CW: bodily harm, blood/bodily fluids.
They fell just to splatter on the concrete, some of them small as ice cubes. It was a day without clouds and the man selling fruit from his stand on the corner was nearly concussed as they began to patter against the street with sound like the early drumming of hail.
There was no red blood oozing from those little ones pulverized against the dirt, only white pulp the color of their fleshy knees and bulbous baby heads, as if the things had no such blood in them, only through to the middle with pale skin and fat like tumors.
It was the small ones that lived. The fatter among them could get to the size of watermelons, and the largest on record was equal in weight to a VW Beetle. These were decimated on impact. Their weight passing through the atmosphere gathered too much force. The Beetle-Baby, that record-breaker, did not so much disintegrate when it touched Earth as explode, creating a geyser of itself, leaving a blistered hole in the ground. The small ones, the size of genuine beetles or smaller, of dice, or quarters, these could be seen crawling. Sometimes only for a few seconds. Sometimes only in spasms and flops. But they did move.
Sludge greased the motorways. Drivers veered to avoid large puddles and patches of pale lard. A few unlucky windshields were shattered or cracked. A few unlucky people were broken or bruised. An infant is much heavier than a hailstone. They fell much further than the clouds and gathered more speed. Arms were dislocated and skulls were fissured.
A woman knelt in the street and wept as the babies fell fast and crashed full against the pavement. Here was a small specimen, hardly the size of a snow globe. Its face and legs still twitched in its death throes and there was a terrible silent wail from its mouth. She saw her own child in the button of its nose, the pattern of its freckles, and she saw this pale thing scream and die and she gazed low upon its face and she lifted it from the dust and cradled it to her chest and screamed that old adage, Poor baby, Poor baby, and around her more strange infants fell and became dust and carnage until she wept with pale flesh straddling her to the waist.
• • • •
High above, in the dark bowels of the Mothership, Hudson Carle sat with his arm outheld. The million ten-fingered hands of the Astro-Spider scraped skin cells from the inside of his wrist. Hudson was naked. Around his penis was a small vibrating collar, meant to keep him alert and pacified and unafraid. A similar device was implanted surgically around his brainstem.
What’s these for? he asked the Astro-Spider. These scrapings?
Diagnostics, said the Astro-Spider.
But what for? asked Hudson Carle.
Oh, Earthling, said the Astro-Spider as it patted Mr. Carle on the top of the head, I suppose we can tell you. What harm could you do?
From these dregs, we will build something beautiful. From your humble dandruff, we will design a machine to rival man. A machine of his own parts that will supersede him. A loyal machine. An intricate, beholden machine. A Twin, a Shadow. And this machine will go and learn from you to make art and to sing and to kill and to do poetry and to sow crops and to do all things that man does.
And when your Twin and Shadow has usurped all man’s Being, we will descend ourselves Planetside and be worshipped, and rule the Land, and this servile, subservient machine of man’s flesh will do our labors and our biddings. And we will live as god and king in your palace.
But you just been taking skin, said Hudson. What about blood? Or tissues?
What? said the Astro-Spider.
You’re only taking skin. You’re not taking any of the inside stuff.
. . . In-side? said the Astro-Spider. It’s different? On the inside?
• • • •
On the surface of the Earth, a woman cried and screamed before a puddle of white skin. At home, her baby boy was rocking lovely in his cradle while his daddy watched giant pale infants crashing into fields and shop windows on the television. This thing in her arms was not her baby. It was something else. It moved, and wailed, and played the part, but it was not even really alive.
This piece was inspired by the rise of generative artificial intelligence—an attempt at recreating humanity’s essence, which succeeds only in making an uncanny, half-baked simulacrum. But, to our detriment in this case, we have the ability to find humanity in anything.
