The Icemen Cometh

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must be based on a photo of an ice crystal

The Icemen Cometh

They had come a very long way over a very long span of time. The galaxy had seen stars come and go over the millennia-long trip. Launched from the first advanced civilization formed after the Big Bang, they were part of an initiative to seed the universe; a grand vision by the first to call out “Manifest Destiny!”

Now the seeds had landed. They were the legacy of powerful minds and enormous egos. The grateful recipient of random chance in their favor, they had found a new home. Meanwhile, the civilization that sent them on their trip was no more than a memory in the cobweb strewn corner of the universe’s collective intelligence.

Nano factories folded out from the inner dimensions of strings and such. They began to build with a fury. After days, they had grown microscopic in size. Within weeks, they were visible to the naked eye. And still they grew; their crystalline structure virtually indestructible. Using the basic building blocks of matter, they found resources to be plentiful.

After a month, the first of them became aware.

Bodiless, they floated through the streets, countrysides and oceans of Earth. There was life everywhere. This was good. From the life of others, they would draw the energy they needed to survive. Sickness and death would certainly come to those they fed from. It was unavoidable.

There were no feelings of guilt about this natural string of events. They were advanced people with a strong sense of right and wrong. They had very strict codes of conduct; taking only what they needed to survive. They would never harm another intelligent species’.

Fortunately for them, they had landed on a planet where, of all the different forms of life, none met their minimum requirements for attaining the classification of “intelligent”.

Word count 299