I.
You have five days until your world ends. That is when They come. We do not know what they will look like or if we can even see them. We just know they are coming because some computer told us it is happening.
You are not ready. We are not ready.
II.
What have we done to prepare for this moment? Absolutely nothing. We have distracted ourselves with meaningless pursuits, ridiculous politics, and screen-fueled time wasting. We are not ready to communicate, fight, or run away. And you would think with all the fighting we have practiced since the dawn of our existence that we would at least be good at that.
No.
III.
They will see us as we see a virus (well, most of us): an entity resistant to some basic forms of eradication, a consumer of all things precious and otherwise, the enemy of the planet we live upon—a carnivorous fetus poisoning the womb. They will not be pleased with what they find in our present or what they learn about our past.
IV.
They will see all the gods we made up and worship, from the ancient times to the online times: stone churches, black boxes in the desert, athletes and singers, flags and fading papers, influencers and content. They will see the God of Time represented as a melting clock, the God of Money represented by the tents and narcotics in our streets. They will see our gluttony and avarice, our cars and televisions, our prisons and graveyards.
V.
When They realize we are incapable of communicating with them just as we are incapable among ourselves, they will move on to our mathematics, our code, our algorithms, thinking it is the same as their tools and technologies. But then
They will see we did not base our future on physics and math but on the decisions of a handful of people unconcerned with the consequences of the things they build: a version of fire with all the rage but none of the utility.
VI.
They will see every time we try to reinvent the world, we do it the same way it failed the last time, and the time before that, and so on: a different version of hierarchy, a different version of work, a different version of slavery, a different version of punishment, a different version of power, a different version of death. But ultimately, all the same. It is simple in our nature and who we are, encoded in our DNA.