All that's solid melts into the mist

Roder sighted carefully through the crosshairs, made a mental adjustment for wind speed and air pressure, and squeezed the trigger. The projectile, powered by a gaussian rail accelerator, was silent and made but a moment's disturbance in the air. Two hundred and fifty meters away, the poacher collapsed in a heap. Roder flashed a thinktext message for a cleanup crew to pick up the body.

Nothing had been disturbed in that pristine scene. The creatures Roder guarded scarcely moved amid the mists of the forest. They were sluggish in the heavy morning air and their slow early scavenge occupied all their attention. The projectile's blue ozone crackle meant neither food nor any known threat to the them and had been completely ignored.

Roder had come to love these wards of his, despite their slow docility and those torpid movements which reflected viscous unurgent thoughts. During his time as a prisoner of war, he'd thought often of them, how their natural grace in the morning mists of the forest lent a touch of grace to this depleted planet, how their uncomplicated beings contradicted everything about his own twitchy kind, untiringly driven from one goal to the next by impulses hard to fathom or encompass.

He'd never regretted being part of the corps which defended the creatures from incursions into their preserve, even when he'd been captured by the enemy and then released in a prisoner exchange. Now that his side had all but lost the war, he was determined to protect these last few specimens in their last few forest redoubts, and die if need be to in order to keep these beautiful creatures wandering in their simple habitat, living their magnificent primitive lives in peace.

He watched as the clan swept slowly through the clearing, picking berries and grubs. There had been quite a few babies this year and the females moved leadenly, weighed down by their plump burdens. The males pushed out toward the periphery of the group, the oldest silverhair with his thick muscles easing the group toward the direction he planned to go. But there was no coercion, no forcing of the path to take; the group ambled softly behind and absorbed the silverhair's will into their own, with no dispute or demurral. They simply trusted him to go where it was best to go.

As the plump pink fingers of dawn retracted from the forest treetops, as the first orange rays of sunlight began to course between the treebranches, Roder felt a sudden sharp jolt in his limbs. He fell from his sniper's nest onto a patch of scrub, and lay there paralysed. He could see the creatures, disturbed by the fall of the protector whom they'd grown so used to, start to mill around the clearing in slow confusion. The babies and young ones started to whine anxiously.

The males on the periphery were the first to go. Slick whining through the air, that blue ozone crackle, and each one fell with a bloody gap where his skull once was. The nursing mothers were next. Roder watched helplessly, unable even to turn his head, as the females were shot through, the babies on their back tumbling into the undergrowth.

Last of all was the old silverhair. He waved his arms to the sky in impotent grief and rage, whirling where he stood, unknowing what even was happening to his family. Three, four, five, slugs whined into his thick chest, which became a mess of ragged skin and blood. He fell on top of the youngest, a baby born just the week before, which lay still in the scrub foliage.

Now Roder saw the Poachers emerging from the trees around. They were just like him: spiderish constructions with composite ceramic shells. Softly hissing servomotors propelled their titanium limbs with brutal efficiency. They had polygon heads that whirled in all axes, silvery dark mercurial buds of eyes that looked everywhere at once. They looked just like Roder, but they were the enemy. They carried weapons - gauss rifles and venom propellors, and of course the electromagnetic pulse projector that had paralysed Roder's limbs.

They moved quickly through the fallen creatures, picking up the squalling babies and silencing them in a moment. With the swiftness of thought, the Poacher group moved through the clearing and in a few moments the whole group was gone. The last humans in the last reserve of forest on planet Earth was extinguished.

Roder had failed; the Resistance and Preservation Movement had failed. The Poachers had won a final victory.

A huge machine came crashing through the forest now, uprooting and crushing the trees. Their roots and rhizomes showered dust into the air, a golden haze forming in the opening-up of dawn’s fierce light.

The machine bellowed, not with triumph but with industriousness and sheer raw power. It had opened a wide vista behind it where Roder could see other creatures like him, arachnoid bodies and composite exoskeletons, laying a plastic road where the forest once had been. A vast plain covered in weblike plastic constructions could be seen beyond the avenue in the trees, neon lights flashing their wares.

Laying there helpless, Roder wished that his designers had given him the capacity to weep for the snuffing out of the human species, the loss of the last sentient biological life on the planet. But tear ducts were never considered as a feature on his model - what even would be the point? And so his eyestalks were dry as the leader of the Poacher incursion spidered up to him where he lay, and placed the blastbolt up against his central neural network.

There were not even any words - for what words could there be? - as the warden of the last reserve of humans was terminated there at the foot of a toppling tree. It was too late for valedictions and fine speeches.

Not so much an end as a quick and new beginning. The posthuman age had arrived and all that archaic slowness was gone at last.

== ALL THAT'S SOLID MELTS INTO THE MIST // END ==

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