I sat in the dark, bored, waiting for something to come, for something to happen. Like the other night when the possums mated under the house and caused one hell of a racket. The cool concrete floor was a little too dry for me. I wished that my reconnaissance partner Bet was here, at least his self-righteous company was better than nothing.
A moving light made the shadow of the window grill cross the room. I stared aghast. They were back from the city far sooner than expected. I scuttled up a chair and scanned the kitchen counter. Neither Bet nor I had left any traces of ourselves there. Then from that vantage point, I looked to the sink and saw only the pile of dirty dishes but nothing else. I climbed back down and squeezed myself into a crack under the wall.
Again I was thankful for the rigid training I received at the Academy. Officer Tot reminded us at the end of every lesson that humans were unpredictable. The more structured and mechanized an individual, the more likely he was to act highly unpredictably. In fact, the last colony we tried to build in this house failed because we didn’t have enough information. We thought that we only needed to watch their family broadcast and then we would know everything about them. Apparently, our predecessors learned too late, that the shows were all nothing more than fantasy. Humans were not as intellectually inclined as those shows made out.
The front door opened and two arguing voices drifted towards me. Carol and David were having one of their episodes again, which seemed to be happening ever more often lately.
“Who the hell told you that?” Carol shouted.
“I saw it myself,” David responded equally loudly.
“It’s none of your business what my sister does.”
“We are getting married next month. It is my business. She is trying to make a mess of it.”
“Maybe we should just cancel the wedding,” Carol yelled and began to cry.
I heard some scratching approach me. I turned and looked. It was my partner Bet. We touched antennas to indicate that all was well, and that nothing was out of place. Then we turned our attention back to our subjects.
“Carol, I’m sorry. It’s just that nothing’s going right lately. I didn’t get the promotion I was hoping for, and now your sister has persuaded your mom to do a huge wedding that we can’t afford.”
Carol put her head on his shoulder in an act of submission. Soon all was well again because they had started kissing and copulating with wild abandon. My partner and I shuffled back to our snug shelter under the sink.
“Well what do you think?” Bet asked.
“They certainly don’t behave as expected, just like how Officer Tot told us.”
Bet let out a heavy sigh. “I still find it impossible to believe that with all the scientific knowledge and empirical techniques that they have, they still believe in Darwin’s idea that humans and apes have the same ancestry.”
“You have been in their library again haven’t you?”
“I can’t help it. Some of the things in there are so ludicrous, I just have to read them.”
“You know very well that we are here to collect direct data, not secondary ones. It’s close to impossible to differentiate their fictions from their non-fictions anyway.”
“You see it too, eh.”
I cleaned one of my antennas. “I was reading some autobiographies of people we’ve learned about at the Academy, and the things those people say about themselves are very different from the video footage our past reconnaissance parties took of their actual lives.”
Bet said, “Maybe their power of recollection is not very good.”
“Or maybe they don’t know how to differentiate reality from fantasy. Those fungal genes can do that to you.”
“I guess. It could be the reason why they can’t look beyond apes. I still can’t believe they don’t see that the only similarity they share with the apes is the physical aspect. All their communal habits, territorial cravings, survival skills and consumption mentality are very similar to ours. I mean, some of them study arthropods. Don’t they see the similarity?”
I mused aloud, “The Great Father of Science should never have done those experiments on our genes. After the accident with the dinosaurs, he tried creating smaller and more intelligent creatures. Now, one branch of the mammalian race has found a way to exterminate us. Gathering information has become a hell of a dangerous job since the appearance of bug exterminators.”
“Might be worse,” Bet said. “I read the papers this morning. There is going to be a new nuclear reactor just two miles from here.”
I began to tug nervously on my antenna. “I know that we will outlast any other species because history has proven it so, but I sure hope nothing bad is going to happen while I’m still around.”
“Yeh,” Bet said, and we both fell silent, wondering if the world had been a better place when only cockroaches had existed.
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