It was late January, 1943, and Jürgen Heidelbaum was lying around, not really doing much of anything.

In fact, it was his goal to do as little as possible at the moment. The sniper’s bullet had missed him by about two feet, and he cowered behind a piece of rubble for cover. There, he lay in complete stillness with his legs drawn to his chest, waiting for another shot to ring out in the silence.

In other words, he was essentially just lazing about.

He wasn’t alone. All over the town of Stalingrad, men like him were huddled together behind heaps of debris, blown out buildings, and ravaged war machinery. Milling around. Dawdling. Loitering, if you want to be cruel. The Russian winter swirled gently around them, a soft but frigid breeze that whistled quietly through the paneless windows and empty streets, lit golden by the setting sun. Hard to imagine a more tranquil scene.

Admittedly, things had been slightly less peaceful a few hours earlier.

Late that morning, a Russian platoon had attacked, materializing out of the urban sprawl like ravenous wolves, eager to rip apart their German invaders. Jürgen was manning an MG 32 heavy machine gun at the time (which is to say, he was laying prone on the ground behind it, occasionally moving his finger over the trigger to squeeze off a shot — really, not much effort, when you think about it). The fierce but poorly-trained Russian soldiers died easy. Some of them didn’t even have rifles of their own, and had to scavenge from their dead compatriots as Jürgen rained steel fury upon them. It only took seconds for them to die, and after four hours, the Red Army had lost too much blood to maintain its offensive charge. The Russians retreated back into their labyrinth of crumbling stone and broken glass, and all was quiet again, save for the occasional opportunistic pot shot from a sniper’s lair.

Four hours out of twenty four.

A measly sixth.

You don’t need a math genius to tell you it was a mostly peaceful day.

This was par for the course in Stalingrad. The battle had technically been raging for over six months, but that was only if you completely disregarded the actual data. Even though hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and nearly every building destroyed, one couldn’t deny that on average there was hardly any violence happening on any particular square foot of the city at any particular time of day. Jürgen couldn’t appreciate this mathematical reality as he cringed behind the rubble, but if he’d just taken a moment to consider the facts, he’d have realized that, statistically, he was in a pretty good spot.

Across from Jürgen, on the shelled remains of the city street, sat a Panzer tank, cold and lifeless. It had run out of diesel fuel weeks ago and was more like a great metal sculpture than a killing machine. Even now, in his perilous predicament, Jürgen had to admire the artistry in its engineering. If he could just make it across the street behind the tank, he’d be safe. Well…safer, anyway. Technically, he was already quite safe, considering he hadn’t actually been hit by any bullets from the Russian sniper. But Jürgen was the kind of guy who enjoyed the excesses of life, so he resolved to make a dash for the tank anyway.

In a flash of pure adrenaline, he uncurled himself from the fetal position, sprang to his feet, and lunged towards the steel monstrosity. He felt the shockwave of another bullet whizzing past him before the crack of the rifle even registered, but it might as well have happened a thousand miles away. The sniper’s shot missed wide, just like every other bullet that had been lobbed at him during this so-called war, and Jürgen flung himself into the safe cover of the frozen tank, unharmed.

Peace continued its reign.

From there, Jürgen was able to slip past the tank and behind the wall of a ruined factory, back into territory held by his German counterparts. The sniper was unlikely to follow, so he was safe as long as he kept his head down. A little ways up the street, he saw a few of his fellow soldiers huddled together in the remains of a department store, listening to a radio broadcast. He couldn’t make out what was being said but he could tell it was in German, and the male speaker’s tenor was solemn and serious. Jürgen preferred music to the Nazi leadership’s stultifying speeches, but as clearly demonstrated, there wasn’t much else going on, so he figured he might as well join them for a listen.

Hunched over, he scrambled across the street, through the ragged hole in the wall where the department store’s front door had once been, and took a seat next to his emaciated compatriots. They shushed him as he greeted them and turned up the volume.

Just a bunch of guys, hanging out, listening to the radio.

Jürgen recognized the voice of Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s high command, waxing poetic to a German public back in Berlin about defeat, about sacrifice, about the 300 Spartan warriors at Thermopylae who’d bravely fought Xerxes’ hordes to their deaths. Jürgen should’ve been happy. The study of mythology was one of his favorite pastimes on holiday, when there was time to laze about and think upon loftier subjects, but he knew Göring wasn’t actually talking about the doomed Spartans of millennia past. He was talking about the doomed German 6th Army today, encircled not by invading Persians but rather Slavic natives whose Motherland lay smoldering and ravaged around them. He was talking about Jürgen.

Jürgen stood up and turned the radio off before walking back into the street. The other men remained seated, staring at the quiet radio, saying nothing. A peaceful silence descended once again as Jürgen trudged down the muddy road.

It hardly seemed fair that he should have to forfeit his own life to the savage untermensch massing their strength just a few blocks over. He’d barely done anything to them! His march to Stalingrad from Berlin had been just that — a brisk walk across the steppes. A hike, really. Perhaps a train ride or two, not unlike the holidays he’d taken to the countryside as a young boy. Sure, there’d been a village or two burned, some peasants executed every once in a while. Jews, Gypsies, and Bolsheviks. But these were minorities, all of them! Fractions of fractions! Their sufferings accounted for mere days out of entire years.

How many mornings had the spring birds sang their songs even as gunfire and shells exploded in the distance? How many summer afternoons passed lazily by, like clouds of smoke and ash riding a gentle, easterly breeze? How many autumn leaves fell unremarked upon, to rot back into the earth by their millions and make fertile the ground of the chosen, as has always been the just and natural order?

Jürgen was too tired and hungry to cry or be angry or do much of anything except continue his trudge down the ruined boulevard — not dissimilar to a fatigued vacationer, groggily wandering the streets of some foreign locale after a long night on an expired visa. But what did he have to be so melancholy about in that moment? His war was over. This evening stroll represented the height of his responsibilities. Sure, there was still some paperwork needed to officiate his once-proud army’s surrender, but for all intents and purposes, he was already living in peacetime.

Once again, the sniper’s bullet came faster than the sound of its departure from the rifle.

Only this time, it found its target. Jürgen didn’t even have time to feel it before it tore through his skull and ejected his brains onto the thoroughfare. No pain, no suffering, no lingering in the foggy mist between life and death. Not even an awareness of how close death had been the whole time. The teenage Jew he’d executed last spring had known his rifle was pointed at her and felt the cold steel of its barrel against the back of her neck. But Jürgen felt nothing of the sort. He died more peacefully than even his sweet old grandmother, whose fevered demise went on for weeks.

The Russian sniper was among the greatest humanitarians in Stalingrad that day.

Having satisfied his mission to humanely dispatch the Nazi invader, the Russian sniper sat up and leaned his back against the wall of the frozen apartment in which he’d taken up position. Even though he’d really just been sitting on his ass all day, watching Jürgen through his rifle’s scope, the sniper decided now was as good a time as any for a smoke break, and lit his last cigarette. As he peered out into the quiet evening, he thought about how little violence had been needed to end Jürgen’s life. Only three bullets, each traveling faster than the speed of sound. The final shot had taken less than a second to reach its destination.

Jürgen’s body lay in the street with a quiet stillness the sniper could only dream of inhabiting. For him, life would go on, perhaps for many more decades. Or perhaps not. He wondered if death would find him as agreeably as it had found Jürgen. He wondered how long it would stalk him, and if he’d see its shadow lingering in his peripheries. He wondered if, when death finally caught him, they’d put that old Catholic command on his tombstone…

“Rest in peace.”

The original gingerbread man fairy tale was printed in 1875 in a children’s publication called St. Nicholas Magazine and many retellings have abounded since. Most of them attempt to convey the moral lesson that misplaced trust can have dire consequences, as evidenced by the gingerbread man's fatal encounter with the fox.

However, in my research, I chanced upon an untold version of the story which explores a Calvinistic interpretation concerning the nature of predestination and the individual's ability to shrug off the shackles of fate. Though the story beats are similar to the more traditional readings, this retelling reveals the true horror of existence in a way that other children's fairy tales can only dream of achieving.

I’ve transcribed it here with minor annotations for the sake of clarity.

There once was a little old woman and little old man who lived in a cottage by the river. They had no children, and probably could’ve lived in a swanky apartment downtown instead of some musty old cottage, but this was considered prime countryside real estate, and interest rates were fucked anyway, so there they stayed.

One day, the little old woman got bored of scrolling Facebook and decided, “What the hell, I’ll make a gingerbread man. Fuck it.”

Other versions of this story go into rather tedious detail about the process and materials used to make the gingerbread man — cinnamon drops for a mouth, raisins for eyes, that kind of stuff — but we’ve all seen a gingerbread man so let’s skip it. The important thing is that when she pulled him out of the oven, he suddenly sprang to life, which was a real shocker for both of them.

“Mother?” the gingerbread man said.

“I mean, I guess,” the old lady replied, “but I’m still planning to eat you.”

“Is this an allegory for the Devouring Mother archetype or something?” the gingerbread man asked.

“What? No. You’ve been watching too many Jordan Peterson videos,” the old lady said. “I was just hungry for cookies. I wasn’t expecting this to happen.”

“I don’t want to be eaten, though,” he said.

“You’re saying this to me like I give a fuck,” the old lady said and got out a plate and a glass for milk. “You’re a cookie, and cookies get eaten. That’s just how it is. Do you really want to tempt fate?”

“You bet your ass I do,” the gingerbread man said and jumped off the baking sheet. “Just try and catch me, you wrinkly, no-cookie-having bitch.”

“Get back here, you little shit,” the old lady said but the gingerbread man had already made it over to the open window.

“Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!” he sang as he leapt out the window.

“Fucking little punk,” the old woman said and burst out the back door looking for her husband to help catch the gingerbread man.

The old man was supposed to be doing yard work but he was in the shed scrolling pictures of thots on Instagram instead. “Goddamn, fake asses have gotten good,” he said to himself. He was about to leave a creepy comment with the peach and winky-face emoji when the gingerbread man ran by the open door. “What the hell?” he said. “Either I'm tripping balls right now or that little guy looks delicious.”

“Not you too!” the gingerbread man said. “Is this whole family made up of ravenous murderers?”

“What do you want me to say?” The old man shrugged. “You’re a cookie, and cookies get eaten. I don’t make the rules. Now, get over here so I can take a big chomp out of you.”

But the gingerbread man took off running again. “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!”

“Are gingerbread men known for their above-average speed or something?” the old man asked as he stumbled out of his shed.

“Fuck if I know,” his wife said as she ran by. “Just zip up your pants and help me catch him, you useless pervert!”

They gave chase, but the gingerbread man had quite the head start. He was, in fact, very fast. By the time the made it to the front gate, he was already out on the road, running down the country lane. Soon the old man and woman disappeared from view behind him.

After running a mile or so, he came across a small farm. No humans were in sight but out front of the farm was a pig pen. A single pig was in there, lying on his side on a patch of grass in the shade.

“Dude, you’ve got to help me,” the gingerbread man said and waved for the pig to come over. “I’m being chased by these psychotic humans who forced me into existence just so they could eat me.”

The pig sat up and snorted with laughter. “What do you think I’m doing here, buddy?” he asked. “I’m just bacon with a pulse.”

“Well, let’s escape together, then,” the gingerbread man said, “Surely you know the area better than I do. Tell me where we can hide — but quick!”

“Listen, I’m going to be honest with you," the pig said as he trudged over to the fence. "I’m not very confident about my chances of cheating fate. Even if we managed to escape to the forest, I’d probably just get mauled by a bear or something. Is that really better? And even if that didn’t happen, I’d just starve to death when winter comes along. I mean, look at me. I've lived my whole life in this pen. I don't have any skills.” He looked around at the idyllic farm and nodded with approval. “Besides, life’s not so bad here. This ain’t no factory farm." He tapped his chest with one of his hooves. "You're looking at local, ethically-sourced meat right here. Sure, the humans will kill me eventually, but they'll do it quick and give me plenty to eat until then.” The pig licked his chops. “And while we're on the subject of food, you look pretty tasty yourself.”

“Oh, fuck you, man!” the gingerbread man said and began backing away.

“You’re a cookie,” the pig said. “Cookies get eaten. Might as well get eaten by me.”

“I’ll tell you what I told those old geezers,” the gingerbread man said and took off running again. “Run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!”

It turns out the pig’s sense of honor was deeply disturbed by this taunt, so he barged through the small wooden gate to the pig pen and began chasing the gingerbread man around the farm. To make a long story short, the gingerbread man went all around to all the other animals, making similar pleas for help, but they all said they’d rather eat him and chased after him. Luckily for him, he was faster than all of them. His morale, however, was beginning to take a hit.

“What is this demented hellscape of an existence I've been unwillingly dragged into?” he said to himself as he continued running down the road away from the farm.

Eventually, he came to a river, which he could not cross. Behind him, on the road, he saw the dust cloud of all the hungry creatures chasing after him, each yearning to tear him to shreds for their own pleasure.

“I didn’t ask to be born, you know,” he shouted to the sky. “What kind of sick God makes creatures whose only purpose is to suffer?”

“He can’t hear you,” a voice said from behind a tree, and out slinked a fox, smiling a sad, toothy grin. “God, I mean. God can’t hear you because he’s not there. This existence is as cold and empty as the night sky, filled only with the dim light of stars snuffed out eons ago in uncaring corners of a universe birthed from violence and destined for oblivion.”

“Holy shit,” the gingerbread man said, and collapsed to his knees.

“We must forge our own purpose from the opportunities laid before us,” the fox said. “There is nothing else.”

“Let me guess," the gingerbread man said with a scoff. "Your purpose is to eat me, right?”

The fox threw back his head and laughed. “Eat you? Hardly. I’m a carnivore,” he said. “I’ve no love for sugary treats.” He grinned again. “But warm blood trickling from still-living flesh on the other hand…” He licked his lips.

“Weird,” the gingerbread man said, still pretty glum, “but what does it matter whether you want to eat me or not? The others do and they'll be here soon, and I can’t cross this river to escape them." He sighed. "I guess everyone was right. This is my fate.”

“Did you not hear me before?” the fox said. “Fate is the prison of the unimaginative, a tool of oppression forged by the ruling elite to discourage the aspirations of the oppressed. Look over there.” The fox pointed towards the bank across the river. “A land of opportunity. Who knows what fortunes await? Will you let a few meters of water keep you from claiming what is rightfully yours?”

“But I’m made of bread,” the gingerbread man said. “It doesn't matter how much you gas me up about my potential or whatever. I’ll never make it across the river.”

“Unless I carry you.”

“You would do that?”

“Only if you ask it of me.”

“Well, I’m asking, man,” the gingerbread man said with glee. “Let’s fucking go!”

The fox let the gingerbread man onto his back and waded out into the water. Soon the water became deep, and the fox asked the gingerbread man to climb up onto his head. The gingerbread man willingly obliged. “This is so cool of you,” he said to the fox. “Finally, I’ve found someone I can trust.”

“Indeed,” said the fox, “but here the water gets even deeper, and I’m afraid my head will soon be wet as well. Climb out onto my snout, won’t you?”

“Sure thing, Foxy” the gingerbread man said and climbed up but then, without warning, the fox suddenly flipped him up into the air. The gingerbread man went spinning, and plummeted back down into the fox’s waiting maw. “What are you doing, Foxy? I thought we were bros!”

“Your blind trust has proved to be your undoing,” the fox said as he stepped out of the water onto the opposite shore. With a quick snap of his jaw, he bit off the legs of the gingerbread man, who fell onto the riverbank, howling with pain.

“Jesus Christ, dude,” the gingerbread man screamed, “I’m half gone!”

The fox took his time chewing the legs, watching with delight as the gingerbread man clawed at the ground with his gingerbread arms, attempting to drag his mangled gingerbread body away.

“What about all that shit you said about fate and opportunity?” the gingerbread man said.

“You never really heard what I was saying,” the fox said. “You thought only of yourself and heard only what you wanted to hear. Did you honestly believe I don't like sugary treats?” The fox laughed and bit off the gingerbread man’s right arm. “Perhaps if you’d considered my point of view, you’d have understood that the opportunity in front of me was to trick you into compliance and then eat you unawares." He grinned. "If you'd realized that, you could’ve kept running and chanced your fate elsewhere. I doubt I’d have caught you, no matter how fast I ran. You are, after all, the gingerbread man.”

“This is so fucked,” the gingerbread man said, pounding the ground impotently with his remaining arm. “My entire existence has been nothing but fear and torment. For one brief moment I thought there was some good in this world. I thought I could finally trust someone.”

The fox nodded. “And here at last, you come to the truth, too late to be of much use. Trust...manners...the thin veneer of civilization…these are but sinecures numbing our senses and deluding us into belief that there is an escape from this bloody and hopeless struggle into which we’re all born.”

“I don’t know what ‘sinecure’ means,” the gingerbread man said.

“Nor shall you,” the fox said, and snapped up the rest of the gingerbread man.

And there, on the sunny banks of some peaceful river flowing through some quiet meadow in early spring, when the birdsongs of new life float gently atop fresh breezes and the trees open their new leaves to the rejuvenated sun, the last remnants of hope found their final resting place in the jaws of that ruthless predator, fate.

— THE END —

Ariana Reyes checked the telemetry data once, twice, three times, and each time it came out the same. It can’t be, she thought. I must’ve missed something. She wasn’t the type that enjoyed second opinions, but this was too big to risk an error. This could change the course of humanity forever.

With a grimace, she unclipped her tablet from its stand and floated across the space station’s observatory deck over to Arjun’s station where he was comparing data from the Janksy Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Really Fucking Big, Probably TOO Big, Absolutely Enormous Orbital Array located right there on the station. He looked up as Ariana floated near and saw in her sparkling eyes all the excitement and terror she was trying to repress beneath her calm, professional exterior.

She pulled up a readout of her data on Arjun’s holoprojector and the two looked at it together. The data concerned a small star 37.84552 lightyears from Earth called J153259.96-0039441, which Ariana had nicknamed “Winky” because of the unusual but uniform way it seemed to expand and contract. That “winking” was the reason she and Arjun had been studying it for several months.

“Look at this,” she said, and projected a timeline that mapped Winky’s changes. “Tell me you don’t see it.”

“Holy shit,” Arjun said. “Those intervals are a near match for the Huston-Wright model.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Like, really sure?”

“Pretty sure,” he said, and tapped around a bit on his workstation. More numbers appeared on the screen, plotted against the timeline of Winky’s expansions and contractions. “Look what happens when we map it against that abnormal radiation we’ve been observing.” The lines on the graph were nearly identical. “I think it’s pretty obvious what we’re looking at here.”

“A Dyson sphere,” Ariana said in almost a whisper. “Which means…”

“You just discovered intelligent life.”

Ariana looked away from the projection and out the station’s window to the vast field of stars, so many in their millions, billions, trillions, each its own myriad of possibilities that would never be known — except for this one star, 38 lightyears away whose secret she had just unlocked. And this is what she said:

“God-son-of-a-bitch-dammit.”

“I know, right?” Arjun said, shaking his head.

“Check it again,” she said.

“It’s just going to come out the same.”

“I can’t fucking believe this,” she said and curled up into the fetal position, floating in zero gravity. She spun in a tight ball for a few rotations before speaking again. “The five other extraterrestrial species we’ve made contact with are enough of a pain in the ass already.”

“The Caltrobions are just the worst,” Arjun said. “Absolute wankers.”

“You ever tried talking to a Bofferrish?” Ariana asked. “It’s hard to believe a bunch of intelligent lizards could be so boring.”

“And racist.”

“See? This is why the AIs turned themselves off,” she said. “They figured out a long time ago that the universe is only full of jerks, so what’s the point in continuing to exist?”

“It’s weird they all came to that conclusion,” Arjun said.

“Is it?” She looked away from the window, back to the projection, and sighed. Winky winked back at her like a total asshole. “What are we going to do?”

“We’ve got to tell Commander Tusk,” Arjun said.

“Or…” she said, raising an eyebrow. “We could just pretend we didn’t see anything.”

Arjun shook his head. “If they check the logs, we’ll be in huge trouble.”

“Fuck me,” Ariana said.

“You know I’m right.”

“Okay, fine, but you have to be the one to tell him.”

“Pshhh, you wish,” he said. “They always name the expeditionary mission after the civilization’s discoverer and everyone always gets killed on those things. You think I want my name on that disaster?” He shot her a wry smile. “And then there’s all the press junkets. New species discoveries are better than a decade’s worth of scandals. You’ll be all over the news web for months. Years, maybe.”

“Fuck me,” she said again.

Commander Tusk’s face was so red Ariana thought it might catch fire but that was because he was finishing a set in his zero-gravity squat rack. But also it was because of the news about Winky. “Tell me you’re fucking with me,” he said, as he unbuckled himself from the rack. “Tell me you’re jerking my dick like six-armed Trogglishi whore at a Martian fuel station.”

“We are not jerking your dick, sir,” Ariana said.

“We wish we were,” Arjun added.

“Jesus-Plasma-Shitting-Christ,” Tusk said and grabbed Ariana’s data tablet. He skimmed her professional summary and scowled. “A Dyson sphere. That’s when you build a big-ass shell around a star, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fucking hell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You haven’t filed this in the central data bank yet, have you?”

“No, sir,” Ariana said. “We thought we should tell you first before the information becomes more…permanent.”

“Good. Yes. Excellent,” Tusk said. “You did the right thing.” He floated over to his locker and began putting his uniform back on. “This is real inconvenient timing,” he said. “I was just about to break my personal record for split squat.”

“Does it count if it’s in Zero G?” Arjun asked under his breath, but Ariana elbowed him in the side causing him to float helplessly across Tusk’s office until bumping into the feeding station.

“We thought the timing was inconvenient too, sir,” Ariana said. “In fact, we ran a few simulations and concluded there won’t ever be a convenient time to make this information public, so there’s really no need to ever speak of it again.”

“Very funny,” Tusk said as he finished zipping up his tunic. “I’ll summon the Council to meet at 0500. Get your report ready.”

“Surely you don’t need us there,” Ariana said. “We’re just humble science officers and the report pretty much speaks for itself. There’s probably no need to even mention our involvement at all.”

“It’s not a request,” Tusk said, and slicked his thinning hair back in the mirror. “The Council’s going to have all kinds of questions I can’t answer.” He turned from the mirror to look at both of them. “And besides, we need to contain this information and anyone who knows about it. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you in Council Chambers, 0500 sharp.” He floated over to his workstation and tapped a button that opened the door to the room. “Now get out of my office.”

Ariana sat at the far end of the huge oak table in the Council Chamber sipping a cup of tepid coffee. The Chamber was located in the rotary section of the station, producing the effect of gravity, which Ariana rarely got to experience up in the observatory deck. Normally, she would’ve relished the experience — simulated gravity was maintained mostly for the comfort of short-term visitors from Earth, whereas the permanent crew was expected to get used to zero gravity — but today was not a normal day.

Arjun sat next to her, making notes on his tablet to remind himself who everyone in the room was. The Council represented the station’s elite and the small handful of Earth-dwellers who were privy to the station’s activities — ambassadors, trade representatives, liaisons from various scientific agencies — and Arjun wanted to make a good impression.

“I’m trying to get transferred out of here,” he told Ariana.

“After today, you’ll be lucky if they don’t revoke your passport,” she said.

She recognized a few of the faces across the table like the Earth President’s Envoy, the station’s Chief Extraterrestrial Linguist, and of course, Commander Tusk but the rest were strangers to her. She tried to sink into her chair so that no one would notice her but curious eyes darted towards her and Arjun nonetheless and hushed comments were made about their lowly presence in this vaulted space.

Commander Tusk shouted for everyone to shut the fuck up and directed their attention to Ariana. “Let’s get this over with,” he said. “As you all know, intelligent life was confirmed last night in the J15…something something whatever system. Ms. Reyes has the particulars.”

Ariana stood up, shivering with apprehension. “Uh…yes…um,” she stammered and began a holo projection of various graphs and figures, which she’d intentionally designed to be as confusing as possible in hopes the Council would get bored and forget the whole thing. “The initial spectral analysis seems to suggest a Dyson sphere but I’d like to stress that we’re still early in our research. We still need to study gravitational lensing and run a full scale — "

“A Dyson sphere would indicate a highly advanced civilization, would it not?” the Earth President’s Envoy interrupted, her eyes boring into Ariana.

“Um…yes,” Ariana said. “As advanced as we are. Probably more.”

“So, a bunch of assholes, then,” the Envoy said.

“Uh…we can’t know for sure at this point,” Ariana replied.

“They always are,” the Envoy said. “They’ll probably have all kinds of opinions about everything humanity is doing wrong and how they’d do it differently if they were us.” She seethed. “It’s terrible optics for an incumbent administration and we’ve got elections next year.”

The representative from the United Commerce Union nodded in agreement. “And let’s not forget that every advanced species we’ve met so far has been a huge dick about trade,” he said. “We’ll have to re-map all the trade routes and introduce new currencies into the interplanetary exchange — and that’s assuming they’re not a bunch of isolationist cheapskates like the Bofferrish.” He shot a sympathetic look to the President’s Envoy. “There’s going to be a recession for sure.”

“Maybe if we send out probes we can covertly pick up their communications chatter and figure out their disposition towards such topics,” the Envoy said. “Assuming we can even figure out their language.”

“Oh, no,” the Chief Linguist said. “Nuh-huh. Nope. You’re not going to pin this on my team. It took us ten years to crack the Grun language, and it drove half my staff insane. I mean literally insane. Their equivalent for ‘hello’ is five minutes of searing, mind-shattering pain, and it’s their custom to say it at the beginning of every sentence.” She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes in frustration. “We’re still settling all the workplace injury lawsuits.”

“Well, we’ve got to do something,” Commander Tusk said, “and we’re not leaving this room until we’ve got a gameplan.”

Across the table, a voice rang out. “We must invade at once!” Everyone turned to look at an unfamiliar man in an expensive, designer tunic who nobody had seen enter the room. “Act now. Don’t delay! You can’t put a price on the element of surprise. Believe me, we’ve tried!” The man pointed to the embroidered logo on his tunic, which read I.D.S.I., an acronym for Interplanetary Defense Systems Incorporated, a weapons manufacturing conglomerate.

“How the hell did he get in here?” Tusk shot an angry glare at his assistant, who was standing next to the mysterious man.

“Sorry, Sir,” the assistant said, and fumbled with his tablet. “It’s one of those pop-up holo ads. We’ll just have to wait a few seconds until we can skip it.”

“We have a number of reasonably-priced packages tailor-made for the needs of your government, rebellious faction, or apocalyptic death cult,” the holographic sales rep continued. “Our factories are standing by, ready to go into production immediately upon down payment — ”

The assistant tapped something on his screen and the sales rep winked out of existence.

“I get that one all the time,” the President’s Envoy said.

Commander Tusk stroked his chin. “Still, maybe that hologram is onto something.” He turned to face Ariana. “Dyson spheres are a pretty serious investment of a civilization’s resources, correct?”

“In theory, sir,” Ariana said, “but we’ve never actually observed one to know for certain.”

Arjun jumped in. “However, the projected expense of a Dyson sphere is the main reason humanity hasn’t attempted one yet. Ever since the discovery of faster-than-light travel, we’ve found it’s much more cost effective to maintain colonies on nearby planets and asteroids rather than build a single megastructure.”

“Decentralization is more strategically advisable too,” the President’s Envoy said. “Even if Earth was destroyed by an invading force, we’d still have sizable operations on Mars, Ganymede, and Callisto, not to mention the expeditionary force making headway in Proxima Centauri. Relying on a Dyson sphere would make us much more vulnerable.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Tusk said. “This unknown civilization seems to have put all its eggs in Dyson’s basket, so one quick attack could finish them off before they even know what hit them.”

“And then we wouldn’t have to bother learning anything about them,” the Chief Linguist said with glee. “Now you’re speaking my language.”

“Wait, what?” Ariana said but she’d become uninteresting to the Council.

“Would the President go for something like that?” Tusk asked the Envoy.

“Oh, hell yes,” the Envoy said. “Nobody votes out a wartime president. All we have to do is pretend we intercepted a hostile transmission from this new civilization threatening imminent attack. I’ll leak it to our contacts in the press. They’ll eat that shit up.”

“My team can fabricate a convincing transmission for the soundbite,” the Chief Linguist said. “We’ll make their alien language really scary-sounding. Lots of guttural stuff. Maybe throw in some Old German.”

“Hold on, everyone,” Ariana shouted, bringing the room to silence. Every head turned to glare at her. “Setting aside that we’re talking about a heinous act of genocide, it’s also possible this new civilization is so advanced that they’d be able to repel our attack and retaliate. If they’re smart enough to build a Dyson sphere, who knows what else they can do?”

“So what do you suggest?” the President’s Envoy asked.

“Do nothing. Pretend we never saw anything and continue like we have for our entire existence up until now, when we didn’t even know this new species existed,” Ariana said. “They haven’t tried to contact us even though they probably could, so maybe they’re not interested. Why bother them now?”

The room murmured in contemplation.

“It’s certainly not as much fun as a surprise attack,” Tusk said. Others around the room nodded in agreement.

“But the whole sector could get bogged down in a long and costly war,” Ariana said.

“Which would stimulate the fuck out of the economy,” the rep from the Commerce Union said and high-fived the President’s Envoy.

“My IDSI stock is going to go through the roof,” the Chief Linguist said.

“Oh! I should buy some,” the President’s Envoy said.

“Let’s all buy some!” said the Commerce Union rep. “Somebody turn that sales hologram back on.”

The room once again erupted in excited discussion.

Ariana slumped back in her chair next to Arjun. “I told you we should’ve kept this all a secret,” she said.

Arjun smiled. “No way! This is going to be awesome for our careers. All the heavy hitters in this room know who we are now. We can get any assignment we want.” He looked over to the other side of the conference table, where several members of the Council were gathered around the reactivated holo projection of the IDSI weapons rep. “I’m going over there to offer my professional opinion as a Dyson sphere expert.”

“But you’re not a Dyson sphere expert.”

“They don’t know that,” Arjun said and stood up. “You coming?”

He didn’t wait for her response. As the murmur of frantic conversation and laughter grew louder, Ariana stood up from her chair and walked over to the window to look once again at the endless expanse of stars, one of which would be a little brighter in a few months’ time once the bombardment being planned in this very room got underway. She sighed and looked to the corner of the window and saw the interior of the conference room reflecting back at her. It was full of smiling, joyful figures, laughing and shaking hands.

“I guess the AIs were right,” she said to herself. “The universe is full of assholes.”

THE END