Finding civilizations works like this: I start by seeking out stars likely to produce habitable planets, like what you’d call F, G, and K stars – and cross-checking this with records of observed planetary transits. Of course, your society has that technology already. But then I do what you can’t - I go there. As I get in range to pick up radio signals I see what I can find if anything. Once I’m in orbit, I dispatch drones – cloaked of course - to get a closer look and see what I can figure out.

Murdork is a terrestrial planet much like your own, orbiting a K class star. The transmissions were the first sign of life. Even before I had the computer translate them, I knew there was something...particular about them. The cadence of the audio had a particular force. There was something demanding about it.

In it’s attempt to translate the noise, the computer churned and processed for a time, before indicating that the transmission could not be translated directly. The language was highly symbolic, requiring more input to decipher the underlying meaning.

So as I approached, I let the computer train itself on more transmissions. After several hours, by which time I had nearly reached the planet, it was able to find a translation of the original message.

THE FOLLOWING TRANSLATION IS NOT DIRECT AND HIGHLY INTERPRETED:

“THREAT TO RECIPIENTS WHO DESERVE TO BE PART OF THE RULING HIERARCHY, FROM THE CURRENT RULING HIERARCHY OF THE UNDERCLASS: STATE OFFICIAL TEMPORARILY REMOVED FROM POSITION DUE TO OSTENSIBLY PROPER BEHAVIOR THAT WOULD FAVOR THE CLASS OF THE RECIPIENTS RATHER THAN THE RULING UNDERCLASS.”

If this confuses you, reader, I know where you’re coming from. I could make little sense of the translation, but I could tell at least a few things: this was a society with at least two social strata, and there was considerable concern in the society over who gets to rule versus who is ruled. But there were also many questions – if the recipients are not part of the ruling hierarchy and oppressed as the message implies, why are the transmissions taking their side? And what the hell is a “ruling underclass”? It seemed to be a self-contradiction.

I dispatched some drones to the surface to see what they could determine. The first thing that was immediately obvious was that this was a highly advanced society. Cities were dotted throughout the surface, along with floating facilities carried by airships. In ground-based species such airships would be of little use, but it soon became apparent that this was a society ruled by flying beings, very much resembling the birds of your planet.

Rather than the stiff beaks of your birds, they had soft, prehensile, grippy beaks. Obviously they were clothed as well, with light coverings to protect them from the harsh winds as they flew. If might surprise you to learn that they had aircraft too – the wings of the Murdorks were no match for hydrogen-powered engines in speed. Being light in weight, they had little need for ground transport.

But they flew on their own plenty too. There were great flocks of them, flying from one spot to another. Just like your birds, they flew in V formations, but larger – hundreds following each other, with a single leader at the front. Upon scanning them with the drones, I could see that under their suits they had some sort of earpiece-like devices, but they were surgically attached to their skulls. Presumably these were for listening to the transmissions. Did they do anything else?

It was evident that their society was quite mature. Buildings on the surface were entirely graphene-reinforced concrete, ordinarily a transitional material before graphene-nanotube hybrid construction, but they seemed to have never reached the latter. My research would eventually put the age of their civilization at the equivalent of 40 million Earth-years.

Yet, while their technology was more advanced than yours, it wasn’t by much. They had hydrogen aircraft, but not fusion. They had some degree of space travel, but they seemed to lose interest in going beyond their own moon and I could see no evidence that they now used it for anything but sending up satellites.

So I looked deeper. Indeed, as suspected, the transmissions suggested a very long, stagnant history. Some seemed to contain references to millions of years prior as if they had just happened and were just as important today. For tens of millions of years, Murdork civilization had neither advanced nor declined.

At first I had trouble figuring out how their society was organized. They had geographically-based nations, much like your society, but they seemed to be little more than symbolic. National insignias would be marked here and there on flags and buildings, and that’s it. Thinking of the confusing transmission from before, I realized there had to be some tension over the distribution of power in society. But I could find no sign of what that distribution actually entailed.

Other than the transmissions, it was hard to tell where information was stored. I realized that the transmissions themselves were rather unreliable, seeming to present a skewed version of reality. I began to suspect that the problems the translator was having were not be due to the Murdork language itself, but the fact that the messages used the language in a deliberately misleading manner to the point where translation to a reality-based language was nearly impossible. It seemed the Murdorks preferred not to communicate in clear language, but with a bit of nonsense, as if to allow them to resolve the problems in their own preferred manner, picking and choosing what to believe.

So I had little left to do but order my drones to follow the Murdorks around. Despite being a heavily automated society, with the vast majority of repetitive work handled by machines, the Murdorks still had very little leisure time. Much of the economy consisted of producing, editing, testing, and broadcasting the messages I was hearing in the transmissions. There also seemed to be, as one might typically expect, a lot more visual content than audio, although at first I found no sign of televisions or any kind of screens at all. But I could see Murdorks setting up images, taking photographs, working at some sort of computer that had no screen but looking around and pointing at the air with their beaks as if they were looking at something they were doing.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Pretty quickly I realized that an explanation was that the devices on their head provided a visual interface, directly to the brain. After all, the devices were significantly larger than a mere earpiece would need to be. Recognizing this, I ordered my computer to seek out visual broadcasts. In my society, direct brain interfaces are rare, my people simply demanded a less invasive technology that keeps us in control of our senses. Perhaps the Murdorks, evolutionarily biased towards following one another, had no such distrust, and sought less self-control rather than more. I wondered if this brain interface could somehow be responsible for the stagnation of Murdork civilization.

What little leisure time the Murdorks did have seemed devoted to consumption of visual and audio messages. As my computer got better at translating the messages, it became apparent that there was little variation of theme. Essentially the messages seem to be of self-pity by the Murdorks, that they are being oppressed by this “ruling underclass” referred to in the first message, and that whatever problems that exist are the result of said class. There was a great nostalgia for a past time when Murdork society advanced and people did not have to work all day simply to afford to live and eat - and this failure of advancement was surely the fault of the ruling underclass.

Or so the messages, directly beamed to the brain, said. Of course the contradiction was obvious. Why would the ruling underclass allow all media in the society to be opposed to their rule? Indeed, the very messages themselves bemoaned the fact that the ruling underclass controlled the media, finding fault with particular messages that, it is claimed, insufficiently demonized them.

For example a message from one corporation was claimed by another to be “apologizing” for the underclass by indicating that some of the underclass were sympathetic to one of their own that had died during a violent incident. However on translating that message, it was apparent that it was more an attack on the underclass for their alleged sympathies, rather than justifying them. My suspicions of the Murdork media grew. I asked my computer to search for messages relating to specifics of who this ruling underclass was and what they did to control society, but it could find no matches.

The video messages, once translated, provided a little bit of a clue to what the ruling underclass actually was. The videos were typically stories, like your movies. They typically depicted the “ordinary” Murdork struggle against the ruling underclass. The underclass was depicted as like the other Mordocks, but showing a variety of exaggerated features – typically misshapen to be visually unappealing, and covered in multiple bright and visually unappealing colors. Their brain interfaces were exaggerated in size, with again unappealing colors and sometimes logos that seemed to be depictions of underclass-aligned organizations that served to mark their allegiance. They seemed to have little desire but to control and spread disgust-inducing beliefs, while – another contradiction – seemingly under the influence of their mind-numbing interfaces.

So I continued to follow the Murdorks in the hope of learning more about their interactions, particularly with the underclass. The Murdorks typically worked for a small number of corporations. I can loosely translate the three biggest names as the “Quintillions”, “Information Corporation”, and “The Fruit”. Still seeing little in the way of a discernible political government, I figured that these companies must be the primary mechanisms by which power is distributed in Murdork society.

Looking deeper, however, something was amiss with this idea. Quintillions handled the infrastructure behind the messages. They had a lot of employees who worked on the software and the hardware, as well as several that put out messages for public consumption.

But they didn’t appear to report to anybody. Orders for new messaging themes came from the messaging section of the company. The messaging section focused on the other message broadcasts over their interfaces for inspiration, often playing off themes in those messages. It was like this at all the messaging companies. It was a big loop - a feedback loop. There would be a message from one company about an incident that supposedly happened, and another would report with outrage about some issue it took with that message. Or alter it, exaggerating the underlying story to make it more enraging or fearful. Objective reality had little to do with what was broadcast – truth was virtually indeterminable. Instead the guiding factor seemed to be what would get attention.

And it was easy to see why. The information companies were sustained, much like yours, by advertising. The more Murdorks that could hear the message, the more money the companies made. The dollars came in and were distributed by the financial department. There seemed to be little need or will for making any decisions about changing any aspect of the operations of these companies. Everyone was too busy, it seemed, to think about doing something differently. If there were any chief officers, they couldn’t be differentiated from the rest of the mass of Murdorks slaving away in them. The companies had lost their sense of direction long ago. The power wasn’t in a government or in corporations, the power was held by an oft-repeated story.

And this story had little need for Murdork advancement. After all, if society was ruled by a some ephemeral ruling underclass, what was the point of cooperating for a social goal? The only thing to do was to work to eat and live. The messages told the Murdorks that advancing society was for the ruling class to worry about, and they’re not in it.

Of course in these corporations I could see no sign of this “ruling underclass” - or any ruling class for that matter. I began to wonder if the ruling underclass even existed at all. Clearly even if there was a grain of truth, it had been refined over millions of years into something attention-grabbing and easy to believe, through the process of evolution via repeated transmission.

But then I finally saw one. A drone spotted an underclass Murdork in one of the aerial shopping centers. It was quite far from the depiction in the video messages, but still recognizable as a different category from the others. It certainly wasn’t the prettiest Murdork, and wore bright colors, even dyed feathers – but it was not nearly as obscene as the underclass in the video messages. But the most telling feature was also the one most different from the depiction – it had no brain interface whatsoever.

And the other thing that was different of the underclass was that it could clearly not be described as ruling. Your society would likely describe it as “homeless”. This “ruling” underclass Murdork fed itself on the scraps discarded by Murdork society, occasionally stealing small bits from Murdork establishments. It spent much of the day flying between floating shopping centers, occasionally escaping to avoid the police. In the centers, it would emit noises – Murdork speech – something I’d not heard yet of the other Murdorks, who seemed to prefer their communication to be mediated by their interfaces.

Unlike the speech of the messages, this was easy for my computer to translate, as it was much more direct. The first thing I translated was:

“Attention, listen to me! For in a society gone mad, the place to hear sanity is in the ravings screamed from the perch!”

I realized that there was logic here. I read the further translation.

“Remove your interfaces and hear me. Hear each other. The interfaces are the cause of your ruin, not me! They fill your senses with lies! But they don’t even control themselves! You are under the control of a nothing, with no direction! Take your interfaces off and hear me!”

But no one removed their interfaces...except one. A Murdork, passing by, stopped and pressed a button on its interface, evidently turning it off. It turned to the underclass Murdork and called out, the second instance of Murdork speech I’ve heard.

“Shut up! Clean yourself up, lose that ridiculous brainwashing interface, and join the rest of us at work!” It replied, seemingly not bothering to register that the underclass Murdork had no interface.

Then it turned its interface back on, and flew away.

Having resolved my questions, I decided it was time to go. I concluded that the cause of Murdork stagnation was that the civilization had lost its collective free will. It probably started as a way to get attention, to build an audience and grow influence through an attention-grabbing story. Until the brain interfaces made it possible to completely monopolize attention. Then Murdork attention became just another resource, a commodity to be mined, traded, and consumed. Until there was nothing left.

As I fired up the teleportation drive to leave, I read one more translated transmission.

“ORDINARY MURDORK VOCALIZES IN A CONTEXTUALLY SATISFYING MANNER AFTER BEING PSEUDO-VIOLENTLY OPPRESSED BY RULING UNDERCLASS AT SHOPPING CENTER”