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visited *loading* times
twistings twitchings in my sleep
whiskers brushing foreign objects
a disturbance in my rem cycles
jumping away
fast breaks
dream dreams
flee
what we already know: through a strange marriage of orchard grass and cavvian soil was created a special grass that when imbibed by two earth rabbits produced profound changes in their brains - making them highly intelligent. at the same time, this grass also gave them other powers or enhancements heretofore unsubstantiated and unrealized in other earth creatures.
we could spend minutes, hours, days, years discovering and describing those changes - mapping the new pathways, examining irregular or supraregular brain tissue and making slides of our own neurons. but we're not going to do that, because A.) that would mean cutting into our own little bunny brains (yes, this is the height of earth technology) and B.) we don't really care how we differ at the cellular level from other domestic rabbits. what we DO care about is making these changes in other rabbits.
what we need to find out: we really have no way of predicting how the special grass would affect other rabbits. it has given both pyong and i different powers. the only thing that does seem to be the same is that we're smarter than we were before and more self-aware. this might not be a boon in others' opinions. i suppose it might be worth knowing how "safe" it is - like, if we were to administer it to other rabbits, would they become merely smart? or would they also become crazy and out of control? i can't imagine rabbits on the rampage would be a good thing for society at large. i mean, not without some common cause or common good to uphold. i also don't know how we could/should test for such a thing. obviously we'll be needing more of the special grass or some way to isolate the whatever it was that worked on us to make us what we've become. as you can see, my scientific vocabulary is deserting me. and we don't really want to do "trials" on anyone because we have no idea what to expect. maybe it's something particular about pyong and i that made us into attackrabbits and not crazy mutant killer rabbits that hang out in caves and savage knights of the round table. hmm. should we offer up the magic grass and let rabbitkind choose to nibble? should we warn them of possible dangers? can we presume/assume that every rabbit will be as ethical as pyong and i in the execution of their power? what kind of hell on earth would we have if everybun were a superbun?
even worse is that we don't even know if we've discovered the extent of our own powers. will there be more surprises in store for us? will new powers unmask themselves when the need arises? are we still changing or is the transformation complete? we are like a new species discovering itself. humans have done this over time - discovered themselves and begun chronicling everything they know. we are the first or the last (depending on how you look at it), and we don't know how much time we have. we're like the replicants, the nexus6, we don't know what our lifespan is. i guess technically no one does - the game is up when its, well, you know, UP! but most beings have an average lifespan. and we don't know if the changes in us, the changes we want to make in others will be something that can be passed on to our offspring. neither pyong nor i will be having any offspring, as we're no longer in possession of our reproductive organs.
the questions weigh heavily in my mind.
as for who might be able to help us, i have a feeling that there is no human being on earth that could - or that would once s/he understood the implications that our research could have. mankind might have to, god forbid, REALLY share the earth. and we already know how well mankind plays with others of his own kind - not so very.
what you need to know: neither one of us has a PhD in biology, or in neuroscience, or in psychology...or in any discipline that would make it easy for us to just, you know, make excellent use of the research space in a facility that studies intelligence. our enhancements do not come with these perks, unfortunately. so neither one of us can absorb information through osmosis or even speed read. it's a shame. it also took us two months to realize that we were getting nowhere and were, in fact, trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
we had peered eagerly and anxiously into and around each piece of laboratory equipment in all of the labs trying to ascertain what they did and how we might use them. we watched the researchers and their legions of graduate students. we listened to them discuss their work. we read their papers. we couldn't really say that we had any idea what they were talking about. when we did understand them, it quickly became clear that their studies might not have any import at all for the kinds of things we wanted to know.
so one night after our lab was emptied of the usual crowd, in a moment of frustrated clarity i announced, "we are getting nowhere!" i had read countless textbooks on neurology and the brain and the longevity of neurons. i had read countless studies on the regeneration of brain tissue in canaries, on the formulation of new neural pathways in young human beings on the abilities of rats to navigate their way through mazes, on the intelligence of other presumed to be highly intelligent animals - whales, pigs, birds, dolphins, gorillas. No one cared about rabbits or rabbit intelligence. people just wanted rabbits for their sensitive eyes and skin, their lucky hind feet (not so lucky for the rabbits!), their soft pelts, their stew, and barring all of that - their radiant cuteness. one gets tired of being only cute after awhile. what about our depths? does anyone bother to scratch the surface?
"we're going at this all wrong." i said. "instead of trying to learn everything there is to know about intelligence - the ultimate goal of this institution - we should discuss and outline what it is that we want to know; what it is that we want to do; and then formulate research and plans based on these things."
pyong just looked at me like, duh.
i felt slightly foolish.
pyong winked at me. "hey, powder, it's ok. i just figured that's how you work. i mean, you want to understand everything about everything. you're sort of a whole picture kind of guy. except then while you're getting the picture, you realize just how incredibly detailed and nuanced it is. and then you decide that you have to know all of the details, and then the details of the details, and then the details of the details of the details. then you get tired and your brain shuts down and you come back around eventually to the starting point and wonder, 'how did i get so off-track?'"
"well, why didn't you, you know, STOP ME."
"you never listen to me when you're so focused."
right. "so, ok, anyway, have YOU made some progress that you'd like to share with me?"
"well. not much, really. i've been overwhelmed by our new digs, too. and i thought maybe you would find something we could use in all of your reading - i mean, before you reached brain saturation. i came up with some questions for us to think about, though: what do we already know? what do we need to find out? and is there any way we can use someone ELSE'S expertise to help us? because, like you said, we don't want to recreate the wheel, or spend years earning our own PhDs in neuroscience."
busy bunnies taking time off to read Harry Potter the sixth...hey, you're doing it TOO!
i felt the first rumble of thunder as i stood outside the double doors. they were heavy - far to heavy for a bun of normal talents to wrassle with. and, of course, it being the wee hours of the morning, they were locked. i waited for the thunder to subside and then parted the molecules like a soft fall of water. they cascaded across my nose and down my shoulder, then reformed as i stepped through. at this point, if i'd had a wire i would have said, "i'm in." but no one was listening. pyong pyong had already arrived and was somewhere in the building. i sent out an inquisitive tendril and felt her respond. she, in turn, sent up a sort of guide light that twinkled softly and bounced in front of me, waiting for me to follow.
i found her one floor down in the basement. she was in front of a vending machine - kicking it vigorously with her hind feet. "this damn machine" pant, pant, "won't give me my triscuits!" KICK! she complained. the plexiglass front of the machine shuddered with each impact of her feet, but the packet of triscuits remained stubbornly lodged in their little metal spiral. i sighed, then shifted the molecules as she hurtled toward the machine yet another time. a very surprised pyong went right through the glass. she quickly reoriented herself and climbed up to her triscuits, which she grabbed in her mouth. she then dove through the glass and landed beside me with a small thwap. she made short work of the packaging and offered me a cracker. we got down to the serious business of cracker munching. ah.
i think that i shall never see
a bun so deep as powder b...
months went by. or at least A month went by. and bunnies seemed to be making no progress. they seemed to be making no progress because they were silent for a long, long time. some might think that the bunnies had simply ceased to exist. but it was not so. bunnies were merely...busy. and not doing the sorts of things that bunnies do. er. well, they are obviously bunnies and so whatever they do is what bunnies do, or at least what THESE bunnies do, but OTHER bunnies...they wouldn't. do. these. things. clear?
in fact, these bunnies were making forays out into the unknown. they were leaving the luxury of a library and preparing for big things in a scary new place. bunnies without baggage are nevertheless bunnies with care and who took care to investigate their soon-to-be headquarters before moving in completely.
and STILL it took powder several days to go outside.
what's wrong with powder b? it's hard to say. rabbits are prey animals, so they have a tendency to keep to what they know, to keep safe. and leaving one safe place for an unknown place of unknown safe-ty was, instinctually speaking, not wise. being bun-napped can make one so much braver. wanting something so much it hurts can really light a fire under a bun. but. this new quest and this new purpose, so fresh, so young, was harder. and after so many months of not doing much at all. a bun gets accustomed to this smaller life, lived among smaller beings...it's hard to break out again and put himself on the line.
one early morning, long before sunrise:
i put a paw, one forepaw through the glass door at the north entrance to the library. the library was closed. the molecules parted obediently. a power confirmed. i've not lost my touch. i looked through the glass at my disembodied foot, trembling on the other side. one hop for powder, one leap for rabbit kind? the moon was a sliver. the lamps glowed at the edge of the road. my paw there, visible, glistening silver in that weird light. so fragile. i am me. only me. what can i do? whispers in my head..."so much." i put weight on that paw, leaned closer to the glass, let some of my whiskers penetrate through. powder through the looking glass. will this be my wonderland? one wiggly nose through the glass, sniffing the night air. i smell...dew. wet grass, plants. humid. it smells delicious. i'm overcome with this desire to dig my nails into the grass, feel the earth, feel grounded. i...refrain for a moment. this is how it will begin. small me, small dream. we will grow.
powder goes now, strong legs push him through the door and into the night. they propel him across a deserted street, down a sidewalk, between some trees, into grass, onto hills, onward ever onward...and there ahead is beckman.
i can only think: i come here to know. i come to find out how others may know. i come to share this knowledge, to light the bright light behind rabbit eyes, between rabbit ears.
"i thought you would have seen it, powder."
"seen what?"
"the connection."
"between?"
SIGH! "between beckman and US, powder B! sheesh. for an enhanced rabbit, you sure can be a dumb bunny when you apply yourself."
"oh right. that."
"well?"
"well?! well, i'm waiting for you to tell me what i'm missing, pyong. i may be enhanced, but i'm not a mind reader. well. except when i'm talking mind to mind with someone. but you know. it's been months."
"if you'd exercise your brain occasionally and stop moping about over EVERY little thing, then it might have occurred to you too! i mean, you've been mulling over our social responsibility for weeks now! and here's this opportunity...and you don't even see it!"
"just TELL me, pyong. then i can stroke your ego and tell you how wonderfully brilliant you are and we can move ON." she chuckled finally. good, we're not going to be bitchy bunnies forever.
"ok. i'm sorry. it's just that you sit here like a lump so much, and it drives me nuts. i know all sorts of stuff is going on inside your head, and you don't really share, you just get depressed. so, really what i'm trying to do is get you excited about this."
"i promise to get excited as SOON as you tell me what it is that you're going on about! i mean, suspenseful, ok, you've got me - i want to know. so give."
"ok. so beckman? they study intelligence. all forms of it. including, i suspect, RABBBIT intelligence."
"yeah, but everyone knows rabbits aren't very bright."
"everyone THINKS that, but everyone is WRONG, aren't they? i mean, look at us! we're hyper-intelligent!"
"yeah, one of us is WAY hyper..."
"right! oh, shut up, powder! i'm serious! everyone is wrong when it comes to us. and what's more, everyone is wrong when it comes to the wild rabbits. i mean, we never knew how intelligent they were!"
"if you can call THAT intelligence. they squander it. they're so concerned with their rules and regulations that they hardly LIVE, pyong."
"i KNOW that, powder, but humans think that they're just like domestic rabbits and we know they're not!"
"you know what they ARE like, pyong? they're like humans. caught up in the pressures of a society that they may not have had any part in creating, but from which they can't escape. they daren't change a thing, because the whole rotten structure might just come tumbling down on them... i take that back... well, part of it. humans seem determined to destroy themselves. they don't care. so many of them just don't care. they won't change a thing to help themselves because any changes would interfere with their lifestyles, their so-called quality of life. so. you haven't said, pyong, what's so great about beckman. they don't know about rabbits, so that tells us they don't know much. and we don't WANT them to know about rabbits, really, because they can't be trusted to be responsible with that kind of information. they'd only exploit us. they ALREADY exploit us - we test their MAKEUP for godsake!!!"
"yes," said pyong soothingly, "intelligent they may be, but that doesn't mean they have any wisdom. i don't mean that we should walk up those shiny granite steps and turn ourselves in - 'oh PLEASE experiment on us! implant electrodes! remove our brains!' human scientists have little subtlety. what we ought to do is check out their facilities. see, humans care about one thing, essentially - themselves. humans are FASCINATED with what humans are, what humans do, and what can be of use to humans. so when they say all kinds of intelligence, my guess is that above and beyond ALL of the rest of life, humans care about HUMAN intelligence. but that's ok. because we, powder, are at least as smart as humans and i want to study OUR intelligence."
"well, what's there to know? we're smart...a lot of good it does us."
"social responsibility, powder. what if we busted up that static, decaying rabbit warren we left? what if we were able to enhance ALL of our kind? what if bunnies became the next superheroes? what would you say to that, powder? if we were able to rally all of the rabbits, change everyone, we could take back the earth! we'd certainly have the numbers...why, Australia alone..."
"i...i'd NEVER thought of that. NEVER EVER in a million years WOULD i have thought of that. pyong, you ARE brilliant. IMAGINE what we could make of the world!"
"yeah, yeah. thanks. slow down, though. we've got a lot of work to do. a lot of work that just MIGHT take your mind off some other things. promise me you'll come out of your funk, powder?"
chin up, powder b! "yes, i promise. i think this is something i can work with."
"good."
it's late. the library has just closed, which means it's just after 3am. soon the sky will start getting light and the sun will chase away my private view of the stars. i'm in my window on the second floor looking out over a campus that seems very peaceful ('m sure that someone somewhere nearby is making a liar out of me). i wish we'd taken up lodging in an observatory, so i could see the sky better. i think often of the g-pigs and wonder what our friends may have endured in our absence. as if a scope could show me the answers to the questions i have. the observatory is not so popular nor so populated as the engineering library. i guess we'd be getting by on slim pickings then. the library is most days full of bright, eager students who cheerfully and willfully ignore the no-food policy. good for us. bad for the library.
pyong has crept up beside me. we sit side by side in one of the large leather chairs, facing the windows. we murmur to each other because anything louder produces odd and unsettling echoes in this large room.
"what are you thinking, powder?"
"i was wondering about the g-pigs. wondering what they're doing. what they know. what's happened to our friends."
"i think about them, too. sometimes."
"yeah, pyong-pyong, but your head is full of other things. you're always *up* to something. i can see your brain's working hard on something - your ears keep twitching. you have this nervous, but brilliant impatience of the ears. "
she thought about that. "powder?"
"yes?"
"do you know what lies to the north of this building?"
"well...a lot of things. do you want to be more specific?"
"i'll just tell you. to the north of the engineering library is the beckman institute."
my turn to think about something.
"and what can you tell me about the beckman institute, powder?"
"not much, i'm afraid. i know our person worked there before she worked here. have you discovered something to do with beckman that will help us find our person?" i was suddenly filled with hope. did beckman hold the answers?
"no...it's nothing to do with our person." my face must have shown my disappointment, for pyong quickly continued, "they study something important there. in fact, they have only one main research focus. do you know? can you guess what it is?"
i scrunched up my nose, trying to remember what i'd heard about beckman. nothing came to me. odd. i shook my head slowly, in the negative. her answer, when it came was surprising. "intelligence. powder, they study intelligence. ALL kinds of intelligence."
"i don't see..."
"yes, i know," she said impatiently (more ear shaking). "but i do."
so cold. fell asleep with my feet all tucked under my fuzz near one of the large windows on the second floor. pyong woke up early and left to go about her business. i woke up somewhat later, somewhat disoriented and chilled. not enough fuzzy bunny to keep warm in this great heat sink. brrr. i repositioned myself near a heat vent and let that warm dry air get under my coat and next to my skin. ahh. a desert bath.
happened to notice a rabbit outside, hopping through the grass on the quad. very purposeful looking bunny. wondered briefly how the campus rabbits live. are they as regimented as the urbana rabbits? like clockwork, the urbana buns. not being among them anymore is both a great relief and a great loss. we didn't make any special friends among them, so i guess logically there is nothing all that much to miss. but for some reason it hurts anyway. i get this funny tight feeling in my chest...because aren't they supposed to be my "people"? and here i lived among them for only a short time and not one of them cared to know me, know what i thought about. they were so focused on their bureacracy, on maintaining some system/appearances. they never cared to ask where i came from...and i could have told them such stories! well, to be honest, i probably wouldn't have told them THOSE stories. who would have believed me? partly i am to blame...for i never bothered to learn who they were either. we certainly didn't stay long enough to know them.
we really do come from different worlds, and i don't mean just because i lived "off-planet" for some time - probably the equivalent of several years in a rabbit's timeline. i was never a wild bunny before, and something about me is still domesticated...perhaps despite their surprising "street smarts," these wild bunnies wouldn't be able to fathom what it's like to be me? or wouldn't see how i've lived as being any kind of advantage. i will readily admit that i often don't see it as advantageous either. it's isolated me more than anything...and i guess i'm a bunny that's hungry for community. more than broccoli stalks, more than cilantro, more than that sweet sweet orchard grass that started all of this, i long for a home and a place and a people.
do you think that if these wild bunnies had had a taste of the orchard grass that they too would long for something more? or would they remain content with what they have? and is it only my lack of having something stable like that that makes me different? would i be reluctant to change even if i thought there might be some other way? just because it was what i knew? i wonder.
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