In hindsight we should have wondered more about the supposed harmless comets. All over the earth the night before, comets, small and supposedly harmless streaked across the night sky leaving trails of glowing green vapor. It was a most impressive light show occurring all over the world. Our governments assured us it was just harmless comets burning up as they hit our atmosphere.

The next day started as any other. Traffic was heavy, horns honked, I got a cup of hot coffee and a danish (despite my diet). A fresh city breeze blew at my ruffled blouse as I entered the rat race that was the office building, my work, my life sometimes it seemed.

It was so normal at first. John smiled at me as we shared the danish...sharing means only HALF those calories so we could semi cheat on our diets. Since dating fellow employees was SUPPOSEDLY forbidden we didn't actually do more then smile and act friendly as I gave him back his nightie from my place. He smiled his handsome chocolate complexion catching the rays of the sun through the windows that needed cleaning badly on the thirtieth floor. We went to work, as usual dreading we might be the ones the big boys and girls in the executive lounges would hatchet, trying to justify their martini lunches. John and I always joked that him being African American, me being a woman...we were the last majority/minorities still semi enslaved in the world.

We could hear Myrna yelling at supplies so she could get her supplies to make her sales quota, to hopefully get her bonus and survive another year. She gulped down tumbs with her coffee every once in a while.

We heard the usual office gossip, who was doing who, who was breaking up, who was cheating on who, who was back stabbing, who was getting married, who was expecting a baby, who was retiring, who might get laid off. The same I think with most places, a little human ant hill in a box of concrete and glass, save ants tend to cooperate with one another a bit more and don't I think take themselves as seriously.

Bob in Supplies came up to yell at Myrna, hiding his desire for her.

We kept hoping he'd just ask her out instead of always somehow losing her supply requests so he could see her. A lot of us had suggested we tell Bob that he was obviously never going to bed with her this way.

Tension sometimes begets sex, other times it begets violence and Myrna didn't take stress and tension well. She'd most probably one day start chasing Bob around the office with a stapler if he didn't ease off and just invite her for a drink after work. A drink after work would work better on Myrna anyway. A nice relaxing drink, soft music, bet Bob used to play pranks on his little girlfriends and may not have learned you get more with sugar then vinegar.

Betty was throwing a paper airplane at Mike in I. S. before he stepped into the glass room that held the main frames and line printers.

She quickly went to work as a bigwig came by and Mike took the airplane in the room, read it, tapped on the glass and gave her an A okay sign.

We guessed they were on for tonight.

It started with no warning at all. One moment Veronica came to the copy machine to make copies. Veronica is the newbie in accounting so had to make the copies with us lowly office types.

She never could get the copy machine to work so John and I always made the copies for her. She bitches about the machine, our signal to make copies. She in turn would make certain our paychecks were NEVER wrong, hand delivered them to us and we ALWAYS got our bonus's without error.

Veronica as typical stood by the copy machine and yelled at it. John and I as typical joked you have to talk NICE to the machine for it to work. Then it started!

The bottom copier doors flung open, throwing Veronica to the floor. Out of the copier rubber hoses, belts and chains to the drum came out and like tentacles wrapped around Veronica's legs as she screamed. Before we could do a thing she was pulled screaming into the copier, the sound of grinding gears sickening us as spurts of blood shot from the inside of the copier. She was pulled fully in as the doors slammed shut. We ran towards the copier as her screams stopped and I swear the damn thing burped. We retreated from the copier as the doors opened, it looked as if it might want a second course.

We saw the phone handset wrap around poor Myrna's neck as Bob from supplies tried to untangle it while fending off the computer terminal attacking him. They went down together, embracing as Bob was finally able to show Myrna how much he cared for her. Down as lovers, their desire shown to late...they died in a spray of blood and we heard slurping.

Mike in I. S. tried vainly to break the glass and get out of the antiseptic room as the line printer cornered and devoured him.

Betty was going down to a group of rapid computer mouses that acted like a pack of piranha. We saw poor Phil in legal try to make a stand with a letter opener as staplers fired at him, finally taking him down, blood and staples covering him. The horror, oh the horror and John and I could do nothing.

They herded John and I into a supply room with a window. From the window we could see taxi's driving by, opening doors and grabbing screaming people into them. Trash trucks that scooped up people as they ran and the subway trains were no longer harmless transports as many fleeing into the tunnels found out. We had a small battery operated radio which had little but static. We had the idea the whole world was going through the same thing. Only the most non technological societies would be spared. But how long till these things would come after them?

We realized the comets the night before had been more then romantic specks of burning debris in our atmosphere. Imagine if you will a universe with no physical form, no reality as you and I know it, perhaps no death, just an existence. Perhaps their science discovered our universe and our little world with life was their first conquest.

Of course to affect anything in our universe they needed physical form.

For some reason they couldn't possess the living - perhaps because the living already had a soul. So they took machines and our more advanced tools. Empowered by a life force the things now lived, the creatures now knew life and hunger and (here is the irony) they would soon learn death.

Because of this though they had only JUST realized they need some of us alive to breed. So here John and I are...the two most overweight people on our floor. They want us to breed, the vending machines came in throwing Pepsi and crackers from themselves at us and left us alone. They probably have no idea how long it will take to breed, or how long it takes a child to mature. They have no idea that a living creature such as a complex animal needs care and love to grow, so our first children would be doomed to die in loneliness anyway.

They do not realize you cannot rule by terror. That only a fool breaks a horse...a broken horse will always turn on people in the end, maiming, killing and being killed. That humans are the same. The abused spouse ends up either killing themselves, killing their abusers or both.

They do not know that life requires the carrot, the joy and some type of hope. That the wild horse will respond to a gentle word, hay and medical attention to let a rider on it's back. The cow to warm barns, hay, grain and a quick stun in the feed lot as they are slaughtered, otherwise they would stampeded and kill having nothing to lose.

We don't have hope at this time. Maybe some humans will successfully fight them. Maybe large animals will as well. Maybe the new rulers of this world will learn to be good predators before destroying all large animal life on this world. Most likely all large animals are done for. Then the conquerers themselves will face extinction.

Large animals may well be done for. It's the small, the meek that will not only survive but destroy these new life forms of metal, plastic and rubber. Bacteria that eat plastic, rubber and metal.

Mice, cockroaches, spiders that can worm their way unseen into the mechanisms until it is to late. The meek really will inherit the earth. Then evolution will start all over with the surviving few small life forms starting it all up again.

Mean while the last bit of hope is to take a few of them with us.

We hope this may save a few human lives for a while longer and perhaps the human race might yet have a chance. So John and I have finished our last meal of Pepsi and crackers. We have made love one last time. We will shortly break the window and embracing jump out and down, down, hopefully landing on one of the large death dealing rapid transit buses. If we hit one this will mean one less machine of massive death. We leave this written account in the hope that somehow humans somewhere, somehow will survive and with the help of the little life forms overcome these alien invaders.

If not, we have sealed this in a kevlar case, then in a bubble wrap in the hope that one day the smaller life forms might evolve intelligence and know what happened to the major life forms in this latest extinction event on earth.

They looked at one another, broke the window and embracing they prepared to jump...1, 2, 3, - the wind swept past them on the way down as they tightly held on to one another....S P L A T They got the rapid transit bus.