The craft hovered in the silent blackness of space.
On board, several beings were discussing plans to invade; invade and conquer. Earth was easy pickings. Remove all life forms and plunder the planet’s resources. Sounded good, but not all of them went along with the commander’s idea. He wanted to transmogrify a battalion, around a thousand of his foot soldiers into domestic cats and drop a company of them on each continent. They could come back later when the breeding had tipped the scale in their favour. At that point the soldiers could revert back to their original form and take over. However, the general consensus being that this would be much too slow. Several of the more senior ship’s officers just wanted to get home to their loved ones.
Then came the idea about rabbits; those guys could really breed. They were rodents capable of reproducing at a far greater rate. The females could have more than one litter a year. It was the case that a female could actually have a number of litters, as their gestation period was around just one month. This plan was seen as an improvement; even the commander saw the advantages of just growing and army much quicker. However, despite this new approach having obvious merit, it took only a short spell of research into the planet’s fauna to discover the attributes of the African Driver ant. Here was an insect, whose queen was capable of laying broods with up to a prestigious three to four million eggs every twenty-five days!
It soon became apparent that by using the ant, a massive army could be generated with enormous speed. It meant that their mission could be accomplished in no time at all and they could all go home early. To this end, a handful of soldiers were transformed into these tiny creatures, with a senior ranking officer being made the queen. These were kept in one of their laboratory’s testing rooms, with a number of technicians seated at a viewing window, observing and recording the rate of expansion. For some strange reason that will probably never be known, the ants began to multiply exponentially, and during one of the mandatory rest periods for the technical staff, the observation room filled to its capacity with test subjects.
When the mass of creatures eventually burst through the room’s viewing window, it went unnoticed on the main deck. For some considerable time, the fact that the security cameras throughout the entire laboratory section were all producing black screens, went unseen. When this eventually came to the attention of the relevant operative it was put down to a power fault, and not that all lenses were smothered by a dense mass of African Driver ants. The main reason for the alien responsible for monitoring all screens not seeing this has to be put down to a distraction on the ship’s deck. A container of crystal styluses were knocked to the floor. These were gathered up quickly on account of their precious nature, being used to mark and direct information screens in a wide range of manner of search and navigational operations.
When it was eventually observed that the entire space craft’s network of cameras were all registering blank screens on deck, it was far too late to do anything about it. The solid mass of ants, with its volume exponentially expanding, was only moments away from breaching the reinforced walls of the most important section of the ship. This, quite naturally, being the main deck. With this final filling of the craft’s interior, the outer structure, including the skin of the entire craft, began to crack. Within moments, it exploded under the immense pressure being exerted by the ever increasing mass of insects that completely filled every tiny cranny of the enormous ship. This created an enormous burst of tiny fragments of the original space craft, along with many dead alien bodies.
In an absolutely remarkable coincidence, this amazing catastrophe, this potential demise of all human life on the planet, was only seen as a miniscule blip on the screen at the SETI Institute. Remarkably enough, this went unseen when a researcher knocked over a container of pencils that clattered to the floor, causing the monitoring technician to jump and look away from the screen at that very moment.
Even if the existence of these two distracting events, both on Earth and in space, were known, it’s doubtful, despite the apparent overload of significance at play, whether any real sense could be made of it…