We are not friendly.

We are also not loyal.

This is The Ambassadors: Planet Earth.

An alien civilization is recruiting fifty humans. To apply, each applicant must confess their deepest secret in a submission letter.

New submission letters are released weekly. Subscribe to continue receiving classified transmissions.

To your department of defense,

My name is Xavier and something has been bothering me since we received your invitation. Whenever humans imagine extraterrestrial contact, we do so with caution. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because of everything we’ve done. Historically, whenever humans arrive somewhere new, things go very badly for whoever was already there. Having our species as the only reference point, it is only natural to project our own behavior onto you and to fear for our outcome when you arrive.

So the question occupying my mind lately is how informed you actually are about humanity. I’ve narrowed it down to four scenarios.

1. You know exactly what we are and made contact anyway. This would suggest overwhelming military superiority. Yikes for us.

2. You know what we are and believe we can be “improved”, a.k.a. bend to your liking. Humans attempt this sort of thing constantly. We call it nation-building, but soon after everything catches fire. It doesn’t work, I would suggest you give up on that idea.

3. You do not yet understand the full extent of human behavior. This is the wild card scenario. We’d both be in for a surprise.

4. You are no better than we are and simply reached interstellar travel first.

But I must admit that, while I would greatly enjoy dissecting these questions with you over a philosophical exchange, that is not the purpose of my letter. We have pressing matters. The truth is, it doesn’t matter whether you arrive as conquerors, diplomats, or tourists. We are preparing for war regardless. I believe war will begin within minutes of your arrival. Possibly sooner if one of our radar operators gets nervous.

If your intention is to conquer us, feel free to disregard this letter entirely. None of what follows will be relevant. This warning is intended only for the alternate scenarios, the ones where our extinction is not the primary objective. In those cases, I’d first like to congratulate you. It’s refreshing to encounter a civilization that managed to prevent its least emotionally stable, paranoid, and violent citizens from overseeing national security. Or, frankly, any position of power. You can call that one of our biggest political (cultural?) flaws.

Now let’s get to business. I need you to pay close attention and resist the urge to dismiss this as paranoia. I am not a conspiracist. I do work for the kind of organization conspiracists like to invent when they run out of confidence in their governments. I work for the International Extraterrestrial Response Coalition, or IERC. If you haven’t heard of us, that is by design. We are one of the best-kept secrets shared across several governments, or so we tell ourselves.

Since your invitation arrived, the coalition has been busy. We have spent years running scenarios for first contact. Thousands of them. Hostile arrival. Silent observation. Resource extraction. Religious impersonation. Contamination. But an invitation to join an ambassadors program was not one of them. That matters because unpreparedness causes panic, and panic causes bad decisions.

Before I get into the details of what I do and can do, I should clarify that I do not hold a position of influence within the IERC. I’m not a director, strategist, or advisor. I’m not even important enough to be properly monitored. But over the course of my career, I’ve learned something valuable: small acts of subtle sabotage accumulate. Bureaucracies are delicate ecosystems. Enough microscopic failures introduced in the correct places and eventually entire operations begin tripping over themselves. I suppose that is my confession to you.

Back in college, I joined a small activist group that believed public protesting was insufficient. We decided our activism would become procedural but invisible. We made a pact: wherever we ended up working, whether in government, finance, media, healthcare, or the private sector, we would interfere whenever we saw something harmful taking shape.

A friend of mine joined a large pro-life organization and intentionally corrupts address databases so protesters occasionally arrive at the wrong clinics. Will this dismantle the movement? No. But somewhere, on some random Tuesday, a woman is able to walk into a Planned Parenthood uninterrupted because thirty angry people are currently screaming outside a DMV two blocks away. That matters to us. We believe in the power of weaponized bureaucratic incompetence.

As for me, I hadn’t really had the opportunity to deploy any of our tactics within this organization. Not until now. My arrival here was the result of a misunderstanding by one of the many people who should never have been trusted with authority, yet somehow keep acquiring more of it.

Before the IERC, I worked for an aerospace startup attempting to secure government contracts and defense grants. My job was handling proposal logistics and compliance paperwork. Once I realized the genuinely macabre ambitions of our CEO, I began applying my usual methods. I delayed submissions by using outdated templates, introduced minor formatting errors that invalidated applications, forgot critical signatures, buried questionable initiatives inside procedural review loops, and occasionally sent documents to departments that technically existed but had not been operational since who knows when. Small things that had a big impact, but not enough to be flagged as sabotage. These are the kind of mistakes corporations or governments make naturally every day. I was simply too incompetent and probably one mistake away from being fired. That was until the head of my department flagged me as useful for his very own, secret agenda.

Mr. Gallner was being paid by my company to oversee my department and by our competitors to perform corporate espionage and various other activities best described by lawyers rather than employees. My apparent incompetence turned out to be useful to him. He assumed my constant procedural failures created ideal cover for his own operations, so he allowed me to continue working uninterrupted while he dismantled the company from the inside.

Eventually, things deteriorated in the way these situations usually do. Internal investigations began. Contracts disappeared. People started communicating exclusively through legal representatives. Gallner accepted a conveniently timed position elsewhere. But before leaving, he did something unexpectedly generous. As a token of appreciation, he forwarded my profile to an important yet inactive organization where my mistakes couldn’t cause immediate damage: The International Extraterrestrial Response Coalition. And that is how I gained access to humanity’s alien defense protocols.

For five years, I did absolutely nothing. In all fairness, they gave me no reason to. We operated almost entirely on hypotheticals where humanity was always the victim. Our job was to prepare contingency plans for hostile extraterrestrial contact. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when you assume you are the one being invaded. I saw no real red flags. No meaningful abuses of power. That’s because, until now, there were no actual aliens to wrong. But your invitation changed everything. It awakened the fears and ambitions of the military crowd and the profit instincts of the institutional dinosaurs. Suddenly, the right people became interested in the IERC. Everyone is getting involved now. And we’re not bracing for war. We’re embracing it. Welcoming it. Planning it.

You must be wondering why I’m telling you all of this. The fact that you approached us with an invitation before we even knew your civilization existed, combined with your apparent willingness to personally collect fifty humans from our planet, leads me to believe your technological capabilities vastly exceed our own. And even if you are genuinely peaceful, I cannot responsibly assume your species is so morally evolved that you would tolerate an attack from us without retaliation, or at the very least without applying the necessary force to permanently leave us behind on this violent little planet. No intelligent civilization could afford to be that forgiving. I certainly wouldn’t.

What concerns me is that many within the IERC have not seriously considered the possibility of overwhelming military asymmetry. They fantasize about tactical superiority like children who watched too many American science fiction films and genuinely believe bravery is an adequate substitute for, I don’t know, superior weapons. I do not want humanity destroyed because a handful of arrogant bureaucrats failed to account for the single most important variable in this entire situation: everything we still don’t know. Hence, this letter.

Not all is lost, though. I’ve managed to cause a reasonable amount of damage and, with any luck, this letter may help end this war before it begins. For example, the IERC recently began tracing ambassador packages sent to individuals requesting submission kits. Their concern, naturally, is that sustained engagement with your species, even through something as simple as these letters, could cause portions of the population to view an attack against you as immoral. Public empathy is considered a significant obstacle to military action. Put more simply: it is easier to prepare humans for war when they fear aliens instead of wanting to talk to them.

To slow the operation down, I created several shell companies that began distributing replica packages across multiple countries. Empty boxes, mostly. Some contained instruction manuals for kitchen appliances. Others contained completely unrelated office supplies. One package contained seventeen replacement blender lids. They are now tracking thousands of meaningless shipments, intercepting random civilians, and investigating warehouse employees who had the misfortune of touching cardboard at the wrong time. Most importantly, the overflow caused them to miss one very critical detail: One of their own employees ordered a real package. Me.

It is absolutely forbidden for IERC personnel to submit a letter. It is also forbidden to discuss the existence of our organization with anyone outside approved clearance channels, including spouses, relatives, and, of course, aliens. Yet here I am, violating both of those sacred rules so you understand the seriousness of this message. I would also like to clarify that I am not narcissistic enough to believe one strongly worded letter from a mid-level bureaucratic saboteur should dictate extraterrestrial defense policy. Which is why I have prepared three possible operational responses for your consideration.

Option one: Don’t come. Shut down the ambassador program entirely and find a planet populated by more emotionally stable beings to invite into your civilization.

Option two: If, after reading this letter, you still believe peaceful contact with humanity is possible, then contact me before your arrival. I can coordinate with members of my activist network to help you enter safely and avoid IERC interference. We can create distractions, reroute surveillance resources, interfere with logistics, and slow response times. We are experienced in bureaucratic disruption. I must stress, however, that nothing is guaranteed. The IERC is paranoid, heavily armed, and largely composed of people who believe every science fiction film was a documentary.

Option three: If your intention from the beginning was the eradication of Earth while preserving a limited number of humans, then I would like to formally request consideration for one of the fifty seats. In exchange, I will provide every protocol, contingency plan, tactical assumption, and operational weakness currently available to me within the IERC. I suspect that information may prove more valuable than nuclear capability. I know this planet very well.

You may choose whichever option you find most appropriate. Or none at all. Again, I may be many things, but I am certainly not arrogant enough to assume a single human should influence the fate of two civilizations. That responsibility belongs to your department.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Xavier

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