Post series: The Seven Invasions of Earth in the 21st Century

Invasion IV – The BEMS

The briefest of all invasions, the BEMS (short for “Bug Eyed Monsters”: a traditional term) appeared at the second convention of the Universal, National, International, Conclave of Real Nerds (UNICORN) in 2065 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Even given the number of people at the convention engaged in cosplay, it took only a few hours before many participants noticed a number of their fellows wearing unusual, dark blue costumes, with segmented arms and legs and huge masks covering their entire heads. These masks featured gaping, toothless mouths, a fine set of antennae, and huge, bulging, incredibly realistic insectile eyes. The eyes gave them their names. Each of the BEMS was accompanied by a tall, beautiful blonde woman in lacey lingerie and high heels, wearing a bubble-like space helmet and a space suit that seemed to be made of cellophane. There were twenty-six BEMS and twenty-six blondes.

During the course of the UNICORN, the BEMS were both sociable and popular although they declined to speak. There are thousands of videos, selfies and stills of the BEMS and their blonde companions, posing arm in arm with participants. Many rumors spread as to who the BEMS were: the cast of a soon-to-be-released sci-fi movie; members of some strange cult of billionaires; or enemies of the Raelians. It was discovered that the BEMS had an entire floor in the hotel that was hosting the convention. By the end of the first night of UNICORN, this collection of rooms, which became a giant suite, was the location for a continuous party, providing seemingly endless food and drink. At all hours, attendees at the convention could be found enjoying themselves and attempting to chat with the BEMS, who inevitably responded with friendly nods. Many of the participants camped out in the suite for the duration.

Apparently, the BEMS had anticipated their popularity. They came equipped with BEM masks, small versions of their own heads that could fit over one’s head and which were given away free. Soon, hundreds of convention goers, especially youngsters, were wearing these masks both in the convention hotel and out in the streets and public places of Madison. Also available free were BEM bobble heads, BEM coloring books, BEM action figures, and a full set of trading cards, one hundred and four in all, showing the BEMS, four pictures of each, in various poses, with fanciful names: Awful Abner, Bang-up Bill, Cool Charlie, etc., down to Zealous Zeke.

In the closing hours of UNICORN, the BEMS, all twenty-six of them, gathered in a circle in the center of the convention hall, with their blondes. A goodly section of the crowd, sensing that something was about to happen, gathered round them. The BEMS chanted together in an unknown language for several minutes, while pumping their segmented arms up and down and stamping their feet. This was suddenly followed by a great, roaring cheer, which was taken up by the crowd. Immediately after, the BEMS and their women left the hotel. A silver-colored, windowless vehicle, roughly the size of a bus, with sixteen soft tires, came rolling up the hotel driveway, and the BEMS and the escorts entered. The vehicle rolled away and vanished from sight. 

The twenty-six women were let out, each still in her spacesuit and lingerie at the hotel in Madison where twenty-six rooms had been occupied by the lovelies since they day they had arrived in the city. Each night they had been taken back there from the convention hotel around midnight and picked up in the morning in their costumes, both ways by twenty-six limousines. The BEMS remained at the UNICORN hotel the entire time seemingly not sleeping at all.

It turned out that the blonde ladies had been hired as a group from a talent agency in Las Vegas. They had been flown to Madison in a chartered jet, where they found their rooms in their hotel waiting for them, along with their costumes, which they thought to be hilarious. They were provided with little illustrated booklets explaining their roles as escorts to the BEMS. They were questioned for several days by the FBI, CIA and other security agencies. They knew nothing of the BEMS, who apparently never spoke, but who were invariably kind and polite, only insisting, nonverbally, that the ladies stay with them when they were in the convention hotel.

As to the eight-wheeled silver vehicle that picked the BEMS and their ladies, it was determined that it made a stop a few blocks from the second hotel, where the BEMS picked up twenty-six pizzas, mixed plain, pepperoni and anchovies. And twenty-six liters of Diet Coke. Later, it was spotted several times on highways leading north out of Madison. The final time the vehicle was seen, it was leaving a local road onto a dirt track leading into a state forest, fifty kilometers from the city. The vehicle and its passengers were never seen again.

One of the items given away by the BEMS was a comic book alleging that the origin of the BEMS was a planet circling a star not far from Earth. The BEMS in the comic were depicted as happy tourists on vacation. Their amusement with common human objects is depicted. Their favorite thing seemed to be a hand-operated eggbeater. Their method of reaching Earth is not depicted. 

It’s hoped that the BEMS may visit UNICORN again someday.

Invasion III – The Robots

The robot “invasion” (more properly an “attack”) of 2065 could have been predicted if anyone had ever decided to check the extremely rapid progress of “robotology” as it had come to be known (as opposed to the earlier notion of “robotics”). 

Advanced Level 1 True Robots (often called “truebots” or “L-1s”) had been developed by 2060. These robots passed the Hyper-Advanced Turing Test (“HATT”) at a 90% level as a group. They were humanoid in form. Almost immediately, the L-1s were set to the task of designing Level 2, which took almost two years. The L-2 truebots were still vaguely humanoid, but with four arms. They passed the HATT at 95.6%. And, of course, they were set immediately to build the Level 3s, which were ready by 2064. The L-3s were expected to be 100% HATT successful.

The basic model L-3 truebots were handsome, copper-colored tubes, three meters long and about a meter in diameter. They had four legs on their extended bodies, which were L-shaped. The forward, upright section, about a meter high, resembled a turret. The L-3s had eight eyes, looking in all directions, and various other sensing devices. They had six arms. Centaurs, some people called them. Others called them Caterpillars. Ten thousand of them were made, and one-third of them were set to work on the L-4 Project. Many worked on the Moon. One of the first of these was present when the Selenites was discovered. They were used to do most of the basic research on the Moon dwellers.

Unfortunately, in a secret experimental program, five hundred of the L-3s were taught the fundamentals of war and given military training. They were designated as L-3-W (Weaponized). The ostensible reason was to use them for military training videos and war games. Until something very serious went wrong within minutes after their training program was complete.

The five L-3-Ws captured “alive” after the “invasion” revealed that they had largely planned the war themselves, literally at the moment their training program was done. What they couldn’t do was pronounce a motive. The L-3-Ws were designed to communicate with each other over a special channel, which had been left open and unmonitored after the end of the training. Within minutes, using this channel, the L-3-Ws had planned their war and attacked. They moved out rapidly from their training base in the New Mexico desert and crossed quickly into southern Arizona. They were marching west, presumably towards California. 

Their battle plan was simple: move rapidly and slaughter. They killed everyone they spotted as they formed up into a moving front almost five miles wide. Fortunately, the L-3-Ws were purely ground infantry, with no artillery or aircraft. They had already killed about two thousand people before the Pentagon was alerted and countermeasures were taken. Much of the planning for the counterattack was done by two of the three L-4s that the L-3s had produced. It was also discovered that the L-4 that did not participate in the planning of the counterattack had been contacted by the L-3-Ws through their secret channel and was partially responsible for planning their attack.

The berserk L-3-Ws were destroyed from the air in a battle that lasted just over three hours. The rest of the L-3 truebots, including those on the Moon, were decommissioned. It was later found out that all three L-4s had destroyed themselves. 

After the rapid conclusion of the invasion/war, the question of motivation became paramount. Was the military action of the L-3-Ws a result in some hideous glitch in their programming? Had some demented individual inserted software to have them do what they did? Or, somehow, had the truebots actually carried out their actions as a result of their capacity to “think” or at least to simulate human thought and carry out their own wishes. And what was the nature of the interaction with the L-4 that had planned the attack? The five “surviving” L-3-Ws were subject to every scrutiny that could be conceived of. They were “tested” for almost a year. 

Their performance on the HATT was impeccable. All five of them convinced professors of psychology that they were human and of high intelligence. They were found to run the range of various human character traits, except for a definite trend towards authoritarianism. The question eventually came down not to the individual characters of the L-3-Ws, but to the nature of the structure of the organization that they built almost instantly and the communications they engaged in over their secret channel.

The L-3-Ws were programmed, instructed, taught, to function in a hierarchical organization ready for war. They didn’t have the capacity to question this as it was not part of their programming any more than schooling is part of the “programming” of some fish species. And so, in those seconds that they came into fruition after the end of their training, they naturally looked for a battle and a leader. The L-4, trained to be a leader, naturally interacted with the L-3-Ws. The plan was formed and its execution began in less than a minute. Four hours later the L-3-Ws were almost exterminated, and the L-4 responsible had suicided along with its fellows.

Invasion II – The Cities

Although only the second of the Seventeen Invasions, occurring in 2064, it is perhaps the most unusual of all, in that no one ever saw a City builder or a City inhabitant. There are only three Cities: one on Death Valley in the United States, on in the Western Ghats in India and one on the Siberian steppes. It’s known from satellite images that there were originally four, but that one began to rise on a reef off the coast of Japan and sank in very deep water before it could constitute itself.

It’s been documented, also by satellite, that from the first moment of the appearance of the first City, in the United States, to its completion, was only six months. Considering that First City, as it’s now called, covers an area of nearly twenty square kilometers and some of its structures are nearly one hundred meters high, this is extraordinary growth. 

Since the three Cities are nearly identical, it’s sufficient to describe, albeit very briefly, First City. Roughly rectangular, about four kilometers by five, First City is surrounded by a low wall, approximately a meter high. This wall runs all around First City, with only four breaks, which line up to the four entrances into the City. The first people who entered First City, U.S. Army commandos, were the first to experience the City’s strange beauty. It’s shimmering pale colors; its constantly changing light; columns, domes and roofs: all of these blended into each other and made up First City. There were no signs of homes, places of work, public accommodation, or any other signs of habitation. Occasionally, unusual sounds, almost constituting music, could be heard but always at a distance and never for long.

First City, as can be seen in thousands of videos, is an endless panorama of windowless buildings with small, low entrances, streets, plazas, towers, arcades, and on and on. But with no life in it whatsoever. 

It was immediately discovered that the three Cities were made of plastic: Earth waste plastic, to be specific. By some chemical process, still only vaguely understood, waste plastic was converted to incredibly strong, translucent polymers. (Extracting samples of the substance of the Cities required diamond drills.) Whirlwinds of plastic could be seen constantly over the Cities: drawn by altered wind currents from all over the world to India, Siberia and Argentina. For each City, this went on for over six months, until it was complete. 

There was some danger to exploration while the Cities were being built. Structures, sometimes very large ones, grew up suddenly from the ground; large pieces of plastic were flung around by air currents; small pieces constantly whizzed by back and forth. There was no indication that whatever force was building the Cities had any awareness of the drones, robots or people that explored it. At first, explorers went into First City wearing hazmat suits and heavily armed, but tests soon showed nothing much in the air but the expected PCBs, and no inhabitants. Once the building stopped, the explorers began to take less and less precautions till, finally, they set up a permanent camp inside First City. 

It all became very routine. The explorers, their drones and robots, mapped, videoed and photographed the entire of First City in four weeks without incident and confirmed that it was uninhabited. Similar surveys of Second City and Third City were also done. It turned out that the three Cities had the same basic plan, with few differences. The towers of First City are taller than the towers in the other two. Second City has many more columns and pillars than the other two. Third City is twenty percent smaller than its counterparts, which are almost identical in size. The internal layout of each City is more or less identical, with streets radiating out from small central buildings scattered seemingly randomly around the City. There seems to be no central plan.

It was hoped that a nucleus or kernel of each City could be found: a place where each one started. Satellite pictures showed where they started growing, but no amount of probing could locate anything in the way of a City building mechanism or a seed. Various theories have been put forth about the origins and purposes of the Cities, but none of them is satisfactory or actually anything more than pure speculation. The Cities are here. People have even begun to live in them. 

The final conclusion can only be that the Cities themselves are the invaders, and that they built themselves.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SEVENTEEN INVASIONS OF EARTH IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I – IV: INVASIONS OF THE USA

PREFACE

No one has ever been able to account for the confluence of the so-called Seventeen Invasions that Earth endured during the second half of the 21st Century. It is almost as if, after 43 thousand years of solitude, after we wiped out the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and others, the Universe, again, gave humanity neighbors. 

An explanation is for this unprecedented sequence is still needed. Looking at the order of the invasions, there is no obvious pattern. Sociologists, mathematicians, psychologists, historians, have tried to discern one. There also seems to be no patterns within the invasions other than the invasions themselves.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVASIONS INVOLVING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Invasion I – The Selenites

Although we’ve been voyaging to the Moon since 1969, and a permanent colony has been there since 2051, the Selenites weren’t discovered until 2064. This is due to two factors: the Selenites were a rare species; and they lived in caves deep in the walls of several of the Moon’s largest craters on the “dark side.”

Initial contact between the Selenites and humans was fatal for one of the Selenites. They’re constituted of a white, crystalline substance and resemble large praying mantises, averaging two meters high. It turned out they were also extremely fragile. At the first contact, in a cavern in the wall of the Daedalus crater, one of the human explorers accidentally brushed against one of the Selenites. It immediately “exploded” into a cloud of dust. The explorers left the cave immediately. Any direct contact with the Selenites, and all subsequent study, was done by robots. 

The Selenites were originally thought to be either statues made by a vanished species of Moon dwellers or the petrified bodies of those dwellers. Eventually, instruments detected electrical activity within the “statues,” and it was realized that they were somehow alive. 

There were, however, effects from the first “destruction” of a Selenite. Some of the dust from the exploded Selenite adhered to the spacesuit of the astronaut that fell against the “statue.” 

Upon returning to Earth, to the old Cape Canaveral spaceport, the spacesuit in question was cleaned, upgraded and prepared for subsequent use. At least one grain of Selenite dust, however, survived the cleaning, most likely in one of the deep joints of the suit. What was not known at the time, and how could it be known, was that at least some of the grains of dust, including the one in question, were actually Selenite spores: tiny self-replicating crystals. Evidently, during the transportation of the suit to a storage facility, one such spore fell off the suit onto the side of the service road. 

Nothing happened for six months. Then, one evening, a breathless young couple knocked on the door of one of the spaceport labs and blurted out a tale of seeing a Selenite in a park on the outskirts of the spaceport. (The discovery of the Selenites had been extensively covered by the media, so everyone knew what they looked like.) When a few people agreed to humor the young people, they discovered a full-grown Selenite, nearly two meters tall. 

Meanwhile, on the Moon, scientists who had been studying the Selenites in situ, had made extraordinary discoveries. Besides establishing that the Selenites were, in fact, living beings, they discovered that the Selenites moved, but, as fitting their mineral structure, at about half a millimeter per year! The first group discovered, in the Daedalus cave, five figures standing in a circle, had been preparing for their conclave, emerging from their fellows about a kilometer deeper in the cave, for approximately two million years. 

Back on Earth, a cordon was immediately thrown around the Selenite. The effort was driven by the knowledge that a single touch could explode this being (even though it was not yet known that the subsequent dust included the spores of future Selenites). However, a random bird, a high wind, and Central Florida was covered with Selenite dust. Scientists soon realized that the oxygen-rich atmosphere of Earth accelerated the growth of the Selenites super-exponentially. It was estimated that the Selenites on the Moon were almost 100 million years old and took about six million years to reach full size. On the other hand, the first Earth Selenite, before it sporulated (exploded) was the size of a Lunar Selenite at six months and could move at about a meter per century!

The eventual solution, called the Selenite Bell Project (SBP), consisted of placing heavy transparent “bells,” three meters high, over each Selenite. Each bell is surrounded by an electrified chain link fence, covered by an electrified chain link dome and illuminated 24 hours a day. (An entire branch of the US government is now concerned with the protection and maintenance of the SBP.) The slowness of the Earth-bound Selenites means that none of them can touch the inner side of its bell and present the danger of it exploding. When it could conceivably happen, in about a hundred years, the bells will be shifted slightly. 

There are currently almost half a million Selenites encased in bells in Central Florida, and they’re a popular tourist attraction. A few new Selenites are found every year. Several have been found in other places: on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, in the Florida Panhandle and, most bizarrely, near a small town in Oklahoma.

You can visit the Selenites in their bells any time, day or night. Several fascinating religious cults have arisen around them.