. . .
Obviously it did not exactly help, but the vitalmados was not the only thing that prevented polkingbeal67 from constructing a plan to change the direction of his life. The chillok incursion into his brain facilitated a braintuning technique known as neutralisation. In other words, every time he developed a thought that was potentially injurious to chillok sensibilities, it was effectively snuffed out at the neuron level. It was like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every time he aimed a kick at it. He conceived one option after another for confronting the chilloks, but they were all snatched from his conscious thoughts before he had a chance to rationalise them. After a while, he knew what the inevitable outcome was going to be but he could not help himself and refused to give up.
The neutraliser was often used in conjunction with a related technique known as transposition, whereby each thought was replaced with a contradictory one. This was cutting-edge neuroscience, even for the chilloks, and the beta-phase disasters were still deeply etched in their collective consciousness. Indeed, two of the pioneering practitioners were still locked in a perpetual argument about who discovered it first:
"No, I did!"
"Yes, you did!"
"No, I did!"
"Yes, you did!"
As it was not possible to determine whose thoughts were being transposed, no one could find a way to terminate their circular argument and the two antagonists could not be separated.
Early the next morning, Melinda made her way over to polkingbeal67's demipod. A bank of slate-grey clouds concealed both suns and threatened rain. Arriving at the demipod, it took her several minutes to rouse him. He appeared groggy and disoriented when he finally operated the door.
"We've upset the chillok ambassador," Melinda announced.
Polkingbeal67 rubbed his eyes and managed to haul himself upright at the second attempt. "Really?" he asked with all the enthusiasm of a patient undergoing a colonoscopy.
"We refused to hand you over as a prisoner and he's basically saying we're now at war."
Polkingbeal67's eyes glazed over slightly, partly owing to the effects of the previous night's vitalmados binge and partly because he felt drained of his newly-acquired ability to empathise and emote, but mostly because his responses were being manipulated on the fly by chillok interference. "I should hand myself in," he said, "freely, voluntarily, without duress. Yes, that would be the right thing to do."
"What!" Melinda exclaimed, "No, no, no, no, no! You're totally not handing yourself in, do you understand? I'm not having it! No, no, literally, no! Y'know what? If they want war, they can have it. Who do they think they are? Demanding this, demanding that. Where do they get off thinking they can trample all over us like this? We should let them have their war and I tell you what - we'll trample all over them! What have we got to lose? They can't hurt us anyway, can they? What can they possibly do to us?"
She had to wait a few seconds for polkingbeal67's reply to issue from his lips, reconceived and repackaged as a consequence of chillok tampering. "They would annihilate us, extinguish our future generations and feed on our remains during the victory celebrations," he drawled.
"Are you all right?"
Polkingbeal67 had begun to realise he was definitely not all right. "No, yes," he said, now struggling against the process being triggered in his brain. "Yes, I'm all right. The chilloks are a wonderful people and should be obeyed."
"People? Wonderful? Seriously?" Melinda stared in disbelief.
Polkingbeal67 shook his head. "No, ignore me! I mean, certainly, yes, seriously. Wonderful people."
"So-o-o-o," Melinda fixed him with a quizzical, almost suspicious look. "You think I should just turn you over to the chilloks?"
"For mercy’s sake, no! Don't! I mean, yes, that would be the best thing for all concerned. They are very caring and considerate people and they will treat me well."
"They will?"
"They're cruel, cold-hearted fiends! I mean, friends. They're cool, gold-hearted friends and will take good care of me, just as they've been taking good care of yukawa3."
"Yukawa3?" Melinda echoed in confusion. Her eyes widened with incredulity and then narrowed in mistrust. "Yukawa3? Are you saying the chilloks are holding yukawa3 prisoner?"
"Yes, they are tending to him with great care, ensuring all his needs are met. The chilloks are wonderful people and they treat their prisoners in a humane and civilised way at all times."
"How do you know this? How do you know he's their prisoner?"
"I beg you, don't listen to this!" By now, the time lapse glitch in the chilloks' transposer process was clearly evident. "I mean, I beg you to listen to this. Yukawa3 is in good hands and I know this because I, uh, learned about it from, uh, reliable sources."
Of course, it would have made the chilloks' task considerably easier if they had infiltrated Melinda's brain too, but they had never envisaged a scenario where it would be necessary (earthling brains were not thought to be sophisticated enough), so they did not and could not. They were stuck with having to use their dubious powers of suggestion and persuasion to influence her.
"Codswallop and balderdash!" Melinda snapped. "Reliable sources! Reliable sources? What are you talking about? I don't know what's going on here, but something's not right and I'm going to get to the bottom of it!" She may or may not have meant this literally, but she picked up an AmbiTemp cushion and wacked polkingbeal67 on the posterior with it.
"What's that for?"
"That's for being a total alienated idiot! Why are you suddenly coming out with all this 'chilloks are humane... chilloks are wonderful forever... it doesn't get better than chilloks' garbage? Really? So, okay, what you actually want is to give up the fight, punish yourself for something you didn't intend to do, subject yourself to god knows what retribution these infernal chillok creatures might conjure up and..." Incensed and exasperated, she flopped onto the bed and stared blankly at the floor.
"Someone's not thinking straight here," said polkingbeal67.
Melinda looked up at him with scrunched eyebrows. "Is it me?" she asked sarcastically.
"The chilloks will keep me in an environment that's consistent with my values and concerns."
"Oh, they will, will they? Like what exactly?"
"Like, well, I don't know... pirates! They'll keep me captive on a pirate ship plundering the high seas. I'd like that. Do you know who yukawa3's cell mates are?"
"Don't tell me," said Melinda. "Penguins, right?"
I do not know who was more surprised - polkingbeal67 or the chilloks monitoring his thought processes. "How did you know?" he asked.
Melinda ignored the question. "Can I just remind you of one thing? This planet, your planet, the planet you've loved and fought for since the day you were born, is at war with the chilloks. Your people are waiting for you to stand up and do what's necessary. Literally. You're expected to save the planet!"
"The chilloks do not threaten the planet," said polkingbeal67, eyes wide with appalled disbelief at the sound of his own words - words that gushed out in fits and starts like water from a faulty tap. "They will take good care of the planet. Trust them!"
"What? Is it my ears? What in the name of anything that's holy? Are you seriously... What?" Melinda resorted to expressing herself in non-verbal language and started beating the cushion with her fists. Then she buried her face in it.
She heard polkingbeal67's voice as a kind of distant, muffled echo. "We, er, sorry, the chilloks have a glorious manifesto for running the planet. Give us, sorry, them a chance and we, sorry, they will sort out all your, er, sorry, our problems."
Melinda suddenly sat bolt upright and dropped the cushion. "You've been got at!" she declared. "What's going on? Look at me! Have you been brainwashed?"
Conscious that the transposition tactic was going pear-shaped, the chillok entities decided to play the percentages and avoid incriminating utterances. "I don't recall," said polkingbeal67 in a clipped monotone.
&nbs
p; Grabbing him by the shoulders, Melinda pulled him around to face her. "Listen to me," she said. "We're not going to let any ant creatures outsmart us! Do you understand? What are they doing to you?"
"I don't recall," said polkingbeal67.
"Are they here? Are they in the room? Tell me!" She dropped to her knees and scoured the floor for traces of insect activity.
"I don't recall," said polkingbeal67.
"Did anyone call here before I arrived? Did you notice any infestations or, I don't know, swarming or whatever else these creatures do?"
"I don't recall," said polkingbeal67.
Melinda clasped his arms in her hands and looked earnestly into his face. "Stay here!" she said and flew out of the door with a look of steely determination.
. . .
Most Formicidae are divided into three castes: reproductive queens, reproductive kings and sterile, wingless workers. A chillok colony, on the other hand, boasted a fourth caste, cerebrum ambulans, elusive microbe-sized creatures that invaded human skulls and interfered with brain function.
Chillok workers varied considerably in size, the senior ambassador being a striking example of one of the largest, but their body parts conformed to the standard Formicidae design - head, thorax and abdomen. They boasted an impressive pair of elbowed antennae, but the real distinguishing feature was a blue, rotating petiole segment between the thorax and the abdomen. Similar in general appearance to the workers, the kings possessed pale, delicate, diaphanous wings and disproportionately large eyes relative to the size of their heads. Their sole purpose was to mate with the new queens, who were by far the largest of the castes. Three or four times the size of workers, the queens were endowed with antennae that were twice the length of their bodies. Although they started life with beautiful, lustrous, veined wings, they lost them after mating. The kings and queens took the credit for all the chilloks' achievements and were the prime movers behind ideological orientation, but they never lifted an antenna to help with the toil and strife. To be perfectly frank, they were mainly concerned with the reproduction side of things.
Although they had advanced well beyond the intellectual capabilities of Mortians, earthlings and other humanoid species, chilloks had ploughed their own furrow in terms of technological and scientific progress. In the fields of cell signaling, neuroscience and wormhole travel, they had left others languishing in their wake, but they had never designed any physical forms of transport and, perhaps because they did not envisage a need for it, they had never developed mutator technology to disguise themselves. It may seem odd to you, therefore, that they appeared to yukawa3 as sub-Antarctic earthling penguins in the context of the alternative reality that served as his prison. Rest assured that the reason for this will become apparent before very long.
When we last left yukawa3, he was being carried aloft like a victorious football coach by penguin forms hurtling around a labyrinthine megalopolis. We find him now lording it over an audience of admiring penguins in an isolated, dome-shaped chamber, accessible only by a steep, narrow passage that was generally ignored because it seemed to plunge forever, deeper and deeper into execrable darkness. Having introduced his new devotees to the heady delights of the yukawa3 tripod dance, he had seduced them further by plying them with syrup in return for a regular supply of fish and prawns. He did not know where the fish and prawns came from, and they had no idea whence he obtained the syrup. You don't always need to know the insipid little details: as long as the big things happen, who cares? To yukawa3, life felt good once again. Despite the constraints of the language barrier, he felt like a demigod. His only qualm was the lack of water, but if there had been any around, so great was his sense of self-importance and worthiness, he would probably have attempted to walk on it.
It had not been smooth sailing all the time, not by any stretch of the imagination. The first few strikes of yukawa3's charm offensive had been random efforts to use anything he could find as bait. This literally backfired when he offered them some pieces of wood he had discovered at the back of the chamber. The penguins chewed it and chewed it and everything looked good until their tails suddenly went up and they sprayed long projectile streams of sawdust all over him. The slightly sweet but subtle fragrance had lingered for some time afterwards and had conjured up memories from the past that he had forgotten. In fact, the memories were more recent than he had thought - the aroma teasing his senses had derived from invercresco trees native to his home planet.
It is, of course, a cliché, but prison changes people. Even if the regime is not cruel or inhuman and the conditions are not particularly harsh or degrading, inmates and guards alike undergo psychological changes brought on by nothing more traumatic than the routine business of adapting to incarceration. Factors such as being deprived of privacy and liberty, the imposition of a diminished status and sparse material resources combine to diminish self-esteem and produce dysfunctional relationships. Nevertheless, perhaps because his self-esteem had already been about as stable as a kite in a tornado and perhaps because most of his relationships had been dysfunctional even before his confinement, yukawa3 had been coping well. In fact, his thoughts had already turned to escape.
A penguin's body, with its streamlined shape, webbed feet, paddle-like flippers and well-developed wing and breast muscles, may be superbly adapted for an aquatic environment, but frankly it's not much use for anything else. When his guards were otherwise engaged, yukawa3 spent a lot of time pecking with his bill at the floor towards the back of the chamber, only to fall through to the chamber below where some of the other birds were huddled together in sleeping posture. They were not best pleased, especially as they were largely only figments of yukawa3's imagination.
In reality, of course, the 'penguins' were chilloks going about their business in the normal way - tunneling, foraging, secreting toxins and devising plans to conquer the universe. Having interfered with the neurons in yukawa3's brain to synchronise his thoughts with their own and thereby ensnare him in an alternative reality (or parallel universe), it seems they had not anticipated the extent to which a Mortian brain would resist and oppose their efforts. In other words, they were not responsible for him perceiving them as penguins - he was supposed to perceive himself as a chillok!
Having acquired the opportunity to experiment with yukawa3, the chilloks had been using him as a guinea pig to test one of their new pet theories. They had recently started to embrace the notion that thoughts are energies capable of existing independently of a creature's physical body and capable of being connected with another creature’s consciousness. Prevailing upon yukawa3 to adopt aspects of a chillok identity had all been part of this radical new approach to braintuning. What the Mortian cadet had construed as hero worship on the part of the penguins, apparently hanging on his every gesture, was actually the chillok neuroscientist workers reveling in the spectacle of their own work!
Needless to say, however, members of the cerebrum ambulans caste felt threatened and were afraid for their future. All was not rosy in the chillok camp and things had been threatening to come to a head - actually, yukawa3's head - for quite some time.
Eventually, when yukawa3 picked up yet another hypnotic suggestion that he should forage for more syrup, the cerebrum ambulans microbes neutralised it and forced yukawa3 to reinterpret it as a yearning for escape. When he tumbled headlong into the workers' sleeping chamber, it could have served as an omen, a premonition of the future collapse of chillok civilisation.
There were further examples of this contention between the neuroscientists and the cerebrum ambulans. Receiving a synchronisation thought advocating a tidy up of his hidden chamber, the braintuning cerebrum ambulans refashioned it for yukawa3 as a cunning new escape plan employing ingenious forms of camouflage or disguise to escape detection. Wearing his sou’wester as his disguise, he endeavoured to find a passageway leading from the chamber, but he was blinded by the ill-fitting hat and collided with wall after wall until he was staggering sideways and one of his
flippers was quivering like the bottom lip of an actress in a third-rate soap opera. The pitiful farce continued until he rammed a wall with so much force that his bill remained embedded in it for several minutes.
. . .
Unlike most of us, Melinda did not experience many moments when she felt helpless, confused and lonely, but that was how she felt right now. She did not know who to trust or who to believe or who to turn to for help. Clearly, polkingbeal67 had been got at by someone or something and, although she was confident the planetary leader was still himself and not subject to the will of anybody else, she entertained the notion of consulting him only very briefly before dismissing it. Frankly, she thought, what difference would it make if he was under someone else's spell? He never said anything sensible anyway! As for nipkow4, he was so inhibited by political correctness and concerns about upsetting intergalactic cohesion, she would need a team of wild goopmutts to drag him off his moral pedestal.
She felt as if she had been hurtling along a road, and there before her was the next bend enveloped in a thick shroud of fog. For the first time, she paused to take stock of the half-dream, half-nightmare world in which she was now so deeply immersed. Thoughts of home on Earth began to flood through her mind. They ebbed and swirled like the Stygian waters of the river Lethe, leaving her numb and stunned and disconnected. Ultimately, these reminiscences served to turn and point her towards earthling humanity for encouragement and illumination, and, without any further delay, she set out for the earthling prisoners' camp at nefeshchaya.
Through The Wormhole, Literally Page 31