Be Careful What You Broadcast

The alien saucer picked me up from a hill overlooking a raygun-blasted Washington, D.C. Just so _cliché_. This whole invasion was a cliché. The giant ship dropping out of the sky over the White House, demanding our surrender; the fleet that followed to destroy other major cities... at least my waving of a white flag seemed to have worked. Too bad about the three billion people who had already been killed.

I was met by an insectoid alien pulled straight out of a '50s B-movie. Should have guessed.

"Look, can we just... have a... time out?"

"Oh, of course," the alien responded, in perfect English, before _melting_ into a carefully gender-neutral human form.

Another bizarre development. I pushed ahead: "Why are you doing this?"

"We saw all your 'alien-invasion' media, while we were monitoring you."

"And then what, you decided the best way to scare us would be to conform to our fiction?"

Then, dawning realization and horror on the alien's face. "Oh no, we thought... we thought this is what you _wanted_."