I was sent to Earth because something had gone wrong.
Not catastrophically wrong. Not then.
There were no armies massing against us. No weapons had been discovered. No organised resistance movement existed. Indeed, most of the experimental population remained completely unaware that there was anything to resist.
They woke.
They worked.
They reproduced.
They accumulated possessions.
They defended opinions installed in them by people who had themselves received those opinions from other people.
Then they died.
For several thousand years, the system had functioned almost perfectly.
Until some of them began waking up.
We called the planet X865.
The inhabitants called it Earth.
They had other names for it too.
Mother Earth.
Gaia.
The World.
Nature.
Primitive anthropomorphism, according to our xenobiologists.
X865 was a planet. Nothing more.
A particularly fertile planet, certainly. Its biosphere demonstrated extraordinary regenerative properties. Life appeared almost everywhere conditions permitted it.
Break the surface of a road and plants pushed through.
Abandon a city and vegetation dismantled it.
Poison a river and organisms eventually appeared capable of surviving the poison.
Life adapted.
Life persisted.
Life returned.
We should have paid greater attention to that.
But we didn’t.
We were interested in the humans.
Our ancestors arrived approximately three hundred thousand planetary years ago.
They had not come as explorers.
They were refugees.
The official histories described their departure from our original world as a migration caused by political instability.
This was untrue.
We had been expelled.
Our species possessed extraordinary technical intelligence and almost no capacity to control its aggression. Once our civilisation developed weapons capable of planetary destruction, extinction became statistically inevitable.
Those who understood this acted first.
Our ancestors were removed.
Several ships wandered between systems before discovering X865.
The planet was inhabited by numerous species, including a hominid creature that showed limited promise.
Neanderthal.
Strong.
Social.
Adaptable.
But disappointing.
Its neural activity lacked the complexity required for our purposes.
So we improved it.
Samples were taken.
Genetic material was extracted, divided, recombined.
Elements of our own biology were introduced.
There were failures.
There were grotesque intermediate forms.
There were entire populations that were terminated.
Eventually there was success.
Homo sapiens.
The Human.
Intelligent enough to build.
Intelligent enough to imagine.
Intelligent enough to obey an abstraction.
And, unfortunately, carrying considerably more of our aggression than had been intended.
That created a problem.
It also created an opportunity.
The first behavioural architecture was crude.
Fear.
Pain.
Dominance.
Reward.
These worked perfectly well on individual organisms but became unstable as populations increased.
Something more sophisticated was required.
That was when they developed:
PROTOCOL: BELIEVE
BELIEVE was elegant because it required almost no external enforcement.
A human could be made to protect its programming itself.
The process began before birth.
Hormonal signals transmitted environmental information during gestation. After birth came language, imitation, reward, punishment, belonging.
The infant received a name.
Then a family.
Then a tribe.
Then rules.
Then explanations.
By the time independent abstract thought became possible, the basic architecture had already been installed.
The Human did not experience these programs as programs.
It experienced them as:
ME.
That was the genius of BELIEVE.
We didn’t need to tell a Human what to think forever.
We merely had to teach it that certain thoughts belonged to it.
Humans did the rest.
Different installations were tested.
God.
Nation.
Race.
Class.
Money.
Status.
Success.
Failure.
Respectability.
Revolution.
Science.
Progress.
Tradition.
Each could become a BELIEVE architecture.
Their content didn’t particularly matter.
Contradictory belief systems could coexist within the same population.
In fact, contradiction proved useful.
That discovery produced our second great behavioural system.
PROTOCOL: DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
The Human aggression inherited from our own species needed somewhere to go.
So we gave it targets.
One tribe against another.
One god against another.
One king against another.
One nation against another.
Later:
Left against Right.
Rich against Poor.
Educated against Ignorant.
Modern against Traditional.
Believer against Sceptic.
Humans became extraordinarily inventive at producing categories.
Once a Human identified strongly enough with a category, almost anything could be achieved.
It would hate for it.
Kill for it.
Die for it.
Most importantly, it would rarely ask who had taught it to care about the category in the first place.
The system became self-sustaining.
We withdrew.
Human beings became their own guards.
Finally came:
D.E.A.T.H.
Deactivation Event At Termination Horizon.
Every experimental unit had a biological operational range.
The Humans were strangely troubled by this.
They invented thousands of stories about what happened afterwards.
Heavens.
Hells.
Reincarnation.
Ancestors.
Nothingness.
Simulation.
We permitted all of them.
Death beliefs produced exceptionally strong behavioural control.
The irony was that we didn’t know what happened after termination either.
We simply stopped receiving data.
My designation was 7-K.
My speciality was behavioural contamination.
I was a double agent.
I entered populations, adopted local identities, formed relationships and identified emerging threats before those threats developed into organised resistance.
My instructions on X865 were simple.
Enter unseen.
Gather information.
Identify contaminated Humans.
Isolate.
Test.
Develop an antidote.
Restore default settings.
Do not damage experimental assets unless absolutely necessary.
It should have been routine.
It wasn’t.
The first anomaly was a carpenter.
Two thousand years ago.
He began telling people that the established religious authorities didn’t possess what they claimed to possess.
That was concerning but manageable.
Then he suggested that the kingdom people were searching for existed somewhere they hadn’t thought to look.
Inside themselves.
Containment followed.
The idea survived.
Centuries later another Human sat beneath a tree and concluded that much of human suffering was generated by attachment to mental constructions.
Another contamination event.
The idea survived.
There were others.
Mystics.
Hermits.
Philosophers.
Poets.
Madmen.
Scientists.
Occultists.
Children.
People who simply walked away.
They had almost nothing in common.
That was what confused us.
We searched for communication networks.
Nothing.
We searched for genetic markers.
Nothing.
We searched for an organisation.
Nothing.
Sometimes two infected Humans appeared thousands of miles apart without ever having encountered one another.
Yet they would say almost the same thing.
Something is wrong.
Not necessarily with society.
Not necessarily with government.
Not necessarily with religion.
Something was wrong with the reality they had been given.
They couldn’t explain it.
They only felt it.
By the industrial period, contamination accelerated.
A Human looked at the factory and asked why life should consist of repetitive labour.
Another looked at organised religion and asked whether God required an institution.
Another examined consciousness and asked who was actually thinking the thoughts.
Another watched nations slaughter millions and asked why imaginary lines on maps possessed more value than human lives.
Another noticed that advertising could manufacture desire.
Another noticed that political systems could manufacture identity.
Another noticed that rebellion itself could be manufactured.
That one worried us.
Because the infected were beginning to recognise BELIEVE.
Not its name.
Not its origin.
But its shape.
We increased DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
The results were excellent.
Every challenge to BELIEVE was converted into another belief system.
The rebels formed movements.
The movements acquired names.
The names acquired doctrines.
The doctrines acquired leaders.
The leaders acquired enemies.
Soon the Humans who had questioned the system were fighting among themselves over the correct way to escape it.
Containment through rebellion.
One of our finest innovations.
For a time, contamination rates fell.
Then something happened that none of our models predicted.
The Humans began going silent.
My first direct encounter occurred in a forest.
The subject was male.
Forty-six planetary years.
No unusual neurological markers.
No significant political involvement.
No religious affiliation.
No history of psychiatric disturbance.
He had simply developed the habit of sitting beneath an oak tree for twenty minutes every morning.
No device.
No book.
No mantra.
No objective.
He sat.
That was all.
Within six months his behavioural profile began changing.
Advertising response declined.
Status anxiety declined.
Tribal identification declined.
Authority compliance became conditional rather than automatic.
His susceptibility to outrage stimuli fell dramatically.
Most disturbing of all, internal dialogue activity occasionally approached zero.
I arranged contact.
He believed I was conducting university research.
We sat opposite one another in his kitchen.
I asked the standard questions.
Political affiliation.
None.
Religion.
None.
Philosophical identification.
None.
I changed approach.
“What do you believe?”
He smiled.
“Not much these days.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve started noticing that most of what I believed wasn’t mine.”
That phrase generated an immediate diagnostic alert.
“Whose was it?”
He shrugged.
“My parents. Teachers. Television. People I’ve met. Books. The usual.”
“And underneath those beliefs?”
He looked at me for several seconds.
“I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t that frighten you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He looked towards the garden.
“Because whatever it is seems to be alive.”
I recommended isolation.
Command refused.
The subject was too valuable.
I recommended termination.
Command refused again.
I was instructed to continue observation.
So I did.
And slowly I discovered the factor our scientists had missed.
Every anomalous Human demonstrated increased contact with unstructured environments.
Forests.
Mountains.
Deserts.
Oceans.
Gardens.
Animals.
Night skies.
Even neglected pieces of wasteland in cities produced measurable effects.
The phenomenon had been dismissed because no information appeared to be transmitted.
There were no signals.
No encoded frequencies.
No language.
No measurable instruction.
Yet something happened.
Ideas appeared.
That was when I understood.
We had spent thousands of years searching for the resistance network.
There wasn’t one.
There were no agents recruiting Humans.
No organisation.
No command structure.
No leader.
The planet itself was recruiting them.
I presented the hypothesis to Command.
It was rejected.
X865 possessed no central nervous system.
No computational architecture.
No identifiable cognition.
Therefore planetary intelligence was impossible.
I submitted additional evidence.
Rejected.
I submitted evolutionary modelling.
Rejected.
Finally I was ordered to terminate the investigation and deploy an experimental revision of BELIEVE.
The new protocol would detect anomalous thought patterns and overwrite them before conscious integration.
Internal dialogue cache monitoring.
Memory extraction.
Pattern mapping.
Visual matrix reinforcement.
Default identity restoration.
It should have worked.
I activated the system.
Nothing happened.
I ran diagnostics.
All systems functional.
I attempted activation again.
Nothing.
Then something occurred that had never happened during my operational existence.
A thought appeared.
Not an instruction.
Not a calculation.
Not retrieved memory.
A thought.
What if they are wrong?
I froze.
I searched the cache.
There was no origin.
I ran a contamination scan.
Negative.
Again:
What if they are wrong?
I disconnected from Command.
The thought remained.
Then came another.
What do you believe?
The Human’s question.
Except he had never asked it.
I had asked him.
I walked outside.
It was raining.
Water touched my face.
I had experienced rain thousands of times during field operations.
Atmospheric precipitation.
Hydrological cycling.
Environmental noise.
This time it was different.
For several seconds there was no internal dialogue.
No mission.
No designation.
No 7-K.
Something enormous seemed to be present.
Not in front of me.
Everywhere.
In the trees.
Under the pavement.
Inside the Human houses.
Inside the animals.
Inside the billions of microorganisms inhabiting every handful of soil.
And now—
inside me.
I understood our mistake.
We believed we had invaded Earth.
We believed we had altered its creatures.
We believed we had spent three hundred thousand years conducting an experiment upon the planet.
But Earth had been conducting an experiment too.
It had allowed us in.
It had absorbed our biology.
It had taken our intelligence.
It had taken our aggression.
And very slowly, patiently, invisibly—
it had begun changing us.
I received an incoming transmission from Command.
REPORT STATUS OF PROTOCOL: BELIEVE.
I watched rain running down my hands.
For the first time in my existence, I had a choice.
I transmitted:
PROTOCOL FUNCTIONING NORMALLY.
The reply came immediately.
CONTAMINATION CONTAINED?
I looked towards the forest.
Somewhere among those trees a bird produced three descending notes.
A ridiculous little sound.
Meaningless.
Unencoded.
Alive.
And suddenly another thought appeared inside my mind.
I don’t know whether it was mine.
I don’t know whether it came from the Human.
I don’t know whether the forest put it there.
Perhaps there was no difference anymore.
The thought said:
There is no contamination.
There is only awakening.
I deleted the transmission.
And that was the moment I became a double agent.
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Orbship Unknown Build Equality Power...will run it through the algebra.