Dave The Penguin (3 page)

But it didn’t say anything, nor
did it shake its head disapprovingly, but then it didn’t have
to.

Dave wondered if it was going
to be a boy or a girl penguin. If it was a boy he could take it on
fishing trips and teach it things. He tried to think of a name for
it, he thought for a while, ‘Dave’ seemed like a good choice.

Penguins didn’t have surnames;
they didn’t need them, besides they were very pretentious, like
‘Livingstone’. Then again if it was going to be a girl then he
would have to think of something else, he could almost visualise
her looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to do something,
make a decision, just like her mother did.

Girl penguins
seemed to know a lot more than boy penguins
, he thought,
they
seemed to know the game from day one, like they were pre-programmed
to know things in a way that boy penguins weren’t. It isn’t very
fair
, thought Dave.

Then again that was the way it
was, the way it had to be, and who said life and nature had to be
fair?

He decided to wait and see what
happened and worry about it later.

Yes that was probably best.

Dave wondered if he himself had
any control over the programming that went into what was going on
inside the egg. Could he shape it, affect it in some way, influence
it?

If it was all one big overall
program that controlled everything, one giant operating system,
could he change things, direct things, shape what was decided,
dictate how everything turned out? Or was it all predetermined, set
in place, fate, governed by set rules, and there was nothing you
could do about it, and it would all be what it would be?

But that didn’t seem right, the
thought of everything being predetermined didn’t seem correct. If
that was the case, anything he did wouldn’t make any difference,
and what would be the point of that?

He may as well not be there at
all or just be a rock. What point would there be in him being there
at all? What was his purpose? If he couldn’t change things or
influence things, there would be no point in anything.

Whatever it was that had
created everything could have just made everything as it would have
been at the end of things, as they say on his favourite cook shows
– “Here is one I prepared earlier…”

He looked down at his feet and
shuffled a little on the ice to keep his feet warm.

Somehow though he felt involved
in a process, part of a larger system - one in balance, in harmony,
synchronised, growing, evolving, or at least that was the idea.

What he did and thought made a
difference; it must do, affecting the overall direction to some
extent, in some conscious way.

Obviously there were winners
and losers in the process, all forming parts of a system that was
there to work something out, to be something, grow, learn, achieve
something; something BIG.

Yet at the same time it was
trying to preserve something, something at the lowest levels, from
the bottom up, otherwise it could have just been created, all
outright in its final form, without the need to grow, adapt, and
evolve. Even if it was very hit and miss.

He shuffled some more, and his
eyes darted back and forth around the gritty snow in front of him.
This was all getting intellectually very deep.

Dave wondered if his other
penguin mates had thought about the same problem, but he suspected
that they didn’t think much at all, about anything, except ice,
snow, fish, light, dark, storms and of course polar bears.

Yet no other penguins could see
things the way he saw them. They couldn’t see things from his
perspective, but then nobody knew what he knew, yet did that matter
anyway? Other penguins knew things he didn’t, and saw the world
differently, that was fine too.

There was no point in trying to
explain his perspective of everything to everyone else, they just
wouldn’t understand, or appreciate it, and they would probably
think he was mad anyway.

It made him worry though. About
everything. Things were just not right, overall, there were a lot
of things that ‘needed sorting out’, ‘resolving’ to stop him
worrying about things. He just didn’t know what they were.

There was that polar bears
thing again, back in his head. He had thought about it again and
now he just couldn’t get it out of his head.

His wife had mentioned it a few
months ago, and it was nagging at him again. Also there was that
thing he had just thought about too, that ‘Why are we here?’ thing,
that was there too in the same way, annoying, irritating, a sort of
itchy mental feeling in his head, like a note out of harmony in the
song in the world, and a pluck on the string in the music of the
universe.

Dave liked the universe. He
would look up at it in the middle of the night, in the harsh cold
pitch blackness when the sun was away - when you could see all the
far off tiny lights in the sky. He liked that time the best; it was
peaceful, it made him feel humble, small, insignificant, and yet
not so, as if he were what it was all there for, and that he was an
important part of it and on some journey within it.

It made him feel like singing
some nights. Well almost.

Dave was good at singing, he
had a great voice, just as did all his mates. He knew it was a
gift, a program that had come from somewhere, and not from his Mum
or Dad that was for sure, but it must have been sent to him by
something that wasn’t him.

Some days he loved to sing out
loud and clear, and even his wife would comment at how loud and
‘nice’ it was.

He could dance too; he had
amazing rhythm. He practised dancing a lot, and had shown his wife
some of his moves, but she had just laughed and fallen on the
floor, but he realised now that she was just jealous.

He wondered how she had learnt
to recognise things that were funny, where the programming had come
from for that, but clearly some programs weren’t perfect, there
were errors here and there. He found lots of things funny, or at
least he used to, especially when he was a chick.

He wondered if some programs
were fixable. What was humour if it wasn’t a program? Just slightly
different with everyone, or was it a sense like smell or taste?

Why were so many things
bothering him? It was a lot for a simple penguin to take in, a lot
to think about all in one go. Also why did he feel so responsible,
with such a need to do something about it all, to sort all the
problems out, and save everyone from polar bears?

He knew nothing of the real
world, how it looked , how it worked, what it all meant, so why did
he had this driving urge to save it, and what was it all to him
anyway? Why did he care?

Dave had memories.

He could remember all of his
past lives, which in fairness were pretty much all the same as this
one.

The same patch of snow, same
glacier, same sea, same sky, same fish, and the same routines.

He could remember everything
that he had seen, the places he had been to, all he had known, all
the experiences he had had, and all of the world he had been
in.

He could also remember all the
other penguins he had met; names, faces and events over thousands
of years. As a result he was now a masterpiece of refined
evolutionary engineering; a honed program of perfection, modified
and developed over thousands of years, to be pretty much the same
as he always was.

With all that knowledge
though came great responsibility - he remembered that phrase from a
film he had once seen. This time around though something different
had occurred, or something had reached a point of change, some
point of criticality, something important. He wondered what it
was.

Dave knew about the collective
penguin mind, combined together with an overall driving force. He
knew about things happening for no apparent reason, things all
changing in one go at the same time for some inexplicable reason,
like everyone deciding to go fishing all at the same moment. Who
had made that choice? He certainly never had, and none of his mates
had ‘fessed up to having come up with the idea on their own, and
yet everyone suddenly started moving at the same time like some
sort of switch being pressed, some collective thought occurring
naturally like some involuntary group decision being made all at
the same time.

It was like some sort of
invisible instant voting system that no one else could actually
see.

Yet, surprisingly,
everything was generally all fine, everything worked OK, as long as
there was nothing wrong, but he had this nagging feeling in the
back of his mind that there was a fundamental problem, something
big, something that was going wrong with the world.

However, perhaps there was
always something wrong, and he was just normally not aware of it,
or bothered enough by it to actually care. He was just a simple
penguin after all, so how could he change anything, what could he
do about it all, and what real difference could he make?

Even if he could, what if he
made the wrong choice, gave the wrong ideas, made the wrong
suggestions to whatever this thing was that did all the
programming, the decision making, the voting? How would it all end
up?

Dave didn’t want that level of
responsibility.

He was not designed for such
big ideas, for big thoughts, on big problems. How could anything
listen to such a small voice, it must know far more than he did
anyway, and in any case how would it benefit him? It had never done
anything for him.

He stood there on the ice
sheet and felt just like a small black dot in a vast expanse of
white, trying to get the thoughts clear in his head. A small bead
of sweat appeared on his brow, trickled along his forehead, along
his beak, and formed a tiny ice crystal at the end.

Two weeks passed.

In the morning of that fateful
day everyone felt it. A change in the information in the air. A
sense of something coming. A feeling. There was clearly a storm on
its way, everyone knew it.

Even though nothing was visibly
different, everyone could sense what was coming; the change in
pressure, the smell on the air, the nervous vibrational
tension.

The clouds in the sky looked
different too; they moved faster and had different shapes.

Everyone started to get
agitated, and it got very noisy, the peace and harmony of the
colony was gone.

Later that morning things
still hadn’t improved, and some penguins had started to huddle
together, and others were heading off to the sea along the defined
paths.

Dave had always thought it odd
that everyone followed the same paths, until he tried being
‘different’ one day, and went ‘of road’, a rebel penguin, and ended
up stuck down in a crevasse for two hours, alone until heads
appeared above from penguins who had followed his new path.

God that had been really
embarrassing.

He tried to concentrate.
Something was definitely wrong with this situation; there was a
‘not right’ feeling in the air - and in his mind.

The sea seemed to be the wrong
place to be heading towards, it wasn’t safe, but he didn’t know
why. A few fights had broken out, and groups were forming, each
competing with each other over what to do, where to stand and who
should stand at the front or the back. Even eggs were starting to
be abandoned as penguins began to wander off on their own; everyone
was trying to work out what to do.

Dave’s head was buzzing.
It felt under pressure, busy, and it ached, as if there was a lot
going on in there.

Dave stood on his own. He
closed his eyes and concentrated.

It was dark… that always
surprised him for some reason.

He concentrated his mind some
more, focused, and allowed the blackness to deepen and his
imagination to live within it, to see where it took him.

He expanded his mind, and tried
to get his head around the whole world, becoming mindful of
everything.

He put himself into the world
perspective, into the collective mind’s eye, and thought big
thoughts - and big thoughts came back.

It was a surprise, both
to him, and the thing that he was trying to get his head and mind
around.

Nothing had ever done
that before, but then you had to know what you were dealing with to
be able to communicate with it, to perceive it, and
then interface with it.

Like
with anything, you can’t see something if you aren’t
looking at it. It also helped if you knew what it was, and how it
thought then you also had a reasonable chance of getting its
attention.

It wasn’t like talking to a
glacier, Dave had tried that, this had something alive as part of
it. Glaciers were different, even though they moved, they weren’t
alive.

Glaciers also just took ages to
say anything, and weren’t interested in him; they were just full of
complaining creaks and groans.

However, what he was
communicating with now wasn’t like a penguin’s mind at all; it was
bleak, cold, harsh, and very ‘big’ and ‘complex’.

It was only communicating
with him now as it needed information, help. It was worried about
something, something coming, a problem. But it couldn’t see, it
couldn’t understand what it was or put it in context with
Dave’s
perception of the
world.

It just knew there was
fear, a threat. It had no real way of being able to describe or
perceive what was happening, like a chick inside a giant egg that
had sensed something.
Fear.

Yet Dave could see, and
understand. He knew what had to happen, and his thoughts, mind, and
knowledge merged with this bigger thing. He worked out what was
being ‘said’ and what was around him, what was coming and what
needed to happen, all at the same time.