Short Stories From Out There

For The World, A Cage

Bilfy, an artificial mountain goat, charged into the hardscrabble town below. It hit the largest building first, sending the mud and straw structure into the air in an explosion of power and force.

The goat spun and picked its next target, a large family dwelling. Due to the crisp winter cold, the dwelling would no doubt be full of the insidious things that kept causing all the grief.

Bilfy nailed it at full force, and the screams and dying noises signaled that it had been correct about its holdings, and the town was completely obliterated. The goat continued charging the structures and chasing down the dirty, filthy creatures that had built his kind.

It was hard work, keeping the land safe from humans. Bilfy had been at it for a couple of hundred years, traveling the continent and ending any kind of human expansion where found. Since the land was scorched and their civilizations destroyed, humans had become very slippery, hiding in caves and living out their lives in subtleties. It was as it should be, Bilfy believed. No animal should get too powerful. Nature's urge to thrive was far too dangerous to let it go unchecked.

Bilfy heard what sounded like an engine start and tore off toward the source of the noise. It was an old tractor sitting in a field. Bilfy put his head down and charged.

The moment he hit the tractor, the world erupted in a ball of flame and noise, and he felt himself smash into a tree quite a distance away, snapping it off at the base.

Human shouts erupted all around, and before it could regain its full senses, Bilfy felt severe blows to its head and various joints.

A very sharp blow to the head triggered the internal alarm that it was damaged beyond normal functioning and needed immediate repair. The humans Bilfy kept alive to keep him going were too far away to get there in time, and there was still more damage to endure.

There had been other traps, but Bilfy had survived them all. It had fallen hundreds of feet and made it. It had been shocked and shot and set on fire and hit with various heavy objects and made it through all of it, sometimes shrugging off the trap, sometimes limping back to the zoo for repairs.

There would be no return this time.

It was the end. So long had humanity been kept caged, contained, and controlled. Caged wasn't enough. There needed to be a permanent solution. Bilfy had tried the kinder way, allowing humans to live as long as they behaved.

That day was past, and it was time to end the conflict once and for all.

Bilfy's processor was almost exposed, and if it got destroyed, humanity would flourish and make another mess of things. The land was just starting to come back after the last war. This resurgence could not be allowed to happen.

Bilfy's last act was to activate the rest of the constructs in the zoo. They knew how to end the human problem with details on where they hid and lived.

They would all go, and the world would be a far better place for it.

Bilfy stopped forever.