Mortal Protection Services Chapter 2: II.VYF: Vote Your Fate

Read chapter 2 of Mortal Protection Services by B.T.Skull on NovelPedia.

II.VYF: Vote Your Fate The only reason World War III hadn't started immediately was because we all knew the one called JIM was watching. Weren't really sure if he'd stop us, but it would certainly annoy me if I made the effort to save a planet full of people and they just started killing one another over it. Humanity as a whole decided to stop any organized warfare for a week. Honestly, it was the most peaceful Earth had been for a long while... at least, on a nation state level. Not that the nation states weren't, too, but down on the personal level, everyone was on edge. Apparently, getting your whole planet moved by a godlike alien organization will do that. We took it out on one another, because state vs. state violence seemed out of the question. Assault charges skyrocketed. Some people treated it like The Purge... fucking assholes. Law enforcement was stretched to the breaking point worldwide. It only takes about 5% of the world going insane to really fuck up everything for everyone else. Lucky for us, only about 4% of the world decided this meant 'purge o'clock'. We were told to start voting on Monday. A little bar graph appeared on every screen showing the current voting percentages. By Tuesday, there were three billion votes tallied and the governments started taking 'official positions'. The United States official position was option 1. China also put out pro-option 1 propaganda. A lot of the EU was pro-option 2, with a smaller bit of support for option 3. The UK joined the US and China. Most of Africa went for option 3, Australia's government tried to officially go for option 3, but what can only be described as a popular revolt online caused them to declare 'no official position' by Wednesday. The world tally updated once a minute, on the minute. Early in the week, options 1 and 2 did seem to heavily favor, each edging out the other in turn, sitting around that 40% line. The "World Debates" were airing on Thursday, and, before they even aired, option 3 had made a bit of a comeback, bringing all three options closer to that 33% line, though option 3 was still behind at the start of the debates. As far as 'must watch tv' goes... the debate for the fate of our species and planet was it. Each option had a proponent picked out to represent them. There was an army of translators ready to relay their arguments back to their homelands. The debate was scheduled for three hours, but went for five. You could literally watch the bar graph change in real time as the speakers made their points. The man for option 1 was a Chinese diplomat. The Americans had tried to send their president, but considering he'd threatened to 'Bomb that son of a bitch, Jim' a few days ago, the rest of the option 1 delegation decided against it. The woman for option 2 was a European scientist. Anthropologist and also PHD chemical engineer, working on her MD as well. An all around academically brilliant researcher, and surprisingly good communicator. The fella for option three was an Australian bloke. No credentials listed nor needed. It was a long debate, so I'll sum up each of their main points. The option 1 man made bold claims about how we'd be able to show up and help accelerate our new neighbors, and how wonderful it would be for us to be able to teach them to exploit all sorts of new resources on their planet. He even said that humanity has learned from its past mistakes, and that we would make a one hundred year plan to introduce ourselves. To give us time to study them in detail to ensure we do not cause our new friends a deadly pandemic. "No small pox blankets this time," he'd said. The woman for option 2 said it was an opportunity to save our planet from our own stupidity, with a little help from friendly neighbors. Jim wasn't fixing climate change, hell, option three promised to make it worse. If we had FTL-capable neighbors next to us, we could learn so much. And if their TV sucks, well we'd be happy to share. We've got a million channels'