As it wrapped its limbs around the decapitated stump of what had once been the Chrysler building, an unnamed technician – sliding hopelessly towards its maw – pulled the emergency backup release switch, sending a few zillion volts and ohms and other things crashing through the skyscraper’s superstructure and directly into its skull, which exploded.
It was still there the next morning, slumped yet upright, oozing yet unmoving. The sun shone dazzle-bright on half its scales; the other half were blotted and blackened from the smog of its vaporized cranium.
After the expenditure of three hundred sixty five trillion dollars, one billion lives, and the frying of the entire electrical grid of the eastern seaboard of the United States of America, it was dead.
That was the first mistake they made. The second was building the plaque.
***
It was a very tasteful little plaque, appropriately somber yet not dour. It mentioned the scale without getting lost in the numbers. It honoured the many rather than the few, bringing the unnamed technician to mind without elevating her above the other billion dead people. It did not nationalize a global tragedy. It praised human ingenuity and selflessness without diminishing the costs. Its font was somber but not oppressive. It did not have any pictures.
It was well done as far as plaques go, but there was a dangerous amount of thought going into it that maybe should have been put somewhere else.
Though really, who could blame anyone for being distracted? An awful lot of the world had been stepped on, and all the parts of it that hadn’t been stepped on were finding themselves in need of food, since so much of that had gotten stepped on, radiated, or atomized too. It was amazing anyone had the brainpower to pull together a plaque, but then again plaque-making committees are a specialized and often-ignored group of people, and they did what they could when they saw the need for it. And in other circumstances this would have been very admirable, save for what the existence of the plaque implied.
The implications were as follows:
The problem had been here. The problem had been solved. This was evidenced by dint of the fact that there was now a plaque. It was now part of history, and thus safe to ignore forever as the blissful future arrived by way of the important present.
This is not to say that perhaps things would have gone differently without the plaque. But it was definitely a mistake.
***
Their third and largest mistake was assuming brain death was of great significance to any and all complex organisms. The unnamed technician could’ve told them otherwise – she had grown up on a chicken farm – but she was dead now along with a billion other people, and so an ass was successfully made out of u and me, as was proven on the fiftieth day after the decapitation when it jerked bolt upright out of its slump and walked through the rubble of the Chrysler building into the side of three separate skyscrapers one after another, pirouetting like a titanic ballerina.
It did not step on the plaque.
***
Remobilization took time. A long time. The armed forces were in a much reduced state, were being rallied from a considerably more jumbled and confused world, and were being called to arms with the fully-earned knowledge that they were almost wholly ineffective against their enemy. This made things slower than they had been before, as did the knowledge that they were trying to kill something that didn’t seem to respect the realities of being dead. It was striding across the countryside at full tilt now, barrelling through and over and occasionally across (when it stumbled) any obstacle that could exist, leaving footprints up and over Montreal, Toronto, Philadelphia, Des Moines, and both sides of the Grand Canyon before falling into the Pacific Ocean by mistake. This was a tremendous relief to the armies, who went home to any homes that hadn’t been crushed.
It emerged three years later in Melbourne, which it removed from existence before tripping over Uluru and toddling its way into the South China Sea.
And a year and a half past that it was in Tokyo.
It only took a week to get to Beijing.
Clearly there had been some sort of learning curve at work here – insofar as something now lacking a brain could learn – and it had been successfully scaled. Projections were looking alarmingly similar to the initial rampage, with the obvious difference being that it no longer roared, merely made low wheezing and gurgling sounds from its neck-stump.
Besides the obvious, there were some worrying changes. It moved truly erratically, moment to moment, month to month. Directions reversed, spun, curved, and re-reversed on a dime, penny, or quarter. It no longer grappled and bit and blasted; its whole body was a blind weapon wielded against a planetary soft target.
Sometimes it got stuck, like when it walked on its forelimbs for six months before falling on its side on top of London.
In addition, it could no longer functionally be distracted, lured, dazzled or blinded, lulled, confused, or tricked. Several very earnest and only slightly poor-taste research papers were crafted on the possible potence of the autonomic nervous system in the absence of the somatic around now, but everyone who would’ve frowned at the timing was too busy panicking so they went almost unnoticed.
Fifteen years later global civilization became functionally deceased as a concept and the papers were even less noticed.
***
The plaque was still in one piece, mind you.