Reset

We were six clicks out from civilian compound 23 when my sensors picked up a pod. I had a split second to alert my team then I dived behind the nearest pile of rubble and pressed the heel of my hand to my locket for luck. It has yet to fail me and didn’t this time. The explosion delivered the viral payload in a tight circle around the trigger which just barely reached the base of the pile I hid behind. The second Geneva Convention outlawed the use of bio-gens in warfare but the off-worlders never signed anything did they? After all, they didn’t want to hurt the planet. They just wanted us gone. Sometimes I wondered if they were wrong.

I was six when the off-worlders arrived, living with my mother in what was left of the East Coast of the USA at the end of the last Human war. Rebuilding had barely begun, and the governments of the world were still meeting to squabble over what would and wouldn’t be allowed in the future. Trying to pave a path out of extremism and destruction. Then the ships arrived. I remember standing outside holding my mother’s hand looking up at the sky. Feeling the awe and fear that comes with having big questions answered and finding the answers more than you want to accept. I remember listening to the news streams about our attempts to communicate, to let them know we are intelligent, and this planet is inhabited. The frantic attempts to convince the un-convincible that we mattered. And failing. It is understandable really, how could they tell the difference between us and a dangerous parasitic organism? We remade our host to suit our needs and sapped the life from it to grow stronger. The planet is what mattered you see. Integral to the galactic ecosystem. We disturb the balance.

My helmet muffled the sound of the Pod’s explosion and the screams of the two team members caught in the path of the blast. I’m glad. The initial reaction to the virus is painful in the extreme. I had seen people pull out a gun and end it rather than suffer. My hands shook a bit as I crouched, waiting to see if they would come. Some Pods needed tending. Those are the ones we steered clear of. We hadn’t at first. The ego of humanity. At first, we’d tried to ambush and destroy. But human stubbornness and drive to conquer had met the brick wall of off-world will. We soon came to accept our new reality. Mere pebbles in the path of the waves. We might survive, but not as we are. Not before being broken down and swept out into the path determined by the strength of the water washing over us.

Only the sound of my teammates' cries lingered in the air, but still, we waited. Our only assurance of safety now is stealth. Corralled as we were into compounds and underground shelters we’d learned not to venture far from our assigned spaces with great pain and heavy losses. I wanted to move so I stifled the urge by pulling out my locket and wrapping my hand around it, so the slight weight pressed into the creases of my hand. I remember when my mother passed it to me. This small silver locket. My great grandfather had given it to my great grandmother as a present. I don’t remember them; they’d died when I was three. In the first wave of destruction that commenced in the mercifully short last Human War. They’d called it World War III at first until they’d realized that was the last time humanity would ever fight each other.

There is unity in death. Death is a moment when the living things around it pause to acknowledge the transition and meaningfulness of existence. Faced with causing death on a large scale, humans united to try and explain and prevent it in the future. Faced with annihilation from an outside superior force, humanity united to preserve our species as a whole. The off-worlders did the impossible. They taught humans to look past selfishness and petty distinctions and stand together.

My team lead gave the ‘all clear’ in my headset and I stood, reluctant to leave my shelter but knowing I had a duty to my fallen comrades, their screams little more than low moans as the virus took hold and began to cut off anything resembling human-like speech. All of the remaining team members, the six of us untouched by the Pod’s effects, gathered in a tight circle around the two laying on the ground. Odd how humans would always seek to make a ritual out of everything. I suppose it gives us meaning and helps us deal with the things that tax our emotions and capacity for understanding. The lead nodded and we sank to the ground, getting as comfortable as we could for the wait. Sometimes it took longer, depending on what they’d decided the area needed. Seldom was it quick and merciful but that is the one truth in life, the brutality of change. Change is painful, no matter the type.

I rocked a bit where I sat, my hand clasped around my locket as I murmured the words, we all learned prior to assignment in the field.

“From the Earth, we come, to the Earth we return. The life we have will take a new form. Not ending but began anew, we honor and remember you.” I chanted it three times then forced myself to look. Jy and Raz. Sighing, I shook my head. I’d liked them. Always a joke or a kind word. They’d been in the field longer than anyone else I know and kept the team’s spirits up even amidst the fear. They weren’t human now.

The Pods disintegrate chemical bonds in seconds. Simple bonds, like those in clothing, go immediately. Then the more complex. Teeth, hair, skin, bones. Everything infected and remade in moments. The telltale green fungus that remained on the surface as the matter transformed spread at lightning speed. Too fast to stop, too infectious to study safely. But it didn’t send out spores, and it didn’t creep along the ground so once it dissipated it was safe to come near to do your duty to the Reset. That’s what they called it. A Reset.

The off-worlders came to Reset the Earth. Rebalance the ecosystem so the energy the planet emitted didn’t disrupt the proper flow of the Universe. Those from outside our system but inside our Galaxy learned over the ages to maintain the delicate dance of life. Travel as they’d done to reach us and begin the Reset was only affected in the direst of circumstances. So, there is no way to stop it. No way to convince them it isn’t needed because they only come as a last resort. The tended explained this to us once we’d stopped killing them. How much knowledge we’d lost in our initial futile attempts to stop the tide no one knew.

The delicate fronds of the plants that were once Jy and Raz waved in some unseen wind atop the small mounds that delineated where their human bodies once lay. I released the locket and slipped it back beneath the collar of my shirt and rose, following my team back towards the compound looking out at the vast field of green and spindly arms of the trees growing from a thousand similar mossy mounds growing amidst the rubble of our pointless wars. A forest of memory. A forest of the fallen. I wonder how long they’ll continue to hold their finger on the button. Clearing the planet of the hiccup and releasing the world to begin anew. I wonder if I will be here to see it. I pressed the heel of my hand to my locket and rub it lightly as I walk, and it stops my morbid line of thought. That’s why it’s lucky. It reminds me of what matters – love, family, humanity. What was and what can be. It clears the badness away. Like pressing reset.