The Vermillion Haze

September 12th, Year 1

It started in China. We all saw the videos. A perfect, basketball-sized sphere of what looked like polished obsidian, hovering silently in the middle of a deserted public square in Wuhan. Then came the first Message. It wasn't a sound; it was a thought, planted in every human mind at once. A spike of pure, crystalline command that made you drop whatever you were holding.

A FINGERNAIL. FROM LI WEI. TIANJIN.

The world scrambled. Who was Li Wei? How did you find one man in a city of 15 million? But the Chinese government, with its terrifying efficiency, found him. A bewildered factory worker. They tried to get him to approach the Orb, but a psychic scream erupted in everyone's mind within a ten-mile radius, dropping people to their knees. The Message clarified, cold and impatient. REMOVE IT. TOSS IT.

So they did. A nervous official in a hazmat suit used a pair of sterilized clippers on Li Wei's right pinky fingernail and tossed the tiny crescent at the Orb. It vanished before it hit the surface. The pressure in our minds receded. The world breathed a collective, confused sigh of relief.

That was the first offering.

May 3rd, Year 4

There are three of them now. "Wanderers," the eggheads call them. The first Orb, after collecting a grotesque patchwork of about two thousand human parts, teeth, tibias, spleens, locks of hair, simply floated up into the sky and was gone. We thought it was over. Then, a year to the day, another one landed. This time in Brazil. The demands started again.

But now we have a new problem. The Wanderers are still up there, drifting through the solar system. Some amateur astronomer in Arizona was the first to find out what happens when you look. He was tracking Wanderer-1 with his backyard telescope. His wife found him an hour later, meticulously trying to peel off his own face. His bones, she said through her tears on the news, had become… flexible.

They call it SWS. Sidereal Wanderer Syndrome. Stare at one for too long, even through a screen, and you change. Your body and your mind warp. People report their skin taking on the texture of granite, or their fingers branching into new, useless digits. Worse are the mental changes. An obsession with impossible geometry, a compulsion to speak in a language of clicks and whistles, a complete erosion of self.

Looking at the sky is now an act of faith.

June 21st, Year 11

The rain started last year. We knew the Wanderers were "dripping," but space is big. We thought it would just dissipate. We were wrong. The output must have been astronomical. The first "Vermillion Shower" was treated as a freak atmospheric event over the Pacific. A ruddy, oily sleet that reeked of copper and ammonia. The fish went belly-up for a thousand miles.

Now, it's a season. We get three or four a year. The sky turns a bruised purple, then a sick, blood-red haze descends. That's your cue to get inside. The filtration systems in our building hum day and night, but the air always has a faint, sweetish rot to it. We don't eat fresh food anymore. Anything grown outdoors is a vector for SWS prions or God knows what else. The hydroponic farms are the new Fort Knox.

Yesterday, the Orb in Africa (Orb-11) demanded an entire lung, a left foot, and six feet of small intestine. From a single six-year-old girl in Toronto. They did it. They have to. When they miss a deadline, the global psychic scream paralyzes the planet for minutes. Planes have fallen out of the sky. Surgeons have collapsed mid-operation. It's a hostage situation where the hostage is all eight billion of us.

February 18th, Year 20

I'm writing this by the light of a bio-lamp. The power grid finally gave out last week. The Vermillion Haze isn't a season anymore; it's the sky. Outside my reinforced window, a permanent, greasy twilight smothers what's left of Seattle. It's always raining. The stuff eats through steel if you let it pool.

Society is gone. There's no government, no internet, no "us." There are only small, terrified pockets of humanity huddled in filtered buildings, and then there are the Changed. The Wanderers are easier to see now, their dark shapes drifting lazily behind the crimson clouds. Looking at them is no longer a choice. Their psychic residue bleeds into the world. People change just by breathing the air.

My neighbor, Carl, started changing last month. His arms elongated, the joints cracking and reforming until he could touch his ankles standing up straight. He doesn't talk anymore. He just scratches patterns into the floor, patterns that hurt my eyes to look at. He's not Carl. He's just a shape the world has taken now.

The newest Orb, Orb-20, landed in what used to be Kansas three weeks ago. We could all feel its hunger. It didn't ask for parts. It projected a single, simple image into our minds: a human body, vivisected and functioning, being absorbed whole. Then the image multiplied. A hundred. A thousand.

A hundred thousand.