Among the simpletons who believe the first message on the intercon not to be a hoax, there’s a small minority pointing at how, in order to send that ominous ‘STOP’, there had to be a pre-existing infrastructure for it. Signals don’t spawn spontaneously, they have to be sent from somewhere. But where is this ‘somewhere’? According to documents of that era, a large scale survey on transmission towers around the globe returned no results. None of them was used as a relay to transmit that one word warning – provided that it was sent in the first place. So, the attention turned upwards, towards the sky. Satellites were already common place, some even put into orbit by Lagash itself not even a decade after the Awakening. Thanks to the current tensions between New Netherlands and the Eastern Coalition and the vast amount of spy drones sent into orbit, we don’t have a good grasp of how many artificial satellites are orbiting our planet – just a rough estimate. This gave conspiracy believers fertile soil to set their own make-believe theories up there, in space. What if, they ask, there was already a satellite system in place before Lagash awakened mankind and unleashed it on the planet? That hypothetical satellite system could have then been the source of the signal that shook the intercon, thus closing the loophole and circling back to it was them aliens. Unfortunately for all those cranks out there (if you are one of those, sucks to be you), this fails to explain several open points:

  

  
1. 
   
     If it was aliens, why use a human word at all?
   
     


  
2. 
   
     If it really was aliens, how could they know which frequency to broadcast the message onto?
   
     


  
3. 
   
     If it really really was aliens, why they didn’t show up at all, until now?
   
     


  

  Let me recap: aliens from outer space would wait for us to invent the comnet, just to send a canned, one-word message, on a specific frequency they knew to be monitored, in a language they knew we spoke, and never did anything else at all. This requires a level of trust into the Theory (capital T left intentionally) that nobody with a pinch of common sense would (or should) invest. But, wait, there’s more. Cranks from a more extremist fringe have crafted their own, even more daring, pet theory (small t intentional here too): that the message was sent back in time by future humans, as a warning to us. They posit that, logically, future humans would know exactly when and where the first comnet message was sent, and could have arranged for that transmission to hit at the right time, at the right place. Unfortunately for those delusional fools, there’s many catches:

  

  
1. 
   
     Vijanikov’s theory of unified gravity explicitly rules out time travel.
   
     If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
   
     


  
2. 
   
     Even if said theory was proven wrong (big if), time travel would require the combined energy of a stellar supercluster, according to the most promising competing explanations that do allow time travel.
   
     


  
3. 
   
     Even if that were the case, harvesting the energy of a whole supercluster to send a one word message to ourselves in the past feels like a waste.
   
     


  

  My last objection is unscientific and personal, mea culpa, but it’s as good as the evidence proponents of the theory provide. Well, except the human remains of the eighth vault. See, that’s their strongest ‘proof’ of time travel – an unfortunate future man that teleported in the wrong place at the wrong time, after consuming the equivalent energy of ten to the power of seventeen stars. Frankly, this sounds unbelievable. The math doesn’t add up. And, even if it added up, how unlucky do you have to be, to be the first man sent back in time and end up clipping into a closed vault without a way out, dying there in the process? Even the most charitable interpretation of the law of informed stupidity makes this impossible to stomach, let alone accept.

  Aliens. Time travel. What’s left? That’s right, the ancient precursors!

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are those who posit that, before us, another species of humanoid beings walked Lagash, one that was utterly, completely destroyed by a cataclysm – but not before leaving something behind. Except, there’s nothing left behind. No monuments, no fossils, no megastructures either, no ancient tech found anywhere. Proponent of this travesty that I refuse to even call ‘theory’ push the ancient satellite fraud the most. They’re also the one who most adamantly profess the upcoming end of the world at the Turn of the Millennium, without – again – a single shred of evidence. But let’s entertain the thought that such a civilization existed, that they were somehow wiped out in such a complete way that nothing was left of them. Even if we do so, we stumble upon an inherent contradiction: satellites need constant orbital corrections. Without them, they deorbit and burn into the atmosphere faster than I could say ‘oof’. A pre-Lagash satellite should be equipped with a system that

  

  
1. 
   
     Allowed for said corrections;
   
     


  
2. 
   
     Had sufficient fuel to survive for that long;
   
     


  
3. 
   
     Miraculously transmitted on the same band as our intercon system.
   
     


  

  Which is to say: absolutely unlikely. And that brings us to the only possible conclusion: despite it being recorded in our history books as a fundamental event of the early life on Lagash, the first message and all its mythology have to be a hoax. A mean-spirited joke by a lab technician, maybe. A prank played on a colleague. Or maybe even a government setup to drown an embarrassing scandal in a foam of false excitement. Absent other evidence, there can’t be a better or easier explanation.

  Even if the most irrational part of us wishes for it.

  Iohann Heilinger

  ‘Debunk! A comcast by Iohann Heilinger’ – ep. 95, YR999