[WP] It wasn't attacking. It was trying to communicate.

The official looking desk is overburdened with reports of the casualties. The man looking at them is the sitting president of the United States, and right now he looks a little shell shocked. He was always a domestic policy kind of guy, he had even used the premise that there hadn't been any major wars in almost the last century as a sort of campaign tool. Who could have guessed that first contact would have happened? Who could have guessed that they would be so goddamned aggressive?

Explosions had become background noise, constant enough to be ignored after a while, and the president almost didn't notice when they stopped. That had to be good news, right? Probably not. The president became almost more worried, wondering what this cease fire could signify, torturing himself by imaging the grand finale to the attacks. He sat and waited. Nothing much more he could do, at this rate.

A man entered the room, looking almost worse than the president himself. He can't bring himself to meet his eyes as he starts talking, not that his eyes would be met anyway.

"Sir, I have some news. The explosions are not an attack. They are actually sending us a message in Morse code."

The POTUS looked up with a spark of hope, and was confused by the dejected look on the man's face.

"Must have been a pretty long fucking message." He still wasn't sure why the man was distraught. Surely the fact that this wasn't all out war was good news, right?

"It was fairly long. It took out most of Arkansas, and maybe some of Oklahoma, nobody can really tell."

"Well, what is this message?"

"As far as we can tell, it was a list. Things that we have done that they found distasteful. Something about a galactic council. It ends on a pretty clear note, though. The end was simply 'prepare for war'."

The President visibly shrunk.

"Fuck," he said.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread