They didn’t fake the money. That was important.

They built things. Start-ups. Battery co-ops, carbon offsets, urban mushroom farms. Real businesses. They paid Earth taxes. They issued payrolls. Filed for permits. Spoke on panels.

No quantum scams, no alien tech giveaways. Just efficient capitalism with a better work ethic.

The profits — real, earned, admired — went into grants. Into foundation-backed NGOs promoting plant-based diets, sustainable living, cruelty-free ethics. Billboards. Documentaries. Legislation. School programs. Lobbying. And nobody asked too many questions, because none of it was wrong.

In fact, it was all right.

Suspiciously right.

Meat consumption plummeted. Greenhouse gas emissions dipped. Public health ticked up. Climate dread stabilized — not vanished, but numbed, like pain under a manageable dose of morphine.

We called it progress. They called it procurement optimization.

Because, you see, they still cooked us.

Not all of us. Just some. At random. Abductions were clumsy — the physics didn’t allow for precision over a planet this large.

So they took what they got.

And what they got, more often than not, tasted like disappointment.

Meat eaters, they said, were a disaster.

Tough. Greasy. Notes of rage and regret.

Anyone who’d recently eaten bone broth — inedible.

But vegans? Vegans were… complex.

Clean. Subtle. Flavor-forward.

One chef reportedly wept into a braised shoulder after tasting the inner moral clarity. “This one believed in something,” she said. “You can taste it in the marrow.”

That was the point. Not conquest. Not genocide. Just a better harvest. A more reliable yield. They didn’t want to take over — they just wanted the stock to improve.

Some of us found that horrifying.

Others found it reassuring.

“They’re doing good work,” said a climate strategist. “So what if their motives are weird?”

“They run legit companies,” said a policy analyst. “They’re not manipulating us — we’re choosing this.”

“We’re not food,” someone muttered at a conference.

But the air was cleaner. The hospitals were emptier. Kids were eating bok choy on purpose.

What do you do when the enemy builds schools?

What do you call a predator that files quarterly reports?

Are we entitled to resist a better world, if the cost is the occasional sauté?

More to the point:

What happens when the people most opposed to the aliens… start tasting worse?