Today, live from Planet XÆA-510, The Intergalactic Public Radio (IPR) interviewed cyborg ZY§µ-33 about his role in Project Earth — a simulation that aims to study how a population evolves after introducing a series of paramount stresses, to evaluate how subjects respond to situations so absurd that they could have only been sent by an intergalactic power purposefully messing with you. 

IPR: So, ZY§µ-33, explain the goals of your simulation and how your simulation is programmed to meet these goals.

ZY§µ-33: Our test subjects, known as “humans” are quite dispensable. We want to see how far humans will advance before destroying themselves. Some humans have tendencies to cause chaos, exhibiting higher aggression levels than originally programmed to have. The dynamic personalities of humans make it extremely difficult to predict how each human will react.

IPR: Explain some of the “threats” that you have employed.

ZY§µ-33: All of our previous threats are meant to scare the test subjects, but none of them were meant to extinguish the whole population. For instance, we might have thrown a rock really close to the Earth, lit a small piece of land on fire, or splashed a bucket of water on a continent — it’s always interesting to see how humans react.

Recently, we’ve decided to increase the intensity. We introduced a virus with great virulence, which thinned out some of the population. Initially, they tried protecting themselves and stopping the spread, but at some point, people stopped caring and the virus began spreading even more rapidly. 

IPR: How long did this “virus” simulation last?

ZY§µ-33: Originally, we had only anticipated for the simulation to run for a few weeks, because, as we programmed it, the virus would have been eliminated easily if people followed those silly social distancing rules. But, the program ended up running for about two years. Generally, people who did not stay away from other humans ended up being infected. The causes of different human behavior patterns is something I can’t quite explain, perhaps natural selection prefers isolationists, or just doesn’t like stubborn people. There are almost no findings that are consistent among humans.

IPR: This project has dragged on for a long while: 20 years? Do you have plans to discontinue it any time soon?

ZY§µ-33: Yes, as of now, we have simulated about 6 million years of human life in the span of 20 years. However, we think our time with this project will be coming to an end. One of the last experiments we have been working on is testing if we can export a cyborg onto the Earth, and as of now, our first two cyborgs have successfully made their way onto Earth, Ye West and XÆA-Xii Musk. They will have remote access to the control panel to activate new stresses upon their own will. 

We don’t believe that this program will even last much longer anyway. Somehow a bug got into the program that seems to cause the humans to destroy themselves – like lighting fires and poisoning their own water supply. The fix probably won’t take long, but we can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

IPR: So our final question, how will the results of this project benefit cyborgs?

Strangely, after being asked the question, ZY§µ-33 left the meeting, for reasons unknown to us. When asking interns of the organization the same question, one admitted, “I honestly have no idea. I lied on my resume; I’m not even remotely qualified for this job. My assignment is to randomly kill 500 of the test subjects daily. Why? I don’t know; ZY§µ-33 never told me.”