These dead and mortally wounded animals are sacrificed to the mini-Sun, Na-Yeli thinks, and the whole ritual is so perfectly timed that either they’ve rehearsed—and practiced—this to death, or they have some form of silent, mutual communication. A multi-species hive mind? Something, someone must have told them or taught them to do this. A sacrifice ritual so crazy, yet so complex must have some extremely interesting background.
It’s grist to the Slow CEO’s mill—mulling over a multitude of data, making sense of the whole. The helicopter point-of-view, even as the helicopter mind fails to see the inherent sustainability of the process.
Suppose the sacrificed animals provide fuel for this mini-Sun, her thinking goes, then this is the most stupefying example of an Ouroboros Gaia possible. The consumed animals feed the mini-Sun, the mini-Sun beams energy down for the photosynthesis of the plants and trees, the megafauna’s prey eats the flora, the megafauna eats the prey, and part of the megafauna is sacrificed. None of these processes is one hundred percent efficient, far from it. So lots of energy gets wasted in the process. Then why does the cycle keep going? It should have stopped dead in its tracks, starved for energy, long ago.
a mini-Sun
There’s something she’s missing, and utterly fascinated that she now is, she intends to get to the bottom of this. She’s so captivated that she forgets to move with caution, making as little sound as possible. She doesn’t notice that she might be noticed.
While reluctantly heading north—deep inside, Na-Yeli wishes to solve this layer’s conundrums before moving onwards to the next—through the dense vegetation in the tropical heat of the foliage’s viridescent reflection, Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien chance upon a large clearing. This one doesn’t seem tailor-made for some arcane, far-fetched ritual—it looks like a natural glade. It’s also quite big. They could save time by crossing it, but they need to be cautious.
Standing still for a few minutes, while carefully scanning the surroundings for megafauna, Na-Yeli and her instruments call it safe. She moves into the clearing and the Moiety Alien follows. When they’re almost at the middle of it, Na-Yeli hears a giant ‘swoosh’ followed by the massive clap of two half-bowls of reddish wood slamming together at the rims, capturing the Moiety Alien in the process. The two wooden half-bowls—has the force of the clap glued the two halves together, Na-Yeli wonders in disbelief—become an encapsulating globe as four Stomposaurs rush into the clearing, surrounding Na-Yeli before she can run away. Her alien exterior doesn’t seem to faze them, quite probably they’re not the first aliens being caught.
She doesn’t fight. These animals are so big, she doesn’t know how, let alone where to start. One of them could stamp her to six feet below with one of its humongous hoofs. Now that she thinks of it, even for such super-sized animals their feet—hoofs, paws, whatever—are quite big relative to their body size. A sign of divergent evolution? In any case, she surrenders or hopes that raising her hands is interpreted as such, and hopes to come with an escape plan, later. Especially after this eerily coordinated megafauna ambush that captured the Moiety Alien in its globular prison.
Without further ado, they lead Na-Yeli—and roll the wooden globe containing the Moiety Alien—towards the rectangular sacrificial site, next to the colossal trebuchet tree. On its far edge, under the shadow of the gigantic catapult tree, lies a big net. Na-Yeli is driven onto the net, the wooden contraption containing her alien partner is rolled right next to her, and then the net is hoisted ten or so meters in the air. An impromptu prison until the time is right for the next sacrifice, Na-Yeli thinks.
She waits until it’s dark and the Ultragiraffes guarding her are becoming sleepy. Then she drills, as surreptitiously and silently as she can, a small hole in the wooden wall of the Moiety Alien’s prison. Once she’s through, she shines a light in. She waits and soon, through her infrared camera, sees part of the Moiety Alien extend itself through the small hole. It doesn’t need much, she thinks and then gestures it to go back. It seems to understand her—their silent interactions as they traversed through this weird layer greatly improved their gesticulative/movement vocabulary—and moves back in its, now breached, prison.
Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien could make a run for it, but since the megafauna knows they’re here, they’d only get the biggest posse of this weird world hunting for them. No, she’s thinking of a different plan—escape in plain sight, as it were—that will also get them closer to one of the big mysteries ruling this layer. For the other big mystery in this layer, she intends to get help from a very close friend. On top of that, right here is the best place to have an undisturbed sleep in this whole Mesozoic Park gone wild.
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An Über-Gorilla, but not quite as I had imagined it.
When Na-Yeli wakes up the next morning, she can still feel the aftermath of the migraine that a LateralSys possession brings with it. Must have been quite a session, Na-Yeli—the Slow CEO—thinks as day breaks and several Über-Gorillas are already schlepping the massive leather pouch in position. Overnight, Na-Yeli’s nanomachines have harvested more useful materials from both her encapsulating net and the Moiety Alien’s wooden prison. She now has sufficient material to form viable wings in this air and gravity. She only needs to get out just in time. She likes the Icarus legend, she doesn’t want to be its female—and alien—incarnation.
As the preparations for the big ritual proceed through the dawn—Na-Yeli reckons that captured aliens are entitled to their own ritual—she reads through LateralSys’s findings.
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That was quite a challenge you left for me, sister, and my special thanks for this, as such almost indecipherable mysteries are the intellectual grist to my mind’s mill. Megafauna that understand each other without an obvious means of communication? Telepathy is the first thing that comes to mind. Not very scientific at first sight, mind you, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck ...
On an oblique whim, I modified some of the crystals you sampled from the Fractal Maze into highly sensitive echo chambers. I had to stretch my makeshift instruments to the limit. I had to scan a huge swath of the frequency spectrum before I got a faint response.
Something’s going on, but it happens at a level that’s barely above the measuring threshold. The best I can call it is a superposed enabler. Remember AM and FM radio, where our predecessors would vary the amplitude or frequency of a radio wave so that it could be encoded for sound & music? Take it a step further and we get how certain crystals, when vibrating, can superpose a huge range of frequencies on an AC carrier wave, used for condition monitoring back in the days.
Now imagine the logical end result of that; i.e. an adaptive, very weak—hence almost impossible to detect—electromagnetic pattern that is yet complex enough to exhibit self-replication, self-sentience, the will to survive, and propagation through symbiosis.
In somewhat the same way that our DNA reacts to its environment and sets up a species—not individuals—for survival in the long run through adaptations. In that way ensuring its own survival in the long run. Thing is, it may change itself—change is one of the two constants—while keeping its basic structure—the second constant—intact. That is, the content of our DNA—the way the A-, T-, G-, and C-bases are encoded—changes, while its basic structure—the double helix—remains the same. Selfish genes, indeed.
Superposed patterns
I suspect these superposed patterners use the same trick. While the actual content—the amount of amplitude and frequency modulation—changes, the way it’s structured—the carrier waves in the host—remains the same.
They also need to adapt the megafauna to new circumstances for their host’s species—not the individual animals—to survive, but since circumstances in these layers change much faster than they do on a planet, they need to adapt much faster.
So I strongly suspect that these emergent electromagnetic patterns somehow evolved a megafauna hive mind that tries to keep the environment the same. The larger picture seems simple—if the mini-Sun does, they die. From our instruments, I noticed that the output of the mini-Sun did increase after it assimilated the sacrifice. Hence, when it’s running out of fuel, so to speak, it will dim. The megafauna and their, well, electromagnetic parasites or symbionts—take your pick—notice, as well, and decide to do something about it.
I extensively checked the footage our cameras made of the megafauna and did find that some of the Über-Gorillas have catapults. So either they already invented the catapult and the communal hive mind decided to manufacture a stupendously large one, even if that doesn’t explain the happy coincidence of a single, super-large tree with just the right form.
That’s when I made my second find—the trees are infested with it, too. The Ultragiraffes mainly function as antenna towers in treeless places like large clearings and the savannah outside the equatorial tropical jungle. Otherwise, the trees keep the hive mind together.
This might explain why they simply don’t catapult dead flora into the mini-Sun, as my calculations hint that every little bit needs to be recycled to keep this ecosystem viable. Only the most difficult to recycle materials—dead megafauna, especially those that have had a long life—can be sacrificed to keep the mini-Sun going. And quite probably the communal hive mind somehow self-selected for the growth of a singular, even-oversized-in-their-world, trebuchet tree.
There’s a huge pattern there—controlled by a minuscule one—but still, the pieces don’t quite fit. There’s no way that burning dead animals brings back sufficient energy to keep this whole crazy ecosystem going. There must be other sources of energy that maintain this ecosystem.
So do keep KillBitch handy in our sojourn to the mini-Sun, as she is much faster than you (or I). No offense intended, I just want to live to tell—and experience—this tale.
Finally, I have a shocker for you, baby. Most of the measuring results I got were from the nearby Ultragiraffes, who are natural amplifiers and antennas, and the trebuchet tree—once I realized they were in it, too—from which we’re hanging. The only other ones from the odd, sleepless Zeppelinfant and Stomposaur who were sniffing at you, thinking you were asleep (in a way, they were right), and then got into range of my makeshift equipment. The megafauna, most probably, has developed a special sensitivity for the signals, so they even sense it over a few tens of meters. The trees are key, and the Ultragiraffe’s neck antennas carry the signals over a wider range, establishing the megafauna hive mind on open plains.
But then I accidentally turned the measuring equipment on myself, and lo and behold, there was a response. These emergent patterns, this superposed intelligence, whatever you like to call it: we’re infected with it, as well.
Once we have some time, I urge you to look into this.
Author’s note: Writers shouldn’t have favourites in their own writing, but “The Berserker Forest” is one of my favourite settings inside the Enigmatic Object. So shoot me, but I got to mix Edgar Rice Burroughs with Jurassic Park and Area X with a dash of Joseph Conrad and Jack Vance. What’s not to like?
Anyway, stay tuned as the unholy trinity of KillBitch, LateralSys and the Slow CEO figure out—together with their new friend the Moiety Alien—what’s going on and how to get to the next layers, which will be both more alien and more terrifying. Welcome to my new followers and subscribers, and many thanks for reading!
