"You didn't see that! Understood?" said an insect and panicked voice.

It's probably a dream. Or my mind is playing tricks on me. There must be

something about zero-gravity that fumbles with the brain.
"No, you're awake," returned the small, chirping voice to my inner dialogue,
"and you didn't see that! Understood?"
"Understand? No, I don't think I understand," I responded sleepily, amused and
still believing this experience to be more fiction than fact.
The voice came again, this time with assurance. "You didn't see that."
I obliged. "I didn't see that."
But I did see that. And "that" was a blonde trundling mass of meteor, or moon,
some cratered free-floating space debris that was clearly visible with my two
awake and deservedly bewildered eyes from the control room of the ISS. The
blonde mass was sifting through the vacant space between me and Earth and, to
my surprise, diminishing in size.
And, as I examined more closely, I saw what appeared to be a frenzy of small,
wiry, sable creatures swarming the mass.
"What is that?" I involuntarily muttered aloud.
"Nothing," came the familiar stranger.
"No, that's definitely something," I assured.
Definitely something. I hopped onto the ISS communication system to alert
ground control.
"I've got something up here. It's a big hunk of ... It's a thing ... a meteor, a rock,
hell if I know. And there's some things moving on it, black infinitesimal objects,
hundreds of them. It appears ..."

They were eating it. They were eating the damned blonde mass. They were
devouring it piecemeal. A colony of ant-like creatures were having a interstellar
picnic on what I can only describe to be a stray, drifting loaf of bread.
I was stunned. Ground control recommended more sleep. This was not real.
"You didn't see that! Understood?"
"Do you know any other lines?" I quipped, shocked, amused, still disbelieving.
The response was a volley of a song, chanted in unison by a hundred or more of
the creatures, each carrying the same small, whiny tone.
"We are the space-ants. Woooooooooooo! We eat space-bread and serve our
space-Queen. We rule the ends of the universe and everywhere in between!"
Then, in a blinding flash, an unfathomably corpulent, viscous, and
unrepentantly repulsive and horrifying queen ant appeared. She had an agape,
drooling mouth flanked by two menacing, serrated pincers, and she bore a body
that resembled an extra large helping of canned cranberry sauce. She wore rolls
of gelatinous skin that melted off her figure and belched a constant spray of
pungent slime.
"BEHOLD! I AM TILDA, MAJESTY OF THE SPACE-ANTS. I AND MY LEGION
WORKER ANTS HAVE COME TO DEVOUR THE BOUNTY OF WHEAT THAT
NESTLES WITHIN THE MOST DESIRABLE AND FRUITFUL REACHES OF
NORTH DAKOTA, USA, PLANET EARTH."
This explains everything. The crop circles in the American Midwest. Men in
Black I, II, and possibly III.
"Are you asking for directions?"
"Yes," the Queen responded sheepishly. "We were momentarily distracted by a
drifting loaf of space-bread and lost our way a bit."

"Oh, well, no problem. Just do a 180 for me. Yep. Just like that. And you see that
little blue and green ball? Just go straight a couple thousand miles or so and you
should be on course for Planet Earth.
Last I heard, Tilda and her legion of ants were burned to a fine crisp during an
unsuccessful flight through Earth's atmosphere.
Their ashes most likely fell somewhere over a wheat field in North Dakota.

Scholars never ceased to write about how amazingly fast humanity came
together when an existential threat was proven to loom over our continued
existence.
We first received The Signal about 30 years ago, right when I had first joined the
SETI team. After five years of painstaking work, linguists were confident that it
translated to the English equivalent of Shut Up, and Play Dead! We had
double checked our translation, running The Signal through dozens of double
blind international teams, all working simultaneously to ensure accuracy and
speed (I had sheepishly -- and wrongly -- suggested that maybe the aliens were
just Jerry Garcia fans).
So, faced with such bluntness, we united. Humanity willingly set itself back
nearly a hundred years to a pre-Information Age culture. Satellites came down
and GPS went dark. No more internet or television signals beaming across the
cosmos. The loose confederation of countries that had formed the U.N. now
became a strict regulatory agency to ensure that no country took advantage of
the global blackout and to enforce the one rule of our survival: stay quiet and
dont move a muscle.
I knew that across the world were many teams working on trying to parse out
even a sliver of additional information from the message so they could figure out
how to prepare for this unknown threat. However, above all, our team had been

transformed from a barely funded back-of-the-envelope operation to the first

line of defense. We had to keep scanning for new signals -- quietly.
Now, instead of doing it with bold detectors openly beaming bragging signals
into space, I hide in a small bunker nearly a mile under the surface,
painstakingly scanning the sky light year by light year. After much deliberation,
the bigwigs in charge of humanitys survival decided that masking our search as
standard background radiation was a risk worth taking. We werent sending the
signals, but we could keep scanning the sky, like a mouse keeping an eye out for
a hawk from the top of its burrow. Im all alone down here; just the machines
sweeping the sky and me. I take month long shifts before being relieved and
there are dozens of these hole-in-the-ground stations around the globe, all
pointing at different parts of the sky.
My display screen has just started beeping. For first time in 30 years, I have
caught a glimpse of the talons in the sky. The new signal comes in fast, 1s and 0s
filling my screen. I quickly check the localizer and see that this time the message
is coming from several light years in a different direction than our original
Signal. What does this mean? Are our secret guardians on the move? Or has
someone else found us? Did we accidentally twitch a limb and now the hawk is
taunting us?
Im simply supposed to relay the pure, untranslated signal to higher authorities,
but I cant help but see if the auto-translate they have installed in our machine
can at least give me the essence of this new message. My heart is racing as I
wonder at the depths of the prophecy I hold in my hands. The translation only
takes a minute -- the code is the same as The Signal. Words begin to fill up my
screen:
Third planet of Sol: why have you gone dark? Please dont tell us you fell for
that old [garbled name] trick; they just want to keep their trading monopoly in
this area. Please signal back if you have any [list of elements begins to fill the
screen].
This," Maleficent said, "is very problematic."

Faye nodded. "I don't suppose you can wait until the second child?"
"No, the spell's very specific. Same for you?"
The short, round-faced witch nodded. "Afraid so."
They both turned to the couple cowering against the wall. "How exactly do you
intend to pay us?" Maleficent said.
The woman, who had mousy hair but a preternaturally perfect body, squeaked
nervously. Her husband, also rather plain except for his stunningly athletic
physique, stammered, "We-we-we didn't think that both of us would--"
"Would be so idiotic as to promise your firstborn to a witch?" Faye said acidly.
Maleficent tsked. "Poor unfortunate souls."
"They chose their own fates. It's the child I feel sorry for."
"Any chance it'll be twins?" Maleficent mused.
Faye paused for a moment, head cocked intently, and then shook her head. "No.
There's only two life forces."
"Two?" the woman said. "Doesn't that mean twi--"
"Here's a hint," Maleficient snapped. "If I kill you, there'll be one life force left.
And it's looking tempting, brat, if I don't get the firstborn I was promised. Gods,
what a waste of magic."
"I have a lawyer who owes me a favor," Faye said.
"You want to bring lawyers into this? Faye, I thought we were friends!"
"Not to sue you. Your claim was established first, I think, it'd go badly for me.
Just to see if he can clear some of this up."
"Your word he won't try to weasel me out of my due."
"I swear," Faye said.
"Fine, call him."

"Elle, Mother Maleficent is picking you up in five minutes; do you have

everything?"
"Yes, Mama," the twelve-year-old said impatiently. "I told you twice already."
"When I picked you up, you forgot all of your dresses," Faye said, arching an
eyebrow.
"That's because Mother was making a raven talk and I was distracted. I
remembered right away when we were on the broom."
"After I took off."
Rapunzel--Elle--rolled her eyes. Faye was worried that this would become a
habit, as she had heard from mothers of teenagers. Elle was vivacious and
generally obedient, but she had seen her friends' children degenerate into sullen
and insatiable slouches practically overnight.
Not that Elle was her daughter, Faye reminded herself.
"Mother Maleficent already knows you're grounded, so don't even think about
trying it, young lady."
Elle glared. "I wasn't in danger."
"You could have been. Cognitive bias called outcome bias; don't use it. The fact
that it turned out okay doesn't mean that hanging upside down from your
broom wasn't a stupid and dangerous decision." Faye finished stirring the
bubbling pale-blue cauldron. "Arm, please."
The girl huffed but extended her arm, and Faye carefully cut her palm until a
few drops of blood fell out and into the potion. She mixed it in as Elle applied a
dab of cream to her hand, the cut healing almost instantly into nonexistence.
Just then, Maleficent appeared in a billow of green smoke. "Ready to go, love?"
"Mal," Faye said, "you remember that thing we talked about earlier? I looked
into them, and it's not a good idea."
Maleficient's nose wrinkled disdainfully. "I presumed as much. What kind of
incompetent idiots were they, anyway."

"It's worse. There's another, a boy, maybe ten. He's--not doing well. None of
them are."
"I have a brother?" Elle shrieked, and both witches jumped.
"Um," Faye said.
"Smooth, Faye." Maleficent turned to the shocked twelve-year-old. "Elle-girl,
your mama and I need to discuss this some more, and we need to, um, talk with
your biological parents before we go any further with this."
"Can we rescue him, Mama, can we, please, please?" Elle begged, ignoring
Maleficent. "I can teach him how to make potions and fly on a broomstick and
talk to cats! And they were mean, those people you made me see once, we can't
just leave him there! He's already been there fore ten years!"
Faye sighed. "We'll talk about it, darling. Your mother and I are very aware of
his situation, and we don't want to leave him there any more than you do."
"I'll be good forever, I promise," Elle said.
"No," Maleficent said sharply. When Elle's head snapped around, shocked, she
added quickly, "You should always be good, but we're not going to leave your
brother there just because you decided to trample the deadly nightshade in my
garden. We're not going to put life-and-death decisions on your shoulders, Ellegirl. That's far too much weight for you right now."
"Yes, Mother," Elle said obediently, although it was obvious that she was just
being agreeable in an attempt to win over the witches.
Faye, to her horror, found herself tempted to roll her eyes.