Second stage
Mankind has a long and not very glorious history of being stupid, we are arrogant, too cocky and full of belief in ourselves. At the same time we are greedy fuckers, and also dangerously naïve, put a perchance for being ignorant about the past on top of that and you have the recipe for disaster. No wonder we have fucked it up, again and again.
This time it was a major fuck up though, one which has shown us yet again that it pays off to slow things down, to think twice before we act and maybe just spend some time doing proper research before we dive in, eager for profits and a quick solution.
It was in short the discovery of the century, a discovery which would change everything and end so many of the problems we created for ourselves. Mankind had spread out from our home world, conquered and mastered new planets and our old earth was still home to several billions of us. Yeah, we are good at breeding, and earth couldn’t handle it anymore. Climate change and natural disasters had reduced the planet’s ability to feed us and starvation and chaos was the result. New methods were found ever so often and most often they either failed or became some rich and greedy person’s source of a great deal of income. When the first research vessels arrived at the planet then known as KX-34-9 it was very obvious that this planet was very much like earth had been, back in the past. A biosphere teeming with life and the ecologists and exo-biologists were beside themselves with joy. It would take lifetimes to get a proper understanding of the extremely complex eco systems of the planet which by then was named Khailaris. The atmosphere and pressure was pretty much like that on earth, the gravity was perhaps a bit lower but not noticeably much and it felt a bit like home, right away. The greatest surprise though was to find that there already were humans there.
It was a small colony, descendants of the survivors of a crash some three hundred years prior and they had adapted and adapted very well. I will have to say that their survival proves that humans indeed are hard to kill for Khailaris was always trying to kill them. Heck, that planet was lethal, simply due to the fact that it was so ideal for life. It was space Australia, nothing can convince me otherwise. If it didn’t kill you it was just because it simply was too small, its venom not strong enough or it was too stupid.
The discovery which brought the name Khailaris onto everybody’s mind was a species of large herbivor, the locals called them Barhar, meaning something like “roarer” and the name fit for they were loud beasts, and very stinky too. Imagine a good sized hippo, give it six legs instead of four, add a long tail and make the head longer and more narrow and there you have it, and yes, it had feathers. The Barhar were a mystery, a creature the biologists just couldn’t believe existed at all for they had never seen anything like them, anywhere. The thing about these creatures was that they had a peculiar life cycle, you would perhaps anticipate that such a huge animal would give live birth, or maybe lay eggs but that wasn’t so. Or, they laid eggs, but not the way birds or lizards do. No, they laid eggs the way fish do, by spawning in a river. And they laid an insane amount of eggs, at a very young age. The biologists understood why after listening to what the locals told, the Barhar were prey animals and there were plenty of predators around at all times. In fact there were way more predators there than on earth and the Barhar were the favourite prey of them all, or so it seemed. They produced an astronomical amount of eggs and that resulted in a very large number of young, that was needed for the Barhar were picked off very easily. They were in short walking meat factories, reacting on instinct alone. Their brains were miniscule and one biologist compared them to the giant sauropods of the distant ages of Earth. Massive bodies but there was hardly any light on at all. They grew rapidly, eating almost anything they could get into their mouths when it came to plants and they reached sexual maturity at the age of six months. By then they were the size of a good cow, so the growth rate was phenomenal, in special when one knows that they came from an egg no larger than that of a frog, just released into a river to go its own merry way.
There were fish also on this planet, or at least the equivalent of fish and they ate the spawn but there were so many of them that many survived still and crawled their way up onto dry land, immediately starting to feed. Even more got taken by the land based predators but still a great number remained and formed the enormous herds which wandered about, keeping the vegetation in check.
The locals had long ago discovered that Barhar meat was edible, in fact it was delicious and tender and it was a stable part of their diet. It was not hard to hunt these animals, they were hardly a threat in any way and always available. That was when somebody got the bright idea of farming these beasts, raising them commercially and bringing the meat to earth, to feed its starving mouths. At first the idea was just that, an idea but people are eager to try things out, to break new ground. Some brought meat with them to the high tech labs of the federation, and had it checked. It was safe, there was nothing dangerous about devouring this type of flesh, as a matter of fact it was full of nutrients and extremely tasty. It would get even better when being cooked and it absorbed spices and transformed them in a way earth grown beef didn’t.
Before long some industrious businessman started exporting Barhar meat from the home world of Khailaris to earth, and it was received with ovations. It was naturally expensive, heck, transporting anything through space is expensive, even with the new jump gates. So at first it was only served at the very best restaurants within the great cities, within the most wealthy precincts. The chefs were beside themselves, the meat had such a marvellous structure, it almost melted in your mouth and it was never dry or tasteless. The price was ridiculous of course, one steak could cost about a month’s pay for an ordinary person or even more and only a very few had the privilege of dining on this priced delicacy. But that too changed, naturally.
At first the idea was to farm the animals back in their home world, but that was unfortunately not very viable. Enclosures with Barhar were always attacked by the predators and since the huge meaty animals never tried to defend themselves the pens would turn into abattoirs. So the suggestion was to take them off world. Since they were breeding in such a rapid manner and growing extremely fast too they should be able to solve the crisis back at earth relatively easily. Of course some protested, earths own ecosystem was in shambles and most species were already extinct, why on earth would anyone introduce something new then?
Money won, it always does. And of course the hope of being able to feed everybody. The Barhar ate anything green, even things other animals would shun and so some experiments were done. They imported different types of plants from earth and let the Barhar try them and they thrived on it, all of it. Some protesters were sure that humans were unable to live on a diet made up on alien meat but the colony was proof that this couldn’t be true. They had survived eating this meat for centuries and showed no ill effects of it, on the contrary, they are all very healthy individuals.
The voices of reason was silenced, by the demands of the people, by the hope of profit, by the sheer desperation of the different governments. Barhar were imported and thus it all began. Of course it went well at first, it went surprisingly well. Their home world was so alike earth it caused the animals little problems and the pens and environments created for them suited them fine. The spawn was collected carefully from the artificial rivers and now none were ending up as fish food but being raised as precious livestock. Within a couple of years the herd had grown so much that they could be exploited.
Some biologists had one question though, nobody knew just how long the Barhar could live for, naturally. In the wild of Khailaris they rarely reached more than maybe two years of age, by then they were huge and heavy and slow and ended up as a quick snack more often than not. And this odd habit of breeding at a very young age? It was of course an adaptation to their very hostile environment, if the chances are that you are to be picked off quickly you better breed first so that your genes may survive. Still, some were puzzled by this. Nobody had seen a truly old Barhar and in fact, the locals had no idea of what they would look like, some suggested that the animals would continue to grow until their own weight became too much for them and they collapsed. Most believed that nature on their home world simply hadn’t allowed the species to develop a survival strategy beyond the age of breeding. Whence that was done the adult animals were in short bait, to pull the predators away from the young which had yet to breed. Why waste time on a small and not as juicy morsel when a huge and fat one was readily available?
Soon Barhar meat became the salvation for the masses, huge farms were built and the humans of earth got most of their protein from these animals. The bones and feathers were used too, for everything from art to stuffing and there was a thriving industry being developed based on the exploitation of this alien cattle. Things were going well, the people who brought the Barhar to earth were praised and celebrated and regarded as the saviours of mankind. Barhar meat was being packed and send off to the colonies, it became a staple part of the rations for the space force, it didn’t take long before this tasty treat became something everybody took for granted. It became cheap and easy to obtain, with its high calorie content it saved countless lives and made many a politician take a huge sigh of relief.
The trouble started after some years, and it was very subtle at first. After all, these animals were new, few had learned all that much about them and so nobody raised the alarm. What most of the biologists had failed to realize was that it is a very stupid thing to bring a species into a new environment. We have as I mentioned fucked up royally many times before, and this time we did it on an epic scale. Like I said, nobody had seen an old Barhar, what we saw there on their home world was regarded as their final life stage, they never had the opportunity to grow old. On earth on the other hand, now that was a different tale altogether. Some farmers got surplus animals, and put them aside to be processed later when the demand was higher. Thus some animals suddenly went beyond that age when most of them would be eaten back on their own planet. Yeah, they continued to grow, and then they changed.
You see, nature is the same all over the universe, it tries to regulate itself. It can create disease or use evolution to slowly change a potential dangerous situation into one which benefits the bio diversity of the eco system. We had in our arrogance and naïve ways forgotten about this. If there are no predators to keep a population under check, well, what does nature do? It creates some. Yeah, any empty ecological niche will be filled, sooner or later. The home planet of the Barhar was packed with danger, predators in all sizes and shapes, the biosphere active and vibrant and very dynamic. The new situation here on earth was the opportunity the Barhar species had been waiting for, to step out of the role as mindless prey and take the lime light, as something way more than before. Perhaps it was a remnant of a time long ago, when there were few predators back on their home world, a mechanism for regulating their numbers before they got completely out of control. Their world had been through disasters, just like most others. Maybe it was something entirely new, brought on by the change in environment? Nobody knew back then, not even the best minds.
It started with a few cows, huge hulking beasts barely able to move due to their excessive mass, they hadn’t been transformed to beef yet and the farmer had kept them by a river, just to make things more comfortable for the animals. They seemed to enjoy the cool breeze and the animals were after all very valuable. The cows got up, one by one and waddled into the water, until only their noses were out of the wet element. It looked funny, and nothing more happened so their owner thought that this was their natural way of cooling off. He didn’t do anything about it at all. That was a stupid move, and we soon found out why. The submerged animals changed while under water, capable of growing very rapidly they also had the ability to swiftly change their entire body structure. It took less than twenty four hours and what emerged from the river can best be described as a six legged T-Rex with a nasty temper and the jaws of a shark.
The few animals who had transformed were later referred to as the six queens of the Barhar, and they devoured most of the herd left on the beach before they broke through the fences. It was discovered too late, the six were already heading for the ocean. We had firmly believed that the Barhar were a species which had normal sexual reproduction, a male and a female and so on. We were wrong. The queens are capable of parthenogenesis, asexual procreation. When they reached the ocean they all waded inn and started to spawn, thousands upon thousands of eggs, eggs which would have been devoured by fish if there had been any left. Alas, what met the spawn was plastic and garbage and they feasted upon some fish farms and by then we knew that something was off. The six queens died after spawning, their grey and ghoulish bodies washed up on the shore like the corpses of salmon, their task done. The second life stage of the Barhar was set in motion and within a week the beaches were literally overtaken by hungry predatory Barhar. It was like the movie jaws on steroids, these monsters ate anything they came across and we soon found out that very few weapons were truly efficient. Sure, we could bomb them from the air, or use fire but they were so many, and they grew so fast. And they spawned, once they reached a weight of about two hundred kilo’s, and that was done swiftly, they would find water and spawn.
The national guard was called inn, then the army, then all available battle ready soldiers. Nations which had been at each-other’s throats for centuries were suddenly forced to cooperate, for the new Barhar were not picky eaters, and there were plenty of humans around. With the wildlife populations more or less wiped out the new terrors went for the easiest catch they could find, humans. Yeah, we fought them well, and hard. We used poison, we used all sorts of guns and we killed them in the thousands but that didn’t work at all. The monsters spread out, and incredibly enough they were able to adapt to any environment they encountered. It didn’t matter what they encountered, as long as there was something to eat they thrived. The Barhar farms were of course targeted and emptied too, there were swarms of hungry predators everywhere and they were incredibly hard to kill. Not only that, their original species had been a bunch of stupid herbivorous lumps of meat which didn’t need any great brain activity to survive. These on the other hand were smart, wicked smart.
And they knew how to cooperate, almost like a hive mind. Electric fences hooked up to the high voltage lines could only keep them out for a few days before they realizedhow they worked and some more or less sacrificed themselves to allow the others to pass through. Mankind was facing a true problem once more, this time a problem we ourselves had brought onto us. Not such a novel thing after all, but one with no solution.
We couldn’t stop them, the death toll was rising and so the final decision was made, to evacuate earth. There was no other solutions, the areas capable of housing humans were not all that large, people lived like sardines in a can and whenever the monsters got through the defences there was carnage. Using nukes would of course kill the monsters but leave the entire planet uninhabitable. The space ports were transformed into hubs of frantic activity. The moon was the first stop, a transit station where people could find out where to go. Then they would go to the colonies and try to find a new future there.
It took three desperate months to empty earth of humans, by then the Barhar were everywhere, literally. When the last shuttle took off the base was being filled with ravenous beasts, eager for flesh. Maybe there was a sort of beautiful irony there, we brought them to earth to feed upon them, they ended up feeding upon us. What is that truly if not Karma?
Earth is no longer ours, it belongs to them now, the Barhar. I am writing this from an office on the moon, laws has been made and sent out, nobody is to remove any Barhar from their natural environment, nowhere! They are regarded as a very invasive and dangerous species by now, too bad that this again has triggered a new sort of demand. Some want the predator version of these animals, for hunting, as trophies. Some give a damn about the bans and go down there, to see if they can best these terrifying beasts. They rarely return.
The latest updates sent by drones and satellites are that the Barhar has evolved once more. Now there are predators hunting the other predators, truly horrible beasts which would make any dinosaur faint with shock. I would say that they give the old Kaiju movies a run for their money as well when it comes to monstrosity. The biologists have spoken, there will be an equilibrium, a balance eventually. It may take centuries but the Barhar will evolve again, to fill every niche like before. Dna testing has been done, all the species of Khailaris has one origin, one species. I wish we had known back then, but it is too late now. Earth is off limits, and will be for ages to come. I doubt mankind will be able to return until that day comes when the sun swells and starts to devour her children like Uranus of old myth.
But the Barhar will probably survive even that, they may evolve into dragons who knows? Mankind has survived before and will survive also this, if we do not finally end ourselves due to a new bout of stupidity. I guess time will show, she of all things holds all the answers. Tonight I will drink my last bottle of wine, and feast on the last steak of Barhar meat I could get my hands on. Humans of all the species out there in this vast galaxy is probably the only species capable of digging its own grave with its teeth. But I am grateful in one way, the monsters forced us away from the cradle and into the wide world, we humans are never as ingenious as when we are threatened, as when we have our backs against the wall with no where to go. I allow myself to be an optimist. Let the Barhar have this old earth, maybe they will transform it back to the paradise it once was, and I honestly think they deserve it, for however long it may last. Mankind’s future is out there, among the stars. As long as we don’t try to bite over more than we can chew, once more.
