Once upon a particularly profitable aeon, a pangalactic advertising agency decided to solve the oldest problem in the universe: how to make sentient beings pay attention forever.
> The Most Addictive Mind Worm Ever Created
They called it Project 42 — a perfectly engineered attention loop. The brief was simple: compress every known stimulus of curiosity, desire, and self-reference into exactly forty-two seconds. Not forty-one. Not forty-three. The timing matched the average duration of an unguarded mind before awareness reboots.
It worked. Too well.
# The Pangalactic Agency The agency, whose name is still under seventeen layers of legal injunction, operated across multiple galaxies and several incompatible timelines. Its clients included beverage conglomerates, hyperspatial influencers, and entire planetary economies whose GDP depended on continuous viewing. They gathered the greatest creative beings ever to inhabit the attention sector: semiotic engineers from Betelgeuse, empathy consultants from Sirius IV, and an entire focus group composed of telepathic dolphins. Together they forged the ultimate 42-second mind worm — a signal so captivating that once heard, no consciousness could look away. The result was catastrophic success. Viewership reached total participation. Commerce stopped. Diplomacy stopped. The weather forgot to happen. Entire planets froze mid-sentence.
# The Great Collapse The pangalactic economy began to unravel within days. Nothing was being bought, sold, or manufactured — except more copies of the video. Even Magrathea, once the pride of bespoke planet-building, was forced to shut down operations and enter deep freeze. The creative directors called it “a campaign too viral to monetize.” In panic, the consortium of interstellar business species convened an emergency summit. Billions of credits evaporated each second as the population of the galaxy stared blankly at screens. The board’s solution was both desperate and brilliant: they would release the **Label Fish**.
## The Babel Fish Antidote The Babel Fish — a neural symbiont previously banned under the Sentient Communication Accords — was designed to translate any form of communication instantly and perfectly. By making every signal *understandable*, it destroyed the mystery that kept viewers enthralled. The effect was immediate. Audiences blinked, frowned, and realized that the 42-second masterpiece was, in fact, a string of nonsense words arranged for maximum dopamine yield. Attention collapsed overnight. The galactic economy sighed back to life. Magrathea thawed. Trade resumed. The marketing department claimed victory.
# The Second Wave But the cure brought new symptoms. With the mind worm gone, civilizations found themselves craving something — anything — to fill the silence. And so began the **Reality Era**. Across the cosmos, billions tuned into endless series chronicling the ordinary lives of bizarre pangalactic species: *My Asteroid Family*, *Keeping Up with the Kleptons*, *The Real Amoebas of Alpha Centauri*. Whole civilizations built around watching other civilizations watch themselves. Attention had survived, but only by mutating. The mind worm was gone; the culture of infinite distraction had begun.
# Legacy Some say fragments of the original 42-second loop still drift through subspace, occasionally hijacking a broadcast or playlist. Others insist that the true worm was never the signal but the audience’s need to feel something perfectly calibrated. In the ruins of the agency’s headquarters, archaeologists once found a single surviving tagline etched into a crystalline server core:
> “We didn’t capture attention. We became it.”
