Apocalyptic Near Miss

In the final days, before the Covid-19 virus began its twelfth and final surge, there was a brief moment in history that could only be described as the last Golden Age of North America. The population halved, and there was general prosperity across the nation. Of course, not long after that, the human population on Earth was abruptly reduced to a few hundred healthy, Covid-immune couples in a hunter gatherer tribe in Kenya in East Africa, due to a chance simultaneous mutation of both the virus and a particular subset of the Kenyan tribal members. From there, the human population remained stagnant and the gene pool, having passed through the most stringent of bottlenecks, became very specialized. Homo Sapiens was at last in very real danger of becoming extinct. 

This is when, finally, the UFOs came for real. It may have seemed like they were just waiting for just such an opportune moment, but in reality it was merely a coincidence that they came to our planet at a time when any resistance they would encounter came only from a relatively few young men with spears, and that only because the young men were restless. They were humans, after all, and the instinct for wanderlust and warfare that had been squelched by their culture so effectively for so many generations was beginning to reassert itself, which of course was inevitable. 

The aliens were cocky. They paid about as much attention to the humans they found as they did to the zebras. This wasn’t surprising. On a scale of one to a hundred, the aliens might have had an intellect of 100, the zebras three, the humans five. The only thing that made the aliens nervous was the almost complete lack of predictability among the humans, and when the first alien was killed as a result of a splendid spear throw, the remaining aliens went back to their ships to reassess the situation. They had encountered predators before but never a murderous race, and they judged it was in their own best interest to move on.