I've seen it vaguely touched upon, but has anyone ever gotten really indepth about how we advance, not as a need, but as a competitive factor? Like with even NASA and whatever we were like "hey we're gonna make it to space before you losers" and the others were like "heck no we're gonna get there before you losers" and it just permeates every factor of our lives ask any child who plays a game and even they'll be pumped to win
Necessity is the parent of progress, the pamphlet had said. It was supposed to be a human saying, but as Vossavangen looked upon the mess the ships humans had made, xe realised how wrong this statement was. As per usual, humans made very little sense. Apparently, it had all started with one of the humans saying they could fix the fuel intakes of the small utility ships (which were working fine, mind you) before and better than another human.
Apparently this was a ‘bet’ - a word that didn’t really translate to Vossavangen’s native language. A lot of the words spoken in the following argument didn’t translate, and those who did seemed strangely fixated around referring to the other human as genitalia. At the time it hadn’t seemed like it would bring much trouble. Like most normal human behaviour it was best to let it play out on its own and let the humans deal with it.
Well, that was what xe had thought then, but less than one rotation later the floor of the room the humans called the garage was filled with tools and pieces of engines. It was a disaster, and Vossavangen had no idea how to explain it to xir superiors.
Talking to the humans had proven futile, but by some miracle both the utility ships they’d been ‘tinkering’ on were fully operational eleven rotations later - less than half a rotation before High Command was supposed to inspect the area. The work space was far from tidy, but the humans had decided that one party would clean for all of them. Which it would be depended on who had brought the biggest improvements to the ships.
Vossavangen was less than optimistic, but xe tested the utility ships none the less. Shockingly, it seemed the human engineers and mechanics had managed to on one of the ships cut fuel use with almost forty percent, while on the other they had substituted the need for traditional fuel altogether for food waste.
After the incident, it became common knowledge that the best ways to get a human to work efficiently was to say they either wouldn’t be able to do it, or that someone else could do it better than them.
