Sloughing off our flesh, replacing our eyes with laser-cut lenses, shredding our nerves in favour of optic wires - these choices were easy by comparison to what comes next. We know these invaders have us defeated on every front. We know they are exterminating us. If they are invaders. If they are trying to exterminate us. Truth is we don’t even know if they recognise us as anything more significant than the soil we stand on. We can’t assume that they think like us. We can’t assume that they think.
Nerve agents rampage through our cities and induce grand mal seizures in all they touch. Artificial storms wrack the coastlines, flattening infrastructure. We don’t know who in our ranks is a baseline human and who is a ticking biological bomb. They scoop out the brains of some people and replace that cortex with their own tech, turning them into zombies with lightning-fast reactions and an uncoupled aggression inhibitor.
And yet, there is a gene-targeted virus circulating that dissolves cancerous cells in humans. The fumes exhaled by their airborne machines scrub the atmosphere of excess carbon. Certain frequencies of old radios pick up on strange harmonizations that some of us take to be singing. Eerie and beautiful.
They are so unlike us.
We know what we must do if we are to regain control of the situation. Annihilate all that makes us vulnerable. Empathy. Feeling. Consciousness itself. We can have no hesitation. No mercy. We must become less than human if we are to maintain what little of our species remains. And that is harder to swallow than the excessive mutations we make to our bodies. Because it means becoming closer to one of them.
Paddy Dobson
8th May 2022