Dandelions
Humanity takes its first steps into space to meet something that was waiting right on Earth’s doorstep. It seemed friendly at first… A science-fiction-horror short story.
We sealed our fate the moment we landed on the moon and finally met the thing that had been calling out on the microwave band since before ammonites were around. They had drawn lots for who would have the honor of taking the first step. Trainor, the American, had won. The Russians had grumbled, but their guy, Brusilov, was along on the lander while their Chinese teammate was relegated to stay on the orbiter.
“Today humanity steps into a larger universe, and we take our place among the citizens of the galaxy.”
“WELCOME. APPROACH.” They broadcast the outsider’s answer, with a time lag both due to distance and the obligatory governmental censorship. A sexless, toneless voice, like shaped white noise.
The lander had touched down more than three kilometers from the outsider’s location but they had come prepared. They unpacked and assembled the electric car (the toy model had sold in the millions in the run up to the mission), planted three flags and drove through the magnificent desolation of the lunar landscape towards history. Soon the outsider’s home loomed in the distance. We knew it was big but Earthbound telescopes resolved few details. All we knew was that it was darker than the surrounding landscape. The car’s mounted camera now showed a spiky coral reef half a mile high, glistening black. Thin needles like a sea urchin’s spines jutted up hundreds of meters into the black sky, waving gently.
They stopped a respectful two hundred meters from the gnarled walls of the structure and got out to moon-hop the rest of the way. When they were just a dozen meters from the expanse of the alien structure they stopped and waited, but nothing came out to greet them. Brusilov had launched into his big speech welcoming the outsider in the name of all humanity and the Soviet people’s in particular when the ground swallowed both men. Mission control must have been as surprised as anyone else because they didn’t censor the screams and tearing sounds that came through their helmet microphones in time. Three billion people witnessed the final judgement on live TV. We could only speculate how we had failed the outsider’s test but I think it was looking for something in our bodies, or inside our cells, or our brain structure, and we came up short.
All hell broke loose on Earth after that. The governments tried to communicate but we never got another answer from the outsider. Most of the up close observations we got from Cheng, the Chinese astronaut left on the orbiter. He had been ordered to stay in lunar orbit and serve as our eyes and ears as long as he could stay alive. The moon was suddenly more active than in a billion years before combined. Rifts opened on the surface, centered on the outsider structure. It must have sent tendrils through the soil over the eons like some titanic fungus, dormant until now. Cheng sent us camera footage of great pits the size of cities forming all over the surface, at least twenty of them. We couldn’t see far into them but laser measurements said they were deep, tens or hundreds of kilometers. Gun ports, fit for mountain sized projectiles. Cheng survived a full week, sending reports and footage until his air ran out.
We got over the initial shock and prepared to strike before those asteroid throwers were fully online, but it was never a contest. The best we could do was delay the inevitable. We built as many rockets as we could in record time, strapped as many nukes on them as possible and fired them off from all major spaceports. Guiding them precisely was impossible so we hoped the released MIRVs would do enough damage through their sheer numbers to make a difference. You could see the flashes with the naked eye. We got lucky and the site of the outsider became a state-sized crater, but even if we decapitated it the rest of its body kept going. The remaining weapon sites were still growing and were now visible to the naked eye, the face of our familiar satellite disfigured and pockmarked with them. The attack was coming.
Even the most optimistic predictions said that the entire surface would be a total write-off, sterilized to several kilometers depth by the impacts. No chance for survival for even microbial life most likely, never mind animals larger than that. We had nowhere to go, and the only safe place was upwards. The only thing left for us was to give something else a chance to call this place home, some time in the unimaginable future. We filled capsules with the hardiest spores of the toughest organisms we could find, able to lie dormant for geological time spans, and fired them into decaying orbits. Chances are that even these won’t survive unscathed, so we packed non-living viruses and prions that might serve as a template for self-replicating life once their arks return to a planet that has stopped burning and might have liquid water again. We don’t know where and when exactly these seeds will land so we relied on sheer numbers, filling Earth’s orbit with a dandelion cloud that will come down over the eons. Some are not intended to come down at all. We threw these into permanent orbit or into the depths of space to maybe reach another sun, mementos of our long forgotten world.
For what it’s worth, we packed as much of human knowledge, art and history engraved on metal sheets onto the seed pods as we could, perhaps to be found by friendlier visitors from outside, or our heirs to this planet. Truthfully nobody expected these to last or be comprehensible even if found. All we could hope for was to resurrect some version of our small part in the phase space of life.
As we watch the skies, waiting for the incandescent final curtain to fall, we dream of the beings to follow in our footsteps. We hope you will know we lived and look back and feel some kinship with us. We, the extinguished, salute you.
