Opportunities

Elliwiny: Watch out, he’s got a microphone! Fun fact, this reporter is the same one we see at the beginning/end of the story.

Sincerely: “But there are plenty of Humans in space already” is kind of a red herring, I think? We never really got around to explaining why that is. Opps is an alternate present* and the part where our history diverged from theirs was in the 90s when Those Who Seek made contact.

There’s also a sneaky secondary divergence where an unknown alien species had been abducting Humans in secret for centuries (or maybe it wasn’t a divergence) and then when those aliens disappeared the humans left behind took over their abandoned tech and have been doing alright ever since.

(*present when I wrote it, so the late naughties)