An unsteady step for a human, a giant leap for an arthropod.
Shia counted three sunsets as she waited on the rocky steps outside the museum entrance for her tour group.
“Welcome to the Museum of Interplanetary Natural History, Art and Culture. My name is Shia, and I’ve been looking forward to showing you around today.” She mumbled it under her breath. Get the first impression right and the group will love me. The rest of the tour will be like…child’s play.
Forty children from three different classes with possibly six teachers and helpers were going to be Shia’s largest group to guide. It didn’t daunt her, not with her training, and certainly not with the challenge of appealing to the interests of mixed ages. There was enough passion in her about the exhibition to rub off on any of her listeners, teenagers and the younger excitable ones alike.
Shia was happy to get the children excited about the exhibition. Keeping them in check was up to the teachers and helpers. She felt sorry for the adults who were torn between controlling the kids and feeding their own interest at the museum. There wasn’t much she could do about it, other than deliver a pitch that appealed to the adults as well as the children, and hope they’d pick up at least some of it.
“Welcome to the Museum of Interplanetary…”
The dull yellow caging of the children transporter came into view as it rounded the horizon. Funny. Shia expected it to be larger, or to have additional trailers for a group of nearly fifty. Even from this distance, she saw the mass of antennae and feet protruding though the bars, waving to gain a sense of what lay outside. Whatever the number of the party, it would be a busy tour.
The transporter rattled over the speed bumps as it entered the empty car park. Shia watched it lurch awkwardly to a stop across three spaces. A pause, as if the transporter was resting, catching its breath after a chase, then, after a few moments, the gridded side panel opened.
“It’s just us, I’m afraid,” said the teacher, wriggling out, “There was a mix-up at the school that I won’t bore you with. I hope it’s not a problem?”
“Of course not,” said Shia. “The children…?”
Shia could almost feel the transporter vibrating from the pure excitement and energy from inside.
“Ah, yes. There’s probably a child-lock.” The teacher returned to the transporter and opened the panels at the back. Shia counted twelve children as they crawled over each other, dribbling onto the tarmac and spilling into the car park.
It took ten minutes to round them up and herd them to the museum foyer. It took another ten minutes to settle them into relative silence.
Shia was keen to get started, but she didn’t mind the delay. She loved her job. It was a chance to share not only her knowledge about the exhibits, but also her work that went into preparing them. With a degree in astro-biometrics and a sharp mind for bringing innovation to reality, she hoped to inspire children to follow in her footsteps.
“Welcome to the Museum of Interplanetary Natural History, Art and Culture. My name is Shia, and I’ve been looking forward to showing you around today.”
The group cheered, and pushed themselves forwards into the first chamber. The smooth stone walls were warm to the touch, and lined with display cabinets that contained shimmering crystals that provided a soft glow inside the room. Touch screens with information by each of the displays invited probing questions to which they’d be happy to answer.
The adults followed the party into the chamber. A couple of the children scrambled to the teacher, anxious to tell her about one of the crystals or shards of shiny metal that caught their attention. Shia moved directly to the far side and pushed her antenna into a small hole in the wall-mounted information box. A gentle puff of scented air confirmed that her olfactory receptor was known to the system, activating voice recognition for the display.
Shia spoke clearly. “Display slice.” The wall turned translucent for a split second. Thousands of tiny multi-coloured bright lights pierced through the rock screen, each light slowly becoming larger so that its light merged with its neighbours. An image appeared.
The light brought the children to where Shia stood. The tour was ready to start. Nearly.
“Before we begin with the interactive models in the next chamber, I’d like to show you this picture to whet your appetite.”
An array of micro-fissures running around the perimeter of the image released small jets of scented gas as Shia spoke. The children extended their antennae into the airstream, their olfactory receptors receiving additional information and directing their attention to where Shia indicated.
The group listened as Shia described the features of the image. A horizontal strip along the lower third with a tiling effect. Above this were vertical panels; three were bright blue with green areas. At the base of the centre panel was a dark rectangle surrounded by a frame. The panel on the right had less gridding than the other two panels, and had a wooden structure placed near its left base. Between the bright panels were dimmer panels with marks that looked like damage.
“As you know, the planet Earth wasn’t always the cold, icy environment that you’ve seen in the live relays. This picture shows how we think the Earth looked when it was habitable to the humans hundreds of years ago. Can you see the bright blue sky and the green vegetation in the panels?”
“This is boring. The picture doesn’t even move!”
Opinion stated as fact from one of the children. One of them, it didn’t matter which. Their thought process, however long, completes and there is no room, time or inclination for further discussion. It’s only when children grow up that they learn that information is needed before setting an opinion in stone.
Shia waited for the teacher to encourage the child to grow up.
“Not when you look at it closely,” the teacher said. Her translucent tail glowed blue. Deep and authoritative. “Now be a good myriapod and listen closely to the guide.” She looked at the rest of her class, ensuring eye contact was made with each of them. “Let’s all hear what she has to say about it, shall we?” The blue softened in tone, seeking assent.
A cluster of tails glowed soft green in agreement. The teacher waved her antenna, encouraging Shia to continue.
The guide opened all forty of her spiracles down the eighty centimetres of her segmented body. The atmosphere on the asteroid was thin, but it contained enough oxygen and free radicals to invigorate and refresh a tired guide at the end of a long week.
“Are there any questions before I start?” Shia continued.
An antenna waved.
“Nikki, go ahead,” said the teacher.
“How did you get the picture?”
“That’s a good question, Nikki. It’s a reconstruction we made from information from an Earth rock.”
A sea of orange tails indicated that her listeners, including Nikki, were satisfied with her answer. The teacher was silent, but her tail was yellow. She was curious, but either too polite or too shy to ask for more information. Shia didn’t mind; it was why she worked at the museum.
“There was a lot of volcanic activity when the Earth cooled, and a lot of dust and debris were ejected into space. Some of it reached here. We detected microbes on some of the particles, evidently capable of adapting quickly to life in environments unlike those found on Earth.
“One group of these microbes lived symbiotically with an insect class on the Earth. The insects weren’t able to survive the journey and we have barely a few micrograms of their remains. Enough though, to be fairly certain that like us, they were also arthropods. In effect, they are our genetic cousins.”
“It’s incredible!” said the teacher. “We have cousins across over four-hundred million kilometres! It makes you think, doesn’t it, about how we came to be here in the first place!”
She looked around. Only a few of her pupils were still by the picture. The rest, disinterested, had dispersed in all directions, wandering by other displays and exploring the interactive information panels. She sighed. “How can we know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been?”
Shia smiled. The teacher couldn’t control her pupils, but she thought deeply.
“The astro-biometrics lab exploited the symbiotic relationship between the microbes and their hosts by extracting the residual sensory footprint of the indigenous arthropod hive mind. In essence, the microbes’ memory is like a huge multi-sensual retina that shows us slices of the planet Earth. We can even search through different times and places to choose any slice we want. The picture you see in front of you is such a slice.”
“I understand,” said the teacher. “So in a sense it’s interpretive like art, more than an objective picture like a photo. That’s very impressive!”
Shia smiled again, this time at the unintentional pun. “It certainly is. In a sense. And credit where credit’s due – the microbe’s adaption during their leap from Earth, past Mars’ orbit to us here in the asteroid belt is also impressive. And that’s not even considering how they were able to survive on hot volcanic ash! As you can imagine, many of the specimens are still alive here.”
Shia caught a flash of red concern in the teacher’s tail. “Rest assured, we’re taking every precaution possible to ensure that they don’t form symbiotic relationships with us!” She showed the brown of her tail, reassuring and warm, and waved her antenna. “Shall we get the children back here, and I’ll describe what the picture shows?”
It took only a few moments to get the children reassembled in front of the picture.
“I was telling you that we created this picture from an Earth rock. If you look behind you, on your left, you’ll see the entrance to our display of interplanetary rocks which includes the one I just told you about.”
Heads turned.
“I think some of you have seen it already…” She smiled with a playful streak of orange, in her tail. There was some giggling and more orange tails in response. Now, as well as their attention, she had won their trust. Nearly.
“You said there were humans, but I don’t see any in the picture,” said Nikki.
“Yes. It’s related with how we created it.”
Shia glanced at the teacher. “We’ve seen the humans in other slices, but it’s difficult to create an image with both moving objects like humans and other animals, and static objects like houses and trees at the same time. The differentials with respect to time yield ambiguous stationary points, and even if we hazard a guess, reintegration cannot be resolved.”
She turned her attention back to the group. “Let’s just say that we know they haven’t been around for a long time so they’re not in this picture. Actually, we still don’t understand how they became extinct. Now, let me tell you about how they lived when they were alive.”
Tails flashed in agreement.
“We know the most about the humans from when they were in their developmental quadrupedal stage. That’s when they had the closest encounters with the arthropods. But actually, the physical form of the human was at its physical peak when it had only two legs. It’s born with four, but the forelegs are a little like our gonopods which morph into so-called “arms” when they’re around nine to eighteen months old. We used to think that the forelegs were shed completely and the arms grew in their place. The theory was based on their teeth which do the same thing.”
Heads nodded, striving to understand.
“Now I’d like you to look at the structure in the picture with a flat base and a curved back. You see the three vertical supports underneath?”
The children scrambled to get a better view or access to one of the scented airflows. Antennae raised like popcorn as each found the structure.
“This structure was very important for the humans. Their upright stance was unstable and it cost a lot of energy to maintain, even when they used their new arms for balance. To conserve their energy, the humans used this structure. They called it a “chair”, but of course it looks very different to ours. Can anyone guess how they used it?”
Conferring. The elected spokeschild announced their decision. “Did they lean on it?”
“It’s a good guess, but the chair doesn’t look very stable so it wouldn’t offer the bipeds much support. What they did was to break off a vertical support, a “leg”, and attach it to their own body for reinforcement. There’s a division in the research department who are looking through the footprint slices working on a theory that this was especially useful on ships.”
“What’s a ship?” asked Nikki.
“It’s a vessel that allows the humans to travel over vast liquid surfaces, approach another vessel, and take possession of its belongings. These ships wobbled, even more so when the humans drank another liquid called “rum”, so they probably fell over a lot. They drank huge quantities of rum before amputating one of their own legs and replacing it with the chair leg.”
Nikki looked confused. “Why did they cut their own leg off if they were already unstable? They could have kept it and had three legs.”
“I agree with you, it’s very curious behaviour. Why stay bipedal when you have the chance to be a triped? Indeed, some of the humans in the final stages of the human life cycle thought the same. They tended to prefer leaning on larger chair legs for support instead of suffering the excruciating pain of joining the chair legs to their frail bodies.”
The teacher waved her antenna before speaking up. “It seems that having a body that needs so much adaption is quite a hindrance!” she said. “At least the microbes you mentioned earlier underwent internal adaptation to their surroundings.”
“I guess you’re right, though some might consider their symbiotic existence to be the pinnacle of dependency.”
“Until they got here with no host…”
Shia saw that the teacher wanted more thought time, but young tails were flashing; the children were restless. Shia addressed them again.
“The picture shows a typical dwelling. From the perspective, you can judge for yourselves how tall they must have been – hundreds of times our height.”
“I can see why they kept falling over!”
Giggling, but a red flash of anger in the teacher’s tail cut them short.
Shia continued. “Because of their physical limitations, the humans were technologically advanced for their geological epoch. They had no antennae to sense their environment as we do, so they developed the gridded frame you see in the upper centre of the picture. They called it a “window”. The window was a two-way portal which enabled the humans to see through walls.”
Nikki raised her antenna, but didn’t wait to be addressed. “What are the marks on the wall on the left of the window?”
“It’s likely that some of the older humans didn’t trust the window technology, and preferred to tap the walls with their arms in much the same way that our ancestors did. The marks are probably the damage that the excessive tapping caused. Of course, we expect that such actions would have rendered these humans even more unstable – unless they were able to find a large chair leg for support.”
“Why do the windows on each side look different?”
“Ah, I was just coming to that! The windows afforded the humans vision through the sides of their dwelling, but they stopped the sounds and smells. What you see on each side of the central window are more advanced models called “doors”. As you see, they could be opened so that the humans could receive auditory and olfactory stimulus.
“The main benefit of the doors was that they afforded complete immersion into the outer environment. It was an impressive feat for them!
“I can see some of you are eager to move on, but I want to show you one more thing. It’s the black square in the lower centre of the picture. The humans called it a “fireplace”. We thought that it was some kind of primitive heating device at first, perhaps fuelled by the parts of the chair that weren’t used to support the humans. Now we don’t think so.”
“So what was it used for?” asked Nikki.
“Well, it was used in the cold, but we don’t know why. The fireplace was a delivery portal for the humans when they were still in the developmental quadrupedal stage. Cheap toys and trinkets were delivered through the fireplace, usually a few days after the Earth’s winter solstice.”
Shia looked around at her fellow myriapods who were in their developmental stage. She loved her job as a guide. She wasn’t a parent herself, but her job meant that she could be involved in helping children to develop.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to deliver food instead? And why weren’t those doors used instead of this fireplace?” Nikki said.
“We’re playing with the idea that the immersive experience of the doors wasn’t real, but provided more of a virtual environment. As for the food, I can only agree with you.”
“This all seems far-fetched. Is it really true?”
“I guess we can’t really be certain,” said Shia. “It’s just the picture we have.”
Paul Sterlini.
About this Piece
A competition entry where I used this picture as inspiration.
It reminded me of estate agents who crawl on the floor to take photos of rooms to make them look “deceptively large”. My mind turned to what else crawls about on floors and how they would see the room – from a completely different perspective!
And it won!