[h2]Sidosido, Earth[/h2]

The Chairman was not having a good day.

Bags laid underneath his normally very energetic eyes, making him look much closer to his age than he usually did. With rejuvenation techniques he had managed to keep his biological age around twenty when in reality he was well over a century old. His hair remained that same black it had been back in the 2020's, though he had grown a thick beard that had been absent back then. After decades of not being allowed to wear one, he'd decided to grow it out and he just never got rid of it.

He had been up all night after the encounter with the alien... or God. He still hadn't decided what to think about it all. The very first thing he did when he got to his office in the morning was to look for his pistol, and sure enough it was gone. It hadn't been a dream or a hallucination. A trick? Perhaps. A ruse? Possibly. But no matter what it had been, it really happened. And though he had tried to ignore it, it was that action precisely that had led to him staying awake all night.

[i]A predator species, huh?[/i]

Terran xenosociologists had long predicted such things. They had the evidence themselves in their planet, which still bore the scars of what had been done to it. The giant scrubbing walls that crisscrossed the planet like a checkerboard were proof enough of that. If another species reached such a late stage of mindless capitalism and failed to stop, then their homeworld would be destroyed. And so they would choose another and bleed it dry, all while infesting other systems and planets with their industries and peoples. Devouring entire worlds and driving species to extinction for the sole purposes of survival and profit.

Such a species would consume entire galaxies if left untouched, all in a disgusting quest for more and more power in which they would eventually lose or willingly throw away all that characterized them. Until they became nothing more than mindless drones serving their masters however they were ordered. Morals, emotions, all of them would vanish. The early stages of the process could be seen in the late stages of human capitalism, in which a poor man selling his organs to be eaten as a delicacy was thought of as a service to him being done by the subhuman who would then consume it.

And that was not something far off into the future for the universe. If the alien's words were to be believed, it had already happened. There was such a species out there. The best cast scenario of "Early advancement"-the idea that humanity was the first to reach the stars-was no longer credible in the slightest. Instead, they had become late. Very, very late.

What if the predators controlled a galaxy? Multiple galaxies? Perhaps they could even control multiple [i]universes[/i]. Against such beings, what would humanity be? Nothing more than a single anthill filled with fire ants. And so they would be stomped out without any remorse. Unless...

The Chairman reached for the phone on his desk-one of the only landlines left-and pressed a single button.

"Facility 417." Said a woman on the other end of the line, after a short wait of course. "Why are you calling, Chairman?"

The voice was sweet, sweet and kind. Like that of a grandmother, mainly because the woman it belonged to was old enough to be one. Though she had never married. It was not the voice one would expect the overseer of a secretly facility to have, especially not the one assigned to Facility 417.

"Are you alone?"

"Yes, is there something wrong?"

"Something big is coming, a force from outside the galaxy has arrived. I was told this by a messenger that simply... appeared in my office.  I believe this force to be a predator species."

"Are you sure this wasn't a hallucination?"

"I gave it my gun as a gift, and my gun is gone. I think that's proof enough."

"I suppose it is. What do you want me to do about this?"

"Do a full neural purge of your subjects."

"Chairman, we still have a lot of research to do on them."

"We understand the brain well enough already, any further research can be done through volunteers and simulations. There is no need for your facility's primary directive, and your subjects should have just been lined up against the wall and shot just like the rest of their kind were. We need not have any interest in the brain chemistry of those corrupted by power, because the leaders of the Union cannot be corrupted."

"Once the purge is complete, what do you want me to do with the subjects?"

"Protocol 3. I will send someone to make the rest of the preparations."

"Understood. Facility 417 out."

[h2]Sol, Near Ceres[/h2]

Murmurs filled the [i]Saltsgaver's[/i] bridge at the sight of the video feed. Not only at the fact that humans were present, but at the fact that a good portion were clearly of middle-eastern descent. It was rare to see such people in the Union, after all, the entire middle east was just one gigantic nuclear wasteland after the European Crusades. 

Unsurprisingly, one of the weapon's officers quickly put the particle barriers of the Alcubierre lance back in place.

"Well, I am proud to say that Earth was not destroyed. The people of Earth and its colonies have been united under the Terran Union. It took decades of bloody conflict, but in the end we claimed victory over our enemies and succeeded in ending the exploitation of Earth and its people. I would like to meet with you in person, and I'm sure our people would love to meet their long-lost brothers and sisters. There is a colony not far from here within the asteroid of Ceres, which was hollowed out and terraformed. If you are willing to meet, I Would suggest we do so there."