We should have suspected something, there were plenty of clues. Trees, vegetation, animals, all were clues we should have seen. Trees would disappear overnight. A forest would disintegrate as Rangers watched. Howling from the forests was heard world wide as animals were seen running and dying, falling into a mass on the ground. We thought some disease had developed, it was conjectured that it was related to the flesh eating bacteria that dissolved a person into countless sores. We could not have been more wrong. No evidence of a bacteria was ever found.

My friend Pinrose might be able to point a finger, if he were still around. We had gone on a fishing trip. We had just established our camp, when tired, he sat at the base of a tree and leaned against the trunk. He kept leaning… and dissolved into a mass at its base. His was a merciful death with little time for screaming and little for suffering. I ran wildly to our jeep and fled driving madly through the dirt roads to the main highway.

Of course I called the police. They responded, the papers said. They were never heard from again. Mayhap it started there, though soon reports were heard from news agencies everywhere that similar occurrences had happened.

Every country was up in arms blaming every other country for what seemed like an attack. No one knew it was much more than that. No one knew that a kind of Armageddon was in process. Who could know?

Soon it became clear… it was the entire planet that was being attacked. It was soon discovered that some kind of goo was spreading with vicious determination throughout the world. Then the revelation came… it was microscopic machines like those called nanites in many science fiction stories. It wasn’t goo at all, it just seemed so when they collected by the millions. They looked like kind of a gray goo, that oozed.

Electromagnetic generators were developed as we raced to survive. These worked at first in isolated localities. The blasted machines, though, seemed to be able to analyze and learn for they soon came up with a process to overcome these by using a method humans call “pile-on”. They would en masse cover the device. The inner shell would be fully deactivated. They would wait… then when the generator’s energy was depleted or otherwise disrupted they would consume the mass, including the generator and build more of themselves.

In short order the earth was rendered a desolate planet. Nothing organic survived. Nothing.

I am recording this message for whoever might care while in the International Space Station. I am alone. Everyone went down to try to save their loved ones… they have not reported in since. I speak now as I watch what appear large vessels, spaceships descending through the atmosphere. It was a planetary invasion. The original machines came down in a meteorite. It exploded like a bolide and scattered the machines widely. They took months to grow to great numbers and then simply wiped out everything. I doubt anyone will receive this log… one of the vessels is approaching the station now. I will jettison the log into space with the hope that it will be discovered. Then I will use the fuel stored here to finish … our species. Goodbye.