Bastards!
I watch as Brandon dies. I flip him.
Bastards!
Flanagan dies. I flip him.
Bastards!
Lena, curse her rotten fucking soul, is having sex with two astonishingly gorgeous DRs. I’m attuned to her mind, so I can see everything she sees. But somehow, her images blur. She seems to be seeing from different eyes. And she’s bloody well having sex! I can’t believe that whore. All the same it’s…
Alliea dies. I flip her.
Harry dies. I flip him.
Harry dies again. I flip him.
Harry dies again. Careless fucking fool. I ought to let him… I flip him.
Jamie dies. I flip him.
Flanagan dies. I…
Flanagan
I see a joyful scene.
The streets are paved with bodies, once again. Blood trickles and pools and we stamp on dead human flesh as we make our way down the boulevard. But at the end of the street, a dozen DRs are vacantly standing. Their guns hang limply by their sides. At their feet are hundreds of human beings, calmly waiting for death. But death does not come.
The human intelligences controlling the DRs are crumbling. They cannot cope with the idea that an entire planet of human beings can stand against them. They are stressed, and fazed, and totally fucked up by the endless self-sacrifice and heroism they are encountering.
That aspect of my plan, the part I always doubted, is actually working. The spirit of the human population of Cambria has collectively defied the robot oppression. Their sacrifice has bought us time, has sapped the enemy spirit, has undermined their confidence and self-belief.
These killer robots are not, in fact, all-powerful gods. They are inhabited by the minds of spoiled and pampered Earth system dwellers. They are millionaires, sybarites, they have swimming pools in their houses and second homes in the Asteroid Belt. They are white-collar workers, but such is the endless wealth of the Earth system that few of them need to work more than ten or eleven hours a week. The rest of the time they can devote to self-indulgence, and mandatory DR duties.
These fucking gutless softies have ruled my planet for over a century. But at the first sign of opposition, they are crumbling. We easily massacre the DRs at the end of the street. Before long, DRs start committing suicide in front of us – blowing off their own heads in order to send their minds back to the comfort and total security of the Earth system.
It takes us forty-two hours to conquer the entire planet.
Brandon
Three DRs appear in front of me and sing, “I can’t get no satisfaction” in beautiful three-part harmony. I’m freaked. I know who Harry, Alliea, Jamie and Flanagan are. Lena is the only one of us unaccounted for. So which of the DRs is the real Lena?
“Who are you?” asks one of the DRs.
“I’m Brandon,” I say.
“I’m Lena,” says the redhaired Lena.
“No I’m Lena,” the gorgeous one says.
“No I’m Lena!” says the Guy DR and they all giggle.
I think I’m missing something here.
“The battle’s over,” I tell the Lenas.
“Shame, we missed all the fun,” redhaired Lena says scornfully.
Flanagan joins us.
“Three Lenas,” I explain.
Flanagan raises his blaster and blows the heads off the Guy Lena and the Redhaired Lena.
“One’s enough,” he says mildly.
Lena screams with genuine horror. “Do you know how that felt?” she hisses.
“Lena, you’re a coward,” Flanagan tells her.
“Well, yeah.”
“I need you.”
“I know.”
“Let’s do it.”
Flanagan
Like every planet owned by the Galactic Corporation, Cambria is armed with an astonishingly powerful alien- defence armoury. A ring of satellites are equipped with force fields, force nets, fusion bombs, and every other human weapon created. These weapons are of course controlled remotely via the Quantum Beacon by powerful computers on Earth. No human or DR on Cambria has authority or wherewithal to unleash anti-alien weaponry. The stakes are too high for that.
The millions of space sensors are on constant alert for the slightest trace of Bugs, BULs, Glugs, Frondies or Sparklers. Monsters from Outer Space, in other words.
We storm the space headquarters. We encounter no resistance. The DRs are all inert. Their strategy was clearly to sit it out until we were good and tired; and then attack again in force.
Forty-seven hours ten minutes have elapsed since our arrival on Cambria.
We hack into a computer link to the Space Factory, on board which ten thousand human miners work at fashioning complex metals and fabrics out of the stuff of stars and planets.
We then fake a radio transmission which is beamed out in zipped encrypted form to the Space Factory, then transmitted back to us at the space HQ. This transmission is, of course picked up by the satellite sensors and conveyed immediately to the computers on Earth.
The message is brief, and unclear, but the gist goes like this:
ME:… no hope any more, can you hear me, out?
BRANDON: Space Probe One, I am not receiving clearly, say again, say again.
ME: We’re infested with Bugs. They’ve taken over the Quantum Beacon. I repeat…
The signal fades.
And so the word is out on the street. The Bugs have invaded! But will the computers take the bait?
The Bugs, scientists think, exist at a subatomic as well as an atomic level. This explains how Bugs can penetrate any partition, apart from the crushed space of a Quantumarity. They can fly through open space. They are invulnerable. They are unstoppable. They are the most deadly thing ever created by that heartless bastard god of evolution.
If the Bugs could escape their cage and enter a Quantum Beacon… who could say what might happen? Could a Bug Army emerge, instantaneously and intact, in the Sol system? If that happened, then all the citizens of Earth and its neighbouring space colonies would die a hideous death.
