YASOD

Soto would tell me that no 'thinking' alien has ever been in the Sol system, nor any other human system. The sack of grayish flesh drifting in front of me is not supposed to exist. Humanity obliterated them from a hundred lightyears away.

We used relativistic kill bullets: rods of matter the size of skyscrapers, accelerated by railgun to 99.9% the speed of light. You can't see them coming. Not until the very last month, when the light of their initial launch arrives in your system, barely ahead of the weapon itself.

But in that last month, you can't look away.

Humanity knows. Because the yasod fired their bullets first.

We had never even met them. To us, they were nothing but an unnatural EM pattern that we had detected from a distant exoplanet. Intelligent life had been our only plausible explanation for the pattern, but we knew nothing about that life. In our initial excitement, we sent messages of welcome, messages which would take a century to cross the gulf between our worlds.

We had no way to know that they'd already shot us. Their weapons had been en route for years.

In the silence of the next two decades, as our initial excitement wore away, anxieties began to gnaw at our minds. Our mood gradually darkened, and our distrust grew. Out of fear, a controversial policy was chosen: preemptive extermination.

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It was seventy-two years after our own attack when we found out we were going to die.

First, their bullets had become visible to our telescopes. Then, to our naked eyes. Kill bullets glow white from collisions with interstellar particles, but their light is so blue-shifted that they look like the ghosts of stars.

On Earth, in the last days, the night sky had turned filthy with them. The whole of the heavens had shone like a glitching screen.

When you exterminate an intelligent species, you don't just fire one bullet at their planet: you assume they'll evacuate, hide, spread—so you fire ten thousand, you riddle every wet rock within a hundred lightyears of them, you snipe at every flicker of a radio transmission from a century ago. And for two hundred years, you don't know the outcome—not until your bullets get there and the light of the explosions gets back. So for two hundred years, you keep firing in a nonstop panic. It's like a pair of strangers shooting machine guns on-and-on into each other's chests, except that neither person can see the other, neither can hear the other, and neither can even know that the other is aggressive until the triggers have long ago been pulled.

The yasod had killed us, their enemy. And twenty-two years later, before they ever saw that they'd hit us, the bullets of their dead enemy had killed them back.

That's why, when I see that dead gray sack floating in the muck, when I realize what it is, my first mindless, uncontrollable thought is:

This must be Hell.