Chapter 361: Information Bombardment

And so, as the landing craft touched down, the group successfully disembarked onto Planet Dige.

The hatch slowly opened. As Jason stepped off the ramp, he was struck by the surreal illusion that he had just returned to Earth.

The sky was a pale green, dotted with high-flying clouds and bathed in bright sunshine. The sunlight warmed his face. The environment was slightly different, yet it felt strangely familiar.

Real sunlight... it has been so long.

Jason squinted, greedily savoring the sensation for a few seconds. It felt like returning to a mother’s embrace, washing away all his burdens.

Almost all the older generation of crew members shared the same relaxed, nostalgic expressions. The younger generation, however, looked around with pure curiosity and excitement.

Unfortunately, trace amounts of nuclear radiation lingered in the soil beneath their feet, making long-term exposure hazardous to their health. Unless they hid in underground shelters all day like the natives, living here without protective gear would lead to an early grave.

"These natives were fools. They destroyed a perfectly good world..." Jason quickly snapped out of his nostalgic daze, feeling a surge of annoyance as he surveyed the irradiated wasteland.

Why did wars even happen? For survival, or for some misguided sense of glory?

Once everyone had disembarked, the reception team of scientists hurried over to meet them on the tarmac.

Jason skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point. "So, what is the situation? What were the results of our analysis on the radio frequencies discovered by Luther?"

A middle-aged senior scientist handed him a report and nodded. "Actually, these specific radio waves act as distinct emotional markers. The frequencies released in Luther’s original video translated roughly to ’summoning’ and ’pleading.’"

"The later batches of data he recorded included distinct frequencies for ’joy,’ ’sadness,’ ’pain,’ and ’fear.’ It appears the entity has developed a spectrum of basic emotions. We are just not sure how far its cognitive evolution has progressed."

Hearing this, Jason’s heart skipped a beat. He took the report and flipped through the pages. It was filled with dense waveform graphs that looked remarkably similar to human brainwaves.

He immediately asked, "Have you attempted to broadcast these frequencies?"

The scientist nodded. "Yes, we did! But it didn’t respond to our calls. Instead, we detected faint frequency bands indicating ’fear’ transmitting from a distance..."

"It seems terrified of us. It hides whenever one of our starships approaches," he added with a puzzled look.

Jason and Austin exchanged a quick glance, a surge of relief and joy rising within them. If the entity was capable of feeling "fear," it perfectly explained its recent evasive behavior.

Everything was moving in the best possible direction!

If this was true, it meant the Gaia entity was still in its cognitive infancy!

There was a genuine chance they could educate it!

Jason didn’t hesitate. "Initiate the education protocol!"

And so, one of the most bizarre, large-scale educational programs in history commenced. The Federation’s industrial factories went into overdrive, churning out specialized equipment. Meanwhile, top psychologists and educational experts were urgently drafted to write "curriculums" for the entity’s various developmental stages.

For these experts, this was completely unprecedented territory. When they were first assigned the task, they were utterly bewildered.

How do you educate a planetary-scale colony of algae? It was a logistical nightmare. They were being asked to teach a highly dangerous, alien organism how to think like a human being.

Heated debates broke out in the planning rooms.

Traditional education relied on tailoring methods to a student’s aptitude. But no one had any idea what kind of temperament this algal colony possessed, and there was zero historical precedent to rely on.

Furthermore, its theoretical intelligence ceiling was likely far higher than humanity’s. Though, judging by its current behavior, its cognitive processing was still heavily reliant on primitive instinct.

"It only developed true self-awareness roughly a decade ago, likely triggered by the explosive increase in contact with the native population," one expert noted.

"Because it was heavily influenced by the natives, its current behavioral patterns mirror theirs. It is highly aggressive, ideologically confused, and entirely lacks a moral compass. Therefore, our absolute priority is to overwrite the natives’ toxic influence with our own!"

One of the lead educational psychologists proposed at the briefing, "We believe the most effective approach is full immersion. We need to let it observe human society, and ideally, integrate it into our culture so it can be subtly influenced over time!"

"Impossible," Jason flatly denied. He shook his head. "We can’t have our civilian population move to this irradiated planet. How are we supposed to integrate an ocean-sized entity into our society?"

Undeterred, the expert countered, "Then we must find a way to bring our society to it! We can do it through massive video broadcasts or other sensory simulations. Only large-scale, continuous social exposure will effectively shape its development."

"Also... Commander, if we want to cultivate a human-like consciousness, we must establish a foundational gender identity. Do we want to condition it to identify as male or female? As a biological collective, it currently possesses no concept of gender."

"Depending on which gender identity we assign, we will need to utilize drastically different sociological and educational strategies."

Hearing this question, Jason froze. He hadn’t considered that angle at all.

Why does a blob of algae need to be a man or a woman?

But upon further reflection, it made logical sense. To truly emulate human psychology, an individual required a core gender identity to anchor their social interactions. Gender was a fundamental biological and social reality for humanity. Gaia, lacking physical sex, would have to have an identity artificially fabricated for it.

The final consensus reached by the committee was to assign a female identity.

Psychologically, female socialization paradigms generally emphasize empathy, cooperation, and gentle behavior over aggression. Given the entity’s terrifying power, they couldn’t risk instilling a volatile or domineering personality. A single violent tantrum could spell disaster for the Federation fleet.

Moreover, projecting a maternal or maidenly persona onto a life-giving, planetary-scale ocean consciousness naturally aligned with human cultural archetypes.

Cultivating a gentle, cooperative girl is definitely the safer bet, Jason mused. A cooperative daughter of the Federation... I can work with that.

Once the overarching strategies were locked in, it took the Federation’s industrial sector roughly a week to urgently mass-produce the necessary broadcasting equipment and digital curriculums.

Jason quickly reviewed the compiled media. The introductory curriculum mostly consisted of videos of human infants, joyful laughter, chaotic but friendly household noises, and classic early-childhood developmental programming from Earth’s history.

This bizarre, highly curated collection of media alone amounted to several hundred petabytes of data!

Naturally, the curriculum was heavily skewed toward feminine developmental cues and socialization patterns.

Because the entity was a planetary-scale hive mind with incomprehensible computational bandwidth, it could process thousands of independent data streams simultaneously. Taking advantage of this, the education team planned to bombard it with thousands of videos at once to drastically accelerate its cognitive development.

As for whether the entity could actually comprehend the sensory overload... they would just have to wait and see.

"Don’t worry about overwhelming it," one engineer assured them. "If it was able to individually respond to millions of praying natives simultaneously, it can handle this. It is the ultimate biological supercomputer."

And so, the massive Titan starship acted as a temporary cargo freighter, urgently transporting thousands of atmospheric drones, massive projection screens, and industrial-grade audio arrays down to the planet’s surface.

The drones operated in squads of four. Hovering in a wide rectangular formation over the ocean, they stretched massive, synthetic white projection screens between them.

These giant airborne screens broadcasted video feeds twenty-four hours a day. They continuously looped footage of children laughing, toddlers learning to crawl, babies being bathed, and loving families interacting. The focus was entirely on human infants and toddlers, replacing the native population’s brutal imagery with pure, innocent domesticity.

Over three thousand of these drone squads blanketed the coastlines, relentlessly projecting childhood media into the ocean in a massive, unprecedented campaign of psychological information bombardment!