The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (10 page)

Finally Cooper gets a word in edgewise. “With all due respect, Doctors, talking’s exactly the wrong way to go about this. Let’s get Gabby inside a bear. Then she’ll get it.”

I’m crawling into the suspended suit that will give me control of Funicello. The entrance to the suit is, of course, the ass. I have to goatse my way in. Lovely.

It’s dark in there, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel: the neck-hole through which I’ll stick my head.

The suit, still suspended on wires—couldn’t they have lowered it to make getting in easier?—sways gently as I earthworm forward. On the way, I feel metal rivets, like the ones studding my unitard, embedded in the suit. “Am I supposed to line up the studs on my outfit with the ones in the suit or something?” I yell.

No answer. Cooper had told me that no one would speak to me once I entered the suit, but I thought I’d try. How am I supposed to figure out what to do if no one tells me?

I slip my arms into the forelegs and my legs into the hindlegs. I was sure I was going to be too slight to be able to operate this monster, but actually I fit pretty well; it conforms surprisingly snugly to my petite person.

I thrust my head through the neck. Cooper is there waiting for me, austere and erect, holding aloft the panda helmet, one half in each hand. He looks like Joan of Arc’s squire standing at the ready to help her don her armor. Of course, that makes me Joan of Arc in this conceit, which is kind of how I feel: heroic, but a little looney too.

If the idea of being fastened into a metal helmet à la The Man in
the Iron Mask sounds claustrophobic to you, let me make it worse. The tongue sleeve makes me feel like I’m being intubated. The nose tubes, that I have to snort like a coke-fiend as Cooper feeds them up each nostril, feel like they’re touching my frontal lobes by the time they’re all the way in.

Cooper fastens the helmet around my head, screw by screw; slowly my world fades to black. Even after several minutes in the helmet I can’t see a thing. My eyes must have adjusted by now, but there is just no light in here to strike my retinas. It’s vacuum-of-space quiet in here too. All I can do is breathe and wait.

The panda musk.

I smell it now (with my human nose). It’s still got a sharp, umami tang, but it’s not as overwhelming as it was before. I take it in breath by breath, and it modulates from being obnoxious, to being interesting, to just being. Soon it’s the new normal.

They activate the suit. No vision yet, no sound, no cybernetically enhanced smell or taste: just feeling. The suit merges with my body, becomes one with my idea of myself. I am huge now, heavy, and much, much stronger. I can sense a great reserve of strength in my limbs and jaws, just waiting for me to order it around. My head is gigantic. My hands are monstrous paws, and they have panda thumbs, which I know exactly how to use.

They must be activating the suit in stages, I realize. The first stage was just for me to get a feel for this body, grow accustomed to its power, its gravitas. The second stage is to synchronize the suit with the
field robot I’ll be controlling, so that I begin to operate it from the same position it is in now.

The suit starts to move. I’m just along for the ride. I try to stop the suit’s movements just to see if I can, strain against the moving limbs. I fail.

I’m now curled up on the ground. I can feel grass tickling my belly. My head is resting on my arms. It seems that my first job as a bear will be to wake up.

My ears come online. I hear birdsong and wind, the rustle of bamboo gently swaying like wooden windchimes.

Now my virtual eyes open, slowly, sleepily. The first thing I see is my nose: white fur, black tip. Beyond it I see my foreleg, where my nose is tucked. The fur feels coarse against my snout.

I experiment with lifting my head; it is exactly as easy as lifting my human head. I didn’t feel or hear any actuators or servos helping me. It’s all just me. I’m a bear, I’m in a clearing, and I see a bamboo forest before me.

My stomach itches. Before I know what I am doing, I get up on all fours, then lean back and fall on my well-padded bear-fanny. I don’t have to think about balance; my body knows what to do. And so, still scanning the area, I lazily scratch my belly.

There is no difference between satisfying a virtual itch and a real one. Both feel wonderful.

This whole experience feels wonderful. This is amazing. I think I understand now how all-encompassing this virtual reality can be. I
sit scratching and taking in my surroundings and marveling at how uncanny this all is. It really feels like I’m a panda.

But I’m wrong. I have no idea what it means to be a panda. Not yet.

Not until they activate the nose.

Early humans had a much better sense of smell and taste than we do today. Studies have shown that, depending on the individual, somewhere between 40% to 70% of the genes devoted to those senses are inactive in modern homo sapiens.

While those with a mere 40% of their olfactory genes deactivated might make excellent sommeliers, those with 70% get along just fine. “We don’t need acute olfaction and gustation to detect traces of poison or putrefaction the way our ancestors did,” says Dr. Natalie Borelli, a Cal Tech professor of biocybernetics and director of Good Taste, a federally-funded program trying to create a prosthetic human tongue that allows users to both taste and speak. “We don’t need to sniff out our food, or detect camouflaged predators. For us, there are very few situations in which smell is a matter of life and death.”

But for the panda, smell serves as the organizing principle for life. Sight just tells the bears what’s in front of them at the moment—and for the panda, it doesn’t even do that very well. Pandas have relatively weak eyesight, and even if they could see better, most of the time they’d be staring at the same informationless wall of bamboo just inches from their snouts. Hearing gives them more range than sight,
but is similarly limited to the here and now.

Smell, however, tells the history of their territory reaching back months. Sometimes you will see a panda approach a tree or a large rock and seem to snarl at it. But that lip-curling, called the “flehmen response,” actually exposes its vomeronasal organ, which allows it to detect the pheromones of other pandas. Those pheromones tell it what pandas have been in the area, how recently, their genders, how big they are—vitally important if you’re weighing your chances in a fight for a mate—and how close females are to estrus.

That last bit is especially important. Sows are in estrus for a bedevilingly short time, sometime for only a single day of the year. But thanks to his vomeronasal organ, a panda boar knows when that all-important day will be. A boar will enjoy most of mating season not by mating, but by mellowing out to estrogen-drenched sow-pee, growing accustomed to the pleasures of its one-of-a-kind bouquet, recognizing it as friendly and desirable, and having their testicles triple in size through a process called “spermatogenesis.”

This is a key aspect to how pandas mate in the wild, a lesson humans were slow to learn when they tried to mate captive bears. Without this long, leisurely process of familiarization, a boar is more likely to maul a sow than mate with her: which, unfortunately, has led to the maiming or death of more than a few eligible she-bears in captivity, sometimes in front of a horrified zoo-going crowd.

For the most part, pandas are solitary creatures. There is no term of venery for a group of pandas. We could default to the generic terms
for groups of bears: a “sleuth” or a “sloth.” We could take one of the adhoc suggestions from the Internet: a “cuddle,” an “ascension,” a “contrast,” or my favorite, a “monium” of pandas. But the fact is there isn’t much need to speak of pandas in groups, since they spend almost all of their time alone.

There are two exceptions. One is when a mother is tending to a newborn cub. Even then, however, you wouldn’t speak of a group of pandas, since the mother usually gives birth to a pair of cubs but tends to only one, leaving the other to die. Mother and cub will go their separate ways once the cub can fend for itself.

The other exception, however, is that fateful day when a sow is ready to mate. Then it can truly be said that pandas gather. Boars will contend with each other—usually through demonstrations of strength rather than battles to the death—for the right to conceive.

This is a panda behavior that has become increasingly rare in the wild, since panda numbers have dwindled so dangerously low. But its resurrection may hold the key to a true resurgence of the population.

For you see, while the victor gets the sow, the losers get the consolation prize of watching the winner’s happy ending play out before them. It is in this fashion that younger, less-experienced boars are taught the ins and outs (ahem) of mating.

Biologists have tried to use videos of pandas having sex to mimic this effect for captive pandas. But humans found panda porn much more interesting than pandas ever did. There’s no substitute for the live show. A panda can’t trust anything it can’t smell.

But if the scents are right and the sounds are right, would-be suitors will find themselves a nice vantage point and spy on the mating couple. Yet another distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom collapses: we are not the only animals who voyeur.

Perhaps the best term for a group of pandas is an “exhibition.”

I inhale the world in a way no human ever could. Scarves of scent, of all aromatic “colors,” ride the wind, wending their way from all over the bamboo forest into my nose. When I open my mouth, even more smells rush in. I respire, and in comes all Creation.

But this is my first minute as a panda; I don’t know how to differentiate between particular odors. I can tell flora from fauna, I can smell the sweet rot of dead plants, the thiol-thick stench of animals decomposing. But I lack the lexicon of fragrances to link each hyper-distinct scent with the real-world object that generates it.

All I know is I smell a lot of death. I’m stunned at how pervasive it is, how relentless. Pandas are often portrayed as peaceful and contemplative, but with all the decay that must unstoppably flood their noses every waking second of their lives, it would be impossible for a panda to be a Buddhist. It inhales suffering every second of its life. Were I a panda full-time, I’d spend my days raging against heaven for its indefatigable cruelty.

The strongest non-rot odor is the musk of other pandas. That I find, to my surprise, I quite enjoy. Now I know why, back at APM
headquarters, they go to the trouble of dousing the suits with that noxious, bestial cologne. That musk is my lighthouse, my Rosetta Stone. That’s how I will know Ken Cooper.

Or rather, that’s how I will know Avalon, the robot-bear he’s jockeying. There are at least four boars in the area, but only one musk smells like his. All I have to do is wait. Cooper will find me.

But so will the other bears. And that frightens me. I don’t trust other bears. I don’t trust anything. All this death. What I want to do is head into the forest of bamboo and sit quietly and hide, and maybe eat.

Oh God, yes, please, I need food. I’m starving.

Basically, I’m paranoid and famished. If you want to know what it’s like to be a panda on the cheap, get high by yourself, and fill your fridge with nothing but bamboo shoots to snack on. Oh, and kill some mice and leave them to rot in their traps.