Challenge 56 'Mindless' - Gynoug - Universe of Mirrors

[tehexile]

 Title: Universe of Mirrors
Fandom: Gynoug
Characters: unspecified narrator
Word Count: 200
Rating: PG-13/Gen
Summary: It would be easier if they really were mindless beasts, broken robots, or demons... (An alternate look at the bosses from Gynoug.)

It would be a lot easier if the enemy was mindless, driven by instinct or faulty programming or sheer inherent evil. It would fit with their appearance, make them easier not to empathise with. It wasn't as if they could be negotiated with anyway, even now they'd been discovered to possess sentience, self-awareness, goals in life and reasons for invading. They were still too alien in so many essential ways - senses, aesthetic tastes, pain and pleasure triggers, concepts of purity and pollution. It was something beyond even a need for resources or a place to live that was a suitable environment for them. It wasn't even a religious disagreement. It was more that...

 

It was the same for them as it was for us. While we found them inherently abominable, grating against every sense of what was right and sane in the Universe, all the essential laws of logic, they looked at us in the same way, like two people staring through a two-way mirror and wondering why the other person looked like them but with their features reversed. 

 

And they make us more like them, forced into a mould we can't fit in, just by drifting through space.