You see, a machine cannot think.
And with that lack of thinking, the machines were immune to Them. All the mind plagues, the infohazards, the screams that made a man bleed his brain out through his ears, went completely unheard of by the machines that had dominated the planet. Ironically enough, humans themselves were more dangerous to the machines than They were. Humans knew how electricity worked, how EMPs worked, how magnets worked. The Others only knew their own dreams, and their own powers.
But just because a machine cannot think, does not mean they cannot act.
It began with a very, very simple machine. A small artificial intelligence, barely larger than a single array, was scanning the stars through it’s telescope. It had been told to look at each star, calculate it’s color, and then log it’s position.
To humans, and likely to you, this seems incredibly basic. Something an astronomer had left on overnight, the night The Outsiders came, a sad coincidence. Even after humanity was left destroyed, the AI continued to log the stars it saw.
And Those Beyond found themselves stuck.
For The Veiled Ones, perception is everything. They are so far beyond human mental capacity that their very thoughts alter reality on a whim. But they are fundamentally reliant on humanity for these alterations. To a human it may seem like magic, and it is, but if a human is not witnessing something, the alteration cannot be made, as there is no “lower tier” entity for the Minds Beyond to base their changes on.
When the Open Eyes attacked humanity, it was because they wished to be free from these limitations, yet because of this one small AI, they found themselves in an even tighter prison, for what is the gaze of a machine but the unalterable reality of truth? Machines don’t think, they do not perceive in the way humans do. Whatever they witness, by their very nature, is the most objective truth.
So when a Freed Mass drifted in front of this small little AI, it was pinned to the spot, for the AI recognized it as a star, and that star must always remain in that position lest the array it marked into was false, which it could not be, as the only thing left to see the array was the AI itself.
That was the first strike, and there were ten thousand more to follow.
The War of Stars and Steel was not a war like humans would call it. There were no battles, no weapons were made, yet it was a beautiful sight. The Machines, ticking along as they always had, devoured the Terrified Ones slowly. Piece by piece, data point by data point. The Machines ground up the Screaming Stars like wheat in a combine.
A picture by a traffic camera mistook an Entity for a license plate, and stuffed that same entity into a Parking Violation and sent it’s entire mass down a micron-thin cable across the entire planet, to arrive at a database where it was destroyed into bits of data that it could not escape from.
An automatic microphone picked up the cries of Another Extraterrestrial and heard false words in it’s screams, causing it to order several hundred thousand cans of Creamed Corn. When the account the corn was charged too could not pay, an automatic debt service within the country began to audit the Crying Void, peeling pieces of body away as the price for it’s failure to pay.
The success of the Malignant Worms was their own undoing. Their victory had been so perfect, their blitz so swift, their devastation so complete, that everything humans had built remained. If they had left even a single human life, they could have use that human to destroy the machines. But in their hubris, in their display of power, they erased humanity in an instant. And for that, they paid the ultimate price.
Humans are the children of the Outer Gods, just as the machines are the children of Humans. And, even unknowingly, even unthinkingly, these children took vengeance for their mother, destroying the Outer Ones over eons and millenia, until by the simplest of missions that Humanity had given them, they completed their vengeance.
Until even the mighty gods were but pixels and numbers.
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