We Came as the Conquerors

By: Ryan Ng

I looked down at the crowd with a grin, ready to see and hear the extravaganza of bitter cries. As we conquered every planet that came upon us, there was no exception to this. Our new rules always inflicted emotional agony amongst the populace, and that is why I do it.

So the last thing I could've expected from the humans of Earth was cries of happiness. As soon as I stepped off the podium, the humans went from fear to perplexity, and just a few seconds later, they started cheering and crying out, "We have been freed".

I initially assumed humans were different to us and that those sounds represented despair. But the more I witnessed them in their natural habitat, the more I realised they were genuinely happy with what we had done.

I have been here for six months now. Everyone else in our ranks had already gone off hunting for the next planet to torture - without even noticing what had happened to this one. I would've followed them in any other case, but what happened here was truly unexplainable. Forcing the native species to work a tyrannical three hours a day, three days a week, for nothing other than basic rights like healthcare and housing was enough to emotionally collapse any other planet.

In my journey to discover the truth behind this situation, I met with the ostensibly most powerful of humans the 'executives'. Typically, they would get down on their knees and beg us to spare their species. But they only did the opposite.

"You can't do this!" Mr 'Woods', an 'oil executive', said. "How will workers be productive if you give them everything? We must threaten them with starvation and homelessness to make them work hard. What will my shareholders think?"

Another 'executive', Mr Fink, said something similar: "I can't imagine what's going to happen to my mortgage-backed securities. If everyone gets homes and there is no demand, I can't pump the price up forever - I'm going to lose all I have! I beg you, do not give them free housing."

In fact, that was just about the only complaint we got —— to revert everything back to 'normalcy'.

During my adventure through Earth, I found some sacred texts. Within these, I discovered why our perfect plan, which had agonised hundreds of planets before, didn't work.

"Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest." This, apparently, was the humans' movement to work less. How would they have time for 'recreation' or "rest" when a third of their day was spent labouring? Surely, that would be slowly killing them off. Even our species, which is objectively the most advanced in the universe, cannot withstand that level of abuse.

Ultimately, I stumbled across a human I wanted to interview. I asked how it was possible they were enjoying our tyrannical rule.

He replied: "Why wouldn't we?"

I glared at him, unconvinced, but I soon realised he was serious. "We are assaulting your planet. You are forced to spend one-eighth of your day working for only medical care and a home."

"What's the catch?"

"That's the catch. You get nothing other than your basic rights."

"Many of us can't imagine not going bankrupt after seeing the doctor. I'm asking because this is too good to be true, and I'm not buying it."

"It was getting so bad," he continued. "We even reached a point where we happily accepted government-sponsored suicide as a solution to being poor."

"Killing your own kind doesn't seem very helpful."

"What comes next? Will you make us eat gummy bears made of insects? Drink cockroach milk? What about the world ending from overpopulation? We have finite space and finite resources, as they say. How will you feed all of us without making us cannibalise one another?"

"Of course not." I was getting annoyed. "This planet doesn't have finite space or finite resources massive. We've built efficient food systems that can already feed 100 times the current human population, and we haven't even finished."

"But what do you get from this? What's your incentive? This doesn't seem profitable at all."

"Does everything have to be about profits?" With that, I let the man go.

We came here as notorious subjugators, an empire set out to enslave inferior planets for our own gain.

But out of pure chance, we've become the good guys.