Ag'ath sweet Ag'ath
- or how a planet was left unaccounted -
Sandra Rennecke, 5-June-2008
Thanks to pierrot and GrandWidow
Pi'rot owned a small planet orbitting an insignificant sun. She did
not, in fact, own the whole planet; but enough of it to make people
belive she did. The sun had a name in the starmaps of course, something
like "MB-F4-5", but the natives ususally referred to it as "sun". The
planet was too small to warrant a name of it's own so people just
called it "home". Pi'rot however decided, "home" did not sound grand
enough. So she ordered the population to henceforth say "Ag'ath" (her
father's name) instead of "home".
This led to some confusion, when people all of a sudden came Ag'ath,
called Ag'ath or left Ag'ath instead of coming home, calling home or
leaving home, but after a while all got used to it. The song "Ag'ath
sweet Ag'ath" became popular, taught to children at school and was sort
of a planetary anthem. Then came the day where the population of Ag'ath
was to be counted by the Interstellar Government. The goverment needed
the statistics for such important things as public health and welfare.
So people on Ag'ath logged into the Interstellar Net to be counted.
However, because of some old remnant software back from the days of a
man called Hayes, when someone said "Ag'ath is my Ag'ath" the speech
recognition would fail. Hayes had been bad at math and hated that word.
So he forbid it used in the same sentence twice. Some hacker, who loved
math, later removed the "M" from the word, allowing him to say "Math!
Math! Math!" as often as he wanted. Just not "ath", but he did not care
about that. Due to that hack however, which was maybe a bit sloppily
done, every time someone said "Ag'ath is my Ag'ath" a long forgotten
bit would flip and he or she would count as zero instead of one.
This is how the population of Ag'ath was never counted and to this day probably not very many have noticed.
