Page 24 of Them

For now.

In the lighter’s frail glow, the man stared at the watch on his wrist, but the hands didn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t sit still. He felt his eyes wanting to lower, his knees begging to give. Safe, yes, but he was unsteady. Beginning to slip.

He did not explore the house. Did not sweep the rooms in his usual ritual. This time around, the man only needed a basement bedroom where the sun could not find him.

There are people out there. I have to believe that. People who dug deep and stayed quiet. People still out there keeping on, fighting the only good fight that’s left. Survival.

My job isn’t done yet, I know. My penance. I can help whoever is left. I can give them hope, tell them that this isn’t something of biblical proportions. This is not the Rapture, just our own hubris making itself known. I think that will be easier to deal with. To accept.

There may even come a time when new souls are born into this world. Perhaps there already have been. They deserve an explanation, don’t you think? They must bear witness to the artifacts, walk amid the rubble. That probably gives one hope too. To know that we once ruled the world. That we were kings and queens on thrones of silicon intelligence and opposable thumbs.

I have not atoned for my sins. I doubt I ever will, but there is a path I can follow. One of accountability. Of repentance.

And when I at last lay myself bare before my fellow survivors, I will let them exact whatever justice as they wish.

That brings me back to where we began, reader. To July 5, 2022. The point of no return.

Adam’s death told us two things. The first was what they looked like in full: metallic alligators on tripods. The second was that they couldn’t survive in Earth’s atmosphere. Adam lasted mere minutes.

The teleportation cannon didn’t fire many times after we brought Adam back, but Project Artemis wasn’t done. Oh, hell no. We were too zealous to end it there, and that generalization doesn’t exclude me. I wish I could say that it did.

Their biology became clear to us as we dissected our prizes. A Scorpion has an obvious mouth that inhales and a semi-hidden nasal passage on the back of the head that exhales. Its sinus corridors are hard tubes that wrap around the internal skull casing and cradle a rigid, metallic brain.

Seven highly sensitive tongue-like organs endow them with tracking abilities that far eclipse those of any terrestrial creature. We never found the upper limit of their sense of smell, but only because we didn’t have a cage big enough to exceed their range. While they possess daylight vision on par with an eagle’s, their bioluminescent eyes also offer immense advantages underwater and in low-light conditions. It’s a small miracle that they’re so defensive at night. They’re like… children in that regard. They used to cry when we shut the lights off. As if a creature with glowing eyes could be afraid of the dark.

They like the rain. They sing when it rains.

There’s a heart, but it isn’t quite a heart—not as we know it. Instead, there are several pumps stretched along the length of its body that keep the chromatic blue blood flowing. It relies on water as much as a human, if not more, and processes food with the mouth, then through a series of thin winding tubes, and finally defecates via an orifice at the bottom of the stalk, next to the tail’s onset. The stinger isn’t merely a weapon, either, but contains something similar to a penis. The womb is whatever corpse is closest, so long as it’s another Scorpion’s. That’s how they were. That’s how they should be.

The issue with the Scorpions was in their lungs. That’s what killed Adam. The atmosphere he came from was composed of ordinary elements in extreme proportions.

That was when I began working more closely with Weisbrot. His sheepish personality grew on me as the months passed. He was a dreamer, sure, but he wasn’t afraid to push back either. Not even against me, but my personal relationships are of little consequence. What you must know is that, through complex processes I oversaw but did not fully understand, the Scorpions were genetically modified with human DNA to repair their breathing.

“Repair?” That’s not the right word. They weren’t broken. It was more like replacing the wheels of a car with boat propellers. So they could be more like us. They were out of place. They weren’t supposed to be here, let alone breathe our air. But we fixed them anyway. Spliced Adam’s respiratory system with human stem cells, just like Weisbrot hypothesized in his college thesis. Piece by piece, their alien genetic code was rewritten to fit our environment.

And then we birthed them. Deeper still into the basement. Enormous test tubes bubbling with limey paste. It took nearly three years of trial and error, but soon enough they walked our world as easily as their arachnoid namesake. Dozens of them in giant pens hundreds of feet below the surface. Living creatures of flesh and blood and steel. We would’ve done whatever it took to understand them. To dominate them. Even a single obedient Scorpion could’ve changed the course of history. A weapon as lethal as any bomb with potentially alien precision. An amphibious tank on three legs. An assassin that would leave all witnesses in a state of otherworldly terror.

But taming them seemed out of the question once it became apparent that even containing a Scorpion was a tall order. At least they were easy to feed. Adam’s autopsies revealed a gut biome evolved for cannibalism, yet if they became hungry enough, the captive aliens would eat almost anything that bled. They preferred one another’s flesh above all else, but we couldn’t afford to have our test subjects repeatedly devouring each other. Live goats or cows would suffice when the creatures were starving, but only then. Otherwise, they simply killed whatever we gave them and saved it for later, just in case we didn’t let them kill one another for an extended period of time.

We never prevented the Scorpions from cannibalizing for longer than a few weeks. Otherwise, their shells would begin to soften. Like a crab after molting. A little sad, I think. Having to eat your own kin to stay safe.

Some techs joked that if we starved them long enough, the Scorpions would probably even eat rocks. That would’ve been a good idea, actually. That would’ve saved us a lot of trouble.

Humans were another story entirely. The test subjects attacked people whenever given the chance, regardless of their most recent meal. The hatchlings devoured almost two dozen handlers, a number that was growing a tad too high to remain inconspicuous. There was never anything left to bury, with even the bones digested.

There was also never enough of a corpse left to impregnate, so we assumed they were incapable of implanting their seed into another species. They never nested in any of the animals we gave them, pigs and cows and horses, only in each other’s viscera. It didn’t matter whether it was a “volunteer” offered up from death row or a technician in a hazmat suit they snatched; the Scorpions shredded humans within minutes. We had no reason to believe they could reproduce with an earthly life-form.

Was it all part of some indecipherable plot to escape? Or the behavior of animals in captivity? I’m not sure there’s a difference. Maybe they didn’t even know what they could do. Not yet.

We were running out of ideas. The Scorpions refused our will each and every time we pressed it upon them, but still we never stopped. We never learned.

There was a laboratory embedded in the foothills of Maine, past Waterville and Bangor and all civilization save for the quiet and unsuspecting mountain town of Chamonee. It, like the New Mexico airbase that housed Artemis, was a Cold War relic. A fervent dash to develop mind control technology simply because we’d heard the Russians were doing the same.

They called it Empathy Base.

The lab coats found early encouragement with rats not long after the base’s establishment, which kept the machine rolling, but complex mammals proved more elusive. They finally broke through to canines and felines in the late ’80s. When Bush was in office—which one, I’ll let you guess—they managed a slippery grasp on humans. Nowhere near field ready, but even scant progress keeps the greenery flowing. If anyone could’ve controlled the Scorpions, it was the brains at Empathy Base.

Empathy asked Weisbrot to arrange for the shipment of three live test subjects to Maine, along with a request for his transfer from New Mexico. They believed his expertise would prove invaluable when it came to dominating the extraterrestrial minds and bodies he’d studied so closely.