Migrations, Volume I : Don't Forget to Breathe

Bunnu sat before the Outlander upon a cushion in the dim light. He could feel the warmth of the oil stove on his lower back, as he lifted his shirt. A single candle flickered behind the head of Rakesh-7 like a halo, immersing his face in shadow, as he settled back in the armchair and blew out a cloud of vanilla tobacco, leaving Bunnu with the distinct impression that he had somehow come to be immersed in a kind of field of particles undergoing incredible shifts in energy. All the light had come to be absorbed into darkened corners of the attic, leaving only Bunnu and the silhouette of Rakesh-7 to float aimlessly in a soft band of luminescence. Amidst the gusts of the Karakaze buzzed an absurd and inaccurate approximation of the Outlander’s voice. Bunnu couldn’t seem to escape the feeling that this voice was particularly odd. So odd, in fact, that he couldn’t be sure it was truly the Outlander speaking. And yet he still felt compelled to listen. He rocked back and forth on the cushion, as the silhouette in the armchair remained still, watching him. And it was then that Bunnu realized that not only was this silhouette not talking, but it wasn’t Rakesh-7.

  It sat and it watched him silently as a voice radiating from nowhere in particular, seemingly wrapped in the winds of the Karakaze, went on in drawn-out tones: “Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.

  “Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.

  “And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.

  “The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.

  “As the Damsel fly-fishing lure is, in fact, a dummy, and thus, unable to communicate with the queen’s subjects on its own, a remote access console is used by the Melic shamans to generate vibrations from a device concealed beneath the dummy’s wings. This device has the capability to create sound waves almost indistinguishable from the scented communiqués of a genuine queen to her subjects. The sound waves permeate through the hive, as though an aromatic announcement from the Queen. Through this process, the Melic can use the power of the throne to control the migration patterns of the Mole flies, as well as affect necessary booms and bottlenecks in their populations.

  “These patterns and fluctuations in Mole Fly populations serve as a long-term coded communiqué, in and of itself: a years-long transmission of code from the Melic papacy to its sleeper cell operatives living among the Gautama and the Morellans. These encoded messages typically take decades to decipher and often provide instructions to the insurgency regarding the objectives, details, and timing of their upcoming covert operations. These population trends, thus, serve ends external to the Mole Flies' perceptions…or faculties of reason.”

  The candle dimmed and the Karakaze subsided.

  The Way of Things