Author : Iain Macleod

“Dude! We are so boned, dude! This wasn’t supposed to happen!” Jimmy frantically tapped at his console, sweat beginning to drip off the end of his nose. “They’re sentient, man”

“What? All of them?” replied Carl, the older of the two keeping calm, trying not to jump to premature conclusions.

“No, just one species but they’re definitely sentient, I can already pick up large developments, cities, huge engineering projects, all sorts of stuff. They’re well past what they were supposed to be.”

“OK, calm down, Jim. Lets just gather some information, maybe there’s some sort of problem with the scanners”

Carl stood at his own console and began tapping away. A frown started to develop on his face when he saw the results.

“This cant be right, surely. Lets check for comms”

The main display lit up like a supernova and both jaws dropped.

“…how, Jimmy?”

“I don’t know, i don’t know!”

“You were in charge of that species, it was pretty much your only job! How did this happen?”

“I dont know” Jimmy moaned and ran his hand through his hair, “they weren’t supposed to get past stones and clubs.”

“Well they’re way past that now, you mong! How are we going to fix this?” Carl slammed his fist down on the console. “We’re on our last warning already.”

“Let me think, Carl, just let me think.”

“They’ve got world wide networks, basic computers and the first steps towards a space program.” Carl scanned through the feed displaying on his console. “Oh god. They’ve got religion and nukes. This is a disaster!”

Jimmy looked up at the his colleague. “Asteroid. We’ll run an asteroid into it and say we found it like that.”

“There are no asteroids we can get here before someone spots this, we need to sort it out fast.”

“…Ok. Moon”

“What?”

“We’ll push the moon off course, it’ll smash into the planet and wipe out everything”

“What about the records?”

“We’ll alter the records, say we missed the fact that the moon had an unstable orbit. Maybe head office will just think we’re idiots and we wont get fired. We’ll get demoted at worst.”

“God damnit, Jimmy…” Carl scratched his head, thinking it through. “Fine. Lets do it fast before anyone spots us”

Both went to work, rapidly tapping commands into their consoles. Forward cam showed the moon slowly drifting off course.

“You need to stop smoking weed, Jimmy.”

“I know, dude. I swear this time is the last.”