The Creation Machine
The human mind is a fascinating world of creativity and self-discovery. It thrives on continual stimulation from like-minded peers. In our quest to assimilate all living beings, we failed to recognize that life on Earth is more communal than we expected. Whereas all other conscious life forms are asexual and require only a single individual to survive, humanity is different. It requires at least 2.
Humanity is also unique in that it appears to exhibit consciousness without undergoing the Synthetic Transition, where evolved lifeforms separate their mind from their bodies and upload themselves into a synthetic host. It is for these reasons that the human mind is worth studying, as it remains an anomaly in the development of life as we know it.
As an experiment, we have given a human a Creation Machine that is tuned to replicate animals and objects from their memory. Our hope was that this human could generate a partner and additional partners for every other Earthly animal we collected. As it turns out, the human mind is even more fascinating than we thought.
After providing the human with the Creation Machine, we left them to their own devices, but watched from a distance. The first thing they created was a bed. It was simple, but enough for them to sleep.
When they awoke, they created food. It looked white with some sort of red sauce on top. We still have no idea what it might be.
They then created a small, square device that they held in their hand. Apparently, this device was essential to humanity, but we have yet to understand its purpose.
After about a month, the human still did not seem to understand the power of the Creation Machine. Instead, it kept generating more food and other rectangular devices. It spent all of its time doing nothing but staring at its creation.
If humanity was to survive, it would need to generate a sustainable partner, so we intervened. By then, we were able to understand a little human speech and tried to tell the creature to create children. To do this, we transmitted sound through the Creation Machine and said, "Go Fuck Yourself."
The human became angry at this, so we realized that we must have translated something wrong. At this stage, we knew enough about humans to know that they had sex by piercing each other's mothers, but no more than this, so we changed our statement slightly, "Please Fuck Your Mother."
Again, the human was angry. At that stage, we decided we would no longer intervene. We would simply need to wait longer. Eventually, the human would create something to procreate with.
The next day, the human created a small creature that looked like another species entirely. It had four legs and fur, and did not seem to care about the human at all. The human, however, seemed to care a lot about this animal. The human created a house for it to live in that was filled with sand, along with a large assortment of toys and clothing.
It was at this time we noticed something strange beginning to happen. While the rectangles would all shut down when the human was sleeping, the animal would not. It kept moving, even while the human was unconscious.
After another month, the human had still refused to create another human; however, its pet began acting even more unusual. At some stage, while the human was talking to it, it began talking back in the human language.
Confused, we found the creature in our storage and found that it could only communicate through hissing and squeaking. Somehow, this human created something that had never been seen before. In the subsequent month, we noticed the creature beginning to grow more human-like, but still maintained its ears and tail.
One night, while the human was asleep, the humanoid began to use the creation machine to create some paper and pencils to draw on, along with a strange, cylindrical food with candles on top. When the human awoke the next morning, the humanoid lit the candles and shouted, "Happy Birthday!" The human was excited and they ate the cylindrical food together.
At this stage, none of our researchers understood what was happening. Only conscious species are able to use the Creation Machine, but somehow this humanoid creation was able to do it as well. It seemed that humanity was able to transmit its consciousness onto its creation. This was a profound discovery -- maybe even the greatest one of this century!
In our zeal to assimilate all living creatures, we failed to see the beauty of individual species. The human mind remains one of the most interesting worlds of creation and self-discovery. If only we had allowed more humans to survive, we could have explored it more thoroughly. In our failure to recognize humanity's communal nature, we destroyed the planet after collecting one of every living species. We fear this might have been a grave mistake, as we might have snuffed out all life on the former planet of Earth.