Dear Sir, Madam, or Being of Indeterminate Gender, We regret to inform you that the Pan-Galactic Bank of Kephras is no longer accepting Souls as a valid form of tender, due to recent abuses of our registry¹. We are still accepting a wide range of other currencies, including Enriched Nebula Dust, Element Zero, Gold Bullion, your Firstborn Child, and IHOP giftcards². Sincerely, ¹An excessive number of Soul-related chargebacks from those claiming a loophole in our Reincarnation Policy. Rest assured, this loophole has been corrected in our updated Terms of Service Agreement, and any future attempts to abuse this clause will be forwarded to our legal department. ²Cards must be validated for balance before being accepted. Anyone attempting to defraud an account with invalid giftcard balances will be fed to our legal department, which is primarily cannibal pancakes.
*Sigh* Alright. I've tucked a few IHOP giftcards into my firstborn child's diaper and am sending him to you now. Does it matter to you if I put airholes in the box?
I can only hope that SOMEONE creates a morgan freeman voice reader.. Because then I will have Keph's text read out by God. ... Yes..
You know what I'd love to hear you rant about? How there's a stranger dropping copies of your Tiger's Mask and Certificate of Ownership to everyone... Like he doesn't want them anymore >.> *get mad, little kitty*
Do you mean to tell me there's more than one instance of this happening, or are you referring very specifically to Defne's acquisition?
It started as a joke. A hilarious "what if?" we'd thought about many times before. Looking back on it now, I couldn't tell you why that night in the back booth of Hennigan's was any different, why this time it finally gained traction. Maybe Lewis had one shot too many. Maybe Donovan was having an exceptionally bad day and decided enough was enough. Maybe it was my fault for egging them on. My fault the skies are black with ash. My fault our world is now a radioactive husk in the grip of nuclear winter. My fault that Lewis, Donovan, Kaitlyn, and all the rest are dead... Have you ever been in a bar fight? A real knock-down bare-knuckle brawl, where everything is chaos? Some guy slugs you, so you wind up to deck him, only to find he's not there when you swing - and suddenly you've just given the bouncer a black eye instead. That's the moment when everything goes to hell. When you wake up the next morning, you're on your ass in the street with the worst hangover you've ever known, and aching in places even a doctor couldn't name. Only this time, it was on a galactic level, and your entire planet is now black and blue instead of green. Some joke, right? The question, if you enjoy irony, was "What if humanity stopped fighting each other?" We tossed around a lot of crazy ideas back then, but theorizing about world peace was always Lewis' favorite. He phrased it a lot of ways - our rule was, you can't use the same "what if" twice - but that was the one that finally stuck. We stayed at Hennigan's until they kicked us out, two hours past closing, and even that didn't kill the discussion. It followed us home, and to work the next morning. It kept coming up in our emails, our text messages, our phone calls, and the next week when we all met at Hennigan's for our usual round of drinks and discussion - "beer and bullshit," as Donovan liked to say - we didn't need a new "what." The question had become "how" instead. If a calendar still meant anything, that's the day you'd want to mark. Kait was the one who brought up Alan Moore. Spark unity by necessity, bring humanity together in the face of a greater threat. Be ready to make sacrifices, thousands for the lives of millions if need be. Make examples of the rest. I never believed we could follow through on it, let alone that we would. It was ludicrous, in both cost and scope, and it'd take two decades before we were ready to call the world's bluff. Crowd-funding is a modern miracle though. We started with hundreds, grew to thousands, and in the span of a year had millions of people funneling petty cash our way. It totaled the GDP of a small nation. And nations took notice, to be sure. We were investigated five times for fraud and other scams in the first year alone. The plan itself was pretty simple - stick a transmitter way out in space, code some simple Commandments into even simpler mathematical cyphers, and issue an ultimatum to the planet. When the inevitable acts of defiance start cropping up, throw rocks at them. From space. Either we all obey the "aliens" and get along, or we unite against them. Twenty-one years, eight days, and three hours after that night in Hennigan's, we were ready to throw our punch. Maybe we weren't fast enough. Two decades is a long time to wind up, but it's helluva expensive to send payloads into space, and then you figure in the years it takes getting them all lined up. Orbital ballet is a slow dance. And, to be fair, there's no way we could've known the bouncer was standing behind us that time. So zero-hour finally came. Our transmitter was drifting out somewhere around Jupiter by then, and the message took about half an hour to reach Earth. It was a full day before news networks picked up on it. The response was about what you'd expect - a mix of panic, skepticism, and outright denial. About ten percent believed it was "another government conspiracy," notwithstanding the fact that every developed country on the planet was trying to point fingers at someone else. What choice did we have? It was time to throw a rock. The "bouncer," in this case, was a surveillance ship. Our probe's transmitter was "directional," but we had to make certain its signal could reach back to Earth without trouble. Which created a different kind of trouble, in that Sir Isaac Newton's third law dictated those radio waves keep going - and someone else heard us too. Someone who didn't appreciate it when the rocket motors attached to one of our rocks flared to life and sent it hurtling down from the asteroid belt to level Moscow. You were thinking we hit their ship? That'd be a trillion-to-one shot, blindfolded, throwing at a target we didn't even know existed. Maybe it'd have been better if we had. A species shouts at itself from space, to "behave or else," and then triggers an event of catastrophic proportions on top of a major population center? I guess to the interplanetary community, we looked like the worst sort of spacefaring neanderthals. So they kicked us out of the club. They destroyed the satellites first. A few of the nuclear powers tried to respond with ICBMs, but they detonated a few miles above the launch sites. America got the worst of it - most of the northern mid-west is a radioactive wasteland, and the fallout blew into Canada and the Great Lakes region afterwards. Anything that looked flight- or space-worthy became a target. Major airports were vaporized, Cape Canaveral was hit so hard the ocean is still filling in the crater, and even radio tracking stations were destroyed - just to be on the safe side, I guess. They never even tried to talk to us, just one alien vessel flitting around the globe with impunity, systematically knocking us back to the stone age where we belong. The depressing part is, it worked. We've stopped fighting each other. We're just fighting to survive, now.
Wow. I got to remember to read this again later this week, when I'm not so tired. But even now, I can see that that was really well-written, and with a deep message.
Marvin sighed heavily. "I dunno Jim, you tell me. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?" "That's just it! No one actually knows!" Jim banged his fist on the table emphatically. "It's all hypothetical. That entire stupid tongue-twister is one big what-if! 'IF' a woodchuck could chuck wood!" "So it shouldn't even matter, because they can't." Marvin rolled his eyes, tired of this debate. Every Tuesday they met for lunch, and his brother-in-law would bring up another absurd saying or cultural colloquialism and try to make sense of it. "You may as well ask if they can Chuck Norris." "Pfft," Jim waved his hand dismissively. "Nobody can Chuck Norris. Except Chuck Norris. But these woodchucks-" "No, I'm done with this. Last week you wanted to read the 'Twilight' series to a crocodile to see if you actually could make it cry." "And?" "CROCODILES DON'T ENGLISH, JIM." Marvin looked at his plate in disgust. His pasta had gone cold while he argued. "They're immune to literature, no matter how bad it is." "...English isn't a verb, Marv," his in-law replied petulantly. "And 'Twilight' isn't literature. It's a laxative." "Then why don't I give a-" "Shall I get you gentlemen the check then, or can I interest you in some dessert?" The waitress' timing was impeccable.
Yes it's quite fun to read. But i didn't understand one thing. The people who went to the bar--were they part of humanity? Or were they aliens that made a destructive ship to help humanity, or did the ship do its job too well? >.>?? Corresponding part i don't understand: "they didn't even talk to us... Just one alien vessel... Knocking us back into the stone age where we belong." ... Or is it that the humans didnt even try to talk to the people who started the project and were more focused on the machines? XD
