apexeno vol 1

8. Specimen Gallery

Having two brains offers many advantages. It makes better use of the body, which is otherwise left idle for long stretches of time. It eliminates the need for permanent shelter or camouflage while increasing the time available for hunting and foraging. Most of all, it brings more brainpower to the challenges of survival.

This begs the question: if having two brains is so effective, how come it never developed on Earth?

It comes down to morphology. In a creature with one-way bilateral symmetry, there is nowhere to stuff a second brain. That is not the case with a centipede, however, which is not only symmetrical left-to-right but front-to-back as well. Tacking on an extra head to the end is evolutionarily very simple.

But how can two brains, each as large and complex as that of a human, share a single body without causing utter confusion? Wouldn't they be at constant war over the body's resources? In the human brain, thoughts shuttle between hemispheres across a conjoined hub, the corpus callosum. In the Janux, the brains are separated by a distance of a hundred feet or more. Sending a message to the co-brain would be like calling the neighbor two houses down. Surely, with quick wits and fast reflexes so crucial to survival, inter-brain routing would seem to present an intractable problem. But nature, in its brute ingenuity, devised a simple solution. It time-shared the body. Rather than working together, the two brains would take turns at the helm like alternating ship captains. One brain is diurnal, taking charge during the day, while the other is nocturnal, running the night shift. Only one brain would be conscious at a time while the other slumbers.

The mechanism is hard-wired and unconscious. A neurological switching occurs at dawn and twilight, placing the body under new management. The process is nearly instantaneous.

As to which head came first, that is a chicken and egg problem.

—Stigel, notes

Stigel wandered through the visual specimen gallery, letting his attention drift. As far as the eye could see, two-headed bugs hung motionless in the air like model airplanes. With a thought, he could set them in motion and watch them mate, feed, swarm, and pollinate the native flora. He could just as easily enlarge, rotate, or peer through their chitin shells into their internal biology, dissecting and colorizing their parts until they resembled a textbook diagram. He could even drill down to the molecular level to see their proteins being synthesized.

Since taking up orbit around the planet Allux, the CU had amassed over fifty thousand species of arthropod with dozens more being added by the hour. Gathering data on a pre-technology culture was easy. Millions of bio-mimetic beetles could blanket an area the size of Rhode Island. The beetles not only recorded footage but were equipped with chemical sensors and miniaturized molecular labs. Using their carbonite jaws, they could swarm and devour a cow-sized animal in under ten minutes, recording its anatomy down to the cellular level. It was gruesome but fascinating to watch, at least the first time. What would Darwin have thought of this? With just a thousand beetles, he could have collected a lifetime's worth of data on finches between breakfast and teatime. With a million, he could have built a life-sized compendium like the one Stigel was now perusing.

Stigel often came here when he felt unsettled. Surrounded by such alien yet reminiscent sights, whatever concerns occupied his mind would dissolve away, and he would experience the same sense of childhood wonder he had felt as a boy when he turned over a rotten log to find it teeming with odd little creatures. Endless forms most bizarre, was how Darwin should have concluded his treatise.

How had two-faced biology evolved on Allux? Had there been a single Adam-or-Eve progenitor, or had it co-evolved multiple times like wings and eyeballs on Earth? Small, gnat-sized bugs only had one head, but somewhere around the size of a ladybug, two-headedness became prevalent. The heads were often strikingly different. One might have bulgy, compound eyes while the other had no eyes at all and navigated by scent or sonar. Some bugs were solitary fliers during the day and social crawlers at night. Some, including the Janux, were night fungivores and day carnivores. Evolution worked on both sides of a creature independently and simultaneously.

The Janux were the smartest of the bunch, but as far as predators went, they were not the most impressive. That title surely belonged to the giant spidex.

The giant spidex, along with its smaller kin, had a top-bottom symmetry with a brain bulge in the center of its platter-shaped body. During the day, it scaled trees and used its machete-like front legs to strip limbs of their foliage which it piled into heaps on the ground. Bugs and worms would colonize the compost and break down the fibrous leaves so the spidex could feed off them. While day-spidex did not hunt, they would attack and kill anything that dared enter their territory, typically another spidex. The stench of compost alone was enough to repel most creatures.

By night, the spidex was a clever hunter. It ventured far afield, laying a network of tripwires that would alert it to the movement of large creatures. Centipedex were its favorite prey, with the Janux being the biggest prize of all. Though nowhere near a Janux's mass, the compact form of a spidex made it an efficient killer. Once it got its legs clamped around the body of its prey, the battle was all but over. It would work its way up to the head and use its machete arms to saw through the neck joint, decapitating it. Then it would cut it apart one section at a time. A spidex could feed off a full-grown Janux for over a month.

Why had spidex not become the alpha species on Allux? Its brains were nearly as large. But unlike the Janux, the spidex were solitary creatures that never developed communal society. When one spidex hit upon an innovation, it was slow to spread to others. In a one-on-one fight they reigned supreme, but against a coordinated attack they stood little chance. In a very real sense, the Janux owed their success to teamwork.