Rites
The destruction was magnificent. The world’s biggest cities on fire, with the rest reduced to nothing but rubble. History was written on this fateful day, and whoever was to survive would learn from the mistakes of our past and never build skyscrapers again. They make for perfect targets.
It was four in the morning in Shanghai — exact time measurement was no longer a thing humans needed after this event — when a giant burst awoke the entire world, and massive earthquakes quickly took care of any being unfortunate enough to live in a city. Some big ones — built explicitly to withstand extreme earthquakes — survived for another hour or two, but a horde of laser cannons would evaporate them later on, too.
The few lucky — unlucky, really — souls who survived being covered in rubble or who lived on farms and the likes were allowed a rare view as the alien military forces shot long rays into the night sky, colliding with the sun’s radiation, creating ionising radiation in the style of Aurora Borealis even on the equator.
Ham radio operators all around the world sent out one signal, a desperate last gasp: “Why‽”
A handful of those who sent out this signal were not around anymore thirty seconds later when the answer arrived. Encoded in JPEG format, the troop sent an image from the film Independence Day, showing a monstrous fleet destroying the White House with a laser beam. The image was badly distorted, the reason for which became clear when a synthetic voice appended,
“Radio signals of your films have bled out into the wider universe for decades. It has granted us deep insight into the workings of the human brain. While the scenarios in these films were highly unrealistic, our little experiment showed that the best attack is exactly what you expected to happen.”
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