Permian- Emissary of the Extinct

by Devyn Regueira

  “Do you know what these are, P-710?”

  P-710 believed she knew.

  “Parallel rows of points, line-segments, triangles, and squares divided into two clusters.”

  “I’ll ask, P-710, that you place more emphasis on understanding the subtle during your forward-casting exercises to come. To know the nature of a distant moment only at its broadest level is no better than to know tomorrow in absolute detail.”

  Her nostrils halved in sized. Insofar as a member of her species was able, P-710 took it personally.

  “For now, I shall explain it to you, P-710. Each cluster represents a small portion of the genetic sequence responsible for governing the manufacturing process of a specific biological trait. One of them is present in our cells, the other found in various forms throughout a small number of pure reptiles - alive, extinct, and yet to evolve. I would ask that you decide which is which now. Is this acceptable?”

  “Yes, Point-74709.”

  Outside of greetings, reverting to an individual’s formal name to express displeasure was a behavior borrowed from human parents of the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. It was an act of defiance - and a small one, given that P-710 set to work immediately thereafter dissecting the nuanced structure of her own anatomy.

  “The second cluster is present in us both. You’ve included the minimum number of nucleotide pairs from the beginning of the gene to allow for differentiation from any other genetic sequence.”

  “This is valid. What is the gene responsible for?”

  “Sequential hermaphroditism.”

  “Explain what it is and why it was necessary.”

  P-710 did not need to precall to anticipate the question.

  “It is an adaptation with origins in our quadrupedal ancestors. During times of intense climactic variability, sexual dimorphism resulted in a resource disparity between the sexes of our species. Males, generally twice the size of females by mass during that period, required prohibitive amounts of food and water. Only males with relatively low levels of testosterone remained at a size practical for surviving in periods of drought.”

  “That is only half the story, P-710.”

  A moment of intense focus, a sharp breath of validation.

  “Sexual dimorphism was reigned in during that period, but far from selected out completely. Climactic fluctuations had become so dependable - counterintuitive as such a statement may be - that survival depended upon a dynamic biological response. Ancestral populations dense in males grazed themselves into localized extinction. Populations devoid of males were unable to breed. It was a small mutation in a single hereditary lineage, from a single generation, that bridged that gap.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “The mechanism for testosterone inhibition already existed by that time, responsible for reducing the size of males while preserving the species’ ability to reproduce. To capitalize more effectively on that existing mechanism, all that was required was a genetic trigger.”

  “This is valid. You may elaborate.”

  “Embryonic development begins across species in the default female state - unhatched males being dependent on the introduction of testosterone to physiologically diverge. The crucial mutation was to suppress the release of testosterone in all hatchlings to protect from the over-extension of resources requisite to males. Only during periods of abundance - be it one season during a single revolution, or a period of heavy rainfall amidst a decade of drought - would the females best predisposed to capitalize on that abundance overcome the activation threshold for the otherwise dormant embryonic testosterone producing gland. Resource availability permits the transition from female to male. Resource acquisition determines which individuals will achieve it.”

  “Why then, P-710, do we only have one male to occupy the director phase even during periods of consistent abundance?”

  P-710 was excited to answer her director’s next question, and, abruptly, dismayed to find that she could not.

  Another psychological stowaway from their excursions into a later time, and perhaps the most potent, was embarrassment. Although sociality was not as intrinsic to their ascent toward intelligence as the humans, P-710’s ancestors had necessarily begun as, and habitually remained, herd animals. There was much to gain from cooperation, and, insofar as they intended to preserve it, some individual pressures toward humility.

  Modesty, too, had been among the consequences of that divergence in standards of association. It was precisely the reason that any precollection of fertilizations was regarded with such disgust. An individual suspected of precalling so much as the goings-on of a future harem around the chasms, a place they visited only during the brief fertilization period, would be subject to decades of shame and unkindness. P-710 had been true to her word - never venturing close enough to the fertilization site to justify such treatment. But there were many causes for shame, and embarrassment, and in the presence of a director universally held in high esteem, P-710 felt them now.

  “I do not know, P-709.”

  “Can you tell me, at least, when the single directorate came to be?”

  This one, at least, she knew.

  “Point-00000, of course.”

  “Do you recall why we take these names? Why you are Point-74710? Why your predecessor, grazing at this very moment with her own predecessors, is called Point-74711?”

  “Our director phase names represent the moment of our respective allotments, expressed in decimals which describe the passage of time between our species’ graduation to sentience and the Permian-Triassic extinction event.”

  “Correct. Our success, P-710, when measured in terms of special longevity, can be attributed to that knowledge made accessible to us by the pressures of ancestral hardship. We have the capacity, together, to assess the past and ascertain those things which are inevitable. But you, perhaps the best equipped of all to precall distant events, could not, moments ago, describe even the nature of your genes, and still cannot describe the principal construct of our society and the position you are one season from assuming.”

  P-710 was upset, and famished, enough of either to strongly consider departing while there was time left to scavenge for decent thickets.

  “P-710, I hope that you will understand my harshness for the lesson that it is. To suppress the phase transition from female to male, by restricting resource access regardless of abundance, was a deliberate effort made and agreed upon. First to consider is our individual longevity. Our bodies, in their first phase, regenerate almost indefinitely in preparation for the eventual transition. Cells begin to degrade at a higher rate in the second phase. Despite all the efforts made to preserve them, male cells will cease regenerating after forty years - an allotment of time nature deemed sufficient for genetic propagation.

  “Second, and understandably more difficult to grasp for any individual, is this. Beginning with P-000, a lineage was established - a temporal hierarchy and chain of custody for the preservation and expansion of knowledge. You alone, nor I, have the capacity to adequately precall all the events to which our species will one day be subject. That requires a species wide effort. Every member must commit centuries to the furtherance of our kind in the role of carrier. It is only by that individual progression, from adolescent former-half carrier phaselets to your own fertile latter-half, are we fit to appreciate the importance of our ultimate role as director.”

  P-710 did not yet understand her predecessor’s harshness for the lesson it was, despite his efforts, but his words had at least abated some of her agitation.

  “P-709?”

  “Yes, P-710?”

  “I have been attempting to identify the first genetic sequence, but can find no direct parallel.”

  “Yes. There are, on occasion, no direct parallels to find. It is those such occasions which most challenge us. They are our present hardships, our modern pressures, the narrow slits through which we cannot pass until we’ve reimagined our shape. If we can do it, we emerge ref
ined. If we cannot, we stagnate behind a boundary we have forced ourselves to regard as impregnable. Time and space are more than just the hard parts, P-710.”

  P-710 got the message. She would be director in one season, but she was not director now. P-709 held that title still, and he meant to test her while he could.

  “May I try again, P-709?”

  “You must.”

  Minutes passed. With no decent point of reference, directional or temporal, P-710 cast her nostrils every which way - broadening them to filter vast swaths of data, narrowing them any time she brushed a potential solution. Upon recognizing the futility in re-canvasing the past, present, and future all on her own, she took a shortcut - a deliberate recall of one forward-casting exercise she and dozens of other latter-half carrier phaselets had participated in - the joint precollection of a distant time; a time decidedly inaccessible to her as an individual. For the sake of stoking at the embers of her comparatively unwieldy sense of self importance, this temporal detour was not at all the path of least resistance. For the sake of reaching a meaningful conclusion in a single lifetime - it was necessary, and it worked.

  “Megalania. The largest monitor lizard species to have existed, endemic to Australia during the Pleistocene. Its status as longstanding apex predator can be attributed to its size, its venom, and, in no small part, to its dynamic reproductive strategy.”

  P-709’s nostrils relaxed. He had refrained from precalling his successor’s answer. He was glad for his restraint, and he was impressed.

  “Which evolutionary strategy?”

  “Protogenesis. Although sex remained its primary reproductive mechanism - vital for preserving genetic diversity - female megalania were capable, in times of mate scarcity, of sexless reproduction. The genetic sequence you asked me to identify is not identical, but sufficiently overlaps with the megalania gene to ascertain its basic function.”

  “How did you come upon this realization, P-710?”

  “I had to reimagine the question, P-709. Rather than following a network of certainties, you challenged me to address the problem from a different perspective; to make those observations which are possible to make, and to draw those conclusions with which they are most in agreement.”

  P-710 was still brimming with pride and expectation when her predecessor turned away, spear in hand and praise un-given.

  “Come, P-710. I have another thing to show you. I insist that you do not precall now, as you did minutes ago while I toiled in the dirt.”

  Embarrassment. Forced to walk her swaying walk - awkward and difficult, as if she and her species were punished for their eagerness to escape quadrupedalism with an eternal rash, she joined P-709 and titled her head to sense his latest drawing visually.

  “Can you tell me what I’ve drawn, P-710?”

  P-710 did not bother telling. Instead she lifted her tree trunk arm and flexed her rudimentary knuckle, pointing with great effort in the direction of the second enormous hole in the Earth. P-709 dropped his spear, dividing his crudely completed drawing of their ancestral nesting reservoir into two hemispheres.

  “Yes. I would ask that you now explain its purpose during fertilization seasons of the distant past.”

  P-709 knew intuitively that such a request would cause some discomfort, and so decided to clear the air.

  “Recollection of fertilization seasons is conditionally authorized, P-710. All participants of that fertilization period must be dead, and the object of your recollection may not be perverse. I can assure you that it is not.”

  Recollection was considerably easier to achieve than precollection. Even a former-half carrier phaselet could recall the earliest days of multicellular life all by herself. P-710 was considerably more capable than that, and, with her director’s permission, made short work recalling what she needed to formulate her response.

  “When Point-23678 and his harem first precalled the Great Dying, a mechanism to preserve our species in some meaningful way was conceived and implemented. One egg per fertilization season would be stored and buried in such a way that fossilization was inevitable. Sediments accumulated above the previous layer until the next level was sufficiently deep for its own ring. Should a technologically advanced and physiologically amenable post-Great-Dying species arise, the prevailing belief was that they would be compelled by curiosity to gather enough genetic detail from the multitude of embryos for special revival to occur.”

  “So why was the last egg buried during Point-55709’s directorate?”

  “Precollection extended to the Abrupt Post Human Interference Boundary, corresponding to the human year 2017. Human technology had advanced sufficiently, at least, to allow for practical genetic parsing. Unfortunately, it resulted in our discovering that to preserve genetic material for the duration was outside the scope of our own. There will be no template of our species available for the humans to follow.”

  “Have you considered how that problem may be addressed, P-710? Have you any intention, while the directorate is yours to guide, of solving our species’ great conundrum?”

  “Of course, P-709. I will preserve and extend the diligent works of our predecessors. With enough momentum of effort, the Abrupt Post Human Interference Boundary will be shattered. Behind it, we will find our true course to survival.”

  P-710 was proud to reassert the enduring cause of her species. P-709 was displeased to hear it.

  “I hope that you will understand my harshness for the lesson that it is.”

  Embarrassment, shame, familiar apprehension.

  “Is that not my role as director, P-709? To push the boundaries of our knowledge?”

  “You are attempting to push an immovable boundary, P-710, when all you need to do is find your way through the slits.”

  “How?”

  P-709 handed the carrier phaselet his spear.

  “Precisely as you did before. Reason, observe, conclude. The humans have a word for that process. Do you know it?”

  That process was familiar to her, vaguely, but the word her director associated it with became much more elusive a thing. Definitions were precisely the sort of concrete data her kind could collect from the distant future with the ease of siphoning water through porous eggshell. It was human abstraction that demanded effort; at least, it seemed, for anyone who was not P-709.

  “I know it, in a way, P-709. But I do not know the word.”

  “Science.”

  P-710 was puzzled, evidenced by the aimless darting of her nostril holes.

  “P-709 - their science, as we’ve come to know it, is not so broadly defined and… slippery. It is a meticulous process characterized by standards and governed by certainties. Simply put - science is the human invention meant to analog our own physiological mechanism for deduction.”

  “If achieving a certainty requires nuanced observation, P-710, how could the humans know where to start?”

  “From the beginning, presumably.”

  “It is in your nature and mine to know the beginning precisely as it was, P-710, but not in the humans’. It is human nature to puzzle over the beginning, and the surrounding, and the impending. They will puzzle for centuries, millions of minds, puzzling all the time, whispering of puzzles to the children who will carry on puzzling when they’ve died content without answers.”

  “How could a species with such simple minds ever come to dominate this world?”

  P-710 was convinced with no nuanced observation to speak of that her director had taken some offense.

  “You have placed yourself behind a boundary, P-710. Find the slit.”

  “Are you insinuating, Point-74709, that the humans’ prosthetic mechanism for attaining knowledge is superior to our own?”

  “In some ways they are indistinguishable. In others; yes, decidedly so.”

  P-710’s face would have been red if it were human.

  “As forthcoming director, I feel compelled to remind you that their species was nearly extinguished several times over a negligibl
e period of revolutions. Their class of species inherited meaningful portions of our genes, and what benefit was it to them? For one-hundred and forty million revolutions they scurried fearfully from footprint to Archosauria footprint. It took another sixty-six million of nearly uncontested reign to develop imagination enough to spit berry ink on cave walls. They are evolutionary meanderers, the imbecilic winners of eons of relative climactic stability; their prize being opposable thumbs deprived of us by circumstance, their brains just complex enough to twiddle them.”

  “Excellent, P-710. It appears that we are in agreement.”

  “How can you misconstrue my meaning so completely? I believe the migration has taken a toll on you, P-709. I suggest you find sustenance so that you might be more sensible before the fertilization.”

  “I do not misconstrue, and I’ve fertilized on an emptier stomach. We are in agreement, Point-74710, because you have, in listing their shortcomings, described those qualities which most endow mankind with a proclivity for survival that we ourselves will not achieve. It is in the very act of surmounting their hardships that the humans prove, and likewise refine, their vastness of adaptability.

  “As a species they represent a fortuitous contradiction - a quandary, from our perspective. How might billions of intellectually, physically, and culturally disparate individuals achieve anything of benefit to the collective? Why would a collective of such volume pander to the whims of the individual? By their individuality they amass boundless knowledge, the concrete and the arbitrary; knowledge with origins to be found in any of one-hundred billion epicenters. By their unification they defend, support, and propagate those epicenters. You yourself have demonstrated the capacity of their nature to radiate itself - you have embraced their pride, and you have applied it to your message and so made hostilities of your words to me. I am not upset, P-710, I am empathetic. I am empathetic because I have learned empathy, just as I first learned and then disavowed pride in my carrier phase, just as I have endeavored to learn enough of the humans and their prosthetic knowledge to do as they’ve done.”