The invasion started on a Monday morning, which honestly tracked.
Nadia Vasquez had been sitting at her desk in the Creston Logistics Solutions open-plan office for approximately four hours, doing the kind of data entry that slowly dissolves the part of your brain responsible for joy, when the sky turned the color of a bruise and every electronic device within three miles simultaneously displayed the same message.
ATTENTION RESIDENTS OF EARTH (DESIGNATION: SOL-3, COLLOQUIAL).
YOUR PLANET HAS BEEN ACQUIRED.
PLEASE REMAIN CALM WHILE PROCESSING OCCURS.
ESTIMATED WAIT TIME: 6-8 STANDARD UNITS.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND COOPERATION.
— THE VORATH ACQUISITIONS GROUP, A SUBSIDIARY OF STELLARCOM HOLDINGS (REGISTERED IN THE TAU CETI ECONOMIC ZONE)
Nadia stared at her monitor for a moment. Then she looked around the office. Her coworker Derek, who occupied the pod directly to her left and who had been passive-aggressively microwaving fish every single Friday for three years, was staring at his own screen with his mouth open. Priya from accounting had her phone out and was filming the window, where enormous silver shapes were descending through the clouds like someone had dropped a handful of nickels the size of Rhode Island.
"Huh," Nadia said.
She saved her spreadsheet. Fifteen hundred rows of shipping manifests weren't going to reconcile themselves, and she had a performance review at three.
The performance review was cancelled.
This was actually the most upsetting part of the day, as far as Nadia was concerned, because she had spent eleven days preparing for it. She had compiled a document. A good document, with bullet points and quantifiable achievements and everything. She had been planning to ask for a raise, and she had evidence this time, organized by category, with a summary page.
The raise was probably not happening now. For several reasons.
The Vorath — which was apparently what the aliens were called, a fact delivered to every human simultaneously via what the message described as a "complimentary cognitive announcement, no opt-out required" — were not, it turned out, the conquering-destroyer type of alien. They were the corporate type, which Nadia was beginning to think might actually be worse.
They hadn't blown anything up. They hadn't landed troops or issued demands. What they had done, with the calm efficiency of a company that had clearly done this before, was begin cataloguing.
Processing centers appeared overnight, assembled by drones from materials that definitely hadn't come from Earth. They looked like the DMV, if the DMV had been designed by someone who understood geometry only theoretically. Each one was staffed by Vorath, who were — and Nadia had not known what to expect, but this wasn't it — about five feet tall, vaguely amphibious in coloring, and dressed in matching gray uniforms that had the Stellarcom Holdings logo on the breast pocket. They were, in the most unsettling way possible, professional.
The pamphlet — there were pamphlets, actual physical pamphlets, which the drones distributed door to door — explained that all residents of SOL-3 were required to report to their nearest Acquisition Processing Center for classification and registration within thirty standard units (footnote: one standard unit equals approximately eighteen Earth hours, so you have about three weeks, please allow extra time as queues may be lengthy).
"It's like the census," said Nadia's mother on the phone that night. "You just have to go in and answer some questions."
"Mom, it's not like the census."
"You don't know that. It could be like the census."
"They bought the planet."
"The government does things like that all the time," her mother said, with the serene confidence of someone who had survived three recessions, two housing market crashes, and a homeowners' association dispute that had lasted eight years. "You fill out the forms and you go home. Nadia, are you eating? You sound thin."
Nadia was not, in fact, eating enough. She had stress-eaten all of her emergency granola bars by Wednesday.
She went to the processing center on day four, because the queue was already two weeks long and she figured she should get in it.
The center nearest her apartment was in a converted convention center that still had a banner up from a regional dental hygiene conference. The Vorath had left the banner. Nadia wasn't sure if this was oversight or a statement.
The line wound around the building twice and then disappeared inside. Nadia got in it behind a man in a postal service uniform who was still carrying his bag. He seemed to have decided that if the mail didn't stop for him, it didn't stop for aliens. Nadia respected that.
"You read the whole pamphlet?" the postal worker — his name tag said Hubert — asked her, about twenty minutes in.
"Most of it." She'd gotten bogged down in the footnotes, which were extensive. "Did you know there's a section on dispute resolution?"
"I read that part. You can appeal your classification."
"Can you."
"If you file within two standard units of receiving it and provide documentation in one of forty-seven approved formats." Hubert hoisted his bag to the other shoulder. "I've got a brother-in-law who's a lawyer. He's already looking into it."
"What's there to dispute yet? We haven't even been classified."
Hubert shrugged. "He's a lawyer. He prepares."
The line moved slowly. This was apparently a universal constant, unaffected by alien intervention.
Inside, the convention center had been reorganized into a series of stations, each staffed by a Vorath in their gray uniform. The fluorescent lighting was the same as it always was in convention centers — that specific shade of white that made everyone look like they needed more sleep and possibly a multivitamin. The Vorath, to their credit or detriment, looked equally bad under it.
Nadia was directed, eventually, to Station 14.
The Vorath at Station 14 had a name badge that read PROCESSING ASSOCIATE GHRENN (THEY/THEM, THIRD CONJUGATION) and the air of someone who had been doing this for a very long time and had seen everything and been impressed by none of it. Their skin was a mottled blue-gray. Their eyes were large and slightly gold and moved independently of each other, which Nadia was doing her best not to find unsettling.
"Name," said Ghrenn, without looking up from their screen.
"Nadia Vasquez."
Ghrenn typed something. One eye tracked to look at her while the other continued reading the screen, which was, if anything, worse than both eyes doing it at once. "Species designation. You are human?"
"Yes."
"Baseline, unmodified?"
Nadia thought about this for a moment. "I have a filling."
Ghrenn stared at her. Both eyes, this time. "A what."
"A dental filling. I had a cavity when I was nine. They put a — it's a tooth repair. With a small amount of metal."
Both of Ghrenn's eyes moved in a way that suggested they were consulting some internal resource to determine whether this was worth noting. "That falls within standard biological maintenance. Not a modification."
"Okay."
"Do you have any registered abilities? Combat rating above baseline? Psionic index?"
"I can type ninety-two words per minute," Nadia offered.
Ghrenn looked at her for a moment that went on slightly too long. "I will mark that as 'no.'"
"That's valid."
More typing. One of the other Vorath at a nearby station said something in their own language — it sounded like someone stirring gravel in a metal bowl — and Ghrenn responded without looking away from their screen. The interaction had the flat, slightly annoyed energy of every workplace Nadia had ever been in, and she found it oddly comforting.
"Occupation?" Ghrenn asked.
"Data entry. Logistics."
"Specify."
"I input shipping information into a database. Cargo manifests, route confirmations, billing codes." She paused. "Mostly billing codes."
Ghrenn typed this. "Education level."
"Bachelor's degree. Information systems."
"Useful skills beyond occupation?"
Nadia thought about it. "I can read a map. Paper map, I mean. And I know basic first aid." She paused again. "I make a really good risotto but I assume that's not relevant."
"Culinary skills are logged in category F, subgroup twelve," Ghrenn said. "It is marginally relevant."
"Huh." Nadia filed that away.
There were more questions. Age, health status, whether she had any outstanding legal issues (no), whether she had ever operated heavy machinery (not intentionally), whether she had any dependents (a houseplant named Gerald, which she did not mention because she suspected it would only complicate things). The whole process took about twenty minutes and had the exact same energy as renewing a driver's license, down to the moment where Ghrenn turned their screen slightly to show her a form and said, "Please confirm that this information is accurate."
Nadia leaned forward to read it.
And this was where things went sideways.
The form looked correct. Her name, her age, her address. Species: Human (SOL-3 Baseline). Occupation: Data Entry Specialist. Skills: Logistical Data Processing (Intermediate), First Aid (Basic), Cartography (Manual, Basic), Culinary (Risotto, noted).
At the bottom was a classification field, currently blank, with a dropdown menu open on Ghrenn's side of the screen. Ghrenn was scrolling through it.
"Standard classification for unmodified baseline humans with administrative skill sets is Category Seven," Ghrenn said, almost to themselves. "Administrative-Logistical, non-essential, general labor pool."
"That sounds about right," Nadia agreed, with only a small amount of internal sadness about it.
"Confirming." Ghrenn clicked.
What Ghrenn did not notice, because they had been doing this for nine consecutive hours and they had already processed four hundred and twelve humans and their second eye had been doing something independently for the last twenty minutes that was the Vorath equivalent of doomscrolling, was that the dropdown menu had a scroll sensitivity issue. It happened sometimes with this particular interface. Tech support had been notified. Tech support, as is the way of tech support across multiple galaxies and civilizations, had not fixed it yet.
The click landed two options above Category Seven.
Category Five.
Nadia Vasquez, former data entry specialist at Creston Logistics Solutions, who had once cried in a Panera because her performance review was delayed, was logged in the Vorath Acquisitions Group database as a Category Five: Combat-Capable Independent Operative with Advanced Tactical and Infiltration Potential.
It was, technically speaking, a promotion.
She didn't find out about it right away.
Ghrenn handed her a small card — hard light, she thought, it had a faint glow at the edges — that listed her registration number and classification. She glanced at it, but the category was listed as a number and a code that meant nothing to her, and she pocketed it without reading it carefully.
She went home. She fed her houseplant. She ate a bowl of cereal because she hadn't gone grocery shopping and the granola bars were gone. She watched two episodes of a cooking competition show that had been filmed before the invasion and therefore existed in a pleasingly normal world where the biggest crisis was whether someone's soufflé would hold.
Her phone buzzed at 9:47 PM.
It was an email from the Vorath Acquisitions Group ([[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])), which had apparently obtained everyone's contact information as part of the acquisition process, which was either impressively efficient or deeply invasive and probably both.
Dear Nadia Vasquez (REG #: SOL3-7742-NV),
Your registration has been processed. Your classification is: CAT-5 CIOP (Combat-Capable Independent Operative with Tactical/Infiltration Potential).
Please report to your assigned unit coordinator within one (1) standard unit for orientation and mission briefing.
Failure to report will result in reclassification as non-compliant, which carries its own set of consequences (see attached document: Non-Compliance and You: A Guide for SOL-3 Residents, pp. 1-34).
Your unit coordinator is: KAEL-7 (Designation: Field Operations, Sector Nine)
Contact: \[hard light beacon, activate card\].
Thank you for your cooperation.
— Vorath Acquisitions Group, Human Resources Division (SOL-3 Intake)
Nadia read the email twice.
Then she looked at the card she'd been given, which she'd set on her kitchen counter. It was glowing slightly more than it had been before. There was a small symbol on the back she hadn't noticed, pulsing gently.
"Oh," she said.
She picked up the phone and called her mother.
"Mom. Did your classification come back yet?"
"Yes, they emailed this afternoon. Category Eight, they said. Agricultural and domestic. Which is basically what I do anyway, I keep telling you the garden is very demanding."
"Right. Okay. Mine came back as —" She looked at the email again. "Combat operative."
Silence on the line.
"Nadia."
"I know."
"You cannot be a combat operative. You pulled a muscle carrying groceries in March."
"I'm aware, Mom."
"You called me crying."
"It was a significant amount of groceries and the elevator was out—"
"You made me listen to you describe the muscle for forty minutes."
"Okay, I understand that this seems inconsistent, but—"
"Did you tell them about your back?"
"It wasn't a back thing, it was a shoulder—"
"Did you tell them?"
Nadia looked at the pulsing card on her counter. "I think there may have been a data entry error," she said.
There was a pause on her mother's end that had a specific texture to it — the texture of a woman who had raised Nadia through childhood, adolescence, two career pivots, and a relationship that everyone had seen coming apart except Nadia, and who therefore had a refined understanding of when her daughter was about to do something inadvisable.
"You should appeal," her mother said.
"The appeal process requires documentation in one of forty-seven approved formats and has to be filed within two standard units."
"So thirty-six hours. How long have you had this email?"
Nadia checked the timestamp. "About fifteen minutes."
"Well," said her mother. "You have time."
She did not, in fact, have time.
Not because the deadline was unreasonable, but because at 11:15 PM, someone knocked on her door.
Nadia looked through the peephole. The person on the other side was human — youngish, maybe mid-twenties, with the kind of cheekbones that suggested good genetics and the kind of dark circles that suggested they hadn't slept since Tuesday. He was wearing civilian clothes, which had a very specific kind of rumpled quality to them, like someone who had been wearing the same outfit for several days and was aware of this but had decided it was not the current priority.
He knocked again.
"Ms. Vasquez? I'm not Vorath, I just want to clarify that upfront. My name is — I go by Ozzy. I'm with a group. We have some information about your classification that you might find—" He seemed to choose his next word carefully. "Relevant."
Nadia opened the door with the chain on.
Ozzy looked at her through the gap. His eyes were brown and had the slightly frantic quality of someone who had recently revised their understanding of the universe and had not fully caught up with themselves yet. "Hi."
"Hi. How do you know my classification?"
"We have someone who can access the processing database."
"That sounds illegal."
"I think the whole acquisition process is arguably illegal," Ozzy said, "but that's kind of a separate conversation. Can I come in? I've been standing in your hallway for a while and your neighbor across the hall has looked out twice."
Nadia glanced across the hall. Mr. Henriksen's door was closed, but the shadow under it suggested he was standing directly behind it. Mr. Henriksen had called the super to complain about Nadia's wind chimes once. She doubted he would let an alien invasion stop him from monitoring the hallway.
"Show me ID," she said.
Ozzy blinked. "I — human ID or—"
"Whatever you have."
He showed her a driver's license. It said his full name was Oswald Petyr Kim, he was twenty-six, and he was listed as five-foot-ten, which was a mild exaggeration. "We also have a website," he said, "but the internet's been kind of inconsistent since Tuesday."
Nadia looked at the license, looked at Ozzy, looked at the pulsing card on her counter, and made a decision that she would later describe, in the memoir she would eventually write and title I Did Not Sign Up For This, as "not her best decision, but also not her worst, given the context."
She undid the chain and let him in.
Ozzy sat on her couch and accepted the glass of water she offered because she didn't have anything else to offer since the cereal had used her last clean bowl and she wasn't about to bring out the good mugs for someone who showed up at her door at 11 PM.
"Okay," she said, sitting across from him in the chair she'd gotten from a Facebook Marketplace sale two years ago that was extremely comfortable and she would fight someone over. "Explain."
"You've been classified as a Cat Five," Ozzy said. "Combat operative."
"I'm aware. There's been an error."
"Right, yes, probably. The error rate on the processing has been—" He tilted his head. "Anyway. The thing is, Cat Fives are being recruited for active operations. The Vorath are planning to use classified human operatives as part of their — it's complicated."
"Summarize it."
He looked at her for a moment with an expression that suggested he appreciated directness and was slightly surprised to find it here. "The Vorath aren't just acquiring Earth for themselves. They flip planets. Buy, catalog the resources, organize the population by utility, and then either integrate into Stellarcom's holdings or sell to a third party. They're using local operatives — that means humans, in this case — to do a lot of the ground-level work during the transition, because it's cheaper than importing staff."
"So they'd be employing us."
"In a manner of speaking. Cat Fives specifically get field work. Investigation, negotiation, some amount of—" He made a gesture that could have meant several things. "Physical conflict resolution."
Nadia looked at the card on the counter. It had shifted from a gentle pulse to something more like a steady glow, which she suspected meant it was escalating from please respond to we have noted that you have not responded. "And you're here because—"
"Because there's another option." Ozzy leaned forward, forearms on knees, in a posture that said I have been rehearsing this and I want to get it right. "Not everyone who gets classified as a Cat Five is a mistake. Some of them actually have relevant skills. And there are people — humans, a few others — who are trying to work from the inside of the acquisition process to get better terms for Earth. Better classification outcomes, legal status protections, limits on what Stellarcom can actually do with the population." He paused. "We need people with Cat Five clearance to access certain parts of the system. People who are willing to actually show up and take the operative assignment, at least on paper."
"You want to use my misclassification."
"We want to offer you a choice about how to use it. You can appeal — and you might win, but the backlog on appeals is already enormous and you'd probably spend months in a gray-area holding status while it processes, which has its own complications. Or you can—"
"Show up," Nadia said.
"Show up," Ozzy agreed.
She sat with this for a moment.
The cooking competition show was still paused on her TV. A chef was caught mid-expression, holding a plate of something that looked like it had gone wrong in an interesting way. The contestant's face said: this is not what I intended, but I am committed to it now.
"The coordinator they assigned me," Nadia said. "Kael-7. Do you know anything about them?"
Ozzy's expression shifted in a way that was not entirely reassuring. "A bit."
"Good things?"
"Kael-7 is very—" He seemed to be searching for the right word. "Effective."
"That could mean anything."
"They have an excellent mission success rate."
"So does a flamethrower."
Ozzy looked at her for a moment. "Okay, fair. They're difficult to work with. They have very specific expectations and they don't—" Another search for words. "They've had some issues with previous operative assignments."
"What kind of issues?"
"The kind where the operatives requested reassignment."
"All of them?"
"Most of them."
Nadia exhaled. "Fantastic."
"The one who didn't request reassignment has been with them for three years and is apparently very successful."
"Do they still have all their limbs?"
Ozzy hesitated for just a fraction of a second too long.
"Ozzy."
"All the important ones," he said.
He left at 12:30, after she'd agreed to at least think about it and had taken the card he offered with a contact frequency for his group, which was called — and she'd had to make him repeat this — the Terrestrial Interests Advocacy and Coordination Hub, which he acknowledged had a bad acronym and they were working on it.
Nadia stood in her kitchen after he left, looking at the two cards on her counter. Hers from Vorath, pulsing with increasing urgency. His, matte black with a small white symbol that he'd said she could activate by holding it for three seconds.
She should appeal. She should absolutely appeal. She had no combat training, no operative skills, no relevant experience. Her most tactically complex accomplishment in recent memory was navigating her office's extremely political seating chart during the third-quarter reorganization. She had cried in a Panera. She had pulled a muscle carrying groceries.
She picked up her phone and started a draft email to the Vorath Acquisitions Group appeals department.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to appeal my classification of CAT-5 CIOP, as I believe this was assigned in error. I am a data entry specialist with no combat training or relevant tactical experience. I believe I should be reclassified as—
She stopped.
Stared at the draft.
Thought about the performance review that had been cancelled. About the eighteen months she'd spent entering billing codes into a database. About the way Ghrenn had typed no with one hand while their other eye watched something on their screen and neither had seemed particularly interested in the fact that she was a person.
She thought about what Ozzy had said: better classification outcomes, legal status protections, limits on what Stellarcom can actually do with the population.
She thought about Derek and his fish.
She deleted the draft.
She picked up the Vorath card and held it until it stopped pulsing and emitted a soft tone, which she assumed meant it had registered her response.
Then she went to bed, because it was late and whatever was going to happen next was going to happen whether or not she'd had eight hours of sleep, and she was at least going to be rested for it.
Her last thought before she fell asleep was that she should really go grocery shopping.
Her second to last thought was that she hoped the important limbs thing had been a joke.
It probably hadn't been a joke.
She went to sleep anyway.
In the Vorath Acquisitions Group regional coordination office for Sector Nine of SOL-3's eastern continental division, a unit coordinator designated Kael-7 received confirmation of their new operative's check-in and pulled up her file for the fourth time that evening.
They read it again. Data entry. No combat record. No tactical training. Ninety-two words per minute.
They sent a message to their supervisor requesting clarification on the classification.
Their supervisor, who had processed forty-seven reclassification requests that day and was out of patience for all forty-eight of them, responded: FILE IS CONFIRMED. OPERATIVE ASSIGNMENT STANDS.
Kael-7 looked at Nadia Vasquez's registration photo for a long moment.
She was looking slightly to the left of the camera, as though something had caught her attention mid-photo, with the expression of someone who had just remembered something they'd forgotten and was deciding whether it was worth going back for.
Kael-7 had worked with twelve human operatives.
They had, statistically, found this experience unrewarding.
They filed the confirmation and began preparing the orientation briefing, with the quiet, specific resignation of someone who could see exactly how this was going to go.
They were, as it happened, completely wrong.
But that was tomorrow's problem.