Tales Between the Lines

II.1 Once Upon a Planet

It was the failure to discover the secret of a certain pink shrub in the Swamplands of the planet Lost Hope that finally made the gods decide to give up on humanity and to turn their divine attention to another planet, thousands of lightyears away.

On that planet, a nematode—washed onto a sandy shore by the gentle waves of its primordial soup—discovered the pleasures of beach life.

At first, the nematode had problems adjusting to the unfamiliar surroundings. Especially since, up until now, the only relevant distinctions in its world had been 'me' and 'thing surrounding me'.

What is it, that... um... let's call it 'grainy' thing beneath me, it wondered, or that vast one above me that is so different from the thing I was in before?

"I think I'll call the first one sand and the other one sky". The sound of its own, somewhat croaky voice surprised it.

And what's the fiercely bright-hot thing touching me from the sky?

It pondered and deliberated its question. "Sun would be a nice name for it."

The challenge of name giving exhausted the little fellow quite a bit. Luckily, one of the friendlier gods took pity and sent him another nematode to share the overwhelming experience. Alas, it soon turned out the companion was more interested in wriggling in the sand and enjoying the warmth of the sun than naming things. At least the companion was female and the two of them decided to found a big and happy nematode family. The male partner got to name all their thousands of descendants and so developed a great fluidity in naming while the female cared for the more material needs. They lived happy, fulfilled lives.

But the real surprise happened three generations down the line.

Over the first years, the descendants of our first couple applied their superb intellects to naming everything their beach offered. They developed a wealth of expressions describing the shapes of sand grains and pebbles and the ways a nematode's body could rest between them. But the number of things to name in their world was limited, and the thrill of naming started to pale. The intelligence they were gifted with ran out of challenges. Boredom started to set in, and then depression. Suicide rates soared, and the species' survival was at risk.

It was in this time of crisis, a mutant, misshaped nematode hatched. The elegant smoothness of its body was marred by eight ugly pimples. Its parents hoped that they would heal over time. But they didn't comply and grew even larger.

On a fateful day, the malformed, little nematode was curvecoiled along a flatgroovepebble and felt deeply depressed. Its distress ran so deep it considered ways to end its life, something that is by no means easily achieved by a being of such simple physique. It wistfully looked up at the cliffs bordering the beach and contemplated the precipitous, life-terminating falls they promised. But they were out of reach for a slithering creature.

And then an idea struck, and the nematode pushed its ungainly eight appendages against the ground, thereby lifting its body from the sand. Clumsily, it took its first steps and called them walking. It made its way towards the cliffside. Quickly gaining dexterity, it changed the walk into something faster that it called a trod, which then became a wild gallop. As it reached the rocks, it began to hop, clamber and climb. When it gained the top, it was exhausted. But its goal was within reach now.

It ogled the abyss below it, rehearsing its suicidal jump before the act. But then, its eyes wandered out to the bay and to a mysterious chain of mountains beyond. Standing tall, on what it now called its legs, it shook its front end vigorously. Instead of leaping to death, it decided to take an evolutionary leap, turned on its heels, strolled, sauntered and skidded back down to the beach and searched for a mate to propagate its dominant genes to the generations to come. Generations that would boldly go where no nematode had slithered before.

As the other nematodes became aware of the multiple possibilities now open to their ungainly relative, growing pimples quickly became all the rage amongst the local worm population. Alas, this led to some quite unique and often useless evolutionary developments.

Some of the mutative sidetracks ended with their own, unique success stories, like the one of a particular tiny nematode that grew a host of giant pimples which in time developed into poisonous spikes and allowed him to become a religious leader of some renown—he had a very persuasive way to convince potential, spike- and spineless followers to thrust his visionary babbling.

Most of the pimple-development, however, ended in sad failures. One example to illustrate the extent of the problem might be the proud nematode who developed a pair of impressive, stag-like antlers, growing in time up to the point where their weight became too much to carry for the poor thing. His former friends were rather embarrassed and finally considered him a show-off when he starved to death, unable to lift his head anymore.

But back to our eight-legged ancestor-to-be of a whole new evolutionary line of nematodes. He soon found a suitable mate, gifted with eight pimples not too different from his own. Teaching her to walk posed some serious problems though, as her pimples were arranged in a spiral pattern around her body. But she was very enthusiastic about the new means of locomotion, and the two of them decided to carry on. Their approach to a solution resulted in the minting of the new word 'corkscrew', a word that caught the attention of one particularly inventive, pimpleless but clever nematode.

That one clever nematode, who—on a whim and for simplicity—called himself Bob, employed the help of some of his pimpled friends, directing them to build a harness and framework from seaweed and sticks. They happily obliged because Bob was the most gifted teller of Chuck Norris facts, and he promised them a private, exclusive recital.*
Donning the harness, Bob was able to actuate various movable parts of the framework by coiling and twisting his body into different configurations, only a few of them embarrassing.

The movable parts were first designed as a helix of legs allowing to locomote the corkscrew way. However, after some unfortunate incidents of nausea and loss of stomach contents, Bob changed the design. He replaced the legs by a mechanism exploiting circular bodies rotatably mounted to the framework. He decided to call them 'eels', but his wife insisted on the word 'whales'. Smart as Bob was, he settled on a compromise, and he named them 'wheels'.

Eccentrically mounted rods allowed Bob to rotate the wheels and to propagate his contraption through the beachscape.

He refined the framework by adding other nematode-operable tools, such as clamps, saws, knives, forks, a bell, and a selfie-stick. As for the selfie-stick, no-one knew what it was good for, but Bob was way ahead of his time.

And Bob was not only smart, but he also had a sense for business, so he patented his invention and started selling frameworks to his pure-blood, unpimpled co-nematodes.
Even though the frameworks were first celebrated as a means for re-unifying the pimpled and the pure-blood nematodes, distrust began to grow between the two developing races.

——
* Unfortunately, since that recital was private, most of the facts are lost by now. Just one made its way to posteriority: Chuck Norris counted to infinity—twice.