After the Epilogue

I lie drowsy in the sunbeam’s soporific embrace, and listen to my daughter rattle about the house. Aiara wants to hike up the mountain, to see the crashed starship there. 

I would have been willing in my younger days, but now it seems so very far, and the secrets it may contain no longer quite so compelling. The grass needs watering, the laundry folding. So instead I pillow my head in my arms, and force a smile at her eagerness. 

“Take your friends,” I tell Aiara, for I’m smart enough to know that I would only slow her down, though not quite wise enough for this not to sting. 

I wave at her blissful, oblivious back, and watch her go. My adventures are over, and this is the start of someone else’s story.

A Balanced Equation

I sit near the edge of the Transform, watching the aliens convert green grass and tall trees into computational substrate, ash grey limned in lines of fluorescent blue. It’s pretty, in its own way, though they won’t stop until they’ve turned our planet into a giant processor.

Sylar says they see the universe as a mathematical problem, and they’re trying to solve for God. Maki says they are a cancer, and must be destroyed. 

I don’t know if either of them is right. God I’m not familiar with; cancer I know all too well.

I fold my clothes into a neat pile, and place my shoes on top. I stand and walk across the dividing line, and feel my feet tingle as the aliens set to work. For too many years I’ve felt like a problem—I look forward to becoming part of the solution.

An Ice Mountain That Is Neither

There’s an ice mountain to the north that is neither made of ice nor a mountain, but rather an ancient tower, made of steel and arrogance. 

Georgia thinks there must be power inside it, engines strong enough to burn away the cold and bring back summer.

“That’s crazy,” I say, following in her snowy footprints regardless. “If the Hathaways had such engines, why didn’t they use them?”

She looks at me with pity. “It happened too soon, of course,” she says, and turns back towards the tower. She huffs a misty, determined breath, and sets off again.

I stand a moment, unsure, kicking at the crusted snow, baring the layer of plastic beneath.

In the Mornings We Take the Red

In the mornings we take the red, which brings the calm and concentration we need to fight. The purple is for those in pain, and the black for those in worse pain. The black brings stillness and release. The white we take at night, else we would never sleep.

The white brings forgetfulness.

Then the morning, the red, and we rise from our trenches and charge the enemy. At least, I think we do. The white renders all this vague and unimportant.

Private … Private Greene? Private Brown? The new one. He is refusing to take the red. He says the enemies are really our friends and families, that we have become puppets in some alien war. The poor man has clearly cracked; this is what happens when you do not take the red.

We hold him down and wrench open his jaw. Feed him the red through a tube down his throat. It’s the only way to end the madness. He’ll be right as rain in a few minutes. Just in time for our next assault.

Extreme Historical Revisionism

A four-legged leviathan thunders towards the infidel castle, fuming with black smoke and ringing like a gong as cannonballs bounce from its metal hide. Mailed men-at-arms follow in its wake. Canvas dirigibles lumber overhead, to pour sand and boiling oil down upon the defenders. 

The machines are gifts from the future, as are the enemy’s guns.

One of the Travelers stands beside me now (as others stand on the castle walls, no doubt, no doubt), hands clenched at his sides. 

“They’ve reached back this far,” he mutters, as a dirigible falls from the sky in flames. “We’ll have to go further, maybe strengthen the Sassanians. Nip this in the bud.”

The tone sounds blasphemous and I open my mouth to object, but no sound comes out. We’ve become puppets, playthings of the future, and our present their battleground.

I Wait for My Lover by the Shores of the Sea

I wait for my lover by the shores of the sea, in fair weather and foul, watching for the signs of her return. Let the lesser men settle for warmer women with their braids, bawling babies and the daily drudgery of settled life. She is the only one for me, wild and carefree as the sea, as mysterious as the ocean depths, as insistent as the tides.

I smile as she crests the shore, and run to meet her. Closing my eyes and shivering as I feel her tentacles wrap around my head.

Just a Stranger on the Bus

He sits alone on a park bench, white-haired, white-bearded, in a white suit that has seen better decades, never mind better days. He sits alone until another comes, in equally faded evening finery, and sits beside him with a sigh.

“I had not thought to see you here,” says the newcomer.

“Come to savor your victory?”

“What victory?” snorts his companion. “I came to admit defeat. It’s still you they love.”

The white one is silent for an eternity, before replying. “They murdered my son,” he says, and dabs his eyes with a white handkerchief gone ivory with age. The other is silent, head bowed, hands clasped across his lap. “Do not pretend sympathy. You never liked him much.”

“I was once your favorite,” the other says, reproachfully. “You seem remarkably unlucky in your fatherly affections. If I didn’t know better, I’d accuse you of doing it deliberately.”

The old man is silent, crumpled kerchief forgotten in his hand. 

“Come on,” says the other, standing and extending a hand. “I’ll walk you home.”

Watery, wounded eyes slowly focus on the fingers. “I disowned you.”

“You can change your mind. If you can’t, then who can?”

“No, not home.” A shake of the head. Home is the place his son isn’t. “I’m ... tired of it.”

“All right, not home,” the other agrees. “Someplace else. Far away.”

And together, the two old men leave the park behind.

Titanomachy

The bones of the titan lie against the mountainside, half-buried in the landslide made when it fell, the last victim of the Titanomachy.

Deucalion and Pandora cling to one another, standing in a valley carved by the titan’s earthquake footfalls, half-hoping, not daring to believe, that the war is finally over. 

“We must rebuild,” says Pandora. “We must heal this wounded land.”

Her husband nods. “We will take better care of it than these uncaring gods.”

Deucalion strides towards the mountain, crushing underfoot an unseen ant colony as he goes.

A Pattern to Their Clicking and Their Clacking

I’ll tell you a secret: I can understand the aliens. There’s a pattern to their clicking and their clacking, and I think I’ve pieced it together. 

The key to it is this: They verbalize everything. Everything. There’s no body language or pheromones, facial expressions or intonation, it’s all in the language. But not only that. Every thought, every feeling, they put it all into words, just this constant stream-of-consciousness patter they have to keep up, an uninterrupted broadcast of everything going through their brain cases.

Imagine if we could only speak to each other through a monitor or tablet screen, through a wall of unfeeling, uncommunicative text. That’s what it’s like for them. And it’s killing them, driving them crazy, fueling their impulse to murder. They’re not trying to kill us, not really—they’re trying to get away from each other. 

That’s what this invasion is. Not a quest for resources. The search for peace.

Smart Gun

The marine readied his gun, an HD2-50 Husker Dű 2mm discarding-sabot fléchette assault rifle, linked directly to the marine’s helmet HUD, with ultralow recoil, integral flash suppressor and 50 rounds of smart projectiles.

He crouched with his back to a boulder, poked just the rifle around the edge, using the image painted on the inside of his helmet facebowl by the HUD to aim, and squeezed the trigger.

“You sure about that?” asked the first fléchette.

He squeezed again.

“I mean, violence never solves anything,” it went on.

“You’ll only end up doing more harm than good,” put in the next round.

“War. War never changes,” observed the third, sadly.

“Should’ve used the dum-dums,” the marine muttered to himself.

“Hey, we heard that,” said a voice from his ammo pouch.