The Big Bhang

By Travis Hill

Jeremy Jefferson Jacobs Jackson--Forjay to everyone but his mother--grew the most potent marijuana on Earth. Some said the entire Federation of Allied Planets. When the Galactic Union declares humanity unfit to exist, only one man has what it takes to be a true hero to the citizens of FAP.

Join Forjay, Ms. Marianna Templeton, Ambassador Dave Thatcher, and a large, diverse, generally annoying cast of the Galactic Union's alien species on an adventure that spans both time and the space. Relish in the glory of victory, plunge to the lowest depths of despair in defeat, and scream insults at stupid, uppity, snooty, gloppy alien jerks who act like they're better than human beings (and think they're tough).

*** Definitely Fake Editorial Reviews of "The Big Bhang" ***

"I didn't understand this book at all..." - Fijj Yom, Wroglarian (a dumb alien species not affected by weed)

"There's a lot of commas and long sentences in this book!" - some reader who complained about commas and long sentences

"This book is not funny." - NYPD Patrol Officer Gary Garrison

"Bark bark bark growl. Bark!" - NYPD Drug Canine Mr. Fang

"This is the lowest form of propaganda, the kind only a weak, mewling race of soup-filled meatbags would dare to popularize." - Tyx War General Boomz Blasterton

"Reading this book is the dumbest thing you could ever do." - the author of this book

"I don't get it... I raised Travis better than this!" - the author's mother

• Language: English
• Publisher: Travis Hill
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386278474

Travis Hill

I'm an author in the Pacific Northwest. I live with my five completely worthless but awesome cats. I write stories I want to read that no one else is writing. My mailing list: https://www.angrygames.com Writes: Science Fiction / Fantasy / Horror / Adult Fiction / Drama / Humor

Book preview

THE BIG BHANG

By Travis Hill

Copyright 2016

Ebook cover art by: Keith Draws

http://www.keithdraws.com

This work is copyrighted 2016 by me, Travis Hill (who claims to be an author, whatever that means), and under no circumstances do I give you permission to use, steal, reproduce, re-post, complain about, or do anything else with this story that might enrage me to the point of becoming an internet troll who harasses you in a comically inept fashion.

However, you might want to fire up a big doobie, sit back, and read it. I cannot guarantee it will not be a major waste of time that you could have spent playing in traffic or browsing for pornography on the internet.

Any resemblance to living, dead, zombified, ghostly, imaginary, or cartoon characters is purely coincidental or unintentional because I didn’t do a Google search to find out if they truly existed. Also, if the future doesn’t play out exactly as I’ve written in this book, you may not sue me for mental/emotional anguish. Or because you quit your job to get high and build a spaceship thinking all of this was written by a time traveler.

1. The Master and the Streak

Jeremy Jefferson Jacobs Jackson—Forjay to everyone but his mother—grew the most potent marijuana on planet Earth. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone fortunate (or just downright lucky) enough to partake of Forjay’s weed that he would someday become the most famous pothead in history. Little did anyone realize that the humble farmer from rural Oregon was to become mankind’s greatest hero. And like the best stories of human heroes throughout their existence, Forjay’s began in a simpler time, before shit got all complicated and he was forced into the role by circumstance.

In 2093, when Forjay was only twenty years old, he took the world by storm by winning the 43rd annual Chronic Cup with a strain of sativa he called Phased Reality. The judges, no strangers to the power of some pretty scary breeds over their careers, had been so high that Security found them playing jacks in a closet on the 39th floor of the Seattle Towers Hotel. Journalists assigned to cover the event had to dedicate an entire online column, complete with pictures and video links, to explain what the hell jacks was. When the public found out that it wasn’t gambling or the latest virtual entertainment title but a retro children’s game with a ball and some weird pieces of metal, they agreed Forjay truly deserved to win the Cup.

Forjay’s win swept him up into a tornado of fame where he was deluged with requests for interviews, autographs, and of course, growing tips from fans, celebrities, and even politicians from all across the globe. Forjay was also the youngest person to ever win the Chronic Cup, and you can imagine how that stuck in the craw of the older hippies and egomaniacal thirty-something CEO’s of commercial marijuana megacorps who’d been perfecting their grass for almost half a century since it had become legal everywhere on Earth in 2050.

But Forjay was above all of the jealousy and envy, for all he cared about was the weed. His goal had always been the next great high, one spacier, more relaxing, more imaginative than the last. This also made his industry peers upset, as they felt he was a bit of a snob. What drove the other contestants the craziest was that he truly enjoyed the competition. He didn’t care about the money, the prizes, the fame, the glory, not even the brand new 2093 Cadillac Neutron EUV with real fake-leather seats and a ninety-eight speaker Realitron™ entertainment system.

Forjay was no stranger to competition. He’d engaged in it with his father, Jonathon James Jared Jackson, a lifelong marijuana breeder and grower, on their modest farm just outside of Tillamook, Oregon, for the first twenty years of his life. The senior Jackson educated his son on every aspect of Cannabis Sativa, instilling young Forjay with love for the magical plant, all while pushing him to demolish the already straining boundaries with newer and more potent hybrids.

When Forjay was ten, his father held an impromptu Chronic Cup and invited ten other local growers to participate. Jonathon Jackson had never been more proud in his life than when all of the growers judged Forjay’s marijuana to be superior to anything they’d entered. He was even more proud when he found out Seth Lincoln, a long-time friend and fellow grower, got so stoned from Forjay’s entry that once he arrived home, he never stepped foot off his property again.

Forjay knew from that moment, holding his homemade cardboard Chronic Cup, a smile beaming so bright that it could be seen from outer space, that he’d found his calling in life. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t even be able to sample his magnificent breeds for another eight years, a rule his father strictly enforced and Forjay gladly obeyed. Forjay’s sense of smell and his prodigious knowledge when it came to breeding and growing had been more than enough to help him continually surpass his previous attempts without fail. Plus, it was a huge help having his father and his Uncle Jim around to cheer him on as they crawled around on the floor, fried out of their minds after testing each new variety he’d bred.

*

By Forjay’s fifth win in a row in 2098, he was a superstar, his name on every news reporter’s lips. No one had ever won the Chronic Cup five years in a row. Karen Li, a middle-aged housewife from Kansas City, Missouri, won it four years in a row in the 2060’s, but back then it was a lot easier to repeat as a champion. According to some, Ms. Li had lucked out when her prized Uzi-12 female clones were pollinated by a light dusting of an unknown strain that blew in on the wind. According to others, the kind, soft-spoken, elderly Korean-American was an undercover CIA operative who still ran the secret MK Ultra program and her entries were weaponized mind control gateways.

But by 2070, repeat champions were rare. Between 2072 to 2093, there had been only a single back-to-back winner. Forjay’s winning streak quickly became the stuff of legends as the attendees who partook of the winning strains told tales that simply couldn’t be true. Most weren’t, and a lot of the tales and stories the lucky partakers told made absolutely zero sense at all. Some sounded like little more than babbling in strange, fake languages.

After Forjay’s tenth win in a row, more of humanity began to take notice of him. Not everyone on Earth was a pothead, but at least half of the planet’s population were familiar with the plant’s psychotropic properties. After worldwide legalization in 2050, it became even more common than beer. The brewing companies were pissed until some of their employees, major stoners to be sure, piped up and told executives over company picnic lunches and drunken Christmas party speeches that with the distribution networks in place for alcohol, they’d make a killing if they got into the business of commercial weed.

When Forjay won his twentieth Chronic Cup in a row in 2113, more than half of the annual contestants dropped out permanently. Some were pissed they could never place better than second, but most conceded that the kid, now a forty year old man in the prime of his life, was simply unbeatable. Quite a few of them sold their commercial and industrial grow operations to 4J Enterprises, Forjay’s ever-expanding global empire of all things green.

Forjay was sad that the competition seemed to be crumbling, and whenever his company swallowed up one of his former competitor’s operations, Forjay himself would be present for the contract signing. Almost every deal ended with Forjay taking his former rivals out for a lavish dinner, where he would slip them a personal check that was sometimes more generous than the amount the company had been purchased for.

By this time, the kid was one of the richest humans on the planet. Not everyone loved him, or even thought highly of him (no pun intended), but those who didn’t usually received a punch to the stomach after having their pants pulled down around their ankles in public. Since stoners weren’t really belligerent and violent like drunks, the punch was kind of lazy, with the aggressors typically falling down in a fit of laughter while trying to run away after de-pantsing the hater.

Forjay earned the highest respect from his former competitors for his kindness, his compassion, and his willingness to spend any amount of money necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) to right a wrong or to help someone or some cause in need that was important to him. He earned the respect of the world when he began to spend large chunks of his fortune to make his home planet, the cradle of humanity, a better place.

*

By his thirtieth Cup win in a row in 2123, Jeremy Jefferson Jacobs Jackson had become quite jaded. He’d burned up more than half of his nearly trillion dollar fortune trying to help humanity, but he’d begun to realize that it was a lost cause. On the day he won his thirty-first Chronic Cup in a row, he cried in front of the cameras. He’d never been more sad in his life than when he looked at the sign-up sheets at the 73rd annual Chronic Cup and saw only two other names.

In 2125, on the day he received his thirty-second Chronic Cup title in a row, a graying but still dashing Forjay told the cameras and his sole competitor that he was officially dropping out of the Chronic Cup. While the entire world mourned Forjay’s exit from the Cup, most took his morose words to heart. Forjay had practically begged the world to get excited and begin working on their Chronic Cup entries for 2126, since he’d no longer be there to oppose them.

Less than a month later, those words were completely forgotten when the Federal Network went haywire with news that the Galactic Union had deemed humanity unfit to exist and planned to exterminate every human being in the Milky Way.

2. Some Backstory About Global Legalization & The Human War Machine

Planet Earth barely survived the 21st century. By 2020, there were forty-three major wars going on across the world. By 2045, water had become something worth threatening nuclear war over, oil was more expensive than diamonds, and the feeling on the majority of human minds was that there might only be five more years left before everything went up like a powder keg and madmen made good on their threats of annihilation.

In a last, desperate attempt to keep the clock from counting down the final two minutes to midnight, the world’s leaders sent their best diplomats and statesmen to Geneva to try and figure figure out how to turn things around. One brash, young diplomat from Australia showed up with a half-kilo of a strain of marijuana called Zombie Dance Party. He spent the night before the first day’s meetings rolling over two hundred joints. Not the giant bombers that he regularly enjoyed, but not little pinners either that were mostly paper and might have a quarter of a microgram of actual weed in them. He calculated that most of the other diplomats were noobs—or at least nowhere near as experienced as he was—and rolled the doobies just large enough to blow their minds but not make them run screaming from the meeting as if they’d been doused in kerosene and set on fire.

The first day’s meetings ran almost fourteen hours over schedule, and the diplomats ordered so much pizza that a portable Pizza Heaven restaurant had to be flown in from an American air base in Germany just to meet demand. The owners of the local shops publicly grumbled, but privately laughed and rubbed their mistresses’ legs as they drove their newly leased Mercedes down the Eurobahn at more than two hundred kilometers per hour.

They’d become rich pizza barons, as the conference not only went fourteen hours over on the first day, but ended up going almost fourteen weeks over. Most of the diplomats who wrote memoirs from that world-changing event stated that the only reason the conference didn’t continue for another fourteen months was because the brash, young Australian diplomat finally ran out of weed, and his supplier had run out of weed as well.

The young diplomat’s supplier ended up writing a memoir a few years later, where he told of being simply unable to believe that the diplomats from around the world had wiped him out of over six thousand kilograms of high-grade, mostly-illegal marijuana. Mostly illegal because only about fifteen percent of the conference attendees had a valid medical marijuana voucher or identification card, and recreational pot was still considered an illicit narcotic. Ninety-seven percent of those diplomats who hadn’t been on medical weed had proper identification and voucher chits within a week of going home.

Over those fourteen weeks, the men and women from around the world knew one thing had to be done if nothing else: make marijuana legal worldwide. They also added an optional resolution that made tacos free on Wednesdays between all day and all night, but the final draft had so much tomato sauce and grease on it from fingers holding pizza while reading the document that no one could fully decipher the optional clause. None of them could remember the full wording of the clause either, even though it had been only twelve words long.

After much political demagoguery and the debunking of harmful yet quaintly humorous anti-weed propaganda, followed by even more arm-twisting, backroom dealing, and threats of blackmail, the world’s leaders gathered at the United Nations in November of 2049 to sign a unanimous agreement that the cannabis plant would no longer be treated as a criminal entity in any of its variations. The medicinal crowd would still get their weed. The recreational crowd could now smoke in peace without fear of drug squads kicking in their doors and drug dogs biting them in their crotches. The industrial hemp hippies could now complain about how the massive global corporations were buying up all of the small, local hemp farms and turning them into massive hemp operations with low wages and no retirement pensions.

*

On January 1st, 2050, humanity celebrated like never before. Wars ground to a halt as both sides airdropped bales of sticky buds on combat troops. Uptight mothers suddenly relaxed and had a real conversation with their rebellious teenage daughters. Angry fathers decided it would be better to bond with their kids by blowing them up and shooting them in the head on the latest WiiStationBox VIII Entertainment Console game than to yell at them and make them feel guilty for being such disappointments.

Police were still kind of assholes, as they’d been indoctrinated to hate dope of all kinds. Some to the point that even when a Wall Street executive in a ten thousand dollar suit smoked a doobie in front of them, all they saw was a stinking, dirty, rag-wearing hippie listening to a Grateful Phish Cheese Panic song on his mobile comm while sitting around sucking on the government’s teat. It took nearly a decade and quite a few lawsuits to un-indoctrinate the police officers of planet Earth to be able to tell the difference between citizens and stinking, dirty, rag-wearing hippies listening to an endless jam band song while sitting around and sucking on the government’s teat.

Evil, ruthless, angry, shouting, podium-pounding dictators became funny and totally high dictators—which kind of made them not evil and such anymore—and when the dictator’s people finally rebelled, they usually did it over a barbecue and some Lebanese golden hash. Only one evil, ruthless, angry, shouting, podium-pounding dictator lost his head during all of the transfers of power, but that’s because he fired up a bowl of something called Dethroned and ended up falling in front of a moving sword.

At least that’s what the dictator’s personal bodyguards claimed. They were sour dudes with bushy mustaches and a hatred of all things fun. When they saw their leader puffing and laughing and carrying on, they knew he’d lost his way and hooked him up with the Dethroned to help him get acclimated to no longer being the ruler of an entire nation. Eventually a mob showed up and held the sour mustaches down and made them get high. The sour mustaches went on to form a boy band and toured malls all over Dubai and Bahrain.

Humans still went to war and acted like assholes, but that’s because going to war and acting like assholes was in their DNA. When the largest human genome data collection and study in the history of humanity concluded in 2028, the scientists assured the world that humanity was pretty much doomed. At least, they said, it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was hereditary. But by 2051, humans went to war a little less and only acted like assholes part of the time, thanks to access to not only marijuana, but also because of the many uses of hemp.

Forests began to regrow, which of course caused them all to grow really thick with lots of dead underbrush. Which of course would burn down every three to five years or so. Which of course led to a bunch of rich people crying about their hillside mansions being destroyed.

Vehicles that still burned fossil fuels switched over to hemp oil, which was great because you could cook, clean, or lubricate just about anything with whatever you didn’t put in your car’s fuel tank. Clothing became a lot more hip, until everyone started wearing hemp, which made polyester cool again. Humans were so high for the first decade after legalization that hardly anyone noticed half the world wearing suits which looked like they had been perfectly preserved since 1972. Paper went back into style, to the point some kids were bullied by their peers for being nerds because they still used digital computers and mobile comms to express ideas instead of writing words and drawing pictures on analog hemp paper.

For the majority of humans though, life was still pretty tough. Unless they were rich, but of course very few were. Yet it never became the hellish, dystopian wasteland of early 21st century science fiction. But because of hemp and because of weed, life was bearable. Workers still complained about their low wages and their fatcat bosses. Teenagers still complained about their dorky, embarrassing parents. Dorky, embarrassing parents complained about their brooding, worthless teenagers. Green Bay Packers fans still shouted insults and threatened bodily harm to Minnesota Vikings fans and vice-versa.

By 2079, the number of major wars going on around the world had dwindled from the low forties to three. Of those three major wars, two were only major because the aggressors claimed them to be. The rest of the world laughed or sighed and played along while trying to get both sides to stop shooting at each other long enough to share a bowl of super-kind.

The only major war was between China and Russia, and it wasn’t really a shooting war so much as a shouting war of really nasty insults. Both sides had laid claim to Mongolia, which agriculture specialists decreed as possibly the best place on Earth to grow weed. Mongolians had mixed feelings. On one hand, they would finally be known for something other than being synonymous with the middle of fucking nowhere, but on the other they were stuck in between two massive armies who promised friendship and financial prosperity while holding big spiked clubs behind their backs.

*

Because the humans of Earth had finally moved away from going to war and acting like assholes, science had another golden age. By 2080, humans finally landed another crew on the moon. By 2081, a World War almost broke out after the most powerful countries began to stake claims on the surface of the moon so they could set up experimental weed farms. By 2082, no one wanted to go to the moon anymore after spending a year watching themselves fight over a piece of land that was utterly worthless and would cost far too much to get very little in return.

By 2083, the moon landings were a hoax memes began making their way around the internet again, but this time they were countered by the government has a secret base where they are building killer robots who eat human flesh panic-memes. Alex Jones Jr. Jr. Jr. attacked one his webcast guests after the two got into a heated argument, battle lines between hoax landings and killer robots having been drawn during an epic forty-three minute screaming match. The ratings went through the roof, but most viewers were so high they couldn’t remember what the two muppets had been shouting about.

In July of 2089, the United States of America, in a joint statement with The New Empire of Japan, The British Empire, the New German Empire, and a few other empires—which made the rest of the world kind of nervous there were suddenly so many empires—announced an almost unbelievable breakthrough in science. Half of the world thought they were watching a science fiction movie when the whitecoat scientists stood at a podium and informed humanity that they were no longer tethered to planet Earth.

The invention of the foldspace drive drove humanity to work together and achieve goals instead of going to war and acting like assholes to each other. The United Nations gathered once again, this time doling out sovereignty to nations and corporations that could afford to buy one of the new planets in distant solar systems being discovered almost daily by automated survey ships. No longer would it take sixteen months for a human ship to reach Mars from Earth. It took less than sixteen seconds now. Alpha Centauri, once a million-year trip, could now be reached in seven minutes.

Corporations bought the best planets money could buy. Governments claimed the best planets an army could defend. Small communities of like-minded individuals put their money together and bought some of the lesser planets, ones that would require hard living and a lot of luck to survive on for more than a generation. The richest men and women bought and sold private planets as if they were Caribbean islands with white sandy beaches, which a lot of them were.

Even the various organized crime syndicates laundered enough money to buy new hideouts and bases of operations. The poorest humans who wanted to escape the polluted, war-scarred Earth could only afford to buy simple habitats that were attached to the larger asteroids scattered around the local interstellar region. Hundreds of thousands of humans who had spent their lives in small-town trailer parks traded in their beat up pickup trucks and welfare checks for a chance to own a six hundred square foot perspex bubble anchored to a spinning asteroid just outside the lethal radiation range of the system’s star, or in the case of most systems, the binary pair of stars. These asteroid parks quickly garnered a reputation not unlike what they’d had on Earth, with crazy tales from the New Florida Star System of outback settlers solving their problems by popping the habitat bubbles of their enemies with illegal shotguns or dying when trying to infiltrate their neighbor’s habitat by getting stuck in the outer life support ducts until their own air ran out.

*

The entire Federation of Allied Planets came to a screeching halt on December 9, 2094. Humanity had finally encountered a sentient species that didn’t originate from Earth. By December 13, 2094, the Federation of Allied Planets was officially at war with the Hipronian Confederacy. The Chronic Cup almost suffered the first cancellation in the history of the event, but the organizers and contestants pressed forward, claiming humanity needed the distraction and the laughs now that they were at war again. Some even tried to politicize the Cup, using it as a platform to rally all humans to work together now that they had a common enemy who wasn’t another human.

By 2098, when Forjay won his fifth Cup in a row, the Federation of Allied Planets, or FAP, was engaged in interstellar war on two fronts. The Hipronian Confederacy were tough little fuzzies, but they weren’t very technologically advanced. Which was good, because humans were still rolling around the galaxy in extremely crude space suits armed with comical, nearly useless weapons while piloting even more primitive ships. Humans and Hipronians were almost indistinguishable when fighting battles in the vacuum of space or the harsh environments of alien planets thanks to the bulky, crude suits. Within a pressurized atmosphere, however, the Hipronians looked like evil dog-gremlins with six arms, multiple legs, and at what seemed like a thousand mouths all lined with razor-sharp fangs.

FAP’s other enemies, the The Tyx Empire, were a different story. Eight feet tall, fully-armored combat exoskeletons, rapid-fire plasma weapons, and razor sharp claws for when the fighting became personal, the Tyx Empire was no joke. At least with the Hipronians, humans had come up with a good reason to go to war: some of the Hipronian colony planets were perfect for humans to settle without terraforming. With the Tyx Empire, the FAP brass didn’t like their demeanor, and accused the Tyx of thinking they were tough.

The Tyx were tough, and kicked the shit out of the humans, dislodging FAP colonies off sixteen planets in just over two years. Humans, as lucky as any race in the Milky Way, somehow got their hands on a few Tyx fighting suits and plasma rifles. Normally, the Tyx soldiers, in the event one of them died to a human, which was really, really rare since fighting humans was like fighting a nest of cockroaches, would have a sensor that detected the loss of a Tyx soldier’s life. Once activated, it would detonate a small implosion charge, guaranteeing humans or any other alien race would never get their hands (or claws, or flippers, or slimy tendrils, etc.) on some good Tyx military gear.

By 2105, the humans—who could breed like cockroaches and now used human-sized versions of rapid-fire plasma weapons and powered exoskeletal battle armor—had retaken twelve of their colonies and battled the Tyx to a stalemate along the Ardurian Front. The humans had beaten back the Hipronians into the Smiling Cat Nebula, which wasn’t the scientific name for it, but no one remembered the lame, boring, scientific name after holographic images streamed in from one of the survey probes showing the nebula to look like a fat grinning cat.

Hipronians could survive inside the nebula, but human ships, even the new battle armor and weapons, became useless within the massive star forge. FAP left automated beacons that continuously broadcast messages to the Hipronians, should they poke their noses out, informing them that humans were going back home long enough to develop ships, guns, and armor that wasn’t rendered useless by the effects of the nebula, then coming back and kicking the shit out of them once and for all. This frightened the fuzzy creatures, and so in 2106, they called their pals, the Gadrians.

The Gadrians were funny looking, and humans almost didn’t go to war with them because they couldn’t stop laughing at the little piggies, as the aliens were known. Indeed, the little piggy Gadrians were hilarious until they unleashed their disintegration rays and humans turned into little piles of ash. Humans stopped laughing and started cranking out more babies, more rapid-fire plasma weapons, and more powered exoskeletal battle armor.

By 2110, humans were committed to four different wars across thousands of light years. With over one hundred colony planets and hundreds of outposts, space stations, asteroid parks, and gas giant refueling stations, humanity was doing what it did best, which was wage war, act like assholes (this time to aliens), and become greedy for more planets. It seemed that the human race had forgotten the magical powers of marijuana, other than demanding an increase in industrial hemp for war supply purposes, which was the reason they continuously invaded alien planets. FAP’s war machine needed an ever-expanding acreage for growing more hemp to supply their armies and navies to fight against the evil alien aggressors.

3. The Lill & the Backstory of the Backstory

Within two hours of the Hipronians coming across humans wandering about within the Hipronian Outer Colonies, the Galactic Union was informed that the 188th race of star-faring aliens had been encountered. Within forty-eight hours after humanity’s first contact with an alien race, a massive GU warship entered Earth’s orbit and demanded a meeting with the leaders of FAP. Even then, some of the generals wanted to lob a few nuclear warheads at the GU ship, just to see if they had shields, and to see if they were tough.

Luckily for humans, the generals weren’t able to actually make military decisions on their own. Once holo-vid footage of the warship in orbit reached the government, everyone visibly trembled. Some even fainted. According to the satellite laser scans, most of the weapons on the alien ship were large enough to fire shells the same size as the skyscrapers they’d surely be targeting.

The humans agreed to a meeting and the GU warship sent down a diplomatic shuttle. Humans across the entire Federation held their breaths as the transport’s landing gear settled on the ground outside of the F.A.P. building in New York City. They were hoping that these aliens were cute and fuzzy like the Hipronians—assuming said Hipronians weren’t baring hundreds of teeth from dozens of mouths, that is. When a frightening monster with four arms and what seemed like hundreds of claws, fangs, and gun barrels stepped from the dropship, panic riots broke out all over the Federation.

The monster cleared its throat, or maybe it said something in its native language, no one could tell, but everyone shut up to see what it would say.

Humans, the thing growled, a shiny translator hanging from its neck sounding like an angry human male, we welcome your species to become trial members in the Galactic Union. Over the next few decades, your species will be scrutinized and studied. Good day.

The monster roared loud enough to shatter the translator around its throat, raised two of its arms and made a crude gesture at the sky, then entered the dropship and blasted off. Two hours later, the Chancellor of Earth received an email from the New Species Welcoming Center. Chancellor Adimo wondered if it was more spam, or a prank, until he opened the attachment and an even more frightening monster began screaming and growling at him. Once he stopped hiding under his desk, the leader of humankind replayed the video—this time reading the subtitles.

They basically say ‘don’t be starting a bunch of wars and don’t be assholes to the other races in the Union,’ Adimo said, a nervous laugh escaping him as he turned to one of his aides.

Sir, the aide replied, shaking his head, we’re totally fucked, aren’t we?

*****

What course of action would you like us to take, Griz? the Lill representative asked the Darvorian, who were the fourth alien species the humans had declared war on.

Darvorians, a race of terrifying quadrupeds that looked sort of like a spider crossed with a wasp, loved nothing more than to sting and bite anyone and anything that enraged them. They were well known throughout the Galactic Union at how easily incensed they became at the slightest of perceived slights—in the same way an angry old human believes every kid who walks within a mile of his house is always plotting to trample all over his pristine lawn. The neighboring alien civilizations within range of a Darvorian’s FTL drive slept with one eye open, but most weren’t too worried. The Darvorians’ extremely aggressive, hostile tendencies practically guaranteed the spider-wasps would end up fighting each other before they could even agree on which neighbor to conquer.

Well, Griz grunted. How about letting us crush these stupid humans and feed their marrow to our offspring?

This was greeted by a chorus of clicks, shouts, grunts, subsonic whistles, and a lot of other weird noises that aliens might make.

Come on, Griz, you know the rules, the Lill said, shaking his head. Everyone gets a fair shake.

Bullshit! cried a Gadrian, whose species was currently in a bitter war with the humans.

Fuck that! said the Hipronian King-Senator. They started shooting at us for no reason! We’re supposed to just take it?

Unfortunately, yes, answered the Lill. Remember when each of your civilizations joined the Union. Some of you were no better than humans.

This caused an uproar of such vehemence and denial that the Lill thought he might have to fry a few of his fellow alien representatives. He held up a shining hand and the room quickly quieted down. As upset as the other reps were, they all knew better than to push the Lill too far.

While the Lill offered equal representation within the Union, the 186 other races of the GU knew that just a few of the energon beings could wipe out the entire galaxy without much effort. The Lill had been around for millions of years at the very least, and had helped guide almost all of the other GU species to become good members, not go to war all the time, and not be assholes to each other.

Fine, Griz relented, looking quite comical yet scary. What do you suggest? He crossed his six arms and waited for the Lill to answer.

We’ll send them a warning, and give them a couple of years to back off and stop colonizing every planet they come across.

Oh, great, said a Wikwak rep, a race of diaphanous, web-like creatures. Its translator unit injected sarcasm for the alien races able grasp such a concept. A warning… I don’t think these humans are smart enough to even read something written in their own crude language. What makes you think a warning will make them change their ways?

Oh, I don’t think it will make them change their ways, the Lill said. "I’m interested to see how badly they will screw everything