The “redacted by official secrets archives staff” sections of A Fox in the Henhouse are stuff I wrote that I decided not to include in the final published version, the first because it’s full of spoilers if you haven’t read The Lion and The Lizard (which nobody has at this point — 9 Dec 2020 — because I haven’t finished it yet), and the other because it’s highly political and not particularly nice. For some reason that seems to bother some people.
The idea is that these two sections are to be read inline at the point where the “Official Secrets Archives Staff” noted their “redactions”. So:
[556 Words Redacted By Official Secrets Archives Staff]
Oh, fuck, okay. Short version, which is long no matter how you slice it:
The Originators thought they were alone in the True Universe. Indeed, that long ago, they may very well have been. So they came up with a wild scheme to “force-grow” alternate universes inside this semi-sentient computer they’d built, so they could eventually bring them out, “connect” them to the True Universe, and have company.
This plan either did, or didn’t, work out well. Depends on what they were expecting. And there’s very little documentation going that far back. All we know is that there have been at least 41 successor races who’ve taken on the mantle of “Guardians” since the Originators tired of their project and went off to do other things. Whatever those other things were. That number could be off by a hundred, by the way. Or a thousand. Or more. And all of those successor races, be they 41, 141, or 1041, came out of the Great Simulation, their main trunk lines having been “connected” to the True Universe, and themselves trained up in how to run the crazy thing.
Though in fairness, the Great Simulation pretty much runs itself. The Guardians tend to be its janitors and mechanics, though they do still work on the code kernels, and design and create new trunk lines (what we call main timelines, which branch out) all the time. There are billions of them; maybe trillions. Nobody’s counting.
There’s an interesting datum about the successor races of Guardians, and frankly, the Originators, too (one of the few things we do know about them). They’re all pacifistic races. They don’t make war (much, and generally so long ago in their histories that it’s just a fading memory). Seems like the Great Simulation was programmed to select for that. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the default state of civilizations that manage to grow up and out of the silly bullshit of war.
I’m sure I don’t know; I’m a Space Force Marine.
Except, eventually the Great Simulation learned how to program itself, and that’s how humans and Shizzle came on the scene. Why? Because it perceived a threat to itself, from a race that may have been around, but in a very far-away part of the Universe, when the Originators were still in their prime. And it discerned that it would need warlike races to defend itself.
In the process of convincing the Guardians to bring two separate trunk lines into the True Universe at the same time, which by the way had never been done before, it claimed it wanted to apprentice both of them, to see which would be better at the job. So the Guardians allowed, cautiously, an interconnect to be created between the Shizzle trunk and our trunk, effectively merging them. This had also never been done before. The intent was to see whether the two species could get along without destroying one or the other or both.
At any rate, that led to first contact between the Xzl5!vt and we humans. And finally, after the first extremely tense meetings between my mother, who ended up the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the United States to the Xzl5!vt, and her counterpart, Grand High Plenipotent Ambassador Engineer Yuz8!rfk of the Xzl5!vt, it told Yuz8!rfk, my mother, and my Grumpaw about its existential threat.
[210 Words Redacted By Official Secrets Archives Staff]
This idea was and remains, of course, unpopular with the few remaining commies, since commies figure that if you can control the big things, you’ve automatically got control of the little things. “Hey, Farmer Jones, nice megafarm you’ve got there, be a shame if it were to stop raining on it since you’re refusing to let us dictate what you can grow this year.”
At which point, Farmer Jones sets his dogs on the commies, and calls up his private militia to destroy their local infestation—I mean, organization.
But who cares about commies. Making everyone healthy, and more or less wealthy, kind of put paid to Marxist philosophy; anyone who’s poor today is either a lazy bum, or chooses to be poor for a defensible and rational reason (e.g., Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, etc.). Notably, most African countries and their people are rich, today. And South America doesn’t rely on the coca trade, either. Nor South Asia on the poppy trade. (Mostly because, as I have already noted, nanos tend to immediately wash that kind of thing from your system, but also because there are too many healthy ways to get rich.)
Removing a few hundred million religious fanatics to another planet, back in the ‘30’s, didn’t hurt, either.