Author : Colin Edley

Nobody likes the guy who told you so being right, especially when the three day bender you went on after the girl he said was no good meant you couldn’t drag yourself out of bed except to phone him up and ask him to cover your shift.

So here I am on the graveyard shift while the rest of humanity patted each other on the back for the same kind of stupidity that nearly saw me without a job, well happy new year one and all.

Shame we’ll never see another, it started somewhere in the south pacific. I suppose it was as good a place as any, that and its the biggest body of water on the planet. We wouldn’t have spotted it so soon if the satellites hadn’t been watching the Caroline Islands being the first place to pass into the new decade.

There have been black tides before and oil slicks, but this one was circular and reflected nothing, not even the stars or the full moon directly above it. Boats and planes went first and then Hawaii, soon the circle was getting ready to shake hands with both seaboards of the pacific. Those hands met again at GMT on the equator thirty hours later right underneath where I’m sat. The guys on luna reckon it has to be almost totally entropic, once its been there is no hot, cold, high or low just a black stain spread over the billiard ball smoothness left in its wake.

How it got to Earth I don’t know, what made it I don’t know that either, one thing I do know is that they must have been a lot like me.

The only reason anybody makes something that destroys everything it touches is if they had already got something they couldn’t get rid of any other way.

Its just about eaten through the base of the tether, so luna this skyhook is about to become a spaceship until it eats that too…

At least I can take something with me, whatever made this thing made one more mistake than I did, one they messed up bad enough in the first place they had to make it to mop up after them, two they let it get out afterwards.