When we got the footage back from comet probe we sent out fifty years ago, we forgot we'd even added audio filters. The video alone was enough to send us all into a frenzy of excitement and furious examination of those brief seconds of film.
The audio wasn't picked up for nearly three months after the original footage came back. At first all we got was a mess of static, half-caught radio frequencies from Earth and the satellite colonies but deep underneath that was something new... something organic.
It took us a while to realise it was organic, that half-screech-half-word sounding noise that couldn't be traced back to anything from Earth. In fact the sound itself seemed to be coming from just past the camera's field of view, somewhere to the left of it behind a jagged wall of rock.
We became so fixated on finding the source of the noise, trying desperately to blame it on something from Earth, something safe, that by the time we realised that the comet had changed its course we were left with no time to do anything but brace for the impact.
Half of the world hoped that the new lifeforms on the comet would be friendly and that their technology would propel society forward into a new golden age while the rest just hoped to survive whatever would step onto our soil, if it even had legs.
We didn't expect them to have sent down bioweapons beforehand, let alone ones embedded within the visual and audio files of the comet we'd all become so obsessed with. The more the files were viewed, the worse the effects got so unsurprisingly the scientific community was the first to fall.
The rest of tech-savvy the world toppled not long after, leaving humanity back in the dark ages. With a comet full of something organic, something advanced enough to launch a planet-wide attack from a .mp3 file, something so utterly alien we didn't even have a name for it, incoming we counted our options.
We weighed our choices against all that we had left and found no reason to fight.
We just sat back and waited.
We weren't made to wait long.
The audio wasn't picked up for nearly three months after the original footage came back. At first all we got was a mess of static, half-caught radio frequencies from Earth and the satellite colonies but deep underneath that was something new... something organic.
It took us a while to realise it was organic, that half-screech-half-word sounding noise that couldn't be traced back to anything from Earth. In fact the sound itself seemed to be coming from just past the camera's field of view, somewhere to the left of it behind a jagged wall of rock.
We became so fixated on finding the source of the noise, trying desperately to blame it on something from Earth, something safe, that by the time we realised that the comet had changed its course we were left with no time to do anything but brace for the impact.
Half of the world hoped that the new lifeforms on the comet would be friendly and that their technology would propel society forward into a new golden age while the rest just hoped to survive whatever would step onto our soil, if it even had legs.
We didn't expect them to have sent down bioweapons beforehand, let alone ones embedded within the visual and audio files of the comet we'd all become so obsessed with. The more the files were viewed, the worse the effects got so unsurprisingly the scientific community was the first to fall.
The rest of tech-savvy the world toppled not long after, leaving humanity back in the dark ages. With a comet full of something organic, something advanced enough to launch a planet-wide attack from a .mp3 file, something so utterly alien we didn't even have a name for it, incoming we counted our options.
We weighed our choices against all that we had left and found no reason to fight.
We just sat back and waited.
We weren't made to wait long.
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