Read My Shorts

First Contact

First Contact

They came out of nowhere.

The asteroids we’d been expecting, the Clarke inspired SHIELD system having tracked the swarm of debris as it approached the Earth. It was the passengers that were the problem. Still reeling from the multiple surface impacts and human cost of their aftermath, the creatures caught the human race unprepared and vulnerable.

We picked up the fast approaching space debris as it passed Jupiter and hoped they would impact on one of its moons. Hope it seems is an easily dismantled construct, and the temple of 'fingers crossed' soon dissolved into a small puddle of disbelief and anger, that gave way to an ocean of panic that covered the world.

As the debris; a collection of rock, ice and agglomerated space rubbish swept through the asteroid belt without incident, the UN frantically pooled the technological knowledge of the world’s best scientists and limped belatedly into committee led action. Ceres and the other main planetoids failed to block the debris, the word ‘belt’ it seems is a misnomer for ‘open door’, and fate's multiple hammers sped toward us. In less doom laded times, we wouldn't complain too much of course as the belt was loose enough to let our own exploratory satellites go out the other way. However, we are where we are and the boot is now very much on the other foot.

The scientists, myself included, think the ‘swarm’ was originally a massive space rock that had come from far outside our system but which had impacted with something else at some point in its journey. The collision was probably with a piece of debris just big enough to shatter it, but not large enough to deflect it. I’m not sure we’ll ever learn the truth now, and that too is perhaps a moot point. Perhaps scientific digression is all that is left to me now as I attempt to leave something useful behind for any that might have use of it.

If it had been just one or two chunks of space rock we may have stood some chance, but as it was, all we had time and the resources to do was send as many missiles as we could and hope for the best. The largest pieces of debris were targeted to try and reduce the potential for another 'dinosaur killer'. We knew the Earth was going to get struck multiple times, but by reducing the size of some of the larger pieces, or deflecting them away if we were lucky, we hoped to reduce the potential death toll.

The Moon soaked up some of the impact as it always had in the past. New scars were added to the pockmarked shield, but this time the human race faced the uncertain future with the knowledge that the Earth would be forever changed.

We were lucky: at least to begin with. A few fragments of the convoy simply missed and provided a spectacular fly past. The largest of the fragments landed deep in the wilds of Canada, the trail of destruction following across into Alaska and then into Russia. The majority of the fragments punched into the landmass, but several large ones hit the sea and punched through the shallow waters into the thinner crust of the ocean floor.

If you vapourise enough water it rises into the atmosphere and forms clouds. With clouds come a decrease in temperature. Lowering temperatures form ice and if they stay low, the ice spreads.

The march of the glaciers has displaced millions now, endless convoys of refugees spread across the northern continents, and as the crops failed starvation started to take hold.

It made little difference to those of us sitting in our scientific outpost at the north pole. We had enough food to last for months, and cold elsewhere didn't make much difference when temperatures mere metres from where we sit hit minus fifty at night even in the summer.

The trouble with modern communications is that we can see everything, anywhere, instantly. We could see people starving, see the catastrophic state the world was in just by touching a few keys or with the click of a button on the mouse. But, as a race we had survived. Despite all our eggs being in one basket, the human race was still populace enough to carry on, or so we thought. Hope again proved a complex and disingenuous wee beastie.

It was at that point we became aware of another problem. Some of the asteroids had been carrying something else. Not lifeforms as such, or even microbes. We could've dealt with those perhaps. The nearest analogy we have for them is nanobots, although they are larger than that. An artificial lifeform capable of replicating, building... and destroying. Carbon based but needing carbon to grow and breed. They multiplied almost exponentially.

After stripping the remote northern forests of Siberia and Russia bare, they proceeded to consume anything carbon based that they came across.

I seem to remember an old Star Trek episode where an alien intelligence described humans as something like 'bags of mostly water'. We are, but there's a fair amount of carbon in there too, certainly enough for a space critter it seems.

First Contact: something man has dreamed about for decades, maybe even centuries if you really want to have an argument about what is and isn't Science Fiction. We didn't expect that contact to be carrying a knife and fork and asking for seconds though.

The creatures seem unwilling to cross the vast expanse of ice to get to us at present but we are steadily running out of food, and at some point we will need to move on. The satellites above the Earth are still working, and the international space station is doing sterling work in keeping the various surviving governments in contact. We talk to them daily, but soon they too will run out of food unless they can link up with the Chinese and get back to the surface or share their supplies.

We have time to sit and think, and catalogue what we know for now, but all we have left are endless questions and theories. Are the creatures some form of terraforming exercise from an alien culture? Will they mutate and change to begin altering the planet, mining its resources to construct some form of space elevator? Are they simply an alien lifeform that has evolved to traverse the deeps of space to find food? Did they start as nanobots to survive the journey through space, and once they've finished this phase of their evolution will they evolve into a more intelligent race once they have settled the earth completely?

Who knows. We who remain do not. And we have no way of finding out unless the creatures who now live on our planet start to communicate or invite the race that made them to join us, if such a race exists. Until then all we can do is observe from our remote and remaining fastnesses.

And hope... there's always hope...

~~~ The End ~~~

A little short based on the theme of First Contact and done for the FPTK_Contests profile who are affiliated with the wonderful folk at ForbiddenPlanet. 

The contest was to write a short story between 1000 and 2000 words starting with the sentence "They came out of nowhere."

This one comes in at just under 1200 words.