Insecticide

She is alone, she is scared, and she is hungry. Being a Higher Power and gaining a million-year lifespan doesn’t absolve one from biological necessities. That privilege is reserved only for the Highest Powers.

She should have thought about this before taking an interstellar detour. She shouldn’t be blamed, though. It is only recently that she was elevated from a Power to the Higher Power. Earlier she was never far away from a meaty planet or even simmering hot delicious Sun. But no, she had to become a Higher Power and go inter-stellar. And now there she is… stuck in empty interstellar space, light-years from the nearest sun.

She looks left, right, front, back, up and down. The tiny dots of light don’t evolve into any familiar pattern. She is truly lost in an unknown part of the galaxy.

She shouldn’t have answered that last Prayer. She thought she can outshine other Higher Powers by answering and saving that species, even though their planet was outside her jurisdiction. And didn’t she feel good when they considered her a goddess? She did. Very much. Well, thanks to that adventure now she is the one in the need of saving.

‘Shall I call upon the Highest Powers?’ She thinks. ‘They can show up here at the speed of thought. But it will look bad on me for miscalculating on my very first millennia as a Higher Power.

Garbled Galaxies! Now my multiple bio-circuits are shutting down along the 36-km body. Need to start the back-up energy source.  What should I do? What should I do?’

She prepares to call the highest power from her Ansible -- faster-than-light communication channel. Before she does, a tiny globule appears in the periphery of her multi-frequency vision. Curious, she quickly jumps next to it.

‘It looks amazing,’ she says. ‘Definitely created by a space-faring civilization. Some kind of derelict vessel for space exploration. For now, it will have to do as a quick snack. It is mostly hollow from inside but still bigger than an asteroid. It should give me enough energy to reach the next star.’

As she prepares her orifices to ingest the vessel, a warning sign lights up somewhere within her.

‘What now?’

She sees within and realizes that her snack is not derelict after all. It has about a million specimens from the space-faring civilization. They all are looking at her in awe. She is now torn about eating it. Rules don’t say anything about not ingesting the species, but it is frowned upon. Anyway… there are probably billions more where this one came from.

‘Got to check nevertheless.’

She lets out a sigh and uses a part of her remaining energy to boot Backward Projection Device. Her addendum vision changes and the derelict… no… the image of the derelict moves backward in time. It traverses back towards a mid-sized sun, past a beautiful ringed planet and other gas giants.

Pause.

It stops near a blue planet, the third one from its Sun.

Play.

There are four other derelicts --  just like this one -- about to escape the planet each with millions of specimens of a species called ‘humans’.

‘Well, the other three ships are there, so I might as well eat this one.’ He orifices dilate again to ingest the vessel as addendum vision continues to play the projection. Missiles from the blue planet gallop towards the four vessels. Three of them find their target but the fourth one misses by hair. Not long after, a large explosion jolts her vision as the blue planet goes up in smoke.

‘Shivering Supernova!’ she exclaims.

The last vessel is almost ingested. She spits it out and looks down upon the vessel. She can get into trouble if she ingested the last specimen of a species. She turns around and looks at the neighborhood again.

Left, right, forward, backward, up, down. Absolutely nothing. Just the darkness of space.

Her circuits grumble again with hunger.

She looks back at the human vessel that is now running away.

‘Ah, well. Highest Powers won’t find it out.’

She makes a jump and gobbles it up in one bite.

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