Stories That Crawled From My Brain

Hive Mind

Transcript from the first news report referring to the Calliope Moth:

“Thanks to Katrina for that weather report…and now - onto our top new story for today. A team of lepidopterologists - that is, the study of moths - from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a strange parasitic moth that, according to the Head of Department Professor Robert Papachristos - lets you communicate with other people near to you using only your mind!”

Transcript of interview with Professor Robert Papachristos, the head of the expedition to the Amazon from Edinburgh University:

“It's really incredible. A small group - three of us from the university and a guide - were studying Lepidoptera - that is - moths - in a hitherto unexplored area of the Amazon. We were there to record and categorise different species, and we found many new species within the Sub-Orders we expected. This was not unexpected at all - you see moths, and butterflies - their Order is the second largest in the Insect Kingdom, already, so new discoveries are not unexpected, or anything revolutionary. However, we discovered a moth that was simply amazing and entirely novel. Most moths, you see, are of the exoporia infraorder, though, there are, or rather there were, before this discovery, five other infraorders. Amazingly, one moth we saw in the Amazon seemed to have characteristics which placed it outside any of the infraorders we already knew of. What we… what I… mean by that, is that it was a completely new type of moth, one that had never been seen before! We carefully captured a few for further study - we generally do this by using a light trap, which is a bright light, put out in the dark, which automatically closes when it senses moths. We caught five - beautiful specimens, three female, and two male - to take back to Edinburgh for further study. Small, but with incredibly vibrant technicolour wings morphing and spiraling like a frozen kaleidoscope. Studying under the lamp, we could see no immediate camouflaging benefit of this, which was most bizarre. We couldn't help but find the moths extremely intriguing, and as someone who has spent literally their entire career looking at moths, we… I mean I can tell you it has to be something pretty special to raise my eyebrows. It's crazy, perhaps we wouldn't have found out about the Calliope Moth - that's what we've named it, after the queen of the muses - we'd have never found out about the Calliope Moth's unbelievable characteristics, had we not been so transfixed by its pattern. If we hadn't been staring at them so intently, so full of excitement for our discovery, trying to figure out why it would have such an eye-catching pattern, that we may not have forgotten to check the charge on the battery for the lights in the bivouac. So, in the middle of the darkness in the middle of the jungle, the lights went out. My colleagues and I padded around in the darkness searching for the spare battery, forgetting entirely about the five moths loose in the tent.

Excerpt from Robert Papachristos's diary two weeks after the Amazon excursion:

“We each had a slight ear irritation at the time, and all assumed that it was just that our European physiologies weren't up to the damp jungle. After all, given the humidity and the lack of cleaning facilities in the depths of the Amazon, it was highly likely that we may have all caught slight ear infections - otitis externa - jungle ear or, more commonly, swimmer's ear - is a very common infection caused by bacteria or fungus penetrating into the ear canal from water, or from headphones, which were were using frequently in communication in our searches. The American troops in the jungles in the South Pacific caught it a lot in World War Two, apparently, and we were warned of such a thing occurring by the medics we consulted before the excursion. And as the four of us trekked our way back through the Iténez forest to the landing site at Versalles, the irritation and pain began to reduce. By the time we reached Versalles a few days later, none of the irritation persisted. And so we continued immediately with the flight back to La Paz. Given none of our eardrums exploded, we all felt comfortable enough to fly back to the UK. But it was only the week after we'd arrived back at the university that we started noticing something had happened: the three of us would be studying the Calliope specimens in the lab, and two of us would hear the other say something, and ask them to repeat what they had just said - but, without fail, they'd say they'd not said anything. But how could both of the others have heard them say the same thing? One of us would impulsively go off and make coffee, or bring lunch just as one of the other two became peckish. Even when getting frustrated with our progress, we found empathy with each other instead of anger. We came up with the same theories and ideas at the same time, as if we were thinking with one brain. As the days went by, these incidents all became more and more frequent. When the second week came by, our laboratory work became unbelievably efficient, with us implicitly knowing what the others were doing. We had theories of course, but they all seemed so farfetched that we all thought we were going mad. But there was no mistaking it: we must have been communicating non-verbally with one another. With our minds, almost. But not quite. In the laboratory after the phantom voices started to appear in our heads, we tried to harness our thoughts to communicate. One of us imagined something, and the other two could, without fail, understand and know what was being said. Not in words, more in form, in emotion. With our minds working in absolute synergy, it was obvious what had caused this: the Calliope Moth. We could share the sense memory of being in that tent in Bolivia, and it was the same for each of us. A quick X-ray revealed the obvious: somehow, in the darkness of the tent, the Calliope had done something utterly magical.