An impossible story

Joe Gray

Publication date: 25 July 2021

The story below is a hard-to-imagine one in that the language used is that of a race long dead at the time of its writing. Even if the Landers possessed the lingusitic skill to crack the dominant tongue of Planet Three, some corruption would have been inevitable and, on top of that, it's difficult to think of any reason for them going to the trouble. In other respects, the story is entirely plausible.

The story has the unpoetic title of 'Report #126175-D, made by Documenter B-35792 to the Lander Records Union'.

In all our inter-galactic travelling, one of the most curious life-forms we have ever encountered—or, rather, happended upon evidence of—lived on Planet Three in Orbital System *1908135. An enduring celebrity has resulted from the conundrum they left, which quickly grew from a campus cult into a puzzle that every pop philosopher in Lander civilization sought desperately to 'solve'. One of our institutions of learning went as far as making generous monies available for a body called the ¿Why? Society. The funding covered, among other things, the lasering of tessellated question marks on the organizational robes.

To this day, the puzzle remains open in that no proposed explanation has achieved acceptance by a majority of scholars. (The Union may wish to contrast this with the crazes that have been built upon contests to find mathematical proofs. One famed example was the challenge of showing that no pair of positive integers can be raised to a power greater than two and have the sum of this equal another positive integer raised to that same power. On universal acceptance of the solution developed by Proofer A-34019, back in the earliest days of our cosmic exploration, the hysteria died down almost instantly.)

The difficulty of the Planet Three conudrum arises in part from the absence, in our surveying of the stars, of any discovery analogous to the project seemingly undertaken by this world's controlling life-form. Nowhere else have we found evidence that points to an intellectually advanced being turning on its life-support systems.

Landing

The landing algorithm had already identified a high chance of there being socially intelligent life on Planet Three, based on the presence of regular shapes on the surface. (Regular shapes have occasionally been found on planets that have never known life [see, for instance, Reports #18001-D and, more recently, #123222-D], but this latter tool remains among the pre-landing diagnostics with the highest specificity.) Landing Party ~46536 was guided down near one of the most striking regular patterns, a huge lattice of hard strips that—despite its crumbled state and the many organic forms rooted in the holes—bore, when seen up close, the hallmark of transport infrastrucure.

None of the rooted organic forms that were seen responded significantly to the presence of the party. Nor was there any reaction from the several much smaller life-forms around the landing site that were observed moving along the ground or above it. Had any organisms shown clear interest in its presence—triggering an immediate departure, of course, under Code @353—the party would not have been able to obtain as much material as it did.

The artefacts found around the first landing site (*1908135-03-0001), not least those showing written communication, further attested to socially intelligent life. But nowhere on the planet did the party find any creature that might be responsible for the artefacts, even though many sites were searched. In the process of searching for the creators, several substantial and well-preserved document caches were uncovered and in them were found many pictures. All of this has been described in detail in report #109785-D.

The dominants

During the landing mission and in the years that followed the party's departure, a profile of the once-dominant beings of Planet Three was built from a combination of the images recovered, some 3D videographs made of remnant infrastructure, and the various chemical and physical readings taken by the party's Samplers.

Arguably the most striking images among all those found in the document caches were of wheeled machines being used to clear large stretches of land of vertical organisms. These organisms, which emerged from the ground with a roughly circular cross-section before branching out, were common on the planet and were of the kind seen growing out of holes in the decayed latticework of transport infrastructure at the first landing site. An immediate hypothesis that was offered to explain this activity (by Analyst A-36055, who was the only Analyst left in the Landing party, following the untimely death of Analyst A-36064) was that the vertical organisms gave off a gas that was toxic to the dominants. This was overturned, though, when results of chemical-processing analyses of the organisms encountered on Planet Three showed that the rooted organisms turned gas-form carbon–oxygen–oxygen into gas-form oxygen–oxygen, while the non-rooted organisms we examined all gave off the former and were dependent on the latter. (This is a pattern that, fascinatingly, has been observed on some other planets [see, for example, Report #99333-D].) And it had already become clear from numerous strands of evidence that the dominants (the life-form most frequently present in photographs, and the only ones commonly clothed and interacting with advanced technology, including the wheeled machines) belonged to the non-rooted group of organisms: they moved bipedally over the surface of the planet.

The conundrum

The frequency of the images of the wheeled machines and the extent of the clearance that they typically depicted was evidence of a programme of mass killing of the vertical rooted organisms that far exceeded any plausible estimate of basic material needs. One deduction from this evidence, which was made by Analyst A-36055 and almost universally supported by other Analysts, was that the life-form in question had not developed that ethical code that is almost ubiquitous among dominant organisms on other planets—the code that precludes such massacres of other life-forms, or themselves. This explanation failed, however, to account for the mass killing being directed at organisms who (as deduced from our sampling) were harmless and acted as a source of the life-giving oxygen–oxygen gas. In light of the reasonably advanced technologies that the dominants had created, it was felt to be implausible that they would not have known of their need for, and the vertical organisms' production of, this gas.

It was again Analyst A-36055 who offered the first tentative theory for this, in a detailed report that listed and, in turn, ruled out other potential 'rationalizations' (#110071-A). While the report was not widely read, its top-line message—that the dominants had knowingly turned on their life-support systems—was the spark that ignited the craze that still surrounds Planet Three.

The revelation in this report was like the decoding of a language, for so many of the other discoveries about the dominants' presence on Planet Three began to make sense. These included: a seemingly limited deployment of renewable energy technology; the siting of major infrastructure with outlet pipes next to large flows and bodies of hydrogen–hydrogen–oxygen (another compound found to be vital to life), which would have enabled the efficient introduction of toxic substances; and even a frightening hint, in patterns of lingering radioactivity, that atom-splitting technology had been used to help quicken their own decline.

What remains is the question of "why?"—the nub of the conundrum. If the Union will entertain A-level activity—namely, philosophical dabbling—from a B-level citizen, might it be that the conundrum is artificial? I propose here an alternative theory to that of deliberate self-harm. Instead, could it have been that the dominant organisms were simply doing what they thought was needed for the functioning of their society and, despite their intellectual powers, were blind to the impact they were having on their life-support systems? In other words, could they have thought that causing their own downfall was impossible? ■

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