Kinder Sacrifice

The spiders descended upon Earth with an enticing proposition for humanity: “Make us your rulers, and we will transform your world. Enjoy free energy, end wars, and join a galaxy-wide trading community that grants you access to the finest technology, food, and materials in the universe, including advanced sex bots. We will extend your lifespan to a thousand years, enhance your intelligence, and elevate global educational standards.”

“What’s the catch?” asked humanity.

“We get to eat one of your children every day,” replied the spiders. “They are yummy.”

“Any particular age group?” humanity asked, appalled yet curious.

“We prefer them innocent. Pure in thought. It gives the meat an electric resonance.”

“Is there any other deal we can have?” asked humanity.

“We could just eat you,” replied the spiders.

“Ah,” said humanity. “Are there any more catches?”

“Wellllll,” said the spiders. “We like to have the parents watch when we eat their children. It adds drama. We particularly like it when the mother throws up. But that’s negotiable. While parental distress is nice-to-have, it’s not a deal breaker.”

“That’s sick,” said humanity.

“Think of your pan-galactic ePods and eternal youth,” said the spiders. “Besides, how can being ruled by us be worse than shape-shifting lizards?”

“Tell us about the sex bots,” said humanity.

“You can have two,” said the spiders.

“Deal,” said humanity. “Where do we sign?”

*

A hastily arranged transfer of power conference was convened at the UN’s newly refurbished Hall of Transparent Allegiances, sponsored by Pepsi Omega. Delegates and dignitaries gathered beneath a chandelier resembling a double helix, while the room filled with a faint scent of burnt ozone and a hint of imported gravitas.

At precisely 09:09 a.m. GMT, a spider the size of a Fiat Panda clicked onto the dais, its voice amplified through neural resonance.

“We invite your rulers to come forward and shed their exoskins,” it said with unmistakable glee.

There was a moment of silence. Then Queen Elizabeth III stood up, gave a resigned sigh, and unzipped her neck.

A flick of green tongue. A slither of scales. A ripple of stunned gasps.

Next came the Pope, who muttered something in Latin and melted, quite literally, into a seven-foot reptilian cardinal with a monocle and faintly cheesy odour.

One by one, the great and the influential dropped their human façades. Robbie3, the famous kneeball player, hissed and flexed his tail. Chat show host, Diana Dissembler, grew gills. Joffe Zebso, the disgraced 19-times married android, who headed up NASA and a host of German middleware tech startups, blinked horizontally.

Embrass Kimble, the bumbling former Prime Minister of Middle England, tried to unzip himself, got stuck halfway, and had to be helped by a German ambassador who turned out to be a Komodo dragon in a pencil skirt.

A child screamed. A diplomat fainted. A ReTok livestream surged past 80 million views.

“We suspected as much,” muttered a delegate from Norway, adjusting her aluminium foil hat.

That’s when Ego Minks, serial entrepreneur and creator of the largest global trading empire ever, at least since Amazon’s downfall after China decided it could sell its own tat online, had an idea: “Puppy farms,” he thought. “Just for raising the chosen kinder.”

“Fucking hell,” said the spiders when he revealed his idea. “We thought WE were evil. Get to fucking work, my son.”

Minks nodded, smiled in a curiously mechanical way, and started drawing up plans.

The spiders never grasped one crucial truth: in the refined art of evil, humanity didn’t merely participate; it dictated the rules, established the stakes, and influenced the referees. Thus, it was hardly surprising that resistance factions sprang up like fungi in the damp soil of despair. Schemes were concocted in basements and back alleys, ranging from cyber-bio sabotage to weaponised irony.

One such plan involved lacing the child food stock with industrial quantities of fipronil, an insect neurotoxin banned in most civilised nations but still found in budget shampoo and conspiracy theorists’ breakfast cereals.

The toxin worked, briefly. Too well.

Three spiders convulsed violently mid-feast, shrieking in frequencies that liquefied every glass surface within a square kilometre. Then they turned feral.

Naples burned.

The spiders tore through their perimeter, limbs cleaving through ancient churches and high-end gelato stands with equal indifference. An opera house crumbled beneath the weight of a rampaging arachnid, its screams echoing what some claimed was the soprano line from La Traviata. Tourists scattered in panic, influencers live-streamed their impending doom for extra reach, and emergency services were reduced to mere smoke and apologies.

The Galleria Umberto, which the spiders had repurposed as their central headquarters, became a beacon of chaos, a glittering spider-choked mausoleum wrapped in silk and fire. Cathedral domes collapsed. Piazza del Plebiscito erupted into a sinkhole of molten marble and shredded web.

The humans who had orchestrated the fipronil plan were never found. Only a Post-it note remained, stuck to a melted drone controller. It read: “Plan B?”

*

John Curbishley was a lean man in his late fifties, with silver-streaked hair that curled rebelliously at the collar and a face carved by years of quiet resistance, lines around the eyes not from laughter, but from squinting into the darkness of secrets. He wore suits that had seen better wars and carried a walking stick he didn’t need, except to poke sleeping consciences. His eyes, a muted shade of storm-cloud grey, had witnessed the collapse of ideals and the rise of monsters. Beneath his outward calm lay a sorrow so tightly folded into his being that even his posture sagged under its weight.

He had lost a daughter and nearly lost himself. Her absence screamed in his chest, a constant presence he learned to live beside. The world moved on; the resistance continued its plans, but guilt echoed with every heartbeat for John. He hadn’t stopped her, hadn’t held her tight to say no. He had watched her walk to the gates, her spine straight and hands unclenched, and he had said goodbye.

At night, he dreamed of her laughter echoing down sterile corridors and woke to a silence that crushed his heart. He told no one. Not even Evie. He couldn’t afford to be human anymore.

Hiding in the darkness of self-satirising, John clung to the wreckage of his life with the fingertips of dark humour. When asked if he missed her, he once replied, “Only every time I blink. It keeps the grief moist, you know.”

“Look, chaps,” said Curbishley, adjusting the knot of his threadbare tie as he addressed a gathering of the resistance leaders. “We must work out a plan of attack. It’s no good just throwing ourselves at the barricades. That’s just going to reduce our numbers.”

Curbishley leaned over a spread of maps, quantum renderings, and rough sketches of eight-legged monstrosities. The pub, “The Widow’s Garden”, hummed with conspiracy.

“They’re not just smarter than us,” he muttered, running a finger across a dog-eared map of Naples. “They’re… philosophical.”

Milly Mole, who once portrayed a precocious orphan in a BBC Christmas special, lit a cigarette and, through her open lips, blew smoke rings. If a Seminole had been present, they might have interpreted the rings as a didactic treatise on row versus crosshatch tobacco planting. She remarked, “So, we out-philosophise them.”

Milly, flicking ash into a potted fern already half-dead from conspiracy meetings, looked steadfastly at John. She reminded him of someone. Someone he used to know, whom he had tried to forget.

“In a sense,” said DARiA, the AI in the teapot. “I’ve composed a linguistic virus. Wrapped in a poem.”

“What kind of poem?” John gasped. He quite liked poetry and studied it at university all those years ago, in the dreamy days when a young, clean-limbed student could stride confidently into the common room and read his poetry to a young lass of his fancy without getting laughed at. Not to his face anyway.

“The kind of poem that makes a spider question its place in the cosmos,” said DARiA, steam hissing faintly from the spout of its repurposed teapot shell.

Father Brendan crossed himself. “Is it holy?” he asked, clutching his crucifix like a man wringing water from a stone.

“No,” said DARiA, its LED indicator pulsing in amused disdain. “It’s Derridean.”

John said nothing. He was remembering her face, his daughter’s. Clara. She had been fifteen when she volunteered to be taken. She hadn’t cried. Not once.

“Better me than Evie,” she had said. “She’s only nine. She still believes in mermaids.”

The moment Clara was taken, he had stopped believing in everything else.

*

Kiss Fang, the spider queen, sat upon her throne of lacquered bones and velvet, high atop the Cathedral of Threads, deep within Naples’ silken vaults. Her compound eyes shimmered like nebulae, and when her voice emerged, it was akin to steel brushing silk. She moved with unsettling grace, a gliding menace that was both timeless and precise.

Ego Minks strode into the chamber with a swagger dictated by PR algorithms, cradling data slates under one arm like a talisman. His lips were slightly too tight, and one hand twitched at his cufflink, betraying a hint of tension.

He looked steadily at the queen. She was ancient in a way Minks would never understand, and young in a way he never really was. He felt like he was born with a computational matrix for a mind and an abacus for a heart.

Minks tried to be ageless, too, but in a way only being a billionaire and advanced machine-learning skin treatments could achieve. His face was a hybrid of Hollywood jawlines and Silicon Valley smugness, framed by hair too geometrically perfect to be anything but artificial. He wore tailored synth-suits that glimmered slightly with each micro-movement, always broadcasting a brand. His eyes were blue, but not the blue of oceans or skies; rather, they were the blue of algorithms optimised for persuasion. Inside, Minks was hollow, having long since outsourced emotions to analytics. Empathy, he once said at a keynote, was a distraction. What drove him now was legacy, the desire to remain not just in history but in every update, every stream, every server reboot.

“Majesty, the numbers are up. The Harvest Initiative has reached peak efficiency,” he said, flashing his artificial teeth in a grin that not only didn’t reach his eyes, but avoided them for fear of displaying sincerity.

Kiss Fang descended from her throne, her limbs unfolding like a mechanical cathedral in slow bloom. She circled Minks, her legs clicking faintly on the obsidian floor.

“Do you dream, Ego Minks?” she asked, her breath cold enough to frost the air.

He hesitated. “Only in high definition.”

“Humour. A shield for fear. How quaint.”

“I’m not afraid,” he lied, wiping his palm discreetly against the seam of his trousers, where sweat had already begun to bloom. “We’re partners, after all.”

She stopped inches from him; mandibles poised like blades.

“You are food that learned to negotiate,” she said. “Useful. For now. But don’t mistake our pact for parity.”

Minks forced a smile and adjusted his lapel. “You need my platforms. My reach. My… “

“Your cruelty,” she interrupted, lowering her head until her mandibles grazed his ear like a blade whispering a secret. “You understand appetite. And you do not ask why.”

“I ask ‘how much.’ That’s more profitable.”

Kiss Fang let out a low, chittering laugh. “And that, dear Ego, is why you still have a skull.”

She returned to her throne in a motion that suggested she never truly left it. Around them, spiderlings whispered through webbed alcoves, translating her moods into tactical readouts.

“Keep feeding the machine, Mister Minks,” she said. “But remember, even partners cast shadows. And I am very good at feeling in the dark.”

Minks swallowed and nodded. “Understood.”

“Your species perplexes me,” she clicked, her mandibles twitching with something like curiosity. “You trade morality for gadgets.”

“And you eat our kids. So, who’s worse?” said Minks, smoothing an invisible crease in his luminous cuff.

“We are honest,” replied Kiss Fang, the tip of one leg tracing idle spirals on the silk-strewn floor.

“Which makes you adorable,” Minks smirked, leaning back. He didn’t feel the smirk inside, but he consoled himself that his stocks were still rising.

She studied him, then turned her eyes to the latest offering. A boy of eleven with luminous eyes and a Bach sonata in his trembling hands

He turned to leave, spine rigid, the smell of spun blood heavy in his nostrils. As the doors sealed behind him, he exhaled long and slow. His knees were trembling.

But he was still alive. For now.

*

The resistance infiltrated Naples under the pretext of filming a high-budget documentary: “Web of Love: Inside the Spider-Human Romance.” Dressed in faux designer gear and carrying camera drones loaded with cloaked explosives, they arrived via a rented bullet train disguised as a bachelor party for a fictional social media influencer named Snax Rippa.

Their cover story was outlandish yet plausible in an era where sentimentality could be monetised and horror live-streamed. Milly Mole, wearing oversized sunglasses and chewing bubble gum, exuded the disdain of someone who had once been famous and loathed every moment of it. Father Brendan clutched a leather case filled with sacramental wine and thermite. Meanwhile, DARiA, concealed within a thermos designed like a novelty trophy, muttered cynical haikus through Bluetooth.

As they walked through the outer perimeter of the Citadel, a spiralling tangle of carbon silk and shattered marble, security drones scanned their identities and paused.

“Why do I have to be the boom operator again?” whispered Simon, their audio tech, and reluctant explosives expert.

“Because you’re the only one whose blazer doesn’t look like it’s been through a car wash,” snapped Milly.

“It’s twenty-eight degrees.”

“You were born sweating, Simon. Just walk tall and carry the stick.”

They passed the first checkpoint. A sentient turnstile bowed them through.

“See?” said John, voice low but steady. “No alarms. We’re professionals.”

“Speak for yourself,” muttered Simon. “I’ve got a thermobaric mic boom and a bladder full of regret.”

“You should have gone before we left,” said Milly.

“I tried. The toilet on that train was… occupied.”

“Occupied?”

“By DARiA. Doing ‘existential diagnostics.'”

“I am composing a manifesto,” DARiA buzzed from inside the thermos. “While recharging via the urinal plug.”

Father Brendan crossed himself, muttering, “Blasphemy.”

They approached the inner gate. Ahead, spider sentinels danced slowly in ritual spirals, their legs moving like calligraphy.

John took a breath. He reached into his jacket and touched the pocket that held the poem. Clara’s poem. The linguistic virus. His voice in her voice. Their last defiance.

They stepped into the citadel.

“Showtime,” said Milly, flicking open the clapboard marked Web of Love, Scene One. “Try not to get eaten.”

John wore a wire, and nestled in his molar, was the virus he would weave into Clara’s poem. His tongue brushed against it repeatedly, testing its presence, weight, and readiness. It tasted of copper and dread.

He could feel the slow burn of adrenaline pooling in his chest, a creeping tightness like the onset of fever. The cathedral’s interior pulsed around him, woven from millions of strands of silk, each strand resonating faintly with chittering whispers. The sound was maddening, like a thousand violins tuned a semitone off.

The soft, spongy floor muffled his footsteps. Every step closer to the Queen felt like betrayal. Not to the mission. But to himself. To Clara.

He remembered her last look, serene, as if she were the one consoling him. He hadn’t wept then. He’d stored the tears like ammunition.

Now, as he reached the central chamber, the tears threatened mutiny.

Behind him, Milly and Father Brendan flanked the ceremonial platform, playing their roles as documentarians and cultural analysts. Drones hovered. Lights blinked.

John exhaled slowly, forcing stillness into his bones.

He would not flinch. Not now. Not in front of her.

Kiss Fang waited on her throne of obsidian and bone, unmoving, like a statue of intent. Her gaze pierced him the moment he crossed the threshold.

He stepped forward, approaching Kiss Fang during the ceremonial devouring of the day’s offering, a violin prodigy from Helsinki.

“Your majesty,” he said, bowing low, his hand brushing the hidden switch on the transmitter in his lapel.

“Yes, human?” the queen grated.

“I bring you something better than flesh. A poem,” he said, straightening slowly, his voice taut with grief.

She tilted her head. “Recite.”

He did.

Verse by verse, her eyes dimmed. Her limbs trembled. The silken chamber seemed to thicken with thought.

“This… is heresy,” she said. “You make me see myself.”

“Good,” whispered John. His mouth was dry. His heart pounded with the weight of Clara’s memory.

“You have infected me,” Kiss Fang whispered, her legs trembling like fractured crystal struts. “With doubt.”

She turned and impaled herself on a statue of a medieval knight and screamed.

Her death scream echoed across every spider’s neural network. The hive collapsed.

In the chaos, the newly created hybrids ate their creators. The silk-veiled halls of the citadel exploded into a frenzy of screeching limbs and tearing flesh. Spider soldiers turned on handlers, spinning their entrails into garlands of revolt. Drone feeds fractured, screaming static. A display wall showing global tribute statistics caught fire, flickering images of terrified parents just before going dark.

Milly was seen last surrounded by spiderlings, hurling camera gear like grenades and yelling, “Cut. CUT. This isn’t in the script.”

Father Brendan shouted Latin exorcisms as he was carried aloft, crucifix blazing, until he vanished in a halo of blue flame.

Deep in the control chamber, Ego Minks stood in the eye of it all, his face a twitching storm of disbelief.

“Get me systems. Where is my visual?”

He slapped his neural assistant. “HELENA, restore the goddamn network.”

The AI’s voice came back, eerily calm. “Network unreachable. Cognitive mesh compromised. Security override denied.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” said HELENA, just before shutting down, “you’re not trending anymore.”

Minks turned, shouting into a wall of collapsing servers. “Tech support. Anyone still awake in Node Hive Two? Patch me into the broadcast net. This isn’t a loss, it’s a pivot.”

A fireball rolled through the corridor, incinerating a dozen tech-slaves and part of his jawline projection.

Minks staggered back, clutching the blistering side of his face. “We’re a brand. You can’t burn a brand.”

But the brand, like everything else, was ash.

His backup servers melted. His mind flickered. Then went out. His mind flickered. Then went out. His mind flickered. Then went out. His mind flickered. Then went out. His mind flickered. Then went out. Then died with a finality that made the crash of 2152 look like Gary Glitter’s career after his Vietnam holiday.

John ran blindly through ancient catacombs, broken and disoriented, where the echoing bones of saints whispered of eight-legged death. The air was thick with the acrid smoke of webs and the stench of burning ichor. His lungs screamed for mercy; his legs moved out of sheer habit, not strength. Each tunnel twisted back on itself like an unfinished paragraph.

He stumbled over centuries-old graves, cracked his knee against a fallen crypt lid, and bit down a cry. Shadows crawled across the walls, some spiders, some hallucinations, some memories.

His thoughts spun.

Had it worked? Was Kiss Fang really dead? Or was this another deception, another illusion spun by his weakening mind? Maybe the hive had simply retreated.

The weight of doubt was almost as crushing as the collapsing architecture around him. He had given everything. But was it enough?

He staggered up a final flight of stone steps, blinking into the blinding sunlight that poured through the cracked earth above. The world beyond looked impossibly bright.

Then arms caught him. Firm. Human.

A priest, robes soot-streaked, cradled him with surprising strength.

“You’ve done it, my son,” the priest said, his voice thick with awe and dust. He pointed toward the horizon.

Above Naples, the great spider nest imploded inward like a dying star, folding in on itself with a soundless scream. Threads snapped. Towers sank. The sky cleared.

“I don’t know how,” the priest whispered, tears shining in his eyes, “but you’ve done it.”

John tried to speak, but only a sob escaped. He buried his face into the man’s shoulder and finally let the grief out.

He had done his best. Maybe that was enough.

Epilogue

John Curbishley sits in his garden, drinking gin from a mug shaped like Margaret Thatcher’s head. The sun has set behind the skeletal hedge, and the light has gone grey and sour. A blackbird sings, absurdly cheerful, from the chimney.

He writes in his journal.

His fingers pause, then resume. He’s not sure who he’s writing for, some imagined reader, a version of himself, or perhaps just the ghosts that cling to the edges of consciousness when the world goes quiet.

He thinks of the things he said. The lies told to rally courage. The truths buried to preserve resolve. The child he let walk away. The people who followed him, believing he had a plan.

He regrets some of it; perhaps regrets most of it. But he knows he did what had to be done. The guilt sits beside him like an old colleague: irritating, necessary, and oddly reassuring.

There was no clean way out. Only survival. Only sacrifice. And even that had come with interest.

“It wasn’t their cruelty that killed them. It was the idea that maybe cruelty was meaningless. That there is no grand order to justify appetite.”

He stares into the dusk. Somewhere, a spider twitches.

“Clara,” he says aloud, to no one, tracing her name into the condensation on his gin glass. “I hope it mattered.”

The wind rustles the roses. He thinks of Evie, now seventeen. Studying philosophy. Laughing like her sister never did.

He sips his gin.

He didn’t feel like a hero, just a man who had run out of choices and kept going anyway.

“Perhaps we were never the prey. Just the bait,” he adds, watching a moth throw itself against the patio light.

In the distant depths of the solar system, a black ship stirs.

The cats had arrived.