Whoever wrote the Drake Equation needs to get punched in the balls.
Was it a guy name Drake? I don't know. What I do know is that he was wrong. Was it a he? Anyhow, whoever they were, they got it wrong. Not only was the universe saturated by life far outpacing anything this "Drake" guy ever imagined, he failed to account for little details like.... oh, I don't know. Lets pick one thing. Alright, like, he didn't think about how our solar system didn't have a black hole. No sir, he didn't imagine that part.
No, in fact our shitty solar system had four god-damned black holes that we didn't know about, all placed in the Lagrange points around Sol: they kept trailing the Sun in perfect sync. At first, the venerable Voyager probe readings were thought to show a bow shock, or end of the heliosphere, but no, that was all horribly wrong. I can forgive the computer scientists of the 70s, but I can't forgive the idiots advising our President in the 2010s. The 1970s scientists were stuck with limited computing, but apparently the 2010s scientists were stuck with limited imagination.
The readings were showing protons being pulled toward an event horizon and our idiot scientists analyzed it as particle drops. It was like running a vacuum cleaner in front of a particle counter: it had readings stolen from it. They concluded the probe was exiting the solar system. The press release was so enthusiastic and cheerful it made me vomit. But you know what really happened? The $870 million dollar probe went straight into a god-damned toilet, and we didn't have a freakin' clue about it for decades. Our one consolation was that it was a solar toilet, of sorts, so we didn't pollute rest of the universe.
But enough of that. Remember how I said four god-damned black holes? Anyhow, those bastards arrested light from reaching us, and in the past few centuries we just assumed the universe was a big empty place and that we were ahead of time. Something like 90 percent of planets hadn't formed yet, all that junk. Redshift, blueshift, it was all garbage.
When The Race arrived, we were all taken aback. For months prior to it happening, there were localized gravitational disturbances. Most of them were fairly unremarkable - an occasional wife complained about gaining weight, plane tickets shot up due to increased weight and fuel expenditure. Few people were killed, or killed themselves, when their investments cratered and they couldn't take it anymore. Turns out gold weighs more when there's a micro-singularity near it, and unless you have one near every gold market, well, that's just called theory of supply and demand.
Anyhow, the President. Obama had just left the stage gracefully, and our future rested in the hands of the new president. When The Race came, we advised to nuke the planet. It was obvious that we'd be sowing radioactive destruction, some places dealing with radioactive fallout and contamination having a half-life of 800,000 years. But no, the idiot scientists cited the Drake Equation again without examining any of the new evidence and pointed out the aliens must be friendly, because life is so rare.
Ha. Ha.
You have no idea just how expendable we were. Or still are. At least if we had turned our planet into a radioactive toilet, we'd get to keep it. Most of us would die, all of us would suffer, but some would live and the species would survive. Our little Earth would get labeled as an inter-stellar superfund site, and if we've learned anything about superfund sites, it's that no one wants to pick up the tab. It was a perfect plan and ... they blew it.
Which brings me to me. Hi, I'm a super-genius military adviser who worked with the last few U.S. Presidential administrations on the intersection of science and science of killing people. If the CIA building was still around, the Starbucks people couldn't write my name down on a cup, or they'd be taken away and waterboarded. Anyhow, did you know that modern warfare planning doesn't consider borders at all? It only considers whether a location is within strike range, and range of being struck. My specialty was defining and deriving those ranges, and boy, I could tell right away that we were in trouble.
But I had a plan. It was obvious from first intel that The Race meant business. Our population just recently hit 7 billion, and The Race sent out a scouting party of 35 billion. That meant that five of them could surround one of us, on a mere physical basis, and more were coming. The good news, found out from vivisections we conducted, is that they were as far as we could tell biologically compatible with us. The universe apparently favored cellular automata as a basis of life, and from there a bunch of similar configurations took hold. The Race ended up dominating most of the known universe by the time they got to us.
Anyhow, that meant that they were as susceptible to radiation poisoning as we were, which was good news. Given our known and unknown nuclear arsenals, we could have made this planet worse for The Race than what the Chernobyl did for German boar hunters. Turns out those stupid wild pigs like eating this prolific mushroom that tends to accrete cesium over time, making it hazardous to point a .30-06 at them, and then eat them for breakfast. So we had a similar opportunity.
But no, the scientists spoke, and we declared peace, and now I'm wearing a slave collar. Or at least I'd like to call it a slave collar because I'd die from embarrassment otherwise. It's gaudy beyond known words.
I was in the bunker when they came for us. The President demanded we remain peaceful, so we did. By that point half a year went by with much interaction between our two species, so nothing was a surprise. Then the entire upper cabinet got vaporized before our eyes, and our loyalty questioned one at a time. One after another, successors to the leadership perished in shows of defiance. Finally it was up to the Attorney General and me, and he wasn't as docile as the rest. He raged and pleaded and when the vaporization beam hit him, parts of his body were obstructed. What remained of him was his left arm, with his gold watch and part of his shirt.
In that moment of abject absurdity, I laughed. I laughed and laughed and couldn't stop laughing. The arm was there, with his watch. In a flash of light, that man's entire life and thoughts disappeared. The pride of his daughter graduating from college, his recovery from a stroke and completion of a half-marathon. His life-work and all the people he helped. I laughed some more and responded to no questions. Finally, when I ran out of steam, overlord of The Race asked me what I was doing. I pointed at the arm and laughed some more, until finally I just said "The Watch. The Watch." It didn't take a pain stick for me to explain, so I did. What have I got to lose in that last moment of existence?
"You see we have a story about a lawyer, a reconciler as you would call it, who got into a car- a craft accident. His craft was struck and he called a lawman, as you call it an enforcer, to help him get justice for damage done to his craft," I said
The overlord grunted, signaling me to continue.
"When the enforcer arrived, he chastised the man for being so fixated on his damaged craft that he didn't realize he had lost his arm in the accident when the other craft severed and dragged it away."
The Overlord shrieked in dismay, "He had not noticed he lost his claw?"
I went on, "No. In fact, when the enforcer pointed that out to him, the reconciler shrieked and yelled -- my watch!"
And again I was caught in a fit of hysterical laugh, pointing at the hand with the watch still attached. While I don't think the Overlord understood the humor of it, he understood me pointing at the arm, and he looked appalled. I don't know if he got the absurdity of it all - the lawyer more worried about his watch than his arm that the watch went on, but he sure was confused. That is, if he had a gender to begin with.
That day, that hour, that minute, the extermination program had been halted. Fast forward to some years later, and apparently, The Race had never before experienced a species with our demonic level of subterfuge and self-deprecation.