Party Time

It wasn't the kind of celebration getting rid of world hunger was thought to be.

“Pop. There goes another one.” Amy Wright was no closer to the truth than when the cake filled balloons first appeared weeks ago. The initial excitement for the tasty treat had turned to controversy when the source wasn’t discovered.

“Every one of them bobbing in the air an arm’s length away. Twenty-five lit candles flame into being when a cake drops into waiting hands.” Every conspiracy their imaginable had been thrown up online. The current most popular one was that aliens were secretly enslaving humans into becoming alien fed cattle.

“Now, there’s food for thought.” It was true there was no longer hunger in the world. “That is something we humans were never able to do.” People first gained weight then lost it and stabilized with no non-nutritional side effects.

The problems arose when countries economies crashed due to lack of sales of food. Commerce surrounding growing, transporting, advertising, and consuming fell apart. “Mana isn’t coming from heaven,” Amy mused, “This can’t go on forever. What happens when it stops?”

As a prominent biophysicist, She was feverishly analyzing the balloons structure and the cakes contents. “Nothing abnormal. Helium filled plastic balloons, basic nutritional elements sequestered in cake tasting form.” It was driving her crazy.

The sounds of angry mobs shuffling against each other brought Amy’s attention away from her research back to the window. Sign’s proclaiming for and against having your cake and eating it too were being used on people’s heads. “Figures,” sighed Amy wearily, “If there was only steak, people would be whining about which was better or worse quality.”

When the mob behavior started to escalate into worse violence, a flying saucer appeared out of nowhere hovering in the sky. Waves of pulsing light and sound drove everyone to their knees, groveling on the ground.

When quiet was restored, the saucer blinked out of existence. Amy went to the internet. Sure enough, other similar sightings were being reported around the world. “Can’t have the cows fighting each other.” Amy didn’t like where things were heading.

Mobs lit up the Internet, uniting against the saucers. Surprisingly, the balloons kept coming along with their familiar payload. What changed was the saucers began culling the mobs, drawing one, ten, a hundred, then countless mobs up into the saucers. “It won’t stop now,” The only thing that unites humankind is a common threat,” warned Amy to her invisible foe.

After twenty-five days the candles stopped showing up. Leaders of kidnapped mobs started showing up at the weak remaining governmental capitals. Earth had been conquered in twenty five days. Each day a candle had gone out as the alien’s aim was further fortified.

Word came out that the Aliens were using mobs on distant worlds to subdue the wilderness and conquer it. Treaties were made with leaders on Earth. With food no longer being a pressing needs, The population explosion had to go somewhere, if only because of the need for space. Nature began to revive and regreen Earth.

Amy found herself recruited for transfer to an Earth-like planet so far away it made her head spin. What excited her was the microbiology of intelligent plant life. “We are not alone.”

It had been a major depressive letdown to find out the saucers were manned by artificial intelligence devoid of any alien overview. The self replicating drones inhabiting the crafts had been doing so for millennia untold.