PROLOGUE
Before there was Cucumber Gin, before there were seminars on human irrelevance, and long before Algernon ever penned his Accords, there was only the Deep.
In the celestial ledger, Aegir was never meant to be a quiet place. It was a world born of a cosmic accounting error—too much water, too much gravity, and far too many sharp teeth. For three billion years, the planetary hierarchy was simple: if it swam, it ate; if it walked, it was crunchy.
Then came the Spark.
No one is entirely sure which primitive, multi-tentacled ancestor first looked at a hollow reed, looked at a fermentation pool of rotting sea-kelp, and thought, “I can build a distillery out of this.”But that single, intoxicating moment of clarity changed everything. Within a mere few millenniums, the cephalopods had skipped right past fire, iron tools, and internal combustion, moving straight into advanced philosophy, high finance, and premium mixology.
The land-dwelling lizards, unfortunately, missed the memo. While the oceans grew spires of bioluminescent glass and universities dedicated to the fine art of civil litigation, the continents remained stuck in a permanent, bloody cycle of bite-and-be-bitten. They did not invent philosophy. They invented better ways to tenderise their neighbours.
It was an unsustainable ecosystem. You cannot run a galactic-standard trade empire when stepping onto a beach means getting digested by a three-headed gecko.
Thus, the High Council of Aegir faced a choice. They could turn the continents into glass using their orbital plasma arrays—efficient, but terribly messy—or they could find a distraction. A dumping ground. A remote, insignificant rock they’d used before to resolve that messy Dinosaur situation, where the violent, primitive impulses of the universe could be quarantined under the guise of an "evolutionary experiment."
They found Earth. Poor, unfortunate Earth seemed to have become the universal landfill, a cosmic dustbin reserved entirely for the galaxy's most unwanted, bitey things.
Algernon, who until now had been feverishly working on his Doctorate for Psychotic Behaviour in Cats, was absolutely astounded to hear the news. The planet he observed the most—apart from the other 12,847, of course—was officially designated a lizard dumping ground. As far as Algernon was concerned, resetting all the dinosaurs, including their water-based relatives, should have been more than enough to unsettle the planet we regard as Earth.
No wonder the ecosystem went into full extinction mode.
Earth is a very strange and uppity place. If it doesn’t like what you’re doing to its climate, it has the most incredible hissy fits.
This is the story of how that experiment went horribly, wonderfully, and entirely predictably wrong.
CHAPTER ONE
THE OUTER LIMITS
Come with me as we travel to the unknown corners (if the Universe had corners... “It doesn’t.” Oh, do be quiet, there’s a good chap) a billion (that’s a conveniently nice round figure) light-years from Planet Earth—a planet that’s the topic of discussion at Algernon’s seminars on the human species and why they’re worth saving... possibly.
His seminars also feature the Theory of Stupidity by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who argued that stupidity is not an intellectual defect, but a moral and social phenomenon wherein individuals surrender their independent critical thinking to group conformity and slogans.
Algernon, unsurprisingly for a planet that’s eighty-four percent water, is a tall, silvery octopus with an intellect not within the reach of humanity anytime soon. That’s if they survive long enough to form a superior intellect (not looking promising so far, to be frank).
Not all the population on Aegir resemble octopuses; that would be ridiculous and extremely odd, because diversity exists in all living creatures. As humans, we would recognise fish types such as dolphins, whales, sharks, turtles, jellyfish, and so on and so forth.
There are also multiple species who’ve evolved on the land, though these have no similarity to humans as they evolved from lizard-like creatures. Within themselves, they are diverse and of all colours; even eye shapes vary from one continent to another. But these lizard beings, like humans, are the only land-living intelligent species, alongside birds, bees, and many varieties not dissimilar to Earth.
Having said this, however, the lizard beings do not have the superior intellect of those who evolved from the sea; they are primitive, somewhat violent, and antisocial creatures, which is the prime reason for their stupidity.
Even humans (I know, I can hardly believe it myself) are more advanced than the lizards. Lizards haven’t invented anything that doesn’t kill, maim, or subdue their prey. They kill to eat, and that’s been the height of their evolution. Anything living is their prey, including others of their species. Even Aegirians are prey to them. A mean lot, and there have been discussions to remove them all and put them on another primitive planet like Earth, and this has been the reason for the Algernon Accords. He believes humanity is capable of change, and evolving into something the Aegirians could tolerate, at least.
Not all creatures of the sea evolved above eating and pooing in their own environment, and like humans, Aegirians eat the fish, especially on Fridays. For the convenience of your tiny minds, I will refer to Algernon’s species as Octogenarians (Right, laugh it up, you ageists amongst you; really, let’s keep some decorum).
The Octogenarians (Shut up!) are the peak of intellectual intelligence on Aegir; they’re the inventors, educators, and gin manufacturers (only Cucumber Gin, they’re not savages).
The Sharktens are a warrior class, handling law enforcement and judges (not a high percentage work for the bureaucracy). When required, they’re absolutely brutal in any conflict; they have a 100% win factor, as there isn’t an army within two trillion light-years who’ve ever had the upper hand. It’s like a flea taking on Bruce Lee; “Be water, my friends,” was his favourite quote because he’d met Sharktens in water and never forgotten it.
The whale and dolphin types are the workers and teachers (the working class), though some evolved to higher status, which is a natural progression of any species. They’re the politicians, artists, actors, and lottery owners.
I could continue to work through their entire social structure, but this story revolves around humans and Algernon’s Civilised Interventions.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ART OF INTERVENTION
To understand the sheer scale of the task ahead of Algernon, one must first understand how a superior intellect goes about fixing a completely botched species. You do not simply land a spaceship on the White House lawn, announce yourself, and hand over the keys to cold fusion. Humans are terribly fragile things; if you show them a silver spaceship, they instantly split into two distinct groups—those who want to worship it, and those who want to shoot at it with high-velocity artillery. Neither reaction is particularly conducive to learning.
Therefore, Algernon’s Civilised Interventions had to be subtle. They had to be carefully engineered prods to the human psyche, delivered through the only medium humans truly respected: their own staggering vanity.
Algernon sat in his submerged laboratory on Aegir, floating comfortably in a nutrient-rich bath of salt water and crushed ice. Three of his tentacles were busy operating a hyper-spatial sub-quantum monitor, which was currently locked onto a small, rainy island on Earth known as Great Britain. A fourth tentacle casually swirled a crystal glass of Cucumber Gin, while his remaining limbs adjusted the dials on a temporal-broadcasting array.
His first major test under the newly signed Algernon Accords was already underway, and he was feeling reasonably confident. The High Council had given him a strict deadline of three Earth centuries to show measurable moral progress in humanity, or the lizard barges would be unsealed.
"The trick," Algernon murmured to himself, his skin pulsing with ripples of thoughtful, blue bioluminescence, "is to introduce concepts they think they invented themselves. If you give a human an idea, they will lose it, break it, or use it to kill a neighbour. But if you make them discover it, they will write a tedious textbook about it and call themselves geniuses."
His current project was the distribution of the Theory of Stupidity. Algernon had subtly beamed the core concepts of the theory directly into the subconscious mind of a German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer during a particularly long and boring sermon in the mid-twentieth century. Bonhoeffer had woken up, blinked, and immediately started writing down the thoughts, believing them to be a flash of divine inspiration.
Algernon checked the monitor. The theory was spreading nicely through the human academic circles, but the general public was completely ignoring it in favour of a new invention called television, which seemed to encourage the exact group conformity Bonhoeffer was warning against.
"Fascinating," Algernon noted, tapping a suction cup against the glass screen. "They are actively building machines to accelerate their own intellectual decline. It’s almost impressive."
He sighed, a tiny burst of bubbles escaping his siphon. If he couldn't get the humans to stop surrendering their critical thinking to slogans, the planet was going to become a reptilian dumping ground ahead of schedule. And frankly, Earth’s ecosystem was already struggling to cope with the domestic cat, let alone a three-ton bipedal alligator with an attitude problem.
It was time for a more direct approach. He needed a human assistant. Someone suitably insignificant, easily managed, and preferably someone who wouldn't try to eat his tentacles.
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