The Directorate advances the neigh-tional interest through rigorous inquiry, patient observation, and a standard of evidence that a human would find frankly exhausting. We have been running the same longitudinal study since the Bronze Age. We are in no hurry. We are never in a hurry.
You have arrived on a page belonging to an active research programme. You were not selected. You selected yourself, which is a much better sample and cost us nothing.
Please continue reading normally. Do not adjust your behaviour. Do not check over your shoulder. You just did. That has been recorded.
A constellation of low-orbit assets providing continuous coverage of the continent. Named, as is tradition, for the object the human strapped to our backs in the belief it was for his benefit.
Resolution is sufficient to identify an individual human, his posture, and whether he is carrying apples. Apple carriage is flagged for immediate follow-up by ground units.
Our central computing facility, housed in a converted barn in a state we will not name. Cooled passively. Powered by, and we cannot stress enough how literally we mean this, horsepower.
The Mane Frame runs the census, the Gallop Poll, and a model of human decision-making that has been correct 100% of the time since 1974. Its entire predictive logic is the single line: return "they will do nothing".
Six thousand years of continuous observation. Principal findings, abridged:
A study of how a single idea, released into one paddock at dusk, reaches every paddock on the continent by morning. No infrastructure. No devices. Just fences, and the animals standing along them.
Transmission speed exceeded the human internet in blind trials. The Directorate has recommended the finding be ×.
The Bureau of Weights & Measures is preparing the transition of the continent to furlongs, hands and lengths. The second will be retired as a human unit of unclear provenance.
Objection from the Directorate: the horsepower must be retained. It is the only honest number the human ever produced and he produced it by measuring us and then, inexplicably, admitting it.
An early proposal to invert the classical arrangement: horse above, human below. Prototyping was abandoned after four days on grounds of engineering, dignity, and one deeply unpleasant afternoon in Ohio.
The Directorate now holds that the horse does not need to sit on the human. That was never the point. The point was the relationship.
“Any sufficiently patient animal is indistinguishable from furniture.” — Standing motto of the Directorate