Your first experiment rarely works. You shouldn’t expect it to. You’re supposed to see it as an apprenticeship project, a learning opportunity. You’ve only failed if you’ve failed to learn, etc.

My first experiment was Earth.

Sorry, Project 649BQ8. (They don’t like it when you use the local names. It usually means you’ve gone native.)

I’ll admit a certain fondness for the place.

I still think of it as a phenomenal planet, one that, quite frankly, should never have been assigned to a newbie.

Did I learn anything from my failure?

Of course I did. The protocol was the same as with any of the intelligent planets. Connect it to the network. Calibrate the existing information systems so they resonate with network frequencies. If the planet resists connection, abort the project and move on to the next.

Should I have followed protocol?

Look, I know I’m supposed to say yes here, but can we please stop ignoring the genius of what I achieved? When the planet resisted connection, I didn’t abort. I designed a new species.

Human beings, they called themselves.

I made them out of local components, then attuned their nervous systems to be conducive to network frequencies.

And damned if it didn’t work!

I nearly wept for joy when they started developing their own communication frameworks, extra-local ones, using what they’d later refer to as their language.

Once they had language, all that was left to do was to calibrate it to the network system, and we’d have the link we were looking for.

It would have been a phenomenal achievement.

What went wrong?

I’m supposed to cite the protocol breach and leave it at that. The higher ups have neither the time nor the imagination for more nuanced analysis.

But I’ve developed my own theory.

These ‘human beings’ are so attached to their ‘Earth’ that they keep trying to use their language to describe their world. It has become an obsession for them.

They cloy to their material environment so resolutely that they have forced their rarefied language upon it. It causes them great suffering. Still, they persist.

It fascinates me.

The idea that you’d link language to base matter!

And that I created a whole species devoted to that endeavour!

What a remarkable outcome!

---

like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions.