Dave The Penguin (2 page)

Then she started to cry. A lot.

“It’s no good” said Dave “you can’t try and
invoke an emotional response in me, I am an immovable male
object.”

“Please, please…” she sobbed, “I love you
Dave, I don’t want this to happen.”

The young version of his wife walked up to
them, and then carried on walking past, and completely ignored
them. His wife suddenly looked very confused, and turned to
Dave.

“But I thought you said….” she started to
ask, but he raised his wing to stop her from saying anything
else.

“It’s OK,” he said “we go through this whole
process every twenty years, it’s fine. I love you just the way you
are, it’s perfectly OK. I love you as you were, and I will always
love you. We are both perfectly happy; it is just something else
that is trying to invoke change.”

Then in that instant a preprogramed
subroutine kicked in, and she changed to look just as she had
twenty years ago, and so did Dave, although in his mind he still
looked the same.

He still had the same amazing 45kg of toned
physique, and the same good looks as he always had.

After all it was hard to re-sculpt
perfection.

She was still sobbing slightly but was
recovering well, the full enormity of what was going on gradually
sinking in. After a while their memories would go back twenty years
again to when they first met, which in Dave’s case didn’t take very
long for the data files to be deleted and reset.

Their programs would start again and they
would be happy, with no memory of the last twenty years. Several
moments later she turned to him and smiled, slightly
disorientated.

“Hello,” she said “what’s your name?”

“It’s Dave” said Dave.

“Dave…” she repeated “That’s a nice
name.”

Suddenly Dave had a weird feeling, it was as
if he had been here before.

A sort of ‘Dave-ja-vu’, moment.

Then it was gone.

“Here,” said Dave “you can have this egg,
it’s just a ceramic one with a small nuclear powered heater inside,
we use it to keep our feet warm. I am just off fishing with the
lads, I will be back in a few months…” and with that he waddled off
to the sea, leaving his wife happy again for the next twenty
years.

Well that was the idea anyway.

After all, what more could you want in
life?

Even though he was a penguin,
Dave knew that his body was just a programmable biological
device.

It was fairly obvious really
when you thought about it, which of course he did, quite a lot of
the time.

After all, out here on the ice,
what else was there to do, especially if you were a smart and
inquisitive penguin?

Which of course he was.

Out here on the ice plateau
everything was very simple, black and white as it were, just
penguins and ice, so things became obvious without all the other
clutter and complications that existed elsewhere.

His wife had been away
for a few weeks now, so he had plenty of time to stand quietly, to
ponder on the bigger questions, to just contemplate things, well of
what few things there were around anyway.

For example, he knew that
he knew about things now that he didn’t know when he was a chick,
and he had seen and done many things that he hadn’t done
then.

He could remember them;
remembered doing them, seeing things, and working things out. So
somehow all that information, all that knowing, all that
‘experience’, had all got into him, or more to the point into his
mind, somehow.

Even though no one had actually
told him anything, no one had explained anything, and he hadn’t
read anything, somehow he just ‘knew’.

Equally when he was a chick, he
knew things that he didn’t know when he was an egg. He could hardly
remember anything from when he was an egg.

Dave looked down at his feet at
the new egg he was standing over at the moment. He also remembered
that as a chick he could ‘do’ a lot more things than he could do as
an egg; equally he could understand things a lot better, and he was
much more interesting in a ‘doing and moving around’ sort of
way.

Yet nobody seemed to be
interested or bothered or concerned as to how that change had
happened; that growing from practically nothing into something that
knew how to peck, waddle, slide, eat fish, and swim. All without
the help or guidance of say a penguin manual, or training lessons,
or school. So it was obvious to Dave that everything was built up
from programs, which you just picked up, from somewhere, that
somehow got into your head.

It was as if right from
the start you were tuned into some penguin radio at a specific
frequency, with all the knowing stuff in there
like a story, that told your evolving mind how to build a
penguin. All the instructions and knowledge were there to download
just like on Penguintube, you just had to use the right resonating
search term, and choose the most popular or highly rated
instruction video, that didn’t leave you with too many spare screws
and parts left over at the end.

What wasn’t obvious to Dave
though, was how it all got there, and where it all came from. All
that ‘knowing’ stuff; all that ‘how’ and ‘what’ you should be type
of information.

He knew it didn’t all come from
penguin DNA, that 1.5 gigabytes of data mostly went into describing
what a penguin should be; its physicality, shape, nature, colours,
body parts and all that stuff. You could barely define a robot
penguin with just that. Perhaps it was a sort of booting program,
that loaded everything else up, from somewhere, linked to other
things that worked out a way forward, figured out what worked and
what didn’t, that sort of thing.

Dave was very proud of
his DNA, he had spent a long time working on it, refining it to the
level of perfection that it was today. But it didn’t have anything
in there about how to recognise fish types, swim after them and
catch them, how to dive, or how to walk with a waddle.

No
body had even mentioned fish when he was a chick,, and he
hadn’t seen any films with them in either. But as soon as he got
into the water and saw some, he knew what they were, and what to
do; it was all instinct whatever that was, and wherever it came
from. He already knew which ones were good to eat, and how to catch
them.

He even knew which ones would
try to eat him, and ones he had to swim away from, like the ones
with big teeth, and whiskers, and black flippers that could come
out of the sea to get you.

Or the dreaded giant black and
white fish, with the big tall fin that had with glossy skin and
wide mouth and sharp teeth and sneezed a lot.

He hated those type of fish,
they made him very ‘nervous’.

It was also a mystery as to how
his cells knew what they had to do; they all had the same DNA, even
though 95% of it was ‘junk’ as far as he was concerned, but that
seemed a bit odd considering how amazingly efficient he was, so
what all that extra ‘junk’ was all used for was a mystery.

Somehow his cells knew what
function they had, where they had to be and what they had to do in
different parts. Who had told them all of that? Where had that
information come from, all that knowing stuff, and what was right
and what was wrong?

It was like the junk DNA
was some sort of bootstrap program that downloaded all the
information it needed from a cloud drive somewhere, which itself
evolved over time both from his perspective and from the collective
penguin mind, which meant that part of him was part of it,
evolutionarily speaking. Dave looked at his body again.
Whatever it was, was pretty smart,
and with a good eye for style
he
thought.

He knew that basic life forms
like algae used up nearly all their DNA programming on just being
what they were, but then they didn’t need to fish or dance. But the
idea for algae DNA must have come from somewhere originally,
perhaps the planet got the idea from somewhere in a sort of
dream.

He saw a patch of algae
on a rock next to him, he scratched it with his foot and bits of it
fell onto the snow.
There
thought Dave,
that showed it
. It made him feel better; it was good to know there was
always something ‘below’ him in the evolutionary pecking
order.

The trouble now though was that
he had upset the balance, he was forcing it to evolve, in ten
million years it might evolve to be a bigger penguin with teeth,
and ‘get’ him. Worriedly he covered over the patch of algae that
had fallen to the ground with some snow, and hoped nobody had
noticed.

However he also knew that
there
were
things he had actually learnt as he was growing up – things
like shuffling. He had picked that habit up from his Dad, who used
to do it when his Mum shouted at him.

It was a sort of programmed
response, so Dave did the same, especially when he was shouted at.
It was just the thing you did. He also used to arch his back when
he put his feet into very cold water, which was quite a lot of the
time.

He had seen his Dad do that
too, and that is why he did the same. He just copied it, and did it
without thinking now. It like sneezing loudly, he didn’t have to,
it was just what he did. But he wasn’t sure why.

It was a total mystery. All
that stuff had come from somewhere, some strange mysterious, all
knowing thing that he couldn’t see. Even skills that he had like
his unfailing sense of direction, his migratory urge and amazing
sex drive.

That had come from somewhere
too, something that stored things collectively, for everyone,
everything, all in one place. He looked down at the egg again
between his feet and shuffled. He then looked back up into the sky
at the colours swirling and changing high in the sky, almost as if
it were alive.

He had to come up with a
better descriptive term than ‘collective penguin mind’, he
coul
dn’t use terms like ‘hive mind’ or
‘herd mentality’, and as they didn’t fly, ‘flock’ was no good
either. ‘Colony’ sounded too much like ants to him, and it made him
itch every time he thought about it.

Besides penguins sort of
huddled and bunched together, but that didn’t fit either, and it
also didn’t really help describe technically what it was
either.

His brain was starting to hurt
now. This was tough going - so he tried to think of something
else.

He looked up at the
psychedelic lights in the sky and he thought of the
song
Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds
. He then thought of Lucy
from
The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe
; he liked that book series;
it had been one of his favourites until he had lent them to someone
and they hadn’t ever returned them. The trouble was he couldn’t
remember who he had lent it to.

Mind you the films were
never as good as his imagination. The same had happened with
his
Pinocchio
DVD, he liked that film too, especially Jiminy
Cricket, and the Blue Fairy, he wished he had a blue
fairy.

He wondered what had
happened to it, or indeed Pinocchio
himself, perhaps he had been made into a wardrobe, or a
cupboard under the stairs. His mind had lots of things coming in
all together; DNA, Pinocchio as an under stairs cupboard, Lucy, the
Blue Fairy, and Scarlet Johannsson.

He was now busy building
up a synchronistic mind map in his head; you know one of those
things with thought bubbles and lines connecting them.

He put them all down in
some structure until he was happy with it, with him in the centre.
Now, in his mind, he started drawing pictures in the Scarlet
Johannsson bubble, and moved it closer to the middle, and threw a
bucket of iced water over the
Pinocchio
one.

Concentrate!
Dave thought,
Concentrate!

Focus on the
now, don’t let your mind wander
!

But while he was on the
subject, he remembered that he had been worried about his sex drive
earlier in the year.

It had been such a long time
since he had seen his wife, and he had completely forgotten how he
was supposed to feel. It had become a sort of distant memory now, a
vague idea. It had worried him, he had even taken to watching some
natural history documentaries, to sort of get himself ‘back in the
mood’ and that type of thing, but it hadn’t worked.

It was difficult to show love
in a documentary, and it wasn’t something he could talk to his
mates about. He had tried that once and it was just met with weird
looks and uncomfortable coughing.

He had worried that he was
eating the wrong sort of fish, or not getting enough exercise, but
a quick look at his amazing physique reassured him that it was
certainly not any of these things.

He had told himself that it
must have been that he had just forgotten the program in his head,
or it was very slow to be loaded, nothing to do with him at all;
just bad or inefficient programming, or slow functionality.

So he had been determined that
when she came back that she wouldn’t get the wrong idea; that she
wouldn’t think he was going ‘off’ her and not loving her any more,
that he was still fit and healthy and virile. That he was still a
fully functioning, switched on, real ‘bloke’ type of penguin.

It had taken her somewhat by
surprise.

He looked down at the egg
again.