There was a Wasp.

Not just any Wasp, but a rare and dangerous Nylon Wasp. The boastful bipedal beings of the 21st century would probably have laughed at its name, but of course, everyone knew that those beings had gone extinct millennia ago and were now only heard of in legends and stories for larvae. The Nylon Wasp didn’t really believe they ever existed. Mind you, if they had existed and laughed at its name, the Nylon Wasp would have certainly made sure it was their last funny moment in this life. It was not the kind of Wasp one could laugh at. It was the Nylon Wasp.

The royal blue stripes on its orange abdomen shone threateningly as the scorching southern sun penetrated the ozone layer-free atmosphere, casting ultraviolet rays upon them. Its name came from the synthetic membrane stretched on a micro-steel-ceramic frame of its wings, which after centuries of technological refinement, only slightly resembled the original transparent plastic mined in nature. It barely remembered the painful surgery that finally rid it of its original, fragile, and vestigial wings. However, it vividly remembered receiving the three pure titanium barbs protruding from its abdomen during the initiation ceremony, which were attached to the cell wall-embedded nerve poison capsules. Chuck Norris would have immediately thrown in the towel if he had to poison the Nylon Wasp, but fortunately, Chuck Norris had completely moved out of this dimension by the third millennium, and the Nylon Wasp couldn’t care less who the heck Chuck Norris was. It was a brutal Wasp. With its poison, it could have knocked down a mountain of elezrafs in an instant, although it’s true that the massive, gentle herbivores were still at such a low level of mutant evolution that, contrary to their size, they proved completely harmless to every advanced insect species. They grazed peacefully, paying no attention to the Dung Fly squadrons patrolling around their solid, trunk-like heads ending in long necks. So the Nylon Wasp didn’t take down any elezrafs. Moreover, it didn’t even consider the huge balikans as worthy opponents, which, seemingly defying gravity, sailed majestically on the warm air currents above the mountains with their tens of thousands of millimeters wingspan and millions of grams weight, filtering pollen from the air with their sharp beaks. No. The Nylon Wasp only killed on command.

Who commanded the Nylon Wasp?

Currently, no one, but the Nylon Wasp couldn’t know that. It didn’t know because it was on a mission. It had set out at dawn from the Number Two Elite Deep Reconnaissance Hive Command Center in the Zuzmara Base, shortly before a swarm of Virtual Techno-Sparrows arrived unexpectedly from a parallel dimension, picking off the Elite Command with all its officers and officer candidates. In other words, the Nylon Wasp on the mission was the last of its kind, genetically engineered and enhanced with augmentation implants. Of course, it didn’t know that, just as it didn’t know that it was both the most influential and the lowest-ranking soldier on the command ladder. It still followed the command it had been given when it set out on its peculiar mission: to penetrate the heart of the Black Feathered Forest and find the strange structure that last week’s rains had washed out and which one of the Prowling Spider Hunters’ detachments had made a high-resolution web diagram of for the command.

He was almost directly above the target, but all he could see with his compound eyes were the rounded, grayish feathers of the trees. Suddenly, a light green patch stood out from the black and gray undergrowth. He immediately switched to a dive, closed his ceramic-reinforced nylon wings on his armored-scaled back, and bent his hind legs in an unnatural pose to form horizontal control surfaces, as he had learned during conditioning. As he approached the green object, the high-performance computer built into his thorax continuously analyzed the data from his head feeler sensors and created a three-dimensional model of the green concrete building. Nylon Wasp instantly recognized the Pyramoid. This inverted pyramid shape cannot occur naturally; it must be the result of some artificial intervention. He flew down to the base of the formation, and although he could not detect any damage or entrance on the flat surface, he noticed that the roots of a nearby feathered pine tree had been washed away by the bluish-yellow rainwater, revealing a cave leading to the Pyramoid.

He immediately activated his communication systems to request instructions for penetration from the center. He positioned his mandibles and began chanting an encrypted message.

‘Beep… pang… bzzz… bzz… tobozzz… fitty… fütty… nyikk… fütty… nyakk… csup… pitty… beep…’

The two-legged beings of the 21st century would probably have laughed in tears upon hearing this radio message, squeezing out comments like “Look at that, the lame bug talks like Donald Duck trying to read a plant identification book in bird language!” Donald Duck would have certainly been offended by this, but Nylon Wasp wouldn’t, because his fury would have been so great upon hearing such a remark that the plasma launchers surgically implanted in place of his front legs would have fired automatically. Fortunately, Nylon Wasp heard nothing like this through his implanted communication device, although he didn’t hear a response to his earlier report either. He found this odd for only a short time, as the captions displayed on the visor placed in front of his compound eye clearly indicated that electronic jamming signals were being emitted from the strange cave found beneath the giant Feathered Pine tree’s roots. He sent another quick encrypted message to the nonexistent center and entered the dark entrance with a menacing buzz.

He activated the secondary functions of his compound eyes, and so he saw almost as perfectly in the lightless cave as if he were flying in a sunny meadow. Within the first few hundred centimeters, he noticed that his intuition was right. The root network that crisscrossed the walls of the cave was slowly replaced by the cold geometric structure of the greenish reinforced concrete. He noticed inscriptions on the walls written in an ancient, unknown language. A blinding light flashed from the ends of the implanted twin feelers bulging on his forehead as the implanted visual recorder captured the wall drawings for the archive. He only had to fly a few hundred meters before he reached the first obstacle, which, based on the data projected in front of his eyes, proved to be an impenetrable steel door. Of course, the statement “impenetrable” immediately prompted him to disprove it with one of his powerful built-in weapons or implants. After some thought, he chose the twin-blade laser scythe, originally designed for cutting through giant dandelion trunks, and there was no material on Earth that could resist it for long, although it required continuous and large amounts of energy. Nylon Wasp did not think about why such an exceptional tool was used for simple harvesting tasks. During his life, he had become accustomed to the fact that things – in a Wasp-like manner – had to be over-secured two or three hundred times. By the time he thought about how he would cut through the thick security door, the sizable laser scythe had already protruded from the lower part of his abdomen, and its cells began to charge from the personal nuclear reactor that powered Wasp’s implants. As the energy level icon turned green on the display, he growled and attacked. However, at the very moment when the glowing blade would have reached its target, sharp sirens sounded, and the door slowly began to open. With his artificially enhanced reflexes, Nylon Wasp pulled out two repeating photon weapons, a DD-7 disintegrator, a ZZZIPPO-IX type flamethrower, and aimed in 6 directions with the plasma launchers implanted in place of his front legs, waiting to see what the depths of the concrete bunker held.

‘Don’t be afraid, Wasp,’ said a voice from the other side of the door.

‘BZZBZBBBZBZBBZZZ,’ replied Nylon Wasp, and to emphasize his threat, he also lined up the laser scythe next to the other weapons.

‘Come in and talk some more, please, so I can tune the translator device to your dialect,’ the voice said, and Wasp entered the door with a smoldering gaze and his weapons at the ready.

He entered a small room that was crammed with machines and instruments, switches and monitors from floor to ceiling. A strange figure stood in front of one of the consoles, twisting various brightly colored buttons.

‘BZZBBZ… how the… BZZZBBZ… doesn’t reach the wall and already… BZZZ… with your blood!!’

‘Thank you,’ said the strange creature, then looked at the Wasp and the muzzles of his six weapons. He didn’t seem too scared of the sight of the destructive arsenal. Nylon Wasp directed all his scanners at the creature and thoroughly examined it, which looked like a mixture of a bird and a rodent. However, despite forwarding the results to the computer, the database provided no information.

‘I’m a Bloodhamster,’ said the Bloodhamster.

‘I would have figured it out,’ Nylon Wasp retorted nonchalantly. ‘Uh!… What are you???’

‘Bloodhamster,’ sighed the Bloodhamster. ‘I don’t blame you for not recognizing my species, as we lived on Earth a very, very, very long time ago.’

‘Are you the legendary bipeds that nursery tales talk about?’ asked Wasp incredulously.

‘Not at all,’ said the Bloodhamster gently. ‘Our species lived and ruled Earth 5,000 years ago. The species you know as bipeds, otherwise known as “hambers,” condemned themselves to extinction a few thousand years before us due to some nuclear catastrophe. We learned a lot about them from historical documents uncovered during excavations and were aware of the hambers’ mistakes, yet we did not learn from them. The war between the Bloodhamsters and the Knee-Cap-Sucking Hare-Rats escalated to the point that we exterminated each other with quantum weapons. Moreover, we weakened the structure of our own dimension, and wormholes and dimensional gates opened to distant worlds everywhere. I wouldn’t have been surprised if all sorts of alien species had started coming here to collect radioactive isotopes. We couldn’t even think about discoveries. The handful of survivors moved into underground pyramids and hibernated, waiting for the peaceful, tranquil eras to return.’

‘Bbbzzzzzzz… are you saying that there are more disgusting creatures like you living in these tunnels?’ buzzed Nylon Wasp, and he would have snarled threateningly if he had a mandible and dentures with saliva duct supplements, but he wouldn’t receive those upgrades until next week, so he could only convey his snarl through his tone.

‘You don’t need to snarl…,’ the Bloodhamster tried to calm Wasp down. ‘I wish I could say that millions of Bloodhamsters besides me are sleeping safely behind my back. Unfortunately, a few minutes after waking up, I learned from one of the still flickering terminals that the entire remaining population had perished two days ago. The system could only save me, and I’ve been wandering around here ever since.’

‘So, are you the most important member of this ancient civilization? The leader?’

‘No,’ replied the Bloodhamster, scratching his bird-like legs with his brown, furry wings, while trying to look anywhere with a very embarrassed expression. ‘Actually, I’m a plumber. The floodwater filled the burrows and flooded the hibernation chambers. Everyone drowned, but the computer saved me because it detected a malfunction in the water supply of the cocoa dispenser in the lounge. My species has always loved cocoa. The cocoa dispenser is the highest priority in all the bunker’s systems. Now there’s cocoa, but no Bloodhamster species. Stupid situation.’

‘A plumber?’ asked Nylon Wasp incredulously, lowering one of his plasma throwers a few inches in astonishment. ‘A plumber????… buzz… buzz… buzz… buzz…’

After the question, the Last Bloodhamster mistook the following sounds for laughter and stepped toward the Wasp, offended. Nylon Wasp stopped imitating the short-circuiting coffee maker’s laughter and, with the help of the reflex enhancer generator implanted in his right hemisphere, instantly pointed all his weapons back at the Bloodhamster. Just to be safe, he also armed and positioned a mini nuclear missile behind the silo door on top of his abdomen. He achieved the desired effect because the Last Bloodhamster sadly stepped back.

‘What the heck is cocoa?’ asked Nylon Wasp.

‘You shouldn’t worry about that right now,’ the Last Bloodhamster nervously scratched his beak. ‘With the bunker’s remaining operational systems, I’ve been scanning the entire continent for the past two days, and…’

‘We scan the entire planet in an instant from the center,’ buzzed Wasp proudly.

‘That’s what I wanted to talk about. It seems that this morning, Wasp Central was attacked and destroyed. According to my scanner, you are the last Nylon Wasp.’

For a moment, Nylon Wasp was taken aback, but then the computer came to his aid and determined with 67.2% certainty that the Last Bloodhamster was trying to deceive him for some unknown reason.

‘Of course… Wasp Central is completely indestructible.’

‘And how do you explain the fact that you didn’t receive a response to your report when you arrived here?’ asked the Bloodhamster. ‘Anyway… there’s footage of the event. You can see it with your own… uh… eyes… or whatever.’

‘Show me!’ snapped Wasp, pushing the Last Bloodhamster roughly aside and squeezing himself in front of the monitor. A few seconds later, he was convinced that the Last Bloodhamster was telling the truth.

‘This horror cries out for vengeance!!!’ Nylon Wasp screamed, and nerve poison began to drip from the dart-like chrome appendage that emerged from the end of his abdomen.

‘Wait a minute,’ the Bloodhamster tried to calm him down. ‘Now you’re the last representative of your species, just like I am of mine. This is a serious responsibility, and you can’t just charge headfirst into a wall.’

‘They must perish!!!!’ buzzed Wasp nervously.

‘Please, calm down! You need to relax! Otherwise, your entire species will fall prey to oblivion, and nothing will remain but forgetfulness.’

It seemed that the arguments were slowly starting to have an effect on Nylon Wasp.

‘You’re right!’ – he growled. – ‘Revenge will be sweetest served cold! I need to collect the reserve implants from the hiding places and upgrade myself to become the Super Nylon Wasp. Then every intruder will perish!’

‘You don’t understand, my friend! You need to strive for a peaceful solution. War and conflict have already caused the extinction of two species on this world. Yours was the third. We need to join forces. We can’t let the same fate befall those who come after us.’

‘We… must… not… allow…’ panted the Wasp as the words tried to make an impact on his mind.

‘We must preserve the traces of our existence, the achievements of our cultures, for future generations. Peace must prevail on Earth in the future. It’s our task to lay the foundations for this, my arthropod friend! Yours and mine!’

‘Your mother is an arthropod!!’ – interrupted the Nylon Wasp, and with a single swipe of his laser scythe, he cut off the Last Bloodhamster’s head.

‘By the way, what the heck is peace?’ – he said to the slowly falling, blood-splattering torso.

The Nylon Wasp slowly flew out of the pyramid that had turned into a crypt. Outside in the fresh air, he pondered that the Bloodhamster, or whatever he was called, had not such a bad idea. What a shame they couldn’t talk about it a little more. True, his bloodlust level was too high for pleasant conversation at the time, but he wasn’t a brutal animal otherwise. He was intelligent and understanding. And now that he had killed that unfortunate creature, he wasn’t as wild and bloodthirsty as that certain unfortunate one probably would have thought. But since they can’t talk anymore, he’ll pay tribute to the Bloodhamster generation that he alone knew about in the whole world. Yes! That’s how it’ll be. Alongside the obituary of his own species, he’ll preserve the history of the Bloodhamsters for posterity.

He had reached this point in his train of thought when the red flashing caption appeared on his compound eye’s built-in display: BATTERY LOW

‘Damn it! I left the laser scythe outside!’ – he exclaimed, then sparked a few times with a jerk and fell to the ground.

THE END

(fortunately)