Intergalactic Voicemail

In the beginning, there was light. Then stars. Then planets. Then, eventually, some jerk with a telescope and a superiority complex named Enrico looked up and said, “Where the hell is everybody?”

That question echoed through time, bounced off a few grad students, got written on a whiteboard, and eventually became the Fermi Paradox. Humans didn’t solve it, obviously. They were too busy yelling at their thermostats and eating Tide Pods.

But in another corner of the galaxy, roughly 82 light-years from Earth, just past the gas giant shaped like a thumbs-up, a species called the Glarnocks had a different perspective.

The Glarnocks were not a noble race. They were not wise or ancient. They were, frankly, petty bureaucratic squid-beasts with a strong passion for spreadsheets and passive-aggression. But they had one thing going for them: they had nailed the Drake Equation. Literally.

They printed it on posters. They sang it at weddings. They used it to calculate everything from alien tax rates to whether you should swipe right on a creature with four reproductive appendages and no discernible face.

Their civilization had thrived for a million years and spanned two spiral arms, all thanks to one core mission:

"Find intelligent life. Or at least someone who can return a vociemail."

So they sent out probes. Zillions of them. Slick little drones shaped like enthusiastic pineapples, each programmed to visit a planet, scan for brain activity, and ask a simple, polite question: “Hey, are you guys smart yet?”

Earth got its probe sometime in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, it landed in a RadioShack.

And died.

Still, the Glarnocks were undeterred. They figured someone would pick up eventually. They’d run the Drake numbers again. Tons of stars, lots of planets, water everywhere, some moldy bacteria here and there. It all looked good.

But centuries went by. Then millennia.

And nothing.

Not even a butt-dial.

At Glarnock Interstellar HQ, morale dropped. Meetings got longer. PowerPoint presentations got sadder.

Finally, a junior analyst named Kreeblor, who had six eyes and a caffeine addiction, snapped.

“This is a waste of slime!” he shouted at the annual Why Are We Alone? conference. “We’ve been waiting for intelligent life to respond for over 900,000 years! Maybe they’re all dead. Maybe intelligence is just a short-lived glitch between monkey brain and mushroom cloud!”

The crowd gasped. A few fainted. One Glarnock exploded out of sheer existential dread.

But Kreeblor wasn’t done. He slapped a new slide onto the holoscreen. A photo of Earth taken by one of the old pineapple probes, zoomed in on a blurry man in cargo shorts yelling at a fast-food speaker.

“Does this LOOK like a civilization that wants to join a galactic council?” he barked.

Whispers filled the room. Someone coughed in binary.

“Maybe,” Kreeblor said, “just maybe... they heard us. And decided not to answer.”

A chill settled over the room. It was the kind of chill that only comes from the realization that the universe might be ghosting you.

But then, beep.

A light blinked on the ancient comms console.

Everyone turned.

It was Earth. A signal.

The room froze. Finally. Contact.

The message came through, crackly and warped from light-years of travel.

“Congratulations! You’ve been pre-approved for a high-interest intergalactic credit line! No species denied, even if you've recently suffered a Type II extinction event!”

Static.

Then:

“To speak to a representative, press 1.”

The room stared.

Kreeblor sighed. “They invented spam before diplomacy.”

And that’s when they gave up. Not entirely, of course. They were bureaucrats, after all. But they shifted focus. The Drake Equation got a footnote:

“N may approach zero when factoring in planetary stupidity.”

As for Earth?

We kept shouting into space, certain someone would answer.
Little did we know, we were already blocked.
The galaxy was screening our calls.

And honestly?
Can you blame them?

END
Brought to you by the Glarnock Institute for Cosmic Disappointment.