The Falling Stars

First Contact

July 22nd, 2025. "This is.. John Holder.. coming to you live from downtown Los Angeles. We're outside showing you a live feed of the night sky. Those strange lights you are seeing are not stars. We don't know what they are. Reports have been coming in nonstop of strange lights flashing in the sky world wide, what looks like stars appearing out of no where. President Beckman has just issued a national emergency, saying all citizens are to stay indoors at all times...-"

"Hello and my name is Martin White, currently live from New York City. There's scattered reports from all over the world of..- oh my God! Something just slammed into the ground down the street behind us. A massive explosion just went off in the distance! They.. They're slamming into the ground! The lights in the sky are slamming into the ground, causing mass dest.. destruction. We need to get inside now! Shut the camera off and m-!"

"We're in Washington D.C right now! This is an alien attack, all troops are coming back to the United States! Justin, get that guy out of the street before that convoy gets here! The White House is on lockdown, every country is under attack, and citizens are advised to seek shelter immediately! There's military vehicles are all over the place! The military and secret service are battling these these things all across the city! Get down...! A military.. jet just collided with a building off camera! We're trying to get to safety right now, but the path to the White House is currently blocked by a machine. They're trying to get as many civilians to safety as they can, but the military are currently trying to take it down, with little effort, and it.. wait.. guys that machine is facing towards us! Everyone! Get behi..!-"

"This.. is the last report we'll be able to send out.. to anyone that has power still.. or working televisions or radios. We're broadcasting to.. anything we possibly can. There's just.. there's just no good way to say it. I'm not even reading from a script. I'm just telling anyone that sees or hears this.. that we've lost. They've destroyed.. everything. No country around the world has survived this onslaught. No more updates are coming in.. from anywhere. There's no one we can contact for more information. I..- there..- There's just nothing left. Everyone here in the studio has blocked and barricaded all entrances and windows as best as we can. So far, I haven't seen any of the alien machines go inside buildings unless it goes to attack someone it spots from the outside. For some reason.. there were rumors spreading about these machines using thermal contact vision, and not sight. So just.. whoever hears this, stay inside. If you see one, just wait for it to go away. After the nukes went off.. something.. green.. entered the atmosphere and landed in California.. Los Angeles. There was a final report.. of green.. and yellow flashes.. both on the ground and in the air, followed by powerful shockwaves and explosions that caused devastating destruction. They lasted for roughly twenty minutes before they ceased. No one has been able to explain anything further than that, and whatever entered the atmosphere was spotted leaving once again. If that means anything to anyone.. or if that helps anyone.. that's all I have for you. I'm sorry.. I can't be of any more help. This studio is now officially deactivated. You won't hear anymore from us. If you do.. eh, you probably just won't. Good luck everyone. God bless us all..-"

These are some of the final broadcasts and transmissions that were ever recorded. The first day.. well, was the only day. Billions.. of lives lost in mere hours, across the entire world. At first, there was hope. When we started fighting back, it was working. It seemed that simple conventional weaponry was capable of taking these things down. Then.. it didn't take us long to figure out that these things were capable of adapting. There were reports of some of the machines being taken out by jets, only to have any others near by suddenly gain flight and powerful ranged weaponry. Some were taken out by powerful explosions, causing others to gain the ability to generate a powerful shield, or quickly burrow into the ground at unimaginable speed. It wasn't like they adapted over time. The speed was instantaneous. You killed one, and the other next to it practically became invincible. This let them wipe out even our most strongest militaries and advanced weapons. It wasn't just their strength and adaptability alone that gave them such an advantage. There was an unbelievable magnitude of drones as well. More drones than there were humans, literally. All the countries around the world ended up simultaneously firing numerous nuclear weapons above the atmosphere... a desperate last attempt to save the planet, by taking a risk of wiping it out or making it inhabitable. They thought it worked, because the sky began raining with broken metal and alien fluids when the bombs went off. The machines started falling left and right seemingly by the thousands if not millions, but it wasn't until the blasts cleared that we realized we only killed the ones that didn't adapt in time. The ones that did.. we knew they were unstoppable. Even so.. it was as if however many that were killed were just replaced by new ones arriving afterwards. It was more like.. millions.. just raining down for a whole day.. slaughtering everyone. When they arrived, they were in the multiple prisms and shapes they float around in today. All of them have a distinct bodily shape when they transform. Any of the bigger bulkier tank like machines that can't move quickly have adapted to have impenetrable armor or shields, and mostly consist of cube or rectangle like shapes. The ones that are more agile or nimble, they've adapted the ability to fly, swim, dig, climb, and move at very high speeds, and consist mostly of pyramid or diamond styled shapes. Then, there's the sphere drones which are more or less just cannon fodder. Even when they adapt, they die quickly. The very few that we killed up close spilled a strange colored liquid. It's black and fluid like a slightly thicker oil, and it has a slight green shimmer to it, like a hypershift paint for a car. When inside or next to a powered machine or power source in general, it glows and pulses bright almost lime green. When it leaves the machines, or if they die, it fades to black, still retaining that green film on the surface. This is what we assume is their "blood", and the green glow is from the energy that powers them, so when it leaves their body, or when one dies, the fluid turns black like a light bulb when it loses power. So far, we've not been able to find any known elements in it. Period. It's as if this material doesn't exist. It defies some of our known laws of reality in ways I personally couldn't explain, especially considering our own scientists struggle to explain it. The smaller machines, as I mentioned before, are capable of adapting to insane unimaginable speeds. They don't however, have powerful armor or shields, so regular weaponry is still able to kill them. That's how we've been able to study these machines, by capturing the weaker ones and ripping them apart, hacking into their programming and memory to see what we can discover and learn. When they transform, they all have two or three red glowing lights on what we assume is their head, although.. with all that knowledge, it still just seems pointless now. It's been two hundred thirty seven years since they landed and attacked us. It's now November 27th, 2262. Now entire countries, civilizations, military organizations, and governments world wide, all lay in ruin, destroyed entirely by the sudden massive attack. There was no hope. No glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. If there was a glimmer of light.. it was only from the red piercing light that comes from their murderous hunting eyes. Hiding underground in tunnels, bunkers, anything we could find and build upon was a proven strategy to surviving. These machines or 'drones' as advanced as they are, can't find us as easily as they can kill us. It's almost as if they relied on sight and pre gathered information. It's suspected that they had to have been here before, even if it was just one drone that arrived. They attacked major cities, mass populated areas, and critical military installations across the world with very great efficiency. Some of them were a bit scattered as they also deployed in small towns and back woods houses, so no where was really safe. Because of the impossible magnitudes of waves they sent ranging in the billions.. there was no surviving on the surface. As far as we know, they sent a ratio of one to one for every human there was. Still, hiding underground was the only way to avoid them, that and keeping out of sight. We began to study them once we realized we could successfully hide from them. We named them DecaDrones because of their shapes, and because these drones are not sentient, but programmed by something far smarter. We've also figured out that they have classes.. or tiers of strength. The drones, when they're not moving or hunting, revert back to the shape they arrived in. The more faces or sides those shapes have, the stronger and deadlier they are. They arrived in third dimensional shapes ranging from one to twenty faces. The weakest, being a sphere with only one face, and noticeably smaller than the others. The deadliest.. being the Icosahedron, a shape with twenty faces. The Icosahedron.. strangely enough, transforms into a humanoid alien warrior machine. It's capable of everything that the lower ranked drones are capable of and more. Unlike the billions of the rest that casually float along the surface, these special drones are only found floating way high in the atmosphere. As the deadliest of the drones so far, not a single one has been killed on record. Sure, myths and rumors spread, but there's no record of one dying. We named them separate from the DecaDrones, being the only ones that have a human shape to them.. or.. well, they have arms and legs anyways, but we call them 'Icos'. Ico is just short for Icosahedron. We also noticed that each shape doesn't have a certain set size to it. Some DecaDrone spheres can be ten feet tall, some can be eight foot, and some can even be twenty feet tall. All of them are random sizes, abut their transformations are always the same. When the spheres transform, they're a writing ball of mechanical bladed bulky tendrils, flailing about to move across the ground as well as strike their targets with insane lethal precision. Large tank-like rectangular prims and anything of the like turns into these large turret towers or literal crawling tanks with many different weapons. The pyramids and diamonds are terrifying. They're like the aerial support drones even though they have ground forms as well, and they're the only ones we've observed to have more than one transformation. They have numerous legs when on the ground, anywhere from three to ten, and they somewhat resemble spiders in the way they move and attack. They leap, strike, and crawl or flail around. They have very sleek alien air craft forms too that are different from their roaming shape, which makes them masters of the skies. Unmatchable aerodynamic shape, unmatched speed, and pinpoint perfected precision. Then.. the shapes with faces ten and up, those are more.. like transports actually, from ten to nineteen. The thing is, we've seen maybe one or two from time to time. We've never once been able to figure out what they transport, or if they actually 'transport' anything physical. Instead, we've just recently begun to assume that they're scouts, because every now and then one enters the planet and then exits after a few minutes, never giving us enough time to study them. Scientists and.. remaining.. military officials told us these things aren't sentient. They're programmed as I said before. They only knew this because while whatever 'code' is used to program these machines, it's a code that relies on binary code at the very base of it. Their understanding of binary is a bit different from ours, considering their language is probably very alien and different, but it's still the same concept. It's more complex because not only are there 1's and 0's for on and off, but there's also segments that use 1-0, 0-1, 1-1, and 0-0, as 'directional' binary nodes instead of on or off, which then leads to many many more segments of codes that more or less turn 1GB of data to them into 1TB of data to us. Luckily, their codes are separated when it comes to directional, and then simple 1's and 0's. These codes are always kept separate, but work together to create very.. very complex functions and commands. Their binary is very advanced, but overtime, scientists were not only able to learn how it works, but also learned how to put it to use. Because of that, we've been granted forms of technology and knowledge we never knew would exist for the human race. We were also able to at least determine their objective when they came to the planet. Mostly anyways. To clear all sentient life. Working day and night, using nothing but computers and data salvaged from the N.A.S.A Headquarters, and a dead DecaDrone, they spent all the time they had trying to learn the entirety of the code. Just getting those materials and data took.. many years. The first fifty years were marked as the worst possible years the first survivors ever faced. The next fifty after that were tough, but once they cracked the DecaDrone codes, they actually started making their own drones. We were able to immediately create powerful tools, drones, and AI that enabled them to gather materials much faster from much farther away, as well as extremely expand this underground structure, and unlock them the ability to initiate mass reproduction through cold methods using mass sperm banks. As for the drones, now we know loads more about them. We also used their technology and advanced coding knowledge to improve ours greatly, removing so many inefficiencies, improving so many limits to what we could do, and because of that, humans can make things that before seemed impossible. We have laser operated fabricators. Machines capable of beaming materials into a pre specified shape on an atomic.. almost subatomic level. Insanely power efficient technology, much more efficient excavation capabilities, and way better food. We have small communication devices that look and act like phones, but they can also act as IDs for a scanner, and they don't rely on satellites. We also actually have a network. It's not as informative as the World Wide Web used to be, nor does it rely on orbiting satellites, but it's still great for when you want to search up something. We still do add to it from the old web whenever we can find data on the outside. All this data is stored on small hard drives. Should we ever be attacked, we can move to a new area and start over. Lucky for us, as humans, we know how to learn and adapt better than any machine will ever be able to. Sure, we can't just develop flight whenever it suits us, but.. in only two hundred-ish years, we turned the old presidential bunker into a massive underground civilization with the capacity to hold over fifteen thousand people. With even more breakthroughs in their code, we've been able to advance our excavations even further. Just recently, they've uncovered an encrypted side objective, but.. it's unclear as to what it means. "Avoid Live Cytrozine Contact-" We have no idea what Cytrozine (Sigh-Troh-Zeen) is, but they're saying it's what their blood is called. Apparently the aliens that made these things are called Cytrozians (Sigh-Troh-Zee-Uhns), which doesn't really roll off the tongue, but oh well. Some discovery I say. Frankly all I want them to figure out is the master shut down button for all these things that doesn't require a bullet.