Author : Samuel Stapleton

“Your Excellency. We can’t move on this. The Intelligence Protection Community is watching too closely. Humans have made their move, their motion for an open debate court was approved.”

“This is ludicrous! They’ve been slaves for less than 30 Earth years. Every other subspecies has served for a minimum of 500 galactic years!”

“Yes, but they aren’t arguing over the Time Frame or the Legitimacy of Servitude Clauses.”

“Well what then?”

“Have you heard about the Rorschach Measures?”

“The new interface? Yes, I think my son is using it, what of it?”

“Distant chatter on multiple nets claim it was designed and written by a single human, with the help of an AI she also designed.”

“How would that even be possible? As a species they failed every single standard intelligence measure, they lost every shot they had at being classified as a prospecies.”

“Our team has been pouring over data from their home world. Did you know their population was 23 billion at maximum capacity? It’s larger than any other known species home planet. And I think we missed a key environmental pressure.”

“Which is?”

“Because of the complex nature of measuring intelligence the galactic society has always assumed that the most advanced organisms only peak after extended periods of evolution and adaption. As a species the humans have barely left the fertilization stage, but we’ve been looking into a phenomenon they call neuro-plasticity. They define it like this:

The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuro-plasticity allows the neurons in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.

Their biology is very common – carbon based, we’ve seen it a thousand times before. But we’ve never seen a central nervous system develop in such leaps and bounds. I think we greatly underestimated the combination of their biology and the environment of their home world. They’re arguing that the galactic tests are old, outdated, and inherently biased.”

“We’ve heard that argument before. What’s different this time?”

“They claim to have already designed a different one. Better. One that they slipped into the Rorschach Measures interface…and that…according to the data they’ve collected…not one intelligent organism has passed ‘critical intelligence indicators’ other than humans…in fact we can’t even identify where the test was hidden in the coding.”

“They hid this test in a public user interface? How long have we been looking?”

“The interface went live a little over three galactic years ago. It’s now the 13th most used interface galactically speaking.”

“What’s her name?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The human female slave, what’s her name?”

“Well we’re still working on tracking her down sir, but we’ve found reference material that links her to a common user name on the net.”

“And it is?”

“She calls herself Darwin.”

“What relevance does that have?”

“We aren’t sure if it means anything sir. We’re still looking into it.”

“And Rorschach – figure out what that is as well. Humans are so young it boggles the mind that they’re this much trouble.”

“What should we do about the court date?”

“Nothing.”

“They said you would say that.”

“Who said?”

“The person who sent you your most recent e-message. It was sent directly from one of the Rorschach servers. Only moments ago. You just got another. Take a look.”

The only thing humans will be slave to, is our own nature. Adapt or die Chancellor. Adapt or die.

-drwn