Schrobear #75, traveler in strange realms

Schrobear #75 traveler in strange realms


　

　
He was a tardigrade (water bear) of the species Mopsechiniscus franciscae about .01 inches in length. His body was rust-colored, comprised of a hard, horny substance and he had eight legs, four on each side of his segmented barrel-shaped carapace. His eyes were red-brown specks, easy enough to see under low magnification, and, when he was feeding, his gut shone like an emerald green ray from within his transparent chitinous shell. As the pronoun denotes, he was male, with a sperm-producing gonad mid-torso, and, in the microscope, his body looked molded, bulbous segments fused together at joints that did not bend. If you watched him moving in the magnified field under your eyepiece, you would see that he walked deliberately on his stubby, stiff legs – there was neither knee nor ankle nor hip in those members which were rather like the limbs supporting a piece of tiny furniture. His rear-most legs were clawed so that he could cling to the substrate over which he crawled, resisting the micro-currents in the droplet of water, a pale, translucent dome, in which he dwelt. Little sensors in the form of greyish whiskers protruded from his carapace, particularly in the places where his torso-segments were fused. He ambled through his world with his head down, snuffling at the debris under foot, for all the world like a bear crossing a meadow replete with earthworms and juicy grubs in the high mountains.

Schrobear #75, as he was named, came from a distinguished lineage. When his mother (or grandmother) molted, an impulse excited her to defecate as well and eggs emerged from her cloaca intermixed with excreta and cocooned by her discarded carapace. Tardigrades are binary: they are either open to the world or tightly sealed monads. # 75's father (or grandfather or great-grandfather – the number of generations is a matter of conjecture) was on the prowl when his mother writhed out of her skin and he expelled an oily plume of sperm into the female’s abandoned hull, coating the eggs and the rest of the detritus as well. In a couple weeks, baby tardigrades exactly identical to their parents, although much smaller, wriggled from within the battered shelter of carapace. Outside of that amber-colored quonset-hut shaped dwelling, it was green in all dimensions, liquid at a temperature that was viable for motion and feeding.

The tardigrades lived amidst moss wreathing a smooth pebble under three centimeters of water on the edge of the Ross Sea in Antartica. A brown mountain, deeply furrowed with avalanche chutes, dipped its knees into the ocean and, on the horizon, there was a volcano smoking like an old, half-extinguished cigar. A researcher studying phyto-plankton sampled the sea water and pebbles at the water’s edge and bottled Schrobear’s progenitors in a sealed flask. When the sea water was decanted in the laboratory examined under X50 magnification, the tardigrades hovering among the moss tendrils came into focus, little rust-colored zeppelins tethered to baroque-looking bright green arabesques – some people call tardigrades "moss piglets."

The scientists let the droplet of sea-water dry. The tardigrades shut all ducts to the outside, withered into themselves, and dessicated – they shrunk into inert skeletal forms, featureless and immobile. In this form, Schrobear’s clan proved to be even more resilient than others of their genus. Not only water but air was sucked out of the hypobaric chambers where they were tested and the inert tardigrade mummies were alternately roasted and, then, frozen – between minus 200 degrees and plus 800 centigrade, the tardigrade mummies endured and, then, when hydrated, cheerfully ambled back to life. Some of Schrobear’s cousins were irradiated by an Alektra AB gamma knife beam. The beam from this instrument, generated to destroy cancer cells, had no effect on the tardigrades. Schrobear’s species, in particular, resisted almost all attempts to destroy them – it was not that the little creatures thrived in hostile conditions, but, rather, that they seemed indifferent to them. In a waterless, crystal vacuum chamber, baked and, then, frozen to within a few degrees of absolute zero, blasted by deadly rays created by nuclear fission, the moss piglets simply withdrew into themselves, shrinking as they dried, the lymph in their coelums inhaled into their carapace, darkening into specks of matter dried from 80% fluid to less than 2 %, blackened germs that effloresced and, then, returned enthusiastically to life when drizzled by pipette into a droplet of water. One of Schrobear 75's cousins was shot into space on the Challenger, exposed to the void, where he orbited the earth 90 times before the capsule fell like a meteorite through layers of fire. The waterbear ensconced in the rocket’s sample chamber was dormant. But in a film of water, under the microscope, the creature rehydrated and came back to life, pooping enthusiastically as he shed his carapace in a full molt before knuckle-walking off in search of something to eat.

Schrobear #75 lived with others of his kind in a petri dish at the University of Technology in Delft. Once a month, crustose lichen scraped from trees in a nearby park was drizzled into the dish, mixed with distilled water to make a dilute tea. Periodically, a girl wearing ear-buds and listening to an I-Pod, made a census of the waterbears in the lichen suspension. Flattened out by the optical qualities of the 50X binocular microscope, the tardigrades looked a bit like greyish-brown crushed caterpillars, semi-translucent with tiny legs like spikes protruding from them, the tips of those appendages decorated with festive-looking short tentacles. They grazed on the lichen like indistinct cows, moving only imperceptibly. The light from the microscope warmed them and Schrobear #75 rolled over on his back to enjoy the radiance suffusing his world. There was neither up nor down and his insides felt pleasantly open, extending to the edges of the existence that he could sense, all ducts and spiracles dilated to enjoy the sweetness of things, his rhabdomeric eyes injecting a cloud of images into his brain, impressions that mingled with the sensations at his bristles to create a vaporous sense of a warm, well-lit interior expanding outward to all horizons.

This interior tilted and directions changed, the orbits spiraling slightly, and, then, there was a dislocation that turned the fields inside out – the corridors and doors began to slowly shut and Schrobear #75 felt himself darkening, a sensation we might experience as falling, albeit very, very slowly. Then, he slept. Then, he dreamed. His dream was bilaterally symmetrical – he dreamt it in both sides of the bundle of neurons that was his brain. To recount the dream properly, I would have to repeat its elements twice and array them in a symmetrical pattern about Schrobear #75's axis, but this would be repetitive and so I will provide his dream in this single version.

In his dream, Schrobear #75 was given a name and spoken about in Dutch, a gutteral language that seems to be almost all vowels. Because he had no ears, he could not hear clearly, but the sound waves in which his name was embedded were caught in the harrow of hairs on his body and he heard the words, albeit indistinctly. Schrobear’s name came from a famous fiction in quantum physics, Schroedinger’s cat. The cat posited by the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schroedinger, is a paradox that illustrates quantum superposition. In the world with which we are familiar, macroscopic objects occupy distinct spaces and can be relied upon to remain where placed except when compelled into motion. Motion, itself, is subject to Newtonian laws and the moving object, a cat, for instance, can be reliably tracked in space on the basis of the forces to which it is subject. But in realm of extremely tiny things, the notion of "object" undergoes a strange metamorphosis. Very small things, for instance, atomic particles, don’t occupy a single location – instead, their presence is defined by statistical equations that tell us where they might be located, but acknowledge a range of other locations extending throughout the entire universe where they also could be lurking. And, indeed, before certain types of measurements are taken, the particle’s existence is superposed – that is, the particle is conceived as existing in all such locations simultaneously. Measurement induces what is called decoherence – that is, collapses the probability function into a single location in space-time where the object can be located. Macroscopic systems, not subject to quantum effects, are thought to be always decoherent because of the multitude of factors impinging upon the object and binding it to a cartesian location, a place that can be graphed in terms of dimensional space and time. Schroedinger’s cat describes a mythical animal that remains in superposition –that is, in an infinite number of places and conditions – until it is observed by human eyes. According to the paradox, the famous cat is both dead and alive until someone sees it – once, the cat is measured by the human eye, that is, said to be in specific place, the animal ceases to be both dead and alive as the system collapses into either one of the two existential possibilities – the cat having been simultaneously dead and alive before we look at it, now is either dead or alive.

Schrobear #75 was nourished to act as a actual, living surrogate for Schroedinger’s famous cat. He had been selected for his resilience the way astronauts are chosen for their adventures – his role was to ride a quantum oscillator and, thereby, be in two places at one time. Scientists had constructed a tiny membrane of silicon nitride, a film only eight times the width of a DNA molecule. A silica crystal polished as a mirror was placed as a target in the center of the microscopic fleck of silicon nitride and the assemblage itself was fused into a quadrangle of flexible supporting fibers. This structure, cradling the membrane with its mirror target at its center, was built to oscillate. When set in motion, the membrane wiggled like gelatine, a tremor that could be induced by a laser-coherent stream of photons. If the membrane were set in motion, oscillating like a tiny trampoline, by photons of one wave-length, a subsequent burst of different wave-length photons, shot against the silicon mirror, would send the silicon nitride platform into superposition – in other words, nudged by two jets of photons at different wave-lengths (that is having different energy) the membrane could be made to oscillate at two separate superposed frequencies. In this state, the membrane is a quantum oscillator, demonstrating superposition. The experiment, although relatively easy to describe in principle, is difficult to perform – the quantum oscillator has to kept from decoherent factors that would collapse the system and destroy its superposition. Practically, this meant that the quantum oscillator had to be isolated in a chamber without impinging air or gas molecules and kept at a fixed temperature very close to absolute zero. The only impulse allowed to act upon the oscillator would be the variable wave-length photon streams emitted by a laser. Ordinary light, which is decoherent (that is, a melange of wave-lengths) would also have to be excluded from the vacuum chamber where the oscillator was mounted. The plan, therefore, was to load Schrobear #75 onto the oscillator’s membrane, evacuate air and exclude light from the experimental chamber and, then, cool the system to a few degrees above absolute zero. Then, the membrane would be nudged into superposition by coherent beams of photons from a laser aimed at the mirror on the oscillator. Schrobear #75 was perfect for the experiment – the conditions in the experimental chamber that would be lethal to almost all other forms of life would not affect him in the short term.

Schrobear #75 felt the signals impinging upon him lessening. His vents and ducts closed. He was no longer hungry even in his dreams. Blackness funneled into him through the columns of his eyes. Duration ceased. Then, a word was spoken. The word was like thunder: LET THERE BE LIGHT! He trembled at the command. Again lightning flashed and the words of thunder rumbled again. His bristles quivered and he was suddenly hungry but not only inside but also outside. He was hungry both within and without and his hunger was beyond him extending to the edge of existence and, also, concentrated at his center. He felt that the dispersal of his hunger threatened to tear him apart but there was really nothing to rend because he was already everywhere and nowhere. Then, everything flattened. He fell through layers of himself into himself.

Schrobear #75 was in wetness. He felt the locks of his carapace come apart and he was free from constraint. In the microscope, the technician noted that Schrobear #75 evacuated particles in his rectum while shedding his skin. He left the little heap of debris behind him, a heap of discarded garments, and ambled along on his little rigid legs, eating nematodes like popcorn.

Sugito, killed by a crocodile

Sugito, killed by a crocodile


　

　
He was born in a highlands village and given a name that people in the city could not pronounce. His grandfather was a warrior and had taken many heads. His grandfather’s father was also a "big man", famous for killing many enemies in feuds and hanging the skulls like gourds in his long-house. Several times, the Dutch put his great-grandfather in jail for homicide, although he was never imprisoned for very long – black fellows killed black fellows, revenge-murder was the law of nature. The skulls of enemies that his grandfather had taken were from Japanese soldiers. When Sugito was little, several times a year the old man decked himself in a headdress resplendent with the tail-feathers of bower birds and showed his grandson his trophy-skulls, hidden in hut deep in the jungle and made from canvas and metal peeled from crashed war planes.

His mother was Chinese and very gentle. She worked as a nurse in the clinic near the highlands village where her husband farmed and raised pigs. People were poor in highlands’ villages and the forests around them had been devastated by logging. Mines tore off the tops of mountains and the streams were red with poisons leached from the slag from the open pits. After awhile, no one could live in the hills anymore and, so, most of the people came down from the highlands to seek work in Sarong City. It was in the slums of that town that his boss, a fat Malaysian fishmonger, named the slender boy, Sugito and that was how he was called when the crocodile killed him.

Sugito was baptized Lutheran and he was married in a church in Sarong City. The wages paid by the fishmonger were insufficient to support his wife and family and, so, he took a job in a factory that made tofu. The factory was owned by a Japanese corporation but the supervisors were all men from Papua Barat. At first, Sugito worked in the granary unloading trucks laden with sacks heavy with soybeans. After a couple years, he hurt his back and couldn’t lift the 100 kilo bean sacks and, so, he was assigned lighter duty inside the steamy factory where the beans were boiled and the curds separated from the milk used to make tofu. The tofu curds or paste was pressed into blocks that a conveyor nudged into a stainless steel trough filled with cold water. Sugito’s job was to score the pressed cream-colored blocks of tofu with a cutting device, making a forty cubes of soybean curd from each block. He worked ten hours a day and made enough money to buy for himself a small, used motorbike. Sugito used the motorbike to travel to and from work. He lived in a tin-roofed house on the outskirts of a small village separated from Sarong City by a few miles of rice-paddies and some small palm-shaded pastures where cattle and swine were raised.

Sugito’s wife was sickly. She died after her second child, a son, was born. Sugito sent his two sons to Sarong City to a Lutheran boarding school. He wanted them to learn English and Chinese. If you could speak English, tourists bound for the World War Two wrecks in the harbor and, beyond, that the great coral reef required guides. People came to Sarong City from America and Europe where everyone spoke English and, of course, Australia. The garbage and mud in the City appalled the tourists but it was merely a way-station for the beaches on the archipelago beyond the harbor with its shoals of half-submerged destroyers and troop transports. The City fathers hoped to develop tourist attractions in Sarong – there was an unique pagoda downtown and some crocodile farming operations that allowed visitors to tour their breeding ponds, but the city was poor and chaotic and most Western visitors didn’t stay long. An ability to speak some Mandarin Chinese was a prerequisite to working at the big storage container facility located behind high barbed wire fences out on the cape. The place paid good wages and Sugito hoped that his sons might find employment there. All his life, he had struggled to find work and didn’t want his two boys to experience the poverty that he had suffered.

Except for holidays when his boys came back to the village, Sugito lived alone. He was too shy to be successful with women and his cheeks were pockmarked from a disease that had almost killed him when he was a baby and, so, he didn’t consider himself to be attractive in any way. He earned enough money to visit a prostitute with whom he was friendly a few times a month. At work, he was well-liked. He went to church every Sunday in the village by the tofu factory and served as a lay-pastor delivering the sacraments to people who were too sick to leave their homes.

In 2013, after much dispute in the city council, an Indian company opened a crocodile farm near the village. Sugito had never seen a live crocodile although, like everyone in Papua Barat, he had heard tales about monstrous reptiles gliding through the harbor shallows where people built their homes on stilts and snatching dogs and, even, full-grown pigs from their cages. When he was a little boy, Sugito’s grandfather showed him the ruin of a canoe that his clan had once owned – a long vessel hacked from a huge tree trunk with its prow carved like the fanged snout of a crocodile. The people in Sugito’s village didn’t want the crocodiles to live next to them, but the Indian businessman said that the animals would be confined behind a wall and that no one in town would ever see them. Further, the Indian businessman said that the crocodiles, raised for their skins that could be fashioned into handbags, would provide a source of revenue and employment for people in the village. When Sugito heard this, he shrugged: "I’m not interested in herding crocodiles." The village council licensed the operation and some earthmovers arrived to gouge-out some shallow pits where the reptiles could wallow. A stout wall of bricks more than six feet high was built around the crocodile farm. The wall was equipped with a mechanized gate and a sentry-house where an old man dressed in an army surplus soldier’s uniform drowsed away his days and nights, his AK-47 automatic rifle resting across his desk like a paper-weight. True to what the Indian businessman had said, no one could see the reptiles inside the enclosed acre of land, but people said that they could smell them – a thick, metallic odor that was veined with the stench of rotting carrion.

A truckdriver’s strike in Sarong City disabled the tofu factory. There was fighting in the streets and checkpoints halted traffic and the trucks that delivered soybeans to the factory were detained in the city. For a day or two, the workers at the factory cleaned the place, polishing the machines until they shined, and, then, there was nothing to do so the laborers were furloughed. The plant’s temporary closing was doubly inconvenient to Sugito. He lost wages, of course, but, also, was deprived of feed for his cattle – it was his custom to buy bags of soybean husks, a byproduct of producing tofu, as a feed-supplement to the grass on which his cattle grazed. It had been dry for several months and the trees were mostly denuded by hungry deer and the grass was mummy-brown and shriveled as if the nutrients had been roasted out of it. Sugito’s cows and his calf were gaunt and they bawled like hungry babies in the dusty pasture near his home.

Sugito sometimes drank in a local tavern with the security guard at the crocodile farm. The man told him that there was high green grass, bearded with seed, around the ponds where the reptiles lounged. He said that if Sugito bought him four or five rounds of drinks, he would look the other way when his friend slipped through the access gate to the crocodile breeding station. "Just be careful," the drunk and red-faced guard told Sugito. He added that at midday the crocodiles were lethargic, wallowing motionlessly on their pale bellies in the stinking mud, jaws wide-open to ventilate bellies full of chicken carcasses and frozen rats. "You can easily outrun them," he said.

The next day, a little after noon, Sugito took three burlap sacks and a box-cutter and went to the gate in the brick wall. He nodded to the security guard and, then, strolled into the enclosure. It was as the guard had described – the big reptiles looked sunstruck, resting like half-submerged logs in the shallow, algae-encrusted ponds. Small crocodiles, most of them the length of man’s thigh, crowded together, paving the mud with their corrugated, scaly backs. Sugito saw the man-made marshes fringed with chest-high stands of reeds and swamp-grass. The air was filthy with the stink of the beasts.

Sugito crouched in the high grass, slashing the reeds to make sheaves that he thrust into his burlap sacks. In a shallow, watery trench a couple yards away, a ten-foot crocodile was lounging in the ooze. The reptile smelled Sugito, shifted slightly sideways, and, then, rolled over thrashing its huge tail like a flyswatter against the man poaching the grass. Sugito was flung from the grass toward the lagoon where smaller crocodiles twisted and lunged toward him. The big crocodile scuttled toward Sugito and bit him in two. Several small crocodiles took his hands and feet in their jaws, and, corkscrewing, yanked his joints apart. Two men in a golf cart saw the reptiles tearing Sugito apart and drove to the place where the creatures were writhing around him. They beat the crocodiles with metal rods equipped with big sharp hooks and drove the animals back into the deeper water where they opened their jaws and hissed like snakes.

The authorities were called and the fragments of Sugito were collected in a khaki-green body bag. A couple days later, a Lutheran pastor said some words over the urn holding his cremated remains. The church was thronged with people and it was very hot and sticky in the sanctuary. Someone suggested that the crocodiles should be made to suffer for murdering Sugito. Others took up a chant denouncing the reptile farm. The church ladies had made some sandwiches and there were pies and brownies in the fellowship hall, but, when the service was over, no one went to partake of that food. Instead, the crowd surged out of the church and rampaged through the village streets, more and more people joining the parade to the crocodile breeding station. By the time the mob reached the reptile farm, the throng of young men at the head of the procession were all armed with hammers or baseball bats or iron bars and pipe sections. The guard who had admitted Sugito to the lagoons a few days earlier saw the throng approaching and ran from his station to where his Vespa was parked and, then, zoomed away. The mob smashed down the guard-house and broke the gate and, then, lassoed the crocodiles, yanking them out of the slimy water and clubbing them to death. The baby crocodiles were easy to kill: people picked them up by the tail and simply swung them overhead, smashing out their brains on the brick wall enclosing the reptile farm. The larger crocodiles, several of them as long as 12 feet, had to be muzzled by wrapping rope around their jaws. Then, crowds of men dragged the reptiles to a pit half-full of garbage, hacking at them with big machetes and claw-hammers. When the crocodiles died, they rolled onto their backs kicking their legs in spasms in the air. The bellies of the crocodiles were pale green, segmented and the color of early morning mist on the river.

The mob killed 292 crocodiles. The insurance claim submitted by the Indian businessman to his insuring underwriters at Lloyds of London was for than more $300,000 in American dollars. The police stood by idly and did nothing to stop the crocodile massacre. "We were outnumbered," they later said. The mob poured gasoline over the heap of mutilated crocodiles and lit them on fire. Many of the creatures were not yet dead and they writhed as the flames bit into them.