Dave The Penguin (8 page)

Dave stood there motionless,
his beak wide open.

Humans were very odd things,
they seemed quite reasonable, responsible, mature and ‘OK’
individually, but when they got into a group they started to behave
quite differently, childish, immature, mad, and it got worse the
larger the group got. This group seemed to be behaving like a young
teenager, doing stupid mindless things.

Yet the group operated in slow
time compared to how an individual would act and respond, oblivious
to responsibility and the surroundings, and then dashing back
inside to its gadgets.

What,
thought Dave,
would they be like if there were thousands of them?
Dave shuddered at the thought -
a baby? Plants in a
greenhouse
?

After several moments of
trying to get some sort of hold on reality, another question came
into his mind.
How had they
not seen him?
It was as if he was
invisible. It was as if he were a ghost.

These were very strange people,
and he was now unsure if he actually wanted their help now.

Dave looked sideways. To his
right there was a round cage; it was about the same height as him,
with a lid on it and it had a black plastic bag inside.

Dave was wary of black bags; he
had heard a lot of stories about penguins being taken away in them.
But this one smelt very interesting, a sort of ‘foody’ sort of
smell.

He carefully waddled over to it
and stuck his head under the lid. It smelt good inside. He tried to
climb up the side of the cage to get in but it toppled backwards
and he fell in as it fell over. In so doing so hit his head on the
lid, and passed out.

He woke up with his head
in a newspaper, he pulled himself back out of the waste bin, and
the newspaper came out with him. He looked down at it sprawled in
front of him. He read the writing on the front. It was named
‘
The Sun
’.

He read the front page, which
seemed to be a list of problems and things to get you worried
about, arguments, and important things that were going on in the
world with famous people’s personal problems. He turned it over and
on the back there were more people fighting, in teams, in reds and
blues, and their personal problems too, and people called ‘fans’
who also fought each other.

Knowledge kept coming into
Dave’s head from some collective place, about what it all meant,
what was going on, on lots of different levels. Dave hadn’t even
realised he could now read. It all made sense, but only in one way.
He flipped the paper over again, and turned to the third page.

These people were clearly also
very interested in biology.

He tried to process what he was
seeing. The words at the top said ‘Hot Chick’. Below them was a
naked human female, not a bird at all, and she was about to eat a
long piece of coloured ice on a stick.

She didn’t look hot at all -
even Dave could tell that she was obviously very cold.

His head was starting to ache a
bit now from all the information coming in. He flicked through the
other pages reading the articles on politics, and who was saying
what about what other people had said on what shows. Information on
what people had done wrong, and where they may be on holiday now.
What countries were saying what about each other, and why they were
sending their people to visit others in things called tanks.

It all seemed very negative,
there didn’t seem to be anything nice or happy or positive at
all.

Then he arrived at the
crossword page. Dave liked puzzles.

His mind was working so fast
now that he could pull in all sorts of knowledge. He looked at the
first few questions, and the answers came to him. They seemed
remarkably easy, even for a penguin.

The first answer he saw
was the word ‘Band’ – the clue was “As in, Big, should be, and
lastic” the second answer was “Width” which was the answer to “What
you have when you eat fast food”. He looked at the half filled-in
box of squares, and his mind started to play tricks on him; it was
filling in the words for him and connecting them in different ways
and meanings. BandWidth, Problem, Biological, Data, Field, Genetic,
Conflict, Transfer, DNA, Broadband, and
Twin Peaks
.

It was almost as if he were
trying to tell himself something, opening his mind - everything
suddenly becoming obvious, clear from the connection.

His head really hurt now
though, his face felt cold and there was a point in the middle of
his head that felt like he had brain freeze from eating snow. It
was at one single point in his head.

The top of his skull ached in
one spot too, like someone was continually pouring ice water down
onto it in the centre, or there was a cold iron bar, point down,
resting on it.

He was processing too much, too
fast for his brain; there was too much information coming in and
out, linking things together in his mind. It was all too much for
his mind to deal with in one go. Worryingly, the something that was
giving him all this information that he wanted, didn’t seem to
realise that.

Like the men with their buckets
of iced water, it was too much all at once to cope with. He only
had so much BandWidth.

He looked down at the page
again, he had solved all the clues now, all but the last one, which
was ‘Old big ship wot sank’.

Images and thoughts and
connections were all firing in his head at once. His mind was
working so hard now that his brain started doing strange things. He
flicked back through the pages to the front again, images and words
leaping out at him; it all made so much sense, but in a mad muddled
sort of way.

He could see what was
going wrong, he could see and understand everything, overlapping
combined thoughts flowing through his head. He made it back to Page
3, his eyes and mind darting from one thing to another,
‘
Titanic
’ went through his mind.

He felt giddy and fell forwards
face down into the newspaper. Before he lost consciousness the last
things to come into his mind were a couple of icebergs.

He woke up still face
down, groaning, feeling exhausted and awful. There were lots of
flashing lights going on around him, there were also lots of people
taking pictures and videos of him.

He
was then placed carefully onto an open net, which
ironically was also where most of the photos and videos would end
up in a few hours, and then ‘go viral’ a few hours after
that.

Dave
was going to be famous, but not in a good way.

They put him in a box,
then on a plane and they took him back to where he had come
from.

A few days later, all the
excitement had died down, and he was settled back in the colony
again, on his home patch.

For days,
h
e tried to explain what he had seen to
the rest of the penguins. He tried to describe the ‘home of the jet
ski people’, and the ‘inside’ places where they lived,
everything.

But the penguins couldn’t see
what he was trying to describe, they couldn’t visualise it all,
they had no point of reference. He had nothing to describe it to in
relation to, or with anything they knew of.

He tried drawing pictures in
the snow, but he wasn’t very good at drawing, and they didn’t seem
to mean anything to any of them.

Eventually even the ones that
believed him just wandered off, it was almost as if the whole idea
had gone from their heads, been moved out for some reason, replaced
by more interesting things.

He just couldn’t get through to
them, or make them see, or perhaps they didn’t care.

Until they themselves had seen
it, perceived it, understood, then it all meant nothing.

As far as they were
concerned it was all in Dave’s mind, all in his dreams, and it
didn’t
affect them so why did they
care.

But Dave knew different.

It seemed very odd to Dave, why
it all just didn’t mean anything to them.

They had their view of the
world, and what was in it, and that was that. It was the way that
some penguins just didn’t even want to know, they had their own
lives and weren’t even interested.

Unless it directly affected
them or threatened or benefited them, they didn’t care.

Some couldn’t believe it all or
didn’t allow themselves to, or were prevented from doing so, by
what they had been told to believe already. Yet some did believe
him but just got on with things anyway and then forgot. It was a
strange situation, it didn’t make much sense to Dave.

He wanted to get them to go
south with him and see. To follow his trail and see what he saw,
and then they would understand, believe him and make sense of what
he was trying to explain to them, and then they could do something
about it.

But nobody was interested,
nobody seemed to care that much, it wasn’t their problem, and they
didn’t need to know.

They thought they were fine as
they were, but Dave knew different.

His brain device was still
processing things for his mind, and it still ached, but it seemed
to be going over old ground now, looping through the same concepts
and ideas, but without the same immediate ‘in the now’ productive
flowing two-way energy.

However when he closed
his eyes he could immediately see a big black sign in front of him
in the dark, a few feet in front of his face. It was in high
definition and widescreen with white letters on it, it said
‘
EMPTY THE
ATTIC’
.

Dave didn’t know what an attic
was but he understood what it meant, or was trying to say.

He had to be more careful of
himself, and his brain, and how he was using it.

Like his body, his brain could
only do so much, and he had to get it into habits, be organised
with his thoughts, interpret what was coming in, what he thought
about, focused on, and manage his mind and what it was doing.

He remembered one of those
management audio tapes he had heard some months ago, about having
SMART objectives, that was it.

He had to
have
…

S
pecific
M
anageable
A
chievable
R
ealistic and
T
ime bounded jobs to
do in his head.

Unfortunately the collective
mind thing had no clue whatsoever about SMART objectives, at all,
or even data bandwidth, or even what a penguin was for that
matter.

Which was a little
worrying.

Especially if you were dealing
with things and thoughts ‘in the now’, live processing as it were,
trying at the same time to work out the context of what it was
trying to get across, what the hell it was on about, and work out
what needed to happen.

All at the same time.

Yet more importantly -
WHY HIM?? It didn’t seem to have his interests and needs at heart -
only its own. It didn’t seem to care much for him either, only so
far as his mind was working, a bit like a slave.

He put his cleaned shades on,
and his headphones, and waddled off towards the sea - in the right
direction this time.

He was going to tsunami
and jet-spray out his
mental attic, sun
bleach his brain, clear his head, empty his mind, and do a bit of
surfing and fishing to get himself fit at the same time.

It was a bloke thing.

Dave wasn’t a religious
penguin.

In fact he didn’t believe in
the penguin ‘god’ at all, or at least in any penguin ‘god’ that
religions seem to try to describe or define.

To Dave they all just didn’t
make sense, add up, or equate and stand up to any form of logic at
all.

Of course not having any
evidence or a detailed explanation of what ‘god’ actually was came
as a bit of a stumbling block for penguin religions as well.

As did all the bad and unjust
things that went on in the real world that ‘god’ was supposed to be
in charge of, or looking after; things that all appeared to be
getting worse, not better.

There weren’t any logical
explanations from religions as to why it was all going so badly
wrong, and why it was all frankly a bit rubbish, compared to how it
used to be.

Dave had done quite a bit of
reading on the subject of religion, in books, and on the Internet,
and like most intellectually structured created thinking forms,
they always seemed to end up with the problem of the ‘elephant in
the room’ again.

That elephant of course, as in
physics, was that uncomfortably large awkward problem that wouldn’t
go away.

One that required some sort of
faith, a leap of logic, or a mental bridge, for the large gap in
the plausibility to work, when you clearly couldn’t join up all the
dots, as half the numbers you had been given were missing.

Dave had also studied
philosophy, psychology, physics, and a couple of other things
beginning with ‘p’, and they all ended up not being able to come up
with a big answer, the final solution, the ultimate picture. That
of what was really there, what it all meant, who was in charge,
what was for, and why we existed.

Which should all be fairly
simple really, and probably not 42.

Even music, which had a set
language and had evolved over time, seemed to be inspired from
somewhere else, but music didn’t have the answers either. But it
was nice.