| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Omni Flash 1.1 |
There’s a knock at the door. Interim Axiom of Eggs Antinan Witt taps his
fingers in the right sequence to signal the security AI to open it. “You
must be Vantu Hidayat.”
“You can just call me Van,” he answers.
Antinan nods. “Thank you for coming, Van. You were in the Teaguardian that
rescued everyone from Eyrenland, correct?”
“It’s not a Teaguardian, it’s a stateless vessel, but yes,” Van replies.
Antinan nods again. “Firstly, as a citizen of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, I
would like to thank you for that. You saved a lot of people. As the Interim
Axiom of Eggs, I would like to explain our needs moving forward. Vonearthan
lives are not all that is at stake.”
“Can I ask,” Van begins, “why are you the Interim Axiom? We rescued the
Axiom of Eggs. I remember seeing her on the manifest. She is alive and
well.”
“This is our way,” Antinan says. “When a leader’s life is threatened, or
their substrate is destroyed off-schedule, their consciousness goes under
review. During this waiting period, they are not allowed to make any state
decisions. I will only hold this position for a few weeks at most, at which
point I will undergo the same review. We like to be extra thorough
here. As I was saying, my responsibility is to the eggs.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to catch me up. What kind of eggs are we talking
about?”
Antinan takes a deep, reverent breath. He almost ceremoniously approaches
the egg locker. This was the Axiom of Energy’s private stash. She graciously
donated it back to the Egg Department to support restoration efforts. But
there’s only one place they’ll grow now, and it’s not here. He carefully
slides the opaque lid up and over so Van can see what’s inside. The eggs are
still protected in the transparent preservation chamber.
Van chuckles voicelessly and lightly as he looks into the chamber. “They do
look like eggs.” He looks up at Antinan. “I’m guessing that’s a misnomer,
though?”
“They’re literally eggs.” Antinan recloses the opaque lid. He wants to
preserve them for as long as he can. Even when they manage to seriously
increase the yields at the secondary location, they won’t be the same. They
are technically the same species, but epigenetically different enough for a
dedicated expert like him. There will never be another Eyrenland egg once
the last remaining ones in storage are consumed or spoiled, and that’s
nothing that can be undone. He almost tears up just thinking about it.
Antinan composes himself and turns on the presentation. It starts with a
video of a cute little creature. It’s bulbous and green, with stumpy little
legs that can move surprisingly fast. Small plates are protruding all along
its back, resembling a stegosaurus—they’re even called stegs, but they’re
not hard, nor even made of bone. They’re soft and rubbery, like mushrooms,
but stronger. “We call this the uquirapod.” He jumps to the next image. “And
this is the uquira. Now, don’t try to call one an animal, and one a plant.
Our Earthan terminology holds no water here.”
Antinan continues through the presentation, showing various footage of
uquirapods wandering the uquira fields, but no mating shots yet. “Our
taxonomical structures create rigid divisions between the branches of life,
and to be sure, Bida has that too, but they’re not the same. Many creatures
blur the lines between plant and animal. Some move but photosynthesize; some
are rooted, but have a digestive tract. One ecosystem basically has a form
of marine snow, except it’s in the open air, thanks to extremely tall
tree-like specimens which shed their waste from the top.
“The uquira and uquirapods are more like two genders of the same species,
but also not exactly. We sometimes call it a symbiotic relationship, but
it’s hard to accept that with all the nuances of their practices. They can
mate within their gender, or with the opposite gender, and they do
both. Again, don’t try to attach assignments to these things. Neither is
male, neither is female; there is simply no obvious analog.
“Now...for reasons that we still don’t understand, when two
uquirapods mate, each partner will drop fertilized seeds on the ground.
They’re very social creatures, and more intelligent than they look. One will
press their partner’s seeds into the ground, and once they’re done, they
will systematically travel together up to eleven kilometers to switch roles.
We believe they do this to prevent inbreeding. The seeds will germinate into
uquira. They will not breed more uquirapods, because that’s not their job.
“Similarly, the uquira are sexual beings, which connect via wind dispersal.
In a fascinating process, they communicate with each other remotely,
sometimes across several meters. They utter a mostly subsonic frequency,
though, that’s in relation to the range of hearing for baseline humans.”
Antinan shrugs. “Many can hear it just fine. In fact, you can’t work in this
department if you don’t modify yourself to hear it, assuming you can’t
already. Anyway, once two uquira match each other’s resonant frequencies,
they will shoot their unfertilized seeds towards each other in an attempt to
find cross-purchase. If a seed does not reach its target, it will usually
die in the soil. But more on that later. Is all this making sense so far, or
do I need to slow down? Because I can.”
“No, I’m fine; I’m following you,” Van assures him.
“Okay. Continuing on then. Once the seeds find the right mates, they will
communicate success to each other, and reproduction begins. They will
produce eggs, which will grow into uquirapods, not uquira. We do not call
these eggs eyren because they are fertilized, and we obviously don’t eat
those, because we’re not monsters. It’s okay, it’s very easy to tell the
difference. They’re just kind of a plain tan color. Eventually, the uquira
stops being able to care for its eggs—which usually come in clutches of
three or four—so a uquirapod has to retrieve them, incubate them, and raise
them. But they will always be able to find their parents. They frequently
return to them out of respect, and we think, even love. They talk; they have
language. They use the same language. It’s not anywhere near as complex as
ours, but they convey ideas.”
“So where do the unfertilized eggs that you eat come from?” Van asks.
Antinan smiles. “The wind is unpredictable. Uquira have gotten pretty good
at aiming, but they can only do so much, and they all mate at the same time,
which means they end up with a lot of seeds that don’t belong to them. Since
they resonate at the wrong frequency, the mismatches will not be fertilized,
but will grow an egg; a proto-eyren. When the uquirapods sniff around for
eggs to care for, they will find these proto-eyren, and eat them whole. They
will lay a clump of cells on the ground. They won’t typically stomp them
into the soil, but we can do it for them. And what comes out of it is
a sort of sterile third-gender; more plantlike, not intelligent. The process
is fragile; eyren are now endangered, thanks to the black hole cataclysm.”
“This is as interesting as it is sad,” Van says. “What does it have to do
with us?”
“Eyrenland was our largest source of eyren, but not the only one. They are
endemic to one other, tiny region on the other side of the world. We need
you to protect it...even if that means removing the stubborn, narcissistic
farmers who live there now.”
