The alien invasion didn’t go quite the way all the books and movies said it would.
There were no looming, city-wide ships raining death on us and the White House in particular.
There were no fleets of fighters zipping through our atmosphere, blasting us with oddly visible beams of light.
There were no 75-foot-high robots or armies of creeping slugs or even fembots.
What happened was this: one morning, everyone woke to find they had a new, bizarre device in their yard or apartment courtyard or balcony or porch or stoop or the dirt outside the place where they slept.
And besides each one of those 7,000,000,000,000 devices was a crude metal sign that said, in the most common language in the neighborhood where it occurred, “Just Because.”
The devices appeared poorly made, from locally-sourced scrap metal and parts, and they were all brightly painted. Also, they were utterly impossible to open and seemed to be impervious to anything anyone could think of to throw or fire at them.
Various angry governments tried confiscating them but the devices couldn’t be moved, so they settled for declaring them off-limits and studied them as best they could. People bragged and complained and sued and took endless pictures of their new devices.
One week to the day after they appeared, the devices began producing things.
Some of them produced slow but steady streams of little balls of some squishy substance. Some of them spat out tiny gleaming cylinders, one a day. Some of them excreted wafers the size of coasters, smooth and warm, just once. Billions of each, everywhere.
Several of the governments and an awful lot of companies tried to hide it when they found out that the squishy balls were not only equivalent to a full day’s nutrients and vitamins but also appeared to cure an astounding array of diseases previously considered incurable. Plus all the other diseases, of course. But that sort of thing gets out, eventually.
It took a little longer for everyone to find out that the cylinders somehow collected and converted solar energy to produce far more safe-to-use power than seemed physically possible.
The wafers were tricky, though. Even as societies across the world went into upheaval over the abrupt and universal solutions to hunger, disease and power, scientists were still unable to figure out what the wafers did. Desalinate water? Regulate global temperatures? Free wifi? Gradually the entire scientific community was bent toward discovering the solution, along with countless millions of non-scientists who nevertheless figured what the hell, I’m smart too and I’ve got a hammer. Huge prizes were offered.
Finally, a month later, a little girl in North Dakota picked up a wafer she’d been using as a table for her doll’s tea party, and she looked at it. She sniffed it. She even licked it a little.
She looked around the playground and saw people laughing, playing with their kids, singing. So many people were healthy now. Everyone had plenty of food because the squishy things were delicious and could be enjoyed fried, boiled, steamed or raw. Endless power meant the only thing you really had to pay for was a place to live and entertainment, and whatever other food you wanted for variety. Yeah, some governments had fallen and the stock market was doing loop-the-loops and lots of people were out of jobs because of the aliens’ gifts. But people were adjusting. No one would starve. No one would be cold. No one would get sick. Little by little, people were adjusting and it looked like the result would be a happier, more relaxed planet.
Why? “Just because.”
And so she did what no one had done yet. She held the wafer up to her lips, and she whispered, “Thank you.”
Instantly the wafers, all the wafers around the world, activated at the same time. And wherever there had been a wafer, there was now an armed platoon of large, green, ferocious aliens. And there were such a lot of wafers.
Because it turned out that the one thing that books and movies got right was that aliens were all bastards.