Win-vasion

Part 1 - The Win-vasion

They came to Earth on a Thursday. They chose a Thursday because they had studied human history during their faster-than-light travel to the planet. Their fleet had dropped several probes that allowed them to speed-read three hundred thousand years of human history from the light waves leaving the planet. Thursdays, you see, were days where humanity tended to lose. In fact, at one point the human word for Thursday was simply a grunt that sounded like a lion eating your loved ones. The human race had prettied up that name when they created the spoken word. Most people had come to believe Wednesday was the worst day of the week, but Thursdays were still innately more terrible than any other day.

When the fleet arrived, its warships encircled the Earth. Single ships took up position over each major human city, as suggested in the war documentary Independence Day. The aliens didn't understand why humanity would broadcast its greatest fears and weaknesses in a visually thrilling piece of entertainment, but they would not fail to learn the lessons it presented. The aliens sent a single Dominator class warship to hover over Area 51, the American President's secret base in the film, while the rest remained in orbit. Their ships looked a great deal like Imperial Star Destroyers from Star Wars, if they had been drawn by a child with a major neurological deficit. They chose to custom build them to impress the masses of Homo sapiens below; their artists just weren't that good.

After taking position, the alien fleet held formation and remained silent for seven hours. During that time the human media produced a frenzy of content, shouting and theorizing about what was happening. There weren't any experts available to talk as the few who did know what they were talking about had already been called in by democratic governments, or kidnapped by the rest...but a complete lack of expertise was no handicap for journalists. It hadn't been since the 1980's.

Earth's governments remained silent, at least publicly. Each of them tried to secretly contact the aliens and turn a profit from a newfound alliance, except for the North Koreans, who wanted to confirm that the aliens were here to serve their Glorious Father-Leader. Every government failed spectacularly. Then the aliens blasted Area 51 off the face of the Earth.

Immediately following the destruction of Area 51 a broadcast was projected from the alien ships. It was so powerful it overwhelmed all forms of human communication, even advertising. The words contained in the message had been translated by the aliens' linguistic experts into every human language, but these aliens believed in the power of brutal colonization and supreme arrogance, so they only played them in English.

"Pathetic humans," the message began, spoken in a baritone voice that was intended to be domineering and sexy, but instead came across frog-like and needlessly included a smoker's cough. "We are the Winners. All we do is win. We have never lost. We have come to this world to win. Which means it is time for you to lose." Then the voice trailed off in a dramatic racking coughing that would put any Marlboro Man to shame.

Though the words grated terribly and were needlessly repetitive, this was considered high poetry for the Winners. The opening section of the speech was based on their most famous poem, penned by a philosopher who, after suffering a head injury, became obsessed with winning. The original title of the speech, roughly translated, was "Winning Good, You Bad". It was intended as an ode to eating dessert for breakfast, but had been converted to other uses as it contained neither the words "dessert" nor "breakfast".

"We have seen that your chosen form of losing is a surrender. As such, we wish to begin negotiating this surrender. You will choose one negotiator and only one. He shall be allowed an unlikely assistant with a governmental job that is simultaneously important and ineffectual. This assistant must wear glasses that fog easily.

"You have seven days to send your spokesperson to the desert outside Las Vegas where he will meet our representatives. He should drive a Corvette Stingray like John Cusack in the human film Con Air. John Cusack played a coward, like all of you, not like the virile and powerful Colm Meaney, who is like us."

At this point, and for the following hour, the Winners went on to expound the value of Colm Meaney's character over John Cusack's. This was intended to establish dominance over mankind's pathetic heroes, but only confused everyone under the age of thirty-five because they hadn't seen this out-of-date, tonally-inconsistent film.

It is worth noting that Guy LeFord, a film expert who had dedicated his entire career to the study of Con Air, felt briefly vindicated until, in a strange turn of events, he was killed as a plane hijacked by a rag-tag group of convicts crashed into his Alaskan home. Had he been alive, he would have appreciated the irony, but he was, in fact, very dead. His dog survived and was later adopted by Sarah Palin, which was the real tragedy of this scenario.