If six years ago you had told me that space aliens would invade and the biggest change that would happen was to make politics less divisive after a bunch of politicians started being murdered by normal people, I would never have believed it. But then five years ago they came and that is just how things are now. Who would have thought that First Contact would be so boring?

It wasn't completely without incident. China isn't a nation anymore, for instance. The invaders had only a few laws that they insisted upon, one of which was a limit on certain types of weapons. No more Nukes, H-Bombs, or anything "autonomous"; and they only gave us a little over a year to decommission everything. China, however, disregarded the rule and decided that it would be able to count itself as the world's only remaining nuclear armed superpower. Now days Hong Kong presides over most of the area, with Mongolia and North Korea having taken chunks as well. When the aliens came in and killed off everyone who was in on the plans to keep the prohibited weapons, or who willingly supported the action... lets just say they were extremely thorough. Now days North Korea has taken over the belligerence that used to be China's place on the world scene, so nothing much has changed.

Mostly things just went on as normal in international politics, with earth humans being the ones to screw things up for other earth humans. Russa and certain parts of Saharan Africa are the only places to have an actual alien overlord running the place. Earth is apparently such a backwater location that we got both humanitarian alien organizations showing up as well as "generous" investors. Most of the world heeded the alien humanitarian's advice to not give the leeches a foothold, but most is not all. The new aliens running Russa are almost completely the same as old Rusha in how they constantly trie to test the rest of the world; the only real difference is that the man in charge is green, taller, and makes empty threats about aliens invading. His normal human wife is pretty enough, as are their infant kids... somehow. I'm not going to try to figure out the genetics of how that is supposed to work. The change in leadership ended up being a good thing for Africa, at least. They are working on reversing the desert back to useful land and have brought in actual regional stability, so some say that the African alien company is better than the one that incorporated Russa. Most of the world is taking a "wait and see" approach.

As for local politics, that changed because of the "game". The way I understand the explanation it goes something like this: "wars are messy and cause collateral damage and by the end the brightest and most dedicated people on both sides are dead, so lets just kill each other in a simulation rather than in real life, ok!" At the beginning a random assortment of people got pods to get started and the plans were given to us so that people could build more of their own. None of those random people were the best or brightest, they all just seemed to be normal folks. Building the Pods themselves was ludicrously expensive, costing tens of millions of dollars each due to rare materials at first, but the price has gone down to several hundred thousand as we got used to building them. When people came out, however, they had learned and grown from their time in the virtual world. Some even came out with magic or superpowers.

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So what do you think happened when hyper-partisan politics influenced people with superpowers before enough law-enforcement Players were around to stop them? I won't say anything about which side is which, but at some point a crazy person from one side killed off a politician of their opposition. When swift justice didn't happen, arguably because the state wasn't geared up for the threat, things got bad. When certain news organizations started saying that the action might have been a good thing and tried to characterize the crazy person as a hero, then things got violent.

Apparently there are a lot fewer hate-mongers when pushing people to be violently angry at their opposition has deadly consequences when the other side retaliates. Who knew? It seems like people get along much better when other people are no longer using anger to manipulate them. At least the aliens prevented any "group actions", as those were treated as a form of warfare, and so all the trouble was with individuals. People were talking about it leading to a civil war, but there were fewer crazies and loudmouths than people expected. So when all was said and done there were around six months of relative chaos before everything just settled down. People can get used to just about anything, it seems. Aliens have invaded and yet the world continues on the same as it ever did.

I participated in exactly none of it. From my point of view nothing really changed that much. But, to be fair, I was stuck behind a screen participating in virtual battles all day. Such is the fate of a professional gamer, and I don't regret it at all. What could be better than living the dream of every high-school nerd? But eventually every gamer has to take the next step in their life. For most that means getting a "real job" and giving up on their passion. For me, thanks to a convenient alien invasion, there is an even bigger challenge I can seek to overcome.

And that is what led me to the home of one of my friends and old teammates, Greg Kemp, to see about getting into The Game.