EATING MACHINE
As brisk April mornings go, this one in particular was no different in most respects. The sun was bright and the air crisp and cool, yet some small clouds rose high on the horizon and blackened into storm clouds. No one thought the world was about to end.
The cube sat fixed in place on the lawn of a small house in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. It was not large, each face was nine feet in the diagonal, so it was by no means small either. It was made of dull gray metal, brushed to avoid sheen. It emitted a low hum. The owner of the house, the owner of a local general store, really had no idea what the cube was. He found it most odd, in fact, that it appeared out of nowhere in his front yard, particularly because he had to mow the lawn that day. He was also annoyed because it was quite heavy and would most certainly
disrupt his precious lawn, to which he had devoted so much care.
The media arrived soon afterward. Either of its own accord or in reaction to the presence of the media, the hum grew louder, into a piercing whine. Sounds of rumbling and bulges in the ground followed soon after. The army and scientists from various universities arrive at almost the same time. Upon performing seismic tests, they found the cube was apparently drilling into the ground. The lawn was definitely ruined.
After a few hours the whine stopped, the low hum resuming quickly. A small device, about the size of a basketball but conical in shape rose up out of the top of the cube and flew off, towards the ocean. Hours later, the cone returned and re-entered the cube.
After several days of no activity the low hum became louder and a small antenna extended from the side of the cube, beaming some unknown signal into the stars. Tracing the beam, something huge loomed.
It took a full year for the machine to arrive. It glided silently past Pluto, past Neptune and Uranus, past Saturn and mighty Jupiter. It glided through the asteroid belt, impervious to the wrath of the flying stones. It glided past Mars and found the Earth.
It followed the electronic beam to the Earth, a shining blue marble in the infinity of space, heated by the merciless sun and followed by the envious moon. The tides were the first thing to change. The gravity of the huge thing ripped the tides into new patterns. As the giant thing orbited the Earth it blotted the sun daily. It was a giant golden sphere, made of polished metal, shiny like a second sun, at night it drowned the light of the moon. It grew closed and closer until its polished surface touched the very atmosphere itself.
The giant sphere polished and perfect like a second, but much larger, moon hung silently, the Earth's partner,
Or, its nemesis. Men from the Earth launched their primitive space machines and landed on its golden surface. They probed, prodded, examined, x-rayed, and did all measure of things to it; its nature remained a mystery. No bomb could damage it, no weapon could pierce its mercurial skin.
Hanging like the devil's Christmas ornament the great sphere ominously loomed over the great ocean. It hung in space silently until something opened on the surface facing the ocean, and a great tube, wider then a thousand football field and longer than anything ever conceived of by mortal men reached down from on high and poked itself into the ocean. Through fantastic mechanical power the waters of the ocean were pulled up into the great silent sphere. The fish and all life were sucked out of it, ejected by the great machine as it drained the ocean. As the water flowed into the great reservoir it was decomposed through electrolysis and made into its basic components of hydrogen and oxygen,
which were cooled, compressed, and stored. The water level
of the ocean was drained at fantastic speed, the great machine accomplishing its work quickly.
In one year the whole of the Earth's oceans had been converted into hydrogen and oxygen, or the sole purpose of fueling the great machine. They fired bombs and missiles and shells and artillery at it, it moved silently and ignored them, leaving a vast ocean of mud and rotting fish. Silently and rapidly it moved through the edge of the atmosphere over the Earth, to Asia. It unleashed a horde of great machines, each the size of a battleship, which flew at fantastic speed and stripped vegetation and soil to the very edge of the Earth's crust, leaving a vast plain of dead rock. It moved at great speed and did this to the whole of the earth, and the great machine, consumed all life and broke it down into its base elements.
The great machine rammed a probe to the very center of the earth, taking in the heat of its core to charge batteries, until the lack of heat made the earth cold, a great, blackened stone. The great machine sucked up the
entire atmosphere and separated the mixture, compressing the various gasses in great tanks.
The machine dragged a huge thing like a jaw over the surface of the earth, pulling up and purifying the sand into pure silicon. This done it moved and and drilled to remove the iron core of the earth, tearing the earth in half with explosions. It left the earth and settled into an orbit around the sun, to absorb energy from it. It left the earth, once a pristine thing of unimaginable beauty, a great frozen stone, a dead world hanging in dead space, whirling around an uncaring sun.
The machine settled into its orbit and began its fiendish work. It made a new horde of the probe-cubes, sending them out in every direction, to find new worlds to victimize.
Unmoving and remorseless, the machine sat humming, performing its cold, unfeeling tasks. It set about refining the materials it collected, and prepared them in stores to
power it to the next planet. Still, its primary task was incomplete.
The machine's great internal works started, fueled by batteries charged with the heat stolen from a dead world, using materials stolen from the hulk of a forgotten, cold world. It set about chugging and making smoke and all manner of things as it made its product, pounding metal into new shapes and making its needed and necessary product, a key resource for the civilization that created it.
The metal stolen from earth was melted down and pressed into sheets. The sheets were pounded into shapes. The shapes were attached to each other by welding. The welded shapes took their final form. Shaped and polished and perfect, the metal was hung in great racks.
The machine had destroyed a world to make spaceship exhaust systems.
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