Three Cheers and a Tiger ~ Bronze
Christina De La Rocha

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I walk in.

Usually they frown and dismiss me and I close the door and set my sights on the next one. Because you try surviving on a pension these days. You wouldn’t give up either. You’d be “volunteering” for medical trials left, right, center, and up the wazoo (yes, even those). They pay and they’re interesting. A break from routine, a strange drug, or three months of prepared meals and a hilarious exercise regime. Even if you’re just the control, you learn new things and that’s so much better than bingo. And so you keep trying to get yourself enrolled in trials.

This time, as they take me in from behind their clipboards and glasses, I see I have piqued their interest. They will let me be their guinea pig.

“Mr. Pfannkuchen,” one says, “you offer us the chance to see how the elderly brain takes to the technology.”

The other nods. “Yes, perhaps you will dispel our doubts that the aged brain retains the plasticity to adapt to it.”

Snotball and Scuzzface, I name them right then and there, although it’s more that they’re ignorant than nasty. They’re too young for hemorrhoids. They’ve never operated an aged, elderly brain. They have no clue what it can do.

I stay and they drill everything into my head. Literally. It takes some weeks for me to recover. Then they send me home.

“The experiment will begin soon,” Scuzzface says.

“Avoid operating heavy machinery,” Snotball adds. “You might find yourself suddenly disoriented.”

I leave with a drone over me, serenading me with its eight-rotor whine. It’s weird to be tracked like this, like I am a hot Hollywood brat ripe for some sort of insanity that they want shots of to wire off wirelessly to the press.

But, anyway, you don’t still function at my age unless you subscribed early to the use-it-or-lose-it philosophy of life. I still fight the stairs, battle the gym, and go every day for a walk. It helps that I live out in the countryside where walking is more soothing and less crime-ridden than it is in the city. The biggest fear I have here is of horse apples.

So I’m out on a farm road one morning, on one of my usual routes. The path runs between two cornfields with stalks reaching up towards the sky, although not quite as high as my eight-rotor tail, its Wi-Fi device, and whatever else it has packed into its body.

It is a beautiful day so I close my eyes and stretch my arms out to soak in the sun. I listen to what hum of the day I can hear under the drone’s droning; mainly the rustling of stalks in the quickening air. Wanting to be one with it all, I start with the corncobs, all fifty bazillion of them surrounding me on all sides from both sides of the road. I feel them all in my brain, the shape of them and their location in space. I feel their heft, the bumpy curves of their kernels. I feel all the ants crawling upon them, each one with its little legs going dink!-dink!-dink!-dink!-dink! as they travel. I feel the caterpillars boring within each cob (a slow munch… munch… munch…). And then I feel the moles, the mice, and the beetles scuttling upon and skittering within the ground.

I exhale.

I may be making this all up (I can’t really sense where all those corncobs are and all that), but life is grand.

That’s when it hits me. Something vast superimposes itself over the pastoral landscape, adding previously unimaginable dimension.

For starters, now I know everything it is humanly possible to know about Zea mays.

Zea mays var. indentata, I correct myself. Also known as dent corn, directly descended from maize domesticated 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley of southwestern Mexico by the people living there at that time.

I become aware that as it is a hot, dry day, the seven-hundred-and-fifty-two-thousand maize plants around me are all holding their breath. All their stomata are closed, preventing the release of of oxygen into the atmosphere and the uptake of carbon dioxide out of it. (Okay, technically that’s the opposite of breathing, but allow an old man poetic license, for crying out loud.) This prevents the profligate evaporation of water out of the soil, via the pores of the plants.

Five birds bomb in (barn swallows, Hirundo rustica), zooming, swooping, chirping, and hunting like mad acrobats completely at ease in the air. I know their speed, how they maneuver so magnificently with tiny changes to the tilt and shape of their wings, rump, and tail, and the evolving statistics of each individual’s fly-catching success.

I perceive that my familiar farm track follows the course of a small stream perfectly hidden beneath the thick stands of nettles (Urtica dioica subsp. dioica), chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla), dewberries, blackberries, and raspberries (Rubus caesius, Rubus ulmifolius, Rubus fruticosus, and Rubus idaeus) that line the left side of the road. All of these plants are edible and the nettles, in particular, indicate that this frequently disturbed soil is, unsurprisingly, given the frequency with which it is fertilized, rich in the nutrients nitrate and phosphate.

I know then that this farm track/stream has been the dividing line between two properties since this area was first cleared and drained for farming, 400 years ago, and that pipes sunk under the fields continue this drainage from several topographic depressions.

Previously, temperate forest (consisting mainly of oak, beech, chestnut, larch, and elm trees) alternated with bog atop this Quaternary alluvium of chert (cryptocrystalline silica such as used in the construction of early stone tools), granite, and schist ground down to gravel and sand, carried over, and deposited by the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet during the last glacial period. This rolling landscape, in fact, marks a southern edge of the miles-high pile of ice at its most extensive extent 18,000 years ago.

It is all here simultaneously around me: the rustling cornstalks; the bitter, glacial wind; the bog and its frogs; and the tall, stately presence of thousands of trees. I sense the comings and goings of the animals and insects and even the human beings that have inhabited this area for thousands of years. I know their customs, their habits, their beliefs, and sometimes even their names, when they were born, and how they died. All of this is woven into a web and I am a part of it too.

I stand transfixed as knowledge streams in about the sun, the sky, the wind, and the air. I smile, amazed as I am introduced to the journey of carbon from the interior of the Earth, out through a volcano, up into the sky, down into the soil, up through roots, into plant biomass, into a herbivore, back out to the air, used for the dissolution of a rock, converted into carbonate ions, delivered to the ocean, taken up by a calcareous plankter, and then sunk to the sediments to be subducted back down into the interior of the Earth to start all over again. I thrill to know that each atom of carbon in my body and in all of that corn has, on average, cycled into and out of the interior of the Earth at least seven times in the last several billion years. The joy this brings tingles out to the tips of all my extremities, including my nose. All of this knowledge drags me into the everything.

And so I trip through the next few days. My orange juice at breakfast treats me to all there is to know about orange groves, about the evolution and development of citrus fruits and their relatives, and about the chemical components of orange, tangy flavor. This so beats reading the back of the cereal box.

Sitting down floods me with the history of chairs, their design, and manufacture, with an anatomical/physiological cost-benefit analysis of sitting, and with a multicultural exploration of sitting traditions down through the ages. It is all the freaking coolest thing ever.

How pea-brained and sad my life before now, spent in the dark and the dirt like a cave man.

I begin to grasp that this is how the human race will transcend. This is the next phase of existence, the next big step in our evolution: rapid, unfettered access to and understanding of all the knowledge that Homo sapiens has acquired over its 180,000 calendar years. We shall be unified, humanized, and then lifted beyond our humanity in our awe of the amazing, meaningful, and interconnected.

Even those who still fear that a flood of knowledge and reason will wash away faith and divinity and flatten the world will be moved. A few moments in this live stream and the scales will fall from their eyes. For the first time in their lives, they’ll be able to fully appreciate the details of Creation.

Even atheist, grumpy-puss I spend the week in a trance, skin shivering, nerves tingling, and eventually am elevated. My self obliterates and becomes subsumed into a great and magnificent vastness. In a word (well, three): Everything. Makes. Sense. And, hot damn, is it beautiful.

I’m back in the office with Snotball and Scuzzface when they power it down. The loss collapses me onto the desk.

“You can’t,” I wail. “You can’t take that away!”

“The experiment is over, Mr Pfannkuchen.” They nod and tick on their clipboards.

“Please,” I howl and beg them to plug me back in. “I was nothing and I was supreme. I knew everything’s name, what it was doing, how it was doing it, and what its place was in everything.”

“You must wait for the first commercial model.”

“How long?” I cry.

“Five to ten years, maybe twenty.”

But I’m a very old man.

“Take heart, your participation has helped,” Snotball says. “We’ll put you down for a discount.”

Scuzzface adds, “Your pay has been transferred. Thank you for your time.”

Then I’m shoved out the door to face what’s left of my life naked and alone. At least they hadn’t smiled and said, “Have a nice day.”

What does one do? I carry on, stumbling about like a fish gutted, an amputee lost and cast out of the garden. Plants are just plants, birds are just birds, and flavors have no extra charm. I am no longer privy to information. I am again an individual. I am no longer enmeshed in the Cosmos.

I try to rectify the situation with my smartphone, searching the interwebs as I walk. What’s that? What’s it up to? What are its secrets? But progress is slow and the threads so clunky, I chuck the phone into the stream.

What a joke.

I consider throwing myself in too, but I don’t need to be mainlining all of human knowledge to know that this will just net me nettle stings, muddy clothes, and maybe some broken ribs. Dying there would take hours and hours of being wet and uncomfortably cold.

So I walk on through the flat, grey gloom of the sunny day.

When I reach the edge of an open field, I see a bird in the air. It’s whirling and swirling, looping, climbing, diving, and laughing, that fucker. I search my own small memory banks for the name: a lapwing. But why does it fly so adventurously? I know nothing. I must be content to make up a fable.

It flies like that because it can because flying like that is super good fun. It is laughing because I have been born five or ten years, maybe twenty, too soon to regain the grand, transcendent knowledge of everything.

And the reason the lapwing is not just laughing but laughing loudly?

Because it knows that I know it. And that is rotten bad luck.

After 20 years of working as a biogeochemist/oceanographer, Christina De La Rocha had a mid-life crisis, threw away her career, moved to Germany, and decided to learn how to write. So far she’s had one short story published (in Analog) and has completed a popular science book that is due out in 2017. Email: xtinadlr[at]hushmail.com