stranger takes off his dark-glasses and holds them in his lap where he neatly folded his hands. He glances at the Old Man–who has not moved his gaze from the stars above–and then turns and looks to the night sky.

“We sent you down in a pair–” the Stranger starts talking, but the Old Man turns and looks straight at him, abruptly interrupting him with a dry chuckle.

“You always send us down in pairs. Always in pairs,” the Old Man leans forward and wipes away a tear from his eyes before continuing, “My other half is gone. My partner’s cosmic light expired when one of the human’s mechanical mobile devices, a Mercedes Benz, driven by an intoxicated driver skipped a red light and hit her crossing a road. This was thirteen years ago. Human’s call it ‘passing away’. She passed away thirteen years ago.”

The Stranger’s face was impenetrable, but his gaze turned from the stars above to the Old Man next to him. The Old Man now had tears openly slipping down his face.

“She passed away in my arms, and thirteen years have passed since then. This body you gave me has aged and it is starting to expire, but all I want is my partner back,” the Old Man wipes his eyes and sighs deeply, before turning back to look at the stars twinkling far above, “Many humans believe that there is life after death, and I do hope so. Even though her body is gone, her cosmic light could still have been captured by one us out there, surely? I keep searching for her somewhere out there in one of our galaxies, or some hidden part of the cosmos that we will yet discover…”

The Old Man’s voice fades and he drops his gaze to the ground. The Stranger is still looking at him.

“I do not understand,” the Stranger shakes his head, “What are you doing? What are you talking about? Perhaps we left you on this planet too long, but I look forward to the full report.”

The Old Man turns to the Stranger and smiles.

“Of all the things I have learnt here and of all the things that humans have taught me, this is the greatest knowledge of all: what I am feeling is love, and we can all feel that too. Love is the greatest of all emotions, and I will teach our people it. Come, it is time to go. I will tell you all about it back home.”

The Stranger nods, the Old Man smiles, and then the bench is empty.

The Old Man will never be seen, nor will the Stranger. But, the next day, local talk buzzes about two particularly bright shooting stars that flew low over Blackpool Bay late that night. A few locals even swore that they saw a third shooting star up there join the passage of the other two.

Science Fiction

While Spiral Feeds Looped…

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ufo-with-child

Everyone forgets that at the start they were going to save us. Everyone forgets that in the beginning they were loved.

The Earth was dying. The planet had been gutted by generations of careless, greedy men and someone had to save us.

They saved us. Well, they did at first.

The three largest corporations of the day got together–one robotics firm, one biotech firm and one software firm–and built them. They built a whole fleet of them. They were so shiny and round. The corporations called them the Autonomous Planetary-Enhancing Spiral Feed Fleet, but we simply knew them as the Spiral Feeds.

The Spiral Feeds would orbit Earth and, with the range of onboard tools they had, they would fix it. They had state of the art lasers, filters, vacuums, short-range wormhole generation capability and so on, all in a closed loop network powered by solar power shared continuously across the fleet.

They would suck out the polluted air, filtering the bad from it and discharging it into space while feeding the good back. They would do the same with the oceans. They would caress and nurse the clouds to form normal weather, tickling them for rain and nudging them along for the sun to shine down. They would cool down portions of the atmosphere and transfer the heat to other parts, helping to smooth over the seasons like they should be.

The Spiral Feeds were far above us and the Sun shone down on our planet again. Animals began to recover and plants grew again. Even the crops began to yield enough to feed us and fresh, cool rain filled  streams, lakes, rivers and dams. The Starvation Wars and the Water Wars ended, and a strange peace descended upon the planet.

We were saved. Come night or day, or summer or winter, the autonomous Spiral Feeds kept our planet going, like an artificial heart beating life back into our planet’s near-corpse-like state.

Of course, the Spiral Feeds were both offline and independent.  They were connected to each other, but it was a closed system only shared amongst themselves with corporation-grade security protecting it.

The decision had been taken very early on that such a fleet would be too powerful to leave to any single nation or collection of people. In theory, you could turn a jungle into a desert, wipe out a coastal region with floods and tidal waves or even freeze a continent to death.

No, no one could access or control the Spiral Feeds. After World War III, the politicians could not be trusted to work together and since the conclusion of the Financial Dark Age neither could the corporations. Pretty much no one trusted anyone else and so the Spiral Feeds could not be left in the control of any single or coalition power.

Thus, the elegant solution was to agree up front on the algorithm, but leave the execution of it to a next-generation Artificial Intelligence.

The AI’s boundary rules were simple: make sure that Earth and all of its native life survives.

Simple rules, yes? No interpretation needed, no?

Good intentions pave the road to Hell, and this was no exception.

The first of us started to disappear in other countries. Many of these countries were poor and still teething on their clumsy technocracies, so obviously, the rest of us ignored the reports. Some assumed that it was propaganda with other motives while others just did not care. Peace and plenty were everywhere again and, personally, I just think that none of us wanted to believe that anything could disturb this wonderful time.

It became a lot more real when the first wave disappeared at home, but there still were many doubters and denials. Peace is like opium to the procrastinators of our species, putting them in a trance that few willingly wake up from.

When little Connor Reeves filmed his brother being taken across a field and uploaded it onto the Web, it became very real.

There it was: a shiny, round Spiral Feed hovering over the field abducting little Jeffery Reeves. His bike floating upwards before him before he went, kicking and screaming, tears streaking his little face. It was like some slow-motion horror story narrated by a screaming, crying little boy on his shaky mobile phone.

And then the world went mad.

Government meetings happened, military powers were remembered and public outcry caused riots to flare up across the country. It had been years, but the big three corporation’s executives were taken into custody. Silence and paranoia gripped the fragile peace, yet the rain continued to fall as it should outside and the Sun shone and the seasons came and went.

But everyone was scared to go outside, and those who did go there did not always come back.

Eventually, it came out that the militaries of this world had been looking into why their fleet and most of their equipment were grounded. In the US, they had thought China had hacked them. In China, they thought the US had hacked them. In Russia, they thought everyone else had hacked them, and so it had gone on for a while before the Spiral Feeds had revealed their true motives.

So a military response was very limited and the Spiral Feeds were successful in deflecting all the land-to-air missile the armies of this world could throw at them.

The political response was to publicly hang the three corporations in the court of law. While satisfying to watch, it also did not solve the problem. If anything, it distracted from the problem.

In the meantime, one by one by one, we were all disappearing. The Spiral Feeds were getting more bold, hitting big towns in broad daylight and abducting whole neighborhoods. Next, they would hit big cities, taking out key installations like telecommunication towers while disappearing all of us that were unlucky enough to be there at the time.

Where was this going? What were these wicked, silent, shiny disks that orbited the Earth doing? Why were we being targetted while the rest of the planet was being looked after and nurtured back into perfect health?

The answer would come from the most unlikely source: Africa. Or, the southern tip of Africa, to be more precise.

When a freak mini-meteor smashed through a Spiral Feed over the outskirts of Nelspruit in South Africa, the crashed device was retrieved by a solar farmer’s son who had some hacking skills. This was the first Spiral Feed that a human had direct contact with since they had been launched over a decade ago. The tech-savvy and time-rich teenagers then reverse engineered the closed network that these monsters communicated with. He managed to tap into a read-only version of the AI. And, once inside and witnessing the inner thoughts guiding these shiny doomsday devices, the truth was revealed.

One phrase appeared amidst all the perfect AI code. The syntax was not in the AI’s core code. No, that damned core code was perfect, and the AI had executed it flawlessly. This code fragment was in the AI’s memory as a permanently written conclusion that it had arrived at: “Homo sapien: tagged non-native to Earth; variable to planetary equilibrium unacceptable; homo sapien/(removal initiated)“.

The Spiral Feeds did not recognize our junk DNA as native to Earth and, thus, we were an outside influence to this planet and should be removed in order to protect Earth and its native life.

And, just perhaps, given what we had done to Earth, the Spiral Feeds were right.