The good news is, we have no intention of killing you.

We know that this is no relief to you. The inherent feature of a position that begins with, “The good news,” is that the bad news is coming and that it usually possesses sufficient substance to be a fool counterweight. Since the good news is the variable that has not been isolated, you must suspect that the total, once fully calculated, might end up in the realm of negative numbers, a sum that would leave any sane individual wishing he could die and seeing his survival as more curse than blessing.

You must know that this is the probability. We have no reason to care about you. We are the people who make all the real decisions in the world, who have no reason to see you as anything but non-entity, and who have shown so little concern for the typical human being that you must know that we could destroy you and everybody you care about without even the slightest conscience pang. At the very least, you must flatter yourself with the possibility that we would torture you for information, imprison you for the rest of your life, or execute you in the most agonizing manner possible; all things that remain among our options, if circumstances require.

That’s not what we intend.

You might harbor the fantasy that tracking us down to our place of power declares you such a resourceful person that we might entertain that other option, recruiting you. That is cute. We recruit the best of the best, the people who know on day one that to serve us they are selling their souls to the devil; the ones who don’t care at all, who know that time is limited and that fighting us is futile and, shrugging, figure that joining the enemy is at the very least a means of arranging a comfortable lifestyle for themselves, in the time civilization has left. We have no trouble finding such people. They are as numerous as wildflowers, and eager to be plucked. You, on the other hand, came here to get the goods on us, believing that if you found out enough you could report what you knew to the peoples of the world, and in that way give humanity the means to destroy us. It is a ridiculous conceit, when you are dealing with the masters of the world, the powers behind all the great governments and powerful corporations; and while we have recruited others like you, when we caught them in the course of their crusades, we have ways of measuring the character of people like you and know you to be an idealist, a person who would listen to our sweetest offers and fling them back in our collective face with a firm but vainglorious, “Never!” We have no illusions about you, and therefore have no offers of employment for you, let alone any seven- or eight-figure bribes that might be enough to make you go away for a while but would never be enough to fund the revolution that is so dear to your fantasies. We know, even if you do not, that you can do nothing to stop us, and we also know, even if you do not, that we need take no extraordinary measures to deal with you.

This is what saves your life.

If you were the charismatic leader of a movement that could change everything, who spoke to crowds of a million or more in the plazas of great cities, who was fated to end up occupying the halls of power yourself, who might in a few years be one of those isms who change the very nature of civilization—in short if you were infinitely more dangerous to us than you are—we would take care of you with a sniper’s bullet, or with some other weapon in the hands of a troubled loner with a hatred of authority. If that would not take care of you, if you managed a foothold in some region and your influence started to spread, we would use more drastic methods and start a war, or something. It’s not hard. Do you know how many false leaders who look like they’re making the decisions on that kind of thing, are actually our dogs, doing what we tell them to do, declaring as the enemies of their respective nations the people we need to get rid of? That is what we do to genuine inconveniences. You are, fortunately for yourself, nowhere near that inconvenient, and simultaneously, unfortunately for yourself, not worth the trouble of buying. You fall squarely between those extremes, and this is why we won’t kill you, or imprison you, or do anything of substance to you.

We are practiced at this.

The history of human civilization is the history of wealth and power being consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. It was going on millennia ago and, though some fortunes have collapsed, others are the same ones that slaughtered heretics, that traded in slaves, that maneuvered to destroy the rise of demographics inconvenient to us. We planned our courses, not perfectly but well, generations in advance; sometimes, centuries. We know now what you have been raging about all your life, that the extraction of wealth and concentration in the hands of a few is unsustainable, for you, and that is why we have sped the process, rather than moderating it. When the great disasters come—and they are not coming but already here; global warming alone being an established fact that any semi-competent researcher can find being referenced as far back as the onset of the twentieth century—when those great disasters come, and the population crashes as we all know it’s going to, we will simply jettison the infrastructure that we all know will fail to save you, and transition to the infrastructure that will save us.

No, not a Mars colony. Be real. Not space, at all.

Him? Really? Do you know how cruelly that man laughs, when one of you expresses faith that he’s serious about such nonsense? Do you really think he wants to live in three square meters, under inadequate radiation shielding? He may send one of you there. He wouldn’t give up his lifestyle.

A generation starship? You’re funny. You’ll believe anything.

No, honestly: the collapse of the ecosystem and a living hell for most of humanity is perfectly fine with us as long as we have extracted all the wealth we can, and have a comfortable island of sustainability where we can thrive, with those who serve us.

We have done the math. All that remains is construction.

And that brings us back to the question of what to do with you.

The answer is absolutely nothing.

You will be released with no charges.

You will be returned to your life.

You will be returned with all the intelligence you have collected.

And, because we know the kind of person you are, you will spend the rest of your life making a pest out of yourself, telling anybody who will listen, of what you have uncovered. You will post about it on the internet. You will make videos on YouTube. You will gather followers, none of whom will do more than share your efforts with others. You may succeed in writing a book, and you will if lucky sell it to a publishing house we own, and it may even become a shocking bestseller, and people will have long and sober discussions about it, and promise each other they will change things, and if you get famous enough some people will call you a lunatic and others will make fun of you on Late-Night Television.

You may hear some people point out that everything you say has been known for decades, that it’s based on common knowledge accessible to everybody, and that you haven’t really offered any effective solutions for getting humanity out of its predicament.

This will of course be true.

We can give you copies of things other crusaders said fifty years ago, or a hundred, or more. Or we can show you magazines that published shocking exposes of these facts just last week.

It is all available for anyone to find out.

It is not a secret.

It just won’t do anything.

But do you know how useful you will be to us, by being so boring?