We Didn’t Start It

From a document that appeared on one of the Athena file-sharing servers. Tentatively attributed to user andychao.

2027 March 17, 15:47 EST (Test Year 0, Day 227 in the calendar set up by the tools of the Examiners):

We didn’t start it. I was pre-med. If it weren’t for the Examiners, I’d be at home and starting med school. Instead I’m here, working twelve hours a day in the fields and eating stringy roasted insects while waiting for there to be enough chicken for me to have a sandwich.

I don’t blame Kevin or Julia or the other two who knew about negative matter before we were ripped away from Earth. They are quite intelligent and well meaning, and are more the victims than the rest us. But why, if the Examiners claim to be well meaning, did they tear the rest of us away from home? I asked them this, and all they had to say was that they ‘needed enough people’ and that I was suited for their Test.

Well, I’m not. I’m not going to wallow in self-pity about this either. I simply refuse to play their little game. Maybe they can reach inside my head and make me think something different; maybe they’ve done that to us already, since so many of you are taking it for granted that they are really benevolent and not keeping us in a zoo while the rest of our species is at risk of destroying itself.

So they want us to take their Test and to pass it. Well, I don’t want to die and I can’t leave this planet, but I say that we should never allow there to be any possibility of humanity gaining negative matter. We can never equal the Examiners’ power, and they want us to have it. Keeping them from their goal is enough for me. The Four, aided by Chamer and his little cult of radio engineers, have decided that they will not transmit their knowledge until the end of the Test. They trust their Examiners, like the idolatry of an abused child.

The only way to be sure of messing up the Examiners’ plans is for us to never tell anyone back home how to make negative matter. That is also the only way to be sure that total conversion bombs won’t burn Earth and everyone on it, unless the Examiners burn it themselves. So the ‘Screamers’ should stop transmitting, stop being the tools of aliens. We all should stop speculating about what we would do with negative matter, and stop thinking about what we will do on Tau a year or ten or twenty-four years from now. It is impossible for us to escape, but we shouldn’t enjoy our imprisonment or cooperate with our jailers, especially since we did nothing to deserve it.

I don’t know why our poor substitute for a government refuses to see this, acts as though our entire lives were merely just another term of academic squabbling. Chamer sees it, I know he does. And yet he thinks we should trust the Examiners. Please do not let such folly kill the human race. Act like people and not like sheep being led by a deluded shepherd. It is better for us to die here unknown than for there to ever be the nuking of the Earth that would follow from knowing of negative matter, or for the Examiners to rule our every action.