“Absolutely unfathomable,” Ch’teek chittered, watching the screen. “How has your species managed to survive this long given your mating habits?”

We were watching the latest incarnation of the TV series “Average Joe” — and as usual, the producers couldn’t leave well-enough alone and shipped in a ringer at the last minute. The handsome blond Brad Pitt look-alike swept the female contestant off her feet in record time, leaving the decent guy she was about to settle upon standing around looking unsurprised but disgusted ... Ch’teek ruffled his neck feathers — something I’d learned to recognize as a sign of confusion, and chittered, “Was the female listening at all when that specimen listed his total lack of accomplishments? Is the female already wealthy? What reason could she have for choosing such a specimen to mate with?”

“Physical appearance,” I replied. “Communications skills. That’s it. That’s what a lot of our species ends up using, at least for the first impression.”

“We had hoped to evacuate quality mating pairs,” Ch’teek grumbled, flexing his four-clawed ‘hands,’ something similar to chicken feet, but larger and independent of his now-vestigial wings. I read the gesture as disgust, something the tones emitted by the Universal Translator chip embedded behind my ear confirmed. “But your species OBVIOUSLY does NOT mate for life...” Ch’teek’s did — one male to two females and a drone ‘mother’ who raised the next generation when their soft-shelled eggs hatched. “Given the way things are going, we should be doing mass CAP testing of the populace — but your governments continue to insist on secrecy...” CAP stood for Capacity, Aptitude and Potential — basically, a measure of an individual’s worth to the gene pool — and a primary criterion for both selection for evacuation and suitability for the fight ahead, which was likely to be Armageddon.

“We can’t stampede them right now,” I replied. “Remember, the reason you’re here is that we’re a lot more cantankerous than any of your member races. We need to do things OUR way, or we’ll destroy OURSELVES before the Sa’arm even arrive!”

Ch’teek clacked his wide rounded beak in assent; he didn’t have to like it — indeed, he barely understood, given his orientation, but the computers said I was right. His computers — the ones that had pointed the Confederacy — and his race in particular, since it was the most capable of understanding ours — at our little backwater world where a race was coming up that had success markers despite some disgustingly nasty habits of violent behavior.

In the normal course of events, either a) we would have advanced technology to the point that we overrode the Confederacy’s ancient, automated safeguards and detected galactic civilization and over time mastered spaceflight to the point of initiating first contact, or b) after another five to ten thousand years we would have become civilized enough that the Confederacy would feel comfortable in initiating first contact themselves — in this case because all of the ambition would have been bled out of us and we’d have been squatting complacently on the planets of our little system, living out our sheep-like lives...

The Sa’arm, however, changed all this. Little was known about the Sa’arm; they appeared to be some kind of insect, but none had ever been captured and dissected — (Ch’teek would have fainted dead away at the suggestion) — or even scanned at close range. There was an apparent hive organization to them, too, but that had yet to be confirmed, too. One thing we DID know — their methods of communication were something no other race had ever managed to figure out — and they didn’t seem to recognize any of the more standard means. They’d been tried; when the Sa’arm first discovered a Confederacy colony world twenty-one years before, the last organized communication from it came about thirty-six hours after they made their initial landings in force. An embassy was sent out to the world they tracked the Sa’arm globe-ship back to and it failed dismally...

I’d studied the exteroceptive (literally a record of data for ‘all external sensory organs,’ including a few we don’t have... ) transcripts from both message pods extensively, and our people were still doing further analysis, but one thing was clear — if you didn’t communicate in whatever esoteric manner the Sa’arm used (telepathy, maybe?), you were vermin. Period. The delegation had been allowed to land on the Sa’arm world without hindrance, and the diplomats had done the ‘take me to your leader’ thing with the first couple of specimens they ran into. They were completely ignored until someone made a nuisance of himself — then the Sa’arm involved swatted him like a fly. Meanwhile, the Sa’arm sent out a team to capture the landing craft. They applied various tools and techniques until they had breached the little ship, at which point the crew evacuated — and watched from a distance while the thing was disassembled — obviously for study purposes. At some point, the communications devices were disassembled and contact lost with the landing party, who presumably later died.

In orbit, the same thing happened. The spacecraft was surrounded and the Sa’arm applied more and more resources until they got through the ship’s passive defenses (mostly a defense shield for high-energy particles encountered in flight) and then they boarded the ship and began reducing it carefully to its component parts. The crew was ignored unless they resisted in some manner, in which case, they were dealt with as vermin. Eventually, the ship was decompressed and the remaining crew resorted to existing in space suits — until the air ran out — while the Sa’arm — also in suits, continued their work. What happened after the pod was dispatched was pretty clear from the action to that point...

Since then, the Sa’arm had annexed fourteen civilized worlds — it wasn’t fair to say they’d attacked them, per se, since none of them had the slightest capability of mounting a defense. The Sa’arm just moved in on the ground and started building their infrastructure. If a local got in the way, he was neutralized — usually messily. Civilization winked out on Sa’arm occupied worlds within hours — instant communication brought pictures of atrocity serious enough to drive the populace to suicidal insanity to living rooms all over the planet; by the time a Sa’arm actually showed up on site on the other side of the planet, the population had decimated itself rather than be exposed to further mindless violence. Scout ships watching these annexations from a safe distance were prey to mass suicides and psychological trauma sufficient that several ships never returned and several limped home with one crew member in ten left alive. Eventually, intelligence gathering was left to automated systems and processed directly by the Confederacy’s computerized intelligence-gathering systems.

It became abundantly clear that there was a serious threat out there and that the Confederacy had no tools with which to combat it; the solution was put in the hands of Ch’teek’s race, the Darjee, based upon the fact that they still had small quantities of aggression left in them, largely vented in their role as galactic traders and explorers. But Ch’teek’s race could no more put troops in the field than anyone else’s, so...

The Sa’arm incursion’s main axis of advance was inbound along our spiral arm of the galaxy, some seventy-three light years away, at closest approach — but they tended to expand concentrically around the axis after each leap, creating a wider and wider cylinder of control. Confederacy computers estimated that Earth’s little neighborhood would see its first Sa’arm globe ship in nine point three years. Under some circumstances this would be viewed as regrettable by those in the Confederation who were even aware of it (a small number, buffered from the full impact of such things by the Confederacy’s AIs), but the Confederacy had specific, hard to fulfill needs...

It actually took almost a year for the Darjee and the AIs to agree that, distasteful as it was, the Sa’arm threat must be defended against in an active manner — the AIs knew this, but the Darjee had to be slowly coddled along. Other races in the Confederacy continued to be unable to comprehend such a situation and sent occasional embassies to the Sa’arm to be eaten; the AIs and the Darjee pushed a requirement through Council that such embassies were required to use outdated technology after bits and pieces of current Confederacy technology started showing up on Sa’arm globeships and landers — notably the defense shield. Once convinced, the Darjee were between a rock and a hard place; they needed to supervise an active defense of the Confederacy, but they were neither suited to the work, nor did they have the necessary tools...

This meant that the unthinkable must be entertained — an uncivilized or only partially civilized race must be found to engage the Sa’arm. Parameters for such a thing were narrow at best — Stone Age civilizations couldn’t help them. The barely sentient couldn’t help them. Races nearing the technological and social criteria for membership in the Confederacy had by definition the same issues that the member races had. Races tended to advance rapidly once true technological development was available to them — if you look at humanity, it becomes clear rather quickly that we’ve moved further in the past century than in the preceding ten, and before that, things were pretty primitive. This meant that the Darjee had to find a race operating within a tiny window of their development — and area wherein violence was frowned upon but still possible and wherein the race had the mental tools available to it to create and embrace technology. Seventy three point six percent of the races that hit this point let their propensity for violence overcome them and removed themselves from the race to become civilized — which left devastated worlds with interesting artifacts, but little else. Of the other twenty-six point four percent, twenty-one percent plus would be useless to the Darjee as soldiers because they would have had all aggression bred out of them before population pressures on their worlds became critical enough for them to get serious about space travel. Eventually, they would become member races, but...

Races on the cusp were few and far between — and the Darjee had the additional concern that whatever race they ended up sponsoring might turn on the Confederation and consume it. Lengthy analysis and discussion between the Darjee and the AIs left them with two candidate races, neither of which had Darjee confidence. The Darjee approached the Ladac, a small race of gifted technicians who seemed to have gotten past the ignition point...

Unfortunately, the Ladac were EXTREMELY xenophobic; the entire race imploded on first contact. Mass insanity over the idea that they were under attack by aliens led to nuclear exchanges and left the race all but obliterated. This crushed the Darjee, who felt a deep obligation to atone for what amounted to genocide and caused a major shake-up in the administration of ‘the Sa’arm Project’. Finally, reluctantly, they turned to the AIs prime candidates — a small planet called Earth, and a race of odd primates that presented a mixed bag of positive and negative traits and referred to itself variously as ‘human’ or ‘man’...

The Darjee weren’t thrilled with us — while we had managed to acquire nuclear power and hold onto it for a considerable period without destroying ourselves, we were broadcasting scenes of incredible violence into near space on a daily basis — as entertainment! But the AIs pointed out that while the ability of a civilized world to retain any integrity at all was to be measured in hours, and their capability to defend against attack nonexistent, Earth, left totally alone, would take nearly a year’s worth of incredible violence to subdue — and even then there was an eleven percent chance that scattered resistance would continue for almost a decade before the Sa’arm completed their conquest, given the data at hand. The AIs further reported that, properly supported, humans might at least provide enough of an impediment to Sa’arm expansion that they would shift their axis of advance away from the pests...

The flip side, of course, was the acute worry that the cure would be worse than the disease. Humans had fangs, albeit blunt ones, and the Darjee were already in disgrace over the Ladac; if Humans turned on the Confederacy after succeeding with the Sa’arm, who would stop THEM? Wasn’t any race capable of defeating the Sa’arm worse than they were, by definition?

The answer was CAP testing. CAP testing of every soldier candidate would ensure that the Darjee got a high-quality fighting man, committed to the survival of his own race and the Confederacy in general, without allowing any monsters in — at least, that was the theory, and we were tuning that theory constantly in concert with the AIs and had been for the past eighteen months, since the Darjee landed their initial embassy.

The AIs were crucial to this entire process; the Darjee couldn’t tolerate us much better than the other races without a buffer — and the AIs were that buffer. Translating Darjee was easy for a UT or Universal Translator — we had the vast majority of the concepts. But some of the ideas our military people put forth took the AIs filtering our output to the Darjee hours to talk around in order to keep from offending the Darjee at the very least to driving them insane with horror at the worst. We learned to step carefully. We ALSO learned that the AIs had been shielding the Confederacy member races from the harsh realities of the universe for almost a million years. The AIs knew what was needed and they had pressed and pressed and pressed until the Darjee finally acquiesced and were basically looking the other way while they did as they were asked...

I know, I know: Why didn’t the AIs do the job themselves? The original races of the Confederacy had seen the ‘artificial intelligence runs amok’ scenario both in fiction and reality, and certain activities were absolutely forbidden by the AIs basic imperatives — imperatives fine-tuned and reviewed regularly for a hundred thousand years. Helping us was as close as they’d ever gotten, and it invoked numerous emergency overrides — but civilization as a whole was at stake...

As far as the rest of the Confederacy was concerned, ‘the Sa’arm Project’ was a Darjee-only enterprise, to be carried out within that race’s resources and that race’s resources only. This was a part of their penance for the Ladac debacle — but that was just an excuse, primarily; the fact was that no race wanted ANY of what was to come on their conscience. In fact, there was a movement in place to expel the Darjee from the Confederacy, purely in an effort to distance the rest of Confederacy from the implications.

This limited what was within the realm of the possible; the Darjee could not evacuate the Earth — the best they could offer was perhaps a thirty percent solution. They could supply technology for more than that, but the defensive effort (as opposed to the war effort, which is what we would end up calling it) had first priority. The good news was that the AIs had the ability to divert assets, too, but they suffered under their various limitations ... Evacuation only postponed the inevitable, too, for everybody; the Sa’arm would happen onto the colony worlds, too, sooner or later. The first-pass approximation was that Earth was lost, but in the process it would occupy the local Sa’arm seriously, slowing them and hopefully granting the colony worlds time to get their legs under them and produce the kind of armies and navies necessary to REALLY engage them. The AIs upgraded this assessment daily, but the major impediment was, ironically, the Darjee, who were afraid to give us too much too soon...

The Darjee learned quickly who to trust and who not to trust; politicians tended to be individuals whose greed was limited only by the institutions they answered to. Intelligence services were riddled with the unsuitable. Oddly, the group initially considered to be the most scary — the military — turned out to be the place where men of principle and integrity were most likely to be found. The defense of the Earth became a military black project, conducted under the covers in several of the most advanced nations — including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Singapore, Australia ... Politicians were let in, tested — and if they failed, the knowledge was carefully removed from their memory, but if they passed, they became the project’s voting base. Intelligence services were cleaned out — but linked, once the dead wood and infiltrators were purged. Some places we just couldn’t go; several countries in the Middle East just couldn’t support the network, for instance — corruption was too embedded in the system. This was true of some Russian states, too. China, oddly, was thoroughly penetrable below a certain level of government, and granted the project valuable manufacturing capacity. We were reaching the point where tens of thousands knew the secret but were literally incapable of passing it on, thanks to a ‘compulsion generator’ developed at some point by some Confederacy race and unearthed by the AIs to keep things locked down; the Darjee did NOT want the Ladac debacle repeated!

Research and development was humming right along as our scientific community absorbed the concepts behind selected Confederacy technologies — and even we knew that we were being handed beads and trinkets. It was irritating, but we knew why, and we just had to live with it...

Manpower was the next thing on the agenda — loads of it. That meant universal CAP testing — but we couldn’t just do that, something the Darjee initially had a hard time understanding. We had less than a decade to evacuate and train our best and brightest minds to defeat the Sa’arm — why wouldn’t everyone report to the nearest testing center as a matter of civic duty? Well...

So here we sat, watching television — which had turned out to be a fine medium for damping down xenophobia, over the years — looking for a gimmick...

“How are you going to manage to get CAP testing under way?” Ch’teek worried. “The timetable is going to be seriously impacted soon...”

I carefully avoided pointing out that we could have had another half- dozen years to prepare if they hadn’t dragged their feet. “We have to do something that entices the general populace — preferably BEFORE the general release date for the information on the invasion ... Think about this as a trade situation; we need to show them what is in it for them...”

“Life — that should be obvious,” Ch’teek replied.

“It isn’t, yet.”

“Surely CAP testing would provide a better indication of a specimen’s mating value than THAT...” Ch’teek waved his claws disparagingly at the TV. He was learning my gestures, too.

“Uh,” I said — something less than indicative of the quality of my thought process. “Hold it a minute...” I changed the channel multiple times, surfing — and found an ad for a mating service. You know the one — it claims umpteen ‘dimensions of compatibility’... “Like that?”

“Such a thing HAS to be better that taking a light image and a few sound bytes,” Ch’teek replied. Ch’teek’s race sensed ‘auras’ or something on top of the kinds of things we use for senses; apparently, it was a prime component of their mating rituals (which we’ll ignore, for now)...

“Let’s combine the two,” I suggested. “We’ll create a game-show version of the CAP test — break it down into pieces — and present it as a set of serious criteria for selection of a mate on a TV show like the one we just presented. We’ll stack the deck, so the guy with the highest score wins — and we’ll have a pretty boy or two there to score low and lose miserably. Preferably, we’ll have a follow-up over time showing the couple with the highest scores living happily ever after and the pretty boys failing at life...”

“Pretty boys?” Ch’teek twittered quizzically. “Wait — I understand. A specimen like the one who just mated there...”

“Exactly,” I agreed.

“This could take years — this follow-up, you’re talking about.”

“We’ll fake it,” I replied. “We’ll run the thing and then fabricate the fascinating future — convincingly, of course.”

“It is duplicity,” Ch’teek complained.

“It’s necessary,” I countered. “We don’t have the time to do it correctly.”

I watched him and his AI go at it; lying was a big no-no... “Maybe we won’t have to do that piece,” I offered. “With any luck, we can create a fad where everybody wants to take a CAP and wear a badge with the results. We can put some producers and advertising guys on it to get the idea out there, subtly, that, particularly if you aren’t visually stimulating, you can prove your worth by showing your CAP test score...”

“When we begin making extractions seriously,” Ch’teek noted, “physical appearance can be altered to suit for viable candidates...”

“When the time comes, that will provide us with considerable leverage,” I agreed. One problem with recruiting was incentives — the Darjee would accept no one who was not a volunteer — and we needed incentives. Having extensively researched the human genome in the past eighteen months, the Darjee could correct or adjust just about anything via gene therapy or using nanobots — they weren’t looking for perfect bodies, but the kind of mind that espoused the characteristics that made us unique and valuable. Aggression had to be there, but tempered by honor, loyalty, intelligence, courage, inventiveness — you get the picture. The best and the brightest. Utterly unique abilities were even more thoroughly courted. The body could be fixed, but a crippled mind — or an unused or misused one — could not. Potential was important; waste of it shameful.

We made it clear, however, that we could not suffer a eugenics project; we couldn’t just cull people according to someone else’s concept of usefulness. This wasn’t as hard to put over as a concept as one might think — the Darjee recognized that it was wrong, too, and somewhat delicate negotiations were going on as to EXACTLY how we were going to select evacuees who were not volunteering for the Confederacy Department of Defense...

A month later, we were deep into it. We acquired the rights to “Average Joe” — not difficult, since the bungling of the producers had created a considerable amount of angst in the viewing public. When you KNOW you’re not perfect and you’re watching a show about some obviously not perfect guys competing for a woman, you want one of them to win — duh — something the clueless producers just didn’t seem to get ... We put out a call and CAP tested a couple of thousand male volunteers and a couple of hundred females, then began production on ‘Average Joe XIV — Getting it Right’. We put up two dozen guys with varying CAP scores and two women — a beauty with a barely passable (for later emigration) CAP of six point five out of ten and a somewhat less impressive looking chick with an eight point five. Interspersed with the usual beauty pageant crap, we inserted CAP test components and games that simulated CAP test components — for instance:

Anybody can figure out how to answer multiple-choice questions regarding moral choices — including sociopaths. The CAP test weeds these by doing what amounts to a sophisticated lie detector test while the written and oral exams are being administered — but we put together a video game for TV. The scenario was that the contestant arrives at the scene of a fire and some woman comes out wailing that her pet dog is in there. The contestant makes a choice as to what to do. Firemen haven’t arrived yet, so there is no one to dissuade the contestant, but he can choose to do nothing — and that presents a reasonable score, especially if he takes action to keep the woman from returning inside. But you CAN go in — most consider that to be expected. One of our underachievers finds A dog on the staircase — not THE dog, since the woman was very clear in her description of both the dog and its location — but at least he got that far ... More successful candidates found THE dog and rescued it, despite minor burns. But Ray, a short, narrow, balding guy with eyeglasses and a slight limp, found not only the correct dog, but the old lady being overcome by smoke in the next apartment and manages to get them both downstairs at the cost of second-degree burns. Did I mention that the game induced a certain amount of pain? Nothing real, since it was induced electrically, but distracting ... Needless to say, this did wonders for both his show scores and audience interest ... At the end of every show, whatever CAP test component we highlighted was displayed for the benefit of the two females — the REAL score, although the show scores followed the real ones closely — for their analysis, along with whatever foolishness we added in for the lightweights. The men were not told their scores, but the audience got to see them, too...

By Week Four, we knew we were succeeding; EVERYBODY was watching and they were placing bets in Vegas as to who would get whom. Next on the agenda were local announcements (everywhere) that we would be testing for the next season in your town — and when you test, you get a nice card indicating your scores to show to others. Two weeks later, totally without us having to lift a finger, some enterprising genius came up with a badge that you could wear that indicated your score in color! We rolled over and made the thing an optional but official indicator, after making the thing as proof against counterfeiting as we possibly could using RFID and holograms. By Week Ten, testing centers were being mobbed in every city in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. We couldn’t put enough teams on the ground! Fortunately, the AIs ran the booths; we built tractor-trailers with a half- dozen booths on them and put them on the roads. Testers thought that there was a human on the other side of the video screen during the oral exams, but it was an AI and composite video ... An AI could run a dozen trailers from orbit.

For Week Eight, we put out that there was a score for sexual potency, and another for technique and compatibility; for Week Nine we got permission to present a competition, which was censored in some countries and not in others — not that it stopped anyone who had an internet connection, since the full video was on the Net fifteen minutes after the show aired. Up close video of a half-dozen cocks — even though only the women knew who was connected to which one — brought the whole world up short, it seemed like; EVERYONE wanted to see the sub-score breakouts for sexual function. Some starlet got quoted as saying, “Fuck his IQ — if his dick size is on there, I want to read it!” Nobody pushed the women into the (unfilmed) sexual compatibility tests on Week Ten — they rather diffidently suggested it. And while we didn’t show them actually fucking, the results were fairly obvious ... By Week Thirteen, even the hottie knew better than to pick a pretty boy — all of their CAP scores were under five — and picked a halfway-decent-looking mid-range guy with a six and a half general score (and eight point two for sexual function). Ray and the smart chick tied the knot — and the worldwide audience went totally ballistic! One of the pretty boys got arrested for snorting coke two weeks later, and it made national news in six nations — including disparaging remarks about his CAP score...

We were off the ground with a bang! Ch’teek couldn’t believe that the whole thing could have gone any different, but then he couldn’t understand how anyone could pick a mate based upon looks, anyway ... All we had to do was shine the spotlight on little Ray and his woman and success gravitated to them; efforts to capitalize on their notoriety by the bottom tier of also-rans were pushed toward failure where possible. The top six contestants that lost out were interviewing women with marriage proposals on network television by midway through the re-run season — and visibly selecting their women of interest based upon their CAP scores, which sent women to the booths in droves!

In the meantime, several other initiatives were underway. Various ‘discoveries’ in local space were publicized as we began the softening-up process for the eventual revelations regarding alien contact and the threat. Several internecine conflicts started winding down as leaders around the world discovered we had more important things to worry about. This was sometimes risky, but it worked. World leaders met to discuss ‘issues of global importance’ and newscasters managed to convey the fact that they weren’t tap- dancing in fake peace talks, but doing SOMETHING serious...

CAP test data found other uses. Virtually everybody has done something or another illegal at some point in their life — but sociopaths are a different animal. Great care was taken to ensure that there was no visible link to testing and certainly a large percentage of the criminal class had better sense than to undergo a complete mental workup, but law enforcement officials found themselves with tips naming and locating some of the worst — especially terrorists and serial killers and others representing the worst of the worst. Oddly, many of the absolutely worst, most amoral individuals on the planet harbored the unshakable belief that they were capable of fooling the examiners and getting a good score...