. . .

Let’s back up a moment.

The Earth spins, unaware of the fate awaiting it. A swarm of scissors seethes towards it from the distant industrialized and scissors-hurling planet of the wicked god of space.

You shouldn’t throw countless trillions of scissors at another planet! But he’s done.

Their numbers are limitless, by the way. They glitter as they fly.

The pressure of photons against their shiny metal surface causes them to move.

Light drives them along. Glints that pass back and forth between them serve as signals; as coordination; as tools for navigation; as the synapses of its great space-brain. If they have no special medium by which they could step outside their raw physical presence and adjust their course — no inherent power, other than the function of their reflection, to do other than fly along the path that their gravity and their velocity set forth for them — then it is equally fair to say, neither do we:

The great brain of the scissors-swarm, with its sharp malevolence, is exactly as much of a prisoner of physics as is the human soul.

It glints within itself. Within itself it makes choices.

It hones in on the Earth.

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