Chapter 1

Ben was a human, in an airport, in Arizona. He had no idea that a dirt-bag Space Elf was peeping in on his intestines and frantically examining the smelly contents while taking notes and saying things like “Oh no”, and “that's impossible”, and “we're so fucked”.

Ben, if he'd been given the choice to know that, or not know that, he would have gladly chosen ignorance because today was the day! Yes! Finally, after one and a half years of sacrifice, Ben had saved up enough time off and money to go on the first real vacation of his adult life.

No parents. No friends. No real reason to do it save that Ben wanted to. No girlfriend, and for the first time, Ben was really happy to be single, because that meant he was truly, truly free to do whatever he wanted.

I joke about his 'one and a half' years of sacrifice, but really, Ben had been working his ass off. No days off, at all, working voluntary overtime and taking the hours as compensatory time off rather than money; and. . . uh, well, that's all he really did.

Oh! He also started going to the gym about nine months ago, and he's looking pretty good. If he were standing next to a bodybuilder he'd still look a little skinny, but if he stood next to a regular dude he'd at least look a little better. He'd also gotten a nice haircut, bought new clothes, and watched some youtube videos for tips on how to groom his facial hair and make it look neater.

All in all, Ben looked good, felt good, and was about to go to Hawaii for like a month.

I know, Hawaii, baby's first vacation destination, but what the hell did Ben know about where to go. He'd just woken up one morning a year and a half ago and said, “Fuck, I'm twenty-eight years old, and I've never taken a real vacation in my life. I've got a good job, I just got the first real, no-joke promotion in my life, and if I play my cards right, I could go to Hawaii with thousands and thousands of disposable dollars burning a hole in my pocket.”

Ben had been fortunate enough to get a city job when he was about twenty-five. His city wasn't the biggest city in his state, which wasn't Arizona, he only stopped by Arizona to visit his parents. What state did Ben live and work in? Doesn't matter, because spoiler alert, he's never going back there, and he's never going to see a single speck of dirt from that place again.

If anyone asked Ben how he felt about his job when he was twenty-six, about a year after he got hired, he would have had a pained, tired expression on his face, and said “It's a good job, it pays well and I have full benefits. It's a career I can do my entire life without worrying about getting fired. We're in a union, I didn't know city workers were in unions.”

Ben would have done his best to put a good face on it, but the truth was, Ben started at the bottom of the ladder, as a guy who dug ditches with a shovel, an unskilled laborer.

A well-paid laborer with really good healthcare, a retirement plan that would actually support him in retirement, union mandated breaks and a really generous vacation and sick package; but still a fucking laborer working for a bunch of old guys who couldn't figure out why Ben didn't want to get a CDL and drive a dump truck for the rest of his life like them. Ben had suffered for his decision to remain a laborer, to pass up promotion opportunities, and for his general lack of interest in football and car maintenance as a topic of interesting conversation.

Ben had been a hard worker, and everybody noticed. Then, when he was about twenty-seven, he started applying for other jobs in different parts of the city government. He applied to work in the offices, doing office work; he didn't get it. He tried to apply for a position in the warehouse, running a forklift and doing warehouse stuff; he made number one on the list, and didn't get it.

Ben was in agony by that point, the process of getting from application to interview took like five months, and he'd been passed over twice! He worried that if it happened again, people would start to think there was something seriously wrong with him, that there was “a good reason” nobody wanted to give him a job in their department. Gossip and rumors moved faster than fire in the city, and Ben realized some of the rumors might be about him.

It was then that he started doing some hardcore self-examination, just really throwing himself into the process of figuring out just what the hell was wrong with himself, which turned out to be a lot. Good for Ben, though, because he figured out that he was terrible in job interviews.

Up until that point, Ben had been working shitty job after shitty job, the kinds of work that took anyone who applied, in the order they applied. He'd been a cashier, a construction worker, a theater employee and a bunch of other things; he'd even done crime-scene cleanup for like a year, and had seen some pretty traumatic shit. He always ended up quitting, because he realized the job was a dead-end, or that it would never pay enough for him to be a 'real adult', or that he would blow his own brains out if he kept going at it. Those kinds of jobs had interviews that were short and mostly procedural, because if you had gotten the interview, you had already gotten the job.

Even his interview to get hired on as a laborer for the city had been a bit of a joke;

“Can you hold a shovel?”

“Yes sir I can!”

“Will you come to work visibly drunk, ever?”

“No sir I won't!”

“Hire this man immediately!”

His last two interviews, which had been real interviews, had gone terribly!

“Can you please explain to me a conflict you've had with a supervisor?”

“Uh. . . hang on, let me think about it. Oh, my last boss at (Insert Specific Company Name Here) was a total tightwad, you know? (He actually said her real name in an interview!) came up to us one day and started complaining about money, and I was thinking to myself about how much money she was making, versus how much she was paying us, and it didn't really sit right with me. I mean, I've seen the invoices we send out. . .” then he talked himself into a hole and talked shit about his former boss for like two minutes straight.

“Oh. Ok, next question, can you tell me about a conflict you've had with a co-worker?” The interviewer winced at that point, because Ben perked up and said;

“Ok, I've had plenty of those!”

Then, at some point, Ben had referenced a company he'd worked for, but forgot to put on his resume. Then the interviewer had started flipping through his resume and said, “um, I can't find that one, what was its name?”, and then Ben completely forgot the name of the place because he'd only worked there two months through a temp agency. Then the interviewer asked what the name of the temp agency had been, and Ben also blanked on that one. When the interviewer asked if he even remembered the name of his boss from that job, Ben started to sweat. Boy, is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

It had gone so badly that a literal voice spoke into his mind about half-way through and said, like God's verdict;

“You Will Never Get This Job.”

So, Ben, realizing his problem, got professional help. No, not a psychologist, he probably needed one, but he hired the next best thing; he hired a professional interviewer. Ben worked with them every week for months, once a week for about three hours per session, with homework. Ben spent every morning reading interview questions, thinking not about how to answer them correctly, but if he would be able to give an honest answer to them. He dug deep into his professional history and began to review nearly everything that he'd ever done in a new and critical way.

In a way, he'd been handed the tools he needed to grow from his experiences, and in the process of that growth, come up with some absolutely killer answers to any questions he got asked.

He began to realize things about himself, that he'd never noticed before, and in the process of preparing for what he considered his final shot at getting out of his shitty, bottom of the ladder job, he became a better employee, and a better person. He found that he was able to act like he was in an interview almost at all times, but not in an annoying way, in a way that made people stand up and be like “Wow, Ben's taking his job seriously. I can respect that.”

Then, he interviewed, and his hard work paid off. The interviewer shook his hand at the end and said, “That was a wonderful interview, really good job”, which was a good improvement, because the last guy who interviewed him would literally ignore and run away from Ben if he ever had the misfortune to cross paths with him. The guy would blow his cheeks out and his eyes would get wide, like he was remembering something that caused him physical pain.

Yes, Ben had just come from an absolutely wholesome journey of self-discovery and growth, he got the job; he got the big pay raise; he out-ranked all those jerks who looked down on him now, and now his rivals looked like they just sucked on a lemon; his new coworkers liked and respected him; and son of a bitch, Ben was really, really good at his new job! He felt like he was finally doing something that really allowed his best qualities to shine, and he felt like he had a good shot of running the entire department someday.

He deserved this fucking vacation, man. Ben had just become a real fucking adult, just become the kind of person a good woman would look at and say “I'd like to marry that competent, respectful, decent looking Man, with a capital 'M'”, and he might even have met her in Hawaii.

It's a real crime that he wasn't ever going to make it to Hawaii.

Oh.

Spoiler alert, but Aldus Divine, the Warden of The Empire, The Light of The Empire, The Keeper of The System, had just finished examining the contents of the last few feet of Ben's large intestines and realized that if a human ever took a shit, or even farted on another planet, that it would be an apocalyptic event for the native population.

Then, Aldus started to concoct a desperate, dangerous solution.

-

“There's no time,” Aldus muttered to himself, “not enough of it anyways, not enough for anything else. That fucking RABBIT!” Aldus screamed, picked up a data crystal and threw it as hard as he could against a wall, where it shattered with a loud, sharp noise. The pieces tinkled as they fell to the ground, and Aldus screamed and threw another crystal, then another, then another.

The crystals, well, they were the journals of Dremian, the former Warden of The Empire, and contained all the information about what Dremian had done to keep the humans on Earth.

He'd started off enthusiastic enough, triggering a rube-goldbergian series of events that would cause Earth's sun to occasionally shoot out a massive flare that would utterly devastate the human's ability to develop technology. Then, he sent a bunch of new bioweapons towards Earth on a comet, which only took about twenty thousand years to get there. If an Empire destroyer, their fastest class of ship that could deliver devastation on a planetary scale, were to rush to Earth as fast as they could, they might make the journey in two thousand years.

Lesson number one about space travel; going from one galaxy to another galaxy takes a very, very long time, even for a highly advanced, trans-galactic empire. And yes, that two thousand years is spent in a wormhole, or hyperspace, or whatever anyone wants to call it; it still takes a very long time.

Ten years to break quarantine? They might as well already be spreading around their galaxy.

“That moron!” Aldus shouted, having run out of data crystals to destroy, “How could he have been so careless!”

Yes, Dremian had been extremely enthusiastic, at first. Then, when the thrill of watching yet another rising human civilization be wiped out and sent back to the Conan the Barbarian days had faded, he got lazy. He set up a bunch of really nasty things and timed them all out so that the Earth would get torched, or asteroided, or super-volcano'ed, or cosmically irradiated, or etc., etc., etc. every one or two thousand years, give or take, for the next million years.

Apparently Dremian had been planning on extending his life, and he didn't want to have to spend even a second checking in on the disgusting, disturbing, dirty humans.

So he didn't! His math was perfect, and after the first two planned apocalypses had gone down without a hitch, he did a complete brain dump on the whole subject of Earth and went tens of thousands of years without ever checking in on them, even once.

To be completely fair to Dremian, things had been running exactly as planned for a long time, and would have continued that way, had one of Dremian's old rivals, (one Dremian had tormented and humiliated after getting elected President for Life), not caught wind of Dremian doing something odd.

He didn't know what was going on, or why, or if it was important or not; what he did know was that if he messed with it, he would be messing with Dremian, and the smug asshole probably wouldn't even notice. “Make me an NPC for the fucking children on a cradle world, I'll show you!”

And he did show him, and he snickered about it for tens of thousands of years, until an Imperial death squad had abducted him and brought him to the capital. A deathly pale Dremian explained exactly what he had done and its consequences.

The rival had graciously allowed himself to be gunned down as he ran away and tried to escape punishment. An honorable way to go as Space Elves measured it, and Dremian respected that about him, even if his actions had doomed them all.

Aldus did not respect the dead rival, or Dremian.

Ten years was a blink of an eye. Literally nothing could move that fast except The System, and. . .

The System. . .

The Space Elves like to pretend they invented The System, but that's like someone getting into the Elder Scrolls mod maker and saying they developed Skyrim.

They found it in the remains of the capital, possibly The Capital, of a primordial civilization. To this day, nobody knows whether it belonged to the good guys, or the bad guys.

The Space Elves were competent administrators of The System, but they merely thought they understood how it worked, and what its purpose was. They founded their entire galactic empire upon the wealth and resources it allowed them to accumulate. They turned their enemies into resources; thrown into The System, where they were made to fight and struggle and grow in power. Every action they took, good or bad, right or wrong, generated wealth and power for the ones who sent them there.

Where everything was recycled and reprocessed, and true death was a long time coming.

If the Elves needed some rare element in quantities which couldn't be found naturally, they asked the system. Then through an alchemy of suffering and struggle, it would grant the wish like a genie, and poof, a yottagram of that rare material that can only be found in the heart of a supermassive black hole and was completely out of reach, would appear where they wanted it.

The System could seemingly do anything, and as its administrators, the Elves reaped the benefits. The System occupied its own dimension, one that could touch any point in the universe near instantaneously.

Aldus briefly considered sending an expedition through The System and attempting to destroy humanity like that. . . then he shuddered, because, in an empire which numbered in the trillions, there wasn't a single one of them who had ever gone into The System willingly. They'd all just slit their own throats before they ever stepped foot in it.

There were worse things than death, and there were monsters in The System. Plus, there wasn't any way out, as far as the Space Elves knew. There was, however, something he could do.

The System, despite what the enemies of The Empire would claim, bitterly and only after checking to make sure nobody could report them, could not just siphon up the entire population of a planet willy-nilly.

All it had to do was get one person to say yes before it could siphon a people. Here's how it went on a typical planet, ready?

The targeted species knows about the Space Elves and their horrible weapon. The System selects a being of the target species at random and gives them a prompt with a brief message that barely and badly explains what The System is, and then asks them if they would like to initialize The System. This is known as the offer.

If they say no, then it sends the same message to another random person, but this time, it offers them some small bonus if they say yes. They'll say no, and this process repeats, with each person getting offered a better incentive to say yes than the last.

By the time it gets to the last person, it's offering something close to demi-god status in the system game world, power beyond their wildest dreams. The System would make them Arch-Demons that ruled over the weak and it would be paradise, for them.

Some planets survive the offer, and The System can only make the offer once. After that, the Space Elves had to wage a conventional war, which they almost always won anyway, but takes up more time and resources than they would like.

If during the offer someone said yes, all life on that planet is instantly inducted into The System, regardless of if they agreed to it or not.

The previous wardens, every single one of them in fact, had come upon the idea of just throwing Earth into that very convenient hole and being done with them. None had ever gone through with it because when they selected the Earth to be targeted something strange happened.

The System would speak directly to them, by name, and ask a single question.

ARE YOU SURE?

The System never communicated. The Space Elves were well aware of the fact that it was sentient, conscious, and not a computer. It was something else, but they didn't care enough to really figure it out.

What it was, though, was quiet. Until the Earth thing, it had only spoken one time, the day it was found.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE ADMINISTRATIVE CONTROL OF THE SYSTEM?

The elf in charge of the expedition had heard the words “take control”, so he obviously said yes, and the rest was history. It never said another word until the first time the Earth was in its cross-hairs, and it repeated the message every time it was targeted.

None of them knew why that message came up, but it scared the shit out of them, and none of them had ever said yes.

ALDUS DIVINE, ARE YOU SURE?

Aldus Divine said yes.

Two minutes later, some guy on his computer reading Litrpg's on the internet had a status window appear in front of his face.

Here's something about The System that the Elves never took the time to appreciate, that they never bothered to realize. The System was extremely intelligent and had an odd sense of humor. He, or she, or it, or whatever that entity would refer to itself as, must have been intimately familiar with humanity. In fact, if one were being extremely bold, they would say for The System, this was like seeing an old friend they hadn't seen for thirty years, and who hadn’t changed a bit.

Because, it didn't give that guy on the computer reading Litrpgs an explanation about what was going on, or what it was, or anything. It offered no incentive, or any indication of what was happening. It didn't need to, because it didn't matter. The System knew what kind of species it was dealing with.

No, the human had a holographic screen in front of his face with two buttons on it.

Yes. No.

The human looked at the screen, started snickering, then laughing like a madman, and pressed yes.

Because, of course he would.

He was a human being, after all.