Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  Dazed from the complete lack of sound, the silence of death, I struggled to make sense of my surroundings. Empty shells floated around me, bumping into me every so often. The blackness was darker than the deepest recesses of the body's inner arteries. Darker than anything I had ever known.

  I swam forward, cringing as I pushed myself against the dead towards the end of this cavern, this grave. A jolt threw me off balance, and I tumbled into one of the dead. My cousin. I may not have been to see, but I could feel his outer wall. He was one of my cousins, lifeless.

  I gulped back a scream. Panic set in. This was a death trap. I wasn't sure why I was still alive, but I had to get out. It was the only way. I pushed forward once again, swimming towards what I thought was the end. Maybe I was hearing things, because I still wanted to have some kind of hope. But I swear I heard a rush of familiar sounds, shocked voices and urgent whispers.

  "Help me," I cried. "I'm still alive!"

  If anyone heard me, they didn't make any acknowledgment.

  "Help!" I tried again. Nothing.

  Bodies blocked my way, and I wouldn’t be able to make it to the end of this black hole. It didn’t matter anyway, because seconds later, a force that defied all natural movement lifted me away from my brethren. Light flooded down the cave.

  I wanted to cry in earnest, to scream at the horror before me. White bodies, all devoid of the life they had moments ago. It was that easy, that simple to die. And me, sitting in the middle of the red stream, still conscious, still here. For whatever reason, I was spared. But death would have been a blessing over seeing so many of my brethren lying still.

  The light was my only option. Using it, I was able to pick a path through the dead. When I reached the end of the cave, I almost sighed in relief from being out in the open. That's when I felt the first prick of dry air against my skin. It scratched at my surface, tearing at my thin walls. My body would implode from the pressure, I was sure of it.

  "This was a mistake," I said, gasping.

  I had borne witness to my brethren dying, just to die myself now. How could I possibly live for one more minute in this agony? Still, I pushed forward, right to the edge. This cavern dropped off into nothing. Whatever I was clinging to was the only reason I wasn't drifting into an abyss. That wasn't the most troubling fact. It was how vast this foreign, destitute place was. Everything that I had understood about the world was wrong. This kind of endlessness wasn't supposed to exist. Yet, here it was.

  I was overwhelmed by how small I was. Tiny, microscopic. The wind clawed at my body, making the dead on the surface of the cavern shiver. I could fight to stay alive in this world, but what would be the point? There was no end in sight, and just as easily as suffering a slow demise here, I could throw myself into oblivion and greet nothingness head on. What would I feel when the cognizant part of me fluttered into darkness?

  The wind abruptly stopped, and I faced a large, gray plain. I thought about jumping off, heading onto the bigger surface. But my hesitation was greeted by a pull, and I found myself back in the darkness of the cavern. The liquid around me had grown dense. I stayed, not willing to fight to get back to the surface. I was exhausted. How many aeons would pass before I died?

  I thought back on my life and felt disgusted by the fact that I was even considering death an option. My lineage would end with me. I had never found a host, never attached, never exchanged DNA. My purpose was draining from my body with each passing minute. This couldn't be the way I went, hopeless, alone, and floating in a sea of dead.

  If I was going to face death, I would do it bravely, fighting. I wouldn't give up and go out with a whimper.

  Just as I started to push towards the end of the blackness, a pop reverberated off the walls. Wet warmth flooded around me, and I tumbled forward. It was as if the universe had listened to my silent prayers. I was being rewarded for my resolve to live.

  Behind me, the cavern withdrew, leaving me, the bodies, and thick liquid in a steam. I took in a sharp breath. There was no way this could be real. All around me were options, choices, new hosts to meet. This was my chance at eternity. Blue and red hues danced around me; cells completely unaffected. Millions of brethren I left behind; just us few arriving here. This was a new land, with trillions of places to call home. A new beginning in a new stream.

  I pushed myself along, searching for a host. I wondered if I were dreaming or dead. Is such a place of perfection even possible? I drifted from cell to cell, still rapt in my own disbelief. It was too good to be just a dream, and too perfect to be death. I was alive.

  Now, what was it that I knew about exchanging DNA? Without the right host, I would be rejected. Rejection meant alerting the immune system, waving red flags that might as well scream what I was; an intruder, an invader. My body was perfectly designed to fit inside one specific cell. Together, we would bring about a whole new era.

  The sweetness of blood around me pulled me forward. Not polluted by the thousands of other bodies in the metropolis. If I listened hard enough, I could hear each pump of the heart. I flowed along with it.

  Beat.

  Beat.

  This would be the greatest new land anyone ever conquered. Clean and untainted. I scanned the horizon. No hosts in sight.

  Beat.

  There. The perfect fit for my body, the lock to my key. I floated towards it, hesitant. Counting the number of things that could go wrong, I almost entered into another panic. Slowly, I eased myself around to the port. I forced my core to steady, holding myself in concentration. Careful. I pushed myself forward.

  The walls of my body shook as I collided with the cell.

  One second. Two seconds. Nothing happened.

  The world went quiet. I could no longer hear the steady rhythm of the heart or the whirl of the blood skimming across my surface. I couldn't even hear the low pulse from the arteries. The dead quiet kept me from moving.

  Three seconds.

  A thousand thoughts shot through my head. I ruined it. The cell was going to reject me. I triggered the immune system, and it's just waiting for the right moment to tear me apart. I had come so far only to fail at the one purpose I had in life. What if I had been the chosen one to survive the barren wasteland only to mess it all up now?

  Four seconds.

  The cell opened itself up, linking with me. I suppressed my own twinge of happiness; it wasn't over yet. I twisted my grip, forcing myself through the cell wall. I entered, no longer as my whole self, but as parts, DNA, and strands. I had heard my brethren speak about this in the past, what it feels like to be broken into pieces. Strangely, even though parts of me had spread in every direction, I was still aware of myself. Each piece latched onto the cell, changing the DNA, mutating the interior, and creating a safe haven for my offspring.

  Please don't do this. The host's voice rang in my head.

  "It's already done. This is my chance, my turn to succeed. You had your life," I told it.

  You don't have to do this. It pleaded.

  "Yes, I do." I tightened my parts into place, strengthening their resolve to take over. The host tried to cry out, warn the other cells, but I gripped tighter, and the cry was stifled. "This is the way it was meant to be, the way it will always be."

  The cell shuddered and exhaled, its DNA fully infused with mine. No longer able, or willing, to resist me. I breathed a long sigh of relief as the replications started. Working each strand of DNA, I replicated myself, a complete copy that I affixed to another casing. I shoved my way back into the stream. Even though the space inside my host was safe, my spawn would need guidance into the world. I would have to point them in the right direction so they would understand the future.

  Of course, they would already come out as smart as me, knowing what I knew. Replication was like that. I learned from my ancestors simply because they already had the knowledge. Having never experienced a takeover myself, I didn't fully understand it until now. It felt good. As I glanced back at the cell I had left, I felt pride shoot
through me. I had done this. I had done what we were made to do, and I had crossed a dry landscape to get here. Something my brethren hadn't accomplished.

  The surface of the cell rippled. "Come on," I whispered. The ripples turned into waves, and the first spawn was encased in a protective coating. It floated past me. The surface bubbled again and another came out, then another.

  My joy couldn't be contained any longer. I drifted amongst my offspring, glancing between them, taken by their glory. They continued on, in search of their own hosts. And unlike the overpopulated metropolis, there were plenty of hosts. I watched two of my offspring swim until they were so far down the stream I couldn't see them anymore. They must have been at least two inches away.

  They grew up so fast.

  To my left, there was a bang, and the stream around me vibrated. I whirled around and came face to face with a long wormlike tube, coiling back on itself with one of my offspring in its teeth.

  "No!" I cried out. This couldn't be happening. There's no reason for the immune system to be triggered so soon.

  Behind me, there was another crash. All around me, these coils reached out, striking at my spawn, trying to kill all of us. They snarled as they snapped. As soon as they caught one of my children in their grip, they would laugh.

  "We're stronger than this." I gritted my teeth.

  Why hadn't this happened in the old world? Then I remembered, the body that held us was weakened. We slowly drained it, and eventually the immune system couldn't handle it anymore. It broke.

  This vast new land had suddenly become a layer in the depths of Hell. Beautiful and open, but still operational and full of landmines. I dodged around a whipping stinger of the immune system and rushed back towards my cell. Was it still producing? Was it still there? I rounded a red blood cell and swallowed when I saw it.

  "No." My voice was small, desperate.

  The immune system had punctured its own cell, my host. It drifted down the side of the vein walls. Tubes coiled out to tear pieces away from the deflated, broken cell. How could they do this to me? To my future, to my name? Everything would have been perfect, if only­–

  I swallowed and drifted into the current. What was the point of surviving all of this if I was going to watch my offspring die? If I was going to hear their screams before their life ended? It wasn't worth it. This wasn't what I wanted for my children. The immune system had sucked on my spawn like a snack, unblinking and unwavering in their desire to eradicate my kind. How could you hate something so much to take such pleasure in its destruction? It disgusted me. Their smug looks, their smacking jaws, the way they lapped us up like we were mere water.

  I was about to give up when movement caught my eye. I turned towards it and realized it was my offspring, the two who had drifted down the blood stream. In their wake were thousands of my grandchildren. My children smiled at me, thanking me for the life I had given them. I nodded, and they nodded back.

  We were in this together. This fight had never been mine. It was the fight of the thousands who died before me. It was the fight of all those who would come after I was gone. Finding hosts was the only way we knew how to live. As we traveled down the stream, a few of us drifted into new cells, new locks to our keys.

  When the immune system triggered again, it was already too late. In our rise, we had replicated too many, too fast. Many of us would die and get sucked into the jaws of death, but we knew we would live on. We died gallantly knowing that this would not be the last of our kind. Our sacrifices would not be in vain as long as we were able to live, spread, and survive.

  Dead Planet Scrolls

  Timothy Hurley

  Ekahau stabbed at the communicator button on his rover’s dashboard. “Nomad to Transport-44. Strange. I picked up narrow band EMWs. I’m on my way to check.” He set down the scanner and thought: Narrow band electromagnetic waves? From a cave in an unpopulated canyon? On a dead planet?

  He stared hard through his visor into the rust-colored Martian hills. The rover grumbled and jumped forward; he pointed it at the cave.

  “Transport-44 here. Hustle. I’m orbiting at position 96 between Deimos and Phobos. Orbit decay is only an hour and change away, and I need to have this ship on the surface in three hours.”

  Ekahau looked at his wrist computer and acknowledged Roberta’s transmission. “Decay time is locked in on my dig,” he said. He noticed her tone and read it as a lack of confidence. “Rob, there isn’t a mine or dome anywhere near this canyon system. If there’s something up there that could threaten the landing, I need to know before I authorize orbit decay.”

  “Just saying. Don’t waste time chasing butterflies. I don’t want to commit and miss my window.” She paused and added, “I don’t want to crash-land this ship on Plana Hubrice. Don’t screw this up, Ek.”

  “Hey, Warp Waste, I didn’t screw that up. I was cleared.” Ekahau reacted whenever he sensed a reference to the crash of Transport-37 on the canyon wall at Melas Chasma in the Valles Marineris system. He was the ground control engineer for that landing, but the review board exonerated him. Formally, it was listed as a computer error. Nevertheless, some transport pilots were nervous about working with him.

  Over four thousand colonists and miners died in that crash. The image of strewn bodies on the canyon wall continued to haunt his nights three years later. Melas Mine was delayed twenty-two months as a result. It proved to be a costly error, and VANAG executives weren’t happy—regardless of where the fault lie.

  “My deploy record is spotless,” Ekahau said. He never got over the need to point that out. He took a deep breath and stifled the expletive ready to burst from him. “Don’t worry. I got my head screwed on. It’s a twenty minute detour.”

  While Nomad’s treads churned up dirty sand on the hillside, Ekahau listened to the computer transmit results of the atmosphere scan. “Upload confirms: 95.3% carbon dioxide, negligible oxygen, atmospheric pressure 987 pascals.”

  The colonists would need the dome and the carbon dioxide crackers right away. They always did. Everyone everywhere needed crackers and the chlorominium laterite that fueled them. Crackers broke down the poisonous carbon dioxide and released oxygen. Primitive crackers that combined the carbon with nitrogen were in use in the population centers on Earth as early as the twenty-third century. Cracking was an energy-intensive process, and Mars was the current best source for laterite ore. The new process using hydrogen yielded energy-generating methane as the byproduct instead of toxic cyanide.

  The drone of Nomad’s machinery lulled Ekahau. His mind drifted to his family. According to legend, Ekahau’s clan in Chiapas had been obsessed with Mars. He wasn’t the first astronaut among his kinfolk. But he was the first Mayan on Mars. As the rover ground upward, he looked at the wide dirt plain below. He wondered what his great-great grandfather Chaac would think of him. Ekahau wore Chaac’s medal on a cord during landing operations. It was the decoration his forebear had won in the Anti-Fracking Insurgency in South America. People told Ekahau the profile etched into the bronze medallion resembled him, with his brown, sloping forehead, and prominent nose and lips.

  Roberta was the only daughter of a Lithuanian diplomat. Brunette, science-savvy, good-looking. They were the landing team the year before for the dome deployment on the other side of the planet. Too young for him, she nevertheless aroused more than his professional admiration. He halted his advances when Roberta became uneasy during their post-landing leave on Deimos. Awkward silence marred dinner, and following coffee, Roberta disappeared to her quarters. After their weekend together, she told him she wanted to keep their relationship all business. He said he understood, but silently he wanted to believe it was the twenty-year age difference—not his landing reputation.

  This landing would trigger the sprint to get ore shipments from Hubrice Mine to Earth ahead of schedule. Ekahau never tired of watching the dome deploy. If the ground team did get the dome up in fewer than eighteen days, there was money in it for all of them.


  Uncharacteristic small talk from Roberta interrupted his reverie. “You’ve been with the Mars Now project since Transport-32, haven’t you?” He couldn’t tell if she was trying to make amends for the insult or telling him to move his butt.

  Ekahau decided to view Roberta’s comment as a peace-making gesture. “Yeah, I helped start Mars Now. And I was with VAN-Luna before that.” He saw the cave’s entrance less than a kilometer ahead. “That was before the merger.” He meant the takeover that created the super corporation, Virgin-Anaconda-NASA-Apple-Google. The maneuver had been controversial, but it ensured Ekahau of assignment to Mars. And it committed Mars to the largest ore extraction operation in solar system history.

  The bonus from this project would let Ekahau retire with enough credits to have a nice place on Luna, or maybe Phobos. Most employees went back to Earth, but Earth had become an over-populated planet awash in political and environmental turmoil. Better to stay in a dome, Ekahau thought. People in a dome knew they had to get along—or risk eco-collapse.

  Ekahau checked his digital timer and forced his thoughts to return to Roberta and the deployment. He knew the mine would produce. The geo-surveys showed large veins of ore, and Hubrice was the first big scale venture in a new canyon system in the last ten years. But Ekahau didn’t spend credits that weren’t in his account. Early mining operations around Cydonia Mensae had thrown so much red soil into the atmosphere that VANAG shut down extraction for two Martian years while the dust hurricane dissipated. Riots erupted on Earth when ore shipments fell below quota. Mortality rose. In the fringe lands beyond the crackers, only plants and workers in space suits tolerated the carbon dioxide levels. VANAG wouldn’t accept more delays. Two thirds of the ore had been stripped from the Valles Marineris system canyons. The next step for VANAG was to send robots to Venus and Jupiter. By the time those projects flew, Ekahau would be an old man in a dome, playing cards and chasing younger women.