The irony was not lost on me, Livvy Hirschenberg, that being the first to observe “The Shape” from the Tel Aviv University observatory, I might be the last to see it go by. I recall from my early days in astronomy, how different stars had been compared to our own sun, with each subsequent star crushing the previous in sheer size and scope. Of course, these stars had been seen and quantified through our most powerful telescopes. What we couldn’t see were the planets that orbited these giants. Planets that reflected their relative size by being behemoths themselves. It should have been obvious really. I clearly recall my first thoughts in seeing “The Shape”. Appalling darkness where Cygnus should have been, and the dread that shook me to my core. At first a tiny point, but with each passing month, swallowing stars and galaxies. It became apparent that whatever phenomena we were witnessing was on a direct course for earth.
As much as we tried to hide the event, any amateur astronomer with backyard equipment could clearly see what was coming. It did not take long for panic to strike, globally. While governments tried as hard as they might to send signals in case the thing contained sentience, the populace looted and burned everything in sight, sure of its imminent demise. I spent most of two months holed up with other scientists at the University during the Time of Crisis, protected by the IDF, and “It” had not even entered our solar system.
When it did, tides rose to greet it, washing over continents. The few of us who were able to, escaped to higher ground. The Americans, Russians, French and Israeli sent off volley after volley of nuclear warheads specially equipped to make the trip out of the atmosphere before they, too, would be submerged. The smoothness of “The Shape” had been determined to be of artificial origin, not just some monstrous asteroid. No missile made a dent. We might have tossed grains of sand at a planet, for all the good it would have done. We waited for our destruction at the hands of overwhelming force, but once again, we were wrong in our calculations. “The Shape” kept going.
It is now passing by, millions of kilometers from the Earth, and has been blotting out the sun for weeks. The temperature is unbearably cold, and the oceans that covered the planet when it first appeared have all but frozen. It has been predicted this will go on for another year or so. We still have not been able to communicate with the craft; whatever frequencies those manning it use must be in the higher orders of magnitude, and we remain amoeba shouting at a brick wall.
The human race will perish. There is no doubt of that now. No machinery will work in the freeze. There is not enough food to last the entire population for a year, no water to drink, and nothing we can do but wait for our doom to be sealed. We never expected this. In our hubris, the only creatures we thought might pose a threat were invaders with superior technology, over which we’d triumph, of course. How could we have not envisioned a race of beings so immense that they not only would ignore us, but would be totally oblivious to our very existence?
Perhaps someday, some other race will appear, to read our epitaph, and it will read: “Here lies Humanity, crushed by its insignificance.”
