All the most important beginnings are built from an ending. Jyk’chn just wasn’t sure how to express that without deviating too far from the script he’d been handed.

It was difficult for him to believe the opportunity he’d been offered. The Flukords corporation was not known to reach out to fans. But after their acquisition of the Earth Project—and subsequently running it into the ground—the results had left their hands tied. They needed experts, and all of the actual experts on the Earth Project had been laid off or paid off for them to get here.

After 250 seasons of dominating the entertainment industry, the Earth Project had finally been canceled.

It was time to give Earth its ending.

As the ship approached signal range, the pale blue dot that had once housed all of Jyk’chn’s favorite characters grew larger on the viewscreen. Obviously, out the physical window it wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. They couldn’t approach that close without entering the dead zone around the solar system that housed it. But that was the beauty that had made the Earth Project so mesmerizing.

“Are you prepared?” the engineer asked, even though she was still fiddling with the archaic transmitter.

The tiny claws of her lower arms were well-suited to the delicate work of ensuring the device survived the trip. It wasn’t an antique. No actual radio transmitters were still in use among civilized races. It—and the dozens like it in identical chambers throughout the ship—had needed to be constructed specially for this purpose.

“Remember, though,” she continued, “because this operates on electromagnetic waves, there will be a lengthy delay. The message will not reach Earth for… What do you nerds call them, hours?”

“Not that it matters,” Jyk’chn said, twitching his mandibles in irritation. “I’m not expecting a response, and even if there was one…it would be from the humans.”

The engineer snickered at that. She knew. The humans had been Flukords’s effort to revitalize the Earth Project’s slipping ratings, and the addition had turned the shows ratings from a gentle decline into a nosedive in the last few hundred thousand years.

It was a huge hit to Flukords’s finances. They’d spent trillions on acquiring the Project, believing the price tag to be a steal thanks to the show’s forecasted continued decline, and now they were forced to shutter it entirely just over 200,000 years into its 250th season.

A colossal embarrassment.

And the humans had another disastrous effect. They were, by all interpretations of galactic law, an intelligent species.

The original idea had been solid; introducing a race of characters who would build a civilization would lead to new and exciting storylines, and the short-lived humans would mean that the rapid cast rotation would be similarly-shaped organisms for a change. It was a dream come true for merchandising. The Flukords’s financiers could have made back their investment and more had it succeeded.

Obviously, it hadn’t. And now galactic law meant that Flukords had to notify the humans before shutting down the buffers that created the dead zone. Otherwise, the shutdown could be considered an act of interstellar genocide against an uncontacted race, with penalties ten times steeper than the financial hit they were already taking.

Hence the need to bring fans in on the Project’s ending. Nobody else spoke Earth languages at the needed level besides linguistics nerds who were invested in the fandom. The humans simply hadn’t been around long enough for the formal linguistics community to become interested in them, and since the humans had come up with it without outside interference, none of the show’s producers had developed more than a passing familiarity.

As a trained multilingual translator who was the next best thing to fluent, Jyk’chn had managed to command a pretty monstrous fee for his services as an English translator, as most of the Earth Project fans who could professionally translate Earth languages had a strange affection for the human era.

In protest, most of those fans had refused to take part in their destruction.

But that just meant that Jyk’chn could accept the job, make a disproportionately large sum as a freelance translator, and happily help Flukords fulfill the legal requirements. Anything to know that the humans were getting what they deserved.

The engineer made a series of satisfied clicking noises as she activated the device.

“Showtime,” she said, gesturing with her larger upper arms at the part of the device that Jyk’chn would need to speak into.

He wanted to chide her for speaking with the device active, but the humans would just hear her speech in their native tongue. The series of rhythmic clicks and hisses wouldn’t stand out terribly from the static.

Jyk’chn made a show of holding up the script.

There was a brief feeling of vertigo. Of being one small part of something so much larger. How many of his fellow fans were in chambers just like this one around the ship? How many were readying themselves to speak in their own preferred human language into similar devices? Had some of them already started? Had some of them already finished? Or were all of them in sync right now, standing on the precipice of human extinction with script in hand, about to begin the transmission that would finally end their favorite show for good?

The feeling passed after barely a second.

It was, as the engineer said, showtime.

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“People of Earth,” he began. Speaking in English was rough on his throat and thorax, requiring him to use parts of his body that were normally reserved for mating calls to generate the sharper syllables. “It is with heavy heart that I inform you of the end of the Earth Project. After 250 seasons, the latest ratings slump has rendered us unable to continue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

The script went on a tangent which was obviously some Flukords executive trying to shift the blame away from themselves, but none of that would matter for the humans. Jyk’chn skipped over it.

“In the coming days, the buffers that have generated the dead zone around your solar system will be shut down,” he continued, picking back up a couple of paragraphs down. “This will cause the galactic system to assert itself over your world. There will be numerous side effects. Chief among them is that your world will be reverting to its state when the buffers were first activated, about a century before season one. Beings with ‘souls’ will survive the transition, and gain access to the system, but everything else will be instantly obliterated.”

He paused, unable to stop himself from going a little off-script. “I imagine this will settle a lot of your questions in short order, once it happens.”

Jyk’chn had taken a long time deliberating on the use of the word “soul” here. Most civilized languages had words for the qualities of self-awareness, intelligence, and ambition that separated beings with beast classes from those with person classes in the system. In the absence of the system when their languages were being made, humans didn’t have such a word. Soul was just the only way to be sure that English-speakers knew why they were being spared.

It would also serve Jyk’chn’s purposes. Confirming the humans’ unearned feelings of self-importance and uniqueness would drive them to keep acting as they always had.

And if they kept that up, it might just lead to their extinction all the faster.

The next section of the script was the reason Jyk’chn had wanted this job. Flukords had included a small section about the current system meta for survival on uncivilized planets. It advised the humans to carefully select the right classes and stat allocations, and included a number of tips and tricks that civilized cultures had cultivated over their millions of years of development.

Jyk’chn glanced at the engineer as he flipped the page over without reading any of it.

He wasn’t sure if she worked for Flukords or if she was just another contractor, but it wasn’t like she spoke English to double-check his translation. She wouldn’t know if he was skipping sections of the script even if she wasn’t pointedly trying to ignore the vibrations in his thorax. In their culture, sustained use of such noises with a near-total stranger would be considered incredibly taboo. It served as more than enough distraction that his omissions would never be reported even if she worked directly for whoever had finalized the script.

“What you might call the Prime Directive will protect you from further galactic meddling. Earth is, after all, yours,” Jyk’chn said, managing not to sneer as he said it. “There will be no invasion, nor will there be any visitors, until such time as you develop technology strong enough to contact us under your own power.” Going off-script once more, Jyk’chn added: “or until your total extinction.”

The rest of the last page of the script was obviously penned by the idiots who had pushed the humans into development. It went on and on about the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and their ability to adapt to any challenge.

Even if Jyk’chn had been a fan of the humans, he couldn’t have brought himself to spew such sap at them. It was embarrassing enough that a non-human had written it, let alone that they expected him to read them this undisguised love letter.

“The world will be returned to what you call a primeval state,” Jyk’chn said at last, once he skimmed his way down to the end of the script, “where you will face unexpected challenges. The system will give you the strength to fight for your survival, but—”

He snapped his mouth shut, mandibles twitching in irritation.

He’d nearly blundered into an important detail that might help the humans survive.

Jyk’chn had only barely caught himself before mentioning the biggest threat to their world. It had been, after all, the reason why Earth had been selected millions of years ago. The inevitable doom incubating beneath the surface was the reason that an exception to galactic law had been made in order to begin the Earth Project.

The advice probably would have fallen on deaf ears, anyway. Even with ample warning, forging friendships was not in the humans’ nature. Just the same, withholding that precious information could only lead to their destruction that much faster.

“I leave you with what has become your race’s catch phrase among the stars,” Jyk’chn continued, trying to affect a more somber tone. “Originated by the number three best human to ever live, according to popular opinion. It is, I think, the only appropriate way to sign off: so long, and thanks for all the fish.”

He made a gesture, and the engineer flipped a switch on the device, ending the transmission.

“Glad that’s over,” he grumbled, rubbing his aching sides. Normal use of English among fans was usually very short, limited to nerdy greetings and catchphrases. At least the speech had been relatively brief, after all his cuts.

“I’m surprised you agreed to this,” the engineer remarked as she started to dismantle parts of the machine. The energy source, and a few other parts, required special storage before they could jump back to civilized space. “If no translator had signed up, the Earth Project might have been forced to continue.”

“They had enough other languages covered,” Jyk’chn said with a dismissive gesture. “I know the guy they hired for the French. They could have just had him go and then dealt with whatever smaller fines the central government might issue for failing to meet galactic standards for population coverage.” His mandibles twitched again, this time with undisguised amusement. “Besides, the show hasn’t been any good since season 90. Why would I care to preserve the humans’ world?”

“You cared enough to learn their language,” the engineer pointed out, hands paused over the power supply. “If you don’t care for them, why learn to understand them?”

“They have things called paleontologists,” he explained. “They were digging up what we suspected to be our favorite characters from past seasons. In a few thousand years, it was possible they would develop the technology to literally resurrect them. You know, for a season finale or something. I wanted to know what they were saying.” He shook his head sadly. “What hope we had.”

“And?” she asked, finally removing the power supply. “Was it worth it?”

“Absolutely not,” he snapped. Mandibles twitched in irritation at Flukords’s meddling. “Their methods and tools are so primitive even now. They couldn’t learn anything of substance, and even if they developed better in the next few thousand years, their so-called work in the first few decades destroyed most of what could have been. Instead of Flukords fudging things and giving us an excuse to go back to our reruns and buy new merch for the greats, they tried to keep us focused on the humans by letting them guess at a more boring version of events that erased our favorite moments in the show.”

“What a shame,” she said, packing the power supply into the shielded container that would protect it from the jump radiation. “Good thing they put those bits into the speech about what’s to come, then. If the records were incomplete and destroyed, they might not know what they’re in for when the system hits and wipes out their world to put it back how we found it.”

“Yeah,” Jyk’chn said, trying to control his mirth. “It was nice of us to tell them what was coming.”