As Zoron waited for refueling, she took notice of the growing economy that has popped up inside the Livermore spaceport itself. There were several very nice restaurants for human tourists who wanted to come eat and watch spaceships take off and land right next to them. There were also a number of duty free shops for expensive goods.

Few aliens could really afford to indulge in these luxuries, Zoron included, but for them, it was as fun to shop as it was for the tourists to gawk at aliens.

The ubiquitous advertising billboards occasionally caught her eye. Advertising preceded ink and paper in human society, and the galaxy was not unfamiliar with its use or effects. What fascinated Zoron was the amazing amount of consumer goods that were being sold, some of them she hadn't even seen before. She would have to remember to ask the human sellers about their prices and see if she could get a sample for her next shipment.

Today, she noticed a new billboard put up by some company named Terra Corp. What they were advertising, however, was not new to her, and she was very, very interested.

Terra Corp was a successful aerospace defense contractor before the aliens arrived. They made propulsion systems, and had clients in militaries and government agencies like NASA, who wanted them to make parts for anything from missiles to satellites.

The market was very lucrative. On their assembly lines, Terra Corp made the most efficient engines for light years around, and rocket launch costs on Earth were lowered into the tens of millions.

Then, the aliens came.

When the government started buying up alien ships, some of them fell into NASA's laps. As a publicly funded agency, NASA couldn't keep many secrets, both practically and legally. Their reverse engineering studies on the alien ships were quickly posted or leaked onto the Internet, depending on which day of the week it was.

Refusing to die, Terra Corp pivoted: they started adapting alien designs into their products. Terra still had several advantages over the many startups that had cropped up eyeing their business: their supply chains and talent. They invested their large cash hoard, and decided to cut their previous clients out of the loop entirely.

After a few months, they had designed the galaxy's first human galactic trade ship. They called it Terra One.

Zoron did not have a phone, but there appeared to be nothing on Earth that can't be negotiated for a small fee. A human vendor had agreed to rent her a phone for a bit. She fiddled a bit with her universal translator and started dialing.

"Terra Corp, how can I help you?" The pleasant voice of the woman on the other end.

"Hi, I was looking at a billboard for a spaceship called Terra One and was wondering if I could buy one."

"Of course, let me transfer you to our customer inquiry department."

There were a few short seconds of some strange but not unpleasant music, and a voice replied, a man this time.

"Hello, my name is Noah, sales representative for Terra. I heard you were asking about our Terra One spaceship line?"

"Yes, yes. How many credits would it cost to buy one?"

"Credits? I'm sorry, may I have the pleasure of knowing who I'm speaking with?"

"My name is Zoron. Nice to meet you, Noah," she said, and as she did, she heard some scrambling on the other end of the phone.

"Uh, Zoron, I'm going to direct you to our VP of Sales. Please hold on for just one moment."

Some more music, then a woman picked up a phone.

"Hello Zoron, I'm Erin. Welcome to Earth. How are you doing today?"

Erin was in Seattle, but she immediately agreed to fly down to Livermore to talk to Zoron.

Zoron had her spaceship moved off the landing pad into a hangar so she would not be blocking the pad for other traders.

For a small fee, of course.

Erin was in her 50s. She'd had a long career at Terra's headquarters in Seattle, right next to where Boeing assembled their rockets and planes, interrupted only by a short marriage and the birth of her only child.

She was in a meeting when an intern ran into the conference room. He took a terrified look at the dozen middle and upper management execs seated at the table, who each made his total net worth in salary every hour, now all staring at him.

The intern decided that this was probably important enough and blurted out, "there's an alien trying to buy our spaceship on the phone!"

That proved very favorable for the future career of the intern.

The flight from Sea-Tac Spaceport to Livermore only took 15 minutes. She met Zoron at the hangar. This was the first alien Erin had ever talked to.

After somewhat awkward introductions, she got down to business, "Terra One actually just entered the production phase, and the first models are scheduled to roll off the line in eight months. So far we have a lot of interest, but you're the first non-human that's called us about it. Is this your spaceship by the way? It's absolutely gorgeous!"

"Yes," Zoron said proudly, "it's been in my family for fourteen generations. I can give you a tour."

"Oh, yes. Please." And what a tour it was. Erin asked a lot of questions about various components in it as Zoron described their function. She was very knowledgeable. It was nice to talk shop with an enthusiast. Occasionally, Erin would ask a question about the internal performance of this part or that and Zoron would not know how to answer, but she did not seem bothered by that and quickly moved on.

"Wow, this is a very impressive spaceship. Wow."

Then Erin switched tracks, "as I was saying, our own Terra Ones will be ready to fly in eight months. We expect the performance specifications for sublight speed and range to be similar to what you already have, but we also boast a few features that I'm sure you've noticed on our ads."

There, she pulled out a tablet and started giving the well practiced sales pitch.

"Our FTL range is expected to be about 6-7 times longer than average alien made spacecraft due to the more efficient fuel injection, and we have a slightly bigger fuel tank. You will likely save more than 50% on reactor fuel costs alone."

There she flipped to a slide with a captivating video showing the differences between the human and alien reactor modules burning side by side.

"Because our reactor has been miniaturized, we have more space for cargo or passengers. Our passenger liner model can carry up to 92 people, or fitted with a more luxurious interior. Our cargo hauler model comes with the standard pallet rail and can carry… well, as much mass as you want. Unlike most other trader ships on the market, as long as you can fit it into the hold, it will fly no problem unless you're hauling something much heavier than tungsten composites. It has a total size restriction of about 120 cubic meters, not including the pilot cabin."

Here she flipped to a picture showing a beautiful white interior of the pilot cabin, with two comfortable looking reclining seats made of memory foam, a triple pane reinforced glass cockpit, digital touchscreen displays, HOTAS controls, and a pull out bunk.

Zoron had to close her mouth to stop from drooling all over the tablet.

"So… um… how much would the basic model cost?" Zoron had learned enough about human consumer goods to know about the add-on business model.

"The Terra One basic package is the cargo hauler. It's going to come out to seventeen million Dollars, or credits, not including taxes and fees. Your blink away cost should come to within two million of that," Erin replied automatically.

Zoron tried to keep the disappointment out of her face but was only partially successful. She was one of the wealthier traders in the galaxy, but her entire bank account had not even crossed the one million mark. Indeed, the only alien trader to become a millionaire was another Zeepil whose entry into what the humans called the "two comma club" was celebrated as a major event on Traders Only.

Seeing her expression, Erin reassured, "we also have several loan options, if you're open to those?"

Zoron shook her head. Debt = bad. She said, "thank you for the introduction. I'm sorry to have wasted your time today."

Erin was not a woman who took no for an answer, figuratively speaking. You don't get to be where she was in life that way. "Ok, what about a trade in for a pre-order? You hand us your ship, stay on Earth for a few months. We'll pay for your expenses. And when your Terra One is ready, we'll give you a significant discount. Consider it… a loan from you to us."

Up to this point, Terra had not managed to buy any alien trade ships yet. They weren't unaffordable for a corporation, but traders often did not want to end up grounded on Earth. This could be an exciting opportunity for them to inspect a live one.

"How much would the discount be," sniffed Zoron. She was skeptical about this reverse loan. This Erin human was evidently very competent and Zoron knew that whenever you felt like you were taking advantage of someone smart, you were the mark. But… Erin had a point. It's not like she could fly two spaceships at once, and she did want the new ship.

"Well, we'll have to figure that part out. I'll have my engineers come down here to take a look and we'll get you sorted."

Over the next few days, Erin and Zoron haggled over the financial details. Zoron was a good businessbeing, and Erin was a professional. In this case though, it was a classic case of a win-win. Terra Corp wanted the alien spacecraft to inspect and do research over; it was worth more to them than a single production craft. Zoron wanted the straight upgrade.

They ended up agreeing to do a like-for-like trade, Zoron's original spacecraft for a new Terra Corp production.

Also known as a barter. Irony is not dead.

They flew Zoron up to Seattle and settled her into a rented single family home in a middle class suburbia near Northgate.

She was a novelty to her neighbors for a while, and Terra took a while to finally navigate her visa through USCIS. But she settled in and got used to it.

She decided this was where she was going to retire to when she grew old and her bones started aching.

Everyone at Livermore had heard about the trade-in.

It's not that someone dug up her tax forms or someone did their due diligence on Terra Corp.

It's not that they saw Terra Corp engineers take apart her spacecraft piece by piece into carefully labelled crates and flew them around the country.

Nah, she bragged about it on Traders Only, which had a several hundred pages long thread about Zoron's proud pictures in front of her new under construction Terra One. Moderators had to restrict it after numerous unpleasant comments against Zoron and her species.

"This is a good sign, right?" Sarah said, remarking on the trade, "it's… barter but aliens are upgrading their ships to human ones." She said "barter" with a disgust on her face, as if it were a crime.

"Yes, and no," ah, it's another complicated answer from Dr Stearns, "it's great for Zoron. Looking at the deal she claimed she got on Traders Only, she sold it well above the market price. Terra just wanted to take a look at the insides. No other trader would get a trade-in value like that."

"The bad thing is, as I've started to realize and think about these past few months after the Gak disaster," he continued, "the aliens have been bleeding their economies into Earth."

"Hypothetically speaking, if you plop down a rich city into a poor area today, what would immediately happen to the poor area is very bad. The people in the city would have so much money and goods that they would start sucking up all the economy in the area like a vacuum cleaner. Say you're a farmer in the poor area, you can bring food to the city, which they don't make, but literally everyone else in the area is doing the same, so they don't have to pay you that much, and you can't buy that much stuff from the city because everything is expensive. That's the best case scenario."

"You could be… I dunno… a construction worker. You can't compete with the hundreds of people in the city who all already have contacts and experience working in the city. They're also going to come out into the poor area with their fancy machines and concrete trucks and put you out of business. Your only chance would be to move into the city to find work as well. Not ideal for everyone, but bearable."

"If you're unlucky, you're a businessman. You're immediately put out of business by people in the city because you can't compete with their scale and efficiency. In fact, the big corporate franchises in the city can easily drive most businesses in the surrounding areas into bankruptcy. Wealth and people flow one-way into the city. So while it's normally a good idea to be near a big market, the poor area doesn't always improve when there's a sudden change in their surrounding area. Sometimes, it might. It would all depend," Stearns wavered here trying to think about whether to elaborate on the cases and conditions.

"I see your analogy, but the aliens have been improving! Gak can now afford goods and food with a little bit of stimulus and aid, and some of their farms are now able to use late 19th century human farming utilities! Other worlds are industrializing too," Sarah said. She was proud of what they'd achieved so far and was not about to let Stearns' negative nancy attitude piss all over it.

"Yes," Stearns said, and sighed coming to his conclusion, "but we've been doing that at the expense of draining the technological reserves, so to speak, of the aliens. What Zoron sold Terra Corp was six, maybe seven centuries of wealth accumulation from a whole family, and if it weren't an R and D opportunity for them, it would be… oh maybe a quarter of the worth of a new Terra One."

"Imagine someone from the 1400s with the biggest shop in… say London. Imagine their children inherited it. Imagine they made all the right plays, invested in all the right things. They went all in on the tulip trade at the right time, and sold right before the bubble popped. In the 20th century, they had stocks in IBM, Microsoft, Apple at all the right times. They become the top ten richest families of their species. That's Zoron's family."

"She's the literal point oh oh oh oh one percent of the galaxy, if not her planet. And she just traded in her entire wealth for something Terra Corp is probably going to make obsolete with another version in a year because there are thousands of multi-millionaires in just America that won't mind a new space yacht. Don't get me wrong, it was the right financial move: if she hadn't traded hers in, it would be obsolete too. But you see where I'm going with this? Pretty soon, the aliens are going to run out of new technology that we want to copy."

"And our economy is going to crash too?" Sarah asked in horror.

"Oh heavens no, we'll be filthy rich, like the city in the story. I mean… probably. I'm an economist, not a fortune teller," Stearns replied, "but I'm bullish because our economy is booming from all this new alien tech. On the other hand, the aliens can't make all the stuff we're introducing because they literally don't have the infrastructure yet. Selling spaceships was the sound of a domino falling, one that we'd been hearing about for a while."

"What happened on Gak a year ago, it's going to start happening everywhere."

"Not this again, what do we do?" Wailed Jen.

"I think we caught it in time, this time. A friend of mine caught up with me last week. Apparently last year, someone wrote an article describing this exact scenario in one of the journals, and he found it while doing some research on capital flow. Anyway," Stearns went on, "we can mitigate a lot of these effects, here's what we do…"

Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration

Hearing on Alien Refugees and Migrant Workers

"Please! Please! May we have order?... Thank you." The open room was packed with people, and a few faces of unfamiliar species in the gallery too.

"I'll make this brief. We are holding this hearing today on the one year anniversary of the Great Gak Spacelift…"

"... a celebration of our values and our common interest with the galactic community..."

"... greatest gift of all, life and the pursuit of opportunity…"

"... brave men and women from all around the world stepped head first into this challenge…"

This was not brief. At all.

"... beacon of light, we strive to be a shining city on a hill for the galaxy…"

Eyes were rolling, c'mon let's get this going Senator.

"... which brings us to the purpose of this hearing: The laws of the land have remained in limbo for months, and we have debated and delayed, but the business of governance can wait no longer. We have no doubt that the rights we hold sacred, the ones enshrined in our Constitution: they apply to all sentient beings, but the question remains of how the remainder of our customs and regulations, our hundreds of years of precedence, how they will affect our relationship with our visitors from outer space."

"We will now hear testimony from several experts. Ladies and gentlemen," the Chairwoman beckoned to her colleagues on the bench, "call your witnesses."

There was a long line of experts and leaders from academia, from corporations, from unions, from colleges, from special interest groups, from every industry that would be affected by whatever came of this, including the payment company that started it all.

"Ms. Miller, your company benefits from alien labor, does it not?"

"Yes, Senator, as we are all aware," Sarah answered unsure where this line of questions were going, "we consider our payment of credits to space truckers to facilitate the Great Gak Spacelift to be a donation to the cause of sentinency."

"That's not what I'm referring to," the honorable Senator said, putting up a number of documents onto the projector, "we have records that your company has hired representatives of other species, on other worlds, in order to sell Offworld Trading Terminals. You benefit from cheap alien labor, do you not? Is that not why you are here, lobbying to allow galactic aliens to legally enter and remain in the United States for work and refuge?"

"Yes," Sarah sighed, this was going to be a long hearing, "as you know very well, Senator, our interests lie in both the galactic community and our country. Galactic Credits are the grease for the gears of galactic commerce that enable trade with the aliens and feed into our booming economy. A rising tide lifts all boats..."

Stearns beamed proudly at his boss, student, and now friend from one of the VIP seats in the galley.

You might expect that the biggest destination for galactic alien visas and green cards into America would be California, being the most populous state with the most temperate climate and all. Or maybe Texas, with the fastest growing population. Or maybe even Florida or Hawaii, for their year-round sunny beach weather. You could even be forgiven for guessing Alaska, because some aliens sure love the cold tundra.

You would be mistaken. Weather has a big effect on migration, but the number one factor is and will always be: opportunity.

A year after Gak, for a while, it was West Virginia.

West Virginia had a large mining economy. Specifically coal mining. The restrictions of which had just been lifted with the nullification of climate change. Even with the ever decreasing price of cleaner sources of energy, it was still cheaper to burn coal… if you didn't care what you were doing to the environment around you and the lungs of your children. In terms of making energy, things really didn't get much cheaper than setting rocks on fire.

For the workers who did the job, one of the most unfortunate effects of coal mining was pneumoconiosis. Also known among coal miners as black lung. Modern technology and medicine had reduced some of its risks and effects, but not all.

See… some aliens, unlike fragile humans, don't have picky lungs. Especially species from Bohor and other polluted planets that had adapted to the toxic fumes that their homeworld called an atmosphere. Companies paid for the meager cost of transporting them en masse onto Earth and put them to work. Save a little here on ventilators, a little there on masks.

A lot of the aliens don't get too picky about the amount of credits they're being paid either.

Hey dad,

I made a human friend and she let me use her phone to send this message to the trader mail office at home. My life here is great, and I am making many friends.

The air in the mines is clean and crisp compared to the ones at home. We aren't allowed to work more than 8 hours a day, but the human inspectors can't tell our faces apart, so sometimes we sneak in with a different name to work two shifts a day.

They have a sign on the wall that shows the number of days since the last accident. It is at 130 today. Can you imagine such a sign in a Gak mine? They would just never change it from zero. Do not worry about me. I am very careful. I even sometimes wear the silly looking hats they give us.

On some days, they do not let us work the mines, so I learned to drive a vehicle and deliver people to places, like a fancy security guard. This doesn't pay as much as the mines, but I meet many new people. I have even met other non-humans!

Even though my human language skills are not very good, I am learning. The mine boss has a translator, so he can help me with them.

Please stay healthy. I will send you another 300 GC this month. I miss you. Say hello to all my brothers and sisters for me.

Love, Gromor

Gromor,

Harvest is very good this year. The soil is rich with water, and the new seeds we bought at the market made so much we may not be able to collect them all before the winter sets in!

Do not worry about me or your siblings. We are all still alive. Did you find the people I was talking to you about? It is very important that you do.

Dad

"Money they send home is quickly becoming a major portion of these economies. This allows the people on those planets to buy investments into their own business. Agricultural output is up, despite the fact that less people are working in agriculture and most are moving into industrial work. Some planets are even producing materials that Earth corporations are importing in bulk, and many of them are building a multiplanetary supply chain."

"Furthermore, a large alien population has rapidly scaled the demand for a large amount of consumer goods," Stearns continued, "they can send home all they want but they still need to eat, sleep, and consume while they are on Earth. Many previously rusting towns, especially in rural areas with a lot of space and cheap cost of living are booming back up. Many of them are restarting their old factories to mass produce cheap late 19th and early 20th century machinery and consumer goods, and these are selling especially well in the better developed alien trade ports."

"So does that mean our strategy is working?" Jen asked impatiently.

"In a word, yes," Stearns summarized, "there have been massive improvements to many of the poorest economies that are now feeding their populations to richer planets, and from those to planets to Earth. We are single handedly dragging the galaxy into industrializing, though the long term effects are uncertain. If our own economy ever got into trouble, I imagine very bad things will happen to all of them."

"Ok, we'll take things one step at a time. How are our own people handling it?" Sarah asked.

"Fairly well, all things considered. There have been a few interspecies conflicts, but those are generally confined to areas where there are very few of them. I hear they make good neighbors and it's hard for people who know them to get angry at teddy bears and otters from outer space. Also, it helps that many of the jobs they have been taking are the ones that are so shitty that even the Indians and Nigerians don't want to do them."

"That's good to hear," Sarah replied, breathing a sigh of relief.

"Yup. Earth is getting richer. And this time, some of the aliens' are too."

Louisa plopped down at the couch as she got home, and started scrolling through her phone. She couldn't wait for her boyfriend to get home. He was supposed to cook today, and Gary is an excellent chef.

She noticed a new message:

Hey Louisa and Gary,

One of my sons has finally found you. We are all very good. We have a lot of food now.

I hope you are doing well. If you ever come to Gakrek again, you are welcome to stay at our house. Our roof does not leak any more.

I named two of my children after you. I hope you do not mind. I asked the trader office to attach a picture of them to send to you.

Gordorker