Asel Ron had once desperately wished that extraterrestrials existed. It was not because he believed in them, but because he wanted to believe in humanity. Ron began his political career as head of the Energy Committee. His early speeches called for reducing the number of passages, restricting travel, and reducing the computational load of supermassive artificial intelligences. His speeches were scientifically sound, but he lost every election. Citizens in the center demanded that passages in the periphery be closed first, while citizens in the periphery demanded that tourism in the center be banned first. People with physical bodies argued that the computational world should be scaled back, while citizens of the computational world demanded that planetary atmospheres be switched off. Everyone supported conservation. The energy they themselves used was not subject to conservation.
Ron tried to devise a compromise. His plan was to reduce consumption by the same proportion across all regions and industries. Organizations defending the right to connection objected that life and tourism could not be reduced by the same proportion, while corporations argued that reducing consumption even at highly efficient facilities was unfair. His plan never even came to a vote. Around that time, the photon deficit rate increased. The shortfall also began to appear in usable energy. Whenever energy flowed, the shortfall appeared in the same direction, as though someone were taking a share of it. A research report used the word “collector” as a metaphor. Ron turned that word into a political question. The question was no longer what humanity was doing wrong, but this: Who was doing this to humanity? Yet there was no evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Ron knew that. The claim that a civilization advanced enough to escape observation could conceal its traces was also impossible to disprove. An aide warned him that making a declaration without evidence was dangerous, but Ron replied that he would not declare that extraterrestrials existed. He would merely propose treating the possibility of their existence as a threat to survival.
The two statements had different legal meanings, but to the public they were the same statement. The day before the declaration, his daughter asked, “Was it really the extraterrestrials?” Ron answered that he did not know. She asked which possibility he hoped was true. He took a long time to answer. “I hope it was the extraterrestrials.” If humanity was responsible, humanity would have to change its way of life. If extraterrestrials were responsible, humanity could fight while preserving its present way of life. The next day, Ron announced the Declaration of Extraterrestrial Intervention. It stated that the phenomenon might be the result of an unknown intelligent action and that there would be participation in a common defense until its nature could be established. He did not use the word “attack.” Yet people believed that a war had begun. After the declaration, stellar alliances that had long been hostile to one another began sharing data. The common defense network also detected actual passage accidents and stellar disasters in advance. Regional wars declined, and the galaxy became more peaceful than before.
Ron’s approval rating rose day by day. He repeatedly acknowledged in public that he might be wrong. His supporters took this as honesty, while his opponents called it an evasion of responsibility. Neither interpretation lowered his approval rating. Surveillance devices and defensive passages built to search for the External Collector consumed vast amounts of energy. A vicious cycle repeated itself: some of the energy sent through the system to prevent the deficit disappeared again. Ron submitted a proposal to scale back the defense network. The legislature rejected it, arguing that defenses could not be reduced while the deficit continued. The extraterrestrials he had created no longer obeyed his orders. The extraterrestrials had become a real threat to civilization.