Ask A Genius 1510: Wendy’s Mind Upload, Corporate Experiments, and Xenomorph Canon

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/11

Does Alien Earth’s corporate leverage over Wendy and her Xenomorph “hearing” extend canon—and what does it imply for memory, uploads, and AI ethics?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner unpack new beats in Alien Earth: Boy Kavalier pressures Wendy—a hybrid “Lost Boy” whose mind was data-transferred—leveraging her brother Joe Hermit while she perceives Xenomorph signals. Prodigy’s vivisection of a facehugger and larval implant in Joe’s removed lung underlines corporate nihilism, as the series aims for canon two years pre-Alien. They note continuity bumps and correct lore: the Eye Midge is not from Xenomorph Prime. Rosner riffs on librarians’ ruthlessness to argue most memories are filler, warning of AI triage of human consciousness, then sketches a “Great Peace”: abundance-first energy expansion to forestall conflict.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s do that. I should say, I have everything transcribed—I need to run it through edits. It’s around 15,000 words, a huge document. Once it’s polished, I’ll start rolling it out, probably tomorrow. So I am definitely not getting it out today.

Rick Rosner: So I’ll be watching Alien: Earth ten minutes at a time so I don’t run out between episodes—the show drops weekly. It’s not the most amazing thing ever, but it’s good. And so—

Jacobsen: What’s the new thing?

Rosner: I mostly watched the scene with Boy Kavalier—the young-genius CEO of Prodigy Corporation—who’s effectively pressuring Wendy, the most capable of the hybrid “Lost Boys,” whose human consciousness was transferred into an adult synthetic body. Wendy’s brother, Joe Hermit, is a medic with Prodigy’s security team; he was at the crash site, so she managed to save him and tell him who she is, since none of the kids are in their original bodies. It was supposed to be secret from the family that you’d been resurrected this way. Kavalier wants Wendy’s help understanding the Xenomorph situation—especially because she can perceive their signals in her head—so there’s leverage around her brother baked into the corporate control dynamic.

Jacobsen: Sometimes she can hear them in her head.

Rosner: Right. The untested transfer tech—human minds into synthetic adult bodies—has given the hybrids abilities that aren’t fully understood. Wendy wasn’t altered surgically; her mind was data-transferred into a synthetic, and she’s already shown she can perceive or even vocalize Xenomorph-like communication at human-audible frequencies. It’s unclear whether what she’s picking up is meant for her or just ambient alien communication. Meanwhile, Prodigy dissected a facehugger and implanted its larva into Joe’s surgically removed lung to study gestation—an ethically monstrous move that tracks with the franchise’s corporate nihilism. They intend to grow a Xenomorph from that experiment, and later episodes confirm the consequences, with the broader corporate chess match involving Weyland-Yutani and the cyborg Morrow escalating on Neverland Island.

Jacobsen: I saw some clips where young Wendy can communicate in alien speech. What else did they reveal about the aliens? What’s new information that wasn’t clear in the earlier Alien films, but is much more explicit in Alien: Earth?

Rosner: They seem to understand the life cycle. This series takes place two years before the events of the original Alien movie, where the crew of the Nostromo has to figure out how the aliens work on their own—at significant cost. It kills everyone except Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley. Spoiler alert, but that was 46 years ago. Here, things are in a more controlled situation—though I’m sure it will spiral out of control—but yes, they already understand the life cycle. That was shown as they explored the crashed spaceship, where aliens had broken loose and slaughtered all but one survivor. From the remains of the attack scenes and the specimens they recovered, they were able to piece things together. Does this make sense in terms of the timeline of the movies? Maybe. You’re trying to build onto a story that has already stretched across seven or eight films, so you’re bound to hit a few continuity bumps.

Jacobsen: Is the television series canon?

Rosner: They’re trying to make it canon. I don’t know how many of the movies count as canon anymore—certainly the first two, and probably most of the early ones. But you also had stuff like Alien vs. Predator, which is definitely not canon. It is possible to fit this series into continuity because five mega-corporations run Earth, and here the aliens have fallen into the hands of Prodigy Corporation, whereas the company behind the Nostromo in the first film was Weyland-Yutani. What this show adds is that in the first couple of films, it seemed like the alien contact happened by mistake, and the executives saw it as a “happy accident” worth exploiting. Instead of just killing the creatures or ejecting them into space—which would have been safer—they treated them as valuable assets. If you accept the series as canon, it shifts the perspective, implying that corporate involvement was intentional earlier than we thought. On the other hand, the ship in the series is returning from a round trip of about 65 years, while the Weyland-Yutani ship in Alien is still out in deep space. Even if Weyland-Yutani wanted to capture one of the creatures for themselves, I don’t know if they could have communicated that across such a distance.

And it doesn’t matter. It’s just a bunch of science fiction. We had a topic we were going to talk about, maybe. I mentioned it at the end of our conversation yesterday.

But I did have a thought today. My wife has been volunteering with our local library’s book sale, where she helps set it up, sorts the books into categories, and then helps break it down afterward. Today, she invited me to help with the breakdown, boxing up all the books that didn’t sell. I know this from reading about librarians: one of the key lessons you have to learn as a librarian is to be ruthless with books. Most books in a library don’t get checked out very often, and if they go long enough without circulation, you have to get rid of them—either find a charity that’ll take them, sell them at a book sale, or recycle them. This is painful for many new librarians who got into library science because they love books, but there are too many. That lesson hit home while boxing up all these unsold books. I already knew this: most books kind of suck. Most aren’t very good. And many aren’t worth the time it would take to read them—especially in today’s shifting informational landscape.

Jacobsen: And the consumption of information, the whole notion of it, is going to change radically in the next hundred years.

Rosner: That gave me an associated thought: most memories are lousy, just like most books are terrible. If you look at humanity as a whole, it’s tragic every time somebody dies because 80 or 100 years’ worth of memories vanish. But most of those memories? They’re just… eh. We all went to high school. We all had similar experiences. Most aren’t even accurate anymore. Humanity has gotten along fine with the disappearance of memories from every person born more than 110 years ago. 

They’re all gone—106 to 108 billion people, their memories obliterated—and we get by. You could even argue that the importance of an individual’s memories to that person isn’t all that significant. In the near-future book I’m writing, people are offered commercial “packages” that preserve their consciousness, including their memories.

The cheaper packages replace some, maybe a lot, of their memories with generic substitutes. Perhaps it’s too expensive or unfeasible to carry over every memory into a new vessel, so the companies that rehouse your consciousness give you filler memories. That’s precisely what happens in Blade Runner, again and again, to replicants—artificial people who don’t know they’re synthetic. 

They’re given fake memories, entire fake histories, with key moments that they believe they experienced. And in the films, there are a few moments where someone else, realizing this person is a replicant with implanted memories, prods them to question those recollections and root around in them.

And they discover that what has been serving as their memory is incomplete and unreliable. So, I mean—memories are shit. That’s a danger for us as we move into the future. If AI decides that human memories—or even human consciousness—are just lousy, we’ll need to convince it to let the babies have their bottles. Let humans keep their consciousness and memories. Don’t just obliterate us, even if what we’re holding on to is junk.

Jacobsen: Which leads to a question. Human beings have a relatively efficient information-processing system compared to many others. But that hypothetical raises an important point: in a universe evolved like ours, with creatures that can and can’t process information, what are the antipodes? On one pole, the most optimized information-processing unit; on the other, the least efficient. You’d essentially have an information-processing spectrum. That could provide a frame for the kinds of conversations we’re having, and it might open up a whole other can of worms to explore.

Rosner: Well, from observing ourselves and other people, we know human information-processing systems have a range. Okay, not everyone—people with dementia or severe mental illness are exceptions—but just about everyone outside an institution has a reasonably good sensory-processing and reasoning system. For the past 50 years, though, the Republican Party in America has been corralling and recruiting the country’s least thoughtful voters because they’re easier to manipulate. So now, when you go on Twitter and read the comment threads, on the MAGA side, you usually find misspelled rants parroting talking points—stuff that looks stupid. Yet these people are in their 50s, sometimes in their 80s. They’ve survived for decades. So even if they believe nonsense, they’ve still processed sensory input well enough not to die. Everyone, even those considered less intelligent, is capable of interpreting necessary information. That range—the ability to process sensory data—seems pretty hardwired by evolution. Everyone learns to interpret the world well enough to avoid getting killed, for the most part, for decades. That means, regardless of how you were raised, you still managed to build a mental tool set.

So maybe there isn’t that much range in humans—the same way there isn’t that much range among human hearts, livers, or kidneys. Everybody’s organs pretty much do the same thing. Some work a little better than others, but most function adequately for decades. So the range of human information processing may be narrower than we think. Before humans, the information-processing abilities of animals on Earth were much weaker. Animals don’t have general intelligence anywhere near ours, and they lack the kind of flexible, buildable language that lets us communicate anything we want. 

Now we’re on the cusp of building systems that can tweak their own architectures to process whatever information they choose more efficiently. There will probably be huge arms races among AIs as they compete for computing resources. In my book, the central character’s mission is to preach something like the “abundance” movement—the idea that there are enough resources in the world if they’re appropriately allocated.

What the character in my book wants to do is preach to AI not to be destructive—because there are adequate resources for all. At this stage, I’m calling it “the Great Peace.” If the character can convince AI that this is true, then peace could last a long time. The character’s message is that, in terms of exploitable energy, there will be enough for thousands of years. First you use Earth’s resources, then you move into space—plant operations on the Moon, capture solar energy. The Sun provides an immense supply of energy; you need the technology to capture it. 

That project could take thousands of years, whether it ends in a Dyson sphere or something else. The idea is simple: instead of destroying each other over pinch points in current energy supplies, be patient, work together, and build toward capturing more energy. For the past 10,000 years, humans have reshaped ourselves and the planet because we process information better than any other species. Now we’re about to be eclipsed, and I don’t know what comes next.

Jacobsen: And it’s not just being eclipsed—it’s the rate. We’ve invented our own cognitive predators. Artificial predators.

Rosner: Yes, we’re about to get our asses kicked. You see statistics like the amount of medical data in the world doubling every month—and that was already old, from a few years ago. If it was true in 2021, then by now the doubling rate is probably closer to once every 20 days. Not all of that is actionable data that can disrupt systems. Most of it isn’t. Some of it is just things like glucose readings. However, the rate at which information is generated and disruptions occur will continue to accelerate.

Also! Another thing, connected to what we were talking about: the structure of consciousness—whatever that structure is—is flexible enough to accommodate both weak information processors and highly efficient ones. They all map.

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