The Girl Who Came Shrink Wrapped - Redux
Chapter 4

Copyright© 2012 by Marcia R. Hooper

The galaxy she chose was globular this time. Sidling up to it, she idled for a time and watched with interest as the entire structure rotated like an immense swarm of fireflies. When able, she inserted herself feet first into the fray near the north pole (well, one of poles of rotation, anyway), choosing this location for the lower rate of spin. Shrinx had no trouble matching the cluster's rotation. As before, she oriented herself to observe the various planetary systems from above. Pretty much at random, she selected an un-noteworthy yellow-white star with an entourage of unremarkable planets. Or so she thought. Approaching the fourth planet out, she got a surprise.

"Professor?"

Grove reacted to her excitement. "What is it Kellie?"

"Would you believe, a spaceship?"

The craft, though tiny compared to Kellie's vast bulk--no bigger round than an eyelash and only half the length-it had to be of immense proportions to even be visible at this scale. An uneducated guess, which Grove concurred with originally but increased by half upon further reflection, was ten miles in diameter and a hundred miles long. It was incredible that Kellie had seen it at all. Upon reflection, she guessed it was the weird distortion surrounding the vehicle that she'd seen, not the spaceship itself. Encapsulated in a bean-sized shell that was at once transparent, and highly reflective, the object was hard not to notice.

"Wow, this thing is fast," Kelly marveled. It approached and circled her equatorially, and then longitudinally, never venturing closer than two arms length. She remained still, but Shrinx watched the intruder with a jaundiced eye, thrumming in her bones, flickering in her field. There was no missing how the pulsing light tracked the craft's movements, circling her as the craft circled. As menacing as it looked to her, she could imagine how the aliens reacted, their gulps of discomfort and glances of alarm. She wasn't surprised when the craft withdrew to four arms distance instead of two. There it sat and shone anxiously.

She whispered to Shrinx: "Don't shoot them if they don't do anything overtly hostile." God, where did she learn to talk like that? "Remember, we're the intruder here, not them. Only highly intelligent beings could build something as big as that ship and pilot it the way they do. I can't begin to think how fast they were going."

Slowly, a crawl in comparison to its previous speed, the spacecraft inched inward and came to hover over Kellie's chest. She moved only her head, tucking her chin to her collarbone to keep the vessel in sight. It worried her than Shrinx pulsed brightly directly beneath the craft. Take it easy, she thought. They aren't being bad boys. She realized it was affecting the attitude of the ship, possibly interfering with its propulsion system, making it wobble dangerously; the surrounding, cocoon-like field began to flicker unstably.

"Shrinx!" A finger of luminescence extended slowly toward the ship, touched the field and slowly eased the ship away. Kellie relaxed as the cocoon became stable again. The finger of luminescence withdrew and Kellie, and assumedly the aliens, relaxed. The craft was now the size of a rice grain, the cocoon an inch-long lozenge. In a whisper, she advised Grove.

"Imagine the odds of stumbling onto advanced, intelligent life," he sighed. "Incredible. I'd give anything to be there to see them."

Kellie wished she could grant him that wish. "How did they build something that size?" she wondered.

"Very carefully," Grove answered dryly. "The resources required to build it must have been staggering. Can you imagine the square footage just of its hull? If that thing is metal, it would be equivalent to an entire city's worth of steel, or aluminum, or some kind of very durable alloy. The engines alone must be enormous, simply gargantuan. What kind of fuel would it use? Anti-matter? Nuclear fusion? Do you see any type of exhaust? How can they tolerate the speeds you describe? The g-forces would be horrendous. It almost rules out any kind of organic life."

He continued along this vein, muttering to himself while Kellie watched the hovering ship. There was no kind of exhaust she could see, nor any hint that exhaust gases were responsible for the ship's movement. Because of its still tiny size, Kellie could make out no detail on the hull whatsoever. It appeared completely smooth, lightly polished, seamless. Of course, it was barely the size of a mouse turd. She laughed at the comparison, and then blinked as the vessel turned and accelerated away.

"It's gone, Professor."

Grove was disappointed. "I would have thought that'd make contact, or try to. But then again, you are the size of small planet. Anything human-size would be completely invisible to you at your scale. Perhaps they'll revisit when you've become a bit smaller. Wait and see, I guess. In the meantime, what do you make of the planets?"

Kellie described what she saw. Only the 4th planet with its single, oddly colored moon seemed hospitable. The planet was mostly land-mass, with reflective white poles and a number of huge, inland seas. No body of water could be called an ocean. She estimated the ratio of land to water at 75/25.

"How odd," Grove mused. "That doesn't seem possible, does it? Maybe the planet sustained some kind of catastrophic event in the distant past, which vaporized most of the water, blowing it off into space. Maybe the surface is overly porous and the bulk of the water seeped underground, into huge subterranean lakes. Maybe the surface actually floats atop the lakes, like our own surface floats atop molten rock. Maybe-"

"Professor?" Kellie interrupted his musing.

"What is it, Kellie?"

"The moon. I don't know how its possible, but I think the moon is made of metal."

It was hard to discern any detail at her size and relative distance, but Kelly thought other spaceships, some identical to the one which had paid her a visit, many smaller and a few substantially larger, nested in tight orbits around the moon. As the planet and its companion swung closer, Kellie could fathom more detail. It didn't ease her dsicomfort.

"Holy Cow," she breathed almost under her breath. "It looks like a planetary fortress." Indeed, the entire surface of the moon was peppered with thousands of rectangular emplacements, each miles across and miles high, jammed full of structures Kellie could not identify but were almost certainly weapons. Realizing that more than a few tracked her apparent movement across their sky sent shivers down her spine.

What kind of civilization armored an entire moon? And what of the planet the moon orbited?

With butterflies in her stomach, Kellie eyed the slowly retreating globe, trying to determine if armoring had taken place there as well. There was the glint of vast, glistening cites reflected in the sunlight, huge structures she couldn't begin to guess the purpose of, and a highway system that interlinked the various metropolitan areas, encircling many cities as they did at home. What furrowed her brow and made her squint in confusion were the vast clouds obscuring many of the cities. The clouds formed a huge, dangerous looking, almost continuous front stretching roughly north/south through both hemispheres, nearly pole to pole. To the west of the huge front was the complex landscape of glittering, expansive cities Kellie had described to Grove. Behind it ... well the cities looked different there, just as large maybe, just as sprawling, but a dull uniform gray instead of jewel-like and glittering. It made the butterflies in Kellie's stomach develop wings of lead.

"Professor ... something really bad is happening down on that planet. Those huge clouds I told you about? I don't think they're just clouds. I think they're smoke and dust and debris. Someone is systematically demolishing the existing civilization on a north/south line, heading east to west, and erecting new, replacement cities in their place." It occurred to Kellie that no substitute road system had been constructed to replace the one destroyed. Each city west of the front was joined to every other via the vast spidery web of super highways; the replacement cities, probably of the same shape and size as the old ones, were conspicuously isolated, more like city-states than cities. More like huge scabs, she thought tensely, where the flesh of the planet had been scraped bare, leaving a wound. And into this horror she planned to descend? Not on you life!

She Informed Grove of her revised plans-he agreed with her, wholeheartedly-and followed behind the planet and its metal moon, letting herself diminish to an appropriate size. She knew it was a shell, of course, a defensive casing erected above the moon's surface for protection, not the moon itself, and wondered if the alien beings would allow her inside or deny her entrance. She was convinced the entire population of the planet had recently fled the horrible destruction she'd witnessed, had taken refuge on the moon, and were even now preparing to flee again--hence the tremendous size of the orbiting spaceships. They planned to migrate en masse to a new star and a new planet, away from the danger. Where would they go, she wondered?

"Professor?"

"Yes, Kellie?"

"I really should try to help these poor creatures."

Grove was disturbed by the idea. "Kellie, we don't really know what's going on here. All we have are assumptions. An observation from space that might, or might not be correct. For all we know, you could be aiding an invading army. What you saw on the surface could be desperate preparation, a huge effort to fortify the planet, an attempt to isolate and protect the individual cities. An expansive highway system could be more advantageous to an invading army than to a defending population. They may be preparing for siege down there. Do you really want to jump blind into the conflict? We have no idea of their capabilities, on either side. And the technology of their spaceships alone proves they are light years ahead of us."

Kelly didn't immediately answer. Her attention was focused on one of those very spaceships, approaching from the moon and winking slowly against the velvet backdrop. She was no more than a hundred miles long now, the size of her original visitor. The approaching spacecraft was maybe a hundredth her size, but still huge by earthly proportions. She guessed its length at roughly a mile, and it too, was rice-grain shaped. Through the surrounding cocoon, she could discern variations in its surface: instruments, portholes, airlocks; other things she couldn't identify, although she was pretty sure the familiar looking clusters at the front were some kind of weapon. Her field glowed and pulsed and seemed almost to make crackling noises, like pent-up static electricity. She cautioned Shrinx not to go off half-cocked.

"These beings haven't done anything but politely come to visit us, Shrinx. Don't get trigger-happy. Wait to see what they do."

What they did was approach to arms length, circle as the larger ship had done before, and then move off to a distance they thought was safe. Kellie knew better. Though maybe a hundred miles, it was not even half the relative distance from which Shrinx had roasted the octopus. The spaceship would disappear in a single, small puff of smoke, Kellie worried. Then she blinked in surprise.

"Professor? They dispatched another spaceship. It just opened up and a shuttle of some kind is on its way over. I can barely see it, but it appears to be the size of an airplane. A big jet liner, though it looks nothing like a jet liner. It's sorta shaped like a UFO, something you'd see on TV."

Indeed, the craft looked right out of a sci-fi movie, wide and not especially tall, blocky, tapered toward the rear with a row of pin-sized holes along the front of each wing. It reminded Kellie of a fighter plane with machine guns. She hoped it didn't start shooting at her. Shrinx watched with mistrust as it circled her as the mother ship had, though only once, and only around her chest. On the return, the craft slowly dropped toward the edge of Kellie's field. Shrinx reacted by forming a small, circular area of calm for it to enter through. The vessel evidenced none of the difficulty the larger ship had experienced and she mentally thanked Shrinx for being circumspect instead of hostile. The shuttle settled onto the front of Kellie's shirt, atop the pleated pocket over her left breast, and sank onto what Kellie guessed were huge landing gear extended beneath the wings. The spaceship looked eerily like a common backyard bug. After a few moments, a wide section atop the fuselage levered open and a number of beings appeared. Kellie caught her breath.

Oh, my God, she thought. If I breathe, I could blow them right down the length of my body. They were large, moth-shaped creatures with gossamer, colorless wings and short stubby bodies. Each in turn tested its wings as the creatures exited the hatch, and one by one they rose to create a formation that eventually stretched wingtip to wingtip across the top of the ship. Kellie was breathless now with awe. The creatures floated, buoyed by unfelt air currents inside her field. Kellie realized her breathing raised and lowered the formation along with her chest, and she prayed she'd not have to cough suddenly, or worse, sneeze. Did the creatures realize she was alive? How dangerous it was, being in such close proximity to her? Any movement on her part, no matter how slight, could result in disaster. She began to shiver involuntarily.

"What's going on, Kellie?"

"Not now," she muttered.

"Are the creatures inside your field? Tap your teeth together if they are. I should be able to hear that."

Kellie obediently tapped her teeth together three times.

"What do they look like? No, never mind. Tell me after they leave. They must be very tiny. Are they humanoid?"

Kelly tapped twice.

"That's a no?"

Kelly tapped three times.

"Okay. Lizard-like? Insectoid? Winged?"

Kelly tapped twice, and then three times twice. Grove was ecstatic.

"Insectoid and winged? Like a dragonfly or a moth?"

Kelly confirmed the latter with three clicks.

"Oh, my God!" Grove exclaimed. "Winged creatures! Immense winged creatures, if you can see them with your bare eyes. Are they out of the ship?"

Kellie tapped three times.

"How many? No, wait. Just one?"

Kellie involuntarily shook her head, and then tapped twice.

"More than one. Less than ten?"

Kellie counted a dozen mentally.

"Less than fifteen?" Grove enquired excitedly. Kelly confirmed less than fifteen.

Above the tiny ship, the even tinier creatures spread out and explored the terrain of her cotton shirt in every direction. Two of the creatures approached her face, but withdrew after encountering turbulence and wind shears beneath her nostrils. They quickly flapped backwards to a safe distance, and hovered side by side, apparently discussing their next move. Kellie prayed they would not attempt to land on her face. She wasn't sure what her reaction would be, but feared it would be an involuntary spasm. Instead, the pair took off in opposite directions, drifting above her collarbones. She looked back and forth between them, feeling a little frantic. And then a horn, barely audible to Kellie's ears, barely within her hearing range, sounded from the shuttle and the entire group of explorers turned lazily and headed back to the ship. Within a minute all had gathered and reformed their original formation above the wings. Kellie relaxed, feeling both her heartbeat and breathing drift back toward normal.

"This is so aggravating," Grove complained. "I wish now I had pursued a video component to this rig." Kellie wished he had, also. It would be easier, knowing she didn't face every new experience alone. It chilled her blood to think if Grove wasn't there at all.

One by one the creatures furled their wings and descended into the craft. Kellie wished there were some way to communicate with them, but couldn't think of a way to do so without out endangering the creatures or their tiny craft. She settled on a series of slow blinks, which caught the attention of the remaining three explorers. They bobbed up and down and faced each other in what Kellie took to be excited conversation. Then all three faced her and flapped their delicate wings in unison, a farewell, as it turned out. A moment later they were gone and the access hatch closed flushed with the surface. The craft lifted off and after hovering a moment, proceeded back toward the mother ship at the same, sedate speed at which it had arrived. Once clearing the periphery of Kellie's now transparent shield, the ship accelerated and disappeared within the other craft in less than a minute. Kellie relaxed and stretched her cramped muscles. She waved her right fingers shyly as the craft moved away and returned to the distant moon. She had drifted aimlessly during the rendezvous. Now she powered up and followed after the spaceship at a more sedate speed.

"I'm landing on that planet," she told Grove. "I plan to find out what's going on down there and right it if I can."

"That could be very dangerous," Grove warned.

"I don't care. I'm doing it anyway." She described in detail the encounter, and Grove admitted unwillingly that it sounded like the refugees only chance.

"They could have very advanced weapons down there. Take nothing for granted, not even Shrinx's ability to protect you. These creatures start lobbing nuclear weapons at you ... the best thing to do," Grove advised, "is go in there big and be ready to run at a moment's notice."

Kellie thought that a very good idea.

"Take me in near the front," she directed Shrinx. "The west side of that lake, where the front is just approaching. I want to be the biggest thing on the planet, and like the professor said, be ready to run." She wondered how effective Shrinx would be against an atomic-tipped missile, and how well the nanos would be should it get through. Kellie imagined herself going up in smoke in a mushroom cloud and shivered. Why was she doing this?

Shrinx sat her down on the west side of the lake, in what appeared to be a huge park bordering the shoreline. The opposite shore was perhaps 20 miles away, and strewn with huge and twisted piles of debris, where once a city had stood. Towering columns of smoke fed the pall overhead and Kellie could smell the destruction. And there was no missing the sound; it came from everywhere. Her view from five miles high revealed everything.

"What are they doing?" she demanded in horror.

Behind her, the city stood intact but deserted. She found no sign of life, anywhere, not even a bird. Everything had fled ahead of the approaching destruction. The city was truly amazing, beautiful glass spires and gleaming buildings of decorated metals and sculptured, polished stone. Everywhere was artwork and greenery-most now run wild in the absence of cultivating hands (did the winged refugees have hands?)-with graceful, soaring highways and connecting bridges between buildings. Many of the structures were well over a mile tall, Kellie guessed. One impressive grouping surrounded an immense structure half her own height and probably a mile wide at the base. Its architectural underpinnings defied Kellie's imagination. It seemed constructed of half a dozen individual, but integrally linked buildings. On every setback or outcropping were stone or metal artworks; marble, granite, brass, bronze, and steel. The abandoned city stretched away for hundreds of miles, highways everywhere. Again she wondered what winged creatures needed with highways. Maybe they were something else, she considered, extravagant artwork in their own right. Grove reminded her that building materials and consumer goods could not move efficiently through the air: a vast highway system was necessary. Kellie admitted the logic in this.

"I'm headed around the lake, now. I want to see exactly what's going on."

"Be careful, Kellie. Although..."

Kellie stopped in her tracks. "Although what?"

"I don't want to downplay the danger, but I have an idea you are in no explicit danger there. The truth is, I think you may be ignored."

Kellie was astounded. "How can that be?"

Grove sighed. "If I'm right about what's going on there, I don't think your presence will immediately be acknowledged, or even discerned. Still, keep a sharp lookout and don't let your guard down. Shrinx needs to be on constant alert."

"He is," Kellie confirmed, noting the flicker of her field, and the continued thrumming in her bones.

She bent low to stay beneath the overcast, estimated her height as now four miles high, which put the small pall at about three miles. In some places the columns of roiling smoke formed unbroken walls, miles wide. The closer she drew to the battle line, the louder the sound of destruction grew. She halted a few miles distant.

"What do you see, Kellie?"

"Besides a demolished city and its destroyers? Nothing." Devastation stretched halfway to the horizon. Kellie made out a barren, no-man's land between the last of the debris-it diminished gradually from the huge piles at the battle-front, to a fine, even ground covering of shredded metal and pulverized stone and glass at the edge of the wide, desolate open area-and the front-line of a new, nightmare version of the lost city. In the demolition zone were a legion of bustling machines, some almost too small to see, others huge, dump-truck-like monstrosities capable of hauling away a city block worth of debris at a time. Kellie guessed the monster trucks to be the size of a mega-stadium back home. The wheels the beasts rode on were a quarter mile in diameter each and studded with protruding tangs that assured traction in the dense wreckage. Where they encountered bare earth, huge rectangular depression were left behind. Cranes a dozen times the size of anything on her own planet filled the truck beds in only a few moments. Kellie felt on the verge of throwing up.

"You're right," she croaked. "The machines don't notice me at all."

Grove sighed. "I thought as much. It was pretty obvious from the start this was not a war."

"I don't understand," Kellie said, shaking her head. "How did you know this?"

"The inhabitants were allowed to leave. En masse. The whole civilization, I would venture, or a very sizable portion of it. Most likely the machines weren't aware of the inhabitants at all. No more than a car is aware of the driver or a TV is aware of the viewer."

Kellie listened as a semi-circular fleet of bulldozers on caterpillar tracks pushed debris taward the base of paired cranes lifting and dumping million pound loads of scrap onto the huge movers. Thousands of smaller machines, many the size of passenger vehicles with a dozen arms protruding around their perimeter, gathered missed debris and carried it manually to the edge of the pick-up area, before darting back for more. What struck Kellie was how the machines moved with such purpose and coordination; wherever she looked, the army of machines worked together like ants, or termites, purposeful, and guided. Guided by what, she wondered? Not once did she see a smaller machine ground to pulp beneath the wheels of the huge movers, or swept up by the dozers, even though some were no bigger than a man or woman. But what really appalled her were the machines busily at work on the unfelled buildings at the battle-line. Or demo-line, as she now had to admit. There was no battle going on here.

"Professor? How old do you think this civilization is?"

"From what you've described, I'd say millions of years. It would take that long just to build their magnificent cities."

"How could a civilization that old and that advanced allow something like this to happen?"

"We don't really know what happened here, Kellie. For all we know, the re-builders-the destroyers-could be a star-borne race that just appeared here out of nowhere. The original inhabitants could be a totally non-violent race, and incapable of obliterating, or even making war on another intelligent species, even one mechanical and bent--no matter how matter-of-factly and unemotionally-on their destruction. Or the destruction of their civilization, at least."

"I think it's more like the machines got away from them and went berserk."

"That's entirely possible too," Grove agreed. "We just don't know. We might never know."

Kellie recoiled as a building half her height suddenly began to plummet straight down to the ground, collapsing within itself as it went, shuddering and shimmering and exploding plumes of dust and fragments just as she'd seen buildings do on television in controlled demolitions. Unlike those buildings, however, all at the end of their lives and mostly ugly and utilitarian, this building was an exquisite three hundred story marvel of engineering, glass, metal and stone. It was like watching the death of an unknown but beautiful star. Huge clouds of dust and smoke roiled outward from the collapse site, looking almost alive and beautiful in their terribleness. Kellie cringed and looked away as several smaller buildings in the immediate vicinity collapsed from the resulting damage, only adding to the pall. Kellie couched violently and protected her mouth and nose in the crook of her right arm. Moments to destroy what took years, decades probably to build.

To be replaced by what? Uniformly ugly and gray boxlike structures that hurt the brain to look at? Block after block, mile after mile of windowless monstrosities that no living organism would ever, could ever call home? Kellie knew instinctually that every scrap of metal that left the demo zone ended up in a mill somewhere that churned out building blocks for the replacement cities. It wasn't destruction the machines were engaged in, but acquisition of raw materials. For every building mindlessly put up, another had to fall. The machines cared nothing about beauty or gracefulness or architecture or efficacy. A ton of metal demolished was a ton of metal available for construction of new buildings. Efficiency gone mad. Kellie prayed this was not the unintentional doing of the creatures themselves. No race capable of such grace and beauty could imagine, much less develop, this advancing architectural nightmare.

She had to leave. She had to be away from this destruction before rage overwhelmed her and she started a wholesale destruction of her own. She had no doubt that between her stamping feet and Shrinx's energy field, they could wreck havoc for miles around. But to what purpose and at what cost? As powerful as Shrinx had proven itself to be, there was no bottomless well of energy here. Eventually--probably with horrifying swiftness--she would mindlessly expend everything Shrinx could produce, leaving her where? Unable to navigate in molecular space, unable to safely land on the next world? She had no desire to shrink away to nothingness in a complete vacuum.

Shrinx cleared its throat. Kellie?

"What? Kellie blurted. The voice was her own, spoken silently into her mind.

The machines are not autonomic. They are directed by local controllers which in turn are linked to intermediate centers located in a north-south configuration to direct the demolition and rebuilding. As the front advances, the centers are relocated west. I've triangulated radio transmissions between the local centers and a master controller for this hemisphere. It, in turn communicates with a global controller, almost directly opposite us on the far side of the planet. If you hope to stop this destruction, I advise we locate the global controller immediately.

Kellie blurted out: "Professor? Did you hear that?"

"Hear what, Kellie?"

"Oh, my God," she moaned. "Shrinx is talking to me." She described quickly what her inner voice had said. "Should I listen to him?"

Grove considered only a moment. "It's capabilities are far beyond anything I'd ever considered, much less counted on. If Shrinx says it can triangulate radio transmissions, I'd put my faith in it."

Kellie mewed despondently, "Take on whatever's directing this madness on a global scale? Are you mad?"

Grove laughed doggedly. "You are the only one there that can, Kellie. Shrinx can't do it alone. He's-and you may want to reconsider calling Shrinx a he at this juncture--he's about the only weapon capable of putting a stop to this madness."

Kellie scrunched up her face. "This is just bullshit."

"Regardless, Kellie."

"How long with it take me to get there? Us, I mean?"

Approximately half an hour, Shrinx answered.

"Half an hour? To go around a planet? How fast do you intend to go?" She remembered being whisked along by the globe creatures on the first planet, and how uncomfortable an experience that was.

The thrumming in her bones strengthened. You will feel no discomfort. You can close your eyes if that helps, Shrinx advised as it lifted her clear of the surface and aimed her in a shallow arc eastward. Kellie whooped in surprise and jammed her eyes shut, clenched her fists and held her breath as Shrinx accelerated to a velocity that left the surface below a blur of gray-green-brown. This time she experienced no whiplash of wind and expected that Shrinx had somehow reinforced her shield to withstand the onslaught. This gave her some encouragement. If the shield could withstand multiple thousand miles an hour wind force, maybe it could protect her against more nefarious threats.

 
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