Earth as we know it is visited by alien life . Upon the landing , a human emerges and says , `` Your species and mine are one in the same . Now it is time to bring you back to the Empire '' . [ WP ]

*Earth as we know it is visited by alien life. Upon the landing, a human emerges and says, `` Your species and mine are one in the same. Now it is time to bring you back to the Empire''. * 
 [ translations may differ ] 
 
 Easy. I stamp in a handful of prepped jargon about post- and trans-speciation and the GI marks it a pass. Now I'm back on track to seven per minute. I maybe had a *bit* of trouble in the 0.8-1.0 difficulty range, but I swear it is n't bad enough to bother anyone. Doing great now! Still on track for 1k -- 
 
 *Earth as we know it is visited by alien life. Upon the landing, a human emerges and says, `` Your species is superior to ours. Now it is time to bring you back to the Empire''. * 
 
 Neat twist, but nothing I ca n't handle. Pass. 
 
 *Earth as we know it is visited by alien life. Upon the landing, a human emerges and says, `` Your species is enemy to ours. Now it is time to bring you back to the Empire''. * 
 
 Second answer requiring military. Why bother testing *us* on the *civilian* species anyway? Pass'with Honors.' and then -- 
 
 *Earth as we know it is visited by alien life. Upon the landing, a human emerges and says, `` Your species is [ untranslatable ] to ours. Now it is time to bring you back to the Empire''. * 
 
 Final question of my block is open-ended. Was a big topic right around our midterm, but that was three months ago. Here I have to spend some effort, hand-arranging a diplomatic assembly from parts off three SIs, all running at once. I lean forward to expose my back, keeping it below TC, and the chamber temp goes up three mils. Still fine. Threads chime back and I run a final consistency check before submitting the theorem. 
 
... 
 
 I wait and wait. GI must be crunching a lot of numbers, lot of testees on this prompt simultaneously. Eventually... straight pass. Could be worse -- 
 
 *Earth as we know it is visited by alien life. Upon the landing, a human emerges and says, `` Your [ untranslatable ] is [ untranslatable ]. Now it is time to [ untranslatable ]''. * 
 
 Trick question, probably has the low- % s writing up something huge. I send the trivial solution right off my prep sheet... or so I thought. Fail with Reconsideration. Turns out the testee myth about open-ended questions being separated, I got excited and missed the whole point of this thing. Remaining statics are `` earth,'' `` alien,'' and `` human,'' which should have been everything, but it turns out the advanced curriculum also tested with a free symbol over `` earth,'' including what to do here. So I flunked this one, and the reconsideration. Oh well. 
 
 My responses and score go on the record just as I get them in-monitor. They're pretty much what I expected. Maybe a little better, but still not as well as I'd hoped. Not enough to get me full-ride to Harvard's Xeno-Dip program. I'd have to start looking at scholarships. 
 
 Ended up a while later with a *fellow*ship instead. Entry pay and summer work for Big G, scanning books and text from photos. Not great, but I told myself I would n't go to the dark side for extra pay. 
 
 Turns out I was wrong. Oh well. CAPCHA breaking is lucrative, even for a site so foreign you ca n't use UTF-8 with their endpoints. I did n't know what those photos were of, because I just sorta ( ahem. ) mindlessly do each one. Soon you stop seeing the image and just notice numbers; eventually you do n't see anything. It's easy to condition a part of yourself for something so trivial that you only give it the exact attention required; here, to find and reproduce corresponding pre-distorted symbols. The ground segments are often totally lost in pre-sentient automation. So I hope you can forgive me if I somehow violated your privacy. If it helps, I *probably* was n't paying attention and do n't remember. Probably. It was a very strange time for me. 
 
 We need more solid Ph.D. and M.Sci Diplomats to handle our next pocket event, more of us doing neutrally-funded, credible research -- not working in CAPCHA mills for client-nation-of-the-day. Yeah, it's legal, but that does n't mean it's clean. Every kid dreams of being a Diplomat after they see original Seattle videos. Every single one. And I've seen *far too many* get caught up in this stuff and *never* make it there. Be careful.
