“The Final Weapon” - by Adam Carlton (and ChatGPT)

The air was brittle, heavy with the tang of ash and the faint ozone sting that hinted at the chemical remnants of war. François Duval stepped down from the shuttle, feeling the grit of the colony’s red dust grind into his shoes. The wind was sharper here, the sky a churn of grey and ochre. Somewhere in the distance, artillery whispered, the muffled sound of a battle already being lost.  

Behind him, Sylvette descended with her usual precision, her hand gripping the rail as though it were her only tether. Her face, composed into an expression of detached displeasure, scanned the decaying settlement ahead of them. She didn’t look at him. She never did when she could avoid it.  

The third to disembark was Violette Marchand. Her steps were lighter, almost deliberate in their care. She took in the surroundings with a gaze that seemed searching, not for beauty but for some hidden meaning beneath the ruin. Her presence unnerved François; she had a habit of looking at him as though she understood something about him that he himself could not grasp.  

Their cover was perfect: a trio of war correspondents dispatched to chronicle the final days of humanity’s presence on Desmona IV. They had press credentials, an itinerary pre-approved by military command, and enough weary professionalism to blend seamlessly with the colony’s shell-shocked survivors. No one here had the energy to probe beyond the surface. That suited François.

He had spent a lifetime hiding behind facades.  

---

The colony was already a mausoleum. They arrived at the last functioning garrison, a skeletal command post dedicated to an increasingly irrelevant war effort. Once an outpost of promise, Desmona IV had been rendered into a blasted wasteland by the invaders.  

Their lodging, such as it was, stood on the edge of the settlement - a hollowed-out building that had once aspired to be a hotel. Its faded neon sign buzzed erratically: 'Welcome', it declared. François read the word with a bitter taste in his mouth.  

Inside, the air reeked of mildew and despair. The walls wept with moisture, a constant seepage from pipes that no one had bothered to repair. Their rooms were austere, barely more than bunks and battered desks. François unpacked in silence, his movements mechanical, his thoughts elsewhere.  

Sylvette, in the adjoining room, wasted no time surveying her space with a faint curl of distaste. His wife barely looked at him when he brought her a ration pack from the dwindling supply downstairs.  

“Thank you,” she murmured, her voice clipped.  

Her thanks felt like an accusation.  

---

The days passed in a grim rhythm. François kept himself busy cataloguing troop deployments, studying crumbling maps, and noting the positions of alien incursions. It was work that gave the illusion of importance, a distraction from the gnawing sense that they were part of something larger, something monstrous, and that their ignorance was deliberate.  

Sylvette approached her duties with the same detached competence that had characterised their marriage. She conducted interviews with exhausted soldiers and defeated colonists, extracting facts with surgical precision. No warmth, no pity—just a cold professionalism that left even the most battle-hardened survivors uneasy.  

Violette, by contrast, moved through the ruins like a spark of life. She spoke to everyone: children scavenging among the wreckage, soldiers gripping their rifles like talismans, medics patching wounds they knew would never fully heal. She listened; she consoled; she smiled. François caught himself watching her too often, drawn by the way her presence seemed to soften the edges of despair.  

He felt the weight of her gaze, too - gentle, probing, yet unrelenting. When she spoke to him, she chose her words carefully, as if aware of the fortress he had built around himself.  

“You’re carrying too much, François,” she said one evening, her voice quiet but insistent.  

“Everyone here is,” he replied, unwilling to look at her.  

“Not like you.”  

---

The attack came at dusk, when the sky burned with the strange hues of the planet’s dying sun. The first explosion shattered the stillness, followed by a hailstorm of shrapnel and fire. François reacted instinctively, shielding Sylvette as debris rained down.  

When the tremors ceased, she shoved him off.  

“Don’t coddle me,” she hissed, her face pale, her breathing ragged.  

He wanted to argue but held back. She had grown so brittle, so remote, and yet he could still see the faint flicker of defiance that had once drawn him to her.  

Two days later, she collapsed.  

François found her in the street, her hands clutching her chest, her lips drawn tight with pain. He knelt beside her, shouting for help, but none came.  

Her eyes fixed on him, and for a fleeting moment, he thought he saw something softening in her gaze. But then the light faded, leaving only the hollow shell of a woman who had despised him even as she needed him.  

---

After the funeral - a perfunctory affair in a settlement too battered for ceremony - François retreated to his room. He sat in silence, the weight of Sylvette’s death pressing down on him.  

“You couldn’t have saved her,” Violette said. She stood in the doorway, her voice steady, her expression open.  

“I failed her,” he replied, his voice raw. “I failed her every day of our marriage.”  

“You stayed,” Violette said. “That means something.”  

He looked at her then, really looked. There was no judgement in her gaze, only an unguarded warmth that felt like a balm on his wounds.  

---

That night, the truth revealed itself.  

When they came together, it was not out of passion but necessity, a union forged by shared grief and a strange, unspoken compulsion. The moment their skin touched, the air seemed to shimmer.  

Memories not their own surged through their minds: laboratories, gene splicing, whispered conversations about a “biotic solution.” They saw their own bodies, altered and prepared for a final act of transformation.  

“We were made for this,” Violette whispered, her voice trembling in dawning realisation.  

Their bodies began to change. Pain and ecstasy blurred as flesh gave way to something new: roots, fibres, seeds. By dawn, the room was empty, save for a scattering of pods that glistened in the pale light.  

---

The invaders swept into the settlement, their grotesque forms moving with chilling precision. They did not notice the seeds carried by the wind, nor the roots that spread beneath their feet.  

Within days, the ecosystem turned against them. Plants erupted from the soil, vines choking their machines, toxins seeping into the air. The invaders faltered, then fell, consumed by a planet that had been weaponised against them.  

François and Violette awoke within the growing forest, their consciousnesses intertwined. They were no longer human, but something greater—a single will bound to the planet itself.  

Together, they watched as life returned to Desmona IV. Together, they would ensure it endured.

---

Author’s note: A Young Adult story written from multiple, detailed draft-prompts by ChatGPT (in Writer mode). It has few pretensions to true literary quality. But all the more readable for that. The plot is, strangely, based on a true story.