Low rumbles reverberated through the steel chamber. Akemi sat primly at its centre, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed, not a single hair out of place. Doors as thick as she was tall shuddered apart, and summer-warmed air poured in. She waited a moment for the dizziness to fade, then opened her eyes. Four decades into the future, her lab was still pristine, and blessedly empty. She stepped neatly out of the bowels of her machine.
It must be a strange feeling to have caused an apocalypse that has happened yet. Can you describe it?
Disappointment. I never got the chance to better the experiment, and now I might never find out if it could've worked.
Is that all?
That's all there is.
The familiar whirring of centrifuges and motors was gone, replaced by silence so absolute it was oppresive. As a rule, Akemi did not like feeling things. It complicated matters, and it interfered with reason and logic. But as she pulled up the gleaming blinds and gazed out at the world beyond, she could not help but feel a prickle of fear. The city spread before her was empty. No vehicles stood shimmering in the heat, no people stood clustered around the cafes and boutiques, no airplanes roared overhead. Odd, tufty weeds pushed through the cracks in the roads and the pavements and the buildings. It was as if the city was a toy that had been stored away after after being outgrown, collecting dust and waiting for something that would never come.
It was fear that kept Akemi hovering at the threshold of the lab. The sensible thing was to go out and investigate; she knew there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Perhaps air pollutants or harmful radiation from the sun had forced the city to move underground. Perhaps LA had become a ghost town. But fear was a powerful drug, and with her senses clouded so, Akemi could not bring herself to go out.
Had she been thinking clearly, she might have wondered why her lab had been so meticulously maintained, when the rest of the city was in disrepair.
What are the creatures like?
They are what they made themselves to be.
Could you elaborate on that?
That's like asking me to describe to you a colour that you have never seen before.
Try, please.
The... circumstances.. of their creation are unique. It would follow that their structure is unique too. From what little testing I could do before my arrest, I found that they were able to exert conscious control over themselves at a molecular level, shaping their bodies as they observed their surroundings . what?-yes, yes, write it down, and a fat lot of help it'll do you or anyone else.
Are they intelligent?
More so than any other creature on this Accursed planet.
A sprawling, almost liquid shadow fell across the city. Trembling slightly, Akemi looked up, and went deathly pale. Unbidden, a word came to her lips, one from conspiracy theories and research papers on UFOs and all the other things she didn't believe in Aliens.
The craft was wide, almost like a hovering deck. Silhouettes milled atop it, distorted by the shimmering air. With trembling hands, Akemi reached for the binoculars in the cabinet near the window, and trained them upon the vessel.
The creatures were reflections of life in trick mirrors. Their bodies were vaguely human; some had the rectangular pupils of a goat or the sharp golden irises of eagles, some had falcon wings growing from their backs, some had the barbed tails of crocodiles and fewer still had curving tusks of elephants. As Akemi watched, a condor flew by one of the creatures with antelope horns. It deftly picked the bird from the sky, shredding her wing and gazing intently at the way the muscles were arranged. Red lumps of similar muscle began to appear on its back.
Akemi put the binoculars down, bile rising. It was not hard to imagine what had happened to the people.
Where do they come from? Deep space?
They have no origin. They are self created entities, and they simply are.
Could you explain that?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's the same thing for the creatures. They birth themselves and nest in paradoxes; there is no beginning or end to them, just a loop that allows no disturbance.
Something glimmered in the corner of Akemi's eyes. She whipped around, and found herelf facing rows of robin-blue eggs near the heater, stacked neatly within incubating containers. An idea seized her, quick as lightning. If she took them back home to 2021, she could hatch them in a lab and find potential weaknesses; she could stave off the alien invasion. Heart pounding, she began to load the containers into the chamber.
The hovercraft flew right by the window, and the creatures leaned in to watch. They didn't seem to have any interest in stopping her.
Akemi shrieked, and began to close the doors. Somewhere past the window, she could see a woman in a grey prison jumpsuit with matted hair stumbling toward the lab. The aliens continued watching, impassive.
"You'll cause this invasion if you hatch them! Stop!" The woman screamed. But the air pressure dropped within the time travel chamber, and the doors clicked shut just as the woman fell to her knees. Akemi blearily throught that the woman had looked an awful lot like her, then put it down to dizziness. She slumped down as the machine rumbled.
What happened to the eggs?
What do eggs do? I was arrested before I could fully secure them, and the hatchlings escaped. They used me as a template to shape their first bodies, but hidden from us, they will grow to the very same creatures I first saw destroying humanity four decades hence.
Thank you, Dr. Rothson.
Author's Note :
I used the concept of a Bootstrap Paradox for this story! I'm not sure how well i could get it across in this story, so do look it up, it's very interesting.!
