Chapter 1

“So”, my host continued. “What have you surmised so far?”

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No”, with a smile.

“You and your family don’t really look like this, do you?”

Another “No” and another smile.

“So, there is something I have or can do for you that makes you willing to give me anything I want. Is that correct?”

“Yes. Our continued existence depends on your help, This means that there is nothing whatsoever that we would not be willing to give you or to do for you in order to gain your assistance. Wealth, more or different women, even men if we thought you swung that way, but we sense you do not.”

“This is correct, but I might take you up on the more women part. I don’t really need any more wealth to be happy and more wealth could be counterproductive.”

“That was our assessment, as well.”

“Ok, so what do you need from me that you cannot do for yourselves? You seem to have a lock on just about everything. My guess is that you came a very great distance to get here and you select the only guy that happens to walk down this particular path. I’m sensing that our meeting was no accident.”

“You are correct and your ability to resolve that fact, intellectually, confirms our analysis. We are nothing if not methodical. In fact, that is the entire reason that we chose you to help us.”

“How so?” I was really intrigued at this point.

“We have been at war with our most terrible enemy for generations and we both suffer terrible losses of our most gifted people on a continuing basis. We send our best and brightest to war and a certain number are killed each time we clash forces. Of course the same situation exists for the enemy, so we are bound for mutual destruction, which is unacceptable to both and neither is willing to call a truce.”

“Wouldn’t that be the logical thing to do?”

“It would, except that both of our civilizations are dependent on access to a certain component that now only exists on a single world. Our metabolisms are sufficiently different from the enemy that we cannot survive in an atmosphere that is healthy for them, and vice versa.”

“This can’t be a new problem. How did you coexist until now?”

“At one time, there were many worlds that could provide for our needs. We used some of them and our enemies used the others.”

“So what happened?”

“Our competing programs destroyed all but one of the worlds. Now we each must own it or die. The reason why neither side can prevail is that both of our societies are driven by pure logic. When a given path is selected to have a higher potential for success, it is taken. This is much the same as the game of poker in your society. The players who play according to the odds are the most consistent winners.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“When multiple players are competing for the same reward, there is a winner and a loser.”

“Ok, so?”

“If we lose, we die, and so will our enemy if they lose. It is quite literally a fight to the death.”

“Why are you so evenly matched?”

“Because each of us has perfected the art of logical thought to the point that we always come to the same conclusions as our enemies, even when we try very hard to deviate from protocol. They do the same, resulting in a standoff, but with loss of personnel on both sides. At some point in time, one of us will no longer be able to continue fighting and our analysis predicts that the victor will have such severe losses that they, too, will perish. A truly Pyrrhic victory”, he sighed.

“Hmmmh”, I said. “This sounds to me like a fight between two deer with large antlers who get locked in combat and both starve when they can no longer access food.”

“Exactly.”

“So where do I come in”?

“Our analysis of your thought patterns shows that you have the ability to think in illogical patterns. ‘Thinking outside the box’ is the term your peers use. You appear to be extremely good at it. We are incapable of acting in this manner, by law. Our laws force us to act logically. We are acting in a very grey area by approaching you. On one hand, we are asking you to do something which is illegal for us to do. On the other hand, it is a logical conclusion that this action not only improves our chances of survival, but is the only chance we seem to have.”

“And I take it that your enemies are governed by the same laws?”

“Yes, bu...”, he broke off as we were instantly transported to somewhere in space.

“I assume that you realized that the enemy would be coming to the same conclusion that you did and your AIs moved us away, just in time?”

“You are correct. Now please move us to a different location before they compute this one.” He thrust a console contraption into my hands that any Earth gamer would die for.

My first response was to twirl the dials at random and push buttons whenever I felt like it. We blipped out and in so many times it would have been hard to follow on a slow motion vid replay.

“Wh-where are we?”, he asked.

“I don’t know, and neither does your enemy, or should I say our enemy?”

“But how will we return to our home world?”

“When they look for you, where should they begin and what should they look for? We have just completed a maneuver that is totally outside their playbook, so they have no means of calculating our position. Correct?”

“Ah! I see your method. But what do we do now? How will we determine where we are well enough to know in which direction to move?”

“How did you find me, in the first place?”

“We scanned the universe to locate a world that...”. We were instantly back on Earth. I have to give those suckers credit. Being required to act logically was killing them, but once a course of action became obviously the correct one, there was no further discussion or delay. The instant their AIs concluded that we should be somewhere else, they made it so.”

“Please continue”, I added. “I am very curious how you made a decision to travel through interstellar distances to seek me out.”

“We simply scanned the universe looking at the rate of advancement in technology. Earth stood out very boldly, having progressed from the first powered flight to landing on your moon within about sixty of your years. That represents a great many orders of magnitude of improvement in an amazingly short period.”

“Were you able to determine the basis for the rapid progress?”