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Everyone is psychic

 

Everyone in the known universe.

 

Everyone except us.

 

The Chorus of Six was happy to tell the world that the violence was all a mistake, that the tiddah hadn't realized Farida was actually alive, the visitors are our friends, they come in peace and, by the way, was there anyone a little more sentient they could talk to? 'Cause obviously Earthlings were sentient, since we'd built satellites and cities and those crazy machines that tore the mantids into orange-yellow shreds but... where were the rulers?

 

The officials in Brussels went 'round and 'round with the Six for quite some time before they realize that it was only the aliens' Italian sock-puppet who was drawing distinctions between the concepts of "ruler", "sentient" and "psychic".

 

In all modesty, I was the one who twigged to that, and my reward for this brilliant insight was, first, to get marginalized, second, to lose my job six months later and, finally, to wind up on a terrorist watch list with a bunch of trumped-up charges after my name. Remember kids: that's what happens to xenthropologists who guess right when the men in charge really, really want a wrong answer.

 

Picture, if you can, warfare with these abilities. They're not technologies, they're not developments, they're natural resources, as easy to the gifted aliens as clenching a fist. Would such battles focus on armies? No, the last thing you'd want to do is cluster your troops! That makes it too easy to break their egos in one grand sweep, or puppetize half and send them against the other half. Warfare for psychics is, you find the location where your enemy has lots of people and you move heaven and earth to get some kind of slaver mind in range. Wars are fought in idea-space, not the three dimensions of armies and aircraft.

 

Aliens don't build weapons.

 

Let me repeat that: *Aliens don't build weapons*. Until they met us, they had no concept of making a machine with no purpose beside harming others. Why would they? The carnivores either have all the fighting gear they need bestowed by nature, or they can just think their prey dead.

 

The most degraded inmate in the harshest earthly prison has a freedom of thought that is beyond 80% of the galaxy's sentients.

 

Then they came to Earth.

 

They tried to turn humans into fawning pets. They hit humans with ego breaks that would turn an average psychic into a slavering fanatic and one Earthling in a thousand was receptive enough to think that maybe he'd smelled a pleasant aroma.

 

They tried to seize control of human bodies. One in a thousand was receptive enough to get a mild tremor or facial tic.

 

They tried to kill us and one in a thousand felt their hearts briefly slow.

 

The extraterrestrials came to Earth and found a race invulnerable to attacks so commonplace that they were instinctive. A race with guns.