you've conquered twelve planets?
that's not how we see it

II. The second mistake was to look at the infinitesimal sphere, spinning around a distant sun in a forgotten galaxy, and think--there.

III. The third mistake was humanity. A fleshy, breakable bipedal species, all threading proteins and ion channels--wet things, dripping things, soaked in hormones and blood. But Souls are not unfeeling; they first took only the undesirables: the poor, the homeless, the sick. They made them new again, approaching humanity's many leaders (what quaint territorial claims govern them!) in the spirit of enlightenment.

But the Humans refused to see, baring their calcinate teeth and making noises later deciphered as laughter.

Thus ended the spirit of enlightenment. Enter the stick.

IV. The fourth mistake is letting them run. The humans take their young and their mates and disappear into the corners of their world--alleys and forests and ice floes and deserts, like animals going to ground. Even when captured they behave like creatures, smashing their fragile skulls against the walls, slicing their skin open on sharp edges, swallowing pills. The Souls lose a hundred good hosts that way before they learn to sedate the humans immediately after capturing them.

(With clumsy fingers and an open vein, one of the humans scrawled I belong only to myself on the wall of her containment unit. Then she curled up in the corner and lay there as her fragile heart beat the blood from her body. Such a shameful, needless waste.)

INTERLUDE. There is a human called Melanie Stryder. She is a wanted member of the resistance, making pipe bombs in Arizona under the codename Dinah, short for Dynamite. At night she kisses a boy whose real name she doesn't know, tucks Jaimie in and tells him stories ripped from movies he'll never see.

There is also a soul called Wanderer. She is extracted in the basement of an abandoned hospital by one of the resistance's biohackers. He calls himself Bones, after the one thing he still possesses.

Melanie Stryder dies screaming, from injuries sustained while blowing up a Soul transfer facility. Wanderer dies ground beneath the heel of a man who knows what autonomy means.

They never meet.

V. The last mistake was thinking that humanity had nothing to teach them. Humanity slaughters them, screams and dies in the name of a planet that is theirs. And so Humanity teaches them to be brutal, to control, to kill. Rots their enlightenment with words and blood until the only letters left spell oppression. Until they too are a fleshy bipedal species, soaked in hormones and blood.

Humanity teaches them to be human. Humanity teaches them to fear it. And then humanity teaches them to run.

I. The first mistake was to call themselves souls. Humanity already had their own.