Merge

"OK, just for a moment. And only on the swing! I don't want you getting dirty before lunch ..."

But Bobby was already out the door. It was a warm autumn day and winter was on its way. He sat on the swing looking at his shadow in the midday sun. Before him was the sandpit with sand piled into a collection of roughly shaped domes. It was his attempt at modelling the smooth lines of the spaceport that loomed above and quite some distance beyond the garden fence. "The spaceports hold the ships. The ships will spread the seed." Bobby intoned.

Life hadn't always been this good. He remembered not having anything to eat. Then his mother and he had become very sick. Perhaps that was just a dream. It didn't matter now. Lunch was almost ready and the sun warmed him as he rocked back and forth.

Somewhere inside his head Bobby heard the words, "Conformance Testing Complete." It didn't sound like his mother but he turned to look at the house anyway. When his gaze returned to the sandpit the little domes had collapsed. Indeed the whole pit had become a rippling liquid yellow pool. Now the trees were raining down, their browns and greens mixing with the yellow from the sand and the blue draining in from the garden fence. The combined mass bubbled and boiled before flowing uphill to join a viscous metallic river running along the street.

With the fence gone Bobby could see that where once there had been a neighbourhood there was bare earth interrupted by fast flowing rivers of glistening liquid. The rivers converged before disappearing into the base of the spaceport. He felt the chains of the swing grow slippery and wet. And then his hands and the chains were one.

"Bobby, come inside now and wash your ...", but the voice trailed off into a garbled rasp. Not that it mattered. Bobby was already in a trillion little bits, swept along on a shining silvery stream.