Memories of the Encounter

Dangling from his wrist, the heart shaped locket was the last remaining artifact he had of his daughters. Both a memento and a trophy, the locket held his only physical memory of the former world; a life before they came. Although his daughter was gone, Eddie was now the guardian of his granddaughter, Ellie. Born only 8 months before the encounters, Ellie has no memories of her mother or the old life, just stories Grandpa Eddie tells.

Eddie struggles anymore to stay healthy, and Ellie stays with him to keep him company and take care of his health as best she can. As Eddie struggles to pull leftover soup from his refrigerator the locket catches the handle; the band snaps and the locket hits the ground.

“You know you’ve never actually told me what happened to my parents,” Ellie remarked as she bent over to grab the locket. She opens the locket to reveal a small picture of her mother and grandfather together, smiling cheerfully at oceanside as a sunbeam glistens across the front of them. Ellie continued “I’m sixteen I can handle to truth finally.”

“I suppose you’ve earned it after catching dinner the other day,” Eddie joked pointing to the chicken remains in the fridge Ellie chased for nearly an hour in the yard.

Eddie saw daughter from a distance, not often having an opportunity to spend quality time with her anymore. He was a cautious hermit, often preparing for potentially hostile takeovers in his neighborhood the were absurdly rooted in nonsense. Evelyn, Eddie’s daughter, was working in the ocean doing plastic clean-up projects. She spent a great deal of time operating a large vessel, monitoring networks of nets and plastic capture machines. She invited Eddie out a few times, but his reserve kept him home. After a dozen phone calls, texts, and visits, Evelyn finally convinced Eddie to come out. He was to catch a ferry that would carry him, along with other supplies, to Evelyn’s vessel for operations.

It was nearly eight in the morning; Eddie was supposed to depart but he was late as usual. He was taking extra precautions to be prepared for anything; from shipwreck to pirates and perhaps anything in between. This was his process, and it was the only way he would concede to coming out the Evelyn’s ship. He made it to the harbor about a quarter past eight. The ferry operator knew to expect this slight delay, so he was not too concerned, though a signal coming from Evelyn’s ship had him nervous.

“I received a bizarre message from the operations ship,” the ferry captain explains to Eddie,” seems like ran into something crazy in the water but I’m not sure what they were taking about.”

“Maybe some whales, or some hijackers,” Eddie jeered, slightly lampooning his own paranoia.

Evelyn tends to stay up late most nights on the ship, drifting of in her thoughts about what her life would look like in the coming years. This was her first time away from her newly born daughter, Ellie, since her birth eight months ago. Ellie’s work needed her on the sea. Just after midnight, as Evelyn was returning to her cabin, she looked across the night sky, the stars dancing in the sky as the moonlight gleams across the ocean, what looked like a meteor crashing from directly above came barreling through the sky, crashing out past the horizon. Past the lights of the net locators and machines, the flash of the meteor was lost to the sea.

Evelyn retired to her crib, slowing passing out to the subtle bouncing of waves against the ships hull and a dull hum of a machine in the distance. These would operate nearly nonstop, only maintained, or cleaned out creating a delay in operations. A few hours would pass as Evelyn slept, until suddenly, the grinding of gears echoed through the sea, smacking the ship, and waking Evelyn from her slumber. Evelyn sat up and peered out the small window, not seeing anything noteworthy. She laid her head back down, attempting to drift back into her sleep, only to be shaken again by another grinding rustle.

“That must be some massive chunk of plastic to cause this big of grind,” Evelyn thought to herself, convinced it was nothing more than just trash. She ascends from below deck and gazed upon the horror of one of her cleaning machines on fire in the distance, pieces strewn about in the surrounding water.

Evelyn and a few surrounding crewmembers stood about the deck pondering what to do in the darkness, a single floodlight shining onto the wreckage. Motion startles the light operator as he moves the spotlight across the water, following an outline through the waves. It was headed for the ship, perhaps unknowingly, as the lights bore down upon them.

Splat! Something runs into the side of the ship. Splat, splat. More collisions, not enough to move the ship, but enough to echo up and over the deck and crew. Two crewmembers rush over to the edge, creeping their gaze down over the edge. Nothing to be seen, only a subtle whizzing sound from below the water. A few more splats are heard against the hull, and it begins to dawn upon the crew that this occurrence in clearly not ordinary. Something foreign, something strange was hitting the ship. Was this something that rose from the sea, attracted to the vibrations of the machines on the surface?

Evelyn hurried back to her cabin, trying to reason what they may be encountering. She began to gather some things from her room, running out with a bag of contraptions. Just before clearing the doorway, a golden flash bounced across her eyesight. A heart-shaped locket her father gave her years ago, hanging from a hook. She remembered then that she was expecting his company in the morning. She grabbed the locket and attached it around her wrist. As Evelyn approached a stairway to go up to the deck or down below, she was stopped by what appeared to be a gelatinous mass; something without permanent shape or structure but maintained a sense of stability. The mass was then joined by one, then two, then four more of these things, slowly absorbing into each other, assembling themselves into a figure on par with Evelyn’s stature.

She froze in place for a moment to witness a horror, then came to her senses to rush past the blob and onto the upper deck. She joined another crewmember, and could only mutter a few nonsensical syllables, finally exclaiming that she needed to get a message out for help. They have encountered something foreign to this world. Evelyn and the crew members joined on the main deck, communications in hand to dispatch their call. Evelyn began her relay, “There is something on the ship. It may be from the water; it may be alien to this world. I have never seen something like this.” A moment passed, but only silence was heard in return.

Piercing the silence currently freezing the crew was a sharp humming sound coming from the door. The crew watched in horror as a small hole breached through the door, slowly widening to accommodate the creature boring through. It was amorphous and could squeeze through the small opening, though it would continue to eat through the steel barrier. The creature finally burst through its opening and crashed onto the deck floor, each crew member gazing ominously. This creature broke into its many pieces, splitting apart and remaining motionless on the floor. Their attention, it seemed, was directed at the crew. Were they hostile? Are they going to attack?

Evelyn stepped forward to inspect the mess, slowly creeping toward the subjects. Each one sat motionless, docile in nature. She grabbed a small compass off a table next to her and tossed it onto one of the blobs. Slowly it absorbed about halfway into the mass, rested precariously on top. She shrugged back to the crew in disbelief, and in that moment each creature again flooded back into each other and reabsorbed themselves. As they joined, the compass whizzed around on the face, quickly becoming incorporated into the creature that now stood before Evelyn. As the compass disappeared, the plastic face and dial dropped, their red and blue clearing visible in contrast to the dark grey mass of foreign monster.

The creature sprang forward at Evelyn, grasped her hand and clenching around her wrist up to the elbow. She gasped at first, then suddenly screamed at her arm began to disintegrate within the maw of this creature. The crew rushed forward to try to pull her out but to no avail. It only took a few seconds for her arm to be whittled down to the bone, a pool of flesh and blood pooled on the floor. They fell back as the creature released her. Evelyn’s locket hit the floor as quickly as the blob fell into it in pursuit. Was it trying to each the golden locket like to metal door? The creature pulled itself back up, but the locket would not be consumed. Evelyn laid on the floor in agony as some of the crew tried to tourniquet her arm at the shoulder, while other crew members tried to arm themselves with anything they could find. The creature swept the locket in a panic and retreated out the door, descending into the darkness of the ships lower levels.

After a few hours of sailing, Eddie and the ferry approached a half-sunken vessel in the middle of a clean-up operation. The ship he was to board to spend a week with his daughter was nearly underwater. Crewmembers had already fled to nearby machines with small decks to crowd on, the looks of fear draping their faces despite a reprieve in the ferry arriving. Evelyn had already passed, swallowed by the sea aboard her ship at it sank. The ferry quickly picked up the remaining crew members stationed on the small decks and began a return trip to harbor. Eddie learned of his daughters fate and spent the entirety of the return trip on his knees, flush with defeat. A man known for every preparation had no way to reconcile this loss.

“So how did you get this back,” Ellie asked, holding the heart-shaped locket forward.

“It’s a gold alloy. As we learned what this alien creature could do, we learned it eats metals, but only certain kinds. After it boarded our ferry, unknowingly, and returned to land with us, the locket fell out of its mass in front of me. I knew exactly what it was, and I grabbed it,” Eddie explained.

After landing at harbor the creature would go on to eat through several ships, along with other metallic items, as well as anybody who stood in its way.

“It could peel the iron out of our blood,” Eddie exclaimed, “It seemed to duplicate itself the more metal it could eat.”

As the creature multiplied several times over, quickly devouring buildings, cars, and anything metallic in structure, the only thing to stop this process was its accidental attempts at eating through chemicals like acids. It’s own mass would disintegrate upon exposure. After vain attempts to halt its progress, governments declare mass losses and launched warheads to eliminate it. Infrastructure crumbled, society fell apart, and the last remaining survivors huddled together in small communities, trying to extract what remaining life they can from their desolate surroundings.

Would visitors from this same species visit again? After almost 16 years, no sign of alien life has been detected, though the impact has cratered human life. Desolation has crept into the minds of survivors, who huddle together in small, isolate pockets of communities. And through the burden of dystopian life they still have, they reminisce on the remaining structures of the old life that barely remain.