Shikow: 10.2014

I woke up. It was too hot. I went back to bed. These are three sentences about life in the 21st Century posted to a social media site. They will be analyzed in binary code by a distant alien race many centuries from now. The first scientist to examine the note is curious what a "bed" is. He/she -- for it's anatomy is not gender specific -- cross-references the word "bed" with other relevances and decides incorrectly that it means "bobsled." This creates a minor debate between another colleague -- for the sake of this tale let's call it M. -- who believes that a "bobsled" is actually "bobsled," because M accessed some more code and pieced together snippets of the Disney film "Cool Runnings" as proof.

Now, our original scientist -- let's call he/she Proletariat #1, believed that "bed" was "bobsled" because of a hidden hope that the original message did indeed involve bobsleds. Proletariat #1, unbeknownst to M, had seen his/her assemblage of snippets of "Cool Runnings" and liked the image of an unknown entity waking up and going back to sleep in a bobsled. This was considered amusing.

M did not find this type of scientific data misalignment to be humorous. In fact, such jokes were not part of the cultural make-up of their species. Most -- let's call them Khadaffis - Khadiffis were absolutely no fun and spent most of their adult lives studying scientific data or having intercourse with one another. The latter was considered a job, so no enjoyment was ever derived. Also, since each Khadiffi had both male and female organs intercourse between other Khadiffis was redundant, so most acts took place between data collection to conserve time and energy for additional data collection.

Naturally, the Khadiffi population was sizable. There were over a trillion Khadiffis living on a series of planets closest to what human scientists would call the Andromeda Strain, but have not been identified by name, so let's make things easy and use the Khadiffi term for the word "planet," which can be roughly pronounced as "Ffffth Kkkolock" just to throw in an actual word once in a while into this story to confuse future Khadiffis who might be reading this and offer them a moment's pause as they decipher...

The Khadiffi on Ffffth Kkkolock had discovered Google by accident during a data mining experiment with a sonar device that was supposed to obtain information on mountain ranges in the American Midwest. They were quite surprised by the vast stores of code -- miles upon miles of it. Once M's ancestors had pieced together Google as a number, they had made it a population goal along with a data collection aspiration. It was actually offered as a type of proverb that can be translated roughly as: "Khadiffis need to procreate to reach a Google population, as they decipher all of Google to be considered true scientists."

This is all based on my rough approximation, so the proverb doesn't necessarily make sense to us, but it made absolute sense to Khadiffis. You see, it was a mathematical game: if X is the number of aliens produced, as well as the size and name of the data translated, then the production of aliens to match the production of translation would make Khadiffis "successful" and "better than other" living beings throughout this and other galaxies.

I know what you're thinking, "Why would anyone want such a marker of success?" Well, every culture is different. Here, in the 21st Century, many human beings consider "success" to be earning a certain amount of wealth or being seen by others on television or online videos. This would be preposterous to a Khadiffi, and naturally, they would be just as dumbfounded as you might be as what is considered "successful" in their culture. If you spent some time on Ffffth Kkkkolock, you may or may not agree with what the Khadiffi deemed as a goal for their species, but if you wanted to live alongside them, you had to actually go along with success as a concept, because, otherwise the system would collapse.

Likewise, the human system needs its believers for consumer culture. This is also why many of you might be wondering why one of our own would attempt to travel to Ffffth Kkkkolock and retrieve any of this information in this first place. I, for one, am with you. I have no idea why anyone would care about distant alien cultures. I, myself, am consumed by human trappings, because I have been raised so well to love all things human. I love Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, women, strollers, headphones, Apple and apples, clotheslines, and other things human.

I am, in essence, much like other humans on Earth. However, there is a slight difference -- and this is where our tale may receives its twist -- I am not entirely human. I was placed here by the Khadiffi people as an experiment close to 38 Earth years ago. My main objective, which was programmed into me around the age of 12 years old, was to radically oppose the social systems in which I operated, until I would be able to achieve "success" in Earth terms for my resistance but also my existence, and ultimately fulfill a Khadiffi prophecy that there would be one genetically engineered "human" who would be "human successful," but also achieve the ultimate "Khadiffi success" by creating his own code that would then be translated many thousands of years later on Ffffth Kkkkolock and reveal the ultimate truth of all existence for all things -- inanimate and animate -- everywhere.

This is that starry-eyed story. It shall be told in approximately 300 pages and include drawings, videos, hyperlinks, strange translations, Khadiffi history and poetry, and eventually, and, most importantly, lead, when pieced together, to the ultimate truth to existence, so that Khadiffis can once again rejoice and find another pastime besides data collection, or likewise, humans can give up "success" for something less successful.

That is the end of the prologue. Our story will begin in six Earth minutes and is often written as 00:06:00 in digital time on watches and Khadiffis' favorite Earth program "The Blacklist."