Rick was all for driving out to the tower and investigating.
After Jim had restrained himself from beating his friend over the head with a blunt heavy object, he managed to drag Rick to the nearby campus library.
The computers here had been severely upgraded, there were more of them than Jim remembered seeing, and a whole section of books were actually something that looked like a CD-ROM inside a clear cube of plastic.
"Oh my sweet," said Rick, getting more and more interested as he looked over the contents of one of the odd "books". "Look at this thing, it has to have ten times the storage capacity of a DVD-ROM."
"That's nothing," said Jim, still engrossed in his own research. "These are just cast-offs. The equivelant of handing out beads and trinkets to primitive natives. The aliens have technology that allows them to sidestep and control things like inertia and gravity. They can spin diamond support beams eighteen feet thick and a mile long. They've conquered eighteen other species, including our own, and apparently regard themselves as beneficient gardeners trying to encourage species to grow into their own roles- as long as they remain subservient to them."
"This isn't one of those 'To Serve Man' setups, is it?" Rick was frowning slightly and studied the Specifications data. Hard to believe this was cast off technology since it was still way ahead of anything he'd ever thought to see in his lifetime.
"Nope." Jim shuddered, having seen that old episode of "Twilight Zone" when he was a child. "Apparently they think that having the guys in charge is natural and having harems of large breasted subservient women will keep the guys largely in check."
"Sounds like a good plan. Did it work?"
"Except for the Afghanistan Crater, the Washington Bay, the Moscow Greater Meteor Lake, and a couple of countries that are apparently now just big holes in the map, yeah. Seems that with their computers, their control of gravity and inertia, they can drop a meteor anyplace they want and control its velocity pretty well. On the good side, they've transported a whole lot of people to Mars which is being terraformed, and Venus which is getting a similar treatment."
"And the crab-guy?"
"Another one of the conquered races. Not sure how you pronounce the name."
Rick pondered. "What about the big breasted naked women? And how come there's so many more than guys? Not that I'm complaining."
"Genetic augmentation. There's even some animorphs and other things like that, part of their 'gardening' is to try different breeds. Their own species has a female component, but a lot less intelligent and their hands aren't made the same either. Hmmm. Apparently the big-brain's homeworld was mainly desert and in their pre-industrial time they were nomads. Seems they've got a lot in common with Bedouin in their roots. Anyway, they apparently just sat inside Lunar orbit and released a few missiles containing a 'harmless smoke' - which was actually something like nanobots or something even more advanced. We still aren't sure what it was but it went around the world in a few weeks and made alterations to people's DNA. Producing the current society."
"Well," said Rick. "There's just one thing to do. And that's..."
Sun Dec 23 06:05:58 2001