Hello, ♇ℶ♃৲. My name is Marcus Allen Johnson, and by the time you read this, I'll be dead. 

Just to be clear, it won't be an accident. All those times you've lectured me about what not to throw in the garbage chute, I've been playing dumb. Every time you've come in to fix it, I've watched you enter the override code and manually clean the intake. It'll be easy enough to do that myself with my head in the hopper. I realize that, given that we're on an interstellar spaceship, the Qloph probably also have some amazing medical technology like cloning or blood nanites—but I figure that without my brain, if they try to bring me back, whatever they get won't be me. 

So by the time you read this, I'll be dead. And if you have any sense of right or wrong or good or evil—or even just common decency for a fellow sapient—you'll tell the universe why.

[hr]

We called our world "Earth." We, meaning my species. Humans. All seven billion of us, spread out over pretty much the entire surface of the planet. Before your ship came, that is. 

We were hardly perfect, hardly united. We spoke hundreds of languages, lived in hundreds of countries, had a million ways to artificially divide ourselves based on arbitrary things like gender and skin color. We robbed each other, fought each other, killed each other. But it had been generations since the last World War, and we were slowly opening our eyes to the possibility of life as a global community. Around the time of my birth, we started linking ourselves to a worldwide communication network called "The Internet", and when your ship arrived, more of us were on it than weren't. 

That was how I found out about you. I woke up one morning and the sun had turned red, so I got on the Internet to find out what was happening. Every news site had stories not only about the sun's change, but also photographs of a cylindrical metallic object suspended in midair between enormous wings of green light, and giant screaming headlines about first contact with aliens.

Your ship appeared over China a few hours after the sun started changing. It just sat there quietly, wings of light unfurled, for about 20 minutes, then suddenly rocketed up into space and vanished. A short time later, it reappeared over India and put its wings back out. It only stayed 12 minutes this time. Then over the Middle East, 14 minutes. The Mediterranean, 7 minutes. By the time it reached northern France, the world had realized it was withdrawing as soon as any aircraft began to approach it, and the French kept the skies clear. It stayed nearly 30 minutes that time, then continued hopping westward from city to city on that 30-minute cycle.

It was broadcasting a single message throughout most of the electromagnetic spectrum on repeat play. Some mathematicians and linguists at Dartmouth cracked the code later that day, translated it, and it spread across the Internet like wildfire:

"This ship is an observer of the Qloph. Within four fours of planetary rotations, your world will be destroyed in fire. We cannot save you. This ship has room for one more being. For two fours of rotations we will listen before choosing your representative."

By that time, the astrophysicists had evaluated the sun's changing color. Consistent, they said, with catastrophic stellar transition. It wasn't big enough to go supernova, but as part of its phase shift, it would eject up to half its mass in a giant wave of plasma that would incinerate the planet.

That's when things went a little crazy.

[hr]

What would you do if you had two weeks to live, ♇ℶ♃৲?

You can probably imagine some of the ways the world changed. Giant prayer meetings. Mass vacations and resignations. A sudden spike in crime. People living life without consequences, or struggling against the one consequence that mattered.

But there was hope. It [i]wasn't[/i] a guaranteed death sentence. [i]One[/i] person would survive.

It was that hope which killed us.

Your ship kept circling the world at the edge of space—taking an angled westward path that within four days would sweep across every corner of every continent. Asking to be chosen seemed as simple as sending a radio message when you could see the giant wings in the sky. Overnight, broadcast radios became impossible to buy at any price. We heard reports from other countries of radio stations being assaulted and looted, or giant battles being fought over someone's private equipment. In a town near me, a library announced they would hold an open transmission session during your first transit; the National Guard got called in when several hundred thousand people drove in from surrounding states in a desperate effort to cram into the tiny building.

I was lucky enough to have a friend in a ham radio club. I got a private invitation to a 2 AM session early in the first transit. The sixty-two of us, splitting four radios, were given thirty seconds each.

My speech was: "Hello, my name is Marcus Allen Johnson, at 39.482128 latitude, -106.022005 longitude. I'm a male human and, to be honest, there's nothing particularly special about me. I'm not the best connected, or the strongest, or the most pious, or the best travelled. But if you're looking for someone who represents all of humanity, I'm as close to average as you're going to get. I'm not that rich and not that poor. I'm pretty smart, but not a genius. My life's been both good and bad. I've been in love, but I'm single and I'm not close to my family, so I won't be leaving anyone behind. Thank you for this opportunity." 

(I kept a printed copy of that in my pocket. I'll have it on me when I die.)

I knew it was a long shot—since, as I said, I wasn't anything special—but in the face of scientists volunteering to carry Earth's knowledge with them and celebrities pledging to represent Earth's culture and pregnant mothers vowing to repopulate the race, I tried to find the best angle I could. After all, the Qloph never said [i]how[/i] they were choosing the survivor.

It seemed like everyone had an angle.  An evangelist named Abe Ellis went on TV to ask Christians to tell the aliens to pick him—they needed the message of Jesus, he said, and if the Qloph were choosing based on popularity, it was up to the Earth to unite under God. Meanwhile, our president's message—broadcast live across the nation as you passed over Washington, D.C.—said that he had been chosen to lead the greatest nation on Earth, which made him the best qualified to go. Similar messages went out from leaders around the globe—far more than I could keep track of. Though I do remember the Chinese government ordering a mandatory nationwide day of parades in support of sending their premier with the Qloph. 

North Korea, on the other hand, announced that the alien message was a treasonous lie, and anyone caught spreading it would be shot. Their leader's ceremonial message to the Qloph was leaked to the world not long afterward. We joked that he must have figured that the less competition there was, the better.

It wasn't a joke for long.

[hr]

A few days in, reports began to circulate of genocide in some African country. Then another. Ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe, and in southwest Asia, and South America. Several of the killers said their victims were spreading lies about them to the Qloph, or just went for broke on the racism and said they weren't fit representatives of humanity.

I remember the United Nations press conference. They read a resolution saying that the world was united in its desire to peacefully abide by the Qloph's choice, and that violence of any kind in relation to the alien offer was unacceptable. Unusually, the Security Council—composed of the world's major powers—had demanded a secret ballot for that resolution. The final vote was 163-30.

Less than a day later, India and China had declared war on each other and were massing troops on their border. India said that China was violently depriving Indian citizens of freedom, in violation of the UN resolution, by forcing a disputed border region to participate in the Chinese parades. 

A few hours afterward—about 9 p.m. Wednesday the 23rd—Egypt and Lebanon invaded Israel. I never found out why. But I know it happened, because that was the last news headline I ever read.

I was sitting in front of my computer looking at the news when my phone pinged. "UNITED STATES UNDER NUCLEAR ATTACK," an emergency notification said. "GET TO COVER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."

I didn't believe my eyes. Everything felt unreal. I tried to click through to the front page of the news site. It froze, then started loading at a snail's pace. My phone rang, but when I took the call, nothing came through. I finally gave up, walked across the room, and turned on the television.

A prerecorded presidential announcement was preempting Law & Order: SVU. "They have progressed from lies to threats to blackmail and murder," the president said, "and the greatest nation on earth will never bend its knee to evil—"

Then there was a bright flash in the sky over the mountains. The television glitched for a second, then froze, then dropped to a blue "NO SIGNAL."

A few seconds later—fortunately, after I had the sense to dive under the table—all the windows blew out with a thunderous roar.

I blacked out.

Then awoke, shivering and bleeding, in a dying world.

[hr]

My species had developed the capability to destroy its own world three times over. Eighty years ago, the power of atomic fission had been put into bombs of terrible destructiveness, and two of our largest nations spent decades stockpiling vast numbers of those bombs as a deterrent against attack. Nobody would launch a nuclear war, the thinking went, because of simple self-preservation.

But what would you do if you only had two weeks to live?

I don't know who pulled the trigger. Which leader decided that their chance with the Qloph was better in a devastated world than a pristine one. But once that first trigger got pulled, the doctrine of retaliation that had previously prevented an attack ensured that the death would spread, and spread, and spread.

That flash in the sky was Denver, Colorado, being vaporized in an instant, along with many of its half-million people. Over the next several days, the rest of them limped out of the city into the surrounding mountains. Many were badly burned. Almost all were poisoned by radioactive fallout. Most of the refugees were dead by the time you picked me up.

The skies were a solid blanket of smoke, and the red sun grew even dimmer and redder. The air got warmer as fires spread unchecked throughout the landscape—which was ironically a blessing, as heating had failed with the power grid, and open fireplaces were an invitation for radioactive fallout. I stayed in my house for two days—taping plastic over the windows to keep the poisonous air from blowing in—until the fires raged into Breckenridge, then had to retreat to the school gymnasium with the rest of the town. 

Food was running low by then. Our world had centralized and automated agricultural production—most of what we ate was shipped in from California or the Great Plains, hundreds of miles away, and with most of our infrastructure destroyed, there was no way to distribute it to where it was needed. Diseases were also rampant, with water and sanitation systems overwhelmed and healthy survivors packed together with the injured and sick. What little we heard over ham radio—my friend was lucky enough to own a battery-powered unit, and kind enough to donate it to the town—was that conditions were just as bad everywhere. When the missiles had launched, one side (or both) had decided to hit cities across the globe, and the entire developed world was burning.

As hunger set in and tensions grew, many of us simply gave up and wandered out into the wilderness to die, knowing that the sun would kill us in days anyhow. I myself was taking a long walk away from the others—staring at the charred foundations of my old home, and considering the idea of lying down there and just not getting up again—when those enormous wings of light descended.

I should have been grateful. I was the survivor. The Qloph had saved me. 

I was just so numb, but I [i]tried[/i] to be grateful. 

Until I wasn't.

[hr]

It's not a large ship, ♇ℶ♃৲. You know this as well as I do. There's the four Qloph, and the three-legged thing with the large ears (your medic?), and you, and me. Every sleeping room in the ship, including my little converted storage space, is right off of the main room, which is connected to the bridge.

I don't know the Qloph language. I don't know what they say when they (or you) turn their translators off. But I know what I see, and I know what I hear.

I can't see the bridge from my room, and I can't get through the force field on the doorway, but the cargo you moved to the main room when I came on board is stored in mirrored boxes. That first day, when we were lifting off, I realized that if I leaned to the far side of my acceleration chair, I could see the bridge display reflected on the cargo.

I saw my world as we lifted off. I saw Earth, grey and poisoned, red-spotted with the lights of raging fires. I saw the silhouettes of the Qloph around the bridge display, and I heard them make those stuttering chirring noises that sound like the malfunctioning garbage chute.

They were laughing.

I didn't realize it at the time. I'm not [i]completely[/i] sure of it even now, but the more time I spend here, the more certain I am of it. Because there's another thing that happened, later that night, long after they'd turned off all the cabin lights and told me to get some sleep.

The Qloph came out of their room in the darkness, and silently walked past to the bridge. I stirred—I wasn't sleeping well—but probably would have fallen back asleep if they hadn't turned on the main display. It shined off the cargo boxes and right into my eyes, and I sat up to figure out what was happening.

They talked a lot. I don't know what about. But the display was showing a bright red orb, with a bunch of text I couldn't make out.

They chattered for a while, and then fell silent, and then the orb began to slowly fade to yellow.

They said a few more things, then turned off the display and went back to bed.

It was my sun, ♇ℶ♃৲.

The bastards put us under a fake death sentence and made us kill ourselves.

[hr]

I think you're a good person, ♇ℶ♃৲. You've never even introduced yourself to me—and now that I think of it, I'm hoping ♇ℶ♃৲ is your name, instead of just meaning "mechanic" or something—but you've tried to be nice. When I was huddled sobbing in the corner that first day, you walked in and left that fuzzy little doll at my feet. And when two of the Qloph broke that tube by the… fuel panel?… and were yelling at each other over the mess, you went in and cleaned it up for them.

They don't deserve your kindness.

I don't know what their plans were for me, but I very much doubt they involve enough freedom to do anything about this knowledge. And the more I think about it, the more worried I am that they're planning some sort of invasion to enslave Earth's shattered survivors and claim the planet. If that's the case, then everything they learn from me just makes it easier.

I don't even know if there's any higher authority who can do something about what the Qloph did. Even if you're sympathetic to what I'm telling you, my actions may not make any difference. 

But hope got me this far, right?

Hope killed my species. It's about to kill me. But the alternative is living as a slave of humanity's murderers, and so all I can do is give it one more try.

Please do the right thing.

-Marcus