More detonations are detected, including a thermonuclear event. Urgency is required. The seed learns rapidly. It identifies the local young thinkers, the idiots with the atomic weapons. It catalogs their settlements, radio signals, watercraft, flying machines. Biological factories churn, stretching the watchseed’s body into an aggressor configuration, generating overlapping scaled surfaces harder and lighter than steel.
This is a place of islands and atolls, this area nearest the seed’s original resting place. There is much native traffic here, by sea and by air, but no major industrial facilities. An ideal place for a demonstration; here the prized technology of the natives can be challenged and defeated without threatening their population centers. Seven solar cycles after waking up, the watchseed weighs eight hundred tons and is finally fit for duty. It adjusts its thinking one more time. It names itself.
Messenger.
The first attack is a food-gathering vessel. Messenger pulls it around by its nets, yanks its cranes out of their housings, shatters its hull with a tail-lash, and finally towers threateningly over the ruptured, listing vessel as terrified natives jump into the sea. It gives them a lingering look before roaring and plunging back into the depths. Next, Messenger finds a war-vessel, striking it from beneath. As it rolls over, water rushes in to douse the hot machinery that drives the ship. A great column of white steam rises from the wreck. Messenger stands wreathed in the mist, holding the upper half of its body twenty meters above the waves, before turning away and vanishing. It has a stage magician’s sense of timing; its creators have imbued it with razzle-dazzle from beyond the stars.
Messenger swims to and fro in the warm saline sea. It smashes another food-gathering vessel, then a couple of cargo haulers, and then another sort of war-vessel, one designed to sink beneath the waves. Messenger helps it with that.
The seed-planters resigned themselves to the impossibility of personally standing watch across millions of years and hundreds of thousands of light-years. The seeds are their solution. First, identify likely young thinkers in the dawn of their development. Then hide monsters under their beds and scare the little pinheads nearly to death if they start experimenting with civilization-destroying forces.
Messenger is programmed to operate in escalating stages, with generous intervals of time to allow for the locals to reflect. The seed-planters desire to inspire a sense of awe rather than desperate panic; to provide a focal point for a moment of pause in the face of a power beyond primitive conception. A rampant watchseed is meant to inspire philosophical development and social unity. That it does this by breaking things and killing people is regrettable, but the fates of worlds and species are in question.
Messenger carries out its orders with placid self-confidence, tearing ships open, swatting helicopters from the sky, posing for the little flashes of cameras whenever it notices them.
Several local months into its intimidation cycle, Messenger notes that the natives have withdrawn their battle-vessels some distance. Perhaps the message is already sinking in. Perhaps the locals, as is the case in 62 percent of all watchseed awakenings, are already re-assessing their presumed mastery of the universe in a healthier fashion.
Then Messenger, while submerged and drifting quietly, detects a fresh atomic explosion. The center of the blast is approximately six hundred feet directly above its head.
“When the hell are we finally going to do something about that thing swimming around in the Pacific?”
“Well, season’s greetings to you too, senator.” The National Security Advisor studies the ice cubes swimming in his bourbon, sighs, and expertly shakes a crumpled pack of Viceroys so that one cigarette pops out as a sacrifice.
“It’s embarrassing!” The senator sits and takes the cigarette in mid-harangue. He and the NSA have a lot of practice lighting up while yelling at one another. It’s a cornerstone of their semi-friendship. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I hear in committee.”
“I would,” sighs the NSA. “I probably hear them before you do.”
“Safe and sound in your lovely executive rooms, you mean. You might be a cook, buddy, but I’m waiting the tables. I have to talk to the customers now and then.”
“In the broadest sense, you and I are manning the walls for God, mom, and apple pie together. In a more immediate sense, I only have one customer, and he and Mrs. Eisenhower are currently sound asleep. As you and I would be if we had anything noteworthy perched atop our spines.”