86 A shrimp’s heart is in its head. The jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula is immortal. Orangutans are shitty climbers – near half of them have fractured bones from falling out of trees. Ghost crabs growl at enemies by grinding the teeth in their stomachs. Bottlenose dolphins call each other by name by mimicking whistles. Slugs have four noses. An octopus has three hearts and nine brains. Ninety-nine percent of those bottlenose dolphins from earlier are righties (which means they are constantly turning left). Lots of animals vote. African buffalo, Syncerus caffer, vote on things like travel preference, but only females are enfranchised. Narwhal “horns” are really teeth that grow through the skin, that they use not for stabbing other animals, but rather to “bop” fish on the head, stunning them before eating. Some sharks glow in the dark. Male ghost sharks have retractable dicks on their heads. Many animals – like dogs, hummingbirds, and scrub jays – have semantic memory, which allows them to sense the passing of time... and anticipate when an event is upcoming. Watches are non-sentient machines that display the time according to a prescribed interval system. The Rolex Deep Sea Special was tested at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, home to comb jellies, the adorable Dumbo octopus, the tiny, bioluminescent hatchetfish Argyropelecus gigas, and the black seadevil anglerfish, a.k.a., Aptat. The tick-tock of a grandfather clock pendulum is considerably slower than the tick-tick of a wristwatch, which is usually about eight per second. Quartz watches only lose about a minute per year. Kangaroos can’t fart. Flies buzz in the key of F. Under all that light-reflective, translucent fur, polar bears are black. Mormon crickets ejaculate up to 27% of their body weight, equivalent to 47.25 pounds of semen for a 175 pound human.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I sprang up from something. Not sleep. You couldn’t call it sleep. More like a fever-dream from inside David Attenborough’s87 brain after an acid-trip. Of course, that would mean he had a real thing for dirty bug sex. I banished the thought.

Dreams that included bits and pieces of my strange knowledge were nothing new – they’d been a part of my life since I could remember. But now the dam had broken. For however long I’d been asleep, the imagery and understanding of those prior lives poured in, churned up no doubt by my time in the dredge paired with a strong assist from the space drugs. But even amid the flood of downcord memories that had been knocked loose by my first session in the machine, there had been nothing in the maelstrom about the Chime. Nothing I could discern, anyway.

Still, I felt fucking GREAT.

I rubbed my eyes and tried to sit up but conked my head on the glassy lid of the dredge. There was Eyes on the other side, looking down.

Save us. Gone is the Bloom of God. You will find the Chime, the Note of Jecca.