God's Breath

Inevitability

It looks like dust. Or mist. Benign particles of soil and atmosphere blanketing my journey's destination like a warm embrace. It looks like a shroud of mystery concealing a future of potential and adventure. It looks serene. Harmless. Comforting...

It isn't.

Nothing on this world is.

The machines call it God's Breath. Trillions upon trillions of nanochips settling at the base of offensive metal spires that stab from the terrain and into the sky as a colossal ugliness, naturally revolting to organic eyes. They touched down four orbits past, and have since diminished the world's population by 83%. They had no demands. They didn't bother with diplomacy. They couldn't even be troubled to wage war.

When we met them with resistance... Heh... "Resistance"... That word, we discovered, was meaningless. God's Breath could neutralize any force, organic or machine, that we threw at them as easy as blowing out the flame on a candle. The world's armies were converted to scrap meats and metals within hours. They didn't even bother taking prisoners for a labor force. Too inefficient. The only thing my people are good for is the minerals in our bones. And they only bother collecting that if we throw ourselves at them. Funny thing is, something like three million people across the world did exactly that. They gathered in flocks to offer themselves to these mechanical tyrants as reusable materials. God's Breath blew through their gathering and dematerialized their bodies in minutes that probably felt like days while being picked apart one particle at a time. Their screams were heard around the world. Literally. There's something extra-conducive about the machine-metal in the air that transfers sounds more distant and precisely than nature. God's Breath encompasses the entire planet. It's only visible around the spires because that's where it's created and is at its densest. They could easily eliminate the entire population of life on this world within minutes. They don't only because they don't care. We are not a threat. Not as a people, anyway.

But a person? A single, insignificant entity who could walk right into the base of a spire without the machines even bothering to plug its numerical value into predictive analytics? A man, maybe, who volunteered his very being to be the first successful attempt at merging flesh and alien-machine nanotech?

Seeing this world through the eyes of two separate species -- ours and theirs -- is almost enough to make me not hate them. They are not malevolent. They're not even apathetic. Organics simply do not register into their calculations as Relevant. Living flesh may as well be the bark on a tree or dust in the wind. Do we not build walls with the meat from these trees to keep the dust from blowing in our eyes?

Whoever created these alien-machines probably lost their world to them as well. It's not karma. It's just... the order of things.

I am the next Thing in that line of order. I am the surgical mask that was created to stifle God's Breath. I am progress. I am inevitability.

I am God's Will.

-cc

Story inspired by:  Mystic Place by ArtistMEF