The Pouakai

by David Sperry

  “Yes, yes,” Colin whispered.

  “What?”

  “It’s a zero.”

  “What’s a zero?”

  There was a crashing in the jungle behind us, and a moment later Alan, Steve, and Mina stepped into view. Alan saw us, and a big grin spread across his chubby face. Steve’s eyes got wide, and Mina let out a short gasp. Colin looked up.

  “Al, get the hell over here.”

  Alan puffed his way over, and knelt next to Colin.

  “It’s a zero,” Colin repeated.

  “Great.”

  “What’s a zero?” I asked again.

  “It’s a Pouakai that doesn’t have any babies growing on its back,” Steve said from behind me. “The last of its line.”

  “Why is that special?”

  “Watch,” Steve said.

  Colin kept cutting farther forward, toward the head end of the Pouakai. They didn’t have heads as such; the body just tapered from its wide point in the middle down to where the spike began. As he cut closer to the spike, Colin got excited.

  “See Al, see? Look at the size of that thing!”

  Steve and Mina leaned in to look.

  “Son of a bitch,” Steve said.

  “Boonie, you still recording this?” Colin asked.

  “Yep.”

  I didn’t know what it was, but for Colin’s sake, I kept pointing the camera at the open gash on top of the Pouakai. He set the scalpel down, and reached one hand into the open wound. Soon he was buried up to his elbow. Stringy yellow fibers filled the opening, a little like the inside of an unripened pumpkin, all floating in the pale yellow liquid. I had an uneasy feeling about what he was doing; it just seemed so unnatural.

  “Got it,” Colin said. He pulled his arm out, and stood up, holding a horror in his hands: A misshapen ball of yellow goo that somehow held together.

  “It’s at least five pounds,” he said.

  Alan nodded. “Probably three times the size of the one from home.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a Pouakai brain, we think,” Colin replied, holding it up like a trophy fish. Alan stood next to Colin, and I aimed the camera at the two of them. They posed like big game hunters, a surreal moment in an unreal day. Mina pulled out a big SLR camera, and took pictures too.

  “The Pouakai is beginning to dissolve,” Steve said.

  We all turned back to the creature. The wings were damp, and wobbled like jelly at Colin’s touch.

  “Shit. It shouldn’t happen this fast,” Alan said.

  Colin went back to dissecting the body of the Pouakai with the scalpel. A minute later, he had the rest of its innards exposed. Then he sat down on the sand, shaking his head.

  “Nothing else unusual,” he said.

  “You’ve got a really weird sense of what’s usual, buddy,” I quipped. Colin looked up at me and grinned.

  4

  We watched the Pouakai disintegrate. Within five minutes the body had turned to a mass of jelly, and after another five minutes, it was an unidentifiable puddle of black goo. Only the rough shape of the Pouakai remained.

  When there wasn’t anything left to watch, we all went back to the shop, and sat down in the shade of its awning. Colin tried calling the sub, but they didn’t answer.

  Alan passed lunch around–granola bars, apples, and milk cartons. I looked at the five of us sitting in the sand, eating like we were on a school field trip, and started thinking about the Pouakai. I’d just seen one taken apart, killed by a rod through its body, as well as a knife to its back. I’d thought I would feel more satisfaction at seeing one split open, suffering like Jennifer had, but all I felt was empty, incomplete. There was too much still unknown about them, and too many of them left out there for me to feel any happiness at the death of just one.

  I looked at the drying puddle of the Pouakai. “So what’s up with the brain?”

  “It’s big,” Alan said, after swallowing the last of his milk.

  “So?”

  “So,” Colin replied, “it confirms a theory we had about them.”

  I raised an eyebrow until he continued.

  “There have been about half a dozen Pouakai dissected by scientists so far. That isn’t a lot of data of course, because they decay so fast after death. Most were dead ones that happened to be found by scientists after an attack, just in time to take a cursory look. They didn’t get all that much information, but one thing that stood out was the fetus/brain correlation.”

  “Which is?” I prompted.

  “The more baby Pouakai it has on its back, the smaller its brain. Nobody has dissected a one or zero before. That is, a Pouakai that didn’t have any babies growing on its back. Of the Pouakai that have been dissected, there were two fives, and a handful of twos and threes. It began to look like the size of the brain grew in each generation going forward. It correlated with other reports said that when baby Pouakai were born, the size of the head region was bigger if they were born in fewer numbers.”

  “You lost me,” I said.

  “When a Pouakai gives birth to five babies, they have small heads. If it gave birth to three babies, the newborn have bigger heads; even larger for a litter of two, and so on. We theorized, based on our observations on Nanumea, as well as the Pouakai we dissected and the few others that received cursory examinations, that the bigger heads mean bigger brains. Nobody had seen a one give birth to a zero, but here we are today, with a zero.”

  “Its brain fits the theory perfectly,” Alan added. “At five pounds, it’s about two pounds heavier than the brains of the twos that had been dissected. Most likely, a one would have a brain a little over four pounds.”

  “They get heavier at each generation?” I asked.

  “We think so, yes.”

  “Why?”

  All four of them looked at each other, then back at me.

  “More room for brain matter? More brain tissue?” Colin said. “Hell if I know. The biological material from the dead Pouakai is not stable enough to study.”

  I took a deep breath. “You mean we nearly got ourselves killed, to substantiate a theory?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Colin began. “This is all about gathering information, so we can…”

  “Son of a bitch,” I interrupted. “You really don’t have a clue what you’re doing, do you?”

  “Boonie…”

  “No, you brought me down here on a wild goose chase. You don’t have anything solid, only have an untested theory about brains. How is this theory going to get rid of them?”

  I glared at the four of them. Mina looked down, tears welling up in her eyes. Alan and Steve were shaking their heads, but Colin held my gaze.

  “Boonie, this is how science works. We gather data. We look for correlations and trends. We come up with questions, and try to find ways to answer them. It’s not all brilliant discoveries and eureka moments. It’s a hard slog through hundreds of wrong turns and incorrect hypotheses. We get piles of information, reams of notes, and computers full of data. Somewhere deep inside that pile of data we may find what we’re looking for. Getting the right information out of mountains of data points is hard work.”

  I let out a long breath. “Sorry. I didn’t realize it wasn’t clear cut; I thought you were on to something with the brain size thing.”

  “I understand, Boonie. You’re new at this. It takes time to go through the data and make sense of it. That’s all.”

  I nodded, and turned to stare across the lagoon, into the midday heat. I realized what an enormous task lay ahead for my friends. All this data they had been gathering…it had to be stored, retrieved, analyzed, tabulated, organized, and correlated. Each day brought more data to be stored and collated.

  It would take a big computer to store all that info, and it would have to get bigger with each new theory or discovery. All the little computers out here in the field would have to feed their information into a bigger computer, so the information would be available in
one place.

  Bigger. Just like the Pouakai’s brain.

  I sat back, staring across the sapphire blue lagoon. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  “Colin, have you guys figured out what an individual Pouakai does with those bigger brains?”

  “No. As far we’ve seen, all their behaviors remain the same, no matter which generation they are.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to look like a fool, even if I didn’t know these people all that well.

  “What is it Boonie?” Colin asked.

  I shook my head, and looked back at the lagoon.

  “Never hold an idea back,” Colin continued. “What may seem silly to you, could be the heart of a great theory.”

  “Okay. This is probably stupid, but…first off, are you guys sure that the glob you pulled out is a brain?”

  “We’re pretty sure. We tracked electrical activity inside the one we captured in Honolulu, and that organ was the center of it all. It appeared similar to the activity we see in animal brains.”

  “So if it is a brain, it could store data, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “And bigger brains can store more data.”

  “Yes, in theory.”

  “Well, you said that each of the unborn Pouakai appeared fully formed, even down to the smallest ones you could see.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what if all the memories of the parent Pouakai were passed down to the children. They’d need bigger brains, not only to store their parent’s memories, but their own too. Then they pass those memories on to their children.”

  Colin’s face took on a glazed look. Alan looked up at the corrugated metal roof of the shop. Steve grinned at me, and Mina had covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Un-frickin believable,” Alan finally said.

  My heart sank. They were laughing at me. Why the hell had I decided to come along, when I had nothing to contribute? I was more than useless here, I…

  “Boonie,” Colin said quietly, “that’s brilliant!”

  “Huh?”

  “Dammit, I should have thought of it sooner. That’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet.”

  “I agree,” Alan said. “It makes complete sense that they transfer information to each other.”

  “It’s not just data transfer,” Steve responded. “They’re scouts. They go out, gather information, and pass it on to their offspring.”

  “That is their purpose,” Colin said, glassy-eyed again “They’re biological machines. Biological data-gathering and storage machines! Dammit. I knew they were too simple to have spontaneously evolved this way. I just couldn’t figure out what their purpose was.” He grinned, and slapped me on the shoulder.

  “That would explain the distribution difference too,” Alan added.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “It’s what I mentioned back on the Kilo Moana,” Colin said. “The question of why we only found Pouakai that give birth to five babies in the Pacific basin, four both here and farther out toward the Indian Ocean, two in the Mediterranean, and so on, until there are only ones and zeros in the Caribbean.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “If they’re constructed entities, biological machines acting as scouts, it would be a way of gathering information. Whoever, or whatever created these things, would send out these scouts, and see what information they bring back. If they don’t come back, they’d create new ones that would have additional generations living past the original ones. Program them to search in one direction, until you’ve created enough generations to circle the globe. The ones that made it all the way around would have a memory of everything its parents and ancestors did. Where they swam, what they encountered, and what the world was like.”

  “They’re Magellan,” Steve said, “circling the globe, and reporting back what they find.”

  Everyone smiled, except me.

  “That’s great,” I said, “but who, or what, is receiving that information at the end of the trip?”

  Their smiles fell, and silence filled the air.

  The radio squawked, and everyone jumped. “Submarine to survey leader, submarine to survey leader.”

  Colin picked up the radio. “Survey leader here.”

  “What is your status?”

  “We are all okay. One Pouakai is dead, and we have information we need to pass along.”

  “Roger. We’ll send the boat for you. There’s a priority message for you too.”

  “What is it?”

  “Unable to relay by radio. It’s for your eyes only.”

  There was a pause as Colin stared at the radio, as if he could get the message just by wishing for it.

  “The inflatables will be there in thirty minutes,” the voice from the submarine continued. “Prepare your boat, and follow them back as soon as they arrive. Radar is clear, but the Captain doesn’t want the inflatables away from here any longer than necessary.”

  “We’ll be ready. Survey leader out.” He looked at all of us. “When it rains, it pours,” he said with a shrug. “Come on; let’s get the trap set up again before our ride gets here.”

  5

  Colin raced down the hatch when we reached the Ohio. I followed him down, through the control room, and forward to a small communications room. Colin went through the hatch, and I reached in to go through too.

  “Sorry, sir,” an armed Marine said, stopping me from entering. “Authorized personnel only.”

  “He’s with me,” Colin said from inside.

  “Sorry, sir,” the Marine reiterated. “Captain’s orders. Only you are allowed in the comm center.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t worry, I’ll head back to the mess.”

  The Captain had reserved one table in the crew mess for us ‘non-quals’, as we were called. Non-qualified riders, we ranked somewhere below a wharf rat, but above pond scum in the tightly ordered world of submariners.

  We’d been through the two-day basic sub training required by the Navy, but there was so much about this ruthless weapon we didn’t know yet. I fingered the radiation detector we’d been given as we boarded. Of all the things I had to worry about, it was just one more layer of concern. I didn’t want to end up glowing green.

  Thirty minutes later Colin walked into the mess, and joined us at our table, a thick manila folder in hand. He had a curious look on his face.

  “What’s up?” Alan asked.

  “This.” He opened the folder, removed a photograph, and set it on the table. “The National Reconnaissance Office sent these to me.” They were satellite photographs of Palmyra, flecked with the same green dots as before, representing the Pouakai.

  “This one was taken three days ago. The count is over three thousand Pouakai on Palmyra. Because of cloud cover and the satellite’s orbit, we didn’t get another photo until about twenty four hours ago, and that’s this one.” He put a second photo on the table. “It’s the one we got before deciding to bring the Kilo Moana in and unload the trap.”

  Alan nodded. “They had left. That’s why we decided to continue.”

  “They didn’t leave,” Colin said. “I think they died there, and dissolved. That’s why we didn’t see them in the satellite photos.”

  Everybody stared at the photographs.

  “Remember last week, when we noticed that there weren’t enough Pouakai in the photos? The trend has accelerated. These are the newest ones, taken today.” He dropped the photos, one by one, on the table. “Samoa, Fiji, Solomons, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Indonesia, Seychelles.”

  We picked up the photos and looked at them. It didn’t matter which one we had, we all had to be thinking the same thing.

  “Can we be sure the satellite isn’t losing the ability to identify them?” Steve asked.

  Colin shook his head, discounting Steve’s thought. “Here’s the kicker,” he said, dropping one more photo on the table. “This was taken earlier this afternoon, just before our encounter with the Pouakai.”


  The photo showed Palmyra, with one single green dot just south of the island.

  “Our Pouakai was identified, so the satellite is still picking them up,” Colin said quietly.

  It took a moment for that to settle into our thoughts.

  Mina looked up at Colin. “They are dying?” she asked in an ever-so-soft voice.

  “I don’t want to jump to conclusions, especially ones we really want to be true, but the evidence seems to point to the Pouakai disappearing.”

  We all sat back in our chairs in unison, and the magical feeling of relief began to spread across the room. It seemed too good to be true.

  “H. G. Wells was right,” Steve said. “It’s the War of the Worlds. Something from here is killing them off.”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t seen anything to suggest that over another theory,” Colin said.

  I picked up one of the photos, but as I looked at it, another thought was bothering me.

  “If the Pouakai are biological machines,” I said, “perhaps they’re dying because their job is complete, and they aren’t needed any more.”

  “If that’s true,” Colin asked, “what comes next?”

  Nobody else spoke for a long time.

  6

  We sat offshore of Palmyra for several more days, waiting for a Pouakai to show up at the trap. Colin, Alan, and Steve took eight-hour shifts, monitoring the cameras we’d set up by the trap, waiting for a victim. All they saw was an occasional sea bird, and one lonely turtle that kept bumping against the trap. The Ohio’s radar scanned the skies, but it drew a blank too.

  Submarines don’t do well when sitting still. The round hull wallows in any waves, making for a sickening ride. I took my medicine so I didn’t get ill. The crewmen didn’t get sick either, but they were not having a good time.

  I didn’t have anything specific to do onboard, and turned to exploring the sub. More than half the boat was off-limits to me however, from the missile launch tubes in the mid-section to the reactor and engineering spaces at the aft end. The crew acted friendly at first, but distant. After a couple of days in though, they barely had a word to say to any of us. Having been in the military myself, I knew a widespread attitude change like this could only come from the top. Soon enough, I discovered the reason.