The Living (9 page)

‘Termites are social insects,’ Ef said then. ‘But I figure that if we give you one, it will be a useful experience for you. I’ll
discuss this issue with the management of the House of
Correction
and the entomologist.’

They obviously discussed it immediately in deep layers: the staff entomologist appeared about ten minutes later and set off for the termite room. He looked away as he passed me. He looked annoyed, almost angry. The entomologist soon came back, holding a small cylindrical plastic container with a single termite inside. He set it up on the Available Terrace, next to my mosquito’s cage. Still not looking in my direction and twisting his mouth in irritation, he told me that the termite ate cellulose, that the termite was blind and asexual, that the termite could not tolerate sunlight and that the termite was a social insect. He told me everything I needed to know about my new pet. Then the entomologist gave me the feed – a silvery packet filled with damp shavings that smelled of mushrooms and
woodland
. I asked about the light – wouldn’t my termite suffer in his transparent container on the Available Terrace – and he explained with hostility that the walls of the container were made from a special light-filtering material. Then he left without even saying ‘no death’. I was surprised: before the
entomologist
had got on well with me and always been pleased with the health of my pets.

I remember how, after he left, a crowd of correctees gathered on the terrace and swarmed round the container with my new pet – it struck me that the container was a little like the Son’s transparent chamber. I remember they were all silent for a long time, either shutting their eyes or looking round in agitation, discussing my insect on
socio
. And a correctee with the
nickname
Foxcub – he was pretty dumb and couldn’t keep second layer well, often verbalising his deep answers – exclaimed in a loud, monotonous voice, ‘Poor soldier!’

A week later I understood everything: their looks, Foxcub’s outburst, and the entomologist’s irritation, and what Ef had said about ‘a useful experience for me’. The termite that was
entrusted to me had been a member of the ‘warrior’ caste in the termite mound. The upper part of his body was encased in a hard brown shell, as if he were fitted out in armour like a knight. For a weapon he had huge sickle-shaped mandibles the same size as the rest of his body – so enormous that they prevented him from feeding himself. He spent the whole week in an awkward
defensive
pose, his blind, armoured head turned to face me and his back to the termite room, as if he were hoping to ward me off and save his home castle. He ceased living on the seventh day, from hunger, on a heap of the aromatic food shavings which I had, without fail, continued to throw into his container all this time… Cracker said that he had been doomed from the start, my new pet.

Cracker said that there, in the mound, worker termites would feed soldier termites like that with the contents of their
intestines
: they would carefully place digested cellulose right into their mouths.

Cracker said that every correctee knew that, anyone who had watched the live feed even once – anyone, but me.

Only then, as I looked through the transparent plastic at my unliving pet, did I realise that Ef had, of course, known in advance how me looking after this termite would end up. And the entomologist knew too – that’s why he had got angry, he had felt sorry for him… Ef wanted to teach me a lesson: loners are doomed. They can’t survive outside the mound.

They can’t survive outside the Living.

I learned my lesson well. I felt humiliated, pitiful and helpless, like that soldier that could not swallow his own food. When Ef came to visit me a day after the end of the termite, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him: not because I was offended, but because I was ashamed to see my reflection. And when Ef, in a conciliatory, almost affectionate way, offered to let me choose a third pet again (‘I think you like that stag beetle, don’t you?’) I was horrified to hear my own reply: ‘I would like a termite.’

‘You clearly haven’t understood,’ Ef buzzed monotonously. ‘Termites are social insects, you should look after a…’

‘A termite,’ I said. ‘Just not a soldier. I want a termite from a different caste.’

They gave me a ‘nymph’ – a delicate, fragile creature, vaguely reminiscent of a winged ant. Her wings looked like the slender petals of a fantastic translucent daisy. In contrast to the soldier she had a sex (the entomologist, it’s true, didn’t want to tell me which, but I was sure that she was a little girl) and could see. For the first three hours she fluttered about the container full of joy, then settled down on a wall and gnawed off both her wings. Once they had fallen to the bottom of the container they stopped looking like silvery petals, but grew darker and started to look like husks. Her wingless body reminded me of the body of the soldier, except without the mandibles and the armour. She refused food, and I got a bad feeling, and Cracker told me that in the termite mound nymphs like this are also, just like the warriors, fed digested cellulose by the workers. But I tried to convince myself that this time everything would work out. I kept repeating to myself: there are no mandibles blocking her mouth, nothing except stubbornness and laziness is stopping her from taking some food. She’ll get hungry and then she’ll eat… She ceased living five days later from hunger, surrounded by the cellulose, like her predecessor the warrior.

As he took the corpse from the container, the entomologist told me that nymphs cannot feed themselves either, because their intestines lack the bacteria
Trichonympha campanula, Leidyopsis sphaerica, Trichomonas
and
Streblomastix strix.
Without these the termite cannot digest food. These bacteria only live in the intestines of worker termites.

‘So, have you figured it out finally?’ Ef asked, looking at the empty container.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve figured it out. I would like a worker…’

They died, one after another. They would die and I would weep for them and ask for new ones. The correctees (all of them, apart from Cracker – he understood) saw my termites as martyrs and saw me as a crazy murderer. The entomologist stopped talking to me entirely. The psychologist checked my PIA every other day (the result was negative). The House administration sent official complaints to the SPO and asked for Ef to be relieved of his duties (reply: ‘declined’). Nothing changed. A termite would die, I would ask for a new one, and Ef would force the administration to fulfil my request. Why? He was as stubborn as I was. He wanted me to be the first to break.

They could not survive outside the termite mound.

I had a worker termite that on the very first day covered the inside of the plastic walls of the container with something like cement; it must have made this substance in its intestines. When he was finished with the walls, he did the ceiling, which the air came through, too. He ceased living from lack of oxygen.

I had a worker termite who built a strange thin tube in his container, leading from the floor to the ceiling, and walled himself in inside it.

I had a worker termite that at first ate well, but then stopped and died, seemingly from sadness.

I had a worker termite that ran away during feeding and died from the light – they found him unliving by the entrance to the termite room.

I had a worker termite that died for some unknown reason, instantly.

I had a worker termite that died for some unknown reason, having first suffered for a long time.

They kept dying, but over time I started getting slightly longer lives from some of them. Twelve days. Eighteen. Twenty-four. A month and a day. A month and two days…

‘…Put the piece of paper in the container,’ I cooed. ‘If you don’t want to end up in solitary like the Butcher’s Son.’

‘…Give my diagram to a termite? So I’ll have to digest it first you mean?’ Cracker chortled. ‘And then he’ll choke and die. Your termites can’t even eat right!’

‘Idiot!’ I took offence. ‘I’ve only had workers for ages now. They eat perfectly. And this one,’ I tapped my finger lightly on the wall of the container, ‘this one, if he does cease living, it’ll be from old age.’

The termite that was my pet at that time had beaten all records. An unassuming worker, he had been living in the container for nearly half a year already. At first – like many of his predecessors – he had just moped around. But after a couple of weeks he found himself something to do. He started building something like a column out of sand, shards of wood, spit and faeces. When he was finished with that, on top of the column (it reached about halfway up the container) he built something like a bit of a slanting palace arch, something like a fragment from the architecture of the termite mound which he, as far as I could see, imagined was a sort of long-range addition to his home castle. At the very least, this rough arch, riddled with holes, divided the container on the diagonal and was directed towards the termite mound. The top of the arch leaned against the wall of the container in such a way that you could draw a perfect line across the Available Terrace between it and the dome of the termite mound. If the termite had had an opportunity to continue his work, that’s what he would have done… When he had finished the arch, he plunged back into despondency – however, I figured out a way to cheer him up. I just rotated the container slightly in a clockwise direction, so that the piece of arch made by my pet would be aimed not at the termite mound but past it. He set to work eagerly destroying what he had created and crafting a new arch, pointing in what was, for him, the only right direction… And so he kept on living with me,
happily, month after month, endlessly building, destroying and rebuilding his section of the castle.

The termite had an excellent appetite: I had no doubt that he would gobble up Cracker’s piece of paper in about fifteen minutes, or at the very least grind it up and put it to use in his construction. But Cracker dug his heels in.

‘There’s important information on that,’ he muttered. ‘I should hide it… in a safe place… in a hidey-hole…’

A hidey-hole. I’ve already mentioned the fact that Cracker set up hidey-holes everywhere. He even hid his notes in the cages with the pets: he would push his little tubes into the dried wood pulp and bury them in the wet sand… Of course, it was forbidden. It was against all the rules. He thought that they couldn’t touch him because he set up the hidey-holes so skilfully… But I knew: if they wanted to find them, then they would find them. There was only one reason why they had not put Cracker in a correction chamber in the Special Unit like the Butcher’s Son: out of respect for his previous achievements. He had created
socio
after all. It would be unseemly to lock up the creator of
socio
in a glass jar, like a blind, asexual termite.

Nevertheless, Cracker was teetering on the brink: his crime was too serious. That is, his first crime, the original sin which had made him fit for the House of Correction. He had tried to destroy the results of his work. A year after the Nativity he had started writing the Frankenstein Message – a virus which was meant to uninstall
socio
and kill the infant Living.

This message began with the words: ‘My monster must die.’ Glap, the
socio
sysadmins traced the source of the potential threat to Cracker’s IP address in time. Actually, at that time, he had a different nickname:
Founder
. But after the sentence was announced – life imprisonment – they gave him a new
socio
name.

Then after a hundred years, when there were no prisons anymore, Cracker was moved to a House of Correction.

He was stubborn. He was a bad correctee. After every pause his PTC kept growing, but this did not bother him. He was teetering on the brink. He told everyone that the Butcher’s Son was innocent of his crimes.

And that diagram of his… I remember when I saw exactly what it was he decided to hide and I thought, this time they’ll definitely get him. Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. His crime was too serious. He should not have been taking risks and aggravating the situation. He should have been working on reducing his PTC.

Five Seconds of Darkness – it sounds beautiful, but in essence it doesn’t mean much. No one knows what actually happens: whether it’s dark or light or just inviz. When an ordinary person hears the phrase ‘five seconds of darkness’ he imagines
something
dreadful. But at the end of the day it’s just a technical term referring to the period of time when the
socio
dispatcher can’t see the incode of the person who has temporarily ceased to exist in the population control system. In other words the Five Seconds is the ‘pause’ itself. It is then followed by reproduction: the
socio
dispatcher re-establishes the incode and registers the geographic position and personal data of the newly conceived person.

The Five Seconds of Darkness is a practically unresearched field. As we know, it is this ‘blind alley’ which is the main
barrier
to us carrying out complete incarnational retrospection and detailed examination of pre-pause conditions in the individual. Hitherto only the Roberts random flare method has been widely practised in pre-pause immersion therapy. We have created a special compound which makes the biological organism more sensitive to Roberts radiation. One injection could be enough to transform the random flashes into a directed ray. In this way, we have reason to believe that our breakthrough will radically alter the current state of the field.

Laboratory experiments on social insects (bees, ants, termites) exposed to the directed Leo-Lot ray have shown that:

a) our hypothesis about the continuity of social insects’ life is correct (if this were not the case, our experiment would not have proved successful);

b) the directed Leo-Lot ray is capable of crossing through the Five Seconds of Darkness and penetrating the pre-pause zone (experiments with
Heterotermes indicola
termites gave record-breaking results – consecutive immersion to a depth of twenty-six reproductions!).

In the event of a successful experiment on humans the Leo-Lot ray will allow us to move beyond the random flare method, which will open up a broad vista of possibilities in the field of incarnational retrospection and guarantee good penetration depth.

Our method allows us to run a session of simultaneous immersion into the subject’s pre-pause zone for both the subject and the experimenter.

In light of the above, we request that you present us with the following correctees from House of Correction No. 3578 (‘Harmony’) for voluntary participation in our first experiment with the directed Leo-Lot ray:

P.S. Poor Lot is very stressed about the experiment. I played him at wonder-chess. He refused a head start, lost, and heaped abuse on me. We were about to fall out. I had to offer a
rematch
and lose on purpose.

Sometimes Lot behaves like a child.