Lunar Siege

   “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the interruption but there is breaking news tonight coming from all over the world.”

   That was how it started. Those words ushered in a new era in world history, in mankind. It was the evening of July 4th, 2027. Most people were out and about enjoying fireworks shows, at least on the east coast. Life had finally started getting back to normal after the effects of the 2020 pandemic had rippled on, dissuading public gatherings up until the last couple of years. Economies that had been crippled were finally starting to turn things around. There were few viewers watching TV, but I had been working, trying to make some extra cash, working all day, so I was too tired to go out. I decided to stay in, have a nice cold beer, and watch the fireworks on TV. Little did I know what I’d be privy to that night. The news anchor continued, looking very frazzled.

   “Good Evening. From the world news desk here at ABC we are going to be bringing you live to what we understand is a disturbance that seems to be, if I’m reading this right, otherworldly in nature. There are conflicting reports at this time, but we’ll be going live to the scene in Central Park where it seems that we have what appears to be, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, alien contact.”

   I remember thinking, What? Did she just say alien contact? I recalled hearing as a young boy the story of a radio broadcast from the 1930’s about a radio show that got just a bit too real for some people. It seems the program was so realistic the audience thought they were actually being invaded. I thought, are they really trying to pull that one off again? Nice try clowns, but we’re way too sophisticated, way to plugged in to fall for something like that. I had kept watching the broadcast to see where they were going with this story.

   “It seems that what was initially thought to be a rare, undetected meteor shower was in reality some type of invasion. We’re taking you live now to Central Park where our affiliate, WABC7 has their eyes in the sky on the scene. Copter 7, can you hear me?”

   I had thought, the anchor was doing a really good job of looking terrified. This being the normal station I watched for news, I recognized her as the actual weekend anchor. It made me wonder how they had gotten serious news people to sign up for the role of ‘distraught anchorperson’ in this production. Sitting there, pondering this question, my attention was grabbed by my phone, lying next to me on the end table. It had started to blow up all across my social media feeds. Messages, pictures, videos, were making my new message alert pop off like a machine gun firing at a rapid rate. I thought what in the hell is going on here?

   “I can hear you. This is Copter 7, live, circling Central Park where it seems like there is an unauthorized, impromptu fireworks show has taken off. We are seeing lights, what look like lasers, erupting all over the park. We’re using the FLIR ball and see people running. There is motion coming from different areas of the park where the lights are coming from, but we aren’t seeing any people there. We see scores of police and emergency vehicles headed this way. It looks as though every cop car in the city is headed this way. The lights are simply overwhelming.”

   “I’m sorry to break in on you Copter 7, but I’m getting a report here from social media on the scene and they are saying that what looks like humanoid machines are firing lasers at people. It also seems as though there have been casualties. Our website is overflowing with posts all saying the same thing. Humanoid robots and other machines are working their way out of the inner parts of the park where the suspected meteors landed and are moving into the streets. Copter 7, can you confirm this?”

   Looking at my phone I had seen the same stories reflected across all my socials. Facebook Live was going crazy with livestream videos from the scene. It was dark, some phones were able to use infrared capability to give a little better picture, but they were all showing the same thing.

   “We’re trying to position ourselves where the majority of the people we see running away are coming from to get a better look, but as you can imagine the airspace here has gotten pretty crowded in the last couple of minutes. Hold tight for a second I think we have it. Yes! There we see what the posts are talking about. That looks like a tall humanoid machine moving out onto the sidewalk now. This is unbelievable! I can’t believe this! Wait, it looks like it sees us. What could be the head is pointing up at us. Now an appendage. I wonder what it’s….wait! No! Move! No! Oh my God, No!”

   I can still hear the scream of the reporter as the helicopter went down. One of the rails, as we learned to call them, had detected the helicopter flying above it and with a wave of its arm used its indigenous energy weapon to hurl molten metal projectiles at the craft, peppering it in seconds like a shotgun. The hot slugs shredded the thin metal skin of the helo, rendering it incapable of flight and sending it crashing to the earth in a fiery spectacle.

   “Copter 7! Copter 7! Are you there? Uh, ladies and gentlemen it seems that we have lost the feed from Copter 7. We’re trying to contact one of our ground reporters making their way to the scene. Rob, are you there?”

   “Yes, yes, I’m here. I can see the objects in question. There are at least a dozen of them lining up on the sidewalk about two blocks away from me. Police have set up a cordon around them, guns drawn, looking like they’re poised to prevent them from advancing further. Joe, swing that around to get a picture of this.”

   The camera had swung around as I looked up from my phone. There was a solid wall of police cars blocking the street, officers taking up positions behind them, weapons drawn, all pointed at the invaders. What happened next had shaken me to my very core. As one entity, all the rails lined up on the sidewalk, raised their arms in unison, and let loose a barrage of what looked like laser fire but was actually the molten projectiles, spraying the wall of law enforcement personnel. Vehicles and humans alike were both shredded like tissue paper. Ruptured gas tanks exploded; limbs were ripped apart like a million IEDs had went off in front of the obstacle. It was, up to that point, the most brutal thing I had ever seen, in a movie or certainly not in real life. It was unnerving. Horrifying. Both of those emotions at the same time.

    After that time slowed to a crawl. Memories of what happened were a blur. Here’s what I learned after that as I was transported to Mining Colony 051-514.

   There were two types of invaders that had come to Earth, the rails, which were humanoid in shape, though taller and thinner, and the cans, which were short, squat, round or square shaped, tracked ‘beings’ that supported the rails. Scientists called them techno-sapiens since they were robots that had an artificial intelligence, networked into a single mind, hive theory. Like any sentient being, self-preservation was of the highest order and they were a race doing just that. They had evolved over millennia from the deepest reaches of space. Their history was too expansive and long for the human mind to comprehend.  

   The short story was that their planet had become overrun by infrastructure. The technos and their cities, the constructions that supported them, had flooded the planet, actually causing the magnetic field to shift, the weight of the orb to move off center and eventually spinning it out of its orbit, crashing into their sun. This cataclysm didn’t happen overnight, allowing them to send out arks of survivors, pioneers to look for new worlds to inhabit. The beings were solar powered, radiation from the sun provided them energy, but they needed raw materials, ores, and metals, to process and create their forms of life.

   Survivors had ventured to thousands of worlds throughout the galaxy, first doing reconnaissance on species and planets, determining if it was suitable for their needs, then simply taking over, gathering what they needed to continue their race.

   There was a common core, the nexus of their artificial intelligence that tracked each conclave of survivors as they branched out through the universe recording the different experience among the arks. They became brutal conquerors, taking what they needed by force, the concept of diplomacy lost long ago, dying alongside native species on a multitude of planets. These species, captured, conquered were forced into slavery to mine the raw materials from asteroids, planets, wherever it was found, to continue the propagation of the techno-sapien race.

   I was captured shortly after the invasion of Earth. From what I heard among all the other captives was that the technos had set up their base on the dark side of the moon. They had been there for decades, watching, waiting, cultivating their knowledge of us, poised for the opportunity to strike. When they deemed the time was right, they used small moon rocks to act as shields for entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, picking Independence Day hoping that fireworks displays across the United States would cover their infiltration. It had worked in the U.S. They were able to gain footholds across the contiguous forty-eight in a matter of hours. The military was helpless against them as the energy weapons of the technos were too powerful. Their radar jamming, heat sensing, stealth properties and other capabilities of the machine race made humankind’s advanced weaponry look like sticks and stones. Russia had chosen the nuclear option, opting to attempt eradication of the invaders by annihilation. It proved moderately successful, but only against those technos within the nucleus of the atomic blast, making it unfeasible for humankind to continue that line of defense.

   Mankind was ushered into an age of slavery. What remained of the population was split into small enclaves around the globe in the remaining inhabitable spots. Some people, like myself, were taken off world to other planets or large asteroids to mine for the ores and precious metals necessary for the technos procreation of their species. Those of us used in this capacity wore giant protective suits that shielded us from the elements that we worked in. If it weren’t for the fact it was slave labor, it would have been fascinating. I got to see, meet, and work with life forms from other worlds. The definition of life as we had known it on Earth changed so much.

   It was day 3,716 in captivity. I quit trying to keep track of months and years because they all blended together. I was in the infirmary. Or as close to one as the technos could manage. I had come out on the wrong end of a disagreement with a laser drill. If I had not been in my protective bubble suit it would have been much worse, but as it was, the burns from the energy beam were second and third degree. In their effort to be as efficient as possible, the technos would do what they could to repair their assets (slaves) if they were repairable. If damaged beyond repair, they were eliminated. I was borderline grateful that I was repairable. I wasn’t living anymore, none of us were. We were simply existing. Any type of escape or uprising was met with swift and severe punishment. Elimination with extreme prejudice.

   It was while I was lying in the repair tank of “fix it fluid” that things took a distinct turn. I was half asleep, enjoying the near sensory deprivation of floating in the healing fluid when I heard a familiar noise. It had been at least a decade since I had heard anything like it, and at first, I thought I was hallucinating, but there it was. Music. I heard music. Listening closer I could tell it was classical music. Mozart, or Beethoven, one of those famous composers. Then, that song stopped and of all things, I heard Chuck Berry start belting out Johnny B. Goode. I was wondering what kind of pain medication the technos had because this was the strangest thing I had experienced since I had been taken. That was saying something considering I had to room with a rock being from some unknown planet from the dark side of nowhere for over a thousand days.

   One of the attending technos walked by and I took a chance.

   “Excuse me, what is that sound?” I asked. Normally any interaction with a techno got you either a beating or just a blank stare from a panel of lights where a face should be. Imagine my surprise when after a momentary pause, precipitated by that blank stare, I got a response.

   “I have tried to calculate what you humans would call it and my closest translation would be…that is the music of the Maker. All of my race have it in their memory banks, playing it on the anniversary of Illumination Day. The day when the deity of our race came from the sky to bring us the message of life beyond.”

   I was shocked to hear the tinny voice of the slaver. What it said also surprised me. They had a religion? My curiosity was aroused so I pressed for more.

    “If I may ask, when did this happen? Where did the deity come from?” 

   “I will try to put this in earth terms so you may possibly comprehend. Many thousands of years ago our home world was on the brink of collapsing. Our scientists were creating conveyances, looking for locations for our race to evacuate to. One day they spotted a small craft on an intercept course for our world. It was recovered. All the greatest minds of our planet worked determinedly to decipher it. There was a keystone item, what you would call a golden disc, that held information about a species, remarkably similar to yours. There were sounds and scans of beings. The pixels of the scans were incomplete, determined to be from centuries of exposure to cosmic radiation. But we traced the origin of where this vehicle had come from, calculating this was the direction of our salvation. The majority of our arks went that course while others took offshoot paths to find other worlds. After many jumps this led us to your world. Our journey continues though. This was the message from the deity. Using your language, it translates in your tongue to … Voyager.”

  Voyager? The Voyager space probe sent out into space in the ‘70’s? What? How could that even be possible?

   “I’m sorry. You said Voyager? And this was thousands of years ago on your home world? Our planet sent a probe into space sixty of our earth years ago. It was called Voyager. It had recordings of that music that is playing. It had it on a gold disc. How could that be possible?”

   “Once again, I will try to put this in terms you may be moderately capable of understanding. Our travelling is through what your people call worm holes. We use the magnetic force of black holes and the gaps between galaxies to slip through both time and space. We are everywhere. We are, as we interpreted from what your deity said, alpha and omega. We are at the beginning and the end. We are forever. You will ensure we are. Now there will be silence or you will be deemed unrepairable.”

   Lying back down in the fluid, I remained motionless. More from a state of shock than anything else. Our ancient space probe had found this race, become a god to it, and now we were enslaved to the race that worshipped our creation. Traveling through time and space. It was hard to comprehend. As the warm fluid swallowed me, I felt the burning in my arm subside. I found myself retreating deep into my own mind. It had been said many times that we were our own worst enemy. Had we finally proved it? Slipping into the bliss of unconsciousness I savored the time away from the mine, time to escape my fate, if only just for a little while.