One day, billions of hovering, featureless alien objects appear out of thin air in a grid pattern across the Earth's surface. Initially, they cause car and plane crashes, but they do nothing for decades. The protagonist's family tries to leave their house when the incident occurs, but run into one while pulling out of the driveway. Nuclear bombs have no effect. Families name their objects and decorate them for the holidays. At the end of the story, the protagonist realizes they have been attacking humanity in a subtle way, though I don't remember how. This was a short story published before 2017.
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5This is quite similar to a Doctor Who episode "The Power of Three" from 2012 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Three_(Doctor_Who)– AndrewCommented Aug 14, 2023 at 23:50
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Reminiscent of "Slow Birds" but not close enough for an answer.– Organic MarbleCommented Aug 15, 2023 at 3:12
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2@qazwsx Did you read it online? In an anthology? A magazine? You say before 2017. Is that because you remember reading it in 2017?– John RennieCommented Aug 15, 2023 at 15:04
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3I know I have read this one, but it must have been a very long time ago. I'm pretty sure it was in a book -- and that's as far as my memory goes; I have no idea what other stories were in the book, nor what the overall theme was (if the book even had one?).– LorendiacCommented Aug 15, 2023 at 22:59
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3I have definitely read this, in one of those "Year's Best SF" type anthologies, but also can't remember when :(– CarfilhiotCommented Sep 23, 2023 at 10:43
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1 Answer
This is a nice description of The Fire Eggs by Darrell Schweitzer. First published in 2000 in Interzone, it has been included in a few anthologies.
They had appeared in very precise locations a number of years before:
the luminous, two-and-a-half meter high ovoids since they first appeared all over the world in the course of half an hour on January 23rd, 2014, anchoring themselves in the air precisely 1.3 meters above the ground.
[...]
If the Fire Eggs are bombs, they’re still ticking away, silently, thirty-five years later.
Naming them is a feature:
We’d named them once, years after they’d arrived, when few people were afraid of them anymore and Fire Eggs had become just part of the landscape and Uncle Rob’s last book, What To Name Your Fire Egg had enjoyed a modest success. We called ours Eenie, Meenie, Moe, and Shemp.
The protagonists family crash in to one in their drive:
My father bundled us all into the car, backed out of the garage with a roar, and then made the discovery shared by so many others that first night, that a Fire Egg could not be removed from where it had situated itself by any human agency. We crashed into the one which blocked our driveway.
Nuclear weapons are allegedly used but have no effect:
so the story goes, somebody somewhere—always in a nasty, remote place where They Have No Respect For Human Life—set off a nuclear device under a Fire Egg. It made a huge crater, destroyed much of the countryside, killed thousands directly and thousands more from the subsequent radiation, but the Egg was utterly unperturbed.
It's left slightly ambiguous but heavily implied that they are taking some action, although the individual involved was close to dying anyway:
“The Fire Egg ate Aunt Louise” didn’t go over well with the authorities, so there was an investigation, which concluded, for lack of any real evidence, that, despite what the two of us claimed, Louise had wandered off in the night and died of exposure or her disease, and finding her body would only be a matter of time.
[...]
I think that we’re wrong to wait for something to happen. I think it’s been happening all along.
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