If They Come, They Will Come From the Stars

Alessandra never knew much about the stars— after all, her father always said astronomy was just speculation, laced with cautionary footnotes about what its study would do to one’s psyche if investigated too eagerly. It was not worth pause, not today in 2054, and certainly not in the future. What lay in the stars, among and behind them, did not matter when the ground beneath men shifted and melted as they walked, and the line between earth and metal and Hell grew thinner each year.

She still liked to look at them, in the way she could. But the stars could no longer be found above. Now the overhead was instead a permanent white sheet created by pollution and unnatural tampering— something that wasn’t quite cloud or smog, but a wall that pressed down and down and then pulled up in a rush when stared at too directly. If Alessandra was lucky when she decided to look heavenward, the wall of the sky had a little dimple in the corner, a cheeky little kiss of light. Some days it wasn’t the sun, others it was best to tell herself it was and keep a move on. When rain fell down, it seemed to come out of the sky like something stolen, like a deviant had taken the tip of a blade and stabbed little leak sites into the wall along its belly, and now rain spilled forth. When snow loomed, those with money bundled their children in lead-lined plastics to protect their skin. When there was thunder, it was best to stay inside. There were never stars.

The stars, the sun and moon, that particularly ironic shade of blue and the bleeding whorls of sunset and rise— they could be seen only by looking at the electronic flat of a display screen. Alessandra looked anyway; she liked the process of searching up images of the stars, because looking at those things gave her a sickening feeling just above the surface of her skin. It felt like anticipating a disease already seeded in one’s blood, like the shiver before excretion, like hair curling at the nape of the neck the second one slips back into a stimulant. Looking at those pictures, with their retroactively added color, with their time-lapsed orbital whirling of white dots, felt so empty and spaceless it seemed a sin. Perhaps it was a sin, to only have those images as a memory of the sky before the wall. And yet, at the same time it rather felt like a pleasure: to feel the self-flagellation her species had been gunning for, right there in the comfort of her own home, by looking at the screen of her little phone.

On February 16, 2054, the same day Alessandra snuck into a lecture hall at her community college and sat down to hear a particularly un-esteemed assistant professor profess the eternal suffering that occurs when one enters a black hole (a process otherwise known as spaghettification), a man in São Paulo discovered how the world would end, and that it would end by stars. 

His name was Marcelo Clemente Zanetti, and he had just been fired from his position at IAG for leering too openly at the female graduate students. No longer an auxiliary professor of astrophysics, Marcelo sat at home in the twitching light of his desk lamp and wrote what would become his magnum opus. It was a fervent, far too long paper, which lapsed between somewhat dubious statistical science and forecasts of doom with enough vague intricacy to rival the Old Testament. It was never published of course, but when it was sent for review, it did give the reviewers a chance to bond over a chuckle at the gall of Marcelo’s concluding sentence:

When They come, They will come from the stars. 

Upon second look, the astrophysicists were mostly laughing at Marcelo’s use of the Navier-Stokes approximation, but if you were to show his paper to any operário in Cubatão, they would also laugh— because nothing comes from the stars. Nothing that could touch them, at least. 

8,082 kilometers away, Alessandra ran out of a lecture hall because there was bile in her throat, and she was on the verge of emesis. She ended up vomiting 92% lean chicken, brussel sprouts and Doritos on the square tiles of an office-lined hallway, three yards from a trash can. Alessandra’s nausea was the first symptom of a genetic change causing mass cellular disruption throughout her body; her mutation was a completely random occurrence, but also the single most important thing to ever occur on Earth.

Further out in the cosmic web, if an attentive being closed their “eyes,” the sound of Alessandra’s stomach contents hitting the floor lined up rather beautifully with the sound of Marcelo’s coffee cup shattering after he hurled it at his bedroom wall in fear. It was not quite a gigue, but something of the sort. 

A great deal happened over the course of the next half century, in a manner similar to the creation of a snowman. One spends most of their time rolling and rolling and picking out grass, compacting and compounding snow to establish girth, but the creator really only remembers the moment their creation began between their woolen mittens and the soot colored product made in the end. In the same way, the discovery made by Marcelo Clemente Zanetti was of note, as is the day of August 22, 2104, the day humans were wiped from the Earth. 

In between, there was the bustle of other astrophysicists coming to realization that Marcelo’s work was indeed quite accurate, and Huang Yuxin (cited as 黄余馨) received the 2097 Dannie Heineman Prize for coming to approximately 83.6% of Marcelo’s conclusion, but with much better calculations and more subtler proclamations of human annihilation. In 2056, Alessandra graduated from college with a degree in business administration she would never use, and two weeks later realized sleeping on her back made her arms float up unnaturally. In 2078, Alessandra divorced, because she could not explain her reasoning for suddenly loathing the idea of bearing children, nor her growing habit of staring at the same three images of stars for hours on end. Marcelo died in 2084, bludgeoned to death with a telescope by a robber in his own home. 

To the approaching beings, gingerly releasing Their limbs from the edges of the stars, the great maelstrom that occurred on Earth in this span of fifty years was a low cacophonous buzzing, like a cursed ninth symphony They could tune out with ease. They dragged Their fingers along cosmic threads, plucking and weaving like the fabric of spacetime was a golden harp, and took great long strides toward several hundred solar systems simultaneously, of which one held Earth. Their approach began at the Beginning, it ran along a period of time incalculable in our known dimensions, it never ended and has already ceased. The closest a human could get to grasping Their travel would be to be caught on the edge of a black hole, stretched and stretched infinitely and immediately, in the process called spaghettification that a girl named Alessandra, who knew nothing of the stars, was fated to learn of and never forget. 

When They came, They came from the stars.

It was a Friday, and Alessandra lay on the cold cement of her roof, the hard flat of it pressing wickedly into her scapulae and coccyx. She did not know what induced her to climb onto the roof that night, but she was also seventy-one years old, and had done far more preposterous things in her time. The wall of the sky was a dull orange, from reflected light pollution and astrophysically prophesied doom that nobody had been able to pinpoint to the day. But it was August 22, 2104, and the world as humans knew it, indeed human’s ability to breathe and think and know, would end in exactly fifteen minutes. 

Alessandra looked up at that endless, unchanging sheet called sky, saw the dimple of light in its corner, and knew it was not the sun. Then the light doubled, tripled and multiplied, like the mutated cells in her body that contained a unique combination of genetic frameshifts and deletions found in no other human who lived or had ever lived. 

To any other creature, there were no stars to be seen in the sky, but Alessandra saw their light mirrored in her retina, in the tears which leaked down her ears and sank into the concrete. These stars were so much like those pictures she had always stared at since youth, imprinted into her nerves akin to the way microscopic fibers caught in the vitreous haunt normal humans. Green and red, radiating color like the eyes of Iris, twinkling and bobbing and ducking and streaking through the sky, were the stars Alessandra had always seen and never seen. Her sight pushed past the polluted wall of the known sky, past the ability of any optical organ or man-made telescope, and saw every star ever created, destroyed, or planned to be created. The result was a light which expanded past human comprehensible estimation of distance, and glowed so bright and thick with being that it blinded her until tears were replaced with blood. 

Yet still she gazed upward— and the space which most humans had ceased to explore or care for and the stars which had been forgotten and abandoned by laymen, both left only to astronomers who could not save a single life even with all the funding in the world, were hers.

She felt the press of beings, the booming waves made with each stride They took toward Earth and each infinitesimal indentation in their skin as if it were her own. She felt Their call, her call to Them, their mutual pull through that opened dimple of light in the sky, saw Them climb out of the wall of stars and face Earth. They had followed the beacon created by the mutation threaded through Alessandra’s blood, a mutation which was mirrored by a single being on every other planet labeled for destruction. The end of Their journey on Earth was the year 2104, but by principles of creation and a higher order, it had begun and ended with the very conception of creation and loss. 

On each of the several million planets destined for annihilation, whether in the midst of rapturous civilization or minutest gasp of produced life, for the peoples which had achieved the greatest reaches of intelligence or art or heinous creation or nothing at all, their beginning was always their end, and it had been created by one of their own.

  As the beings reached down to those planets and to Earth, as They pulled the threads of man into null and Hell, Alessandra and all her mirrors rose to meet Them.