It chose a great barren canyon, its craft obliterating a once-towering mesa and landing in its sudden absence, altering itself it take its form, down to the very grains of clay and stone. Once completed, the scientist sent forth a telepathic message to the others: Bring them to me.

Hiding behind the storms that were necessary to blanket their arrival, the testing began almost immediately, conducted on the very first of mankind to be taken. More people, then; samplings, dissection. At last, a single, successful manipulation, with extraordinary results: The very building blocks that gave them existence, the strands of molecules and chromosomes, if adjusted and twisted, affected the makeup of the very air around them.

The experimentation continued. Few survived. But those who did, who had been changed themselves, each commanded a power: fire, storms, death, and disease.

The testing began, small, slow. The specimens released into varying locations. From within the canyon, it watched their environments, seeing how each was affected by their return. Diseases spiked. Storms leveled homes. Murders increased. Even the food, for many, became deadly to eat.

And the scientist was pleased.

No longer would it be necessary to send their kind into battle, to eviscerate valuable natural resources in order to wage war. Once perfected, the very populations they wished to remove would be taken, altered, returned, and activated.

In the end, all their enemies would ultimately kill their own kind.

But almost immediately, the scientist discovered the fatal flaw. The abducted, when their weapons were activated, could not withstand it. Their fragile brains faltered, leaving them incapacitated. And when the time came to see how far the specimens had traveled, the scientist made an astounding and enraging discovery: Even their pathetic governments had realized the danger they posed and corralled them, limiting the scope of the sampling.

Furious now, the scientist ordered all of them removed, even the one—the boy—who it intended to thrust them into the next phase of testing. None of its kind knew what it had done, how far it had gone, to complete the task.

Take them away, the scientist had ordered. They may still be of use.

It was much later when the scouts—the scurrying, smaller of its kind that quaked in his presence—alerted the scientist that a few of the abducted were not in their ships. Including the boy named William.

Enraged, the scientist retreated into its work, knowing full well that the boy was alive. Only it, and it alone, could know this.

Longer experiments, more extensive manipulations, taking year after year, examining the strands of DNA that they had taken from the boy himself. The conduit was too valuable to abandon.

Then the scientist unraveled its mistake, the fatal miscalculation born of pride and arrogance. It ordered the scouts to begin the reaping once again.

The boy would be grown now.