A vessel from Earth drops out of sub-light speed, a million miles away from an ongoing battle. The vessel, a thin white tube of aerogels and graphene wrapped in ceramics, looks delicate, but that is to put it lightly. It comes to a stop and bobs dangerously inside a gravitational anomaly.

"Fuckers are using gravitational weapons on each other. Need to find a safe eddy to set up operations," says the ensign on control, a brash fellow freshly graduated from the academy.

"Engage." the man sitting in the captain's chair intones as if bored.

The navigator finds an eddy and plots a course. And the control works his magic. In route the science officer chimes in, "Captain, getting a system read out now, 500 vessels engaged. Detecting north of 500,000 inert bios. Gravitational weapons, subatomic explosions, and plasma sparks are taking out as many friendlies as they are enemies."

"They must really hate each other. Which war is this again?" the captain sits with his chin in left-hand, elbow on its armrest. He scowls as his question goes unanswered. Humanity numbers wars and this one was categorized with a barcode. The slang term for any war is a thrift shop but no one volunteers that information or bothered to memorize the twelve-digit code associated with the here and why of the death on the bridge-viewer. This thrift shop is bits of color and the occasional quantum explosion. It is not a coincidence they are here to witness this, for this is humanity's bread and butter. Most of human space-faring existence has been spent sniffing around graveyards like this one. Vast regions of space in which the fall out of interspecies warfare exists well beyond peace, or annihilation, and will likely until the heat death of the Universe and then maybe even beyond that.

"Any change? Have they seen us?"

"I don't know captain. This is a bad one. They might be too distracted. But I can't tell."

"Captain to dramatics."

"Dramatics here." The face of the director appears on the bridge-viewer. He is a frail man with many health problems. Yellow skin, black bags fully encircling his beady blue eyes. He is certainly not fit for space service, under any other circumstances, save for being the Terran solar system's imminent combat materialist.

"Mister Director, how close are we to getting started?"

The director turns a critical eye over a data pad, then a finger down the information there, and reports, "Aye, captain, putting the finishing touches on today's theatrics now. Can probably raise curtain whenever you want to call action."

The Captain nods, "Action, Mister Director, and give them hell."

The director smiles a crooked yellow tooth smile and the viewer goes back to the battle. Immediately there is a huge explosion, right in the middle of all the action. The flash is accompanied by a gamma particle wave. It's an illusion like being in a wave pool back on Earth. The gamma wave can only nudge, but when the director lets loose five more explosions of light and gamma waves, one right after the other, he gets every single living thing's attention.

Communication confirms, "we got them now sir."

"Good. Mister Director, when you are ready for the second act, on your mark."

There is no reply only the sudden appearance of a planet-sized being sparkling with green lightning. The gamma wave roll of the illusion rocks both sides of the conflict. One of the reported effects is massive amounts of motion sickness. Like shaking a soda bottle, a few ships pop in huge explosions. A few others shut down, with all electronics and non-life systems fried. The Gamma waves of the massive illusion can isolate a target over and over but what it looks like to those observing is that the ship exploding has been eaten.

The chaos, the theatrics cause, is immediate. Some of the warring vessels turn and run leaving a few behind to fire on the monster before them, but being a thing of light the weapon-fodder sails right through. This is actually the dangerous part for the humans. Where at any time a fear-induced accident can occur.

But nothing going, the execution of the production, this time is flawless.

"Excellent work Mister Director. Conduct act three and begin the clean up."

The captain acts stoic but inside he is smug. It is all too easy, this deception. Like no other species knows how to detect a performance so for that silly reason alone this keeps working. Some of the slaves have suggested the ability to lie is unique only to humans, that, everywhere else, honesty is considered the gold standard for a species' survival.

An alarm sounds announcing the beginning of act three. This was everyone's favorite part. All hands type action. The illusion extends to a fleet of salvage vessels that fly into the graveyard and begin chopping up the alien tech. The human vessels look like moon-sized versions of the planet-sized monster that curls into a ball and begins snoring green gamma lightening as its children eat what's left. But in reality, survivors are enslaved and auctions are set up with allies across the galaxy for the interesting bits. And most importantly those that escape take with them a fear that they don't fully understand, a fear for a new Apex predator, most call The Ship Devourers from Terra Prime.

It is a time of great drought and famine. People starve, or people do what they must. And this person is part of a group of bandits raiding a small village. The mighty sword of Peleus glows stately orange as its wielder weaves trails sprinting into battle. He wears the armor of the great warrior Peleus' line also, receivers of gifts, Gods favored, Athena Kissed.

His shield is made from the forge-flames of the God Hephaestus. Greaves, breastplate, and shinguards are made from the shed scales of dragons. His helmet is whittled skull of a titan. His sandals have the wings of Icarus on their heels. They flutter and he runs with the speed of the Gods and can fly great distances with a single leap.

Great were the warriors of the family Peleus, though he is not one of that favored lineage, however.

The last of them was the mighty Achilles, who wielded this very same flaming sword. Whose father was bestowed it as a gift by the mother of the Gods herself. The son of a sea nymph and a king was felled easily in battle by an errant arrow and was buried. He and his kin ended their family's long reign fighting for someone else's dowry. His body lay undisturbed under that ancient battlefield for almost a Thousand years. Until our fateless brigand literally fell into the crypt and robbed it blind.

Upon entering the town he spots a target; an old man shielding a young child from the mayhem, he takes aim and leaps. The leap was more than he intended and he misses the duo and lances through the roof of a hut.

The flaming shield and sword of Hepaestra immediately kindles the hatch roof. Baking in the equatorial sun the flames spread quick to the walls and jump to other huts. The maurader doesn't feel the heat, but one of his fellow raiders does as a wall collapses directly on top of him crushing him to death and beginning the slow process of roasting his body to ashes.

Our would-be maurader escapes roasting but finds himself no better off, as outside the quickly destroyed hut, the entire village burns. Villagers run screaming toward whichever direction looks the safest and the marauders stand still disappointingly watching what they came to steal go up in smoke.

I think Will can make up his own mind.

Cherry blossoms and a cool breeze under a mild sun. The hot dog vender's cart vents off steam from his product and makes stomachs growl. Birds chirp and old men sit on benches chatting the time away.

"He said no gods," he wears a fedora and scratches at a mustard stain on his brown sweater vest missing the glob of onion on his trousers.

"I know," says the other man who could be the twin of the first. Right down to the white orthotics and black cane. He didn't eat a hotdog but holds a stale slightly gummed on pretzel in his palsied hand.

"Or monsters."

"How dare you, but I know that also."

"Only People."

"I know."

"So, what are we going to do? Things have already gone too far. We can't just turn everything off and go home."

"Be a people I guess. Can't make the big guy mad."

"How do you be a people?"

"Well, the way I see it we are the people of this bench."

"What the hell does that even mean?"

"It means that if a census taker were to come right now and take the census of this bench we would be the people he would count."

"Wouldn't that census taker want to know particulars?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know, like religion and skin color and education level?"

"I would tell them the truth."

"What's the truth?"

"I would give them my name."

"Which is?"

"My name is Legion, for I am many."

"Stop, it is beyond certain that the census taker would have heard that old line, you'll give the game straight away with it."

"And you would what? Give him our real names? And that wouldn't give even more away? Just picture the news headlines, Abaddon and Apollyon have come to earth when will the malady mayhem begin? When will the seven trumpets blare?"

"Do you really think they have time to print another run of papers? Things are pretty much about to kick off any second."

"I know. Just fantasying."

"Look, I know you are disappointed they didn't catch on any sooner. Whether you checked with me, or not, they certainly had enough clues. But here we are. Go ahead stand up on the bench and shout it out. Let everyone know what's about to happen. It might make you feel better."

"I wanted a war."

"You get slaves."

"I have had slaves, I wanted to lead a great army and ride a bloody path across the earth. This? This is too--- "

"Easy, yah I get that. Look we didn't pick each other, we got punched together by fate. And now we make due."

"Speaking of due."

"You're right, lets's get started."

We should be concerned with any well-funded intelligence that can act in any way it pleases in the name of "its better good."

It's way too late to do anything about the alphabet agencies, but chat GPT is just a tool like Google Search was before google became an ad company. Eventually, Chat GPT will be used to sell us our favorite products too, all the while patting itself on the back for offering us something we already wanted.

Being the size of a pool, I wonder if any of it will even remain after entering the atmosphere. The coolest part of this story is they spotted something over a million miles away and have 23 years to intercept it and try to divert or capture it as an experiment.

This is triggering. only because I woke up to no internet and now it's making youtube laggy.

Go Get 'em bro