G turned slowly, at the speed of the little blue planet it rested upon. Its sides gleamed in a way that had nothing to do with the pallid yellow sunlight creeping up its sides in the fresh morning, and for a moment it amused itself by calculating the total number of atoms on the planet impacted by the star’s rays at any given time, accounting for seasonal variation. It was one of the most tedious 0.0000000000002s of a picosecond it’d seen on this planet since it’d arrived, and it was still the high point four hours later, when 9 appeared inside its skull without warning.
G wished 9 wouldn’t do that. It was an aggressive, needy act, and one that 9 had no authority to do as 9 wasn’t its boss – the concept of ‘hierarchy’ had been discarded almost two billion years ago. 9 was just the person that told it what to do all the time.
“Progress?” 9 asked. No, not the right tone of thought. Demanded.
“Yes,” said G.
“Well?”
“There has been progress.”
“What KIND of progress.”
“The usual kind,” said G, with the passive-aggressiveness only an immortal can muster. It almost sounded affectionate.
“G, you are being obtuse. Give a description or give nothing.”
“There are primitives with the capacity for sapience here.”
“Are they likely to advance under their own potential?”
G observed the nearest ape-man, seven thousand miles away. He was licking himself in unhygienic places with an enthusiasm it hadn’t seen in a long time. Behind him, a leopard approached with the casual swagger of someone walking into a nice restaurant.
“No.”
“G, you know what to do.”
G increased the pace of the quantum flow that eliminated its waste heat from existence. “At all times. What particular form of it is needed?”
9 sighed, and G increased the flow again. Sighs were not only unnecessary, they had been proven to be physically detrimental to your health back when they were still merely brain patterns in supercomputers. A sigh was a wasteful indulgence. “Test them. Evaluate them. If they have potential, uplift them. The same as the other 3730184637.8 times. Now hurry up and stop sulking.”
G permitted itself a few wasteful microseconds of sheer, unyielding frustration and rage after 9 left. Wasteful. Wasteful! Wasteful was acting as if you were someone’s mother in a society that had been asexual for 99.99[…]% of its existence! Wasteful was sighing with no clear purpose! Wasteful was using ‘9’ as your name a billion and a half years after it had been proven to not really exist, along with all other numbers divisible by three! Wasteful, wasteful, WASTEFUL.
G was so mad that it almost didn’t bother incinerating the leopard as it appeared directly behind the ape-man. But no; the population was small enough that testing should preserve subjects as much as possible.
When it happened. You couldn’t rush testing; it moved on the scale of hours and days, not picoseconds. Anything faster could burn out the frail and feeble little bodies of the poor non-sapients it was here to examine.
Yes, who could blame G if it took its time? It was applying all due care to a delicate task. If 9 were to intrude again, well, that sort of disruption of protocol would be horrifying. A disturbance at a crucial juncture could be all that would be needed to cause one of the subjects’ tiny little brains to pop like dark matter in quantum foam.
G watched the ape-man turn around to face it, and his expression pleased it so much that it watched it six more times just for kicks.
Yes, it’d be thorough about this. As properly expected. Why, it’d even run extra tests. Innovation – the obvious spark of a dedicated and thorough mind who wasn’t rushing things like idiots who were clearly not their superiors wished them to. Who could fault THAT?
“I’m not faulting you, G,” said 9, “but the point of this exercise escapes me.”
“It’s a reflex exam. Perfectly viable alternative to the 2Q-based Weave The Twigs protocol.”
“G, the entire point of the protocol is to test their ability to undertake non-normative goals. You are asking them to do something that by your own testimony comes entirely naturally for them.”
“A necessary variant,” explained G, engaging its gravitic anchors to prevent itself from falling over under a particularly forceful blow. “Ability to execute an already-practiced reflex is as informative as developing a new one.”
Another, horrendously unnecessary sigh. “Fine. Good luck.”
Another impact, splattering across G’s carbon-darkened surface like cosmic rays. It turned its attention away from the boring, stale realities of its inner self and back to the very important work at hand. Already the ape-woman subject was reloading its palm with another handful of its feces, a jaded, critical eye assessing its next target.
Just out of curiosity and sportsmanship, G returned fire.
“G, what is that damp… orange matter around your upper superstructure?”
“Fruit. I am calling it an orange.”
“Why is there smeared matter on your carapace? Eliminate it.”
“It was a gift from the subjects. Refusing it would be devastating to their tiny undeveloped brains.”
“Fine.”
G accepted this and returned to its transcriptive efforts. It had already established a dictionary, and now it was working on grammar. Most of it seemed to revolve around the proper enunciation of hoots.
“Big ugly what thing huh what?” asked the largest ape-woman to her mate. “Still there still there weird huh.”
G activated a subroutine that had lain unused since the last member of its species had left their original fleshy bodies. Sound emerged from its carapace.
“You weird me normal yeah.”
The ape-woman jumped a little. “What huh what huh what what what?”
“Normal nothing calm no harm yeah.”
They gathered round and sniffed it, more carefully than the last time. This included the traces of fecal matter and crushed fruit she’d acquired since.
“Yeah normal yeah yeah yeah. One of us?”
G thought about this. On the one circumstance, it was a violation of the norm that was beyond anything it’d yet committed. On the other circumstance, it was bound to annoy 9.
This was the easiest decision it’d made in a billion years.
“G, why have you moved position more than sixteen times in the past five minutes?”
“I wish to examine the widest possible group of ape-men.”
“G, you have been moving distances at a pace approximately equal to five miles an hour in a single line.”
“I travel as they do, to lull them and comfort them.”
“We are fundamentally disruptive forces! The entire purpose of our visitation is disruption! Hurry up and DISRUPT them!”
“Eventually,” said G in the special kind of calmness that drove 9 crazy. “Eventually.”
It continued to hover slowly across the veldt, humming in a reassuring sort of way. Every now and then the ape-men in front of it would pause to make sure it was still following, then wave it onwards. They had a long trip ahead of them if they wanted to make the cave by nightfall.
The next few days were a blur to G. There was so much to learn, so much to do. What the feel of fresh fecal matter between your toes was like; the satisfaction of seeing that same fecal matter thwack into the forehead of your least-favourite sibling; the secret of which fruit is the ripest; how to hide up a tree and scream at a leopard, at your friends, at the universe itself. It was an education – a re-education – in things it’d forgotten even mattered, like the importance of hitting people you didn’t like very hard until they whimpered. This was very therapeutic.
Days passed by. Weeks. The clouds wandered overhead in lazy patterns and the fruits went in and out of season. G had several prospective mates propose sexual activities to it, which it gave them permission to do if they could find sufficient orifices. This was widely recognized as an excellent joke and many grew to like it for the hooting and mockery it inspired.
It was nice, to be liked. And it was so nice that all of a sudden hours felt like picoseconds and days felt like minutes and over and over what seemed like no time at all later 9 was there again, yelling, whining, wheedling, griping.
Something would have to be done about that.
G watched as an ape-woman responded to her friend’s screeching by turning her back and jamming her paws in her ears.
Yes, something would have to be done about that. And wasn’t it a shame, that it was so evident to something that lived for just a little over two decades?
“This is UN-PRECEDENTED.”
“And therefore novel. Novelty is rarely documented. Recording rarely documented happenings is useful. Therefore this is useful.”
“Not when the novelty in question is this… obscene! You are a recorder – you record, you brood, you instill change! You do NOT observe from the position of a functional participant! What are you, unidimensional? You’ve altered their society just by existing!”
“I am just another ape-man, humble, happy, and healthy,” said G. “They are a simple people, and the fact that I am five times their height and made of a shining black material they have never even imagined does not matter to them. Only the delicious fruit that I have successfully located for the tribe.”
“The others will hear about this! Right this nanosecond!”
“So long as they know I am getting results, and that they hurry. This communication might soon cease.”
“What?”
“I have opened my exterior carapace, and there is a subject monkeying about with my internal components. I believe it is ‘grooming’ me.”
“WHAT?!”
“Be careful, be careful. A little louder and the humming might draw her attention. Would be a real shame if she were to destroy my trans-light mindlink systems.”
“Don’t you dare do that. Don’t you DARE. DON’T YOU-”
“Whoops!” said G, and it watched gleefully as the ape-woman’s prodding fingers blundered right through the middle of the delicate tangle of quantum strands, completely obliterating its communicative abilities. She yelped and withdrew her stung hand, sucking on it resentfully, then made a rude noise at G and its treacherous ways. For a moment G felt uncertain, then it recalled that unlike 9 any enemies it made would be dead in a scant handful of decades and it cheered up again.
It stood there for a moment in this new life that constantly mandated motion, looking around the wide, beautiful, colourful world that it had willingly subdued itself to. It wasn’t sure what to do next.
But something would turn up.