I pushed my best high school bud off the Hoover Dam. Don’t even recall why. Maybe we were competing for the girl who became my wife. My pal was a smooth operator. I could dial him up and ask his quantum self for the details, but I won’t. I’ve only so many hands, so many processes to run at once, and really, it’s more fun not knowing. There are so few secrets left in the universe.
This I do recalclass="underline" when I pushed him over the brink, he flailed momentarily, then spread his arms and caught an updraft. He twirled in the clouds of steam and spray, twisting like a leaf until he disappeared. Maybe he actually made it. We hadn’t perfected molecular modification, however. We hadn’t even gotten very far with grafts. So I think he went into the drink, went straight to the bottom. Sometimes I wonder if he’d ever thought of sending me hurtling to a similar fate. I have this nagging suspicion I only beat him to the punch.
The heralds of the Old Ones came calling before the time of the terrible lizards, or in the far-flung impossible future while Man languished in the throes of his first and last true utopian era. Perspective; relativity. Don’t let the laws of physics fool you into believing she’s an open book. She’s got a whole other side.
Maybe the Old Ones sent them, maybe the pod people acted on their own. Either way, baby, it was night of the living dead, except exponentially worse since it was, well, real. Congruent to linear space time (what a laugh that theory was) Chinese scientists tripped backward to play games with a supercollider they’d built on Io while Earth was still a hot plate for protoplasmic glop. Wrap your mind around that. The idiots were fucking with making a pocket universe, some bizarre method to cheat relativity and cook up FTL travel. Yeah, well, just like any disaster movie ever filmed, something went haywire and there was an implosion. What was left of the moon zipped into Jupiter’s gravity well, snuffed like spit on a griddle. A half-million researchers, soldiers, and support personnel went along for the ride.
Meanwhile, one of the space stations arrayed in the sector managed to escape orbit and send a distress call. Much later, we learned the poor saps had briefly generated their pocket universe, and before it went kablooey, they were exposed to peculiar extra-dimensional forces, which activated certain genetic codes buried in particular sectors of sentient life. So the original invaders were actually regular Joe Six- Packs who got transmogrified into yeasty, fungoid entities.
The rescue team brought the survivors to the Colonies. Pretty soon the Colonies went to the Dark. We called the hostiles Pod People, Mushrooms, Hollow Men, The Fungus Among Us, etc, etc. The enemy resembled us. This is because they were us in every fundamental aspect except for the minor details of being hollow as chocolate bunnies, breeding via slime attack and sporination, and that they were hand puppets for an alien intellect that in turn venerated The Old Ones who sloth and sleep (and dream) between galaxies when the stars are right. Oh, and “hollow” and “empty” are more metaphorical than usefuclass="underline" burn a hole in a Pod Person with a laser and a thick, oily blackness spewed forth and made goo of any hapless organics in its path.
The Mushroom Man mission? To liquefy our insides and suck them up like a kid slobbering on a milkshake, and pack our brains in cylinders and ship them to Pluto for R&D. The ones they didn’t liquefy or dissect joined their happy and rapidly multiplying family. Good times, good times.
I was the muckety-muck of the Territorial Intelligence Ministry. I was higher than God, watching over the human race from my enclave in the Pyrenees. But don’t blame me; a whole slew of security redundancies didn’t do squat in the face of an invasion that had been in the planning stages before men came down from the trees. Game, set, and match. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Nonetheless, I think a millennium to repopulate and rebuild civilization qualifies as a reset at least. I came into contact with them shortly after they infiltrated the Pyrenees compound. My second-in-command, Jeff, and I were going over the daily feed, which was always a horror show. The things happening in the metropolises were beyond awful. Funny the intuitive leap the brain makes. My senses were heightened, but even that failed to pierce the veil of the Dark. On a hunch, mid-sentence, I crushed Jeff’s forehead with a moon rock I used as a paper weight. Damned if there wasn’t a gusher of tar from that eggshell crack. Not a wise move on my part — that shit splattered over half the staff sitting at the table and ate them alive. I regenerated faster than it dissolved my flesh and that kept me functional for a few minutes. Oh skippy day.
A half dozen security guards sauntered in and si-phoned the innards from the remainder of my colleagues in an orgy of spasms and gurgles. I zapped several of the baddies before the others got hold and sucked my body dry.
I’d jumped into a custodian named Hank who worked on the other side of the complex, however, and all those bastards got was a lifeless sack of meat. I went underground, pissed and scared. Organizing the resistance was personal. It was on.
We (us humans, so-called) won in the end. Rope-a-dope!
Once most of us were wiped from existence, the invaders did what any plague does after killing the host — it went dormant. Me and a few of the boys emerged from our bunkers and set fire to the house. We brought the old orbital batteries online and nuked every major city on the planet. We also nuked our secret bunkers, exterminating the human survivors. Killing off the military team that had accompanied me to the surface was regrettable — I’d raised every one of them from infancy. I could’ve eliminated the whole battalion from the control room with an empathic pulse, but that seemed cowardly. I stalked them through the dusty labyrinths, and killed them squad by squad. Not pretty, although I’m certain most of my comrades were proud to go down fighting. They never knew it was me who did them dirt: I configured myself into hideous archetypes from every legend I could dream up.
None of them had a noggin full of tar, either. I checked carefully.
I went into stasis until the nuclear bloom faded and the ozone layer regenerated. Like Noah, I’d saved two of everything in the DNA repository vault inside the honeycombed walls of Mare Imbrium. The machines mass produced in vitro bugs, babies, and baby animals with such efficiency, Terra went from zero to overpopulation within three centuries.
The scientists and poets and sci-fi writers alike were all proved correct: I didn’t need to reproduce rats or cockroaches. They’d done just fine.
The layers of space and time are infinite; I’ve mastered roughly a third of them. What’s done can’t be undone, nor would I dream of trying; nonetheless, it’s impossible to resist all temptation. Occasionally, I materialize next to Chief Science Officer Hu Wang while he’s showering, or squatting on the commode, or masturbating in his bunk, and say howdy in Cantonese, which he doesn’t comprehend very well. I ask him compromising questions such as, how does it feel to know you’re going to destroy the human race in just a few hours? Did your wife really leave you for a more popular scientist?
Other times, I find him in his village when he’s five or six and playing in the mud. I’m the white devil who appears and whispers that he’ll grow into a moderately respected bureaucrat, be awarded a plum black ops research project, and be eaten alive by intergalactic slime mold. And everyone will hate him — including his ex-wife and her lesbian lover. Until they’re absorbed by the semi-infinite, that is.