Zette's Storybook

From: Alan Orion, Head of FUTURE

December 22, 1995

Report # 54678

Message Begins:



I have had another official request to explain how things have gotten so out of hand on earth. I have twice written my official report and beamed it in, complete with graphs and diagrams.

It is, apparently, not enough.

Do you really want to know what happened? What went wrong?

We came to earth.

I didn't know much about this world when I first arrived. One week I had been heading the ciphering division at the main HQ out in the Veldic Sector, and the next thing I know my bosses packed me off to some newly found backwater world out on the edge of the galaxy -- a world no one would have even noticed if the natives hadn't been so damn noisy.

So there I was on Earth.

The sapient population looked humanoid, at least, though with no written or oral recollections of being a colony. Nevertheless, HQ wanted me to use these locals to set up an intelligence system so we could learn everything possible about the Terrans.

I should have shot myself. Or become a Mingold cleric and lived the rest of my life on a rock in the acid sea. Either would have been far less traumatic.

The Vananadanians had already decided they didn't want the Terrans let out in the stars, apparently fearing they might be even better warriors, and bit more vicious, than the Van themselves.

And that idea worries everyone else.

So, I went to work with the Terrans, wondering how I could create any sort of viable network to collect information about this odd world. This proved to be less of a problem than I expected. I quickly learned an important truth about this world: Earth politics are so convoluted that no one questioned when I sat up my own organization of my own. They believed I was the head of yet another damn Terran intelligence agency. FUTURE became legitimate just by surviving.

Ten years I've been on this backwater world, collecting more and more information about the natives, who have so many different cultures they can't keep them straight. I've fought off three Van preemptive attacks, kept my background a secret, and nightly hope that someone higher up takes pity on me and gets me out before I either go native or join the Van myself.

And in all those years, I've only made two really bad mistakes.

Unfortunately, now they're my top two agents....