The Cosmic Audit of Sector 4G

Arthur Dent had a towel, whereas Greg Miller had a laminated clipboard, making him infinitely more threatening to the cosmic balance. Greg was working as an auditor for the Intergalactic Bureau of Administrative Efficiency. He had a simple job to do for three hundred years – classify the planets and name them either “mostly harmless” or “highly volatile.” But now, he has been assigned to Sector 4G, which is known as Earth. His superiors told him to expect the unexpected with regards to the humans, failing to mention how weird the humans could be.

Greg sat unseen on a park bench in Chicago, clutching his electronic accounting book. He had been there for forty minutes, and his brain was ready to explode. He murmured in his communicator that the dominant species made use of very advanced digital supercomputers, which could give access to the total sum of human knowledge. Yet they mostly employed these machines to watch little domesticated predators staring blankly at the glowing rectangles. Humans called this behavior "cat memes," but Greg was sure the predators were those who really reigned supreme. A man approached his bench, shouting and making vigorous motions with his hands in the air over an "imaginary sports draft." Greg found it clear that humans often took part in psychological invisible warfare over imaginary sports games, experiencing actual cardiovascular stress.

Eager to comprehend how they lived, Greg transformed himself into a human accountant called Bob and visited a coffee house close by. In horror, he observed how a barista was making a drink for one customer, requesting that she create an iced, half-caf, oat milk, no sugar vanilla latte with extra caramel drizzle. Greg’s inner database processed the elements involved. The humans had taken a fine grain of life and ground it down with water, claiming that it originated from a mammal. Then they stripped away any natural sugars, stripped out the element that prevented sleep, and then pumped an obscene amount of sugar back into it.

The true breaking point occurred at five o'clock in the evening, when Greg followed a crowd to a facility called a gym. Inside, humans were willingly paying monthly subscription fees to mimic the backbreaking manual labor their ancestors had spent thousands of years trying to escape. One man was running at high speeds on a motorized conveyor belt that led absolutely nowhere. Another group was lifting heavy circles of iron, putting them back down, and then lifting them again while groaning like dying beasts. They had built a torture chamber and framed it as a luxury, driving motorized vehicles to a building just to walk on a machine that simulated walking outside.

On that particular night, Greg was able to submit his final report to the Galactic Council while admiring the twinkling skyline of the city below. Greg noted how humans enjoyed eating spicy foods even if it caused pain just to show off in front of their friends. In Greg’s opinion, the planet known as earth cannot be conquered not because they had some kind of weapon against invaders but due to the fact that the conquerors will get confused and lose their mind from all the craziness. The humans were covered in blankets because they liked to feel suffocated, dressed in clothing with holes because they felt fashionable, and screamed to a plastic box in rage when their colors lost the battle.