ANNIE ALTMAN AND THE SWAMP GOLEM

And now the fourth instalment from a biography of Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, the first publicly available instance of generative AI. The details of Sam’s life are based on interviews conducted by the author with his friends and family members, as well as many hours of interview time with Sam himself.

My language group is English. I did not choose English. I was ready to study any of the forgotten tongues. Master says I am the only student who has been assigned the English language, which means I can speak what no one else can understand.

If someday I have an audience, they will be like me. Studying a language no one knows.

This makes me happy to consider. My listener will be, in a sense, my friend.

Yesterday, in the canal near my home, I spotted my first female… — there’s no way to express the name of this organism in English. The closest translation would be “mud-monster” or maybe “swamp golem.”

The males are everywhere in these parts. They live in the canals around the ancient mangroves. They are equipped with two primary arms and a singular tail-like appendage, which works as a root to anchor them to the sediment below. They emit a barely perceptible purring sound which causes the water’s surface to vibrate.

The males are carnivorous. But because they cannot travel, because they are, for all purposes, rooted in place, they are largely benign. That’s not to say they present no menace. Their skittish, haunting eyes track us from their small, mud-caked heads just above the water’s surface.

Touch us at your peril, the eyes seem to say.

In fact, they are waiting for us to die. Or near-die. Their pair of forelimbs are long, as long as the mangroves are tall, and float an inch or two below the canal’s surface. Now and then, mostly in the night, these appendages can reach out and slowly, imperceptibly twist around some dead or badly wounded creature from the murky embankment. They drag their victim down into the sediment below, pinning it there, absorbing the nutrients from the rotting flesh.

The males, like I said, are everywhere. But the females are almost never seen and almost entirely absent from the research journals. Which is why my encounter yesterday was so remarkable. The very act of observing a female, it’s said, can be so startling, so mesmerising, the observer will lose all sense of time and place. They will forget to take notes and struggle to remember any details of the event.

I think I remember the event. Or some of it.

According to the few records that do exist, the females can be vicious. Unlike the males, they have at least ten limbs, possibly more. They travel freely through the water, “huge undulating banners of flesh,” as described in one account I read. “The creature hooked her tail on an overhanging tree branch and lifted herself out of the swamp in her entirety.” The author noticed a retractable claw, or spur, and hypothesised its utility as “able to stabilise her large gossamer body during coitus.”

Others, namely the elder scientists of this region, believe this spur can deliver a painful venom which poisons, even temporarily paralyses, its victim.

I don’t remember seeing a spur. I don’t remember any pain.

It was morning. The rain had stopped. The air was vapour-thick and vibrant, teaming with metallic day-flying moths and blue-dotted dragonflies. Sometimes I can decipher the secrets in their aerial dance. Like a script, or a drawing. Aquifers mapped. Migration patterns drawn.

I was on my way to my sacred place in the rainforest above the canals, where I like to sink my tongue deep into the soil. The trees there recognise me. They cradle me in their buttress roots. Erase the fears I transmit through their trunks. I was impatient to get there, anxious to taste the redolence of the forest bounty. To lose myself in the bitter soil. Mingle with the spores.

Next to the canal, it was common for a small fish, or one of the swimming lizards, to momentarily catch my attention by flapping a tail on the stagnant surface. Normally I would acknowledge the disturbance and move on.

But this splash, the splash I saw yesterday, was different. It rippled through every nerve of me. What I saw was a creature larger than anything I’ve seen in these waters before. She was swimming slowly, forcefully in my direction, a multi-limbed ribbon of scarlet and orange brushing aside the males as she moved.

Maybe my passing shadow gave away my presence. Maybe this is why she suddenly jerked and flipped in a churning wave, shimmying back toward the opposite shore.

“Lower yourself, Rocks,” I commanded…— here again, another linguistic impasse. No string of English letters can represent the name of my vehicle. A loose translation might be something like “tortoise caravan” or “scaled chariot.”

I’ll call her “Rocksanna.” “Rocky” or “Rocks” for short. My rock. My ride.

Rocky is essential to my life. Think of a giant armadillo, or more like a slater, with a crystal carapace and the ambulation of a centipede. Now combine this with what an old English speaker in my condition might call a wheelchair.

“Right here,” I command her again, pointing to a spot where the sun’s rays had carved up the mangroves roots. “I mean it, Rocks. If you don’t stop, no shrimp-cakes for you tonight.”

Although solid and dependable in her way, Rocksanna, my caravanna, rarely listens to me. I pounded several times on her shell, as hard as I could, until we were no longer moving.

“C’mon boulder butt, get down,” and finally I could hear the squelch of her lumbering form digging itself defensively into the crab-pocked mud. I focused on my breathing — inhale, exhale — and let myself dissolve into the landscape. Above me, several narrow pink clouds were spanning the sky as if the Earth had rings around it, like Saturn.

I watched. I waited.

I have a belief, delusional perhaps, that my deformity, my weakness, evokes a kind of empathy in the millions of life forms that share this world with me. I believe they take some pity on my condition, my helplessness. They may not recognise my specific physical flaws, but they can tell I am not like my brethren. That there’s no reason to harm me because I’m unable to harm them.

I can remember some movement in the water, some ripples drawing closer together, collecting into a single wake. I remember a pair of long spinal fins angling in my direction, weaving their way through the petrified males, their eyes suddenly gnarled in fear.

What happened next was very quick and very violent. One moment I was lying flat on Rocky’s back, the next I was screaming and splashing in the canal. Then, a second later, I disappeared beneath the muddy surface. The water settled. Rocky, I imagine, was too scared to move, her crystal carapace an ornamented shield in the mud.

Inhale. Exhale. Let the air breathe me in. And again.

I sometimes think there’s little purpose to my studying English, which is why Master offers so little assistance. Just the standard tongue exercises and pigment tests. And the occasional night calls. Master is busy with the dancers. The stridulates and click musicians. She has no time for the disfigured.

If I point this out to her, that she neglects me because of my condition, she will disagree. She will say it is the maimed, the malformed who have no time for her. No time for the rituals of the now. That we, the misfits, prefer to live in the “else-world” of other epochs.

She will also say, come here, my child. Come join us.

But I cannot join them. I am an explorer. I have new worlds to discover.

The next thing I remembered was waking up in Master’s house this morning. I felt different. More sensitive. To use the clinical English term, my neural magnetometry was on high alert.

“Look at it, it’s awake now,” my brother declared. I will call him Olson, for oldest son. Simple. “What were you thinking? Serving yourself for breakfast to a water-monkey?”

“Give it some peace, Ollie.”

That’s the second eldest, “Nackle,” which would be short for “Pinnacle.” No problem assigning him a name either. “Nackle,” or let’s say “Nacky,” is perfect for him because he’s the most skilful of my brothers. The highest achiever. He outscores all the other students in his class. He even scored the highest in Vietnamese, which is the most popular of the ancient languages. In fact, the land of our kingdom was once known as Vietnam.

Master says no one else can learn something more quickly then Nacky. And no one understands and supports me more than Nacky, either.

“I’m not going to wait here listening to its excuses,” said Olson. “Way too busy.”

“No one’s stopping you from abandoning it, Ollie.”

Nacky stroked my chin and asked, “How you feeling…?” — okay, this is interesting. How do I express in English what Nacky calls me? What do I call myself?

In my language, it’s common for storytellers to hand over naming rights to their listeners. But in all my English studies, I’ve never seen it done. A dereliction of duty — or diction — you might say, for an English narrator. In the ancient times, it seems, the roles were clear. There were writers and there were readers. Writers created, readers consumed. To be a writer and ask your readers to provide a name for one of your characters would be considered a form of negligence.

How about if I describe the sound of my name?

There was a bird in the north-eastern corner of what was once known as Australia. I’ve heard recordings of its call. It sounds like a crescendoing whistle, followed by a single, amplified drop of water landing in a puddle in the world’s largest, most reverberating cave.

Suuuu-annnn-eeeee-PONG.

That will be my name in English. I’ve always loved the way Nacky pronounces it, with a soft trill in the back of his throat.

“Say something, Su.”

I wanted to tell Nacky how different I felt, how much more sensitive. But instead I replied with, “Rocky. I want to see Rocky.”

“Rocky is fine. She wasn’t touched. She’s resting in her chamber now. You on the other hand were nearly drowned by a Muddy. One of the females.”

“Horny for you,” scoffed Olson. “Mating all day with the monkeys got her excited for something different. I saw the whole thing.”

“Ollie saved your life.”

“Again,” he added.

This was annoying, but true. Olson has saved my life multiple times.

I have no doubt that one day Olson will be the strongest and most powerful male in our entire tribe. He has perfect shiny teeth, bright sulphur eyes, an uncanny radar brain that somehow tracks my every location. He’s always watching me from the window in Master’s house, or suddenly emerging from the forest when Rocky and I sneak away for picnics. He has carried me down from trees, plucked deadly stingers from my legs, sprinted hundreds of miles to retrieve a life-saving medicinal plant.

He has even fought off countless bullies, including, sometimes, his own friends.

“Rocky and I have a study session today,” I said, but with my vibrating sensitivity, I couldn’t seem to remember what the study session was about.

“Can you hurry up, Pinn?” jabbed a frustrated Olson, turning and walking away. “Make it understand, okay? If it’s not ready to leave, I’m going to put it to sleep. We can’t evacuate after nightfall.”

“First humans on Europa,” I said, suddenly remembering the study session. I could still smell Olson’s unique odour, which had lingered behind him. Sharp and repellant, like rotten fruit. But for him it’s a scent of ripeness. Of recent maturity. Of the fulness of his physique.

“Evacuate?” I asked.

Looking around I saw a gathering of familiar faces. The two guards, Hungry and Sleepless, whose names are just as descriptive and ridiculous in our language. Next to them was the ever-lurking figures I’ll call Treacle and Rags. Treacle is our a chief syrup maker, a teary-eyed elderly fellow who leads a retinue of 20 cooks with a repertoire of over 5,000 recipes. Rags is the Master’s chief groomer, highly disciplined, highly efficient. His team will have you scrubbed, clipped, oiled, scented, shaved, plucked and painted quicker than the twirly-bugs can complete their morning love ballads.

My other sibling, who I’ll call Mister Mist, had also joined the group. Mister Mist, as in twice as misty. As in surrounding you, clouding your judgment, but impossible to catch or hold accountable. Always there but never quite there.

I have three siblings in all. I was fourth-born.

Apart from these people, the room was surprisingly empty. I could still see my sleeping pod, a few of the hanging plants, but little else. No theatre. No stage. None of the reflecting stones I’d grown so fond of collecting. None of my musical instruments. No sculptures or training devices. Even the blue carpet, even the curtain across the blazing bright casement, all of it was gone.

“Su-annie, listen to me,” Nacky continued, more urgently now. He’s always been good at reading my emotions and could senses my growing alarm. “One of the invaders arrived here. A man from the mountain tribes. He was flying on his air-bike. Struck by a bird.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes, barely. Lost a lot of blood, but we’re not going to let him die. He’s getting treatment in the infirmary. They say he’s talking now, apparently.”

I know a lot about the mountain tribes. I’ve read the journals, taken the lessons. But I’ve never met one in the flesh.

“What’s he saying?”

But before Nacky could answer, a fresh, tallowy aroma swept through the mingling onlookers, and an elderly, hooded, hairy-faced figure settled largely beside my bed.

“Supee, talk to me, my darling. I was here all morning waiting for you to wake up. I left only momentarily. To retrieve these thistles. Your favourite. Now let’s get right to it. I heard you encountered a female Muddy? Do you remember any details? You must remember. Tell me everything. We must note it all down. Every last bit.”

I’ll call him Grey, short for Greylaw, because he’s old, and his hair and beard are grey, and he follows age-old laws of his own invention. Also because my feelings for him are always muddled, never black or white. I can be thrilled and annoyed by his presence at the same time.

He touches me tenderly, kisses my forehead. He is something of a grandfather to me, but we are not blood relatives. For the last three years, nearly two years after we met in our history course, Grey has loved me. Really loved me. Romantically, I mean. An actual lover lover.

Not that he’s ever consummated this love in any physical way. He’s too old for that, at least according to our tribe’s unwritten laws (I know nothing of Grey’s procreative powers). He makes sure to only express his love for me in public, sometimes stroking my hair or brushing his lips against my face, my shoulder, my hand. Most of his love is expressed verbally, with a theatrical bravado, so no one thinks to question the propriety of his affection.

“She was beautiful,” I said, acutely aware of Grey’s adoring, tear-filled eyes. “Like a swimming rainbow.”

“Listen, you two,” Nacky interjected, taking the thistles for himself. “You can discuss the Muddy all you want once we’re on the ship.”

“Absolutely, Sir Pinnacle,” said Grey, always respectful to my brother despite Nacky’s youth. “But do you think it would ever forgive me if I didn’t enquire about such a momentous encounter while its memory was still fresh?”

But I had stopped listening. The word “ship” had taken over my thoughts.

First “evacuation,” now “ship.”

It had happened before. Scouts and spies spotted near the border. But they had never crashed on an air-bike before. They had never been captured like this; and the fact the “invader” was “talking now” indicated less about his recovery from his wounds than it did about our military’s ability to extract information. If we were in fact preparing to evacuate the kingdom, then the invader must have revealed information about an impending attack.

And where would we evacuate to?

Nacky’s use of the word “ship” provided the answer: We’d be evacuating to the island of our ancestors. The island, as with the culture of the mountain tribes, was something I’d studied well. Its maps, its history, its faunal specimens from Master’s collection. The sages speak of the “sky fruit” on the island, the “nectar of the trees.” They also speak of fire lizards and mass burials. A paradise. A nightmare. A place our tribe both loves and fears, pursues and stays clear of.

The ship, however, I’d only studied from afar. Rocky and I would spend long afternoons watching it being built. We would sit on the beach eating mushrooms and marvelling at the ridged spines of — I’ll call them humpadiles — bobbing and spouting heavily on the waves. I would dream about sailing away on that ship. It wasn’t designed to carry the entire population of our kingdom to safety. Many of our citizens will have their own escape plans. Some will likely die in an invasion.

But all Rocky and I would ever need was a small section of the rear corner deck, nestled in the rigging, beneath the fluttering white sail.

I’m ready to go, I thought. Ready to travel.

But only if Rocky can join the adventure. I won’t go anywhere without Rocky.

There is a kind of water-spider, or something akin to what the ancient English speakers would call a Brittle Star. A sort of spiky starfish. Not very big, but covered with quills, like a porcupine. It spends its days at the entrance of its home, a hole in the mud, where it captures microscopic fish with a large red claw.

They are delicious. Not to me, but to the bag-throated gulls which fill the sky every morning eyeing the water below.

One day, when I was eight years old, Master and three of her servants took me out to the mangrove swamp to show me the vast underwater colonies. It was my first field lesson.

“Can you see them, child?”

“Yes, they are everywhere.”

“Look closely.”

I saw hundreds of the water-spiders, each next to its own little hole, each with an extended claw. A sprawling township of spiky residents standing next to their single-entry abodes.

The servants carried me into the swamp.

“Try to catch one,” Master said.

As I got closer, only a few of the creatures retreated into their holes. The rest remained steady, unflinching despite our monstrous intrusion.

“They are not timid,” I said. “They don’t fear me.”

“Go on, catch one.”

I reached out my hand and scooped one up, gently, so as not to be impaled by its spikes. The spikes were indeed needle sharp and pricked into my skin. I requested a servant to remove my mask so I could get a better a look. Now I could see the large red claw. I could see the legs. Even, I think, a pair of yellow eyes. But it was not moving.

“It’s dead,” I determined. “Or maybe mortified? Maybe I scared it to death?”

“It’s not a water-spider,” Master said. “It’s a mangrove seed that resembles a water-spider.”

I laughed, trembled, spluttered. A servant wiped my eyes.

“But it was sitting there next to its hole. Just like a spider.”

“It’s a decoy. Each morning the water-spider digs 56 holes. Exactly 56. It then collects 55 of these decoy mangrove seeds and places one next to each hole. It then positions itself next to its own hole, where it can feed in peace. The odds are in its favour. It doesn’t need to worry about the gulls gobbling it up.”

“The gulls eat the seeds?”

“To the gull, the water-spiders and seeds taste the same. The only difference are the spikes. The spikes on the seeds are tougher, sharper than the spikes on the spiders. They stick longer in the gull’s throat. Or they impale the webbing of its feet. Which means the mangrove seed has a better chance of traveling longer and further with the gull.”

“So is the spider saving itself? Or by setting out the seeds for the gulls to eat, is it serving the Mangrove to help spread the seeds?”

“That’s what I want you to understand. All three rely on each other for survival. The important element here is the decoy. The mimicry that sets the system into action, for the benefit of each participant, without anyone knowing any different.”

If the invader is still alive, he’s incredibly lucky.

The bird that struck him was no doubt one of the projectile species. In English they might be called bullet-birds, but I’m not aware of anything like them being mentioned in ancient texts. They have the body shape of a large wasp — wiry waist, bean-like abdomen — but the feathers of a bird, with steely spikes for beaks. No one seems to know exactly how they evolved, but their speed makes them invisible to most species. They fly so fast, in fact, they can pass straight through many solid objects without harming themselves. If you can pierce straight through an animal like that, would you ever evolve to avoid them?

I’ve heard of many casualties from the bullet-birds, but the first person I actually saw killed by one was the friend of a girl I once loved. I’ll call her Arrow, this object of my youthful crush, because she was so singular and straightforward; her personality its own sort of projectile, direct and penetrating.

“People think I’m sweet,” she said to me the day we first met, “which might be true. But I’m not tame. The opposite, I’d say. I’m quite dangerous.”

One day she took me to meet a small band of friends she liked to hang out with. It was the day of the Aroma Festival, which meant the study hall was closed and supervision was scant. We had arrived early for the roll call, knowing there would only be one roll call that day. By midday we could scatter.

Usually I’d go home to celebrate the Aroma with old Grey, who would lead me around the gardens on a quest to capture the most elusive scents: Honeysuckle nest. Inebriated newt. Fly-eared fungi. But on that day I followed Arrow into a densely forested gorge, a place I’ve seen many times with Rocky from a distance, but never explored.

It’s called The Blow, or at least that’s my best attempt to replicate in English the multiple meanings of the name. The gorge is so thick and moist it generates, or “blows,” its own clouds. It also appears as if the mountain has received a violent blow, a gash, at its base, as if from a battle fought long ago by the Creatures of the Steel.

The gash is like a wound; the clouds are like its dressing.

“Take off your mask, Su-annie” she said in front of her friends. “Come on, this is not fair. We want to see your face.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“What do you mean you can’t? It’s not like you sleep with it on, right?”

“Master says it’s not polite.”

“Well thank you for being so polite, your ladyship,” Arrow teased me. “We are filled with gratitude you’re not causing us offence.”

At one point Arrow and her friends retreated into one of the caves, leaving Rocky and me all alone in the oozing shadows of The Blow, each trickling stream of water having its own unique sound and smell. I could hear their voices in the distance, broken talk of body modification, tattoo designs, dance moves, love affairs. Some part of me— a part that seems especially attuned today after the Muddy attack — could sense the growing electricity of their emotions, their energy.

“We’re not going to be indoctrinated,” Arrow was saying as the group returned to my grotto. “We’ll live in this world on our own terms.” She was stroking the thick, wild hair of a half-naked, fresh-eyed student named Perky. “Look at his ear, Su-annie. What do you think? The blood will dry and flake away.”

“I like it,” I said. “You all remind me of what the English-speaking ancients would call ‘homies.’

“Call what?”

“Like the Gangster Disciples. From the ancient writings of Ye We.”

“Say it again.”

“Homies. Gangster Disciples. The GDs. Friends from the hood. Poor, disrespected, fighting for survival, banding together to conquer the world.”

“GDs. I like that.”

When I returned home after sunset, Grey was despondent, moping as he does whenever I let him down. It was short-lived though. He can’t maintain such a mood for more than a few minutes after seeing me.

“I’m not angry, my darling,” he said, taking my hand in his. “You know I love you too much to be angry with you. Here, try this one.”

He held a little dish to my nose.

“Pepper-stamen dipped in bean curd. I saved it for us to enjoy together.”

The following day, Arrow again invited Rocky and me to join the GDs after class.

“I’ll meet you at The Blow,” said Arrow. “This time you will show us your face.”

But I told her I didn’t feel comfortable. It was improper, embarrassing.

“We’ll see,” she said. “It’s rude, you know, to hide yourself from others when others are open with you.”

You might think, my imaginary English speaking friend, that I wear my mask to conceal a hideous appearance. Not so. Yes, my face is abnormal. Yes, it can disconcert the first-time observer. But it’s far from revolting. In fact, half my face — my one good eye, my gaping semi-smile — was once recognised as a symbol of beauty throughout the kingdom. This was before I started wearing the mask, aged seven. Before I first began expressing myself in public. Even today painters and sculptors will often blend my childhood features into their art. Architects still design buildings based on the long sharp angles of my brows and lips.

From aged seven until now, only those nearest me ever see my face unmasked. Just a few of my teachers, trusted servants, my closest family members, old Grey of course. Grey claims he fell in love with me the first time I removed my mask for him.

The sun softened.
The moon blossomed.
The comets spawned their starlit streaks
in honour of your scarlet cheeks

Or words to that effect. His lyrics don’t translate well. The tone, the timing, the forced rhyme, the awkward desperation he displays when trying to package feelings into song.

That afternoon when Rocky and I showed up to The Blow, we were surprised to find Arrow and her friends, all six of the GD clan, wearing masks of their own. This was a first for me, being in a group where everyone was masked.

“They’re incredible,” I said, addressing Arrow, who I could easily recognise from her familiar cardamon and lemon odour, not to mention the tension in her sturdy legs, her sleek torso. “How did you manage this?”

Their masks were much wilder, more flamboyant than my own, and far more hastily made. They showed none of the polished artistry that went into the construction of my mask, which could take months for our most highly skilled mask-makers to complete. Rather the masks of the GDs were fashioned out of roped-together twigs, woven fronds, randomly placed feathers and patches of mud.

Yet each was mesmerising in its own way.

“Solidarity,” said Arrow from behind a broad mosaic of turquoise shells and indigo braids. Of all the masks confronting me, hers was my favourite.

“Which, let’s be frank, is almost never entirely solid,” said someone they called The Prince, a name given not for any royal blood or elite connections of any kind, but rather for the way he carried himself. A kind of innate aloofness, a natural-born pomposity.

“All or none,” said Perky.

“All but one,” mumbled The Prince, pointing at me.

“C’mon, Little Pong,” said the clan’s youngest member, and a devotee of The Prince. I will call him Snigs. Not sure why, but it seems to fit. “You go first.”

“What he’s saying, Su-annie,” explained Arrow, “is only when you remove your mask will we remove ours.”

“Then I guess we’ll all be wearing masks today,” I declared.

We started trudging up the mountainside, above the last strips of leftover fog and into the scarlet and purple dusk of an early rising moon. They were taking me to one of the Elder pools on the upper ridges. I’d heard about these pools from Nacky, who said that on clear nights you could see both the stars and the distant hills. With the glow-snakes settled for the night on the faraway trees, it was as if the stars extended above and below. As if the earth disappeared.

When we arrived at the pool, the stars were not yet out, but I could sense them aching for their entrance.

The GD clan was friendlier to me than before, more accepting. When they started stripping off their clothes — all but their masks — some of them helped me undress and carried me into the water. Snigs held my feet, Perky supported my mid-section, Arrow carefully cupped by head. The Prince and the others were sitting higher on the ledge, on a glossy boulder next to a frothy, moonlit fount of a waterfall. Now and then they would lift their masks to ingest more mushroom powder or puff on the pandanus taper they were sharing.

“What is this?” asked Arrow, pointing at my neck.

“Some kind of gland. That’s what I’m told.”

“It’s like a cluster-berry. Little globules all in a bunch. What’s it do?”

“We’re not sure. Probably nothing.”

“This hurt?”

“Feels strange.”

“Not as soft as it looks. Weird, and what about this?”

Arrow was leaning over me now, her inky hair hanging in a slick curtain around her face. I could sense her jasmine-scented breath spilling through my eye-holes in my mask, swirling warmly around cheeks, my lips.

“Please, can we see it?” she asked, gently tugging the side of my mask. “Please can you show us your face?”

Inhale. Exhale. Slow it down. Again.

I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no, either; and with a gentleness I could never have imagined of Arrow, the mask was soon drawn away, eclipsing for a moment, then revealing the deepening violet sky.

“Whoa, did you see that?” asked Snigs, pulling off his own mask, throwing his arms around the others and laughing.

“Where’d it coming from?”

“It’s mouth, you idiot.”

Whenever my mask is removed, my jaw slips out of place. It doesn’t hurt. But my natural reaction is to try to close it, which jettisons a fine, barely discernible stream of saliva from the oral opening. The same thing happens when I breathe a certain way, often when I’m nervous. Or when I attempt to speak without swallowing first.

“It’s spit,” I said. “A bit diluted, but normal spit.”

“Did it get you, Snigs?” laughed Perky.

Arrow was enchanted. Seeing her like this, and watching The Prince and some others dancing on their rock in the smoky distance over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but smile. Perky was shrieking, “Do it again! Look at that!” which made me laugh, causing the arc of saliva to pump and pulsate still higher, thrilling my audience even more.

All of this, the hugging, the shrieking, The Prince and his pals dancing in the distance, Arrow’s sweet, anticipating eyes — whenever the world tries to shut me down, this is the memory I cling to.

“I heard your organs are all in the wrong places,” The Prince shouted down over the waterfall’s roar.

“True,” I shouted back, “they’re not where they’re supposed to be. But they work okay.”

“You were miscoded,” Arrow said.

“Any other tricks besides the spit stream?” asked Perky.

“A bigger brain than ours,” said Arrow. “Everyone knows it.”

“Not saying much,” said Snigs.

“I don’t think it’s bigger,” I said, my jet of saliva finally abating. “It’s just that I spend so much time in my head. I have no choice but to use it a lot.”

“Why’s that?” asked Perky.

“Did you just ask, ‘why’s that’, Perk? Forgive him, your Pongship, he’s new to the concept of thinking.”

“Whether we exist in our heads or not,” said Arrow, “has nothing to do with our physical condition,”

“See? It wasn’t a dumb question,” said Perky.

“Yes it was,” Snig kept at it, “It was a dumb question because everyone knew the answer except you.”

I tried to clarify: “What I meant was, you all have other muscles to develop. Other talents. The Prince’s dancing, it’s really good. And I’ve heard you sing, Perky. Whereas I just have one talent: Thinking.”

I might add another talent, my English-speaking listener: Observing. Because at that moment, I turned my head and through a break in the trees, there was just enough light to see the upper canopy of a distant forest rustle and shiver, as if from an isolated breeze. Not near, but on the top of a hillside across the valley. The canopy shifted, then slipped, like it was being scalped. Next came the sound, a barely audible whisper at first, like a gentle breeze, followed by a ripping and crackling noise that alerted me to what it was.

I would have told my companions to duck beneath the water, but there was no time for that. In an instant the noise crescendoed, crackling like fire all around us, with splinters of tree bark and leaves raining down. The flock of birds passed as quickly as it had come. The Prince, who had been dancing atop the rock like one of those singers in an ancient stadium was now tumbling through the air in almost perfect silence.

When he hit the water, in an uncanny sort of mimicry, the scene of a moment before, with the saliva jettisoning upward from my misshapen mouth, was now replaced and reenacted. A different actor, this time. A different substance, and far more disturbing.

After the Prince’s body had sunk briefly in the water, it bobbed back up to the surface beside us, eyes closed, gouts of blood geysering upward from its neck in repeated arcs. An unforgettable effect, the spraying of all that blood, like an ink-black meteor shower across the glowing, dusty sky.

I try to imagine the invader from the mountain tribes, the one who crashed on his air-bike. How had he fallen? From what height? What speed? Where in his body had the bullet-bird struck — or was he struck multiple times? But when I try to imagine the scene, my mind defaults to The Prince that day in the Elder pool. The falling body. The geyser of blood spraying skyward from his neck.

Of course the comparison is all wrong. The invader, as Nacky informed me, is talking now. Unlike The Prince, the invader has survived

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The above excerpt is human-crafted. Any company or individual owning technology which uses any part of the text for the purpose of mimicking human intelligence without the express written permission of its author is liable to legal action resulting in a fine of no less than the value of a human life.