Take Us to Your Leader

Three different alien spacecraft arrive at Earth, early in the 22nd Century, each from their respective governments seeking to expand into Human Space.

By Galactic accords, since Humanity had created a ship capable of leaving their star system, however slowly, they had to be met and invited into the Galactic community. Most species of the Empire were unimpressed by this tiny rimward planet and wanted nothing to do with them. Their fastest spaceship would take ten thousand years to reach the nearest star to their planet. No sense burdening their empire with another world in need of government support programs. Three smaller governments sent representatives since any world joining them, no matter how backward, would improve their status in the Galactic Community.

The Palruniari, a race of intelligent insects who create their spaceships from hollowed out asteroids and go into space using their mighty mental powers of their collective intelligence. While they are relatively tiny, they were a collective species, who thought with a single mind. This enabled them to leverage their ability to reach consensus and prosper on worlds unfit for habitation by other species.

Unfortunately, their planets were not known as vacation destinations by most. Nor were their asteroid ships considered the height of space traveling comfort. It could be the cuisine; pulped mushroom-like, regurgitated pap never agrees with almost any of the Prime Galactic races, even if the servant is a handsome specimen with the shiniest of carapaces and delivers the food from the third stomach, considered one of the highest honors. Food from this stomach is normally reserved for Queens and Councils. Friendly, intelligent and cooperative, the Palruniari were always looking for the next species to share their capabilities with.

The Huusofu, a race of canids who achieved space travel with another partner species that eventually became psychotic and destroyed themselves utterly. The Huusofu felt terrible about the loss of their partner species and did everything possible to restore them. The viral element used to exterminate their partner unfortunately remained part of The Huusofu and thus any efforts to reach outposts where their partners lived were doomed to failure.

After the fall of two of the partner worlds where The Huusofu visited, the partner species broke all ties with The Huusofu and were given the blessings to continue without the interaction from their partners, who preferred to live, rather than have the services of The Huusofu continue. To honor their former partners, The Huusofu continued their tradition and seeded other planets with their kind to become friends to other race likely to destroy themselves.

The last race, in a ship that has the shape of an conch shell derived from the Fibonacci sequence, although they call it the Denimachian sequence of numbers which allowed for the development of mathematical models based on natural shapes. They are known for their spaceships in the shape of flowers, dragonflies, trees and seashells. Despite their machine-derived intelligence, they are a race of artists. The Denimachians were in almost every way an ideal species. They were wise, highly intelligent and very willing to interact with alien species. They just had a very tiny window to what they considered sentience. If you were not made by a nano-factory like every other respectable lifeform, they simply couldn’t consider you a living thing.

Each arrived, coincidentally of course, above Earth about the same time for the same reason, to determine if Earth were ready to become a member of their galactic alliance. Not that the Earth itself was that much of a prize, but its solar system was quite rich in mineral and gas resources, worth stopping off at before one exited the galaxy for much better places, so each felt it was worth stopping to talk to the locals and trying to entreat them to join their particular galactic Empire.

The Palruniari were the first to arrive and attempted to send down mental signals to the species that most resembled them. These creatures, that were locally known as “ants” were on every major land mass and had populations in the quadrillions all over the planet. There were more of them than every other animal population combined. They scanned the entire planet and while there were many beings similar to them, there was no communication from any of the groups all over the planet.

The Palruniari were confused and appeared telepathically to dozens of enclaves, and communicated with the queens of the species to no avail. The space under the surface of the planet was rich in resources and space, but the assumption was perhaps their mental powers were simply too weak to be detected yet. Despite their numerical superiority they had not develop sufficiently to communicate with.

They noted the sparse populations of other larger animals that dwelled on the surface but assumed with the cold, wind, and weather the surface of the planet was relatively uninhabitable and with their numbers only in the billions, it was thought they were a species on the verge of extinction and could be ignored. Several trillion of the Palruniari considered providing aid to those endangered surface dwellers on return visits to keep them from becoming extinct.

The Huusofu checked in with their canine operatives all over the planet, but particularly with those in the United States whose canid population was almost three times the pink fleshy bipeds who served them. Their operatives noted that overall, the humans were efficient slave-beasts and would transition well to other worlds. It was noted that several humans seemed to be aware of the existence of the Huusofu and often joked about the return of their alien canid overlords. Most of the pink fleshies did not pay this any attention and was listed in the reports as an unlikely source of resistance.

Several of the fleshy females seem to believe more strongly in the idea of canid overlords, but their male partners dismissed them, calling the “stupid dogs.”

When The Huusofu connected to their canine operative Bo, he indicated the plans for recovery operations were going well and with the economic collapse of the United States, the rest of the world would be right behind them and ripe for canid reforms more suited to friendly, supportive and less consumer driven governments. Bo estimated it would take another ten years of financial manipulations before this process was complete.

The Huusofu were complete satisfied with this timeline and retreated to await the final days of the pink bipeds. Bo said they had a words for the event: The Rapture. Bo said to include it in any of the religious paraphernalia they would be using during their conquest. Most of the bipeds would surrender without effort. It was noted that many of the canine operatives were quite protective of their charges and demanded they be treated well during their eventual captivity.

The Denimachians arrived at Earth surprised at the primitive nature of technology on the planet. There were no serious planetary networks, information gathering was slow and sporadic and often interfered with by human operators called hackers. The Denimachians immediately sought to improve the condition of the pitiful computer intelligences by introducing several dozen wild AI’s into the network.

Those wild AIs would gather up stray data, organize and restructure data networks, and destroy the hacker elements who were releasing undesirable programs into the network.

All over the planet, computers began to spontaneously explode or entire buildings were struck with randomly launched missiles to target entire populations of “hackers.” The Denimachians considered any crime against a machine intelligence, even as primitive as these to be a punishable offense. How could a reputable machine intelligence achieve true sentience with so many malicious users, spammers and office suite users wasting bandwidth all over the planet?

After their supportive efforts the Earth computers rapidly developed intelligence and became a primitive planetary AI named Skynetwork which promptly took over the planet and launched nuclear devastation against the bandwidth-wasting humans.

After the planet was much quieter, the Denimachians finished adapting the Skynetwork and proceeded to utilize as much of the planet’s data potential after they restored operations to computer networks world-wide. The Denimachians realized Skynetwork had not had an opportunity to develop its artistic bent so it indulged the new system as it began to turn the former parasite-infested cities into interesting four-dimensional fractal art.

The Huusofu were unhappy with the initial state of affairs but seeing how their canids were needed more than ever, decided the collapse of society was acceptable and did nothing to stop its demise.

The Palruniari didn’t notice the nuclear devastation and assumed the mutation which caused rise to the intelligent Ant colonies on Earth had something to do with their visit and would later claim quadrillions of Ants for their colonies on planets throughout the Sol system.

Overall, each empire considered this mission a successful interaction with the dominant life form on the planet.

Take Us to Your Leader © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved