The Great Gigaprofessor Gorgodoola, Grandioso of Galactical Gurgitation (GQD), gazed grimly at their undergrads. A sea of kirllion fry, networked into a single neuronic web. Six hulking hecintonners princesses, abroad to learn of the Small before inheriting their mountains from their mothers. Thirty-two nuclear proxies created by agitating select radioactive wavelengths into ‘bridge sentients’ connecting a remote student’s computer complex with a ‘hyperspot’ of spatial patterning inside the classroom demarcated by a red rope and a ‘danger! Radiation hazard!’ sign.
From the fringe of Gorgodoola’s borders, a single tendril patrolled the edge of their desk with the exhausted hunger of a fryless gull; another plucked the tea-stained baleen that overhung their jaws; a third coiled their microphone closer to their speech aperture.
“Class is cancelled,” they burbled forth – and then, at the joyous rise of voices from silence and behinds from seats, louder: “and REPLACED! With a special assignment! Sit DOWN you nuisances! Down! Down! Back in seats, ears open – this is half your participation score for this course! This is your next assignment’s grade for this course! This is the easiest stack of points you’ve ever angled for! I will tell you all a story, and I will ask you questions. If at any point one of you believes you have the answer, simply raise your hand, proceed to my desk, and whisper it to me for full marks and an early ticket out of here to go do…whatever the things you do are. It’s been five thousand years. I forget. ANYWAYS, here we go!”
***
Many years ago, three students of a long-forgotten xenosapiopology course were assigned to conduct a practical survey and report of a planet of unknown, unstudied, and uncontactable people. They were given a full suite of study equipment, a comprehensive rubric, plenty of encouragement, and a standard 1:5 time dilution.
The first of these students I will call ‘A,’ to protect her identity. A descended from the assignment craft in broad daylight, on a pillar of atomic fire and landed within three hundred meters of the study target, to whom she walked up, transvocalizer in one hand and her breakfeastslab in the other and her recorderizer in the other other and her belt buckle in the other other other and she said ‘greetings, ground-dwelling creatures! Tell me of your ways!’
It was a quote from some docudramatic-fantastic series she was into, I believe.
Anyways, the study targets got along well with A. She shared some of her breakfeastslabs and lunchbricks and they shared some of their dried meat and roasted roots. She told them about her life in the andrometan sprawl and they told her about how to avoid being eaten by large carnivorous ambush predators. They showed her how to knap flint and she showed them the ‘on’ button on her study sled and then one or two of the younger kids took it out for a joyride and used the utter-automatic setting on the bioharvest module to drive several megafaunal species into extinction and delete sixty percent of a mountain chain.
After submitting her report, A received a failing grade. What for?
***
A calciferous limb waved in a self-generated breeze from a coral-pine’s mechanized wind-support fan system. “She shared outside technology?”
“Wrong!” said Gorgodoola.
“She shared outside information?” guessed a resplendent and freshly-shed trillionpede.
“Wrong!”
“She revealed himself to them,” said one of the hecintonners princesses.
“Wrong!”
“She didn’t enable the safety lock on the study sled?” ventured a fetal ferrosaur, floating within the iron walls of its containment egg.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” shouted Gorgodoola, slamming their mighty wardorsal into the roof of their tank for emphasis. “You’re all wrong! But there’s another chance: the story goes on!”
***
The second student I will call B, for similar reasons I gave for A. B wrapped themselves in a trillion-filament-fibre fold before entering local spacetime, deleting their sensory profile from existence for the duration of the study. They descended through the atmosphere using their study sled’s insertion needleforme and only departed it to hand-gather samples, parking it in between the first and second dimensions whenever they did so. They watched, smelled, heard, tasted, and proxy-proprioceived their study targets as they suffered under a hard winter, and a dry summer, and the buildup of salts in their fields from centuries of over-irrigation, and at last the arrival of a furious cyclone that carried away homes, and lives, and livestock, and the top layer of the soil itself, leaving behind stone and concrete-baked dirt. They starved, they withered, they died. B recorded all of it and did not reach out once, not even to secure a deceased specimen for practical lab use. Upon concluding their observations, B applied a retroactive collapse to their fold and reappeared in their initial approach vector, peeling loose their entire spatiotemporal presence from possibility before it happened and leaving only the purest data in existence.
After submitting their report, B received a failing grade. Why?
***
“Indifference to the subjects’ suffering, suffering, ring, ing, ng, g!” hooted the spokesape of the bearded burderoo troop that observed from the classroom’s apse.
“Wrong!” said Gorgodoola. “And don’t throw that at me!”
“Unauthorized deletion of personal records from the fundament?” theorized a broccoli.
“Wrong!!” said Gorgodoola.
“Failure to secure a research specimen,” said the top student in the class, an insufferable beast.
“Wrong!!!” said Gorgodoola.
“Nothing and you’re screwing with our heads!” suggested a nuclear proxy, flaring slightly from its electron shell.
“Wrong!!!!” said Gorgodoola, dropping into ultrasound for emphasis. “Completely, utterly, devastatingly, fully wrong, all of you! Yet not irrevocably! My story continues!”
***
Student C. Moving along.
Student C timed its atmospheric descent to coincide with a small meteor shower and hid the sled in the fiery wake of the largest bolide. It slid itself and its belongings anterior-realitywise through the heart of the small mountain that loomed over its study targets and selectively circumscribed a small segment of its heart into a study base, from which it began to emit various monitoring rays, rhythms, pulses, and equations to build a real-time sumulation of the study target and by proxy the planet and the neighboring seventeen lightyears of its immediate environment. These was then used as a cross-reference by it when compared against immediate local data for the subsequent duration of the study. During this time C undertook four actions that were not monitoring, collecting, or collation.
First, it generated a mid-stratospheric static pulse that spontaneously rewrote the regional weather pattern for a period of two hours, preventing a projected freak three-day blizzard that would have struck when the study group’s youth were undergoing their midwinter initiations halfway up the peak.
Second, it detonated an observation coiler into waste heat, transforming a midnight avalanche set to entirely engulf the outer study target into a plume of hot vapor.
Third, when spring came late, it reconstructed its emergency caloric vat into a molecular school that physically simulated a local prey grazer, then set it to ‘collapse’ and ‘die’ near the center of the study target.
Fourth, when the lowland marchers came to clear the mountainside, it strategically ‘powerflowed’ sumulated erosion hyperprocesses through the peak’s core, creating emergency caverns that had not existed until ten thousand years ago ten minutes ago, then lured the study targets inside them using their own recorded voices and its pocket graser pointer.
After doing all of this C erased its observation post, left the retrocaverns untouched, and left for orbit from behind the horizon. And after THAT, C received a failing grade. How come?
***
Silence, true silence, is found among the defeated.
“Well?” demanded Gorgodoola. “Well? Come on! Only thing worse than being wrong is being afraid of it!”
A false goose raised its neck warily from threat-hunch. “…It detonated scholastic research gea-”
“Wrong!”
The false goose fluffed up to ball-shape. “Deploying the pocket graser was use of outside materi-”
“Wrong!”
“You’re a NASTY POMPOUS OLD-”
“Factually correct but irrelevant to the question with regards to which it remains WRONG!”
Silence again, but uneasy, uneven, a near-silence, a false-silence, filled with the thickening anxiety of those who suspect they somehow have even more left to lose and the gentle hiss of a waterfowl trying very hard not to kill.
Mercury roiled around the Gigaprofessor as they scoffed. “I will give you one more hint,” said Gorgodoola. “All three of these students failed their assignments for the same reason. Do you know what that reason was?”
It got worse. A thousand minds of different bodies all sank together, bound in the panicked lack of inspiration that only desperation can bring.
Gorgodoola’s wardorsal retracted, their baleen combed itself into calmness. The ripples around them stilled at last. “Of course you don’t,” they said, kindly. “Of course you wouldn’t. You know what they didn’t do? They didn’t FORMAT THEIR REPORTS CORRECTLY. HOW AM I TO GRADE THEM IF THEY DON’T TELL ME THEIR NAMES, THE NAME OF THE COURSE, OR EVEN IF I AM THE CORRECT PROFESSOR TO HAVE SENT THE ASSIGNMENT TO?”
A pause for a gulp of tepid teaplankton, and following it, a soft sadness. “And you know why I knew you wouldn’t know this?” Gorgodoola asked, mournfulness marching from one wingfin to the other across the league of their body’s breadth.
They didn’t.
“Well, if you’d read the syllabus, you’d know that’s because NONE OF YOU FORMATTED YOURS PROPERLY EITHER!”