Barry set down his quill with deliberate care. The oil lamp beside him flickered its golden light, pooling across the cluttered desk, bathing the pages of his notes in a warm, drowsy glow. He leaned back, his joints stiff from hours hunched in concentration.
He’d worked through the night. Again.
Before him lay sketches and calculations, anatomical renderings, and fragments of translated data, all centered on one improbable creature. Extinct since the last ice age, thousands of summers ago. Little understood and often ridiculed.
Slugadsimilis.
A name spoken with derision in the Cluster Chamber. His brothers smirked when they said it, if they mentioned it at all. To them, the creature was absurd, an evolutionary joke. A being with soft, moist skin and a sluggish gait, barely coming up to the knee at their full height. Larger than a slug, yes, but to Barry’s brothers, in every other way, just as unimpressive.
Ever since he started studying the creature, his colleagues mocked him in front of the Queen. He would stand his ground, but his position in the Cluster Chamber would be damaged unless he could come up with an argument strong enough to intrigue the Queen..
His brothers saw only the creature's fragility. Its short, stiff limbs, its ponderous movement, its poor eyesight. Forward-facing eyes, Barry pointed out, which is a trait often associated with depth perception and tool use. But his colleagues dismissed even that. The eyes were too small, too simple. The limbs are too rigid. The hips are too wide for hopping, and the jaw is too weak for combat or predation.
"A scavenger at best," they’d said. “And a stupid one.”
But Barry saw what they would not. What they refused to.
The head. That oversized, unwieldy head. In proportion to its body, the cranial cavity was vast. Eerily close in volume to their own. And that, Barry believed, was no accident of nature.
For months, he’d studied their remains. Their above-ground structures were built in sprawling, ordered clusters. Colonies. Not random burrows, not nests. Colonies. And between colonies, there were paths. Trails for transport, wide and intentional, visible even now from the air. Migration routes, he proposed. Constructed, maintained. But his colleagues pointed to termites doing the same thing.
Barry countered that an unintelligent slugad similis could not have survived in such numbers without tooth or claw, flight or armor. But it did. This must mean intellect. Surviving with cooperation. With agriculture, perhaps.
This conjecture only made him a target for derision.
“Just because it’s ugly and unlikely,” His brothers said, “doesn’t make it intelligent. It thrived because it faced no competition. When it lived, birds were smaller, softer, and more easily outmaneuvered. It was a docile world that made space for slugadsimilis.”
But Barry could not accept this.
He turned back toward his notes, the lamplight still steady. He traced the lines of his reasoning one more time, silently. It convinced him that he can’t stop now.
No claws. No speed. No weapons.
And yet. Community. Shelter. More than survival. It thrived
There must be something more. And perhaps the little silver disk he found would have the answers.
But Barry was weary after trying to decode the dots on Slugadisimilis ’ silver disk all night. Translating the dots into an understandable buzz-communication was still beyond him. He was sure there must be a pattern, but buzzing the dots sounded like the ravings of a mad-drone.
He picked it up, then put it down. Rubbed his forelegs together. His six green legs were thick as tree trunks, and his body and legs were armored like a tank. He no longer bore the yellow and black stripes of a soldier. His compound eyes were as big as a television screen. His antennae and powerful mandibles completed the rest of his face.
Barry stretched his wings, which were beautiful with an intricate red and green pattern over them, but they were for display and dance only. His last metamorphosis gave him his conscious intelligence, but he was now much too big to fly. He missed flying, but truly appreciating flying needed an intellect. Achieving an intellect meant he was too big to fly. This paradox brought an ironic smile to Barry's antennae.
Light was beginning to show at the entrance to his hole. He heard the wings of the first reconnaissance flight beat the early morning air and fly off into the distance. He wondered what damage the birds wrought overnight. As a soldier, he'd flown these early morning flights. His ability to do this task brought him to the attention of his Queen. It led to him receiving the royal nectar that allowed him to make the final metamorphosis to conscious intelligence. Barry marveled that he'd progressed from one of the millions of unfertilized male eggs, which hatch each year, to one of the half a dozen drones in his colony and one of the biggest and most intelligent animals ever to inhabit the planet.
Queen Bee was bigger and more intelligent than the drones. The chance of becoming a queen from a fertilized female egg was even smaller. There is only one Queen, and she has been able to rule for over 120 years.
It was dawn already. Again, he'd worked too long on slugadsimilis. He and five other drones would be attending to his Queen in an hour. The Queen favoured drones that debated well, but Barry would be dancing in the dark. Too tied to put up a good argument for the slugad similis' intelligence, even if he knew one.
The most significant counterargument was that slugadsimilises’ large head was present in all the creatures. His brothers joyfully pointed out that not all the millions of creatures could be intelligent. Together in one colony, millions of intelligent minds would have been more chaotic than anyone could contemplate. Five other drones and the Queen in a colony were enough. More than enough.
Barry put out the light and tucked his legs up under him to get some sleep. He would dance in the Cluster Chamber today. This was all he could do to entertain Queen Bee enough for her to mate with him.
Before putting his head down, he couldn't resist looking at the symbols he'd discerned from the side of the disk without dots. They must mean something, he thought sleepily, putting his head down. There was no way of knowing that slugadsimilis would have read these symbols as “Bruce Springsteen–‘Born in the U.S.A.’”