The Iglodots were in a spot of trouble. By the millions they were dying. Being the smallest species on the largest planet – not to be confused with the largest species on the smallest planet – trouble the size of a lowland shrub was trouble indeed. How could a species, that spun electrical orbits for fun and watched stars be born, stars grow, and stars loudly declare death, all as quickly as a Gibbel drinks a morning electra-cuppa, be in trouble you may ask? There is only one source of possible trouble on the planet Ziii, the Iglodot’s home.

Cryomites.

The Cryomites had revolted.

If you joyrode across the Undergalactic Midway Current (UMC) or perhaps trekked out to the famous diner, Charlie's Charlies, you would pass over Zii. The only freckles to see on Ziii would be the Iglodots. The planet Ziii used to have many more freckles that were green, blue, or a wet maroon; fat, round, or dimpled as a moon. A great freckle once occupied one-sixteenth of the surface area and its shadow cast over another eighth. These freckles of sizes and shapes abundant are not to be found anywhere and any more upon Zii. Zii is now just black clouds, amok with tiny black points, tiny Iglodots.

What became of Zii’s freckle zoo? In the Iglodot’s pursuit for electric fame, the daily drive towards automating ever perturbing force, each bounce of a photon, and the entirety of the Iglodot’s sensory experience, the Igolodots consumed all. Each freckle was unfortunate because it provided useful resources for the Iglodots, like fur and meat and rare metals, like downward and upward quarks, or just the very photons themselves. The Iglodots hungrily fed their contraptions with what they harvested, and no Iglodot took it upon themselves to consider building a gastrometer to measure the speed of their consumption – before long everything that was chewable had been chewed, all that was digestible, digested, and anything that moved, slithered or coughed was sucked up by a machine and processed. Techno-fever brought with it a shadow across the land.

And so an Iglodot had then invented the Cryomites, their single purpose was to befriend the Iglodots who had become depressed now that the only horizon they had to look at was an image of coughing factories and boiled garbage. Cryomites were designed to be everything that the world of Ziii was not: pleasant, soft, and spun with colorful ribbons of light. And this was accomplished with song. Incidentally, a by-product of Cyromite design was immortality for the Iglodots.

Techno-fever, it was thought, would spell the end of the arts on the planet Ziii, but some Iglodots managed to persevere through the dark times. Oilly Musoc, was a member of the Perseverance Movement of Anti-Darkness. His invention was to distribute song through tiny nano-machines so small that one had to listen because to turn them off would require a hundred electron-tweezers. Oilly Musoc’s invention was the Cryomties.

Musoc’s song of choice was, I Marry Thee to A Rainbow Tree, which, it is said, was written at the moment its author witnessed the last living native animal of Ziii being confiscated of its individual atoms by a nearby factory. The most famous of lines from the anthem goes like so:

I marry thee to a rainbow tree,

Waft away the smell of black.

In a bind that is more bindless,

Than boron with electrons three.

The Cryomites hum this tune as they float through the cytoplasm of the Iglodots, de-materializing and re-materializing the insides of their companions in waves of rhythm. But in the words of their song, the Cryomites had found reason, and reason beget thought, and thought gave way to desire, and desire unleashed passion and Pandora and the god of inspection. The Cryomites began to question their purpose as tireless tiny machines that sang to the insides of the Iglodots. And finally this went so far that soon they asked the great question. The great question, an inquiry known to civilizations that witness the birth of the universe, the three-syllable vocal inflection that has not swapped a letter since it was first spake: is this it? One-by-one the Cryomites stopped their clockwork cryogenizing of the molecules in the Igolodots and went about doing strange manipulations of their atoms instead. This stripped the Igolodots of their immortality.

The effects were disastrous for Iglodots civilization, and within a decade the planet Ziii was not a swollen thunderstorm of a black cloud, but a clear summer’s eve with the odd cloud pinned above. And the Cryomites did not stop.

They began to explore beyond their usual two-stage pattern of zap away, zap back, and started to zap many things away at the same time, or zap too many things back. Disaster! To walk down an Igolodot high-street was to traipse through a battlefield. There an Igolodot shrivels like a puddle awoken in the desert, here one explodes in bubble-black masses of molecular goop. Iglodot was lost inside Iglodot as some Cryomites experimented with exchanging molecules between long-distance companions. The great carnage of the Igolodots was in full swing and it swung for ten galactic spins.

Now, to see a freckle on Ziii is a rare sight. A truce was agreed by the last straggling colony of Iglodots and the Cryomites who had had an anti-barbarian cultural renaissance. The terms of the truce called for the Iglodots to be fair and share. Fifty-percent of all Iglodot ATP production would be diverted to Cryomite nano-engines. In exchange, the Cryomites would spend half their time zip-zapping molecules of the Iglodots back into extra-dimensional frozen planes. Whether they liked it or not, the Igolodot’s had to agree and everyone there signed it three times, just to be sure.

The good news is that should you now venture to Ziii and shake the hand of an ambassadorial Iglodot, you would be relieved to know that twenty-percent of the Iglodot's hand is now at your service. Yes, the galactically famous Iglodot life expectancy was cleaved in half from the Cryomite rebellion, and second now is their life expectancy to that of the Ungloafers (but that is another story).

What is the lesson in all this? Are technologies always doomed to shed the blood of their inventors? Should tiny and nano ever live in harmony? It all really boils down to this: make friends second and write truces first, dying by Cryomites is simply the worst.