The Baulomorph 🔮 Vancouver

On Becoming Human

Mammary Glands

For Berry the business of becoming human wasn’t all bad. He remembered his early years as a toddler, exploring the green leaves with his ten fingers. Tasting the banana pablum on the tip of his tongue. Tearing across the hard pavement on his tricycle. He also had to admit he enjoyed the breastfeeding part.

He would never forget being so close to another beating heart, to another sentient being who loved him so completely, for no reason except that he was the product of her body. No wonder human astronomers called their galaxy The Milky Way. No wonder so many human artists depicted God’s love by drawing a woman with a baby at her breast:

Even Hitler’s mother probably loved her chubby little baby. But it wasn’t just the unconditional love. To drink in nourishing liquid without having to kill something and suck out its fluids was the most peaceful thing he’d ever experienced. 

Yet as he grew he found that the mother entity expected a great deal in return. Come to think of it, unconditional love didn’t quite describe it accurately. The breast didn’t have a consumption meter or any other sort of pay-as-you-go mechanism. Someone should at least have posted a notice about the payment schedule.

Nor was there any warning about the toll this conditioning might eventually take on the consumer, especially for the male of the species. Once deprived of this fundamental mechanism of survival and satisfaction, he would forever search the backstreets looking for something that resembled that perfect reciprocity of fulfillment and need. Women in tight t-shirts drove him to distraction, all because he continued to want what he was conditioned to have without asking. Not surprisingly, artists all over the world paid tribute to the beauty of the female breast.

The female, on the other hand, was programmed at the moment of her adolescent crisis to develop the soft cushions on which she could rely for a boost of confidence, and onto which she could safely fall when the enraged male of the species was so frustrated that he couldn’t bear to look at her.

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The Infraction

Berry realized that the whole thing wasn’t very well planned. But then again, who was any good at planning? His own people dropped the ball by delaying the Infraction for thirteen years. He understood their rationale: wait until the human elements were deeply ingrained and then infract the Baulian infrastructure at adolescence, when the unsuspecting victim was becoming erratic anyway. And there was another advantage to this timing: parents were so busy dealing with threats and foul-language from their loudmouth 13-year-olds that they didn’t notice the tiny shifts in eye tint or the slight changes in behaviour that resulted from the subcutaneous rewiring of the central nervous system. Adolescent hormones! they’d cry out, without so much as a blood test or CAT scan.

Infraction was efficient, but it was hard on the Baulomorph. By infracting a more powerful network into an already established network, the Baulian eugenicists threw nascent Baulomorphs into a crazy spin. All of a sudden their bodies felt like they were about to change into something else.

The average teenager had a hard enough time navigating hormone fluctuations, lengthening bones, and daily alterations in skin texture and pheromone output. Baulomorphs had all of these, yet they were also infracted with a new neural substructure. This hidden yet potent substructure didn’t replace the previous system. Rather, the new system doubled and controlled the old one, making Baulomorphs see the world the way they had always seen it, yet also making them see things that their human friends would never see. 

While Infraction was confusing and difficult for Baulomorphs, it also connected them to a much wider reality. This connection counter-balanced the feelings of alienation that otherwise threatened to overwhelm them. To begin with, they were no longer limited to seeing things with only five senses. Imagine that, only five senses! And even these five were minimal in humans, limited to visible spectra, audible sound waves, things they could touch and smell, and objects in their mouths. They could hardly be said to be connected to the world at all, and yet they tried so desperately to understand it.

As a result, humans were forced to rely on what they called intuition, which was almost always a disaster. Following intuition was to extrapolate from a dim and flickering cerebral network to the vast and unpredictable world around them. At times, the models they created in their heads were more accurate than the conclusions their limited sensory data allowed them to reach. No wonder they talked of reason and critical thinking. These concepts made up for the coherence they couldn’t collect from seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, or smelling. And yet these concepts were fatally insufficient. They were inside each person’s head, and failed to make it out into the orange ether, the streaks and beams of which connected everything. With Infraction came a connection to these beams and to the universe of knowledge inside the ether.

The Infraction chemicals, vibrating in their almost invisible orange essence, also made the expanding brain of Baulomorphs intimate with the knowledge and culture of a species that had evolved over the last two and a half million years. A species that had been through a thousand revolutions, had learned to infract chemicals with condensed sentient patterns, and had learned to travel across what humans would at some point call orange matter. At present, the only concept that came close to it was dark matter or the monads of Leibniz. It connected universes, and the Baulians had learned to ride it like a wave, from orange to purple, and back to orange. But it wasn’t until they happened upon Earth that they realized the wave went deeper in colour the deeper it travelled through a certain type of water.

They had never seen such water before. Nor such an abundance of subaquatic life. And yet humans were busy destroying it with their hooks and nets and chemicals. Even after they sent Greta the Swedish Baulomorph to hound every politician and industrialist in sight, still they only mocked her and called her naive.

Even with all the scientific data the Baulomorphs leaked to their scientists, humans refused to act.

The Baulians had no choice but to act for them.

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Next: 🎲 The Matterhorn

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