Once upon on a pretty blue planet

Gla’k T’ung was never fond of humans, but at the same time, he thought it was a damned shame that they were almost extinct.

Of course, Gla’k didn’t really like the flavor of ANY hominid, so he never had an investment in the arguments about how many should be harvested off the third planet from the system’s star — the “Pretty Blue Planet with Tasty Terrors” as they once called it in the Humanliner advertisements.

Part of it was true. The humans were terrifying — a very warlike species.

Gla’k had been on the first expedition to survey the rich planet — a seemingly boundless wealth of life and prestigious protein that ran around on two legs. (Okay, mostly they sat on simple technology they called “couches”, but they were capable of bipedal locomotion, just like Gla’k’s own species, the Thringians.)

But once the human defences had been suppressed, it had been easy to start harvesting them. Most of them resided in vast banks — cities, they were called and they were teeming colonies of succulent h. sapiens on the hop. But within a decade, the populations there were depleted, and the Thringian Authority called for a moratorium. But Humanliner continued trawling the less-populated parts of the planet, where there was no ban.

And then the population crashed completely. Almost all of them were gone. Certainly not enough remained to make for a commercially viable humanery. And Thringian palates had become so used to human, that there wasn’t a market for it as a delicacy.

Gla’k T’ung sort of missed the scary hominds, not because he liked a nice slab of h. sapiens on the barbecue, but damnit, without them, the landmasses of that pretty blue planet were as dead as the oceans.

Inspired by:
‘Critical danger’ warning on fish | Photo by StarMama