"And... Voila!"
Noah gesticulated excitedly towards his family's oversized satellite dish as he led his two best friends into his backyard.
Not noticing anything different about the satellite dish, Paloma raised her hand to her chin and tilted her head.
"Ummm… you've had that giant satellite dish since forever, Noah."
Noah shook his head excitedly, and pointed to a logo printed on the receiver.
"It's been improved."
Betty raised an eyebrow.
"SETI at home…"
Noah nodded.
"Dad's been noticing some weird stuff at work, and it's piqued his interest in aliens! Since we already had that dish, he figured he should put in his two cents. Our humble satellite dish is now part of a worldwide network of miniature radio telescopes that search the heavens for alien signals!"
Betty raised an eyebrow.
"What sort of weird stuff?"
Noah shrugged.
"Dad said some of the Air Force Base's counter-stealth radars have been acting up recently – picking up transient contacts that move way too fast to be aircraft. They come in really fast, stop for fifteen seconds or so, and then leave just as fast. He says it's probably a software glitch, but he can't seem to get to the bottom of it."
Betty's eyes opened wide. Noah, his eyes fixated on the wire-mesh dish, continued.
"The whole thing got Dad thinking about UFOs, and the next thing you know, I get my own radio telescope!"
Paloma frowned.
"Doesn't look very powerful to me…"
Betty shook her head.
"You'd be surprised how sensitive radio dishes are, Paloma. The Voyager probes we tossed out ages ago are more than a hundred astronomical units from the sun and have a twenty-watt radio transmitter – about as bright as a light bulb. Our radio telescopes can pick a Voyager out from the background noise in one second flat. The GPS signals your satphone picks up come from directional transmitters with a power of fifty watts – two light bulbs."
Noah nodded excitedly.
"According to the website, Dad's setup should be able to pick up a 1-watt signal from as far away as Mars."
Betty's bracelet began beeping insistently.
"Ummm… I think I ate something that didn't agree with me. May I use your bathroom?"
Noah nodded assent, and Betty shot off like a rocket.
Paloma chuckled.
"Trying to impress Betty with your own personal radio telescope, Noah?"
Noah turned beet red, and held his arms up defensively.
"No! Not at all! Uhhh… if that were true, why would I have brought you along?"
Paloma put her hands on her hips.
"To make it less obvious?"
Noah ran off towards his house.
"I need a glass of water!"
Paloma laughed.
Safe from prying eyes, Betty pressed a button on her bracelet, and saluted the heavily-encrypted, jam-resistant, bandwidth-conserving hologram of Admiral DeGill, Commander in Chief, Galactic Guardians, Orion Arm.
"Atomic Betty reporting for duty, sir."
DeGill, pipe in hand, began his briefing.
"Atomic Betty, I have a mission for you. There is trouble on Aquia."
Betty frowned. Six months earlier, the power-mad warlord Maximus IQ, ruler of a good-sized industrial fiefdom, had launched a genocidal campaign against the peace-loving Aquians, harvesting billions of sentient Aquians for pet food. With the aid of a hastily-raised Aquian militia and a self-replicating weapons factory (standard issue for all Galactic Guardians), Betty and her team had successfully halted Maximus' campaign, saving the Aquians from complete genocide.
"Since your last visit to Aquia, things have gone from bad to worse. Maximus's genocidal campaign murdered over thirty percent of Aquia's pre-genocide population of one hundred billion – including most of Aquia's political, scientific, and technical elite. Thanks to your timely intervention, nearly ten billion Aquians were successfully liberated from Maximus's factory ships, albeit with varying degrees of physical and psychological trauma."
"Unfortunately, with the loss of so large a part of their population, Aquia has since experienced economical, social, and ecological collapse. No semblance of legitimate government remains, thirty billion more Aquians have died of violence, starvation and disease, and the thirty billion survivors are locked in a free-for-all civil war. Billions have fled the planet. I regret to inform you that the ongoing civil war is being fuelled by the vast weapons stockpiles and self-replicating fabricators you left behind to arm the Aquian militia."
Betty's jaw dropped, and her eyes went wide.
"Why… why wasn't I informed of the situation sooner?"
DeGill removed the pipe from his mouth, and rubbed his… chin.
"Well, the Local Group of Galaxies is a big place. A lot is going on at any given time. Why, just yesterday a star-nation in the Perseus Arm opened war on its neighbor by hitting twelve worlds with illegal relativistic weapons. Six hundred billion are feared dead so far. We can't keep our Guardians informed of every new geopolitical development, and I do not expect my Guardians to keep track either."
Betty's mouth opened and closed as she thought of a reply.
DeGill continued with his briefing.
"Regardless, signals intelligence assets monitoring the civil war on Aquia have discovered that a faction of Aquians have successfully procured unshackled nanological weapons. As you are aware, such dangerous nano-weapons can spread between star systems rapidly and are very expensive to contain, and are as such prohibited under the Galactic Code."
Admiral DeGill pulled up a schematic of the weapon in question – a fairly generic black-market nano-plague, designed to hijack the nervous systems of its victims to turn them into plague-spreading mind-controlled zombies.
"If left unchecked, the nanobots that constitute this plague will be able to build starships to spread the infection and combat containment forces, rendering this plague especially dangerous. A task force of the Andromedan Defense Coalition is preparing to ship out for Aquia. They are scheduled to arrive in eight hours, following which the planet will be sterilized by relativistic weapons to eradicate the threat posed by this nano-weapon."
Betty's jaw dropped for the second time in as many minutes.
"A most undesirable outcome for the thirty billion survivors on Aquia, yes. Your mission objectives are threefold. Firstly, you are to reconnoiter Aquia System and report any threats to the safety of the inbound Andromedans. Secondly, you are to enforce a quarantine around Aquia, for which you are authorized to shoot down any vessel attempting to leave the planet. Thirdly, once the above objectives have been achieved, you are to attempt to prevent the deployment of the nano-weapon and recover it for safekeeping. Good luck."
Betty nodded, and saluted her commanding officer.
"Yes, sir."
As Betty ended her transmission, she realized that she couldn't cry. Sixty billion people, with hopes, dreams, and families, had died – and she couldn't shed a single tear. She was shocked and saddened, yes. But the sheer size of the number – sixty billion, many times more than Earth's entire population – was too abstract, too distant, for her puny human brain to comprehend the suffering involved.
Joseph Stalin was right. A million deaths really is a statistic.
Death on a massive scale was no less profound than a single death. But it was certainly harder to feel something about it.
Betty shook her head. She had a job to do.
"Beam me up, boys!"
END