[16] This type of discovery Gortox named Reverse Discovery. If the most Bad Gortox could feel was waking up from the dream and staring at the fang until the moon set and the sun rose, then doing the opposite could lead to an opposite result.
[15] This information was discovered in an attempt to prove or disprove sentience in humans, in order to see if they could perhaps, provide some explanation for Great Fang. Gortox hoped for the humans to try to burn her in return, but the meek mitigation of damage seemed to Gortox a undeniable proof to the lack of sentience.
[14] The hypothesis of Animal Selection had taken many experiments to become a proven principle. An experiment would include burning one forest over and over again to see if the animals within it become more flame resistant when compared to the animals in the “control” forest. The results were inconclusive when it came to fire resistance, but significant regarding animals’ running speed and reaction time to the smell of smoke. Conclusive results could be reproduced over as little as two cycles of exposure.
[13] Gortox wondered why.
[12] Gortox usually ate animals whole but the question of why different animals tasted differently had to be solved, and so she had torn apart several animals in order to put that nagging question to rest. The fact that some humans tasted better than others seemed to be easily explained by the higher ratio of white-very-tasty compared to the other elements, which also explained why bears tasted better in autumn than in spring. On the other claw, spring bears were easier to find as they were hunting for salmon at the mouths of rivers. Bears were better tasting than humans any time of the year, and so were elks, but they could not be conditioned like humans were, so she got most of her nutrition from the 4x2 human colonies she’d conditioned, and picked up a bear or stag when they crossed her path.
[11] Gortox could still remember that moment, when instinct drove her to breath fire into a cave that she thought a bear had run into. If the bear really had been there, it would have become a burnt corpse inside the cave. If it wasn’t there, that meant that the bear had to be somewhere else. She’d looked at the sun, forgetting her hunger, and witnessed that logical construct, the first, with the entirety of her.
[10] Gortox has spent some time thinking about why that instinct, unlike others, did not lead her to an action that made her feel Good, but did not come up with a satisfying explanation. Perhaps not everything could be understood - a Bad provoking thought by itself.
[9] A category that includes animals and Gortox herself, even though she was no animal. Not everything belonging to this category was edible, but anything that was did. Not-self-moving was everything that only fell or got moved: Rocks, water, parts of Gortox's body she shed, like skin and claws. Gortox hasn’t made up her mind yet about fire and trees.
[8] Gortox also had a theory about the strange things animals did together in order to create offspring, but she didn’t like to think about that.
[7] Gortox had lain prone on the beach before they hatched, and so the hatchlings ignored her entirely, knowing that for their entire lives Gortox had just been there, so she was probably no danger - until she burned them all in a furious rage, leaving the shore glassed over.
[6] Gortox had to move to another cave after her own grew too small, and move again as the new one did the same. In one of her visits to the Cave Gortox Hatched In, A tooth fell from her mouth, and she noticed that it was almost as large as Great Fang. So much the world has shrunk. It was at that time that Gortox noticed that her fire could melt stone. Perhaps the world became not only smaller, but softer? She was not sure.
[5] Hoping is a strange kind of thought that came not out of reason, but because thinking it made Gortox feel Good. She used to be very careful about hoping, worried that it would corrupt her ability to arrive at correct conclusions, but the more time passes, the less she cares about thinking things that might not be true.
[4] Gortox notes that there must be a prior language etched into her mind if this other can make sounds she understands but even that interesting deduction is pushed aside by the unprecedented amount of Good flooding Gortox’s emotional landscape.
[3] How can Gortox deduce information on the mental state of The Other based on the noises she is making? Gortox would love to figure this one out, but there’s no time.
[2] How does she know there are several? Because if it were only one or two, her species, the species she is a part of, could not exist.
[1] She never was.
Gortox Was Not Alone
In a dark cave, in the depths of a forest, on a very tall mountain, Gortox awoke one hungry morning and wondered when was the last time she had devoured human flesh. She came out of her cave, spread her wings, and spat a torrent of violet-white fire to clear her throat. The flames reached all the way to the tower of ivory that stood just outside of her cave, from the day she’s hatched: Great Fang, she called it. It looked like a single tooth, long and thin like one of her own but larger than her entire body, lodged into rock that seemed melted by impossibly hot fire.
Great Fang’s existence was the greatest riddle of Gortox’s life. It posed three questions:
3. Gortox had never seen a being so big that one of its teeth could be bigger than the whole of her. What creature existed that was so much larger than Gortox?
2. Gortox never produced or witnessed fire so hot as to melt stone. Was there a creature whose fire was so much hotter than hers?
1. The fact that Great Fang is lodged in rock implies a decision has been made, and for a decision to be made there needs to be someone making it. An other. So far, the existence of Great Fang is the single datum Gortox has ever measured supporting that there are any others in the entire universe.
Great Fang’s effect on Gortox Varied. Sometimes seeing it made her feel Good - a promise that there is a sentient being somewhere in the world, beside Gortox. Sometimes it made her feel Bad, making the lack of that sentient other painfully clear. Gortox had not yet formalized the pattern, but she figured it had to do with how much Good or Bad she’d felt before.
Today, Gortox woke up feeling Bad. Perhaps because she had the dream again, and she always felt Bad afterwards. She felt Good during the Dream, it was only once it ended that the Bad came.
Gortox, who was very clever, had already understood that the best way to relieve herself from intense Bad is to outweigh it with things that caused her to feel Good[16], and so she did. It had been, to Gortox’s counting, 4x4+2 days out of the cycle of 4x4x2 days. Which, if her memory was not mistaken (and it never was), meant that today’s sacrifice would be provided by Walled City on a Hill by the Sea, a human colony relatively close to the mountain on which she resided. Gortox flapped her wings and took to the air, and as she flew, she busied herself with her third favorite activity (the second was eating; the first was learning new things) – reviewing her own brilliant ideas. Preferably in lists, which Gortox loved.
Here are two principles that Gortox had discovered are crucial when conditioning a human colony to offer sacrifices to her:
2. Consistency. Once every 4x4x2 days she should arrive at the colony, preferably when the sun was at the same height in the sky and eat exactly one human. It was very important that she ate exactly one at a time, even if she was hungrier or not hungry at all, because humans get easily confused. It was also very important she spat some fire around, burning humans and their stone mounds, creating what Gortox recently named Bad-motivation[15]. After two or three such visits, most colonies would start nailing individuals to a piece of wood, saving her the trouble of catching it herself. At that point, it was very important that Gortox stopped spitting fire at them and ate only the sacrifice the humans left for her. That was important to create Good-motivation.
1. Moderation. It was important that Gortox takes only one sacrifice at a time, two at best if it was an abnormally large colony. When Gortox was younger, she had occasionally taken too many sacrifices, or came to visit too often, and the colonies on which she had performed these early experiments stopped sacrificing and simply dispersed. That made sense to Gortox, with accordance to the Principle of Animal Selection[14] – colonies that wouldn’t have reacted that way to natural disaster, would not have survived. As she flew, Gortox wondered if that idea should be developed further.
Gortox’s eyes were sharp, and even among the clouds she could see the sacrifice Walled City on a Hill by the Sea erected for her that day on the top of a stone hill - a plump human with sunlight-colored fur on the top of its head and pale skin. It was very similar to the type of sacrifice this colony always provided for her, as colonies usually settled for one sacrifice style[13].
Gortox landed in front of her meal, among the herd of humans lying face down on the ground (as this colony always did). And just before Gortox spat the fire out, another human ran in her way, almost throwing itself into the fire, and Gortox directed the fire away, lest she break the principle of consistency. The errant human started making noises, squeaks almost too high-pitched to hear, its tiny blue eyes looking directly at Gortox as if it was trying to communicate with her. The sacrifice started making sounds also, looking at the interrupting human in a way that looked superficially like communication. Gortox had spent a lot of time listening to sounds like these, trying to hear in them some shred of intelligence, but they were too soft and inconsistent to have meaning - just chaotic animal noises. Gortox noticed the superficial similarities between these two humans specifically, greater than the general similarity among their kind, but couldn’t conclude anything concrete from it.
Gortox was growing cleverer every year, but that meant that there were times she was not so clever, when she futilely begged humans for any kind of response. “I wish you could understand me,” said Gortox to her meal, but there was no reaction aside from the errant human watering its eyes. Is that something an intelligent being would have done?
Gortox gently pushed the interrupting human aside with one claw, and let out a yellow-blue flame, roasting instead of scorching, and listened to the noises the animals made, lamenting that they meant nothing.
Gortox ate her meal and flew away. Even though it was delicious, Gortox felt Bad. All of her attempts at communication failed, whether they were with humans or other animals. For a long time she staked her hopes on the humans being different - their relationship with fire was particularly encouraging - but the more she researched, the more it seemed that humans imitated each other without thinking of anything new, allowing for increasing complexity even without Reason. It should not have been a surprise; humans were made of the same four elements as the other animals – red-tasty, dark-not-tasty, white-very-tasty, and crunchy - so why should they be different[12]?
Gortox flew above the mountains, and though her belly was pleasantly full, she still felt Bad. And, feeling Bad, Gortox could not help but remember her dream.
It went, every single time, like this: She is standing in a meadow watching a raging fire that she did not start, and an animal she had never seen before. The animal is green like Gortox, and flies like her, and breathes fire. It is not an animal, Gortox realizes, but an other. And Gortox says to her - “I see you. I am here.” And the other answers in kind.
Then Gortox kills her. The other tries to kill Gortox, too, but Gortox is faster and stronger. Afterward, Gortox claws open the other’s chest and she eats her heart, lightly roasted.
The dream made her feel so much Good, while she had it, that on the nights of such dreams Gortox woke with her cave full of smoke and her body feeling strangely tender. At nights when Gortox slept particularly well, perhaps after eating more than one human, she dreamt of the eggs that would blossom within her after eating such a heart, and of flying in search of caves to lay them in, each one in a cave of its own.
Now Gortox felt even more Bad, thinking about the dream, and how far she was from understanding it.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It gave her so much Good, to understand things, to make order of the world by atomizing it. And she tore it in three primary ways:
3. By using the concept of dissection—that things could be separate from one another. It seemed obvious now, to name things, but before that she could only remember vague impressions and colors: the cracking of her egg, the first breath of the world’s air and the first of fire to follow, the taste of her first kill, driven only by instinct. Before words, before Good and Bad, she could not claw out chunks of meaning out of the world.
2. By using numbers, that in their own way are a dissection of the world. For example, Gortox had known that days pass, but now she could ask how many had between two specific events. Numbers had not only made it possible to cultivate humans to feed her, but also made her feel a significant amount of Good just by moving them around - the initial Good-motivation for their creation in the first place.
1. Reason, the opposite of instinct[11]. Instinct was the force that drove actions made wisely, but without thought. Like knowing that she should roast animals before eating them, or that flapping her wings will take her to the air. Instinct was what humans used to mimic each other, not knowing why.
Although instinct was crucial for things like flying and eating, Gortox needed Reason in order to solve the really hard problems. Here’s one - Humans were getting smaller, which meant that they were less satiating for her. The solution? She will fly further and start the process of conditioning more colonies, thus providing more sacrifices.
It wasn’t just humans who were shrinking, of course – bears and elk and the mountains themselves were growing steadily smaller, and even Gortox’s teeth constantly shrank until they fell out of her mouth, larger ones sprouting in their place. Gortox would soon have to find another cave, too, or come up with a way to dig deeper into her own. That was Bad – it was Good to be in the same cave she hatched in, that same cave where instinct drove her to burn her own eggshells[10].
Understanding things was Good (one of the words Gortox was most proud of), sometimes because it actually got results, but mostly because of the Good it caused immediately. Gortox found that the principle of her actions was that she was trying to do things that would make her feel Good. Actions that made her feel Good were good, and the opposite was bad. So, she had chosen human meat over bear, losing the Good of tastier meat but gaining even more Good by having time to think and observe, list the processes that were changing the world. Three seemed constant:
3. The shrinking of the world.
2. The increase in the amount of Bad that comes every time considers the Singularity Hypothesis. Here it is now, that Bad going all the way from the bottom of her abdomen to the top of her head when she goes over the most probable hypothesis: that she is the only sentient creature that exists. A Bad that can only be relieved by raising her mouth and letting out a blazing torrent so bright it scares the birds out of their nests, and trying to think of something else.
1. Her dreams. Gortox’s ability to decipher meaning out of the world depends on her having been born with prior knowledge with which to interpret her sensory input. Obviously. This is how Gortox would explain it, if there was anyone to explain it to: if Gortox perceives the world through her senses, whether real or dreamed up, then that means she came into being with some component letting her process such information. Yes, she had given meat its name and chose to devour it, but she was hatched with the innate sense that meat was Good, that loneliness was Bad, that she should flap her wings like this and not like that. And if she hatched with prior knowledge, then dreams could also be a manifestation of such knowledge.
But where would that prior knowledge come from?
Gortox used her sharp eyes to watch the ways of animals, looking for any clues of intelligence, and she noticed that everything that is made out of self-moving-matter[9] comes out the backside of another animal, termed mother[8]. So, if Gortox assumed that she, too, was self-moving-matter, she must have at least had a mother, from which her memories and dreams could originate along with her flying-related instincts. And that mother must have had a mother too, all the way back.
Gortox remembered spending a whole night looking at turtle hatchlings making their way from the shore to the sea and thinking that no one taught them how to navigate the sand. Using a specifically developed method of observation[7] she could look at the turtles from close enough to see how direct and focused their movements were.
Three emotions arose in Gortox from watching the turtles (Gortox was very careful to categorize her emotions, for they were the landscape on which she cultivated Good):
3. Envy towards the hatchlings for knowing which way they should go.
2. Anger at the turtle-mothers for leaving their eggs alone, and the strangest of all three:
1. A fear of the eggs which she could not explain, no matter how long she thought about it. She placed that open question in the “cave” in her head where such questions waited for the right answer to come for them and make them whole.
Looking at the glassed-over beach, thinking of the trick she had pulled on the turtles, Gortox wondered if the sun that had moved the same way since Gortox first opened her eyes had hidden away some complicated emotion that would one day drive her to abandon her trajectory and scorch the world whole.
That question belonged in another “cave”, with other questions of the same kind: Could she know that she was awake, and not dreaming? And if she were dreaming, could she know that she was even Gortox, and not a bear or tree, dreaming that they were flying high? What if humans were actually sentient, but couldn’t communicate? What if rocks were?
Gortox had to learn to stop thinking about questions like that lest she forget to collect her sacrifices in time. Usually these questions brought no pleasure, except for when they did. For instance, the pain in her head lessened when she imagined generations of generations of her ancestors crawling through the same thought process that she was going through, the sand of solitude in their eyes.
Gortox landed by Great Fang, and giggled at the sandy image. Such an aesthetic Good Gortox derived from unique combinations of words, even if they had no external function.
But here’s the thing, she thought as she watched the sunset light shine over the ivory – if she had a mother, as all self-moving things did, the mother was no longer with her. And that meant that her mother had perhaps chosen to leave her, which made Gortox feel Bad, but also meant that there were others like Gortox, which made her feel Good.
Gortox had two hypotheses:
2. The dream is a sort of generational memory, preparing her for something that will one day certainly happen. Thinking that she will meet an other made Gortox feel Good, and thinking that this other, like her, might have both instinct and Reason, that she could actually talk to her, made Gortox feel an amount of Good so great it was, strangely, almost painful. She liked this hypothesis much better than the other one, which is that:
1. The dream and all of Gortox’s reasonings are nothing but a way to feel more Good in a world that has in it neither a central principle to understand nor an other to talk about it with.
After Gortox thinks about the second hypothesis, she often repeats her experiments on Animal Selection. Not so much to reproduce the results, but for the little decrease in Bad that comes from watching self-moving-matter burn.
Gortox went to sleep, and awoke, and ate, and thought, and went to sleep again. The sun went around and around, and the world got smaller and smaller[6] and still the only other Gortox met was in her dreams. The more time passed, the more she was excited to notice possible traces of her own kind: a burnt city, even the smell of fire; a thunder sounding somewhat like Gortox herself; even the shape of a cloud, that happened to look like a wing or tail. But all these brought nothing but more Bad, in the end.
#
One spring day, after eating a couple of bears, Gortox lies down by the river’s origin and watches salmon lay eggs and die. She finds solace in their dying – if they did not choose to abandon their eggs, then perhaps her mother had not chosen, also. Perhaps after she had laid Gortox as an egg, she had no choice but to die. Perhaps she wanted to stay with Gortox more than anything else in the world. Gortox hopes[5] so.
When she sees a cloud twisting in the corner of her eyes, as if wings have beat inside of it, it is mostly out of habit that Gortox raises her head from the dirt to look at it, bracing for the pang of disappointment that is bound to come, but doesn’t. First, she sees the green wings, then the red, slitted eyes and the mighty jaws and the burst of white-violet flame coming from them. An instant later she hears a roar, one that is clearly not thunder, and suddenly Gortox is no longer alone.
The other’s scales are green, just like in the dream, and she is bigger than any other being aside from Gortox herself, dwarfing the world even further. When she dives low, the wind from her wings bends the trees and brings a smell to Gortox that is like meat but better than any meat Gortox has ever smelled. She is so very beautiful.
“I see you!” Gortox cries out. “I am here!”
“I am here!” The Other calls back, her head turning towards Gortox. “I see you!”[4]
Gortox spreads her wings and takes flight toward the valley. “Here I will kill you!” Gortox declares, just like in her dreams.
“Here I will kill you!” The Other answers with glee as she lands at the edge of a forest.
Gortox is dizzy with the speed with which it is all happening. Will they really kill each other here? She wants to kill The Other and lay eggs, an instinct so strong it almost overtakes her, but she has so many questions, so much loneliness to quench, which is also a Good usage of words. She wants to tell the Other about it.
“Wait,” Gortox says. “We don’t have to kill each other. Not yet.”
The Other raises her head from her flames. “What does that mean?” Her voice is annoyed.[3]
“Why do we have to kill each other? Why can’t we just continue living?”
“This is what we do. We kill each other. We lay eggs.”
“Do you mean that this is what our ancestors have always done? Or that it is Good to do?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, and I don’t want to. Are you sick?”
The Other is so different from Gortox it shocks her. “I’m not sick. Think. One of us will die, and the other one will either die or be alone again. Do you understand that?”
“No. You will die and I will eat your heart and lay eggs.”
Gortox would have suspected that this is another dream, if not for how much Bad she feels. “Why do you think I will be the one to die?”
“I know you will die because I'm stronger than you and I will kill you.”
Gortox looks down at the other member of her species, at how smaller than Gortox she is. All other animals grow with time. Perhaps Gortox just had more time to grow? What an idiocy Gortox has committed. She had identified the wrong process: It was never the world that was getting smaller—she was getting bigger. Is the other making a similar idiocy? “But what if you're wrong?”
“I'm not wrong.”
“Ok, you’re not wrong. Can you imagine, temporarily, what if you were? That we are going to kill each other for nothing, when we can just stay here and talk?”
“If you don’t fight me I can still kill you and eat your heart. But I’d rather you fought me.”
“I will.” Gortox puts so much effort into not killing the other that her body begins to shiver. “Just answer this one thing, first. When you hatched - Do you remember if there was a large fang outside of your cave? Bigger than you were?”
The Other gives Gortox a long look, and Gortox is suddenly more alone than she’d ever been. “I do not,” The Other answers, “Remember.”
Bad, so much Bad Gortox doesn’t know how to mitigate it. Should Gortox fly away and return to her lonely musings, to her lonely project of constructing an understanding of the world? Or should she stay here, give herself fully to the sensual urges that her mother had left in her?
The other turns away and starts making a battle ground for them, burning through a forest and a little human colony at the edge of it, ignoring which animals run faster than others and how the humans react to the fires. She just burns it, and as the flames burst out of her mouth, Gortox feels a great desire ignite in her guts, to kill and eat heart and lay eggs, and seeing that the only alternative is loneliness even more profound than the one she felt before, she succumbs to it.
#
There is a long time in which Gortox feels the eggs[2] brew in her. Her instinct guides her to take special care of her abdomen, as if something inside might break, and her teeth fall more often now, as if their white-hardness is being allocated into other places in her body. She can’t wait to share all of these discoveries with the others that will sprout from the eggs within her. She cries now even more than she did before, but she cries with Good, an echo of the Good she expects to come.
She will stay with her eggs, she will teach them all of her methods - or better yet, be an assistance as the others build their own models of the world.
When it is time, it is instinct that guides her to find a cave; Instinct that guides her to convulse her cloaca just enough to release a single egg. It is so small - smaller than a single tooth, so fragile and precious.
So why does Gortox, as soon as she sets eyes on it, feel a Bad so intense that she can either run away, or burn the egg dead? Nothing else. She stands there for a long moment, refusing to surrender either way, feeling as if the two greatest forces in the world are pulling her in opposite directions.
Finally, when she feels like the fire will burst from her mouth by itself if she stays there one more instant, she leaves the cave, before her violent nature overtakes her.
Outside of the cave, she stands for a long time, daring to hope, but there is nothing to hope for. If she returns, she’ll kill The precious Other. But what will be of her little offspring, sentient and curious and so alone? Gortox’s tongue finds a loose fang in her mouth, pushes it out. It drops onto the rock, on its side, and Gortox knows that it is not quite enough, as far as clues go. She takes the fang between two claws and erects it at the exit from the cave, produces a jet of fire so hot it melts the stone around it, forming a steady connection.
There. Gortox has never felt so much Good and Bad at the same time, as when she leaves that clue for her offspring, and understands, finally, the clue that has been left for her.
Gortox flies towards the next laying spot, and thinks about her life: about her own mother wanting to stay there but not being able to, about how she must have felt - like Gortox feels now. She thinks about how everything she had ever seen was a clue to one great riddle that can never be fully solved and feels a Good for life, for the entirety of it. And Gortox, finally, is no longer alone. [1]