Ardnard Eukaryotic Zoo proudly presents our new column to the Ardnard Underline. We will report our current and new animals for educational purposes aimed at both young and old.
A shipment arrived from the far north, one week ago, with a newly found species inhabiting a sheltered mountain range. The creature, now named the Universi cognitor, resides in the zoo while our expert zoologists determine its nature and behaviour. Their first report is as stunning as it is horrifying.
With its six immobile limbs, the U. cognitor is believed to hide in dark areas due to its intrinsic ability to sense the world. While humans have abilities to feel, taste, hear and smell, the cognitor can sense so much more. Daylight overwhelms it, fragrant food leads it to echo in murmurs, while lullabies turns it pulsating in what scientists believe to be utter terror and despair. How much more it can sense, the team is unable to measure, but the creature taps into so much information it now attracts hundreds of religious members from the Church of Innotita demanding to exploit its powers. The zoo refuses, of course, to let their new discovery suffer needlessly, and continues to investigate in the most humane methods.
“It is a struggle,” says the lead scientist, Dr. Gile Sporeton. “This animal behaves erratically. We just don’t know what comes next. We believed it had no mouth, so we tried feeding it by submerging it in nutrient baths. When that didn’t work, we injected it directly with cocktails used for the other mouthless species we have in our zoo, such as the scuttleboar. It refuses it all. It is almost like it wants to-”
He is hesitant. He shakes his head, staring at the pavement with eyes glazed like cream-pudding.
“It is almost like this animal wishes to die.”
According to zoo security, a member of the Innotita broke into the animal’s enclosure one night. With their pseudoscientific device claimed to be a connector to the cosmos, they hooked up the innocent beast in a frantic measure to understand the meaning of our very being.
“They are completely ludicrous,” says Dr. Sporeton. “Our attempts of gaining the cognitor’s trust have failed. Imagine sensing so much of the world – maybe even all of it – and being connected to that machine. I lose sleep over it.”
“And what happened that night when the church broke in?”
Dr. Sporeton squats. There are raw, bald patches on his head. Stress? Beast-wrangling? It is hard to tell.
“We realised something was wrong when we heard an infernal sound. It was screams of pain. No, not pain. I cannot describe it fully. Imagine a choir of a thousand people, half singing, half screaming, all in different chords, some of them so otherworldly it roots itself in your mind. The ones of us exposed cannot forget it. We hear it day and night. The arrested Innotita said this is the sound of creation.”
Dr. Sporeton scoffs at that. “At least we found its mouths.”
“And what about the creature now?”
“Lying in a soundproof box, gently humming in anxiolytic rhythms. It calms even the doctoral students when they open the porous, one-way sound transmitter. Maybe the lack of stimuli is the only thing keeping the cognitor alive. It doesn’t need nutrition. It doesn’t need love, nor play. As long as it doesn’t have to sense the world, it lives on in this perpetual, passive state. It puzzled us as to why it evolved this way. What is wrong with nature?”
No one is allowed to see the Universi cognitor, but if you stop by Ardnard Eukaryotic Zoo, even you can hear a sample of its humming tunes. The scientists believe it is safe, as long as the box is never opened again.