Spaghetti Invasion

Independence

"Has the whole world gone mad?"

It had been four years since Slippery Sam's arrest. Now, his daughter found herself scanning the news report on 'her' PDA with dismay. A free-for-all at the UN had global tensions running higher than ever. President Polk was prepared to sign an executive order expanding the draft in preparation for another world war. As if three hadn't been enough already!

The draft already in effect had nicely thinned overcrowded prisons by forcing all nonviolent convicts into some branch of the military. It had been going on for so long that most nonviolent convicts never saw prison at all. 'Belle Sprite' often wondered how her father was faring in the military.

Life without Sam had been a real test of her abilities but Belle was doing just fine. She ate the finest food- after the restaurant was closed, of course- and wore decent clothing. Her fashion tastes were simple but always of quality cloth.

The expanded draft made it even more important for Belle to remain clean, or at least not under arrest, since the expansion would include everyone with no proof of secondary education and gainful employment. In other words, without a formal high school diploma and wage statements, Belle was a prime candidate to be drafted.

The ever-present war loomed larger as the government scrambled to find soldiers. Anyone arrested without proper documentation was placed into the nearest military training facility. Belle soon found herself forced deeper and deeper into the shadows and away from the best places to ply her trade in order to avoid arrest.

It was becoming too risky to pick pockets anyway, especially when she was capable of rendering any lock, electronic or otherwise, as useless as if it weren't even there. Things could have continued in this vein indefinitely, had the aliens not arrived.

~~~

No one would ever forget the day when humans discovered that life definitely existed beyond their own solar system. A great fleet of ships of varying size, all shaped like aluminum cigar tubes and looking as if they'd escaped from a low-budget movie, arrived just beyond the moon and clustered there, coming a few at a time to hover over the earth. The giant cigar tubes had disgorged little antacid-shaped crafts with big attitude and piloted by beings vaguely humanoid, though off-white in color and elongated to resemble a child's stick-figure drawing.

Some wag in a government office somewhere was overheard to comment on the resemblance the beings held to a bowl full of spaghetti and the name stuck. The aliens became known over the entire earth as "Spaghetti men" and their space crafts were promptly dubbed "pasta plates." It would have been hard to take them seriously had the animated spaghetti-noodle people not been so bent on conquest. Italian cuisine and Asian noodles became popular fare at state dinners after the pasta-plate ships were discovered to contain a weapon most devastating.

The first nation to taste that weapon was in Southeast Asia. It so happened that some of the pasta-plate ships took up a position over the Great Wall of China just before the Chinese New Year, in order to deliver an ultimatum to that nation. Unfortunately, the government failed to notify its people of the threat before the start of the celebration and the Spaghetti men misunderstood the meaning of the multitude of rockets, fireworks and parades displayed the following day.

At first, those under the ships noticed that the day had grown unseasonably hot and took shelter. Just over an hour later, banners and paper lanterns left out seemed to spontaneously combust and burned under the intense heat of the alien weapons. The heat took three hours to build but at its peak, melted entire sections of the wall into sheets of lava. Thus, the Great Wall, having stood unbroken for millennia, became a display of the power contained in that alien technology.