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ecotone99 · 5 years

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[SF] They Came From The Moon

Note: I don't care about the real-life details of the real event that's being reported on right now. This is my inspired take on it. Enjoy.

It all started when we went back to the moon. And now here I am, about to die. There’s not too many of us left, I don’t think. At this point, they’ve pretty well exterminated us. And they won’t stop until they get every last one of us. I’m certain of that. I’m surrounded now, and I’m not going to get away. There’s nothing I can do.

These damn things are indestructible. You can shoot them, stab them, bomb them, nuke them. And they just keep coming. The most indestructible creatures known to man. And to think they started out microscopic and insignificant.

Fucking tardigrades. Water bears. Moss piglets. Monsters.

Of course, it’s our own fault. These things were perfectly content, blissfully unaware, non-sentient little bugs who never hurt anything or anyone. Fine tuned over bazillions of years of evolution, the little bastards were perfectly adapted to, well, everywhere. Water, frozen and boiling, volcanoes, tropical rainforests, you name it. People say only cockroaches and twinkies would survive world-wide nuclear holocaust, but so would tardigrades. These things can live in the vaccuum of space for jebus’ sake.

At some point we decided it was a fan-fucking-tastic idea to shoot them off to the moon to “see what would happen.” Humans. Balls, we’re stupid sometimes. Not that our smartest minds could have foreseen the events that would happen to transpire a few decades later. At that time, it was no big deal. The tardigrades were dehydrated and cryo-frozen in epoxy, and sandwiched between plates of nickel. And then these plates - no larger than a DVD - were blasted off to the moon, where an Israeli ship crashed into the lunar surface. Oops.

Oh, and also sandwiched between those plates of nickel? Human DNA.

Human DNA and tardigrades. Together. Forever. Why you ask? Fuck knows.

And now here we are, a couple decades later, facing certain extinction. I don’t know if anyone knows how they became what they are - indestructible, slimy, 12 foot tall, sentient (REALLY fucking sentient) tardigrades. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Although now that I think of it, there very well may no longer be any human scientists around. So maybe I’m the closest thing to a scientist now. Maybe I’m the smartest human left on this monsterbug-infested planet. And I’m surrounded by them. Not so smart, I’m thinking.

What we do know is that a little over seven years after that initial tardigrade-dump on the moon, we went back for them. We always intended to of course. Scientists wanted to see how the lunar environment - weaker gravity, temperatures nearing absolute zero, the bombardment of radiation (so, SO much radiation) - would affect the biology and chemistry of those little shits, and apparently that of human DNA.

So these discs came back to Earth. A fully automated combination lander/rover/rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Station in August, 2026. Space X’s latest and greatest at that time. It gently reverse-thrusted it’s way to the lunar surface 42 hours later. The rover unfolded itself from the lander rocket, set its 12 treaded wheels on the dusty, grey ground, and embarked on its mission. It took a little while, but eventually it made its way to a series of craters that upon first glance looked empty. But half buried and scattered throughout the two largest craters, were four DVD sized discs that the rover came for. Nothing else survived. No debris from the crash, no additional components. It was designed that way in case of a crash. You know, don’t contaminate alien worlds and all. Just the discs. Almost as if it was intended that way.

With the discs rounded up and safely stored away, the rover made its way back to the lander - now lunar rocket - and mechanically secured itself into a specially designed niche on the side of the ship. And off it went, right back to whence it came.

So they came back. Seemingly no different than when they blasted off the first time. NASA and Israeli scientists initially reported that the cryo-frozen tardigrades appeared to sustain very little, if any damage, and that they were still blissfully alivedead in their cozy little petri dishes. Re-hydrated, they went right back to their unassuming tardigrade ways, sucking nutrients from mosses and lichens through their face-holes and floating around lazily in saline solution. That’s the last I had heard back in the day, and hadn’t thought anything of it until the mushroom clouds appeared.

That was about two years ago, I’d say. I haven’t kept track. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. It’s either late 2039 or early 2040 now. Winter. Only there’s no snow, there hasn’t been since last winter when nuclear fallout toasted most things and dried it to a crisp.

Those blasts killed most things. Not a whole lot of us survived. Not a whole lot of anything survived. But a few of us did. Cockroaches, and some people who had the wherewithal to shield themselves in time. And a few of us who can only chalk it up to dumb luck. I was out fishing when it started. Deep, deep in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. Considering packing it in for the day, fish-less, when I noticed the sky darkening and grey-green smoke rising between two peaks in the distance. Forest fire was the first thing that came to mind. Until the smoke quickly took a form that is unmistakable. As the mushroom-cap billowed upwards, I turned and ran. Had it not been for old crazy ass mountain man Liam, I’m sure I would have radiation puked myself to death within days or weeks.

That guy was a riot. And I mean, a machine gun totin’, bear trap loadin’, full blown lunatic of a man. The guy turned his small peaceful cabin and surrounding lands in the middle of nowhere into Fort Fucking Knox. That’s what he called it. Only he wasn’t guarding gold (maybe he was?), he was guarding himself. From them lib’ral snowflake soshulists comin’ for his guns. And his rights, he tells ya what.

So by a strange cascade of events that I don’t have time for here - mostly me runstumbling through the brush - I found my way to Liam’s bunker. More like, he found me. At gun point. The man, staring at me down the barrel of a Kalashnikov; greasy, stringy white hair flowing from under a disgusting old red trucker cap with worn once-white lettering on the front. I couldn’t make the words out, but it looked familiar from a time long ago. I thought I could vaguely make out the phrase “...GREAT AGAIN.” After much deliberation I was successfully able to convince him that indeed I was NOT one of them soshulist motherfuckers. I told him our govmint turned on us and were nukin’ us goddammit. I had no idea what was going on, I had to tell him something.

Liam’s place - Fort Fucking Knox - happened to come equipped with a state of the art nuclear fallout bunker. Of course it did. One of those they sold in mail order catalogs back in the 1950s. Better than duck-n-cover. So we holed up for a while. We ate a shit load of baked beans. Luckily, Liam preferred to keep to hisself and for the most part, that’s what he did. We listened to the chatter on his shortwave receivers, which is how we came to understand - mostly - what was happening. Liam didn’t keep TeeVee, or internet, or satellite. Just his goddamn CB radios. Probably a good thing, because I’m pretty sure these things would have found us sooner if he wasn’t so goddamn paranoid. They were smart. Very smart.

Not a whole lot more to report, honestly. Some time has passed, and Liam dies from some shit. No idea what. One day he just wouldn’t wake up. For the best though, I was gonna kill him soon if he hadn’t. I couldn’t take any more of his conspiracy theories, or his baked beans.

Over time the chatter on the CB radios went quiet. They were all getting found. I even listened to a couple good ol’ boys broadcast their own terrifyingly gruesome deaths. The Water Bears found them. It didn’t take long, they found them all.

Now, the bunker is surrounded. I have guns - Liam’s guns - and I have explosives. I have actual hand grenades. I’ve been out of the bunker a bit these last couple weeks, I don’t think the radiation is too bad, I’m only puking once every couple days or so. I’ve taken guns out looking for things to shoot. No animals anywhere, no birds chirping, not even a cricket.

And that’s how I fucked up. You see, I was out looking for anything to eat besides baked beans, when I rounded a group of huge boulders. And I saw it. That thing. It was huge, at least as big as the largest boulder I was standing next to. At first it didn’t know I was there, and it was preoccupied with something I couldn’t see. Then it froze. And much quicker than it had any right to, based on its fleshy marshmallow man contours, it half-twisted around to face me. It’s alien face - is it a face? - staring directly at me. The bung that is it’s mouth/face-hole slowly puckering in anticipation.

We stood there frozen for many milliseconds. Then I acted, pulling Liam’s only AR-15 around and semi-automatically squeezing off as many rounds into its pudgy rice pudding torso as I could. More rounds. I was on my ass on the ground now, the assault rifle having knocked me over. But I kept shooting. It folded in, like a roley-poley and collapsed face-down. I could see brown green goo dripping from the exit wounds on its reverse side. Thankfully, no one came and took away Liam’s guns.

Then they slowly, but surely, closed up. The wounds. They healed right before my eyes, and the thing started to tremble and move. I took off. As fast as my aging knees would let me, I stumbled back through the wild, crashing through the steel barbed front gate of Fort Fucking Knox. I didn’t stop until I was down in the bunker, locked from the inside.

That was two days ago - I think. Not like I’ve slept, and I’ve stopped looking at the clock. I’m not even sure what time or day it was when I got back to the bunker after shooting that thing. I knew, of course, that they were indestructible. I heard as much from the handhelds. Guns, bombs, nukes. Apparently, we (the govmint) retaliated by shooting nukes at Canada. This after the bugs already nuked Canada and most of the rest of the world. Wasn’t much left of ‘Mercia then either. But we still had our nukes.

They wanted to see if we could nuke those bastards. Because perhaps our nukes were better than those Russian nukes that already gave their college-try. Apparently not. Or if the nukes did get ‘em, more just came in their place.

Fucking machetes. One good ol’ boy hacked one up with a machete. Then as he was proudly broadcasting his victory on channel 13.5, the thing got him.

And now, here I am. Surrounded. I know I am, because I’m watching them on the closed circuit monitors. I’m going to die. Not sure if today, or tomorrow, or when, but I’m going to die. At least I’m in the bunker. I’m certain they can’t get in here. Reinforced concrete and steel. Underground. So I’ll just watch them, LEARN them. For my own edu-ma-fuckin-cation. I’ll eat these beans, though I’m only seeing about half a dozen more cans. I’ll drink whatever water is left, also not much. And then I’ll die. Either I’ll starve or die of thirst, or maybe I’ll rig up this whole damn place and blast myself and them to kingdom come. Or just myself. I turned around and puked into an old stainless steel turkey fryer.

I guess we’ll just see what happens. You know, it’s a bit ironic, don’tcha think? For decades now people have been freaking out over the climate changing. Me too. Now I’m in a bunker in the middle of a wasteland. And we didn’t even do THAT shit. People have been freaking out over viruses - these “super bugs”. The flu is goddamn scary these days, for sure. People die from that. At least, they did. Super bugs. Ain’t that some shit. I’m looking at the real Super Bugs right now, in all their closed-circuit, black and white, low resolution glory.

Fucking Tardigrades. Tardigrades from the fucking moon. And yes, we did that shit.

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