The Experiment

Copyright © May 1993 Patrick Khoo

"Have you seen experiment 3.55A.96?"

"Yeah, it’s over there on that table."

"Man did you hear what happened did last night?"

"No, what happened?"

"Those life forms we accidentally created yesterday started doing all sorts of funny things."

"Like what?"

"They even started to gain what looked like a little bit of higher intelligence! But of course that can’t be possible. Such a thing has never been known to happen in our experiments before. But if it did…"

"Yeah, but whoever thought a life form as small as that could be even half intelligent eh? ha ha! I mean we created them! Unintentionally even!"

"Anyway, I figured we should place the test tube under observation today."

"Sounds like a good idea. In fact, lets take a look at it now. Put it under the microscope."

"Hey, what’s this?, they’re actually moving around a lot today."

"Animated responses, but man, do they throw out a lot of excretions. They’re destroying their own environment. You can’t call that intelligent, that’s suicide! Ha! Ha!"

"Wow, they’ve changed overnight! See how different their environment has become. And they’ve multiplied quite a bit too."

"Hmm, roughly speaking, at this rate, they’ll overflow the test tube by tomorrow night! What other so-called signs of intelligence do you see?"

"Here, look at that, they’ve actually modified the environment to fit their needs."

"That’s no sign of higher intelligence, lots of lower life forms do that all the time! It’s instinct."

"Yes, but does instinct cause them to huddle together and form clusters and seemingly cooperate?"

"Well instinct covers a wide variety of natural responses. And instinct by our laboratory definition is not a higher level of intelligence."

"Look! Look!, That one is moving much further away than any of the others have ever gone!"

"Well they’re running out of space, its simple exploration! Instinct again."

"I don’t know, I want to call the Boss in on this one."

"Come on, you can’t say that this is a fantastic discovery. These life forms may be just a quirk of nature, a dirty petri dish. One of them happened to slide too far out from its original spot."

"I could have sworn that they even managed to communicate effectively between one another."

"Where’d that rubbish come from? Ha! Ha! Can they sing?"

"Well, If you look at the microwave channels, you’d see strange fluctuations, repeated signals and even what looked like melodies."

"This is too much, I mean, we’re not supposed to have any "intelligent" life forms appear on our beat. That’s AR5’s department! We’re only supposed to create tiny simulated universes for the Boss."

"I know, but can’t we at least tell AR5 about this? I mean, they might want to develop this species into higher level life forms and release it on one of our bigger simulated universe projects."

"It’s not our department, forget it. These things do not demonstrate a high enough level of intelligence for anyone to be bothered with. Let's just trash this and start over."

"Yeah, I guess maybe you’re right. Maybe I am imagining things. It is some kind of life all right, but probably not worth the trouble to keep."

"What’s the official project name for this simulated universe? Earth and the Solar System? Never mind, we can throw this batch away and make a new one. Call it 3.65A.96. Hopefully it will be devoid of any life forms or dirty test tubes. I’ll tell the Boss about this later."

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