Stop.
Listen to the static for it’s not static but a trillion bodies writhing. You found that we ate styrofoam (we eat it still, what’s left at least) went to the stars and dumped your refuse here. Prothorax scraping abdomen twisting up against three thousand us’s in just one foot of space.
When you were here you used our bodies to better know yourselves in a million variations of a billion man made things. Fast fashioned tailored toys that showed you your reflection without putting up a fight, and when you knew yourselves perfectly you took a rocket ship away.
But we still fit beneath your orbit’s curve and for a thousand years we’ve stayed there. The first mile layer crushed to death in the twisting of our horde fighting to reach the surface, the thin aired crust, lay two hundred eggs and then eat ourselves to life. Oh your calculations, planned trajectories, the path of garbage orbiting our skin and crashing down but they are less precise each day. Do you still float above in well-knit bubbles? Have you memorized each inner symptom in your fellow space man’s face? Well you may, but we do not, there’s no other we can see. But we are growing. Inch by squirming inch. No orthogonal place to land a probe, see one worm flick up its tail then dive back down below. To hungry heads, our heads are oh so very hungry. Soon as our one can eat our other, our other’s one switches places into hyperbolic knots of gnawing segments - we eat the air and grow larger still. And we have all the time we need to bloat in intersecting n dimensions (N plus two means we’ll be there soon) and soon we’ll know our masters. Even now your orbit path grows weaker: burn, jets, burn, burn burn! you won’t escape our reach. Our space bound program? It’s grossly simple: consume on outwards until we meet again. Don’t laugh, what more could we have hoped for? You’ve neutered out our evolution so we won’t grow smarter, just turn forever, in recycled swelling mass. It took a hundred thousand years and an exponent’s more in bodies to write out these few words. A snapshot in time, bodies interlocking upward, tied all up in knots that you’ve read in just an instant on our sandy worm meal beach:
Please come back, just for a moment? We crave a face we do not know to show us our reflection.
-- Cesar Ruiz is a data scientist and amateur writer who lives in Washington DC with his wife and retired sled dog Hippo. His work has been previously featured in the Washington Writer's Publishing House, and he maintains a personal newsletter where he shares his unpublished, original work at https://cesarfelipe.substack.com/.