This is the story of a certain intelligent species in the Chroma Key Galaxy. Unfortunately, they weren’t intelligent enough.

Despite the fact that they’d developed a sophisticated civilisation down through millennia—now in high definition where available—they couldn’t help themselves when a Hollywood actor got up on stage and slapped another Hollywood actor over a perceived slight. It was the juiciest scandal they’d seen in years!

As it happened, it was also the first domino in a chain of endless disasters. A different Hollywood actor had declared his career finished, and as such this meant he could no longer be counted upon to save the day the next time an extinction level meteor wandered into the solar system—which one did.

Their last hope was another Hollywood actor, but when they begged him for a miracle he answered, “If the angels bring some sort of script that’s written in gold ink that says to me that it’s going to be really important for people to see, I might continue down the road, but I’m taking a break.” Alas, there were no angels, nor heavenly paper upon which to doodle gold ink movie dialogue.

So, plebs everywhere went back to fussing over the ‘slap heard around the world’, for what else could they do? They needed distracting from the existential terror that was a meteor steaming its way towards the polar cap. The skies turned red. The seas boiled. The Rapture even came and went—in surround sound where available. And no one was paying attention to anything other than the soothing balm of bloated Hollywood egos.

That’s right. Nobody did a goddam thing. The meteor struck. There was a cataclysm. A whole planet became a barren ball of rock in mere days. Fucking intelligent species! So not fucking intelligent enough!