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It was on a Tuesday that it showed up – no, wait, that’s not right. It was a Wednesday, and a typical Wednesday too: dead in the water, limp-legged, slouch-backed, and tepid. That was when that big old meteor went and turned itself into a meteorite, cratered right hard right in the middle of the country where the wind blows straight and the horizon’s all around you. Left a pretty big hole, too, but after a few reporters took a couple of pictures and some men in the battered, lackaday clothes of serious science took some samples of soil and rock, that was it for interest. It was just a rock in the end, even if it’d come a million trillion miles to land on our planet and make a hole in it.
Now what grew down in that hole, that was the big business, even if it started as small business. Just a little tuft of white stuff at first. Cream-coloured, if you’d like to be specific, but it was so small it was hard to tell. Real small. Josh Macintyre saw it sprouting there, and some little bit of the back of his brain made him swerve his tractor an inch or three to the right and change the course of history.
So history happened. That little white tuft bloomed and blossomed and ballooned and it got bigger and bigger. It sucked up all the fertilizers on the plants near it, and then the plants, and then the field. It was halfway through sucking up Josh Macintyre’s barn when he called the police down.
“Interesting,” they said. And then they set fire to it.
It sucked up the fire, and then it finished sucking up the barn.
“Try the national guard,” the police said.
The national guard came down, and it brought some more badly-clothed people of science. They scraped and chipped and analyzed, and they said something or other but by then the issue was being voted on by some very important old people and they had no time for pencil-pushing slide-ruling egg-headed science-types. So they voted that the army shoot it until something happened.
The army showed up in some really big machines, pulled out some much smaller but even more dangerous machines and all their little lead snacks, and then they shot it. It sucked up the bullets, expanded out to the highway, and started chewing its way off in all directions, following the asphalt and worrying it like a dog on a bone.
“Maybe we should,” said one of the science people, and he was told to put on his lab coat and go away because we’re BUSY here professor. The thing, whatever it was, was voted on three more times, and after two splits on partisan lines it was agreed that it would be bombed until it was reduced to many small pieces not exceeding three centimeters in diameter. These would be pureed and charred and used to flavour a very lucrative new kind of ice cream sandwich.
It was bombed, duly, and expanded fifty-five times overnight, by which point it was crowding into every major city on the continent. The highways were overgrown lumps of fluffy, puffy white matter, a cross between a marshmallow and a mushroom.
“This is obviously some sort of conspiracy against us,” agreed some of the very important old people, and they voted a bipartisan consensus to find out whose fault it was. For a while it was argued that it could be because of those young people, but it certainly wasn’t any of THEIR grandchildren, THEIR grandchildren knew how to behave properly and respectfully, so it was probably some other country.
The other countries said this probably wasn’t the case, and maybe this was some trick they were trying to pull here, unless they were just mistaken and being silly gooses.
“Up yours,” voted the very important old people.
Take a long walk off a short pier, suggested half of the other countries. No, they make sense, argued the other half.
You and whose armies?
Ours.
Well, OURS!
Ours can beat up yours.
By this point some of the puffy white stuff had punctured its way to the other side of the ocean, running along old undersea cables and such, and everybody was getting fed up with it.
“Obviously,” advised the very important old people of the first country, who were experts at this by now, “the solution is to bomb it harder.”
Right, agreed the rest of the world. And an awful lot of bombing happened, and an awful lot more of the white stuff spread everywhere. It crawled up skyscrapers, it ate up roads, it turned houses into puffy, plumpy caves. It clogged gun barrels, smothered missile stockpiles, and sunk bunkers into big squishy pits.
This was obviously some sort of plot against someone by someone else, so the countries all did the sensible thing and accused each other of harbouring a nasty plot again, especially the ones who’d asked whose armies, because the answer was quite obviously their armies and nobody likes a smartass. So the countries all took a break from bombing the white stuff, which was an unrewarding chore at best anyways, and started bombing each other, which was a lot more satisfying, fun, and traditional. Besides, nothing they tried slowed the damned thing down. It ate the spent munitions, and the exploded bomb shells, and the ruined husks of buildings, and everything worthwhile. And the more they fought the more there was for it to eat. It was getting tiresome in the extreme.
What we need, all the countries decided, separately, independently, and privately, is a bigger bomb.
Luckily, quite a few of the countries had really big bombs, so they broke them all out all over the place, hoping to get rid of the white stuff or maybe at the very least do in its food supply. And that was how most of them vanished overnight in a series of startlingly huge explosions that filled the atmosphere and soil with a lot of really nasty stuff. Luckily, it turned out the white stuff liked to eat it, so the world was only partially unlivable for about a decade.
When that about a decade was over, the white stuff covered a nice big chunk of the planet’s land area, but wasn’t growing too much anymore. No more food for it to expand with, and it was actually shrinking back a bit on the edges. Too much too fast, overreached itself a mite. And down the road came a few people to see what was making it fade away, falling back, to look at all those thousands of miles and millions of tons of matter just shrinking away into nothing.
And just as they were packing up to walk back home, the youngest person there asked the white stuff, “now why’d you do all of that?”
And the white stuff said (in a very small but clear voice, all fibres and filaments): “No-one ever asked me to stop.”