Extreme? No way. Let me tell you about my home planet.
Now, before I start, I must preface this by saying that nobody on your planet even believes there are other intelligent beings "out there" (that cracks me up, by the way. You can't imaging how funny it is to go several thousand light years and wind up in orbit around a bunch of mammals who think they are God's Gift to the Known Universe...but I digress).
This is all ancient history now. Fortunately for us, the good guys ended up winning and saving records of what really actually happened, which is not easy on our planet, because there is no difference between video reality and video art, and hasn't been since the Journalists got themselves under control. The down side is it makes it real easy to fake the news, as it were, so to speak.
Where was I?
Oh yes, the Sloid.
This was a long time ago, remember. Back before interstellar travel. Before we even made contact with any other intelligent beings from other planets.
One nice autumn day, there appeared over our largest cities some spacecraft. They looked a lot like the V-wing fighter jets you have, only bigger.
Inside these ships were Marines. Not a bad thing by itself, but these Marines were insects. Not giant insects like your movies, just the same size as us, 50 feet tall. Most of them looked and acted hungry.
In less than thirty days, they killed almost one-third of our entire race.
funphone.com
Wanna talk scared, bubby? This was beyond no knowledge of next meal. This was no certainty of survival for anyone on our planet.
Things got bogged down after that first month, since they forgot to cope with a few of our tiny airborne organisms, winter was coming on, and we were not unskilled at fighting and killing insects.
Right, where was I?
Right. Turns out they were from a planet of ultra right or left wing insects that had a code something like "Cook and Eat All Godless Reptiles Everywhere Immediately or Later Today".
Now, you might be smiling here and saying, "Cute story, sounds like "War of the Worlds" meets "Them" meets "The Planet of Godzilla" or something, but I assure you I am telling you the truth.
The thing about these insect doods was that they had a friggin' religion that made it OK to snuff our planet. They claimed it was all part of "God's Will". They were very devout, too. Every morning at sunrise, they would all pray together, drink reptile blood, and eat reptile meat.
Oh, it was sweet. If we attacked them during prayer, it proved we were godless heathens and deserved to die.
Eventually, we managed to not only kill them all, but acquire their technology as well. But that's a different chapter. Secret stuff besides.
Anyhoo, the point is that we were able to figure out their whole scheme in hindsight. I mean once we had killed every one of them on our planet and set up a little net around their planet. The penalty for going through the net is pretty cool, but that’s not relevant here.
These bugs had been fighting amongst themselves for the equivalent of about 2,000 of your years. The "Not Really Spiritual, We Are Just Pissed Off" religion eventually won, and the entire planet was essentially moved back in time and the priests took over from there.
Very oppressive stuff. Lots of death, torture, terrorism, all that. I mean, this stuff is so ugly I don’t even want to get into it. Suffice to say it was on a scale larger than your entire planet, and it was about twice as mean as two rabid stornflorfs ripping each other to shreds.
Then one of them decided they needed to make the entire Sector of Known Space safe for the "Kill the Infidel Reptiles" branch of Oneness With The Father or whatever they called it.
Those bugs were a bunch of friggin’ wankers if you ax me.
We still monitor them, but now it’s under an interstellar treaty that is policed by these little robot dudes. (Ooh! The Day the Earth Stood Still!)
The sad part of the story is the bugs that lost the battle on their home planet. They had two actual prophets! Both of them got wasted, and their entire religions were wiped off the planet totally. We only managed to find out about them from secret records on their own planet that we discovered accidentally. These guys had actually made some revolutionary discoveries (for them) in the area of spritual power. Pretty good stuff, I’ve read it. Maybe in another thousand years, they will get the concept again and be safe to do business with.
In the meantime the ones that are still alive are all in Insect Jail, and we are moving about the galaxy faster than light, and listening to Hawaiian slack key guitar music and like that.
sloid.com |
