Les Animaux de Feu

Dearest Friend  

Fact that you're actually reading this is brilliant. Many thanks for the delightful invitation to your upcoming 121st birthday party, however, I'm sorry that I can't now attend due to the Fire Animals. Before I explain, please permit me to apologise for the slightly burnt edges on the paper that I'm reduced to using to get this last communique to you.

The Fire Animals began in my mind, and without the whys and wherefores (which were a little too successful), escaped my spent body as a broken zoo and, except for where you are, they are amongst us all now. They started out so infinitesimally small, these ordinary little animals literally made of fire. 

Chillingly, they grow to twice the size of their non-fire animal counterparts. Then it starts. They are even more unsafe than the inexplicable knowing in the glance of the eyes of some strangers. The Fire Animals are not metaphoric, nor symbolic. They begin to run amok, composed of living combustion. Effortlessly hungry and insatiable, their predation is no longer about teeth, claws issue a mammalian, reptilian, avian nor metaphysical death. They consume in a form of limited ecological burning. No chaotic wild fires, not gentle calming warmth. Creatures possessed of an intelligent, moving hunger; preying upon the Earth and everything on it. Feeding is just conversion, not consumption.  The Fire Animals don’t “eat” matter, they convert matter into energy directly. Anything flammable becomes potential nourishment: Plants; Wood; Love; Peat; Coal; Oil-rich soil; Dead organisms; and even atmospheric gases we all breathe in some special cases.

When a fire-creature feeds, it doesn’t tear flesh. It oxidizes existence. Instead of being swallowed, its prey is transformed into flame and light, absorbed back into the creature’s mass. Although that’s not quite it. The qubits fill the spaces we cannot see behind the fire. The whole act looks like slow, single-cell engulfment, not biting, their only pleasure the music they hear as they listen to the pain its flames make, taken from living flesh absorbed into itself.

Even a decade now after they started, the Fire-animals drift and stalk through forests and cities, leaving behind: Blackened soil; Smouldering roots; Heat-scorched stones. They are tamer by their natures than bushfires were, moving in deliberate patterns, and except for the carnivores, the rest of the fire-animals avoiding total sterilization. Why? Because ecosystems that regrow produce more future fuel and, unknowingly, they would practice fire-farming. 

Biological creatures are not their ideal prey, even for fire-animals originating from carnivores. Biology is too wet, too inefficient. No meat-drowsiness to slow them down after a full feed. Fire-animals still hunt beings like our kind for fat content, sweet bone marrow oils, stored chemical energy. Much like AI did to us in the few short years before the fire-animals took over all. Well, all except for where you chose to live, so far away from us all which has proven to be a genius move on your part.  Not that you had any choice in it, but I understand why.

Because you've never seen it, the Fire Animals ‘kill’ isn’t violent looking in a traditional sense. An old fashioned ‘Wet being’ encountering a fire-predator simply collapses as moisture flashes into steam, their fire-proof clothing and flesh blistering and charring in seconds, their credit-debt laiden body slumped into glowing embers. A death nearly instantaneous. Painful, but brief. Neither merciless nor merciful.

Fire-Animals don’t see light like we do. They perceive heat gradients, chemical richness, combustibility potential. Much as better barristers perceive witnesses the moment they reach the box. To the Fire Animals, a lush forest appears bright and radiant. Deserts look dim and starving and that’s where a few beings such as yourself and family still hide, where to the fire-animals, living beings seen through their eyes would glow faintly. Dry wood to them though shines like tungsten-lit diamonds. Fire-animals claimed all the regions excepting deserts the the way apex predators claim hunting grounds. But their territories are defined by fuel density. They migrate seasonally between dry zones, guard ancient forests like feeding vaults, fight over oil seeps or resin-rich groves the way multi-nationals used to over the world’s resources until December 2066. Except without the constraints and civilising influence of the liquids we’re forced to live in. The Fire Animals’ battles do not spill blood, but erupt in blinding flares, heat waves, and explosive contact. And the winner absorbs the loser’s flame. 

The Fire Animals reproduce through ignition. Instead of mating, the Fire Animals can shed sparks that grow into juveniles, or they can split into smaller flame-entities and can sometimes ignite eggs embedded in charcoal husks. The young fire-animals start as small, flickering forms, feeding on leaves and insects before graduating to larger fuel sources such as domestic pets, people and cities. Before long, forests become ash plains, peatlands turn into smoky basins and the carbon stored underground is gradually oxidised. The Fire Animals would evolve and form into one another into a common soul. Just like our sun. But until then, they will slowly unseal the Earth’s stored sunlight, burning the tens of millions of years of captured energy back into the sky. The planet warms. Atmospheres must change. Seas recede. Earth isn’t a home. Earth is a colossal fat fuel organism. Forests are organs. Oil is bone marrow. Coal is just fossilized fat. 

They are not evil. They are digesters and for all of us who are preyed upon, our world is slowly being remembered as heat - just as it will be in a few billion years time again once more. Matter becoming memory. Form becoming glow. 

Life becoming light.

The Fire Animals have returned to the remains of my front garden, keeping their promise to save me until the last thing they consume. My life is a very small price to have to pay to spare you from their wrath, but saving you was all. Your kindness to me a century ago and just a little beyond, has always been appreciated, as has your necessary distance these many past decades. Had you shown up to my 6th birthday party, all this would never have happened. Love to your kids and no doubt hundreds of lovers. I would like to have met them all, you most brilliant and gorgeous human being.

Forgive the Fire Animals if the chocolates I also asked them to deliver with this note have completely melted by the time they get to you, but such I'm afraid is just the nature of things.

Yours in haste, 

love always 

Once Your Friend yet still Your Admirer xxx