Has anyone considered the Hive is not what the message intended?

The more I think about it, the less I’m convinced the Hive is what the original message was supposed to do.

All the rats test “negative,” which suggests the lab never actually reproduced whatever the signal was encoding. They didn’t successfully build the original construct – they built something that still runs, just in a broken, human-specific way.

If this was a real interstellar blueprint, you’d expect it to be fairly general: some kind of high-level “program” that can be realized in different biologies. Instead, what we see looks like a bad compile:

That’s exactly what you’d expect if the decoding process introduced an error. The signal might be repeating a much more complex instruction set, but the scientists only manage a lossy, approximate translation into this RNA “virus.” The result is a mistake that still functions: a half-corrupted version of the intended payload that latches onto human neurobiology and collapses into a hive mind.

Under that reading, US isn’t the “true” face of the message – it’s what you get when a bunch of sleep-deprived primates try to rebuild alien code with the wrong compiler… and accidentally ship the broken build into the water supply.