Lazarus

A green flying ball came at the side of the royal slither which it quickly dodged but the ball expanded into a thick green sludge upon impact and caught the slither. It couldn't move. The sticky slime was soft and flexible but the slither couldn't pull from it. It was like cement and sticky glue combined.

Its soul mate was also stuck in slime and was already unconscious. A drone that had shot its friend down with purple lightning came over and fired its taser.

Once all the dickroaches were gathered in a pile. A white light stretching from the saucer enveloped them and they teleported. The spotlight then turned to the slither's pile and beamed them up too.

***

The universe is a very big place. After all, it contains everything that exists. In our solar system, there are eight known planets (Mercury; Venus; Earth; Mars; Jupiter; Saturn; Uranus; Neptune) and 796,354 known minor planets.

A galaxy is a system of millions or billions of stars that are held together by gravitational pull, together with gas and dust. In the milky way galaxy (our galaxy), there are about 100 to 400 billion stars and assuming each has at least one planet in its solar system, about 100 to 400 billion planets.

Outside of that, there are about 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

That is from Earth's perspective.

It is wrong.

In the whole universe, there are 400 trillion galaxies including micro-universes, the negative zone (anti-matter universe) and the void.

It was normal to explore one's surroundings. Many advanced civilisations have visited Earth before. Some came to study, some came to hunt as a sport, some came for experimentation by using Earth as a planetary-sized lab, some came and marked the place as a habitable or terraformable planet, some even came to take a piss and dump their excretory wastes from their spaceship.

There were even those that came to blow things up or sexually exploit the natives. They could do anything on an unclaimed planet.

There was one that came to a backwater planet and taught the humans how to build. The pyramids were the first great buildings that were constructed. The Stonehenge was a sculpture of worship for the Boa. These were aliens that moved in giant capsules as heads.

The humans didn't make the statues smaller just because they didn't have limbs, to show their devotion they sculpted the giant heads even though it was very heavy to move around.

Although they were worshipped. They never returned. One day, the civilisation perished overnight.

Little did they know, one of the people touched the container of the Boa heads. A common bacterium spread through fomites. It was a contact-type transmission in which just a handshake would get one infected. Indirect contact through an intermediary object was also contagious.

35% of all microorganisms on Earth came from outer space. Evolution led to coexistence as microorganisms that had a high mortality rate lacked a host to spread. This produced a natural selection pressure for co-existence. One of the most well-known and highly adaptive bacteria that has extraterrestrial origins is Escherichia coli. AKA E. coli.

Since the dawn of Earth, one of the regular visitors were the Zeta Reticulans which are better known as the Grays. They had small bodies with smooth grey-coloured skin, enlarged hairless heads, and large black eyes, Grays are typically described as human-like but are shorter than the average person.

***

On a spaceship in a long room, countless rows and columns of containers were on what looked like a giant shelf behind a glass window. A Gray walked from one container to the next, pausing to look before moving on.

Behind the glass window, there didn't seem to be a floor. There was a hole that seemed bottomless.

The Gray stopped in the middle of the room and looked surprised as he gazed into container 174.

Subject E was a slither and should have been held by two mechanical clasps in the centre but it was loose from its restraints and nowhere to be found.

He turned on the screen of the window glass and selected infrared imaging. There were no buttons. The Gray sent a command through a chip in his brain and which overlayed information over his vision.

The thermal imaging showed various intensities of heat as colours from yellow, orange, red, green, blue, purple and black, hottest to coldest respectively.

The centre bottom of the container was red and moving radially away from the centre was orange. The corners were green while the outside of the container was blue and dark purple. The ceiling was mostly yellow while the light bulbs were white.

"Impossible..."

There was no way a slither could have escaped even though this subject was of a royal bloodline. It was shockproof, scratchproof, shatterproof and even acid-proof.

Then the Gray looked indifferently at the screen. He noticed a darker yellow in the ceiling. Pressing a trigger with his mind, liquid nitrogen gas poured from the vents.

*Screech*

A green coloured string fell from the lightbulbs to the bottom of the container. He deactivated the controlled freezing mechanism and thermal imaging. The royal slither stopped squealing. The Gray turned on the speakers.

"I anticipated for you to pull something like this."

Subject E raised its head at the Gray smiling at it.

"I know you can understand, I even tweaked the audio to frequencies that you would hear clearly from those ears of yours."

The slithers have ears on the inside just like fishes do.

"So, you know who I am." The royal slither replied telepathically.

"Hahahaha! Yes, I do know, Iriel."

"That's not my name."

"Of course, it's not! You don't have a name. But when you took his body, you were more brilliant than he ever was. Besides, it's convenient to call you by name."

"Call me what you want. I know who you are. Lazarus, the one who lead your people to glory and the one who destroyed it."