Hiroshi Sakurazaka - All You Need Is Kill

Rita didn’t have any second thoughts. She only wanted one thing: to kill every last Mimic that had invaded her planet. She knew she could do it. She was her father’s daughter.

3

On the next clear night, look up in the direction of the constellation humanity calls Cancer. Between the pincers of the right claw of that giant crab in the sky sits a faint star. No matter how hard you stare, you won’t see it with the naked eye. It can only be viewed through a telescope with a thirty-meter aperture. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth seven and a half times in a single second, it would take over forty years to reach that star. Signals from Earth scatter and disperse on their journey across the vast gulf between.

On a planet revolving around this star lived life in greater numbers and diversity than that on Earth. Cultures more advanced than ours rose and flourished, and creatures with intelligence far surpassing that of H. sapiens held dominion. For the purposes of this fairy tale, we’ll call them people.

One day, a person on this planet invented a device called an ecoforming bomb. The device could be affixed to the tip of a spacecraft. This spacecraft, far simpler than any similar craft burdened with life and the means to support it, could cross the void of space with relative ease. Upon reaching its destination, the ship’s payload would detonate, showering nanobots over the planet’s surface.

Immediately upon arrival, the nanobots would begin to reshape the world, transforming any harsh environment into one suitable for colonization by the people who made them. The actual process is far more complicated, but the details are unimportant. The spacecraft ferrying colonists to the new world would arrive after the nanobots had already completed the transformation.

The scholars among these people questioned whether it was ethical to destroy the existing environment of a planet without first examining it. After all, once done, the process could not be undone. It seemed reasonable to conclude that a planet so readily adapted to support life from their own world might also host indigenous life, perhaps even intelligent life, of its own. Was it right, they asked, to steal a world, sight unseen, from its native inhabitants?

The creators of the device argued that their civilization was built on advancements that could not be undone. To expand their territory, they had never shied away from sacrificing lesser life in the past. Forests had been cleared, swamps drained, dams built. There had been countless examples of people destroying habitats and driving species to extinction for their own benefit. If they could do this on their own planet, why should some unknown world in the void of space be treated differently?

The scholars insisted that the ecoforming of a planet which might harbor intelligent life required direct oversight. Their protests were recorded, considered, and ultimately ignored.

There were concerns more pressing than the preservation of whatever life might be unwittingly stomped out by their ecoforming projects. The people had grown too numerous for their own planet, and so they required another to support their burgeoning population. The chosen world’s parent star could not be at too great a distance, nor would a binary or flare star suffice. The planet itself would have to maintain an orbit around a G-class star at a distance sufficient for water to exist in liquid form. The one star system that met these criteria was the star we call the sun. They did not worry for long that this one star might be the only one in this corner of the Milky Way that was home to intelligent life like their own. No attempt was made to communicate. The planet was over forty years away at the speed of light, and there was no time to wait eighty years for the chance of a reply.

The spacecraft built on that distant planet eventually reached Earth. It brought with it no members of their species. No weapons of invasion. It was basically nothing more than a construction machine.

When it was detected, the interstellar craft drew the attention of the world. But all Earth’s attempts to make contact went unanswered. Then the ship split into eight pieces. Four of the pieces sank deep under the ocean, while three fell on land. The final piece remained in orbit. The pieces that landed in North Africa and Australia were handed over to NATO. Russia and China fought over the piece that landed in Asia, but China came out on top. After much arguing among the nations of Earth, the orbiting mothership was reduced to a small piece of space junk by a volley of missiles.

The crèche machines that came to rest on the ocean floor began carrying out their instructions quietly and methodically. In the depths, the machines chanced upon echinoderms—starfish. The crèche-produced nanobots penetrated the rigid endoskeletons of the starfish and began to multiply in symbiosis with their hosts.

The resulting creatures fed on soil. They ate the world and shat out poison. What passed through their bodies was toxic to life on Earth, but suitable for the people who had sent them. Slowly, the land where the creatures fed died and became desert. The seas where they spread turned a milky green.

At first it was thought that the creatures were the result of mutations caused by chemical runoff, or perhaps some prehistoric life form released by tectonic activity. Some scientists insisted it was a species of evolved salamander, though they had no evidence to support their conclusion. Eventually, these new creatures formed groups and began venturing out of the water. They continued their work to reshape the earth with no regard for the society of man.

When they first appeared on land, the alien xenoformers were not weapons of war. They were sluggish, and a group of armed men could easily dispatch them. But like cockroaches that develop resistance to pesticides, the alien creatures evolved. The crèche machines that created them concluded that in order to fulfill their objective of xenoforming the planet, they would have to remove the obstacles standing in their way.

War engulfed the world. The damage wrought was swift and massive. In response, a worldwide United Defense Force was established. Mankind had a name for the enemy that had brought the world to the brink of ruin. We called them Mimics.

4

Rita Vrataski joined U.S. Special Forces after the battle that earned her the Thor’s Medal of Valor. The medal, which bears a likeness of said deity brandishing a hammer, is awarded to any soldier who kills ten or more Mimics in a single battle. The Mimics had emerged as the only foe capable of standing against a platoon of fifty armed infantry raining a hail of bullets. Few Thor medals needed to be struck.

The officer who hung the gleaming medal around Rita’s neck praised her for joining the elite ranks of those who could claim to have taken down a double handful of Mimics. Rita was the first soldier in history to receive the honor on her second battle. There were some who wondered aloud, to her face, how Rita could have possibly acquired the skills needed to accomplish such a feat by what was only her second field operation. Rita answered them with a question of her own:

“Is cooking dangerous?”

Most would answer no. But what is a gas range but a short-range flame thrower? Any number of flammable materials might lie waiting beneath the average kitchen sink. Shelves lined with pots could weaken and fall in an avalanche of iron and steel. A butcher’s knife could kill as easily as a dagger.

Yet few people would consider cooking a dangerous profession, and indeed, the actual danger is remote. Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen is familiar with the inherent risks, such as they are, and knows what can be done safely and what can’t. Never throw water on an oil fire, keep the knife pointed away from your carotid artery, don’t use rat poison when the recipe calls for parmesan cheese.