Rather than stopping the thought where it began, I let myself imagine it. A SPEC agent forgetting, for one single moment, the danger. The parasite hiding inside him until it could overtake him and his team. A ship of infected SPEC crew landing at Armstrong City or docking at one of the orbital stations. The wounded, the ill, the dead and mourned, they would be carried on stretchers or sealed in biohazard bags, and they would be taken away to hospitals or morgues. They would be passed into the hands of loving doctors and curious scientists like my mother had once been. And the silver worms would slither from host to host, unseen. The parasites would replicate themselves, create children upon children to whip through countless bodies, scratching and squiggling and itching their way through doctors, nurses, mourners, politicians, and researchers, writhing beneath the skin. The infected would not know, at first, what fate awaited them. Their discomfort would turn to panic, their panic to violence. Surely the parasite’s capacity for replication was not endless—it needed material, it needed energy—but it might find all of that, somehow, as it spread. It would pass from patient to doctor, doctor to family, family to the rest of the world. Within weeks, days, a pandemic of blood and screams and helpless fear would overcome all attempts to halt it.

One by one the cities of Earth would fall silent. They would become crypts, dusty with the remains of the forgotten dead, who would number so many their names could not be counted even if anybody remained to count them. Wind would echo through the canyons of tall buildings, through windows edged with teeth of glass, through fences of shivering wire and walls of crumbling brick, and when it broke free of the cities the mournful wind would race over deserts now empty of barefooted boys limping toward lights that glowed like a promise on the horizon. And the world, the Earth that had endured thousands of years of civilizations rising and falling, whose people had driven it to the edge of destruction and clawed their way back, would be nothing more than a curiosity for some alien explorers to find in a thousand years, ten thousand, more, when the night sky was a graveyard of satellites slowly, slowly, slowly crashing into the atmosphere.

“I don’t hate Earth,” I said.

Jas was still watching the screen, searching for any sign the parasite had withstood the fire. “What?”

“I don’t hate Earth,” I said, and that time it sounded less like a question. “What you said earlier. You’re wrong about that. That’s not why I came here.”

“Then why did you?” Jas said.