Star- Spangled Threat
[GALACTIC COMMUNIQUE] [DO NOT IGNORE] In accordance with Galactic Charter Fi-Contega we are extending an offer of acceptance to your fledgling species. After reviewing your achievements, we desire to include you into the "Milky Way" co-operation group. Please send a representative from graphical region "ESTADOS UNIDOS" that bears the authority to enter a diplomatic treaty on behalf of "The Earth".
I swear everything about it felt like a SPAM message. All our details were slightly off, and felt crammed in like a bad game of ad-libs; Lying without context in some out-world joke. If the media didn't swoop on it the way it had, I wouldn't have even given it a second thought. But it was odd, the point that the pundits kept sharp, thrusting into the community at every chance. The unavoidable, almost damning point that every person on the planet received that message in an email, text message, and in-app pop up at the exact same moment globally.... Yeah, that point, as odd as anything we've seen, didn't really shock me the way it seemed to shock others.
I, along with a group on the internet, had figured it all out. There were state actors meaning to spread panic, wanting us to feel like they were the ones to protect us, like they deserve the tax dollars for getting us all wrapped up into another big lie. How terribly, disgustingly fucking wrong we were.
See, we were all trolls then. Like the jackasses before us, we were joking %100 percent of the time and lived to get a rise out of people who were living their lives too seriously. That's why I still don't understand.... I mean... Why me? There's no way that I was the first to reply... But that's exactly what I did. The text I deleted, but I still had a copy of it when it hit one of my alt accounts. I tried my best "galactic communique" speak and nominated myself for the offworld adventure.
[CHARTER RESPONSE] [OPEN IMMEDIATELY] It is with great authority and humility to your awesome power that I contemplate acceptance to the "Milky Way" co-operation group. I will command our beings to produce a vessel to bring me to the council. Please send schematics for inter-stellar travel at your soonest convenience, so we may leverage this understanding to bring our union about more hastily. Love, Captain Duggie.
I thought I was sooooo funny. DON'T THESE PEOPLE CHECK REFERENCES?!?
No sooner had I hit send than I found myself standing in the stars. I was well dressed, neatly shaven, hell, I looked like The Great Gastby. Standing on a glass floor with stars below, stars above, and only a robotic belhop at a mahogany desk push the magnificent beauty into the background.
'Welcome Sir Duggie! Can I get you anything before we begin?"
Surely I'm dreaming. Or tripping? Maybe I've hit my head? Better to go with it, I decide.
"Yes a Red Stripe please." I don't know why I expected confusion, because a moment later a bottle that may have been straight out of a Jamaican ice chest was produced by the belhop. I took a sip and smiled. "Aren't you going to take my bags?"
"Very funny sir! Please step this way, the committee would like to meet you."
That's when things started to get weird.
See, I was pretty sure I was hallucinating at this point, so my behavior is that of someone who just discovered they were dreaming and begins to go Lucid. They do things they would never and I mean never do in real life, like slap the pope or jump off a bridge to practice flying. That should, hopefully, explain some of the terribly awful things I did in my next few moments.
_
I step through a curtain and in an instant I'm in the galactic congress room from Star Wars. I looked around for the usual Jedi faces, but all I saw were other humans. Some wore strange paint and some had stretched ear-lobes, but nothing I hadn't seen on Earth. I chuckled, sipped my beer and tapped loudly on a little microphone protruding from the pod I found myself standing in.
Stooping over it like I was dedicating a Karaoke ballad to my new fiancé, I said "Where's Jabba?" and looked widely around the impressive chamber. I laughed wretchedly at the silence, spilling about half of the Red Stripe (the half I hadn't drunk) over the edge of my pod. A member took the silence from me, before I completely hung myself with it, but his words were like nothing I would have dreamt, which still chills me to my spine.
"Silence!" His command rang through the hollow, seemingly infinite chamber and left behind exactly what he decreed. I suddenly felt very awake, but not quite convinced this isn't a joke. "You bear the mark of Pal-tir and it is clear among all civilized galactic societies that this mark seals within it the spirit of Pal-tir that you have so blatantly demonstrated since your arrival. Do you deny this fact?"
After a moment of deliberation, I determined my best response would feign ignorance.
"Uhhhhh..... What?" Still clutching my empty beer bottle I felt it get cold and heavy once more in my hands. Suddenly, over the part I lovingly call "Ye' Olde Mouth-Hole" I saw the symbol of Pal-tir burning hot white. It was a star! These space-freaks hate our star? I thought to myself before the plasma-heat of the star flooded the glass, and on into my hand. I dropped the bottle where I stood, and it shattered into the floor of the pod. I was now standing naked, barefooted among the bottle shards daring not to move. I still felt no shame, much as one does in a dream.
"You have seen with your own eyes our power. If you want our attacks on Earth to cease, you must remove the symbol of Pal-tir from your seals of leadership. Do you understand?" shouted a different member.
"You were attacking us? I didn't even notice." This sent the room into a Fury. The hologram that made them appear human began to crack around its edges, showing an encyclopedia of monsters mid-tantrum. It reminded me of the way some kids (and adults) on Earth acted when they were told no. It was actually pretty disgusting, which is probably why I said what I did.
"Alright listen here. That "Pap-tean" thing you guys are all puckered over is something we call a 'star' and HERE IN AMERICA it means FREEDOM! Today you want us to change the little pointy thing you don't like, Then what? No more Red Stripe? You gonna tell us we can't shoot off fireworks? Listen. You do you and leave us the fuck alone, how 'bout it?"
_
In the next instant, I found myself waking up in bed in the White House next to the First Lady and a note scribbled on a bar napkin that read "Dear Captain Duggie, We're Through Asking Nicely..." That's how it all happened. I swear!
