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This is Matt's first professional fiction sale, though he has been contributing to humor site Cracked.com for the past two years or so. He currently lives on Earth with his wife, daughter, two dogs, and six cats, where he works as a teacher, proofreader, and motivational speaker for animals (mostly motivating them to get off his computer and let him write). He is slowly working towards becoming a fulltime writer.
1. It is not because you are damaging the planet almost irreparably, laying waste to the very flora and fauna that your survival depends on.
We have our own planet.
2. It is not because your sad attempts at governing yourselves have led to a tiny fraction of your population living like kings and queens, while vast numbers of you go without shelter, food, or clean water.
We are not here to make things equal.
3. It is not because you make things just to dispose of them, filling up the land and oceans with your junk. Or, that you have started to do it in space, too.
If we wanted to, we could reverse all of these things.
4. It is not because we think you are a threat, with your nuclear warheads and your delusions of grandeur. We are far too advanced for you to harm us--there are no weaknesses in our defenses that have gone unnoticed and can be manipulated with a well-timed computer virus, or well-placed explosive, despite what your fiction has told you.
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When we attack, you will have no warning.
5. It is not in order to liberate the other life forms that you have subjugated and reduced to mere machines that give up their flesh for your consumption, after living short, violent lives in hellish conditions.
We all have to eat, after all.
6. It is not because you are so small-minded that you judge others of your kind based on the color of their skin, the language they speak, or other accidents of birth.
We plan to eradicate all of you.
7. It is not because you have slowly improved your technology to the point where it has started thinking for you, so that you have surrendered your free will to algorithms that you do not understand.
It is a far more efficient system.
8. It is not because that, even faced with the benefits of your scientific age, there are many of you who still doubt the method and its findings, arguing over the creation of your world, the evolution of your species, even the shape of your planet.
This would be the last gasp before complete acceptance.
9. It is not because the most fortunate of you are more concerned with having the newest hand-held device than you are with the horrific conditions that those who made them must endure, or any of the injustices of your global economy that ensures there will always be poverty on your world.
You have bigger problems ahead of you.
10. It is not because you refuse to learn the lessons of history, electing the same people based on the same empty promises, and blaming complex problems on a select group of people, denying them asylum from conflicts your own elected officials created.
Your history is almost at an end.
We are not invading you for any of these reasons, for we were the same as you not so long ago, before we left Earth.
So, why are we invading you?
That's simple: because we can.
The End
This story was first published on Tuesday, March 13th, 2018
Author Comments
This story is dedicated to my late grandfather, who jump-started my life-long love of reading, writing, and anything with aliens in it, and who also taught me that sometimes it is us fallible humans who are the bad guys.
- Matt Cowan
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