We Will Destroy Your Planet Page 13

  You do not need to be entirely selfless to take this approach, of course. You could well be concerned about turning humanity away from an aggressive expansionist path before it gets too much of a foothold in space.

  Another far more practical reason for uplifting humanity is if you have become stranded, and require a superior level of technology to be attained in order for you to repair your ship or otherwise complete preparations for your return home.

  NATURAL INSTINCT

  It is possible that you are a non-sentient creature of some kind, and that your arrival on Earth was by pure chance, perhaps carried by an unsuspecting sentient traveller. If this is the case, your whole objective in life will be to survive and possibly reproduce.

  Since if you’re not sentient you won’t be reading this, there is very little advice that can be given, other than to watch out for hunters, either human or otherwise. Certainly you will have no need to conquer the Earth in order to roam wildly, and nor would you ever conceive of doing so anyway.

  For what it’s worth, general advice for such a species would be to make sure to find a suitable location in which to create a nest or den, because hunting is a popular pastime in most regions of Earth.

  THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

  On Earth, the human race often refers to itself as the most dangerous game, in the context of big game hunting, or hunting animals for sport. If such hunting is a part of your society’s life, then it may be worth considering using the Earth for this purpose.

  The wide range of terrain and environments make for a good choice of types of chase. Although human bodies are relatively flimsy, you may always find, or even breed and train, specimens who will give the most satisfying chase, or prove to be worthy opponents in physical combat to test their mettle.

  If you are going to engage in blood sports on Earth, you will not necessarily need to conquer the planet in order to do so. There are enough remote areas of all kinds for you to conduct hunts without being disturbed by human authorities in most cases, though you will have to ensure that your prey do not bring others into the game. You may even be able to gain permission for such hunts with the collusion of terrestrial governments, who may be willing to give you their enemies or criminals for the purpose.

  THE PLANET OF FUN

  You also will not need to conquer the Earth if you simply want to blow off some steam by having some raucous fun, blowing stuff up, recreational fighting (Glasgow has been good for this sort of weekend off for aliens since Victorian times), and so on.

  So long as the native authorities and militaries do not have the ability to seriously harm your holidaymakers and their activities, it doesn’t matter whether they know about you or not. You can simply carry on enjoying yourself in whatever way takes your fancy.

  There is so much to see and do on Earth that you could simply enjoy yourself for years, with every whim catered for, and nothing to stop you. Visiting the Earth simply to see the sights, insult the natives, play pranks on them by strutting up and down making ‘beep beep’ noises, or destroy things that don’t matter to you for the sheer joy of it, are all perfectly valid reasons for going.

  Why shouldn’t the Earth be a vacation spot? It has many beautiful sights. If you want to sample the sights, the food, the sports, or just to have whatever your society considers to be a good time, there really is no need to mount an expensive and complex military campaign.

  GOING NATIVE

  Well, it does happen from time to time that visitors to the planet are either so taken with the lifestyle of humanity that they decide to join in, or are stuck for so long that they assimilate into a human lifestyle by exposure over time becoming habit-forming.

  This is far more likely to happen to visitors who have crashed, been exiled, or otherwise ended up living on Earth for extended periods not by choice. This, logically, will happen to individuals rather than societies. And so conquering the Earth would be neither practical nor desirable. By doing so, the adopted native will be denying their preferred status.

  If you find yourself in this situation, probably by trying to blend in at first, you can try seeking help from government agents with suburban families or interested amateurs.

  CARE AND FEEDING OF YOUR HUMANS

  If your interest in the Earth is in its strategic position or mineral/chemical resources, you’re probably wondering what would be the point of preserving some humans. After all, they’re going to get in the way, resist your control of the Earth, try to prevent you from actually getting at all those resources you want, and generally prove themselves to be a nuisance.

  There are several reasons why you, as triumphant planetary conquerors, may decide to try to keep humanity around, some more obvious than others, and some more practical than others.

  Enslavement. Humans are apparently often considered excellent work machines. Nothing can crawl into a narrow crevice in a quarry and carry out some rocks to dump on the rock-crusher’s conveyor belt like a human can. According to most theorized alien invasion reports and propaganda stories, there is usually little regard for the health and well-being of these organic work machines. This is, of course, highly inefficient and generally motivated by an immature desire to play at being powerful; in reality, healthy and happy workers are always more productive.

  You will undoubtedly find that offering the carrot rather than the stick is generally more effective in motivating your workers. In fact, rather than openly enslave them, and thus generate resentment and rebellion, you should simply offer the population jobs in which they will be paid in the local currency. Since Earth’s currencies will mean nothing to you, this will increase productivity while decreasing the odds of resistance and rebellion.

  Food. The Earth is teeming with life, pretty much all of which depends, in some way, upon consuming the biomass of other life forms. Since humanity is the dominant life form, it is at the top of the food chain, and some believe, therefore, that it must contain the most superior nutrition. Even if not, it’s certainly the case that any organic life forms coming to the planet will require sustenance, and since all the life forms on Earth will be equally as, well, alien, to the invader’s digestive systems, there is perhaps little reason to differentiate between species that contain nutritional value for you.

  Presumably if you yourselves are human, you can skip the idea of keeping humans for food. Otherwise, any good farmer knows that the best food – be it fruits, vegetables, fish, poultry or animals, needs to be looked after and husbanded. Different breeds of the same species may have noticeably different flavours and nutritional values. Battery farming is obviously the most cost efficient for large scale processing, but you’ll find that properly bred free-range humans are far tastier and more nutritious.

  Even so, if terrestrial organisms are edible and nutritious to your species, you would be better off farming and consuming the larger food animals, which have more food on them, and are unable to form organized military resistance groups.

  Also, the fact that any organism you can digest can transfer dangerous bacteria to you definitely applies to humans. Eating them will put you at risk of cross-species bacteriological warfare, because it absolutely will not take long before it occurs to the resistance to start infecting themselves in order to introduce harmful bacteria into your food chain. It would be a long game, true, but they may well eventually succeed in causing mass illness among their forces. Since the humans you eat would be being killed anyway, they wouldn’t really have anything to lose.

  Zoology. You may simply be interested in studying captive specimens, either because this species in particular interests you, or as part of a wider study. It’s even possible that your specimens would be valuable to private collections. This is quite inadvisable in general, as you will be spreading a potentially rebellious enemy to several of your locations away from their home, and that will be asking for trouble, as at some point in the future you may face insurrection in many different locations, from the descendants of your specimens, rather tha
n just on Earth.

  Medical research. It’s always difficult to calculate how useful a study of a species from a completely different biosphere would be in medicine, but there is a common theory among humans that aliens have a particular need to conduct medical experiments on them, as humans conduct experiments on other species on the planet. If your species is carbon-based, then perhaps you have found enough similarities between yourselves and humanity to make such scientific comparisons valuable.

  If this is the case, then you will need to make sure your specimens are suitable for the scientific method – that you have a range of samples, and that they have not been contaminated by your biosphere in any way before the experiment begins. You will also need to maintain a control sample of average, normal (if there is such a thing) humans for comparison.

  Whatever the reason for keeping a group of humans around, you will need to be sure that they are healthy and fit for the purpose, and that they are suitably trained and conditioned to accept the situation with equanimity.

  FIRST CONTACT

  How the humans you encounter when you arrive on Earth will react to you will depend upon a number of varied factors: how human your species is, whether you are openly extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional, how openly hostile you are, how religious the human is, which culture the human is from, and how educated the human is.

  In fact, reports and stories about the arrival of visitors from offworld are so much a staple part of human society from its earliest development that it may actually count as an advantage, as the native population is already preconditioned to view such arrivals as relatively normal.

  On the downside, most of these tales, especially over the past century or so, have been produced with a rather tribal defensive tone, in which the arriving species are invariably treated as hostile and exploitative. While the reason for this is in fact rooted in human society’s past – in which many of their earlier-developing civilizations destroyed or exploited the ones that were less developed – you may find that this all-pervasive image colours the native expectation of you and leads to the belief that you will be attempting conquest, even if you are not.

  If you are planning a conquest of the Earth, that won’t matter, although it may interfere with any plans you have to pretend otherwise as part of a scheme to lull the native authorities into a false sense of security.

  It has always been possible that certain types of religiously minded humans would consider you to be gods, angels, demons, or some other form of supernatural entity. This is especially the case if your appearance matches local legends and beliefs about such beings (e.g. you have wings, horns on your forehead, etc), or if you are more geared towards the use of innate natural and biological abilities rather than purely mechanistic technology.

  It is obviously best to make your first contact with humans under carefully controlled conditions and ideally well before actually launching your campaign of attack.

  In fact, you should be studying them as part of the research phase of your advance planning. Monitor and observe them first, test them, and finally isolate and acquire subjects for testing and interrogation. You may find yourself viewing these subjects simply as lower animals suitable for physical and intelligence testing, to see what kills them, and how they’ll react to stimuli, but you should always remember that they are, by some standards, sentient, and so can give you information on their attitudes, plans, and psychology.

  Currently, most of the population of Earth, certainly in developed industrialized societies, are perfectly au fait with the idea of visitors from other planets and dimensions, thanks to the propaganda called science fiction. Let us make no mistake, much of this type of literature and art is indeed propaganda, telling as it does stories of how almost-invariably hostile aliens are constantly attempting to conquer or destroy the Earth. Even when the stories are about humanity visiting other worlds, they tend to focus on the idea of the aliens found there being evil, and humanity having a duty to try to defeat them, for its own sake.

  This is both a blessing and a curse – and may even be a motive, if you’ve picked up television transmissions from Earth over the past 60 years or so – for those who seek to conquer the planet. It is a blessing because it means the populace have an understanding of the intricacies of space travel, and the fact that they are not the only life in the universe; it is also a curse because it has preconditioned human society and individuals to view alien visitors to the planet as hostile.

  This means that establishing trust, however false, in order to leverage surprise, is a much harder job than it might otherwise be. Whether this is actually a deliberate strategy on the part of a media complex in a position (and with a desire) to affect and control the minds of the populace is unclear. There have been other stories released into society that feature friendly or beneficial aliens, so perhaps it is all one big coincidence. If not, then clearly some of you are ahead of the game, as it would make excellent strategic sense in the battle for the hearts and minds of the populace for you to have inserted your own propaganda into the Earth’s media, in order to moderate the levels of preprogrammed hostility you might otherwise face.

  HOW TO ABDUCT A HUMAN

  There are standard protocols for abducting humans from Earth for either interrogation or scientific study. The guidelines are quite simple, and most species should have little difficulty following them. Those of you originating from other time zones or parallel worlds should feel free to follow the same protocols as part of your pre-attack reconnaissance, safe in the knowledge that witnesses and interrogation subjects will assume your actions to have been committed by space travellers.

  In particular, the most likely scapegoats will be grey humanoids with large eyes, thought to be from the vicinity of the Zeta II Reticuli star system. Both of these elements actually have purely terrestrial origins (see text box), but in the unlikely coincidental event that any of you are large-eyed grey humanoids from the Zeta II Reticuli star system, you will be getting blamed for everybody else’s actions, which must be a motive for anger.

  Note that if you intend to capture actual humans for interrogation or study as part of a pre-invasion reconnaissance programme, it is not strictly necessary to kill the specimens in order to protect your plans or intentions. In fact, among certain terrestrial societies, the study of random specimens by extraterrestrial visitors is considered a relatively normal occurrence, at least when the typical protocols are followed. Killing them is still the most secure precaution, though, unless you want to fit them with some form of monitoring device, parasite, or mind control apparatus, with which you can use your abductees to learn more during reconnaissance missions, or to conduct operations which you yourself are too nonhuman to get away with.

  If you are able to create some sort of duplicate of the test subject – whether it be a robot, clone, plant replica grown in a pod, or some other type of doppelganger, then you should do so, for intelligence-gathering, fifth column duties, and to generally allay suspicion in case, despite your best efforts in selection, they will be missed by someone.

  You should look for humans in remote areas, and ones who will not be missed. Hermits, the homeless, individuals on long journeys far from home, and so on.

  Firstly, make sure your chosen subject is, in fact, a human. Quite apart from the fact that there are many related hominid ape species on the planet, which share a common evolutionary ancestor with humanity, the preponderance of mammalian life in general on the surface of the planet could cause some confusion.

  Humans tend to be bipedal and relatively hairless. It’s embarrassing enough to have accidentally beamed up an orang-utan or chimpanzee, but there have been many reports from farmers on Earth reporting that their cows and horses have been abducted by aliens. That said, there is also good reason to take sample subjects of other terrestrial species for study. You may wish to compare their biologies, test them as suitable food sources, or even prefer their company to that of more troublesome humans.

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p; Once you have confirmed that your chosen subject is human, and not, for example, a cow, the abduction process should be fairly simple. Since reconnaissance should occur before humanity in general is aware of your presence, isolated individuals should be chosen, to minimize the risk of witnesses or resistance. The subject should be taken either from their sleeping quarters (humans generally sleep singly or in pairs, so these are appropriate numbers) or from a ground vehicle subjected to EMP attack. A small ground vehicle is best, because it again will typically contain one or two humans, and larger vehicles or aircraft will carry with them more danger of witnesses and discovery.

  The vehicle approach is recommended. On Earth, only humans will be in control of vehicles, so there is no room for confusion. Simply choose a ground vehicle that is moving in or towards a remote area with no other travellers. Descend in a suitable vessel, stop the vehicle with an EMP burst, and remove the occupants for study.

  You should either teleport your abductee into a space vehicle, or carry them there by anti-gravitational means. If you do not have antigravity, then ensuring that the subject is in an altered state of consciousness – by chemical, sonic, or electromagnetic means – will give them the same effect. Your subject should be immobilized but conscious throughout, so that they can respond to our questions, and their brain chemistry responses to different stimuli can be studied without danger of resistance or escape.

  All clothing should be removed for separate study. Feel free to poke, prod and probe unnecessarily, as this will be expected. Having chosen a human who will not be missed, you should dispose of them now, or at least ship them to your homeworld or another planet within your sphere of influence where they can be useful in some way.