This was a strange piece, that was me testing out omnipotent narrator because I felt I had too many first person stories, and then I inadvertently made them more god like, but if god was a scientist running at live simulation model. It has more than a little judgment on our current society. What can I say, the education system is more than a little skewed.
Humans were a strange sort. A mess of contradictions, pack animals longing for independent validation.
They even knew it, and created proverbs to warn others of the coming peril. “Be careful what you wish for” and “may you live in interesting times”. Both about getting the things they wanted, but with the understanding that what they wanted, they would not truly enjoy it.
Most animals lived far simpler existences, even those such as dolphins which were no less intelligent that the humans. More so actually, but humans didn’t know that, as there was a limit to what dolphins could actually demonstrate on a human test of intelligence.
What was it that the humans said “If you judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree it will spend it’s entire life believing it is stupid”. Thats the strangest bit about them, that they came up with such profound and interesting sayings, and on the whole completely ignored them. This is why they thought they were smarter than dolphins.
Also its why they measured intelligence using a paper test, which only measures a specific type of intelligence, and even that not very well as a huge part of the test is, inadvertently, reading comprehension. It is true people with very high reading comprehension are intelligent, but if you haven’t learned how to read, you are not inherently stupid, youjust have lived with very different circumstances. This of course extends to standardizes testing as well, which is odd, because they don’t actually let the teachers hold the children back to actually learn the materia,l and be what they consider to be successful, no they simply push them along and then marvel at how they scored even lower the following year
The wise thing to do, would be to change the system so that it was more accommodating to actual learning, and not based on some outdated theories, but alas, it would be very difficult and one thing I had learned in my time, was that most humans were lazy.
Watching the dawn of human civilization was entertaining, they learned so quickly, and grew faster than I could have imagined. I admit to having to do a little fast thinking when I realized the the crafty buggers had managed to figure out how to escape their tiny habitat, and carefully relocated their little biodome into a large enclosure, where the other planets weren’t just a careful projection that they saw when they looked up at the sky.
I admit to going a little overboard. I actually put them somewhere so large, that if they managed it, they would be able to get to other “galaxies” and build entire colonies. I, of course, recorded everything, in case I missed something key, but each night I still had to go to bed, and sleep even if it did feel like I was at the most interesting part of their development yet.
The day I came out and saw them all, barely visible through the pollution they had created, I was more than a little surprised. The model was indicating overheating, somehow, while I was sleeping, they had managed to destroy their own planet. They were smart enough to realize that they had screwed up, and some of them were even trying to fix it. On the whole though, they were ignoring it, and then being mocked for doing so. I ran the projections, and knew it didn’t matter either way. They weren’t going to be able to fix this.
I looked at the now, excessive space that I had made for them, and hoped, desperately that they would be able to explore a fraction of it before they were gone. Or, that whatever evolved on the planet after them was far smarter. Maybe my sister was right, and I really should have stuck with the dinosaurs. They were pretty neat.
Anne McSommers' Writing Nook 