Tribbles (Final Form)

Lyrics

A parallel log. Stardate unknown.
Captain Kirk, reflecting.

Captain's Log.
It began as a pest. Cyrano Jones on Station K-7.
The sound of them in the vents, in the quadrotriticale.
A biological joke consuming all the grain.
We thought we solved it.
We just didn't understand the problem.

In an age of replication,
when you can print gold, print dinner, print a ship's hull...
the only true scarcity is life itself.
Un-printable.
Un-buffered.
Stubbornly, chaotically, alive.

The Federation perfected abundance.
But we still needed a baseline. Something real.
Not an algorithm, not an energy credit.
We needed an anchor.
A Tribble... a Tribble cannot be synthesized.
The replicator states simply: ‘Cannot create living organism.’
Its purr became the sound of a stable asset.
The feeling of wealth in your hands.

In an age of replication,
when every need is met by a beam of light...
the only true scarcity is life itself.
Un-codable.
Un-faked.
Stubbornly, endlessly, alive.

We learned to manage the hyperinflation.
One becomes eleven. Eleven become a hundred twenty-one.
We learned that wealth which doesn't grow, dies.
The Klingons never understood. Their hatred wasn't just aesthetic.
It was a rejection of the new physics of value.
They couldn't see the ultimate store of value was a self-compounding organism that calms the nerves.

So here I sit.
The ship's vault is no longer shielded with tungsten, but with sonic dampeners.
The measure of a world's wealth is the soft, warm weight of its... population.
Cyrano Jones.
Not a con man. A prophet.
He gave us the First Coin. And it purred.

The trouble with Tribbles...
was never the Tribbles.
It was us. We didn't understand value.
End log.

The punchline becomes the axiom. File closed.