by Steve Alten
“Enough! You sound like a bad GPS system. Focus on that plastic specimen cage.”
SPECIMEN CAGE IS ELECTRIFIED. LOCATE POWER SOURCE AND DISABLE.
“Power source? Makes sense.” I scanned the outside of the pod, finding nothing. Retrieving a large stick from outside, I wedged the branch beneath its curved bottom.
“Hold on, Oscar.” Using the stick as a fulcrum, I flipped the clear cage onto its side — exposing a toaster-size portable power pack housed within the base. Using the blunt end of the stick, I smashed the assembly until it sparked and short-circuited in a burst of smoke.
The pod cracked. Using both hands, I pried it open.
Too weak to move, the cephaloped remained curled in a ball.
Gently, I reached inside and scooped the invertebrate’s upper torso into my arms and against my chest, straining to lift the three hundred plus pound creature. With no recourse but to drag its tentacles behind me, I carried it to the redwood pond and released it into the water.
21
If the Earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants.
— THOMAS BERRY, Roman Catholic priest
The dying cephaloped sank to the bottom of the redwood pond, bubbles of air trailing from the breathing organ atop its skull.
Realizing too late that the land creature might be in shock and actually drowning, I went in after it. The cold water instantly soothed my own frayed nervous system.
Hoisting Oscar back to the surface required pinning the back of its head and upper torso against my chest — which meant running my arms beneath its tentacle sockets as a lifeguard might do to assist a drowning person.
Maybe that was its “sensitive area” because the moment I touched it, the inert animal suddenly reached out for me with those monstrous appendages and held me in its vise grip underwater!
The sensation of panic sent a memory flashing through my mind’s eye. When I was sixteen, I had enrolled in a life guard training seminar at summer camp. On our first day, the instructor — ten years older and seventy pound heavier than yours truly, volunteered me to swim out to the deep end of the pool and “rescue him.” He was calm on my approach, then, playing the role of the panicking victim, suddenly lunged for me and clasped my head to his chest, holding me underwater as I became his flotation device. The fucker kept me pinned underwater for the longest, scariest forty seconds of my life, teaching me a valuable lesson … and later a simple lifesaving piece of advice — a drowning person will only release you if you pull them underwater.
Reaching up through a sea of tentacles, I grabbed the cephaloped by one of its eye stalks and pulled its head underwater.
It released me instantly — its eye stalk, I imagined, being the cephaloped equivalent of my testicles. A minute later the two of us were out of the water, panting heavily as we leaned against the side of the rain-filled tree stump.
Slumped over, the land squid stared at me with its jaundiced eyes through droopy double lids as if trying to figure me out. After several minutes, it did something quite marvelous and, in retrospect something distinctly human — it slowly reached out to me with one of its appendages.
In turn, I reached toward it.
The touch of flesh to tentacle fin was startling, eliciting its own impulse wave that was shared by the two of us — a deep, almost hypnotic resonance that seeped through every cell in my body.
RECALCULATING … MASSIVE INFLUX OF SODIUM AND CALCIUM IONS DETECTED, ACCOMPANIED BY AN EFFLUX OF POTASSIUM IONS. POST-SYNAPTIC POTENTIAL CYCLES ARE BEING ALTERED—
My eyes rolled up in my head, my body tingling. ABE, how is this happening?
ECHOLOCATION.
Before I could blink, ABE had downloaded a dozen pre-GDO studies on the effects of dolphin echolocation on humans — echolocation being the dolphin’s natural sonar system which functioned like an ultrasound, enabling the mammals to detect objects through the water over great distances. Results of experiments showed that when a dolphin echolocated a human, the sonic clicks caused dramatic changes in the subjects’ neurotransmitter production, affecting the entire endocrine system. This positive response was caused by the effects of cavitation, which induced sonophoresis — an increase in hormone transportation.
Dolphin echolocation took place in the water; my contact with the cephaloped was direct and prolonged … and it was a multidirectional healing. I could feel the squid growing stronger … the pulsation of its three hearts cascading within my own bloodstream, its terror dissipating.
WHY?
ABE whispered the one-word inquiry out of the ether and into my consciousness, breaking my train of thought.
My internal response: Why what?
WHY?
I opened my eyes. “ABE, what are you asking me?” I was so annoyed at being disturbed that I failed to realize something important …
ABE IS PROGRAMMED TO RESPOND TO INQUIRIES, NOT TO GENERATE THEM.
“Then stop saying ‘Why?’”
THE INQUIRY IS NOT ORIGINATING FROM ABE.
“What?” I sat up, gazing into the alert yellow eyes staring back at me. It’s coming from the cephaloped?
CORRECT. THE SUBJECT IS COMMUNICATING USING THOUGHT ENERGY. “WHY” IS THE SUBJECT’S EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION OF THOUGHT ENERGY APPROXIMATED INTO ENGLISH.
Can it understand me?
NOT DIRECTLY. ROBERT EISENBRAUN’S THOUGHT ENERGY IS BASED ON CONCEPTS DEFINED BY AN ESTABLISHED VERBAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE COMBINED WITH EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE. OSCAR’S THOUGHT ENERGY IS BASED ON A VOCABULARY OF EMOTIONS, DESIRES, NEEDS, CURIOSITY, EXPRESSED THROUGH THE LIMITATIONS OF ITS MEMORY FOUNDATION.
What is … wait — did you refer to it as Oscar?
CORRECT. IT HAS ACCEPTED YOUR DESIGNATION OF ITS PHYSICAL PRESENCE.
Just out of curiosity, is Oscar a male?
OSCAR POSSESSES AN ENLARGED HECTOCOTYLUS ARM DESIGNED FOR INSERTION INTO A FEMALE OR MALE MANTLE AND DEPOSITING A SPERMATOPHORE, THEREFORE THE SUBJECT IS A MALE.
Female or male? Are octopi bisexual? Wait … I’m not holding its hectocotylus arm, am I?
REPRODUCTIVE DATA REFLECTS AQUATIC SPECIES OF OCTOPUS; DATA ON EVOLVED TERRESTRIAL SPECIES IS STILL BEING FORMULATED. PRE-GDO STUDIES ON AQUATIC OCTOPUS SEXUALITY INDICATED SUBJECTS, WHEN PAIRED WITH OTHERS, FAILED TO RECOGNIZE WHETHER ANOTHER SUBJECT WAS MALE OR FEMALE UNTIL AFTER THEY BEGAN THE ACT OF COPULATION. MALE-TO-MALE COPULATIONS LASTED LESS THAN THIRTY SECONDS AND DID NOT CULMINATE IN SPERMATOPHORE RELEASE. MALE-TO-FEMALE COPULATIONS LASTED TWO AND A HALF HOURS AND RESULTED IN THE RELEASE OF ONE TO FOUR SPERMATOPHORES. OSCAR RECOGNIZES THAT ROBERT EISENBRAUN IS MALE. IT WAS THIS RECOGNITION THAT LED TO OSCAR RESCUING EISENBRAUN FROM DROWNING.
Now I’m completely confused. Oscar rescued me because it recognized that I’m a male?
CURIOSITY APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN THE MOTIVATING FACTOR.
Has Oscar ever even seen a male human before?
OSCAR HAS NEVER SEEN A MALE HUMAN. OSCAR DESIRES AGAIN TO UNDERSTAND WHY ROBERT EISENBRAUN RESCUED OSCAR.
Why? Because Oscar … Exhausted from the internal dialogue with my biological chip, I squeezed the creature’s fin, looking directly into its stalk eyes. “You rescued me from the ocean, you saved me from the ants. Humans … my species — we too believe in treating others with acts of kindness.”
To my surprise, the creature became agitated. Withdrawing its tentacle, it stretched its reach overhead, snagged the nearest branch of the redwood and disappeared into the canopy.
“What’d I say? Is he coming back?”
UNKNOWN.
Unknown? You were reading its damn thought energy! Can’t you … Ah, never mind. ABE, based on our shared observations, summarize Oscar.
OSCAR REPRESENTS A SPECIES OF CEPHALOPOD THAT HAS EVOLVED FROM AN AQUATIC ANIMAL INTO A SEMI-AMPHIBIOUS AIR-BREATHING LAND ANIMAL. OSCAR DEMONSTRATES GENEALOGICAL TRAITS LINKED WITH HIGHER FORMS OF INTELLIGENCE. OSCAR RESCUED ROBERT EISENBRAUN BECAUSE IT WAS CU
RIOUS ABOUT ROBERT EISENBRAUN. OSCAR’S THOUGHT ENERGY RELATIVE TO ROBERT EISENBRAUN’S PRESENCE SUGGESTS CONFLICTING CONCERNS THAT EQUATE TO EMOTIONS OF FEAR, TOLERANCE, CURIOSITY, EMPATHY, DISTRUST, AND FRIENDSHIP. OSCAR REPRESENTS A SPECIES THAT IS BEING HUNTED BY A SUPERIOR PREDATOR DISPLAYING AN ADVANCED KNOWLEDGE OF REMOTE SENSING, PLASTICS, AND RELATED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGIES.
“Stop. Formulate best response: Why is Oscar’s species being hunted?”
IMPOSSIBLE TO DETERMINE, BASED ON LIMITED DATA. POSSIBLE RESPONSES INCLUDE FOOD, HARVESTING OF BODY PARTS, POPULATION CONTROL, EXTERMINATION, SPORT, OR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. BASED ON THE SIZE OF THE TRAP, OSCAR’S SPECIES IS INTENDED TO BE CAPTURED ALIVE.
“Then the hunters will be back to claim their prize.” I stared up into the canopy, its treetops swaying two hundred feet overhead. ABE, design a means to rig the fire cave’s perimeter with a trap of our own.
“The hunter is about to become the hunted.”
* * *
ABE must have accessed every wilderness article ever written, but in the end I knew the trap’s chances of success had more to do with whether the element of surprise outweighed the technology of the unknown hunter we were facing. Or hunters. There was simply no telling how many its would show up, or for that matter when they would return.
The trap was rigged to the bottom of the pod — any attempt to remove the device would trigger the release of a log that was teetering on the edge of the redwood’s limb. Vines attached to the log ended in snares positioned in and around the cave floor. The vines were green and thin, but possessed the tensile strength of steel wire. Most important, they were easily concealed within the spongy walls and floor of the fire cave.
Luring an unknown quarry into the fire cave was central to the trap. Creating a dummy to replace Oscar inside the plastic pod proved the more difficult task. In the end I settled on segments of thick roots and mud, which offered the appearance and feel of mass, and smeared cephaloped blood on the interior glass to prevent a clear inspection.
Hopefully, the hunter would spring the trap before the ruse was discovered.
The sun had nearly set by the time I had finished camouflaging the last snare. Climbing into the upper branches of another redwood, I concealed myself behind a blanket of leaves, set the binoculars on night vision, then waited.
Hours passed. I rolled over on my back and gazed up at a redwood canopy set against a backdrop of stars — stars that would allow my bio-chip to recalculate its chronometer. Instructing ABE to alert me to any unusual sounds or movements, I closed my eyes and slipped inside the warmth of my forest cocoon.
* * *
INTERNAL ALERT! NEW ENTITIES PRESENT!
I opened my eyes to an ABE-evoked rush of adrenaline. Where are they?
FIFTY-SEVEN METERS TO THE WEST. DESCENDING FROM AN ALTITUDE OF 792 METERS.
Looking up, I could see nothing but the dark outline of the redwood treetops and a sprinkling of stars. Then I held the night-vision binoculars to my eyes and the invaders became visible.
The platform was hexagonal and dark and I would have missed it except it blotted out a section of stars twenty-feet long. Hovering above the forest canopy, it appeared to be motionless, lacking any obvious means of propulsion. Zooming in on the undercarriage, I saw a faint pattern of spinning circles, the movement generating a soft green glow in my otherwise olive-tainted field of vision.
I was looking at the bottom of the hovercraft when a life-form appeared above the treetops, rising eerily toward the levitating object. At first I thought it was one of the giant bats, only the creature wasn’t flapping its wings, it was using them like a kite, catching the wind to increase its altitude. As my eyes adjusted to the starlight, I saw a pair of dangling biped legs and then arms — human arms. The faceless head, the fleshless skin … everything was cloaked in black to blend in with the night.
Rising in tow behind the flying biped was a pod trap, and there was clearly something thrashing about inside. ABE quickly confirmed it to be a cephaloped.
Was it Oscar, or another one of its kind?
Cursing under my breath, I parted the leaf blind and searched for the primary redwood limb with my binoculars, tracing the highway of bark and ferns back to the buttress. My heart pounded in my chest as I peered inside the fire cave, staring at the dark silhouette of another winged being poised just outside the entrance. For a long moment the biped simply remained there, its head slightly cocked as if evaluating—
Womp!
There was no scream or screech, just the report of a vine snapping beneath the weight of the now dangling log and the panicked flutter of leatherlike wings beating the night air as one of the trap’s snares wrenched tightly around the ankle of my quarry, flipping it upside-down and pinning it to the ceiling of the fire cave.
Got you, you bastard! How’s it feel to be—
DETECTING AN INCREASE IN PARTICLE WAVES. WARNING: INTRUDERS CAN DETECT YOUR THOUGHT ENERGY.
Huh?
Before I could muzzle my mind, a blinding white searchlight ignited from the platform’s hexagonal undercarriage, the beacon cutting a swath of day in my direction through the chaos of foliage.
There was no time to react. One moment I was scrambling to hide beneath an illuminated umbrella of greenery, the next I was swept off my feet and into the air, a viselike grip squeezing my rib cage into my lungs, the assault as sudden as it was terrifying. Helpless and frightened, I bellowed a bloodcurdling scream yet uttered no sound, my mouth filled with goo …
No, not goo, it was a tentacle!
Oscar?
SILENCE.
The searchlight followed us as we moved through the trees, two of the cephaloped’s tentacles wrapped snugly around my waist and legs, the others grappling for vines and branches. Crashing through curtains of leaves, Oscar dropped in a dizzying, stomach-churning free fall into darkness — and then we stopped.
Oscar released me just long enough to pin my back against the trunk of a tree. Splaying its head and tentacles, it blanketed my body, its flesh changing colors, camouflaging us with a cluster of thick surface roots amassed around the moss-covered base of a two-hundred-foot sequoia.
I could feel my guardian struggling to control its gasps. My own breaths were somewhat stifled, my face covered by a semiporous sheath of stretched tentacle skin.
Breathing, escaping, awakening … none of it was important. Wrapped head to toe in the cephaloped’s embrace, my only priority was to manage the building waves of euphoria that were causing my body to shake uncontrollably as every square inch of my being was submerged in what felt like a pool of pure energy. My cells cavitated, the neurotransmitters in my brain rapid firing as if touched by the hand of God.
Thankfully, ABE stepped in. Channeling the onslaught of echolocation, my bio-chip recalculated my brain waves on the fly even as it escorted my mind’s eye on a journey through another sea of consciousness that melded the cephaloped’s consciousness with mine.
Oh … my.
Through an emotion-laced prism I stole a glimpse inside my host and discovered my soul … and Oscar’s soul … and the redwood’s soul — each a spark of purity that bound every life-form that existed, had existed, and will ever exist not only to a higher power but also to one another. Call it the soul, call it energy … what I saw, what I experienced was the essence of creation — love without pretense, giving without receiving — a marrow of caring so honest and perfect it defined selflessness.
It no longer mattered whether I was asleep or awake, dead or alive. In this one brief moment of clarity I had resolved the meaning of life, the very reason for us being — and this simple simplistic understanding stripped evil of its purpose and boiled hatred and greed and corruption down to its naked truth. I saw the Creator’s essence in its design and I wept, my newfound wisdom setting me free, robbing death of its impact; revealing the soul’s immortality.
And then I slipped out of this echolocation-induced magic carpet ride as my being was swept down a dark funnel
.
And then I saw through the cephaloped’s eyes.
What I saw was evil.
The biped was hovering twenty paces before us, its outstretched batlike wings catching the wind, its face masked by the predawn night. Reddish brown eyes shimmered catlike in the darkness as they inspected the redwood trunks, ours one of five sprung from a fertile limb that hung two hundred feet above the forest floor.
Uncertain, the sentry remained.
Dawn announced its intentions, first as a morning mist, then as filtered gray light — gray light that vanquished the night and with it the demon’s silhouette.
I could see the wings, but not well enough to tell if they were organic or artificial. The demon, however, was quite human, its flesh muddied and pasty and camouflaged in a tight-fitting cephaloped hide that barely concealed the sultry female’s breasts.
That’s right, the hunter was a huntress — a vixen of the forest. Her long raven hair hung in dark coils past elfish ears and down her muscular torso; her lips, thick and full and pouting, launched a thousand memories.
The vixen was my vixen, and I ached at the sight of her through the cephaloped’s partially closed eye stalks.
For her part, Andria continued to scan the flora and fauna, the coldness in her brown eyes and the barbed electrified lance coiled in her fist enough to suppress my overwhelming urge to reveal myself.
Brighter curtains of gray filtered through the redwood labyrinth, dawn’s threat chasing my long-lost lover back into the forest canopy where she boarded her awaiting chariot.
Oscar and I remained bound to the tree until the gray bled gold and the nightmare melted into day, our thoughts and emotions fusing as one.
22
I believe that we are all standing on an evolutionary threshold in which we have the possibility not only of creating a new culture, but actually becoming a new kind of human being that will understand how to live with connection with ourselves, with each other and with the earth. So much of the suffering and acts that will happen in the meantime, we have to be prepared for. But if we can work with it instead of resist it, that evolutionary leap may be possible.
