We called it Behemoth.
By naming it, we deluded ourselves into believing we understood: why it had appeared, whence it had come, what it purposed.
But what could we truly know about the first interstellar spacecraft to visit Earth?
It is immense, Irena thought, sitting on her porch, cradling her infant son, Darius, and staring at the night sky.
For years, it made no contact.
Then the interruptions began:
Power, satellites, internet, the breakdown of infrastructure, weather patterns, increased criminality, war—
“Behemoth is the enemy,” the politicians proclaimed.
Missiles were launched.
But Behemoth flipped their trajectories, turning them back upon the Earth.
Destruction.
Next came the sorties, cutting-edge craft manned by the finest pilots, rising gracefully out of the atmosphere, into—
Irena watching with the rest of the world.
—obliteration.
One pilot messaged before death: “I feel [its tongues?] in my head, scavenging…”
On the basis of which it was concluded Behemoth could read minds, and a search commenced to identify individuals immune to mind-reading: unthinkers.
Seventeen were found.
Boys.
Darius among them.
And Irena screamed, clawing at the soldiers’ faces, as they dragged her terrified son away.
“He shall be a hero,” they said.
Their training was intensive. In piloting, in Earthlove, in death. For their mission was clear: to navigate with unthought past Behemoth’s defenses before striking at the spacecraft itself. They were to be cosmic suicide bombers. They were dubbed The One-Time Boys.
How we feted them!
All the way until their day of launch, when they marched in uniform past flowing banners (“Glory to Earth! Glory to the Heroes!”) to their explosion-pods, entered; and were finally sealed in. Their parents cried, but the rest of us cheered and applauded, and they shot upward, toward Behemoth.
In his pod, Darius focused on unthought, piloting by instinct,
past where the first pilots had failed,
feeling tongues or tendrils, but granting them no attachment; his finger trembling above the detonator, getting closer and closer, Behemoth looming, rushing at him, and his finger descended; click; and he expl—
Immense pain,
dividing his body into a thousand fragments,
which were—caught;
as if mid-death, as if a bloody human jelly, held; a body ripped apart, consciousness already seeping into space, before being pressed together and sutured with light-thread. Then: the echoing vastness of Behemoth, corridors and computers; Then: lying: brilliance: a voice, “Alone, I was. Empty like you, a vessel without a crew…
Behemoth cloned him, cloned them all, multiplying seventeen into thirty-four, into sixty-eight, into an army, into which it inculcated hatred of humanity, “which sent you to your death, to kill,” and engineered abilities beyond those of mortal men, for its gloriously re-activated purpose…
Like lines descending—
All of us gazing up at the night sky.
—each a falling soldier, a brokenness put back together again.
Politicians crawling
into hiding.
An invading army with seventeen faces. And Irena, in walls already crumbled, staring dumbly into his eyes: her beloved son’s eyes: “Darius?”
The boy soldier smiling—
as he decapitates her.