Evil Empire 123Appendix 15, Number 2. The Agent Probii
Exploration
Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman
when discovery was made of this planet—the ninth one to which the
iotafying machines had sent survivors, millennia ago—the first thing
we did was to confirm that its inhabitants were in fact human. Aside
from a few small mutations, such as growth of the outer ear and an
elongation of the fingers, it was determined that they remained perfectly
human. The second thing was to decipher the language in which they
communicated, a feat that proved far more difficult than anticipated—
not because decoding it seemed impossible, or because they spoke more
than one language (a perfectly human possibility), but because what we
found defied the very notion of “language.”
The planet was discovered by Agent Probii, one of our best, who,
despite having undertaken extraordinary research, was unable to draw the
conclusions that would have saved his life. This report is based on his data.
Agent Probii’s first days as undercover agent were particularly
disconcerting because the city (if it can be so called) to which he
arrived was lacking in stable landmarks: where one day there was a
paved corner, later that night he found a wasteland; where there had