I’m not too sure where this story came from. It just popped into my head, I swear I’m not an environmentalist…
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Moving Day
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The portals opened about a week before Moving Day. They were small at first, strange glowing circles of light that just hung in the air. Most were outside the cities and some, like the one near my home, showed up right in the middle of downtown between the skyscrapers throwing off that strange light day and night. They made the electronics around them wonky, and they buzzed something awful.
The police came first and cordoned off the area, pushing people back and displacing us from our homes and offices. The containment zones grew and grew as the portals got bigger; the whole of downtown was evacuated a couple days before they came. The army moved in and scientists came to try and figure out what they were. The portals were as tall as buildings and as wide as a city block by then. Massive blocks of light that lit up the sky for miles around. They were all over the world the reports said, on every continent.
They came on Moving Day, without ceremony they began pouring out of the portals. Short fleshy round things tottering on skinny legs, strange bags of meat that looked more alien then I ever imagined anything could look. Big bulbous heads that swiveled impossibly to push their two little eyes this way and that, slack too-wet mouth holes gaping open in their faces filled with a multitude of awful looking teeth. From this nauseous hole poured screeching, chattering sounds that they used to communicate with each other.
Some were clothed in rags, others in finery that I could call opulent if it weren’t so alien. Everyone carried something, strange boxes that seemed to hold their possessions, all they had in the world. They poured from the openings into our world. They came on foot, if you could call what was on the ends of their legs feet; they came in machines the likes of which we’d never even dreamed of. Strange craft that flew by unknown means drifted out and hovered over the crowds entering our world.
They seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see them but that didn’t stop them from coming. They poured in day and night for three days, first hundreds, then thousands, then millions they came and trudged away from the portals into our world. We told them to stop, they didn’t understand us any better than we understood them, we shot at them but the flying machines they brought with them rained a cold white fire down upon our armies that obliterated everything it touched. Our finest weapons of war were swatted from the sky like flies at a picnic. Even many of the ones on the ground carried weapons, strange handheld guns that spit flame at us and tore our bodies to ribbons.
Finally, the fleshy beasts stopped coming though the portals but before they evaporated into nothingness vast machines rolled out on treads to follow the groups moving away. I saw one with my own eyes, it was a thousand feet long and two hundred high, nothing could stand in its way. It ploughed though buildings as if they weren’t there and left a path of destruction in its wake as it moved away with the aliens. I watched on the news as the aliens made their way to secluded areas of our world, the deserts, the arctic, the forests, it didn’t matter they moved away from us and their massive machines finally came to a stop. When they did something amazing happened. The big machine seemed to fall apart into thousands of smaller machines. All moving like a hive they swarmed the ground and started building. Skyscrapers rose, roads rolled out and whole cities were built almost overnight. Industry sprung up and started belching black smoke into the sky as more and more machines were built. They spread like a plague over the land harvesting everything they could find to build their city. Massive open pit mines pried minerals from our soil, huge derricks pumped the oil from deep underground at a furious rate. When it was done massive gleaming landscapes of sky scrapers dotted our world, filled to the brim with the round discolored beasts that had invaded us.
They go about their lives, ignoring us. Taking what they want from our land. Their industry is constantly spewing incalculable toxins into our air; our scientists say it’s the greatest global environmental catastrophe since the industrial revolution. We’ve tried diplomacy, but they ignore us. We’ve tried war but they destroy us without even noticing. They go about their strange lives, ever consuming.
Some have ventured out of their cities in recent years. They haven’t learned our languages but we’ve learned some of theirs. We’ve talked to some of them, they say they came from their world, five hundred million of them but just a small fraction of the billions they had, when they have finally exhausted all their own resources. Their world is dead now and all they left behind is gone, they say they’re not leaving here that we have to just put up with them. They are unapologetic. We asked them where their world was, they point at the night sky, at the edge of the bright galactic span and say:
“There, it was called Earth but its dead now.”
