Chapter 1

Everyone who saw the Martian spider shaped space craft climb out of the smoking crater it had crashed into agreed, that the large central round metal sphere surrounded by eight slender articulate and extremely long legs looked like a giant metal spider, and ought to be promptly squashed accordingly. Some experts on the TV said it most closely resembled a 'Harvestman', the most common 'daddy long legs' insect, which isn't really a spider at all, but agreed something big and military ought to step on it pronto.

The UN, our President and a host of talking heads from various governmental think tanks all thought that inter-species communication and inter-planetary trust and trade were of far more benefit. Besides, they hadn't figured out a way to talk to yet, and no one was quite sure what political correct folder to add our new alien visitor in. No military options were even being considered, the President said.

Being an educated young lad and a student of culture, I knew better. I'd watched that episode of Jonny Quest as a boy where the evil Dr. Zin had sent a robot spy-eye to steal Dr. Quest's top secret ray gun. Obviously the wily Martian thought this was a clever idea worth borrowing.

Right from the start I knew that no good was going to come out of this. If just one tank or bomber commander had had the balls to waste the fucker in these early vulnerable days, about five billion lives would have saved ... easy.

No one was really sure however where our new and rather unwelcome guest had actually come from. Space Command had tracked the small craft coming from the direction of Mars, but no one knew if the ship had actually originated there or was merely doing the standard seven day tour of the SOL system, i.e. if this is Tuesday, today we visit Earth (make sure your shots for the common cold are up to date), Wednesday we'll visit Venus so wear your acid resistant footwear, etc.

All of the usual TV talking heads espoused various theories why this particular alien had come to visit the most ass-backwards part of the known universe, far out on the unfashionable wing of our particular galaxy. Left with a whole lot of nothing that passed for real news, 'our Martian visitor' became the new media watchword.

Our 'visitor' wasn't talking. Puny humans tried to get its attention in dozens of ways but were soundly ignored. Our namby-pamby politically correct President and Congress just wrung its collective fingers and dithered while doing nothing and continued to leave the alien alone.

The craft had an agenda all of its own and it was too busy (or self important) to bother with the likes of us monkey-descended riff-raff. It ignored all attempts to communicate and benignly disregarded the increasing amount of top-shelf military hardware that was now shadowing its every move. Its tendency toward garbage picking through our trash seemed to hold its interest much more than us.

Simply put, our Martian 'harvestman' scooted across the countryside sampling the garbage dumps available to it until it found just the right one. About a week after landing in New Jersey (no, not at Grover's Mill, ala the 1938 radio version of War of the Worlds radio show) the craft wandered its way into Ohio and parked itself down on the ground near the outskirts of Akron and proceeded to more or less dismantle and eat up a couple of warehouses storing computers, televisions and other tech-waste electronic parts stored there to be eventually disassembled and recycled.

It didn't bother to say please or even thank you, but in less than a week it had gobbled enough formerly high-tech trash to double in size three or four times. Where originally the central sphere had been about the size of a city bus, now it could be easily mistaken for the old Astrodome, as it was now a couple of hundred yards in size.

About this time, some one-star Ohio National Guard commander got tired of waiting for Washington to 'do something' about this oversized pest that was growing larger by the day and he decided on his own authority to send in the tanks. His local Air National Guard counter-part decided belatedly to come along for the ride and the pair of them finally sent in all of their toys to squash this metal insect once and for all. Well, not quite ... it might have worked a week ago, but not now. A day late and more than a dollar short, but still you couldn't blame the poor guy for trying.

The Martian ignored the first couple of smart bombs and sabot penetrating anti-tank rounds and even went 'ho-hum' when the A-10 Warthogs started to rake it over with their 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling guns with depleted uranium rounds. When the napalm started to turn its dinner into molten metallic soup it began to get a tad annoyed however.

Slowly and methodically it rose back up on its legs and turned its attention to chastising the folks who were disturbing its lunch ... extremely effectively I might add. An hour later every tank, attack helicopter, A-10 and F-22 Raptor was a crushed metal pile of junk ... perfectly bite sized for recycling by the craft. At least it left a neat and tidy battlefield, one late night comedian quipped.

Once the minor little skirmish was over, the Martian went back to its lunch. And the Pentagon went back to the drawing board.

There were persistent media rumors that on at least three occasions' nuclear weapons were dropped or fired at it ... none detonated. The four star generals and most of the smarter politicians started to make themselves extremely scarce and retreated into their 'Oh Shit!" caves deep underground and the still dithering President of the United States even admitted on national television that 'military options had been taken off of the table at this time.'

Lovely. A perfect case of snooze and you lose.

Refreshed from its light snack, and quite a few sizes larger once again, the craft rose up into the air again like a round behemoth that could blot out the entire sun over a decent sized city, and it flew off to give the rest of the world's garbage a bit of a closer examination. Mostly it continued to ignore the human occupants while it completed its inspection, but the toxic tech waste dumps of China and Eastern Europe proved to be tasty temptations it couldn't resist. The largest, a junk yard on the Chinese coast near Hangzhou, contained at least half of the world's stock of trashed electronic components and was gobbled down like the finest caviar.

"Om Nom Nom!" was a featured news headline and caption for at least a week as the alien craft ate, and continued to grow until it was over a mile in diameter, and then the first FemBots began to appear.

Then things started to get weird.

As an increasing army of FemBots began appearing in all of the major cities of the world, they began taking a close minute examination of mundane human life, and apparently weren't too terribly impressed. They were nominally peaceful, and didn't seem to be looking for trouble, but they didn't take any shit from anyone either. Shoot them and they'd shoot right back ... harder. Guns and military rifles were fairly ineffective against them and didn't frighten them one bit. It took anti-tank weapons or a lot of explosives to disable them, but after awhile hardly anyone bothered. They seemed to appear far faster than they could be destroyed, and it really annoyed them to get shot at.

Only the wackjobs in North Korea fought on to the bitter end against these implacable unwanted visitors and in less than two weeks the shapely female robots had completely kicked the ass of the world's fourth largest army ... rather convincingly and frighteningly fast. It was like watching Gulf War I all over again, except with an entire country becoming a figurative 'highway of death'. Nasty.

Even now we still weren't worth speaking to. The FemBots had yet to say even a single word, but they were already gathering an army of devoted human followers and admirers, and even I had to admit that these robotic creatures of mayhem were quite decorative. They were almost anatomically perfect human females a bit over six feet tall, very busty and they looked like something from a bad British 1960's sci-fi show, with brightly colored hair cut into a short but perky futuristic style. They wore bright metallic silver mini-dresses complete with matching 'go-go' boots. They looked mod and hot, as if they were dressed for a night on the town at a swinging 1960's Soho discothèque, but world domination would do instead in a pinch.

Did I mention their large breasts that held firm without a bra and displayed inch long nipples that clearly poked unrestrained underneath the thin filmy fabric? Don't let the beauty fool you ... they were still robots. Rumors were that only their faces and tits were modeled female perfect, and that their short skirts covered only smooth faux-skin covered metal. Too bad, otherwise they would have been the dream love doll.

Martian styling soon became 'in' and every designer raced to pull out their weirdest 1960's 'B' movie era sketchbooks to bring the Mod 'Go-Go' craze back into style on the world's fashion runways. At least one good result of this was that the bra (and even panties to a significant degree) were now very much out of fashion and eschewed by the younger and more hip generations.

Latex or leather body suits and corsets, rubber halters, sheer mesh see-through tops and other vintage 1960's fetish clothing became 'must wear' wardrobe items. A year ago it would have been too outrageous even for slut-wear at a sleazy night club, but now it was paraded in daylight on main street USA. Ahhhh, it was good to be a red-blooded American male! Well ... for a little while at least.

Then things definitely started to get even weirder.

After about three months, the Harvestman finished its hearty dining at Hangzhou and its main body was now approximately two miles in diameter. It bloatedly staggered its way back across the Pacific, after a stop to devour a phosphate rich small island in the south Pacific, it returned back to the USA to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania and our Martian made its first public demand: It wanted steel, lots of it, and keep it coming. There was a very clear sense of 'Or Else'.

Some pundits saw this as a clear 'Win-Win', either this would revitalize the US steel industry or else it would devour Pittsburg and then start eradicating the rest of the rust belt. No one, except for the local politicians in Pittsburg, had much of a problem with either option.

And so the steel began to flow, slowly at first and then in a mass of national production unseen since the 1950's. Over the next couple of months the Martian grew slowly but dramatically until the extent of its multi-jointed legs reached out to their maximum of about five miles from body to tip and these original eight legs then fused to become the framework for a new even larger spherical structure that would be about ten miles in diameter when completed.

Now the world governments really began to worry. I think every nation on earth that had a nuke on a rocket, plane or even a flatbed truck launched them. Darned near every single one. Not one exploded. All landed as duds near the harvester and were recycled.

A new fresh army of FemBots appeared, and this one was loaded for bear. The lovelies now had a nice long list of demands; take it or leave it. The 'Or Else' part was now blatantly obvious.

Clouds of smaller shuttle planes were ferrying FemBots into every major city in the world, nonstop night and day with no signs of stopping. There were millions of them now, each virtually indestructible and possessing instantaneous communications with its peers, and possessing more raw firepower than an M-1 Abrams main battle tank.

There wasn't a lot of violence at first, but as the FemBots slowly took command over every single military base, government executive office, state/province capitol, city hall and police station in the world, they made it very clear from the start exactly who was now in charge, and that disobedience meant instant death.

I'm not sure if their July 4^th 'Independence Day' declaration speech at the UN was intentional or just extremely ironic. My guess would definitely be for 'intentional', and something inside that space ship was probably laughing itself silly. No one else in the UN that day was laughing however.

The demands were straight forward and non-negotiable.

Zulla was now to be hailed and acknowledged as the Divine Empress and Ruler and Mistress of this world. Any and all resistance will be met by death. Under Zulla, administration of this planet was to be conducted by a seven member executive panel of human women, to be selected by Zulla. All other lesser government positions, national and local were to be also now held strictly and only by women. There were to be no men whatsoever in any position with any authority over a woman; the female sex being far innately superior to that of men, according to the Divine Zulla. Men were to be stripped of all legal rights, including voting and owning or managing property. Their rights and properties would automatically transfer to the senior matriarch of each family. Males then becoming 'chattel', the property of the maternal line - pending their examination and 'inspection' for their fitness to serve in menial positions, primarily hand-tool technology agriculture. Human society was to denationalize all borders, assume a single world currency and single language, English. All newspapers, radio and television were to cease operation until appropriate approval by the new government. All females were to be examined and selected for 'superior breeding characteristics' while the majority of the males would be culled as 'unnecessary and surplus to demands'. Can you say eugenics? Yep.

Holy Crap! You know, of course that this meant war! Way more than just a day too late and multiple dollars too short.

The largely male run governments of the world naturally did not take this lying down, and even the vast majority of women could see where these decrees were leading and joined the last great fight for freedom. The rebellion was glorious, romantic and utterly doomed right from the very start. Think of ten thousand or more Warsaw Ghetto uprisings, each violently short and ultimately pointless, snuffed out nearly all instantaneously at a horrific cost in human life. The FemBots didn't mind one little bit wading their pretty Go-Go boots ankle deep in human blood.