Forever Thrilled, Part 10
Chapter 4: A Wall of Tentacles
Lashed from the sky by a wall of tentacles, Na-Yeli thinks, just as I thought I was doing so well. As the adrenalin recedes, she has no room for hurt feelings, as the pain from her broken arm is all-encompassing. She remains engulfed in agony until the painkillers set in.
Arm broken in three places—a complicated fracture, the autodoc’s report reads, Cast applied to stabilize the broken bones. Estimated healing time: eight weeks minimum. Much rest—especially in the first couple of weeks—and no crazy acrobatics, especially when your arm is still in its cast. After the fracture heals, a few weeks to get your muscles and body back in shape.
Out of action for two months, at least, Na-Yeli thinks, Well, I’d better inform the rest. She conveys the news to her traveling companions—the Moiety Alien, the communication AI, and—through the latter—the hypersounders. Look at it from the sunny side, she muses, at least it didn’t happen during a massive crisis. And now I’ve got company. Her train of thought is broken by an announcement of the communication AI.
—if there’s no action for several weeks— it signals —then the hypersounders request if you can slow down their simulation—
“What the Hell,” Na-Yeli says, “they’re bored?”
—they were optimally motivated when we moved through the strange hail and doom bell hell— the communication AI signals —they’re afraid they might lose that motivational apex, their edge—
“I guess it makes sense,” Na-Yeli says, suppressing a deep sigh, “they’ve adapted to an environment that’s constantly trying to kill them, so they can’t afford to ever let their guard down.”
—how do i say this tactfully— the communication AI (who until recently couldn’t define ‘tact’ if its life depended on it) signals —with your last act, you didn’t exactly lead by example—
Like the goddess that failed, Na-Yeli thinks, the heroine has fallen from her pedestal. Out loud, she says: “I guess they have a point.”
—so you agree with their request—
“It’s no skin off my teeth,” she says, “and easy to do. Let’s do it before they experience their next wave of existential ennui, their Nietzschean version of ‘god is dead.’”
—killbitch seems to like them— the communication AI signals —they’re a very pro-active lot—
How in tarnation does it know? Na-Yeli thinks, slowly starting to wonder what happens when she sleeps. “Each to their own,” she says out loud.
—speaking of that— the communication AI signals, after a slight yet pronounced pause —maybe you could de-activate me too, for the duration—
“Are you pulling my leg?” Na-Yeli says. “I thought you resented being literally kept in the dark.”
—i’ve found that i thrive when i’m working, like translating, communicating, exploring new roads of information exchange— it signals —and i tend to get this empty feeling//is this what you mean with ‘existential ennui’//when i’m not doing anything—
“So you won’t be angry when I shut you down?”
—i’ve come to regard that as a good ‘off’-period until the next challenge—
“Thank dog, there’s still one of us who can withstand being bored,” Na-Yeli says, not bothering to hide the snark.
—but you are human— the communication AI signals —you’re world champions at being bored—
“That’s enough,” Na-Yeli says and switches it off. I don’t know what I prefer, she thinks, The old days when it was just aloof, or the new days when it invents backhanded compliments.
That leaves Na-Yeli with the Moiety Alien to face the upcoming days and weeks. Not only will it take several weeks for the triple-fractured bone to settle and heal, but she must rest, during which she’s also limited in her movements. In the first few days, this works fine, as Na-Yeli catches up with tons of lost sleep while the Moiety Alien stays near her side like a guardian angel—its patience seems unlimited. As far as she can see, though, she’s not in any real danger from the fauna here. To Na-Yeli’s deep regret, there is no sign at all from the old megafauna.
She could try to study the neo-physics and the novo-mathematics that the hyper-advanced aliens from the other Universe—the SEKO builders, hell, the designers of this whole Enigmatic Object—have sent her, but that’s way over her head. Of course, LateralSys would love to do the honors, but then Na-Yeli’s off time would be spiked with intense migraines. Apart from the fact that it might interfere with her rehabilitation process, she’s not quite up to so much voluntary suffering. LateralSys will have to wait until they’re out of here. So Na-Yeli must keep herself busy with something else. The new flora and fauna of this layer are the first apparent candidates. She gets to that as she wheels herself around in a makeshift wheelchair, the Moiety Alien circling her like a bloodhound-cum-watchdog.
She discovers a few small predators like the reddish-brown feline with a fox’s tail that miaows with a deep growl she’s named Foxy the Cat and the blueish-green meerkat lookalike with a lupine head that howls with a vibrant tenor she’s named Jeffrey VanderBlues. They seem pretty rare, and the few specimens she’s spotted look thin and haggard, as if on the edge of starvation.
This might be—Na-Yeli surmises, as her usually hyperactive mind is quite unable to slow down, it has to do something, anything—because there is precious little prey. She’s spotted a few with rabbit-like bodies featuring a squirrel-like tail—squabbits—that seem to have their nests in the nooks and crannies of the trees (which are much smaller than the megaflora that used to be in this layer) and a few with a mole-like body and an anteater-like head—molants—that seem to burrow in the undergrowth.
Since the mini-Sun rotates stack above the equator all the time, there are no seasons in this mini-world. Water slowly melts and flows from both poles—she has to assume the world above the equatorial’ Wall of Tentacles’ is a mirror image of this one—to the temperate and subtropical regions, where small rivers, pools, and lakes of various sizes form. Ironically, the down-flowing water gathers into a few big rivers that flow almost straight through the tropical desert, so the largest lakes form near the steep ridge around the equator. That is where most of the evaporation takes place.
Equatorial Hadley cells then carry all these clouds to the subtropical and temperate regions—sometimes even all the way to the poles—where they come down as rain, hail (the regular kind), or snow. As such, most of the layer’s vegetation is relatively green. There are a few forests both in the temperate and (sub-)tropical zones, but most of the area is steppe- or savannah-like. Not to mention that the undergrowth is teeming with crawling insects, some of which seem to produce pyramid-like mounds.
The flora is both quite varied and plentiful. There’s a wide variety of fruits, both from trees and bushes, there seems to be a huge diversity in pods, nuts, and seeds; and on top of that the air is literally abuzz with millions upon millions of insects.
This doesn’t quite make sense to Na-Yeli. The squabbits—for all intents and purposes—look like they would love to feast on nuts and seeds, which seem plentiful. The molants—to the best of her biological knowledge—look like they would immensely enjoy snacking on a variety of insects, which are so abundant as to be a plague right now.
Therefore, the small mammal-like animals like the squabbits and the molants should be thriving, but they’re most definitely not. Does this mean that, at this point in time, Na-Yeli is just witnessing an extreme example of a predator/prey population cycle? Impossible to say as there are no seasons here. She decides to sleep over it, a luxury she now can afford, even if she’s itching to move on, but she’s well aware that a healthy Na-Yeli barely made it all the way here and that a not fully healed Na-Yeli might still find an untimely end. This does nothing to stop her increasing frustration, though.
For the first few hours of the next morning, things seem their languid, usual easy-as-she-goes ways. Until, just before noon, Na-Yeli hears a sound like a giant whip being cracked. It’s a shock of recognition, as she heard the same sound when she was smacked from the sky a few days ago, breaking her arm during the hard landing. However, it’s not as loud this time.
That’s because it comes from farther away. Na-Yeli looks up to the towering ridge that rises up in an impossibly steep incline—although Na-Yeli suspects that the weak, quarter-G gravity has a lot to do with that—that transitions into a halo of very long, very thin tentacles that undulate in the updraft of the equatorial Hadley cells. The army of tentacles on top of the wall around the world.
Another whiplash—the striking sound softened by distance, yet clearly audible in the morning silence. And another, one more, and yet one more. In quick succession, the amount of whiplashes increases until individual bursts become lost in the cacophony. From her vantage point of almost thirty kilometers away, all the golden tendrils—in reality, five hundred meters long, massive shining tentacles—seem active. Not a good place to be right now, she thinks.
At what are these whiplash-like tentacles—the speed with which they move is genuinely astonishing—lashing out? It’s impossible to see from this distance, and she’s certainly in no condition—even if she had the inclination—to check that up close. So, she programs her metamaterials to fabricate a telescope. This will take a while, and Na-Yeli hopes it’ll be finished before the remote spectacle ends. She needn’t have worried, as it goes on for several hours.
As her makeshift telescope is ready, Na-Yeli zooms in on a section of the frantically lashing army of tentacles. At first, it’s tough to see what’s going on due to the high speed at which everything is moving, but as her mind adjusts to the frenzy, the situation dawns on her. Birds. Dozens of birds, no hundreds, thousands of birds, correct that—if this happens across the entire equator—we’re talking about millions upon millions of birds trying to get through.
The birds are beautiful. Cobalt blue wings on a black-and-white striped body with a scarlet head and a black beak, both broad and pointy. The birds look like a cross between a swallow and a common swift—wings like boomerangs that must give them both a very high flying speed and excellent maneuverability. They are indeed very swift and exceedingly fast, but the tentacles lash out at blinding speeds, as well.
It’s a massacre so intense the word aviancide barely does it justice. It’s almost, but not wholly, an extinction event. Yet, a minimal amount of birds do get through.
It’s sickening, yet Na-Yeli can’t stop looking. Like lemmings jumping off a cliff into a stream by the thousands, like countless freshly hatched turtles crawling over the beach to the sea only to be picked up by predatory birds like quick snacks. Witnessing the ongoing whiplash extermination event with a mix of disgust, sick fascination, and disbelief, Na-Yeli estimates that of these beautiful birds, maybe only one in a hundred thousand gets through, possibly even as little as one in a million. At some points, the normally yellowish sky behind the wall of tentacles is tinged blue due to the massive number of birds approaching.
The intense annihilation episode lasts a few hours. During it, Na-Yeli can barely stop looking and recording, no matter how nauseous the aviancide makes her. In the end, as the whiplash mayhem ceases, Na-Yeli’s mouth is bone dry, and not just from forgetting to drink.
Still, as far as she could see, some birds did get through. At least, she hopes it wasn’t her imagination, a kind of wish-fulfillment mirage. The extermination event has shocked her. She drinks, but her throat still feels parched. She’s restless, and moves in big, slow circles with her makeshift wheelchair, but the images won’t leave her mind. She knows nature can be cruel but never quite realized how cruel.
Author’s note: after quite a gruelling five weeks of work, I have some more time. Time to catch up, once more. Expect more frequent posts in the coming weeks, if all goes well. Welcome to the new subscribers and followers, and many thanks for reading!