The Hypos drifted through CTA25OR624’s asteroid belt. Their queen, Chrissie, liked this star, but she was feeling a tad bored. Waiting for the break of day, as it were.
Her favourite event, the consummation, was still ages away. This was when their host star would bloat into a red giant, and pour energy into every Hypo within range. Then they’d feast, pack up, and swan off to the next system like a gang of interstellar freeloaders.
So, to pass the time, Chrissie poked a wormhole through spacetime. She aimed it at a soggy little planet crawling with waterbags. She adored waterbags. So entertaining. Small, bipedal puddles that argued about everything. They built flimsy towers that fell over, and produced the most ridiculous music. She particularly liked the ones who screamed into microphones while wearing Lycra. Pure art.
*
One afternoon, a scientist noticed her wormhole. He poked it with a laser. The laser bounced back with a delay that made him hop up and down like a rabid wallaby.
He bolted devices onto the laser, allowing him to peer through the wormhole at CTA25OR624’s star. With the shock of this revelation still buried in his excited little heart, he telephoned another waterbag. The second one arrived. She took one look, and both laughed. They had discovered a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
“We can solve the energy crisis!” they crowed. “We’ve saved our planet. We’ll siphon power from this distant sun.”
Word raced up the chain of command until it reached the President. They formed Force Alpha, which built a probe to traverse the wormhole. It went, it saw, and it returned dripping in data. Joyous press conferences followed. Force Beta had a bigger budget. They shipped a series of von Neumann probes through the wormhole, which assembled itself into an energy-harvesting array.
The array switched on.
*
Chrissie felt the first reduction of the star’s output and bristled. Minuscule but unexpected. It would delay consummation, and that meant delayed feasting. Hypos did not do delayed gratification.
She convened the others.
“They’re milking our sun,” Chrissie said. “If this keeps up, the consummation will be late.”
If they’d had heads, they would have all nodded.
“I’ll start the consummation early,” Chrissie announced.
A collective “Aww” rolled through the group. “But that’s no fun. We were looking forward to the slow build-up. The tension. The dramatic swelling.”
“A short-term inconvenience,” Chrissie said.
She gave the star a firm mental shove. It went nova.
A tidal wave of pure energy roared down the wormhole, scoured the waterbags’ planet clean, and left behind a polished, sterile marble.
One of the Hypos drifted closer. “Did you have to kill them all?”
Queen Chrissie considered. “Maybe not. But I hate hypocrites. They were saving their world by eating our dinner.”
The other Hypo said, “Fair enough.”
They settled back among the asteroids, already eyeing the next star system on the menu, while the ashes of a very energetic solution cooled on a distant, quiet world.
