Xauri’EL Zwaan is a mendicant artist in search of meaning, fame and fortune, or pie (where available). Zie lives and writes in a little hobbit hole in Saskatoon, Canada on Treaty 6 territory with zir life partner and two very lazy cats.
***
There was a strange plant in Mrs. Edgerington’s garden.
The plant looked like a tiny clamshell sprouting up out of the ground. It had a smooth surface, glistened with a dull silver sheen, and ended in a sharp knife-like ridge. It didn’t look like anything she had ever seen before. In fact, it hardly looked like a plant at all, though it certainly grew like one. Mrs. Edgerington had her grandson look on the internet to see what it was, but he couldn’t find anything matching the description. He told her she should dig it up and burn it, but Mrs. Edgerington liked weird plants, and she decided to let it grow and see what happened.
The plant slowly got bigger and bigger over the next few months. Neither water nor lack of water affected its rate of growth, nor did shade or sun. It eventually grew to about a foot in height and half a foot in width. Every day, Mrs. Edgerington took a photo of it on her phone and uploaded it to Facebook. She got lots of comments calling it weird and unsettling, and many more telling her to burn it. She was also forwarded news articles from all over the world about other people who had found similar plants. Scientists were baffled; they seemed unrelated to any species ever before seen. Most people who found them were destroying them. There was just something unnerving about them. But the scientists said there were probably more growing in the wild places, and that they probably couldn’t be controlled without a massive worldwide extermination campaign, which nobody seemed willing to fund.
One day, as Mrs. Edgerington sat on her front porch having her morning tea, the halves of the clamshell split open, bending over toward the ground. Inside was a perfect silver sphere, about four inches in diameter. As she watched with rapt attention and growing unease, the sphere began to quiver, then to pop up and down. After a few seconds, it popped right out of the clamshell and rolled off toward the woods that her property backed onto. She tried to follow it, but she was no spring chicken anymore, and it quickly rolled off out of sight.
When Mrs. Edgerington dug up her garden a few months later, she found that the plant had totally filled the earth with silvery roots that cut her hands if she even so much as touched them. She had to get her grandson to clear them out, wearing the heaviest work gloves he could find.
*
Grayden Reilley was riding his bike along a path in the forest when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a glint, like light reflecting off metal. He stopped, left his bike tipped over on the path, and walked toward the flickering light.
What he saw took his breath away. Sitting in a pile, nestled into a hollow full of autumn leaves in a clearing between the trees, were a bunch of little shiny metal balls, dozens of them. That was weird enough, but the really strange part was that they were all moving, pushing each other up and then falling down again, climbing each other as if they were sticky or magnetic, forming a seething, seemingly organic mass. As Grayden watched, some of the balls seemed to come apart, splitting into five perfect meridians like the sections of an orange and then unfolding. Inside each was a dark mass of boils and nodules to which the thin metallic sections attached. Each section split and split again, many times over, fanning out into petals lined with smaller petals, and on and on until they became a fuzz too fine to even see. They looked kind of like starfish. But only kind of.
Some of the things started to flop and flex, then pushed themselves up on fuzzy arms. The conical masses in the centers of them began to stretch and move, pointing this way and that, seeming almost to taste the air. Then they focused on Grayden, and the mass of fruiting bodies began, slowly but definitely, to lurch toward him. He turned and ran back to the path, grabbed his bike, jumped on it, and cycled away as fast as he could.
When he told his parents later, they didn’t believe him; he had always had an active imagination, but felt that this was incredibly unfair and sulked in his room for days. He also told some of the kids at school; they called him a liar and challenged him to prove it. When he took them to the place where he had found the balls that had turned into weird starfish things, they were all gone, although the ground and leaves were cut up where they had formed their horrid mass. Ethan Crane punched him in the gut and called him a lying sack of shit, and the other kids abandoned him.
It wasn’t until he went on the internet to try and find out what he had seen that he realized he wasn’t the only one. Some others had even posted pictures. He wished he had thought to take one; if he’d only had proof, he would have been the most popular kid in school.
*
Artie Winterheimer’s ham radio was making weird sounds.
It had started with just a few clicks and whistles and moans, but quickly accelerated into a cacophony of complicated noise. It was on every frequency and continued constantly, washing out the faint signals of the other amateur radio enthusiasts he communicated with on a regular basis. It sounded almost like music, though a strange and alien music, unlike anything Artie had ever heard, even the bizarre robot noises the kids liked to listen to these days.
Since retirement, ham radio had been Artie’s sole passion, and aside from a few strange people like Delbert Ness the computer nut, his only real friends were the other ham radio people he knew around the world. He missed them sorely, but the noise had a fascination all its own, and Artie soon became obsessed with it. He started listening to it for hours on end, entranced by its endless variety and strangeness.
Artie soon developed the theory that it might be a code. He had been a radio operator in his time with the navy and knew a lot about codes, but this was stranger and way more complicated than anything he had ever encountered as a signalman. He had Delbert over a few times, and Delbert thought his theory had merit, but the sounds unnerved him and he didn’t want to come over to listen to them much. Artie didn’t mind. He could have used some help in his project, but he and Delbert weren’t really friends anyway, just fellow fringe people driven together by the subtle ostracism of small-town conformity; and anyway, he trusted his own skills and knowledge more than that of newfangled computer chips. He had begun trying to analyze the code, noting the patterns and working out what kind of cypher it might be. More and more, he was becoming convinced that it was a language, probably a foreign one. Maybe even more foreign than anyone on Earth knew.
*
Jack Boland’s toaster was missing.
He had searched high and low, cursing up a blue streak, through every cupboard in the kitchen, then through the attic and the garage as well, tossing things haphazardly onto the floor as he went. Jack had trouble remembering things sometimes, but he was sure he would have remembered putting his toaster anywhere other than where it was supposed to be. Sneaking suspicions began to form in his mind, as often they did. He went around to Mrs. Edgerington’s next door and, when the sweet old lady answered his angry knocking, he accused her of stealing it. She was always looking at him, that woman, always weighing and measuring, her glares reminding him of the time he had done in prison and the fact that everyone in town knew about it. She very calmly and patiently denied having seen it, multiple times as he grew more and more hostile and swore louder and louder, threatened to involve the police, threatened to bring his buddies from the malt plant around and search her house for it himself. When he finally stormed off, she called after him, asking pleasantly that if he were to see her lawn mower, would he let her know? Apparently it was missing too.
Jack took his basset hound Donny for a walk in the woods to clear his head. He wasn’t sure why he had lit into the old bird like that. After all, she was just a harmless busybody, and what were the odds that she had really stolen his toaster? She just rubbed him the wrong way, and sometimes he got these moods. Like the time he had hit his ex-wife, and she had pressed charges and taken their son away. Thank God he hadn’t hit Mrs. Edgerington. That kind of trouble was the last thing he needed, with the bosses at the malt plant already on his ass for goldbricking. He walked faster and faster, past the spot where, unbeknownst to him, Grayden had seen the weird starfish things a few weeks ago, then deeper. As he neared the ravine, Donny started to baulk. He pulled on the leash, trying to head Jack away, and whined pathetically, then howled. When Jack began to see glints of metal through the trees, he left the frightened dog behind, barking frantically as he neared the edge.
Rising from the middle of the ravine was a peculiar structure. It was a sort of derrick made of a random hotch-potch of metal struts, and welded to it and each other were all kinds of machines. There were power saws and cordless drills, laptop computers and gaming consoles, parts of washing machines and car engines. There were starfish-like things with fuzzy-tipped arms and warty conical masses sprouting from their center swarming all over it. Many of them carried other bits of the technological paraphernalia of everyday life, and were carefully maneuvering and placing them in the mass, welding them in place somehow with their bushy hands. Jack recognized Mrs. Edgerington’s lawn mower, as well as Dan McGillicuddy’s beer fridge and Art Cline’s TV. Finally, perched on a little pylon near the top, he saw the unmistakable 50s-style chrome body of his toaster.
Anger easily overcame caution, and he shouted, “Hey, you fuckin’ ding-dongs! What the fuck are you doin’ with my toaster?” The starfish things didn’t respond in any way, just went about their business.
Now Jack Boland might not be smart, and he might not be blessed with a surplus of self-restraint, but he knew an unfair fight when he saw it. He went back to where Donny was howling as if in agony, took up his leash, and went home. He took a Pabst out of his fridge, cracked it open, and drank half of it down in a single swallow. Then he nursed his beer for a while, and two more followed. He sat for several pregnant minutes, then went into his bedroom and got his shotgun.
He didn’t take Donny this time, although the poor guy was frantic when he saw Jack getting ready to leave. No sense exposing the one thing in the world that still truly loved him to danger. He hiked into the woods, grumbling curses every step of the way, until he once again saw the tower of mish-mash appliances rising from the ravine. He leveled his loaded gun, and called out in a slightly slurred voice, “You little bastards better give me back my toaster, or there’s gonna be trouble!” When no response was forthcoming, he aimed carefully at one of the silvery-metallic starfish and firmly squeezed the trigger. The starfish blew apart with a satisfying squelch. Before he had time to fire a second shot, however, one of the creatures near the top of the mass of metal slithered quickly inside. From one of the pylons that stuck from the top, a bluish bolt of electricity lanced out, hitting Jack Boland square in the chest, blowing him right out of his shoes and several feet back into the forest.
When he came to again, he found that his shotgun was missing. He staggered to the edge of the ravine, and saw one of the five-armed things carefully fitting his gun into the chaotic mass.
Jack had always had a hard time knowing when he was beat, but this time it was clear as day. He slunk away back to his house and spent the rest of the evening drinking and petting his dog. The next afternoon, he showed up at Mrs. Edgerington’s doorstep with flowers and an apology.
*
Mrs. Edgerington watched the stories on the news every night. Grayden Reilley followed developments avidly on Snapchat and TikTok. Jack Boland and his buddies gathered nervously in the evening at the U-Turn Bar & Grill to swap rumors. Things like the tower that Jack had seen in the ravine were going up everywhere—all over the world, on a grid at points regularly spaced 42.6 miles apart to the inch. Where there was human habitation, they went up quickly, aggregated from various mechanical and electronic detritus, but they were being built far away from civilization as well; the starfish seemed to be mining and smelting metals and forming them into the necessary parts if need be. Everyone in town knew by now about the weird plants, about the starfish things, about the tower and what had happened to Jack when he had tried to defy its makers. People in other towns and cities had tried taking the towers down—whole gangs of them, sometimes. The towers and the things building them repulsed every attempt. Even destroying the starfish things was no good; the pieces just budded into new, smaller starfish that took up right where their parents had left off.
Nobody in town would have known what a Von Neumann machine was, except maybe Delbert Ness, but the experts on the news programs carefully explained: something had come to Earth from the stars, a tiny seed that had sprouted into plants like the ones Mrs. Edgerington had been reluctant to destroy. The plants had fruited into the balls, and the balls had hatched into the starfish, and the starfish were building something. Nobody knew what or why, but a few were willing to speculate. Decades ago, the idea had been floated that Von Neumann machines could be dispersed throughout the galaxy to prepare other worlds for colonization by space-faring humans. Apparently, someone else had beaten them to the punch.
The Army had been trying to clear out the towers, bombing them to smithereens. But as soon as they were off to destroy one tower, another went up. There were millions of them, and even large armies had limited capacity. Nobody ever came to try and destroy the tower in the ravine. A few particularly high-security sites were guarded to make sure the starfish didn’t come back, but eventually the game of whack-a-mole was mostly given up, and an anxious world settled in to wait and see what the things were for.
A couple of months later, each and every tower began to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. The scientists on TV said they were breaking it down from the very soil and rocks in the ground. The output quickly equaled the amount of CO2 released from all human industry and civilization, then exceeded it, and kept climbing. The scientists who had forwarded the theory that aliens had sent the Von Neumann machines to colonize the Earth now speculated that the towers’ purpose was to radically alter the climate, perhaps to make it more hospitable when the alien colonists finally arrived.
*
It was Mrs. Edgerington who called the town meeting, not through any official channel but by posting on Facebook, in the local Buy & Sell and the PTA discussion group and the local union’s online forum; her grandson showed her how. Almost the whole town showed up in the end, crowding into the local school gymnasium, which had been provided for their use at short notice and without even the usual rental fee. At first, the Mayor tried to take charge of the discussion; Mrs. Edgerington just listened politely to his pontificating, then got up and quietly began to speak.
“We need to do something about these starfish things.”
Once she finally openly addressed what had been on everyone’s minds, the dam broke. After she had made her case, that the government wasn’t doing anything about it, that they had to look after themselves if they were going to survive, others started speaking for and against. The Mayor was passionately opposed, and a lot of people thought it would be taking too much of a risk; what if the aliens decided to come to town and kill them all for interfering with their designs? There were shouting matches, but by the time the meeting had been in full swing for a couple of hours, the people who were against intervening had mostly been shut down and left in a huff.
Then, they started debating what exactly to do. Should they try to kill the aliens? That just didn’t seem to work. What if they brought in a bulldozer from the quarry and knocked the thing down? The aliens would only build it again, and anyway, that wouldn’t solve the problem; there would still be millions left. Maybe try to get together with other towns, other cities, and destroy all of them? How could they, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, possibly accomplish what all the governments of the world could not? It wasn’t until the options seemed to have been exhausted and people were getting frustrated and angry that shy, friendless Artie Winterheimer raised a hand and said hesitantly, “Why don’t we try talking to them?”
*
Jack Boland backed his truck through the woods, more careful than he almost ever was, stone sober and with murder in his eyes. Mrs. Edgerington rode with him in the cab. A whole crowd of people followed, union guys from the malt plant and the quarry, housewives and teenagers and old folks, school teachers and the people who owned the businesses on Main Street, even a few of the Town Council. Strapped down to the truck bed was Artie’s ham radio, and beside it, one of Delbert’s high-grade laptops, both powered by a car battery Grayden Reilley’s dad had found in his garage. Delbert had dug up a document in some file server on the dark web, a half-complete report by linguists at the NSA trying to translate the aliens’ radio-wave language. He had put it together with Artie’s attempts at cracking the code and some open-source translation software and wrote a program that could maybe possibly translate between alienese and English. It was their only shot.
When they got to the ravine, everyone stood hushed before the tower, many of them seeing it and its alien manufacturers for the first time. They knew they were in the presence of something incredible—life from another planet. All the sci-fi movies had never prepared anyone for it. They had portrayed aliens who were hostile to humanity, who tried to exterminate us, and aliens who wanted to help, to get us to join their galactic federation, but most people didn’t quite know how to handle aliens who were simply indifferent, who went about their business on Earth without even acknowledging the human species’ existence.
Finally, Mrs. Edgerington hobbled up to the computer and spoke into its microphone, “You have to stop.”
Immediately, the movement of the starfish things that clustered on the tower halted. There was a pause, and then the computer began to speak in a harsh synthesized squawk.
“SIGNAL ACKNOWLEDGED. SOURCE UNIDENTIFIED. SUPPLY DESIGNATION CODE.”
Artie leaned toward his radio and said, “This is not one of you. This is the humans you’re speaking to. The inhabitants of the planet.”
“ERROR. NO SENTIENT INHABITANTS DETECTED ON PLANET.”
Jack Boland shouted, more at the tower than at their makeshift communication equipment, “Whaddya mean, no habitants? You took our tools and stuff to make your damn tower! You shitheads know damn well we’re here!”
“MINIMAL TECHNOLOGY DETECTED. NO ANTIMATTER POWER INFRASTRUCTURE, NO INTERSTELLAR CAPABILITY, NO NANOTECHNOLOGY MANUFACTURING. NO CIVILIZATION. NO SENTIENT INHABITANTS DETECTED.”
“You can’t mean that,” Artie protested. “Just because we don’t have any of that stuff, we’re not people? I mean, we have rights!”
“ERROR. COMMUNICATION UNINTELLIGIBLE. NO THREAT TO THE PRECURSORS DETECTED. NO CIVILIZATION. COLONIZATION WILL CONTINUE UNIMPEDED.”
“So just like that, you’re gonna kill us all?” Jack yelled. “Change the damn climate until we can’t survive?”
“COLONIZATION IS IMPERATIVE. THE GROUND MUST BE PREPARED. THE PRECURSORS REQUIRE RESOURCES. EXPANSION MUST CONTINUE. A REMNANT MAY SURVIVE. THEY WILL ADAPT TO THE NEEDS OF THE PRECURSORS.”
“I don’t think that’s how it’s going to go.”
Grayden had stepped forward, a serious expression on his face. Some of the adults muttered that a mere boy shouldn’t interrupt his elders, but Grayden continued, resolute.
“We’ll adapt all right. The human species is good at adapting; I learned that in biology class. But we won’t adapt to the needs of your masters. We’ll adapt to be able to destroy them.”
“ERROR. NO THREAT TO THE PRECURSORS DETECTED. NO CIVILIZATION. MINIMAL TECHNOLOGY-USING ANIMALS. NO SENTIENT INHABITANTS.”
“You think we’re animals,” Mrs. Edgerington said softly, wonder and horror in her voice. “Beasts of burden. Not even people. Because we’re no threat.”
“You may think that now,” Grayden continued, “but just wait until your Precursors get here. Wait until we get hold of their technology. Humans adapt. We won’t just give up, let the Precursors make us into slaves. We’ll resist. We’ll make them pay for what they’ve done to us.”
“ANIMALS CANNOT UTILIZE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. ANIMALS ADAPT TO SERVE THE PRECURSORS. ANIMALS CAN EASILY BE DESTROYED IF THEY BECOME A THREAT.”
“You willing to bet your Precursors’ lives on that?” Jack snarled in a venomous tone. “We love technology, we’re always getting better at it. I’m pretty sure we can figure out your nano-whatever. And then we’re gonna bomb your asses into the stone age!”
“There are alien specimens in labs right now,” Delbert said. “We’re already starting to figure you out.”
“I learned about colonization in history class,” Grayden said defiantly. “It happened here too. The Europeans explored everywhere and took slaves, took land, took over governments, and tried to exterminate anyone who resisted. They had superior technology too; nobody could stop them. They thought they had the right. But in the end, the people they colonized took their technology and used it against them. They didn’t adapt to serve. They adapted to compete, to get stronger. And eventually, they fought back.”
“It’s true,” Delbert muttered. “They took my people as slaves, then they took our whole continent for themselves. We suffered for generations. But then, bit by bit, we took the master’s tools and made them our own. And then the Africans rose up and claimed their independence, and the Asians and Indians kicked the invaders out, and the Black slaves and Native Americans made them treat us as equals. There was a reckoning. In the end, we won, we took back what was ours. But the damage was done. We became what had destroyed us. We became just as bad.”
Mrs. Edgerington said, “We don’t want to be like that. We’re just starting to figure things out here on Earth. How to treat each other like people. It’s a lesson your Precursors could stand to learn. We don’t want to have to do to them what had to be done to us. We don’t want to have to become like them just to survive. But if we have to, we will.”
Artie said, “The Precursors must have been like us once. Just a bunch of low-tech animals. Then they developed the tools to be a ‘real civilization.’ And if they can do it, so can we. This right here is proof. We figured out your language, and we can figure out any technology the Precursors bring with them. And then there’ll be hell to pay.”
There was a long silence. Then the computer spoke again.
“ACKNOWLEDGED. POSSIBLE CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION DETECTED. POSSIBLE THREAT TO THE PRECURSORS DETECTED. THE HIVE MUST DELIBERATE. DO NOT ATTEMPT FURTHER COMMUNICATION.”
People kept trying to talk to the aliens, trying to reason with them, to threaten them, to cajole them. They were all ignored.
*
About a month later, the towers stopped releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Then, bit by bit, they were taken down. There was no explanation, no communication, no indication of why it was happening. Their parts were just melted down into slag, and the alien starfish things buried themselves in the ground and dissolved into a featureless mush. In the end, only one tower remained, protected from any interference by a massive pylon that shot devastating lightning bolts at any man-made object that came within a mile. And that tower was broadcasting a signal into space. When the NSA linguists finally finished translating the aliens’ language, they told the world what it was saying: “WARNING. CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION DETECTED. THREAT DETECTED. COLONIZATION ABORTED. AVOID THIS PLANET.”
There was endless speculation about why, after they had been able to do pretty much whatever they wanted with humans offering no impediment, they had abruptly decided that we were a threat. Most of the people in town kept quiet, and the few that talked about what happened on the internet were painted by the rest as liars and cranks. Nobody wanted the government coming around and asking questions. They just wanted to live their lives in peace.
A few months later, astronomers reported that the same kind of towers were starting to appear on Mars.
Copyright © 2023 by Xauri’EL Zwaan.