“So what new stuff did you discover right now?” Ramesh asked.
“I looked at those taste organs on the limbs. I had identified the equivalent of nerves in the Shaitan body previously… I think. The taste organs on the limbs are connected to the motor function hubs of the arms. I had inspected it briefly and didn’t think of it much earlier. Those motor function hubs have thick nerve bundles going to what I think is the main part of the brain.
In many ways you can think of those motor function hubs as performing the same function as our spinal cord. Most people don’t realize this, but the spinal cord is really an extension of our brain. Not only does our brain offload some of the autonomous and reflex action computation to the spinal cord, but it is made of the same type of cells as the brain.
When you withdraw you hand sharply on being pricked by a thorn, the action is performed by your spinal cord, the information does not reach the brain till later. The spinal cord makes the calculations and takes the reflex action. The motor function hubs of the Shaitan body is likely to be performing similar function, so it is part of the brain and I should widen my definition of the Shaitan brain.
So yes… to answer your question, it is possible for the taste organs to send rich and large amount of information to the brain. That however is not what has gotten me all excited. It is another fact, which I shouldn’t have missed. When I sampled the slime in question on their body, I found something interesting. I had sampled the slime earlier, and stored the data for later research. I had done the same with the brain cells.
However I had not bothered to compare the two. There was no obvious reason to do the comparison immediately, and I have had so little time. However with you raising the question about the slime and being able to send signals to the brain, I relooked at both the sample’s cell composition. What do I find? They are identical!
Then I went back to the cadavers to carefully examine the pores which secrete the slime. When I traced the capillaries through which the pores secrete the slime, they are directly connected to the brain! The Shaitans slime is a direct secretion of their brain material. Do you realize the significance of that Ramesh?!” Violet asked, sounding excited.
“Ughh… sounds disgusting. I am guessing that the significance of that discovery is that the Shaitans slowly lose their brain mass and become dumb as they grow older?” Ramesh said.
Violet laughed out loud. She was enjoying the conversation. “Nothing of that sorts Ramesh. I am sure that they grow smarter as they grow older just like us. Their brain is an organic learning machine just like ours. They are not secreting brain tissues, just the slime inside which the brain is floating in their brain sac.
The brain tissue is the machinery with which they think. Till now I thought that the slime was only for lubrication, but now I suspect, it has another function. It is the electrolyte that transmits signals to various parts of the brain and the body. If that is so, then it would make perfect sense to secrete some of the slime to the external world.
The slime can taste the external world chemically along with the taste organs, and send the signals directly to the brain. It would be the source of rich and huge volume of information. Your hunch might be right Ramesh. However it opens up an even more astounding possibility.” Violet was almost jumping with excitement.
“What is that Violet?” Ramesh had to ask, since Violet was not saying anything more, thinking things out to herself. Ramesh was dying of curiosity.
Violet reluctantly tore herself out of her mental arguments and continued them by speaking it out for Ramesh’s benefit. “Suppose these two Shaitans were inside this room alive. It is a dark room and they cannot see each other. Evolution has given them excellent hearing we know that, so they can find each other.
What if they nestle next to each other and touch each other’s slime? Or one touches the slime of the other through those taste organs on its arms? The slime had a direct connection to their brains. So do you see the significance of that Ramesh?” Violet asked excited.
“Their brains get a direct connection! Like two cores of a processor get connected on a silicon chip! They become a faster and more powerful parallel computer!” Ramesh said, catching the excitement of Violet.
“Spoken like a true computer geek! Yes those things may be true, or maybe their brains don’t work that way. We don’t know yet, but there is one thing that would happen for sure. Their brains would be able to communicate with each other at a tremendous speed without the need for a language. They could share complex ideas and emotions directly from one brain to the other almost instantaneously!” Violet said.
“So how do we prove all this?” Ramesh asked, he wanted to get on with it. If his theory turned out to be correct, then it was only the first step in his struggle to crack the alien computer.
“It would have to involve the two live Shaitans. I am worried about their health though. I have no idea what they eat, they can’t tell us, and we cannot set them free to roam the habitat and point out their food. We have taken all kinds of things that were lying in the habitat, which remotely looked like food and dumped them in its cell.
From what Alex’s boys on the watch tell me, the Shaitans have touched many of them, but no one can be sure if they have eaten anything. It does have a small mouth like opening in the center of its body, just like an octopus, but it might be its anus or its vagina for all we know. I was sure it needed water, since I had examined the living quarters, and we found small pools of water in the chambers and the grotto.
The quarters of the Shaitan have pools of water in them. They just sits in the pool and soaks up the water with their skin. That is the way they drink, and they drink a lot of water. We have to fill the pool every day. So it is possible they eat the same way as well. Nothing we have given them however has been consumed, so I suspect that they are starving.
At least we know one more thing about the Shaitans. They can go without food for a long time, at least 27 days that these Shaitans have been starving. We humans would have died in half that time. I have however started noticing a loss in body mass of both the Shaitans. They may be hardier, but they cannot last forever without food. They will die eventually, if we don’t figure out what to feed them, or take the chance of letting them out of their cells to find food for themselves in the habitat.”
“Or we could simply learn their language and ask them what they eat!” Ramesh said, almost half serious. He had a feeling that if he could crack the Shaitan computer, he would be able to crack their language fairly fast.
“Yeah… Yeah… If you can do that, you get the Nobel prize.” Violet said sarcastically as they started walking towards the cells where the two Shaitans had been incarcerated.
“Didn’t you know? Nobel’s wife ran away with a mathematician. He hated mathematicians. As a result there was no prize for mathematicians, and by extension computer scientists.” Ramesh joked. “But seriously Violet, how do you plan to test on these Shaitans?”
“Getting queasy are we?” Violet taunted. “We will start with a simple experiment to prove the basic hypothesis with this…” She raised a pen like gadget she held in one hand “and this.” She raised her other gloved hand which held a large blob of thick gooey slime.
Ramesh hadn’t noticed it before and he stepped back one step in revulsion. “And pray what is that gadget and what the hell are you planning to do with that filthy slime?”
“This my friend”, said Violet holding up the gadget “is a neural analyzer and also a neural probe. It can detect and send small micro-electrical pulses through the nerves of animals. It works on the Shaitans as well, I have tested it on both the dead and the live Shaitans. Simply touch this to their skin and send a small impulse, and they jump away like crazy. Either they are hyper sensitive to it or plain shit scared.
So I am going to ask the marines to hold down Sheba. Apply this slime on various parts of her body, then use the neural probe on the slime and see if she can feel it. That would prove your basic hypothe
sis.” Violet said with a wicked smile, as if she was going to enjoy zapping the Shaitan.
“Wait a minute… you named the Shaitans?! And what makes you think it’s a she and not a he?” Ramesh asked in amazement.
“Actually Sheba was named by Mischa. I named Mimi. I don’t know if they are female. I don’t even know if they have gender, sex or sexual reproduction. Both of us women felt that if they have gender, then these two must be females. They seem more intelligent and feisty than usual, which is the hallmark of a female, don’t you think?” Violet smiled and gave a wink. Ramesh just rolled his eyes obviously disagreeing with that prognosis.
“No… seriously, female is the default template for all life on Earth. All human embryo by default starts its body plan as female. It is only around the 6th week of the development of the fetus, does a specific SR – Y gene in the Y chromosome of a male fetus give a genetic signal to the body saying ‘I am going to be a male’. Then the body starts developing male organs.
That is why all males have small breasts despite it being of no use to them. By the 6th week, before the ‘I am a male’ signal, the body has already started developing rudimentary breasts, which stays. If the Y chromosome fails to trigger the ‘I am a male’ gene, as it happen once in a while, a genetic male would develop into a very normal female.
So you see, Women are the default, Males are the exception on Earth. If the Shaitans have to reproduce, they need females for sure. Males are not necessary. There are many other ways to reproduce. Women rule the universe Ramesh, get used to it. That is why these Shaitans are more likely to be females than males.
They got their names from our respective cats we had as little girls. We were talking about how we used to hate and also like those cats. Then we realized that it was the same with these two Shaitans, although it is not liking, but pity. We are using them as experimental animals. They are sentient and intelligent beings, we must not forget that.” Violet said.
That brought the burning hatred back into the eyes of Ramesh. “Yes and they can go and burn in hell as far as I am concerned.” Violet did not say anything to aggravate the delicate situation. Ramesh’s implacable hatred for the Shaitans, almost bordering on the irrational was well known in the human camp on Titan.
The marines were on guard outside the cell. They were sitting on crates brought from the human camp, one was playing a game on his personal console, while the other two were sharing some joke. When Violet explained what she wanted to do, they radioed and called in two more soldiers. One was a big Chinese, and other was from Leanna’s regiment.
They left the Chinese soldier on guard, and the rest of them donned the suits kept next to the crates. All of them were required to be suited up before approaching the prisoners inside the cell. The Shaitans still had their natural claws made out of very hard biological material, sharp enough to rip their guts out. No one knew what body fluid they might be able to eject onto the humans either, and what effect it may have.
The four soldier picked up cattle prods that had been jury rigged by Sasha and the one other remaining engineer from his team. They had reused the pikes and the long spears they had fashioned for the battle, and had added a small battery and capacitor unit, which discharged high voltage and gave a shock on the press of a button.
Violet felt sad that they were treating an intelligent sentient being this way, but it needed to be done for Human survival. She was glad that Mischa wasn’t here right now. Mischa felt very disturbed when she watched all this. Violet had specifically chosen Sheba because she was the more docile amongst the two.
Mischa had been studying these two Shaitans since the beginning of the capture. She was also the primary caretaker of these two. She knew them the best and it was Mischa who had noted that Sheba was more docile than Mimi.
Sheba was an intelligent creature. She had gotten used to this routine, and knew what was coming. Instead of fighting, she just stood still as far back as possible. The marines were also practiced in the routine. They proceeded with caution, their cattle prods in front, but made no attempt to hurt when Sheba didn’t put up a fight.
Sheba and Mimi were Type – A Shaitans, which meant they were only twice the mass of an average soldier. The four marines were able to pin her down, and Violet proceeded with her experiment. The slime was applied to the arms and the underside of her body, and in each case she displayed reaction to the stimuli applied to the slime with almost the same intensity, as if it was directly applied to her skin. It proved that the slime was an excellent conductor of neurological signals.
The next part of the experiment was tricky. They called in the other military men present at the Shaitan camp. First they entered Mimi’s cell and restrained her with the wires they had used originally to capture them. Then they dragged Sheba to Mimi’s cell. The whole episode was being recorded on audio visual, ultrasound, and infrasound.
It had become apparent very soon after their capture, that these Shaitans could recognize bright light from the dark, and probably sensed humans visually as very hazy and faint blobs in a well lit room at best. That was the best they could do visually. The Shaitans for all practical purposes were blind.
That didn’t mean that they could not sense the humans. They didn’t need light to do it. The emitted high pitch ultrasound like bats and probably had a very sharp picture of all the objects in the room.
The two Shaitans started communicating with each other using sound, mostly in the ultrasound range not audible to humans, but some of the sounds were low enough to be heard as shrill high pitched whining, trilling and cooing sound.
Violet had attached neural analyzer to Sheba’s skin slime using tape. She had removed it immediately. They had punished her with a shock from the cattle prod and then attached again. She got the message after the second shock and did not remove it a third time.
The small device was communicating wirelessly with the portable terminal that Violet had brought from her makeshift lab. They let Sheba approach Mimi. The natural mode of complex communication of Shaitans became apparent immediately. Each raised a limb and placed it on the skin slime of the other. The moment they did that, Violet’s terminal started recording signals at a tremendous rate.
The two Shaitan had been touching each other for less than five minutes, after which they decoupled and stood separately. It seemed like they had said everything they had to say to each other. It would seem strange to a human that the two Shaitans had so little to talk after 27 days of such ordeal. Only Violet knew the answer.
In those five odd minutes, her terminal had recorded nearly 100 Terabytes of information. She showed the results to Ramesh in jubilation. Ramesh smiled and said. “The good news is that it proves the theory. The bad news is that you probably missed a lot if not most of the information. Do you realize why you recorded nearly 100 terabytes in just under 5 minutes?” Violet nodded her head in the negative.
“The wireless link protocol that neural analyzer uses can send data at the maximum rate of 20 terabytes per minute. So you got the maximum possible through the wireless link, which is 100 terabytes. If you want to capture the entire conversation next time, use a wired link. But I think that is enough data for us to analyze for now.” Ramesh said.
The next several days were spent by Ramesh, Mischa and Violet cooped up in Violet’s lab. Ramesh used his considerable data analytics skills to slice and dice the data and make sense out of the patterns. Since the data was biological and fundamentally analog. Violet had to initially help in decoding and digitizing the signals.
As a psychologist Mischa assigned broad semantic meanings to various patterns identified. She kept juggling those semantics, until some sense started getting squeezed out of the recorded communication. They were helped by the ultrasonic recordings of the two Shaitans talking. They were less complex. It was assumed that they said similar things by ultrasound, since the Shaitans didn’t know at that time that they would be allowed to touch each other.
They correlated the ultras
ound patterns to the patterns obtained by sampling the slime, and started making progress. On the 5th day, Mischa was ready to perform the first test of their fledging knowledge of the Shaitan language. With the help of Violet and Ramesh, she had programmed the neural analyzer to transmit a specific pattern of electrochemical signals, instead of a dumb shock as they used to give till now to the Shaitans.
The same pattern had also been programmed on her com equipment, which had been modified to emit and detect ultrasound. She entered Sheba’s cell. Sheba had visually emaciated now. She was probably reaching the limits of Shaitan hunger. The marine minders were present next to Mischa, Violet, Ramesh and Jorge, but they had made no attempt to approach Sheba, who was standing slightly cowered at the other end pressing herself to the wall.
Mischa turned on her com and let the pattern they had programmed play out loud. They could not hear the ultrasound, but the tablets held by Ramesh and Violet clearly indicated the waveform that was being transmitted. There was an immediate reaction from Sheba.
She did not respond or indicate in any way that she could comprehend the message, but she seemed to stand a bit straighter and made half a step closer to the humans, no longer tightly pressed to the wall. It was almost as if Sheba was trying to hear the sound produced by the com better, although it was being played very loud.
They had played ultrasound recording earlier to these to captives, even recordings of earth bats. There had been no response in those cases, clearly Sheba must have found these ultrasound patterns meaningful in some way. However Sheba did not respond back in ultrasound even after they had played the pattern to her many times over.
The problem that the humans had faced in establishing a common language was that the Shaitans were almost completely blind. They couldn’t show a familiar object to the Shaitans like a planet or a star and then play a sound that the Sheba could corroborate. So Mischa moved to the next stage of their test.
Wrath of the Shaitans Page 4