Crack-crack-crack, came the noise from the sky.

“Look! Whizz-cracker!” said Lau-Lau, and the other Piplings joined her to watch.

“That not whizz-cracker,” said De-Li.

“Not whizz-cracker?”

“Not whizz-cracker. 90-millimetre anti-aircraft gun.”

“Oh. Pretty 90-millimetre anti-aircraft gun.”

Just then, the Piplings heard the famil­iar chimes of the mys­ti­cal device that some­how con­trolled their lives, and like every other day, they were com­pelled to obey its call.

“Yogo?” asked Yojojo.

“Yogo!”

“Debate finer points of anti-aircraft war­fare after Yogo,” said De-Li.

And off they went.

Lined up in front of the name­less device, each Pipling took their allot­ted turn in the rit­ual, announc­ing a shape into which they would have to con­tort themselves.

“Tree!” said Nok-Tok. And they tried to look like trees.

“Shell!” said De-Li. And they tried to look like shells.

“Mon­key!” said Yojojo, which all the oth­ers thought was prob­a­bly cheat­ing. But the machine was watch­ing, so they did it anyway.

“Fish!” said Lau-Lau. They tried to look like fish.

Then, at long last, the device began to chime its song again. It had been appeased for now, and the Piplings tip­toed qui­etly out of the clear­ing in case it heard them and sum­moned them back to dance once more for its enter­tain­ment.

Back near their houses, the Piplings were look­ing out again at what lay beyond their tiny ver­dant world.

“Why rest of Nara so brown?” asked Nok-Tok.

“Chee­bie last week say End Times com­ing,” said Yojojo. “Chee­bie par­ents say some­thing about ‘Jee-sus’.”

“Lau-Lau won­der why Chee­bies leave, go back to brown place,” said Lau-Lau.

“Chee­bies say some­thing about ‘Soma’ wear­ing off,” said Yojojo. “Chee­bies go back to get more.”

“Oh,” said Nok-Tok. “Make sense.”

Another noise entered the Piplings’ world from across the hori­zon — this time, a more human noise.

“Chee­bies?” asked Yojojo.

“Chee­bies!” exclaimed Lau-Lau. But they turned and looked, and didn’t see quite what they were expect­ing to see.

“Why Chee­bies so old?” asked Nok-Tok.

“Why Chee­bies carry assault rifles?” asked De-Li.

“Play Peeka?” asked Lau-Lau, who was always a lit­tle slow on the up-take.

“Yes, Lau-Lau,” said De-Li. “Play Peeka right now. Play Peeka really, really well.”

So the Piplings hid them­selves in logs and pots and up trees, not sure what to make of the new kind of Chee­bies they had seen.

It soon became clear that, not being five-year-olds asked to look for CGI crea­tures they couldn’t see, the new Chee­bies had some­what of an unfair advan­tage when play­ing Peeka. The Piplings were soon rounded up and made to sit back-to-back in the Yogo clearing.

“What new Chee­bies names?” said Lau-Lau, still not fully grasp­ing the sit­u­a­tion at hand.

One of the Chee­bies stepped forward.

“Sergeant Arrow­smith, US Marine Corp,” he said. “Are you the inhab­i­tants of this place?”

“Lau-Lau not know word in-habbit-uns.”

The sergeant sighed. “Do you live here?”

“Yes!” said Lau-Lau hap­pily. “Piplings live here!”

“And do I under­stand cor­rectly that you are in pos­ses­sion of a machine known as the ‘Any­thing Machine’, which is capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing any object known to the user?”

“Yes! Any­thing machine!”

De-Li kicked Lau-Lau’s ankle sharply, and got a gun pointed at her for her trouble.

“Play nice,” said the Marine on the other end of the gun. He sneered down the barrel.

“You will take us to this machine,” said the sergeant.

The Piplings were marched at gun­point to another clear­ing, where the Any­thing Machine sat.

“Good,” said Arrow­smith. “You will now use this machine to pro­duce for me an LGM-30 Min­ute­man bal­lis­tic mis­sile with a sin­gle war­head, tar­geted at Moscow.”

“No!” gasped De-Li, and wished she hadn’t.

“Nok-Tok not know what that is,” Nok-Tok said. “Machine not work when not know what making.”

“The pink one knows, sir,” said the Marine who’d pointed the gun earlier.

“Pink crea­ture,” said the sergeant, point­ing his own rifle at Lau-Lau. “Make the fuck­ing mis­sile, or I shoot the stu­pid one. No tricks.”

De-Li took one look into Lau-Lau’s wide star­ing eyes, and turned her atten­tion to the machine. A few sec­onds of think­ing, a few sec­onds of trem­bling ground and burn­ing air, and off the mis­sile flew into the sky.

They waited, and waited. Min­utes passed.

Then, over the hori­zon, a bril­liant flash lit up Nara’s sky.

“Good,” said the sergeant, heft­ing the Any­thing Machine onto his shoul­der. “Tie the crea­tures up and make them walk. We’re head­ing back to base.“

Years later, the once-green patch of Nara was as scorched and black­ened as the rest of the land. A gust of wind sep­a­rated the last of the four glit­ter­ing crys­tals from the Yogo device, and it splin­tered into a thou­sand tiny pieces on the ground. Never again would it call the Piplings to per­form for it — the Piplings were free at last. But the Piplings had not been seen since that day they and the Any­thing Machine were taken. If they still some­how lived, they were the last things to live on Nara.