And yet, the president’s fears didn’t match reality. No giant mantises were emerging in our actual midst, nor were the creatures a danger to our children. They poked their heads peacefully into our infants’ Sesame Street tutorials. Alongside Big Bird there now squatted an enormous grasshopper, and our immersive dance studios were becoming home to injured arrivals who wanted nothing more than food and water.

But the president had issued his executive order. A new immersive military was being formed. Online forces were ready to stop any creatures who attempted to crash our virtual borders. He praised the Pendleton shooter and urged our teenagers to turn their tanks from the war-torn landscapes of their video games toward the horizons which were dotted with insects. Blast the creatures with mortar shots, he said; use whatever resources you have to fight the aliens online. Then, facing the camera, he spoke the words we’d hoped never to hear.

“We are at war.”

THE FIRST DAYS OF WAR

When we logged back on, we found our offices and universities swarming with white trucks and avatars in hazmat suits wrangling insects into refrigerated HGVs. A large van screeched to a halt in front of our yoga class and armed soldiers descended upon the mantis with projectile nets. The creature’s thin antennae beat against the mesh, and it looked at us with its large black eyes. It raised its wings, frantically opening and closing them against the nets until we heard something crack.

“Stop!” we yelled. But the men, being men, didn’t listen. They bashed us with nightsticks and corralled us into corners. They shot the creature with tranquilizers and pulled it across the pavement into their trucks. We stood on the stained bamboo floor, watching the vans disappear from our screens into some dark-web site where we couldn’t follow. None of us felt like meditating anymore.

How many of them died in those early days, no one knows for sure. We demanded to know where the insects were being taken, but the president remained silent. Scott Blossom, who’d sought political asylum in Norway, leaked a video of cramped cages in an immersive detention center, the creatures mashed together within the wire pens as our president waged his war against the cosmos.

A group of black hat hackers arose in rebellion, programming temporary firewalls of safety which the government frantically sought to crash. The revolutionaries appeared on our screens with insect masks and a video of the enormous mantises they’d kept sheltered from the roaming feds. “We’re creating a worldwide network of sanctuary sites,” they announced. They spoke of encrypted warehouses hidden deep within the inner cities of our children’s sandbox games, and of global protectorates scattered across the mountaintops of our skiing modules. It was up to us—hackers and everyday citizens—to hide and protect the creatures.