ENTRY 3 (13.20 hours)
There is a reason I’ve decided to break science-speak and enter this journal appendix in the field guide. My name is Treefrog7 and my husband is Morituri36. We are from a village in southwest, Ọnaghị agba nahịa, the people of the impossible beads. Of course, out here in the Greeny Jungle, we cannot wear our traditional beaded attire. Far too heavy. Instead we wear plain light clothing (northern attire). But we never take off our beaded bracelets and marriage earrings. And there is always the bead of the soul. So that is us and that is all I will say on the subject.
I’ve begun uploading this audio series because, after three months of exploration, we are closing in on something big. Very big. The very process of finding it should be documented along with the scientific information.
Altogether, we’ve uploaded two hundred and eighty-eight new entries to the field guide. Our fellow explorers are proud. What we explorers do is dangerous work. Many of us die for the information we gather. Many of us return to civilisation with only half our bodies, or half our minds, or ill in a thousand ways. Many of us are lost. Morituri36 and I are not lost. We know exactly where we are and we know exactly what we seek. We will find it. And human civilisation will be changed forever.
I’ll explain what “it” is when I’m in a less difficult place. The mud is deep here. My back aches. I need all my faculties for the time being. I wish Morituri36 would stop singing that song. World of Our Own. It reminds me of home. He has such a beautiful voice. I wish he’d shut up. I wish my body would stop aching. I’m sick of being pregnant.
ENTRY 4 (19.21 hours)
I was bitten by a clack beetle today. Their venom is itchy and the white spot it left on my skin is about the size of my fingernail. It shows up on me a lot more than it showed up on Morituri36 when he was bitten last year. I’m a much darker shade of brown than he is. Which means, yes, I get to complain about it. I don’t mind cuts, scratches, bites, etcetera. But something about a mark on my skin of temporarily-neutralised melanin really bothers me. No matter. It should be gone in a few days.
Last night, as we looked for a tree to sleep in, we heard the creature. How long is it going to follow us? What does it want?
Field Guide Entry (uploaded at 11:23 hours)
Clack Beetle:
The Clack Beetle is a flightless insect of the taxonic order Ahuhu-ebe, which includes all beetles. It is shiny black and the size of an adult’s fingernail. Instead of wings, it has two short stalks with shiny poisonous black balls on the end. Warning: Clack Beetle poison causes intense itching and neutralizes the melanin at the site of the bite. When it bites, the pleasure of sucking the victim’s blood causes these two balls to loudly “clack” together. Try to crush a clack beetle and you will receive another dose of its poison, this time from the two balls. It’s best to shake a clack beetle from your person and quickly walk away. The symptoms will last for a few days if you are lucky. In rare cases where an explorer has repeatedly tried to kill the highly durable insect, the symptoms have lasted forever. Nocturnal.
ENTRY 5 (12.03 hours)
Shh. I have to whisper quietly. Morituri36 is beside me, too. Something just screeched very, very loudly. An elgort? As soon as we can climb down, I need to find a certain seed…just in case. Morituri36 is too clumsy to handle them. He’s looking at me, annoyed, but he knows I’m right.
We’re still on the trail of what we seek and I believe that whatever has been following us is still on our trail, too. Maybe the elgort will scare it away, or better yet, eat it.
Field Guide Entry (uploaded at 00:01 hours)
Elgort:
The Elgort is of an unknown taxonic order, possibly Enyi Mba. It is a nasty destructive stupidly irrational beast that physically bears a similarity to a pig or elephant spliced with the genes of a demon. It is generally the size of a small house and has smooth black skin and a powerful trunk lined with many large sharp teeth. It is an egg-layer and, despite its size, capable of moving very very fast, fast as at least the speed of sound. Six explorers I work with have been eaten by these cursed beasts. More on the elgort soon. They are not easy to study.
ENTRY 6 (21.12 hours)
We’re at the very top of a baobab tree. Morituri36 and his cursed junglemyelitis. If I fall out and die, our unborn child and I will haunt him until he joins us in death. Right now, I can hear it below.
Why is it following us? What’s it after? And what is it? It’s not violent, fast, huge or destructive enough to be an elgort. I’m glad it’s nocturnal. Come morning, we’ll be able to leave this tree and continue on our way.
We are searching for a mature CPU plant, so mature that we can actually download its hard drive. We call them M-CPUs. Acquiring a copy of an M-CPU’s hard drive has never been done in all the history of exploration. BushBaby42, a close friend of mine, found one three months ago but she disappeared before she could download anything. She happened to send us the co-ordinates of her location just before she stopped responding to us, so here we are. We’ve come hundreds of miles.
It is hard for me to speak of BushBaby42.
I don’t wonder what happened to her. She is an explorer, which means it could have been anything. It is very often our fate.
On the M-CPU’s hard drive will be unimaginable information, the result of centuries of gathering. Legend has it that these plants connect to networks from worlds beyond. Imagine what it knows, what it has documented. We will not kill or harm it, of course. That would be blasphemy. We won’t even clip a leaf or scrape some cells. We’ll only make a copy of what it knows. Our storage drives should easily adapt to fit the plant’s port. Though our drive is most likely a different species of plant, they’d have to at least be of the same genus.
The CPU plant’s entry does it no justice. The entry is a human perspective, ascribing significance to the plant because it is cultivated and used as a tool for humans, a personal computer. The true CPU plant grows in the wild, neither touched nor manipulated by humans. And this plant takes hundreds of years to mature.
Many of us have seen young CPU plants with their glowing monitor flower-heads that light up nights and sleep during the day. They plug into the network and do whatever they do. But an M-CPU? Nearly legend. What must BushBaby42 have felt gazing upon it all alone, as she was? What must she have seen on its screen? And what happened to her? She could take on a man-eating whip scorpion with nothing but a stick!
Incidentally, the creature we heard screeching this afternoon was an elgort. As big as a house, with tight-black skin that shone in the daylight, beady yellow eyes, as fast as the speed of sound, irrational and food-minded.