The Last Human Horror

I remember their faces. I remember the pasty flesh, covered in dirt, grit and the appearance on those faces of the solemn reality before them: extinction. It was the eyes that troubled me then, and trouble me now. It was those sad, blue and green and brown eyes, the eyes of those human creatures, so sad and filled with resolve to die, that haunt me in my quiet dreams.

I am two-hundred and seventy-five years old, according to the Earth calendar. I was born in a distant quadrant of the cosmos, and that location is in fact so far removed from this blue sphere of Terra that, where I to speak the distance, men would die of age before the count finished. Let us just say, it is far, far removed from Earth.

My appearance is unimportant, for I am like countless other life-forms. I exist. Particulars are irrelevant. My race, the “Gruug” (pronounced Groog), are a technologically advanced race, and our purpose, up until we stumbled upon the home-world of mankind, was one of absolution erasure. We specialized in the eradication of lesser forms of life, paving the way for a clean cosmic highway for the higher echelons of evolution. It was a dirty occupation, if your tastes ran against such endeavors. My kind had always known this work. It was the way of things.

Earth. To us, it was a name that suggested placid waiting. For some reason we viewed the blue and green orb of diversity as some terrible secret, tucked away beneath a dead and dying ideal for some sleeping, cosmic leviathan in slumber. It was almost a pun among the conversationalists of my race, few though they were. We are a quiet people, saying only that which need be said, so it was a powerful shock to the depths of our ranks when we heard all the NOISE coming from that little blue planet.

Radio signals. Broadcasts of moving pictures with sound. Screaming mobs in the warring nations of the planet. People constantly making noise. Several of my superiors actually committed shen-ka (suicide) over the conflagrations of noise in your bionosphere! All around this little blue ball of life, we heard the thunders of overkill, the screeching of assimilation, and the quiet need for a bath of disinfectant.

We came to the planet eons past, to begin watching the new race known as man. We witnessed his ingenuity. We watched his genius evolve from the quagmire of pack hunters into walled castles of depraved dictators with worship of false gods and pieces of wood. We listened as he stood on the moon and declared himself a demi-god. We watched him atomize an island of his own kind and shoot his superior in the brain case. We watched all of this with a mixture of revulsion, and severe detachment. We watched, and we grew tired of watching.

As I thought-write all of this into my memory crystal, I am somber. My kind has always had an anathema view of emotions, not like the characters in the television shows that mankind used like a mind-altering substance to hide from his secret natures, but because we had no need for such things. Emotions simply got in the way when one needed to be decisive. Hesitation, as in all life situations, was death. We never did, and so we never died. It was a circular way of thinking that worked.

What made me somber was the day of our assault upon that blue orb called Earth, and not merely the fact that one day was all we needed to eradicate all life from the planet. It will forever etch itself into my multi-brain, and I am not the same creature I was before.

We arrived at earth en masse on what many human’s called Christmas. It was supposedly a celebration of life. One group of humans celebrated a rather large and porcine man, whom they referred to as “jolly old elf”. In our tongue, the word elf means “decay”.

Another group of humans pledged that day to be the birth of their “savior”, some super-human entity of unequaled status and power, yet he was always depicted in this celebration as a newborn human, which was strange to us. It was insane. But then again, the insanity of man had kept him alive so far.

The ideas which man had cultivated for generations regarding visitors from distant worlds was sorely lacking in reality. There was no delegation holding up an appendage. There were no mathematically-attuned musical notes played on a massive instrument. There were no radio broadcasts about an invasion. There was, in all reality, no warning we had arrived. There was no way for man to group up his resources and announce us because, quite frankly, when we actually arrived planet-side, mankind was already set back almost 200 years technologically.

We disabled any and all electrically powered devices on the planet surface in the first hour using nothing but our collective wills alone. Ours is a psionic race, and we only use machines in war when we are fatigued. Otherwise, we use our mental bombs.

By the middle of the second hour, all mechanical devices had lost their function and motion properties: wheels stopped turning. Pulleys stopped their work. Springs lost their coil. Locks lost their security.

Within the first few minutes of the fourth hour, the planet had gone mad with shock. Their were masses of people in large metropolitan areas looting, rioting, and creating madness for those who claimed responsibility for being in charge of things down there. There was no longer a societal pecking order in place.

Without his machines and normalcy of daily life, man lost his mind.

Perhaps the horror of what we had set into motion hit me for the first time when I was shown a view on-screen of a southern area of the planet, known by the natives as “Venezuela”. There, the chaos of the upper American-named places was the same in the cities, but there were large tracts of space between those cities, places where man had not the need for all that machinery, where he lived a primitive yet rewarding life among the darkened trees and rivers of his ancientness. There, the chaos was eerily serene.

This was the horror, the horror that mankind had attempted to write about for ages, but had not quite grappled with correctly. It was the horror of knowing that all around you, all about you in the distant rumbles of a world un-forming, you were utterly alone as the world around you was being systematically annihilated. The horror came into focus as I realized that the beings living in that paradise-come-madhouse had no idea what was happening, or the finality of what was to come.

By hour five of our task, all of the oxygen of the planet earth was half-converted into what human beings called methane. It was the perfect way to sterilize a planet of possible resistance fighters, when all of them breathed oxygen. We were not, after all, here to conquer and subjugate, but to deaden and cleanse.

Upon the arrival of hour seven, my resolve to follow the dictates of my superiors without complaint had reached the end of its cycle of life. I zoomed my view screen in on a home in suburban Canada, as it was known to the Terrans. There sat a young human female, perhaps seven or so years old, looking up into the sky, with a look of complete and utter defeat. She did not so much look afraid, as she looked….done with it all.

What unnerved me about the scene entire was the fact that she appeared to be looking right into my own multi-faceted, lime green eyes. It was as if destiny for her and her race had led her to look to her murderers with accusation, but resolve to accept the fate dealt her. I have seen many a planet scoured of life, but never have I seen the face of humanity repeated in such wrenching horror. The face of humanity was one of emotion, sometimes hidden, sometimes openly displayed for the onlooker to fear or shy from. Sometimes man was a beautiful creature, and sometimes, just sometimes, his sneers could freeze a star. What a terrible and enormous power it was that we erased from the galactic timeline…

Perhaps the next planet of sentients I help destroy will not offer so much expression…