Chancellor Beuford stared across his paper-strewn desk. His laptop was open, but he hadn’t touched it in days. He sighed.
Defunded in less than a week. Almost no science department at all. And the football team was terrible this year; the alumni were upset.
Chancellor Beauford wondered if he falsify his identity and credentials and find a tiny New England college where he could grow a mustache, wear fake eyeglasses, and teach 14th century French poetry.
He had loved his science department. Everyone did. Even the students. It was small but dedicated, not well-funded but reasonably equipped. Now the State had withdrawn its funding and the science department…
..well, if you decide to devote your life to teaching science, you probably, or at least hopefully, care about it. The entire staff was far too depressed to do anything, all except Dr. Dupree, who hated science but had been forced into it by his mother decades earlier. He was last seen playing a gig at the local Goth bar wearing quite a lot of eyeshadow and doing lovely things with B minor.
So an entire ship of space aliens from multiple planets had come out of the sky. They said they were looking for new trading partners, and also just generally curious about other species in what, it turns out, was a Galaxy full of life.
Why had humans not detected it?
Because they were still using a very, very outmoded technology: science.
It turns out that something humans were one or two stages away from finding this out. They already realized that science had paradoxes and chaos and string theory and so forth, but they figured there were explanations for everything.
The next step would be figuring out that there were NOT explanations for everything and the Universe was NOT consistent at all, when you really got down to it.
The reason Humans hadn’t invented Warp Drive =that it was impossible, using Science, to travel faster that light speed. But Warp drive was critical to galactic civilization. As Science begins to break down, a certain loneliness sets in. Then a certain madness. Then, usually, war, death, extinction, very sad, bad for business, so…
…they were offering the Warp Drive for free. This would make humans much more valuable trading partners. In return, all they wanted was to do business. This was pretty wonderful for most humans.
Only the Warp Drive technology turned out to be…
…a I, three-hour ritual with pentagrams and the space aliens equivalent of Latin and we won’t say what happened to the chicken, but it got very complicated.
It turns out that Humanity’s turn away from Magic and towards science was incredibly normal for sentient species. So this group, or another like it, was very likely to show up before it could happen.
It was probably working. There was certainly still a great deal of cheering and a great deal of drinking going on. The cheering was from the students; the drinking was from both sides, but opposite reasons.
The psychology department might have helped, but the space aliens, upon hearing that we still used psychology instead of telepathy, nearly took off. They helpfully informed the psychological professionals of the world that their jobs were actually far less effectual if they hadn’t developed telepathy, and it was really weird that ours had gone in such utterly different directions. Were we ok?
Chairman Beauford sighed. He reached into his right-hand desk drawer, pulled out a folder marked “BANNED”.
He played poker with at least one guy who could pretty definitely forge some diplomas and maybe a nice doctorate from some place so podunk nobody would bother to forge it. He’d found the fellow so charming during the process of banning him from campus that he didn’t mind that the guy clearly cheated every single week; it was rather entertaining.
The guy’s number wasn’t in his phone, but it should be in the folder. He opened the folder. He flipped through it. He stopped, looked, checked, and dialed.
“Jack?” he asked. “What’s the going rate for a diploma from, I don’t know, some college in Alaska?”
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