The end of the world came, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Their name in their native tongue was utterly unpronounceable to us humans, a cackling of cartilage that was unreplicable to us humans. The names we gave them, however, were as diverse as the stars in the sky. The Others. The Interloopers. The Skymen. I personally preferred the Visitors.
The Visitors were not evil. They did not conquer us to eat us, or to implant within us their young, or anything like that. Their biological functions, while stable at STP that betrayed that their homeworld was very similar to our own, were utterly incomparable to us humans. They also did not torture us for fun. When one of their hunters burned through a small school in New Zealand several years ago, there were actual reparations made. However, that did not change one fact: that we were in their way.
Though, perhaps I should start at the beginning. I still remember the warm, muggy night that their ships first lit up our skies. The air force was scrambled, a curfew on pain of death was enforced across most of the world. However, they did not invade. Their ship captain, using a broken algorithmic translator, explained that they were searching for new worlds and wanted to open peaceful contact with humanity. Their first gifts to us were truly without strings. Poverty and disease were eliminated within two weeks. The human life expectancy jumped to 120 without implants. They became our heroes.
As time went on, they began to offer even greater gifts to those who would be fine with giving something up in return. The government of Cote d'Ivore was usurped by a military dictator who began destroying Visitor technology throughout his demesne. Hundreds died in the fighting. The Visitors secretly came to the government of Burkina Fasho with a proposition: They would allow them to have vast secrets beyond human imagining if the country allowed the Visitors to set up an occupation zone in the African nation, for protecting the people of course. Naturally, they agreed. The first Visitor soldiers landed on earth, and within an hour, the dictator's head was on a spike outside the presidential palace. The first Visitor boots on the ground. Burkina Fasho began to absolutely glow with the new Alien tech that was allowed into the nation. And as time went on, more and more nations grew deeply jealous.
World War III was over within a few weeks. Nations across the globe, hoping to gain the favor of the Visitors, began fighting each other, offering the land of their neighbors in exchange for Visitor secrets to the mysteries of the Universe. The Visitor armies were absolutely beyond anything the Earth could achieve. They conquered but did not kill. Industry was commandeered but the people were not abandoned. Those who truly refused to surrender to Visitor control were deported off world, to vast dyson spheres packed densely with myriad alien species. They gained more and more goodwill as they expanded their reach on earth. By 2030, Africa was, in one way or another, essentially owned by the Visitors.
But then, the truth was revealed. A group of terrorists (who, some were say, were aided by a rogue Visitor who was against the policies of their homeworld) ended up intercepting a message on the vast quantum computer that the Visitors used to communicate with each other. The message was replayed on every major news outlet on earth. Ultimately, the Visitors were not here to harvest everything, they wanted the Earth herself. The cosmos had only a meager few worlds where the Visitors, or really any other species, could survive without either highly expensive terraforming or vast engineering projects that even the Visitors were not particularly fond of embarking on.
On one hand, many humans were fine with this. The Visitors had ended things such as poverty, yes, but the wealthy gap between poor and rich has never been greater. The Visitors chose groups that were historically marginalized and mistrusted throughout the world to enforce their will. Not to mention, the Visitors chose to settle in lands that were only marginally suitable for human habitation before making them bloom. Visitors also established control of Mars and Venus, where they began turning the worlds into gardens. The Visitors were not downright genocidal, either. A wealthy human could even afford to send their children to get cutting edge implants or knowledge in the grand Homeworld of the Visitors, or move to Mars or another world. And even the poor were mostly content with their lives. Yet, many of us were disgusted at the concept of the Visitors stealing the very earth away from us.
This all came to a head in 2055. Radical elements within the American and Chinese government stole nuclear codes, and launched a full nuclear assault on the Visitors. While the Visitor ships were, naturally, rather impervious to such perfidious and barbaric weapons as nuclear weapons, the Visitor cities were not as lucky. For a time, it seemed as if the Visitors were on the retreat.
Until the Ironfall. Visitor armies designed for use against interstellar powers that were on parity with the Visitors, and not the primitives living off of scraps that we were to them, dropped across the world. The United States government was utterly destroyed, and vast portions of the American population was off-worlded. The Hungarians, who played an instrumental part in the attack on the Visitors, were given the choice to be either deported to Finland or off-worlded while Hungary itself was turned into a Visitor colony. China was invaded, but between the surprising effectiveness of several Chinese projects and a massive manpower advantage, vast parts of the Chinese countryside remains in PLA control.
On this day, May 31, 2058, the order would come in that, except for certain vital religious and cultural sites, Humanity was to be off-worlded to a distant space station tailor-made for Humanity. And in the end, most of us wouldn't even resist.
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