Bundle of Joy

While looking through the documentation, I found a reference to a training program for pre-born members of the species.

You ever seen the Godfather trilogy? Yeah, I'm sure you're thinking first of a Sicilian family. Your thought is incorrect.

The training program involved a series of three movies that seemed disconnected but were in fact a planned trilogy:

• Mississippi Burning
• Mississippi Masala
• Mississippi Taquería

Looking back at your time, I smile and let out a short chuckle. You had it easy then, before three-dimensional communication replaced this simple text-based language. You could sit and watch a set of flickering images projected onto a wall or electronic window and pretend to know what the images were telling you, trained as you were in linear storytelling methods and hearing speech between actors as an integral part of the storyline.

I suppose I turned out all right so it wasn't a complete waste of time to spend thousands of years perfecting a writing system, only to discard it and start over.

I can see that you're in the early stages of the big changes ahead. Pretty soon, you'll hear of roving gangs of violent moneymakers infiltrating your neighbourhoods. They started out in the deserts, hills, abandoned city centers and other areas that you tended to look away from as you drove past or flew over on the way to another safe zone. That's how it will look to you. You may or may not become aware of them being legitimized and pulled into the core constituencies of your society. It is a constant process, like waves upon a beach, with one successive group overtaking another in acquiring and owning the bartering system upon which all societies stand.

Revolutions are not always headline grabbers. The revolution you are about to experience has been going on so long that people no longer care to read about it. They want instant changes, they want their whining and complaining to be addressed immediately, like infants. Such is the drawback of the Internet Revolution upon which the greater revolution is occurring. While scientists were paid to solve the perceived medical problems of attention deficit syndrome, the revolutionaries were using their understanding of texting and other constant feedback that turned into a general social illness looking for a cause to advance their cause.

I know how you feel. Even though very little of me is like you in a pure species-level genetic comparison, I still share enough traits to see through your eyes, so to speak. You cannot believe that there is a revolution happening that you are not aware of. Well, it is and in fact, many are happening. We only became aware of this in full after we moved the Earth Science Study Institute to its temporary headquarters on Earth's moon, Ainu. By then, most of the scientists had lost their social connections to the planet and could look at data in a truly detached manner. They no longer had reasons to protect, however hidden in their thoughts they might be, people with whom they were connected or would encounter personally and professionally on Earth.

What did the data reveal? We discovered the revolution. Or rather, all of them. We saw your species in total, able to watch the waves of changes sweeping through individuals and groups just like watching waves in a pond left by different sizes and shapes of pebbles thrown at different times. Except it was more like seeing the waves in a room bouncing back and forth, sound waves, light waves, radio waves, etc.

Of course, scientists and researchers in your time have performed similar studies. What they missed was the start of the ultimate revolution:

Historical Fact
The Great Purge was fueled by the discovery and implementation of the three-dimensional language now used throughout the galaxy.

People and machines no longer communicate using one character at a time. While I use ancient equipment preserved by my ancestors for just this moment to prepare you for your family's key contribution to the Great Realization, I am also carrying on conversations with everyone else in the galaxy while servicing and repairing an old communications satellite that still operates the refurbished Beagle 2 retro unit on Mars, sponsored, of course, by Ye Olde Computing Devices Museum Gift Shoppe, Ltd. Our conversations are processed real-time and rated for growth potential by companies looking to advance new products. No longer are corporate research labs cordoned off from one another but cooperate in designing and building products geared toward integral social improvements. Governments, as you see them in your time, are now corporations run by corporations, responsible to all of what you call species, but actually responsible to the complete universe, probably too complicated for you to understand right now. Be patient.

Unfortunately, you will not be able to experience my life. See it as a tradeoff. You get to enjoy the time while your species was primarily Earth-bound, looking up at the stars and dreaming of better days ahead. You have ignorance on your side, pretending that you're the King of the Jungle, controlling your destiny. Have fun. Your species' 100,000 years of life in the toddler stage will come to an end and you will awaken to a universe beyond your imagination. I envy you. I will not experience another revolution like the one you will see, you having grown up twice, so to speak. I am just doing my part to ensure it happens.