Achilles’s Hairy Ball
In an attempt to unite the nations of an unrestful world, governments and media agencies and anything with an acronym gave a crack at the ol’ common enemy trick. We all convinced enough of each other that there really were little green or grey bulbous bipedal Martians that had been spying on us, lowering fertility rates, weakening our economies, loosening bolts in our otherwise-healthy machine to get us all to turn on ourselves for them to swoop in for an easy invasion while we’re all riding in scrapwork monster trucks, too busy looking for clean water to look up.
It was a good way for all nations to appear effective peacekeepers while everyone ignored all the real poisons that were dragging them gravewards — solve everything and nothing with a good show! Some people were angry and opposed, but plenty had grown apathetic having been born after the stars had disappeared beneath an LED sky.
So all the space agencies of the world (after some polite then firm restructuring) devised several plans and the most expensive one was picked to churn out rocket after rocket and missile after missile to show off the might of a modern and global military industrial complex with the packing power to remove a piece of our very sky. The rockets couldn’t actually do anything, really they would huck asteroids at the planet to do the real damage and then detonate a few explosives around the scene. We couldn’t let the general public know that atrocity could come so cheap.
The day came, and for a lucky half of the Earth they got full view of a sudden flash in the sky, and angry fire like the sun was uncoiling itself. The other half as they spun into view got to see what appeared as a tiny and sad-looking nebula, like a gunned-down amoebae.
And just like that everyone could mark on their calendar one September day the death of an entire planet. We all just stood dumbly looking up at the night sky with a sudden smear on the lens, or staring at pictures on our televisions and phones, or just contemplating the new hole in our collective minds. And while we all marvelled at Mars like children fascinated by roadkill, the Venusians came down and quickly enslaved us all. They got us while all our backs were turned, and no one could argue that wasn’t an impressive feat when their target was a fucking sphere.
They mocked us relentlessly, compulsively. A Venusian master couldn’t walk by you without saying “hey Earthling, it says gullible on Mars!” and if you didn’t politely chuckle along with them they’d stamp on you with their hooves while in uncontrollable and violent mirth.
Many people took fine to the takeover once things had settled, however. The Venusians had similar economic sensibilities to us (why else do you think their planet looked like that?) and by October everyone was back in the office. Not much had changed except they put porn back on Tumblr. That kept us all going for a while.