The Academy for Science and Progress was born of a different time. The 1950s. Those in power in America were convinced the end was near, no doubt because of how close they were to inaugurating a nuclear holocaust. A small countermeasure, that’s what ASP was meant to be. Amongst the hawks of war, the Academy was meant to be a dove, its sole mission the preservation of the Earth.

At the time, that mostly boiled down to sabotaging the nuclear arsenals, both here and abroad. That’s right. ASP was actively engaged in treason. When they weren’t disabling warheads, they were providing faulty intelligence or misleading spies in the field. Their own compatriots were just as, if not more, dangerous than the Soviets. Cowboys with guns bigger than their holsters. ASP saw past the fleeting lines men drew on maps to separate one country or ideology from another. Borders, after all, are temporary. Their allegiance wasn’t to a flag but to a planet, even when that loyalty meant disloyalty to one’s own homeland.

By and by, the shadowy leadership at the top of the Academy began to recognize the sheer magnitude of a much greater threat. Nuclear war, thermonuclear war, that hadn’t gone away. We were still dancing on the ledge of destruction with our eyes closed. But, for all the danger that we posed to ourselves, nothing compared to the threat the rest of the universe posed to us.

The cases of Project Bluebook represented only a small fraction of the encounters we had with those from elsewhere. Aliens. Spacemen. The frightening thing about the Bluebook cases was that, at least for a long time, we could come up with no explanation for what occurred. Even the men who knew of aliens, of their capabilities, of how much further ahead they were than us in just about everything, couldn’t wrap their heads around the Bluebook cases.

Bluebook changed everything. Bluebook convinced us that we had to play nice with those we used to consider our mortal enemies. The Soviets, yes, but the French, too. The Iranians. Even the North Koreans, eventually. It was incumbent on the Academy to present the evidence from Bluebook and make the case that unless we banded together, we had no chance of surviving. Not any of us. It wasn’t easy work, but only the fools held out for anything longer than a heartbeat. The proof was there for anyone -- anyone with Top Secret clearance -- to see.

In the process, ASP grew stronger. Global buy-in meant a bigger budget and better resources. Top talent, too. All the world’s capable but unstable brutes were invited to apply. ASP demanded ruthlessness in its employees’ adherence to their existential mission. They found no better candidates than those already familiar with violence.

It has to be said that ASP achieved its goals. For a long time, at least. Threats were removed. Earth survived. Wars were mostly avoided or, at worst, abetted and isolated, like a cancer. Meanwhile, the threat from out there, the dark soup we’re floating in, was constantly monitored. Maintaining the status quo was the goal. Steady-state. No laser too big pointed in our direction. No invasions planned. No plague or pestilence from meteor or comet.

Now and then, ASP communicated with the others out there. The conversations were never very long and happened with no great frequency. The purpose of them, though, was always the same. We were gauging the temperature, reasserting our status, and begging for the continued survival of the human race.

Because, and this has to be said, we didn’t matter a lick to almost any of them. Earth? Earth wasn’t even a waystation, wasn’t even a rest along the infinitely long expanse that is the Universe. We had an unremarkable culture, no great or unprecedented technologies, and an obtusely self-centered psyche. We were so far under the radar that even our closest neighbors barely paid us any mind. Most of the interactions that did happen -- abduction, crop circles, ‘weather balloons’ -- were either outright mistakes, adolescent pranks, or the wayward, rogue actions of space lunatics. Nothing to sound the alarms over, essentially.

There were exceptions, times when the bad guys out there were taking very well-calculated, deliberate attempts at Earth. Many of them turned into Bluebook cases and probably spurred the creation of ASP. Earth’s aggressors came in many shapes and sizes: demagogues and democracies; theocracies and kleptocracies. Their reasons for pointing their weapons at us or letting loose a spacecraft or two were much less varied though.

We were a weak, disunited faction of overfed primates ripe for the picking. We were big juicy ants and they were opportunistic anteaters -- though only a very few of them actually wanted to eat us; most were content with displacing us for our molybdenum and liquid water. Of course, none of these attempts at planetary genocide worked. Sometimes it was because of incompetence on their part; an error in the math of a rocket trajectory, for instance. Sometimes, once the Academy began to learn how to operate in this new paradigm, it was because of sabotage.

But more often than not it was just dumb luck. It bears repeating that Earth lasted this long for two reasons: our sheer unimportance as a species and as a planet, plus luck. We were not divinely chosen or uniquely intelligent or even very crafty. We were just useless enough to be ignored or fortunate enough to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs.

Until recently. Our fortunes haven’t changed much but, recently, we’ve gotten a little too loud to be ignored.

What about the Milieu? Where do they come in? You can put them in the story wherever you’d like. Beginning. Middle. End. Doesn’t matter. Because, though they're the ones who happened to factor into this story, they might as well have been the Luddites or the Pharisees, or the Yellow Turbans. That it was this group of rabble-rousers, of table turners, doesn’t matter so much. Neither does their philosophy. Humanity’s brief but explosive and mostly stupid history is full of bands of primarily men who spout doomsday rhetoric to cause their own apocalypse. The Milieu is only the latest flavor.

But, all right, the Milieu. Diversity of creeds. Few things in common amongst the Communists, the Communards, the Anarchists, and the Environmentalists in their ranks save for a foundational belief that things would not get better. Call it institutional pessimism, though that’s not meant at all in a pejorative fashion: given the evidence at hand, it was perfectly normal to assume that we were in the last throes of a sad and irreversible decline.

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Everything was screwed. Reform was impossible. Our best and only shot was to start again from the ashes. Anything short of that was compromise and these were not people open to negotiation.

No wonder then, given that their ideas were antithetical to the singular belief in harmony through the status quo at the core of the Academy, that ASP sought to end the Milieu. And vice versa. They were natural enemies. A keen observer might point out that their fanaticism made them more alike than different, but neither ASP nor the Milieu was interested in the musings of keen observers.

The leaking of the Project Bluebook files, those 701 supposedly unsolved cases, was yet one more in a long list of fusillades by the Milieu. In and of itself, it should have caused no great stir or commotion, only the usual disappearances of suspects, harsh reprisals, and extrajudicial renditions. The Milieu would not succeed, they would only antagonize the flea on the backside of the bloated cow.

Others, too, would get caught up and, inevitably, harmed by the Academy’s response. This too was nothing new. In this case, the young lady at the hotel, the divorcees, and the antique shop owners. Even that lowly foot soldier of the Milieu shot and killed along the highway. Amongst them, there was little guilt to go around, but the very nature of ASP did not allow for careful discretion in matters of retribution. Action was best taken swiftly and absolutely, with dissenting opinions only welcome well after the fact, in the form of post-mortems and after-action reports. Out-of-court settlements, too. It was generally understood to shoot first and send flowers to the funeral later.

This episode, this blip in the long and disgusting history of humanity, ought to have caused little to no discernable difference in the regular operations of the planet. It was embarrassing and it was expensive and it would require some cleanup, but it was certainly nothing that should have caused anyone who knew anything to think it was time to change course.

Except that, Earthlings weren't the only ones watching. And though we considered the whole ordeal a minor inconvenience and a sloppy mess, a dog’s mess on the carpet, for the spectators out in space, it was something of the last straw.

They didn’t care as we learned to make fire, formed vowels or consonants, etched paintings on walls or deerskin, turned rocks into blades, bent rivers to fill our fields, tricked seeds into becoming our crops, tamed beasts to til our farms, printed words on a coarse white page, crafted laws to make men hollow, crossed seas to swallow the wilds or tuned string to conduct the sounds of music.

But somewhere between the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the internet; sometime surely after the first raising of an idol, the first lynching of the wrongly accused and the first firing of a musket, our extra-terrestrial neighbors started to get concerned that we were a little unstable.

Never mind Agent Orange.

Never mind Yellow Journalism.

Never mind Instagram.

While most of their planets and moons were far enough to be safe from us and our actions, whether intentional or not, we were quickly growing to be too boorish, too stupid, too drunk on our own feeble machinations, to be ignored. It was self-interest, plain and simple. Hard to disagree with their logic, either, not with how things had been going here. We had no right, through our limitless unctuousness, to destabilize the rest of the universe. It was one thing when we were only hurting ourselves; we were getting dangerously close to hurting others, too.

The rumors trickled in slowly from credible friends and allies beyond our orbit. We didn’t have many of them, certainly, but those we did have made themselves awfully clear. Like so many offers on late-night TV, our time was limited. Forces were being assembled. Plans were being written. It would most likely be one or two swift blows rather than a full-scale invasion. Still, there were bureaucratic processes that needed to be adhered to, papers that needed to be filled out, and boxes that needed to be checked. Annihilation can be swift, but the approval process is always long. In the time that would take, Earth had something like one last chance.

That’s where the Milieu comes in. Turns out, they were right along. The only way to make things right was to really, truly tear it all down. Earth had to make itself so feeble, so nearly invisible amongst the smoke and the charred ruins of our former civilizations, that the rest of the universe would either take pity on us or forget we ever existed. Ants. Here’s the ant metaphor again. We had to be the bunch that destroyed their own mound to hide from the rain.

It was a paradox, a contradiction in terms. Survive by dying. Succeed by losing. But it was Earth’s best and only shot.

That’s where the Milieu comes in.

“And that’s why it was a shame. Dat Vinh.”

Sullivan muttered to himself, still not quite believing what he had heard. And no wonder: it would have been tantamount to treason coming from anyone else’s mouth. Heretical. Apostasy. Libelous.

Bullshit.

But from the Commanding Officer?

That made it Gospel, albeit a difficult creed for Sullivan to swallow.

“You understand what we need you to do,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. It was untrue. He didn’t know what they wanted him to do and he didn’t know why they wanted him to do it. A sea change. A window closing. Sure. They’d thrown any number of different cliches at him during their long narrative. He wasn’t any closer, though, to comprehending what might come next.

The Commanding Officer sighed heavily and wearily, like the sound an old tree makes before it falls.

“I’ve already given orders to free those members of the Milieu currently in detention.”

“All of them?”

“That’s right. Those people are all Allies now. I suppose that they were always our allies. We just weren’t wise enough to see it until it was too late. Or, almost too late.”

“And then what?”

Sullivan had to say it twice. The first time the Commanding Officer didn’t respond. No words. No coughs or labored breathing. Only silence.

“And then we let them do whatever the hell they want, short of literally destroying Earth. Everything else is fair game. And not only do we allow them to have their little fun, we abide by it, but we also facilitate it, we light the match so they can start the fire.”

It was in direct opposition to everything his adult life had been built around. He was being told, ordered by the chief of the whole Academy, to become an agent of destruction.

“I can’t--”

“You will. You will. You. Will. Do you want to know why?”

Sullivan didn’t. The only thing he wanted was for everything to go back to the way they were. Hadn’t he come to receive a medal? Wasn’t he supposed to be commended for his valor?

“Because there is no more Academy, Sullivan. I might as well come right out and say it. It’s gone. Subsumed, I suppose. What the Academy was is now part of a broader organization with a different mission statement altogether.”

Sullivan knew what words would come next out of the Commanding Officer’s mouth. That didn’t make them any easier to hear.

“The Milieu.”

Sullivan hung up the phone not long after. His immediate orders were simple. He was to make nice with Hillary, Sam, and Lilly, the girl from the hotel. They were now comrades of a sort. His orders thereafter would be communicated through new channels, but he had no illusions about what the end game would look like, even if he didn’t know what steps it would take to get there.

The Academy was gone. Enemies were now allies. Survival was only possible if they courted destruction first.