I cannot stress enough just how ordinary my day had been before I found out. As ordinary - I had assumed - it had been for everyone else on the planet. And I guess in a way, it was still ordinary, just a different kind of ordinary.

There’s a girl I like to sit next to in college: We only see each other twice a week for the units we have in common, but we always sit together when we see each other. At the time, I had no idea what Stella saw in me, but she was astronomically cute and liked dressing to flaunt it, even in cold weather, so I wasn’t about to complain.

We’d always pair up for the week’s practical assessment and walk together for as long as we could after class before going our separate ways. Conversation would include this and that, but would usually touch on the war, one way or another.

“Do you think we’re winning, Chris?” She’d ask.

“Of course,” I’d say, affecting what I imagined an alien might sound like while pretending to be human. “As a hu-man, I lack the cognitive capacity to doubt our mili-tary’s daily reports of success. As a galactic superpower, hu-man victory is inevitable! All glory to the hu-mans!”

She would laugh and roll her eyes and we’d change topics.

I was only slightly exaggerating, of course. Every morning, there would be new reports of planets, star systems and whole swathes of the galaxy declared completely sanitized of the barbaric Xolroxian aggressors. It wasn’t bad news as such - footage from the earliest stages of the war showed creatures that had even the most ardent monster-fuckers reconsidering their kink - but the relentless onslaught of uniformly positive news had become not just routine, but more than a little annoying.

Meanwhile back on Earth (and presumably across our multitudinous other colonies) things continued as normal. Suspiciously normal, in hindsight: The threat of galactic annihilation had united all of humanity’s myriad bickering factions, but despite the threat having been officially neutralised, they didn’t seem too keen to get their bicker back on.

Anyway, it was more than a second year college student could be bothered worrying about for very long, which is why it was the furthest thing from my mind when Stella and I were walking together and she looked around conspiratorially before asking.

“Hey, do you …