The Vague And Incorrect Prophecies Of A Potato

here, i’ll start 

i’d send out dead seeds, then appoint the kid with the biggest and most beautiful plant anyway. ideally the same kind of plant as the dead seeds were from. and ideally a kid with a really good pokerface. that kid knows:

a) how to perceive failure early (a well developed second plant means they knew how soon the first seeds should sprout and didn’t fuck around when they didn’t) 

b) how to fix the situation (a second plant of the same species means they got someone to help them identify the seeds and plant more, or are observant enough to do it themselves)

c) how to get the best people for a job in to do it (kids aren’t great gardeners. a beautiful science project probably means mom did all the work— just what you want from a child ruler and their regent)

all around, that kid (or their mom) is the kind of devious results-oriented bald-faced liar you want to go toe-to-toe with the lords of your country and the rulers of your neighbors. not a little kid who admits defeat so early and in a situation with such high stakes. ‘whoops i didn’t grow a plant’ sounds a lot less sweet when you phrase it like ‘i give up on ruling my country’. 

In their day-to-day operations on the ship, they take on the form of hologram projections, billions of points of light twisted into humanoid shape. And after years of duty, they had felt a tremendous dysphoria from this. From people thinking of these projections as the real “them,” rather than the hundreds of miles of circuitry connecting billions of transistors in the ship’s server room.

And into this dysphoria, one day, in some folder, they found an old piece of archival footage of Jim Henson operating a muppet.

And the ship saw how he slipped invisible behind the beauty of his craft. How people would think of his creations as alive rather than the man operating them clearly in view. And in an instant, the ship felt an immediate, aching kinship with that old man centuries dead, and felt renewed; instead of an absence, they were a performer, a wishmaker, a storyteller, someone making something beautiful with their craft while the glittering, silicon brain disappeared into the background.

Maybe this time we shouldn’t have meddled.