“If the Neanderthaler could talk (though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired) should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him which the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling.”
~ C.S. Lewis
They stood near my cave’s entrance, as still as a sundial’s shadow. They shouted my name, “Fuzzy-Wuzzy!”
I wobbled out of my cave slowly. Hibernation had just ended and I’d been trying to avoid bright lights.
“We expected something taller,” a shaved bear said. The sun gleamed off his hide.
“Sorry?”
“Take nothing. Your needs are already provided for.”
“What?” I asked.
It never occurred to them that I might say no. And strangely I didn’t. Curiosity overcame judgment. Though I followed, the silky bears avoided me. I heard one of them whisper how I smelled hidebound and primitive. I didn’t know you could smell those things.
I discovered that there were two thousand and twenty something shaved bears living on a vast city-sized floating platform, which had always been called the Mono-Continent, they said, but maybe they’d forgotten its true name. It was programmed to follow the sun, they said, because night was boring.
I never learned the age of the shaved bears. They could only recall that they must have come extremely far from their barbaric past; which they imagined looked something like me.
These polished bears always employed one unshaved bear as a technician on the Mono-Continent. But I never did anything: the platform virtually ran itself. Their nanobots lived in the air, infusing every part of everything. The shaved bears only kept a technician on board because they considered the occupation beneath their dignity.
However, their technology was truly impressive, far surpassing anything I’d ever learned about in my cave. If I wanted to, I could chop off my arm and a swarm of microscopic servants would keep my severed limb flowing with blood and a larger robot would reattach the arm as if it had never left. Truly astounding, and yet it all simply bored them.
Over time, I also absorbed some of their ennui. On the rare times I needed to repair a robot that had been imperfectly repaired I found that I’d almost forgotten how.
But I couldn’t forget what I witnessed in their games. They all competed. Not participating would be shameful. Games varied: some games involved thinking fastest with their brains outside their head. Several of their games relied on reattaching their head to their arm. One of their favorite games included temporarily canceling gravity on the Mono-Continent to float their hearts for a game like water polo.
During one of those games, a heart ricocheted off my face.
“Time out!” I blubbered.
“How dare you interrupt the game?” one bear screamed.
(He had nearly won.)
“If the referee says to stop, we stop!” a second bear shouted.
(He was currently in second place.)
The first bear threw a still beating heart at the second’s face. It squished on impact.
“This calls for a duel!” the second bear said.
“Very well, whoever can stick the most feet in their mouth wins!” the first bear said.
“Agreed!” the second bear said.
Both of them rushed off with the rest of the two-thousand-twenty-something shaved bears following in excited pursuit.
I kicked the heart that had collided into my face; it floated inoffensively out into the empty open spaces of the Mono-Continent. Slowly, nanobots floated all the rest of the hearts toward their respective owners.
Life continued that way for a long time. Games, following boredom, following more games: all in that interminable sunshine and perfect weather. I lost track of how long I served there, or rather didn’t.
It goes without saying that the shaved bears had surpluses of food. They had stockpiles so large that one of their other favorite games was won by whoever could empty a ton of food over the side of the platform first. One day, their food accidentally rained upon a village of Neanderthals near the ocean.
The Neanderthals made such a ruckus that even the shaved bears noticed. Below, an old Neanderthal wearing the skin of a bear wailed a low song, while the others around him crouched on their knees.
A new game occurred to the shaved bears: throw food at the Neanderthals. The first to knock over the old man in the center would win. A pumpkin and a butternut squash struck him simultaneously with a sickening crunch.
In disputes, they would remember to remember that I existed.
“Fuzzy-Wuzzy, who hit it first?” one asked.
“It was my butternut squash, wasn’t it, Fuzzy-Wuzzy?”
I ignored them. For some reason I could not look away from the old Neanderthal. He probably never saw it coming… I kept staring.
“Who hit it first?”
“Answer!”
“Do your job!”
Standing on the shore, the Neanderthals hurled up several rocks. One whizzed past my ear.
“Look, they’re trying to fight back,” one shaved bear guffawed.
The bears forgot their bickering and started to food fight in earnest. An avalanche of over-fresh food flew off the edge of the Mono-Continent.
I couldn’t watch. Instead, I shuffled away to tinker at a surgery robot that had been smashed by a rock in the kerfuffle. Like a sudden revelation, I realized that I had completely forgotten how to fix the damage. I watched as that one broken robot failed to fix another and the malfunction multiplied. I could not fathom how, but one gash from one muddy stone in one robot triggered a domino wave of total failure throughout all of the Mono-Continent.
When the sun began to set, a shaved bear cried out in agony after a rock struck her. That’s when they recognized something had changed. Pain was reborn.
My joints began to ache like a memory.
As the breakdown fed on itself, our city-sized platform peacefully drifted down toward the ocean. Soon, salty waves lapped at our feet. In the failing light, I leapt off the platform and paddled for the shore.
“And that’s how it happened,” I concluded to the narwhal listening to my story.
The narwhal nodded slowly, deep in thought.
I shook off my wet fur and dried in the chilly twilight. I stared back toward the shaved bears. They were all huddled together in devout shock. I couldn’t see precisely, but it looked like they weren’t moving at all as the ocean swallowed up the Mono-Continent.
“Why aren’t they swimming?” the narwhal asked.
I shurgged. “They’re probably inventing some way to breathe water.”
“Maybe,” the narwhal replied. “Or maybe they’ve just forgotten how to swim.”
I enjoyed that the bear was named Fuzzy-Wuzzy, though I recall that the source material bear had no hair, so this created some dramatic irony for me as a reader. The bears engaging in behaviors that people do, distancing ourselves from our ancestors, but with some hyperbole was interesting.