Continental Voice
May 31, 2440
By Marisa Okafor, Opinion
Matthew Marmaduke, Freeholder of Missouri and self-described High Lord of the V’ren, wants to tour the world without owning the world’s problems.
In his now-famous car video, recorded somewhere on a Missouri back road, he looked into his phone and told us plainly that he makes “no promises” and that our “local problems are not [his] to fix.”
Many viewers applauded the honesty. Many others, quietly, asked a harder question.
If the V’ren and their chosen High Lord are not here to help solve the planetary crises the rest of us are drowning in, why are they here at all?
This is not xenophobia dressed up as policy. It is a question about the terms of an arrangement no one else remembers signing.
One million V’ren refugees crashed, quite literally, onto Marmaduke land in Missouri. He granted them sanctuary. In return, they gave him a title out of old space opera: High Lord. Since then, their ships and shuttles have stitched new lines across the sky while much of Earth still runs on patched-together grids and roads that predate our grandparents.
Every government with a camera has rushed to stand beside him. Every regional bloc wants a slice of V’ren logistics, V’ren medicine, V’ren data. Yet when asked, even indirectly, whether he intends to use that leverage to address teacher pay in Manchester, housing in Lagos, or port safety in Veracruz, his answer is a shrug framed as principle.
Not my problem. Not my mandate.
It is his right, of course, to define the borders of his responsibility. The Freehold is not a world government. The V’ren Trust is, officially, a refugee administration, not a planetary development bank. But rights are not the only axis on which politics turns. There is also perception, and legitimacy.
From Nairobi to Naples to New Delhi, people see starships overhead and are told, when they ask for help, that the man who commands those ships is too careful, too bound by contracts, too respectful of local sovereignty to intervene. At the same time, those same local elites fly to Missouri hoping for private deals.
Small wonder some citizens conclude that the entire arrangement works only for the already-powerful.
So yes, the taboo question is surfacing in comment threads and call-in shows: if the aliens are not here to help fix the world, should we tell them to leave?
Realistically, no one is towing a crashed refugee fleet off our planet. But the sentiment points to concrete options. Host nations could renegotiate landing rights, data-sharing agreements, and tax statuses. Cities could decline the photo-op visits and demand binding infrastructure compacts instead. Unions could refuse to cooperate with Freehold-linked projects until labor standards are written in, not implied.
We could, in short, stop treating access to Marmaduke and his V’ren as a mystical blessing and start treating it as what it is: a power relationship that can be questioned, limited, even revoked.
The uncomfortable truth is that many governments welcomed the V’ren because it let them outsource both hope and blame. If things get better, they can thank the aliens. If things do not, they can point toward Missouri and mutter about a reluctant High Lord.
Marmaduke has now told us that he will not play that game. The question is whether we will continue to play ours.
If the aliens stay, and they likely will, it should be on terms that make sense for more than one man’s contracts and one region’s stability. Otherwise, the quiet chorus asking why they are still here will only grow louder.
