Life's unpredictable evolution... INANIMATE! But the children, brother and sister, who miraculously survived in a terrible all-planet disaster, will have to follow her involuntarily. Because the self-replicating microdrones - "midges" - created in the Pentagon's top-secret laboratory for military purposes, like super-weapons, can, it turns out, not only extract metal from deposits, but also... Devour all enemy weapons! What is made of metal. And the metal of "their own"! And to resist the expansion of self-sufficient midges is absolutely unrealistic: they penetrate into any gap, and turn metal into new midges - incredibly quickly!