There was certainly too much of that going on in the world.
Luckily IT’s mother seemed to know what to do, and it wouldn’t be long before the swimming lessons would start, and IT would be away, and he wouldn’t feel so guilty any more.
5 Dave Heads South
It had been a very foggy morning, but frankly that wasn’t really much of an excuse.
Dave had woken up early and had set off towards the sea to do some fishing, or at least that’s where he thought he was going. It seemed like a good idea to get an early ‘fish in’, while they were still waking up, and before everyone else got there.
It was only about an hour later, wandering through the fog, that he started to think that the sea was, well, much further away than he remembered. But with his unfailing sense of direction he knew he was going the right way, so he carried on.
One foot after the other, on and on he walked.
After a while he just relaxed, knowing he would be there at some point, eventually.
It was all OK, besides he could use the time to think, contemplate, relax, and just chill, and lose any track of time. It was fairly easy really, there being no night-time here in the summer. He just left his penguin body device in ‘homing’ autopilot, and carried on walking.
He had his shades on and was listening to his Genesis albums through his headphones.
Three weeks later Dave’s feet were starting to ache a bit, so he stopped.
Sweat was also starting to drip down his forehead in the heat, so he removed his sunshades to wipe his face. It was at that point that he realised that it wasn’t foggy at all. His glasses were the only things fogged up - aside from his brain - and had misted up from all the dried sea spray.
Easy mistake to make, he thought.
Bright sunshine shone out on the open snow plain, and he realised that he was in the middle of nowhere. He started to panic now. He had no idea where he was. All he knew was that he had been going completely in the wrong direction, away from the sea rather than towards it, South rather than North.
THIS WAS BAD!
He swallowed hard. He was lost, a long way from home, and on his own, and the batteries had run out on his tape player. Not good for a penguin.
He took a moment to calm down and looked around; there was nothing, not even a mirage to lead him astray. It was just white and flat, in every direction.
After about ten minutes of patiently standing hoping the problem would go away, he noticed a flash in the distance, a brief reflection from something, just for an instant.
With no other options open to him, he headed off in the direction of the flash.
An hour later a strange structure came into view.
It was a collection of giant silver and grey half-buried tin cans. They had long twigs poking out from them into the air and long bits of wire attached. There were also lots of parallel line tracks in the snow all around them. The tracks appeared to have been made by a jet ski, specifically a ski-doo MXZ model, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure at this range.
There was also a very large stick with wires on it some way away that was dozens of times higher than Dave, and they seemed to be giving off a buzzing noise that made his head feel funny, spinny, like he didn’t know where he was.
He didn’t like it.
As he got closer he could see the tracks went off towards some larger, square, brown and white shaped objects further on, and also to a big silver dome thing, as if the moon had fallen into the snow. There were also lots of brightly coloured national flags flying, which Dave deduced, had obviously been stolen from ships.
There was also a silver ball thing on a post, with red and white eels spiralling around the post.
Dave decided he needed a closer look. It was very quiet so he guessed everyone must be off fishing.
He carefully waddled up to the nearest giant tin thing, stretched up on his toes, and looked inside through one of the square clear ice things on the side.
The inside was very complicated; there were lots of things that he didn’t recognise, lots of shapes he didn’t understand, so he couldn’t see them in his mind, as they didn’t make sense to him.
In one area, on a sheet of flat wood, raised up high, there were some penguins in a clear ice box with a headlamp above them. There were two Chinstrap penguins and a Rockhopper. Dave didn’t like Rockhoppers, they were aggressive and rude.
One had shouted at him once and made a rude gesture at him, which he had never forgotten, so from then on he made a point of leaving them alone.
Dave was going to wait until it saw him, and then he was going to get the rude gesture in first. But it looked like it was asleep.
Lucky for him thought Dave, and then he felt a bit guilty, and a bit sad for it.
The whole area inside seemed to be full of biological things; green things, like seaweed, but growing upwards. Fish and whales that he recognised were there, but flat, and on the wall. It seemed a strange place to be trying to keep, look at, and grow living things in.
Dave waddled around to the front of the hut and looked for a way in to see if there was anyone who could help.
He knocked on the door with his beak and waited. There was no reply, but he could hear a lot of laughter coming from inside. They seemed to be coming closer to the door so he politely stepped back.
Suddenly the door burst open and several people emerged carrying buckets of ice water. Dave was anxious at first and wandered what he had done to offend them.
He stepped to the side but they seemed not to have noticed him at all, they were far too interested in themselves, talking and laughing. Two of the men had no clothes on their top halves.
The two men then proceeded to kneel down, and were handed the buckets of ice water. They then poured the water over their heads, screamed, and everyone laughed, and took photos.
Then they all ran back inside quickly, straight past Dave, leaving him with his wing still raised, poised to ask a question. The door slammed closed.
Dave stood there motionless, his beak wide open.
Humans were very odd things, they seemed quite reasonable, responsible, mature and ‘OK’ individually, but when they got into a group they started to behave quite differently, childish, immature, mad, and it got worse the larger the group got. This group seemed to be behaving like a young teenager, doing stupid mindless things.
Yet the group operated in slow time compared to how an individual would act and respond, oblivious to responsibility and the surroundings, and then dashing back inside to its gadgets.
What, thought Dave, would they be like if there were thousands of them? Dave shuddered at the thought - a baby? Plants in a greenhouse?
After several moments of trying to get some sort of hold on reality, another question came into his mind. How had they not seen him? It was as if he was invisible. It was as if he were a ghost.
These were very strange people, and he was now unsure if he actually wanted their help now.
Dave looked sideways. To his right there was a round cage; it was about the same height as him, with a lid on it and it had a black plastic bag inside.
Dave was wary of black bags; he had heard a lot of stories about penguins being taken away in them. But this one smelt very interesting, a sort of ‘foody’ sort of smell.
He carefully waddled over to it and stuck his head under the lid. It smelt good inside. He tried to climb up the side of the cage to get in but it toppled backwards and he fell in as it fell over. In so doing so hit his head on the lid, and passed out.
He woke up with his head in a newspaper, he pulled himself back out of the waste bin, and the newspaper came out with him. He looked down at it sprawled in front of him. He read the writing on the front. It was named ‘The Sun’.
He read the front page, which seemed to be a list of problems and things to get you worried about, arguments, and important things that were going on in the world with famous people’s personal problems. He turned it over and on the back there w
ere more people fighting, in teams, in reds and blues, and their personal problems too, and people called ‘fans’ who also fought each other.
Knowledge kept coming into Dave’s head from some collective place, about what it all meant, what was going on, on lots of different levels. Dave hadn’t even realised he could now read. It all made sense, but only in one way. He flipped the paper over again, and turned to the third page.
These people were clearly also very interested in biology.
He tried to process what he was seeing. The words at the top said ‘Hot Chick’. Below them was a naked human female, not a bird at all, and she was about to eat a long piece of coloured ice on a stick.
She didn’t look hot at all - even Dave could tell that she was obviously very cold.
His head was starting to ache a bit now from all the information coming in. He flicked through the other pages reading the articles on politics, and who was saying what about what other people had said on what shows. Information on what people had done wrong, and where they may be on holiday now. What countries were saying what about each other, and why they were sending their people to visit others in things called tanks.
It all seemed very negative, there didn’t seem to be anything nice or happy or positive at all.
Then he arrived at the crossword page. Dave liked puzzles.
His mind was working so fast now that he could pull in all sorts of knowledge. He looked at the first few questions, and the answers came to him. They seemed remarkably easy, even for a penguin.
The first answer he saw was the word ‘Band’ – the clue was “As in, Big, should be, and lastic” the second answer was “Width” which was the answer to “What you have when you eat fast food”. He looked at the half filled-in box of squares, and his mind started to play tricks on him; it was filling in the words for him and connecting them in different ways and meanings. BandWidth, Problem, Biological, Data, Field, Genetic, Conflict, Transfer, DNA, Broadband, and Twin Peaks.
It was almost as if he were trying to tell himself something, opening his mind - everything suddenly becoming obvious, clear from the connection.
His head really hurt now though, his face felt cold and there was a point in the middle of his head that felt like he had brain freeze from eating snow. It was at one single point in his head.
The top of his skull ached in one spot too, like someone was continually pouring ice water down onto it in the centre, or there was a cold iron bar, point down, resting on it.
He was processing too much, too fast for his brain; there was too much information coming in and out, linking things together in his mind. It was all too much for his mind to deal with in one go. Worryingly, the something that was giving him all this information that he wanted, didn’t seem to realise that.
Like the men with their buckets of iced water, it was too much all at once to cope with. He only had so much BandWidth.
He looked down at the page again, he had solved all the clues now, all but the last one, which was ‘Old big ship wot sank’.
Images and thoughts and connections were all firing in his head at once. His mind was working so hard now that his brain started doing strange things. He flicked back through the pages to the front again, images and words leaping out at him; it all made so much sense, but in a mad muddled sort of way.
He could see what was going wrong, he could see and understand everything, overlapping combined thoughts flowing through his head. He made it back to Page 3, his eyes and mind darting from one thing to another, ‘Titanic’ went through his mind.
He felt giddy and fell forwards face down into the newspaper. Before he lost consciousness the last things to come into his mind were a couple of icebergs.
He woke up still face down, groaning, feeling exhausted and awful. There were lots of flashing lights going on around him, there were also lots of people taking pictures and videos of him.
He was then placed carefully onto an open net, which ironically was also where most of the photos and videos would end up in a few hours, and then ‘go viral’ a few hours after that.
Dave was going to be famous, but not in a good way.
They put him in a box, then on a plane and they took him back to where he had come from.
A few days later, all the excitement had died down, and he was settled back in the colony again, on his home patch.
For days, he tried to explain what he had seen to the rest of the penguins. He tried to describe the ‘home of the jet ski people’, and the ‘inside’ places where they lived, everything.
But the penguins couldn’t see what he was trying to describe, they couldn’t visualise it all, they had no point of reference. He had nothing to describe it to in relation to, or with anything they knew of.
He tried drawing pictures in the snow, but he wasn’t very good at drawing, and they didn’t seem to mean anything to any of them.
Eventually even the ones that believed him just wandered off, it was almost as if the whole idea had gone from their heads, been moved out for some reason, replaced by more interesting things.
He just couldn’t get through to them, or make them see, or perhaps they didn’t care.
Until they themselves had seen it, perceived it, understood, then it all meant nothing.
As far as they were concerned it was all in Dave’s mind, all in his dreams, and it didn’t affect them so why did they care.
But Dave knew different.
It seemed very odd to Dave, why it all just didn’t mean anything to them.
They had their view of the world, and what was in it, and that was that. It was the way that some penguins just didn’t even want to know, they had their own lives and weren’t even interested.
Unless it directly affected them or threatened or benefited them, they didn’t care.
Some couldn’t believe it all or didn’t allow themselves to, or were prevented from doing so, by what they had been told to believe already. Yet some did believe him but just got on with things anyway and then forgot. It was a strange situation, it didn’t make much sense to Dave.
He wanted to get them to go south with him and see. To follow his trail and see what he saw, and then they would understand, believe him and make sense of what he was trying to explain to them, and then they could do something about it.
But nobody was interested, nobody seemed to care that much, it wasn’t their problem, and they didn’t need to know.
They thought they were fine as they were, but Dave knew different.
His brain device was still processing things for his mind, and it still ached, but it seemed to be going over old ground now, looping through the same concepts and ideas, but without the same immediate ‘in the now’ productive flowing two-way energy.
However when he closed his eyes he could immediately see a big black sign in front of him in the dark, a few feet in front of his face. It was in high definition and widescreen with white letters on it, it said ‘EMPTY THE ATTIC’.
Dave didn’t know what an attic was but he understood what it meant, or was trying to say.
He had to be more careful of himself, and his brain, and how he was using it.
Like his body, his brain could only do so much, and he had to get it into habits, be organised with his thoughts, interpret what was coming in, what he thought about, focused on, and manage his mind and what it was doing.
He remembered one of those management audio tapes he had heard some months ago, about having SMART objectives, that was it.
He had to have…
Specific Manageable Achievable Realistic and Time bounded jobs to do in his head.
Unfortunately the collective mind thing had no clue whatsoever about SMART objectives, at all, or even data bandwidth, or even what a penguin was for that matter.
Which was a little worrying.
Especially if you were dealing with things and thoughts ‘in the now’, live processing as it were, trying at the same time to work out the context of what it was trying to g
et across, what the hell it was on about, and work out what needed to happen.
All at the same time.
Yet more importantly - WHY HIM?? It didn’t seem to have his interests and needs at heart - only its own. It didn’t seem to care much for him either, only so far as his mind was working, a bit like a slave.
He put his cleaned shades on, and his headphones, and waddled off towards the sea - in the right direction this time.
He was going to tsunami and jet-spray out his mental attic, sun bleach his brain, clear his head, empty his mind, and do a bit of surfing and fishing to get himself fit at the same time.
Dave The Penguin Page 6