Visions of Jupiter: Volume 0

~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~

Once the conflict finally began, the war didn?t last long at all. Our early efforts, our initial salvo, started a dramatic collapse in business. The aliens themselves inadvertently made their situation worse.

We were very careful that our campaign didn?t hurt any living beings and we really didn?t want to damage property, but we certainly didn?t stop short of humiliating them. There is a practical limit to how long people will continue going for pizza to places where aircraft are noisily circling near the ceiling while spraying silly string over the food; there's a limit to how often they will go to a burger place where remote-controlled cars attack their ankles and set off stink bombs.

We used that intolerance to our advantage.

Naturally our enemies spun some of our more dramatic assaults into news stories and spurious allegations alluding to bogus claims of evil domestic terrorism (which the media love, as it falls under the heading of not letting any good catastrophe be under-exploited and this got a lot of extra mileage from the rather confusing events). We suffered through the usual tortured prose on the important role of entrepreneurial businesses of which the burger stand was the quintessential example.

But we countered, with a rumor mill that was computerized and lethal. We had synchronized denial-of-service attack systems on their websites, supply chains, and our street teams tweeted countless (alleged) grievances against the chains. We had bloggers and pundits of all sorts at our beck and call, who were happy to promote the idea that food should, in fact, have actual nutritional content.

We had the muscle. We had the best story. We were the underdogs and they, the evil corporate empire. We even had the brand name: Fast-Food Wars.