Incident Report: 56BB-TT
Description: Combustion event on AZZ645 (Catalog name: Earth)
Action Taken: Added relevant information to profile
Future Prevention: None
Report by: Arthur Ingleblot, crew boss, deep mining team 012
[As recorded and transcribed by company operator 34467795, Middle Galactic Zone Staff]
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First of all, let me say that we realize that this looks very unprofessional.
Everyone assures me that these reports aren’t about assigning blame or anything, but I think it is important to put that out there. The whole team feels awful about the incident.
Secondly — and I know you guys hear this all the time — it was an honest mistake. It was just an allergy. We’ve isolated the compound that was naturally occurring in one portion of the planet’s flora. The inhabitants we met call it broccoli.
Terry had never had this nutrient on his world and it wasn’t on the planetary restriction list.
Can I repeat that? This was NOT on the restriction list that the company released to the team. I realize there are other protocol issues here and my team takes full responsibility. But this is a fact. If a planet hasn’t been fully qualified, it shouldn’t be granted visitation status.
Obviously it is a moot point now, but I’ve filed a 2553 grievance with HR.
And to address the inevitable itinerary question: No, we hadn’t planned on stopping there in the first place. But we needed a break. That was easily the worst maintained wormhole I have ever been in. Really, what exactly is the galactic refurbishment department doing these days?
Plus, Terry had been to this planet before when he worked with that team out of Andromeda. And he raved about something called a macaroni and cheese.
“Amazing!” he said. “The tiny humans make it all the time! They are adorable!”
Energy clouds can be so funny sometimes.
So we stuffed ourselves in a few corporeal bodies that looked more or less like the humans and went down to a food dispensing establishment Terry had visited before. And of course, they were out of macaroni and cheese.
Can you believe that? You make an unscheduled stop on a backwater planet to get a taste of a local delicacy, and they are out.
Terry was so angry I thought he would explode on the spot.
At this point, I was already concerned that we were creating an incident. Several humans at the food dispensing establishment were looking at us in that way that suggested our application of the blend-in directive was not all it could be.
But we were hungry. And we figured we’d just apply a memory wipe after we finished, so why not try something else?
We requested another local delicacy called pizza. We didn’t even ask for the pasta salad. Terry’s partner Alice thinks they gave it to us because Terry caused such a scene over the macaroni and cheese. She’s probably right.
When Terry got back, he had cooled down and he seemed to really like the pizza. Then he tried the pasta salad.
And that’s when he exploded.
Now let me just say right here that this isn’t my first time to work with an energy cloud. I know these things happen. I thought it was just a sneeze at first, but as he expanded I knew better.
Looking back, it’s clear what happened. This establishment made the unfortunate decision to put broccoli in their pasta salad and Terry had a reaction.
Based on a little research that Alice did after the incident, this isn’t an unusual recipe. Of course, that’s just based on ephemeral data. It’s not like we can go back in time and check, you know? But still. Another strike against the company’s restriction list.
So anyway, once the chain reaction started, our bodies were roasted with the rest of the inhabitants and we had to regenerate in the ship and keep an eye on Terry from orbit. It took a few hours to burn through his system. Allergies can be tough on anyone, even energy clouds, but he seems fine now.
The human colony was destroyed, of course. But it was instantaneous and the cute little humans probably didn’t feel much.
At any rate, we began to apply standard protocols. To hide the incident from the indigenous population, we consulted the action steps in our intel pack and followed them to the letter. We went strictly by the book.
This should be as far as our report has to go.
Unfortunately, the standard protocols reflected the same shortcomings as the dietary restrictions list. You really should have someone from corporate — someone from the planetary standards group — down here answering these questions.
With hostilities in the region high, our intel pack advised that an incident of this scale would most reasonably be masked as a nuclear event.
Can I repeat that too? The simulated nuclear event was NOT our idea. That is straight out of the intel pack.
So anyway, we followed protocol, altered the landscape, fed the memory wipe data, and left the planet.
Bing, bang, boom.
How could we know that the humans would blame each other for the incident and trigger a full-scale planetary extinction event? One simulated nuclear blast and the whole place goes to hell? You can’t blame us for that.
Needless to say, there were a lot of problems on this planet long before Terry took a bite of pasta salad.
For what it is worth, the compound profile from the broccoli has been added to Terry’s restrictions list so this should never happen again. At least until the next time corporate screws up on the restrictions list.
So, that is what happened.
If HR has a problem with this, tell them to blow it out their collective hyperspace vent ports.
This should not be reflected on the permanent travel record of any member of my team.
We are professionals.
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End transcription // End Incident Report