Another dream. Another nightmare.
You're standing in a room, watching Team Moon thrash Team Sun in airball on the viewscreen. It's the Landing Day game, but Verzin can't out-jump Korzi any day of the year and his gliders, the wingmen that are supposed to assist, are apparently daydreaming of being somewhere else. Your friends and family mingle about the view-room. There's candy and aggrove fruit on the table, in diced, mashed, and roasted varieties, of course. The massive entertainment space this room is designed for is flashing all colors of the rainbow in ambiance. There's a blaring horn, and the teams separate for halftime, as a Zeck singer, a gorgeous brunette with the slightest tinge of a pattern of seafoam green and sky blue to her flawless skin, steps up on a podium and begins the Landing Day anthem.
“Happy Landing Day, and goodwill to all Zeck!
A song in memory to you brave souls that made the trek!
To everyone who dreams of stars,
To pioneers of worlds so far,
The future now lies in your grasp, all hands on deck!
It's not a small endeavor to stand up to the night,
To hold yourself against the void, and fill it with your might,
But skies do swear you'll find your place
Among the galaxies of space
All glory to the Zecki race,
And Titans bless us all!”
As you listen, you look out the window and sip your cup of water. A few of the other colonists are playing pick-up airball outside, in the cleared space just before the groves of gigantic indigo aggrove trees that make up the border of the colony. All is well.
All should be well, in any case.
You pause as that last thought enters your mind, and the atmosphere shifts invisibly. Your parents laugh with your guests over a joke the AI told them, but you didn't hear it. Something isn't right. You look down at your cup, the water sloshing slightly, reflection shuddering in the surface. Zecki don't drink water for Landing Day, they drink aggrove juice or moonshine. "Can I get a pick-me-up?" You shout aimlessly to the crowd, but no one answers. You blink, hesitantly, then go to the table and pick up one of the candy pieces. Starburst. They haven't made Starburst in years, and if they did, they didn't make it for Zecki. You ony know what they look and taste like because it was a present scavenged from the ruins for your bir-
Another burst of laughter. You look up. Your entertainment room is huge- too huge. You only use about a third of the space for the table, the loungechairs, and the viewing screen. The rest of the room, aside from your guests, is empty space. Cavernous. Wasteful. The Zecki would never allow that sort of luxury on a colonizing planet.
The laughter is louder this time, and someone taps you on the shoulder. “You okay, man?” You turn around and see yourself looking directly at a flawless six-pack of powder-blue abs you recognize all-too-well. Looking up past a set of inflated, muscular pecs, you see the face of Milos, a look of gentle serenity in his eyes... and a light smirk on his face. Zecki can vary in height, but not this much.
“Happy birthday to youuuu~~”
You whirl around as you hear that song. No. It's not right. You're a Zeck. Zeck don't celebrate their birthday. Even so, there it is- your friend Jason, somehow even shorter than you are, labors to bring in a platter with a full birthday cake on his back. The platter is easily bigger than he is, nearly twice his height. His neck is crooked and his black hair is messy with sweat as he pants with the effort of carrying the weight. Atop it, a single candle sits, flickering with his shuddering steps towards the table. He's hardly taller than its edge.
And, you notice, that edge is rising. Not just for him, but for you, too.
It's then you notice you're both shrinking.
“Happy birthday to youuuu!”
The table is rising. Milos is rising. The chatting guests are rising, their conversations completely unbroken and uncaring. The already huge viewscreen is expanding over its wall. The other walls, already incongruously distant, are speeding away into an endless black void. The floor is rising towards you.
You hear a final moan of despair as Jason collapses on the ground, the cake still atop him. The table had outgrown him before he could deliver it, but the cake was multiplying in size and weight beyond his control. He feebly tries to pull himself a few feet forward, but the expanding cake grows over him. You listen as he gives one last feeble wail of despair before he gets absorbed into the white confectionery icing.
“Happy Birthday Dear Matthewwww....”
You run for the porch window, fear of the crowd of growing giants overtaking you. You try to dodge over feet with pastelle-toned skin, but they're all still growing, and none of the giants care where you're running as they mill about on building-sized legs. You weave past aquamarine sandals and vault over the toe of an emerald-green sneaker, but then a soft yellow slipper careens out of your blind spot and knocks you scattering. You pick yourself up, pushing down the ache, but then you see what you've landed before.
Even compared to the surrounding giants, the boots are huge. A set of thick, walnut-brown combat boots, with a small slash on the left toe. You'd know those boots anywhere. You look up at Milos, still rising taller along with the crowd, as the crowd around him lets out another titter of laughter.
“You wouldn't do this to a Zecki!” You shout up at Milos in panic. Milos chuckles, smirking, as a boot the size of a neighborhood lifts up, its dominating bootprint of mud-colored rubber eclipsing his face and everyone above.
“But we'd do it to you. Happy birthday to you, Matthew.”
The world seems to slow to a crawl, the chattering giants' voices deepening into some indecipherable bass-tone as their syllables drag out. You look up at the dirty print, your god and executioner, your fate, your doom. Small bits of grime are unceremoniously trapped under the treads. You will soon be no different. You already know, instinctively, that this is the end. You can't run. You can't escape. You can't fight. You can't do anything. If you'd spent your entire life preparing to fight this moment- if there were a thousand of you- you wouldn't have control of anything.
All the universe was for the Zeck. Mankind just lived in it.
As you feel the abrasive rubbery sole and its acrid smell of processed factory chemicals finally touch down, you look out at the porch window one last time. The pickup airball game is still going on, but the two teams are now dressed in Moon and Sun garb. Moon is now entirely staffed by people you knew- your uncle Mark, your parents, your friends Jason and Caleb, your girlfriend Emily. They're all screaming as they're being trounced by a bunch of sneering Zeck, who are literally stomping them into the ground as they rapidly grow to their proper size. Mark explodes like a gory red balloon under an airball cleat. Caleb gets snatched as he tried to fly away and has his chest crushed, pinched between two fingers. The singer from before stands on the balcony, eating a piece of cake.
“Oooo, looks like a bad season for comeback stories! The Moons are getting demolished! Looks like they'll just have to hope for better luck next time- and here comes cleanup!” She comments jovially.
Way beyond the treeline of cerulean leaves and dark purple branches, a steamroller the size of a continent barrels towards you all, an avalanche of crushing destruction in its
“Wake up. Come on, Mike, rise and shine.”
Two gentle slaps to your face punctuate your wake-up call. You sit up quickly and open your eyes blearily as you process what happened and what's real. It takes a second, but your brain sorts the cognitive mess out and you remember how things actually are.
Your name is Michael Mures. You aren't a Zeck, and you never will be one. You're a human, part of a tribe of a hundred and forty-three, living in the floors underneath the corners of the house of one Milos Acrometa, a Zeck leader who controls police and military matters in the wider Zeck colony on Earth. So long as you're careful about what you "borrow" (a weird term choice the older crowd started using, you just went with it) they didn't seem to care too much. Your dream had his size all wrong, though, even at the end- At 4,850 feet tall, it would be an impossible miracle and a blessing for a human to be as big as his little toe, and if that's not profoundly pathetic you don't know what is. Zeck toes couldn't be vaulted over, they weren't the size of a couch. They'd be the size of the living rooms the couches would fit in, maybe twice that.
You suppose that just illustrates how hard it is to properly fathom the Zeck. You'd been living under them all your life, and you still can't get their scope right even in your dreams.
Humanity was invaded one hundred years ago, and was rendered nearly extinct by the following year. The fight was like dust before a broom- so one-sided it couldn't even be called a war. The only reason they didn't bother finishing the job was because humanity wasn't worth the effort, after the major population centers were literally rolled over, burned, then buried in their building foundations (some sort of weird nanite-concrete-plastic substance.) Everyone left made sure to stay quiet- the few idiots who didn't got zapped by the Zeck AI doing pest control or Zecki insects the size of airplanes getting rid of pollination competition. You shudder. It felt ridiculous to be this arrogant on the bottom of the food chain, but there was something especially horrible about the thought of being ripped apart by a bunch of mindless insect aliens compared to at least dying to a higher being like the Zeck. At least with the Zeck, you knew you were being replaced by something superior.
You rise from your bed pallet of scraps, stretch, and then sigh. Common area meetings mean this is a chore day for the tribe. Lovely.
“Oh,” says Jason, turning around two steps later. “By the way, happy birthday.”
“...Thanks,” You mutter back, sullenly. Happy birthday. Never got old.
Humans didn't get to be happy, not unless the Zeck allowed it, and the Zeck didn't care if they existed.
-----
At the meeting, the elder, a bearded man named Joshua who had to be pushing ninety, spoke of a sobering issue...
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