A Tale of Two Porplets

Collectively, the small-prey-specialists (or fishers), and one specific subset of the large-prey-specialists known as pastoralists are some of the most common daydreamer races. Fishers and pastoralists have differing habitat preferences, with fishers mainly sticking to open fast-flowing channels in the sea where their prey shoals, while pastoralists graze livestock in vegetated algae and sea-grass pastures where the flow is calm. But these habitats are interconnected, and together they form a matrix throughout the shallow seas, so that both species occur over the same range along the shallow waters off Serinarcta, with only ever-shifting natural borders forming the uneasy boundaries of their opposing societies. Fishers feed entirely on ‘fish’ (though do not distinguish readily between ray-finned fish and the most fish-like neotenic metamorph canaries!) for both ethical and cultural reasons, considering killing such animals more tolerable than alternative prey that may look and act more like themselves.

These daydreamers are uniquely social even outside of their own species, curious about the experiences of other organisms with different minds, and so regularly seeking to form connections with non-daydreamer animals. Some of these interactions have a dynamic of pet and owner, while others are more complex such as that with the luddy, a near-sapient porplet - a related but plant-eating dolfinch species - which frequently lives in close proximity to the fishing daydreamer. Luddies have learned over the millenia to stick close to them for safety, not just from less benevolent daydreamer races, but other carnivorous animals too, as most predators are generally not able to distinguish between those daydreamers which only eat fish and those which will hunt anything they can catch.

These inter-species interactions go back nearly as long as the fishing ecotype itself has existed, and so over the last three hundred thousand years the fishers have developed an overarching belief system that as the self-proclaimed physically strongest, most mentally advanced, and most certainly most moral of all the dolfinches, it is their role to play as a sort of protector to those species which are less able to defend themselves. This means that their culture is strongly tied to those of smaller and weaker, intelligent species like the luddy, and is thus itself a multi-species society, though unlike that of the woodcrafter and gravedigger these interactions are more peripheral to day to day life, and none of them are between full equals. In all of them, the daydreamer finds itself in a sort of authoritative and parental role, which is heightened by the small and chubby appearance of porplets which triggers protective parental instincts in daydreamers (at least those that have not been socially conditioned from childhood to eat them.) Fishers and luddies communicate verbally, both species adopting elements of language from the other over the generations, but luddies are incapable of high-concept thinking like daydreamers, and their conversations tend to be simplistic by necessity.

above: two fishers navigate the shallow coastal seas in search of food in the company of several mischievous luddies, who eat only sea plants and do not well understand the need to be quiet when hunting for food.

Pastoralists live very different lives from fishers. They are insular and even neophobic, their culture favoring keeping within their own kind. While fishers are often outgoing and curious - and sometimes, on extension, can be pushy and aggressive - pastoralists are generally shy and avoidant unless no option to retreat is available. Their lives are more monotonous, dedicated to herding their livestock, a chubby and balloon-shaped creature known as the nop, which is the main thing they eat. They dedicate the majority of their day to day lives to guarding the nops, which like the daydreamers never need to lie down and rest as their brains sleep in hemispheres. Herding ensures the stability of food supply at the expense of many other pursuits. It also occasionally brings them heat from the fishers, and certainly contributes to the ancient lack of communication between the two, for the nop is not a fish, or even another type of bird. It is fairly closely related to the daydreamer itself: a porplet just like the luddy, indeed it is its closest relative. But as different as fishers are from pastoralists, the chasm is far deeper between these cousins.

Both of them are descendant species of the ring-necked porplet, which evolved over the last three million years into two species now known to us as the luddy and the nop, nicknames that arise from shortenings of their species names; the luddy is Pascoquaticus ludibundus, meaning “playful water grazer”. The nop is P. inops - the “helpless water grazer”. The luddy is the surviving wild-type form and is still similar looking to its ancestor, while the nop has been a long-time domesticate of the daydreamer and its predecessor the seastriker, a population whose evolution has now been artificially controlled for hundreds of thousands of generations by its captor species. The luddy has gotten smarter since their common ancestors split, at least partially to better avoid the daydreamer’s fiercely predatory ancestors, though its social structure and psychology is still highly shaped by a life often short and ended at the hands of large carnivores. Fear remains one of the core tenets of its being, though it is countered by a drive not to let themselves be devoured by it, and to still find time to play and enjoy the little things in life.

Nops, however, have gotten dumber… not just slightly, but to such a degree they have lost all the hallmarks of high intelligence shown by their ancestor, including some things as primitive as base emotional states. The nop’s pre-sapient ancestors were domesticated and held captive by the ancestors of the daydreamer, to the point escape from their predators long became impossible. In spite of - or perhaps because of this - the nop now lives a life virtually devoid of any fear or negative emotion at all. It has so long been altered by eons of selective breeding for docility and edibility that fright has all but been bred out of it, replaced by a constant sense of ease, as there was no benefit to terror of a fate inevitable to all. The nop’s body changed with its mind, growing as fat as physically possible while still remaining able to move, maturing earlier and producing more young for the daydreamer’s table. The two could scarcely be less alike today. While luddies rely on large groups of similar appearance to reduce the chance of a predator picking out a single individual, nops became selectively bred for unique and interesting markings and now exist in many colors.

And while every luddy is free, but lives in a shadow of fear of the day everything ends, no nop is free - for a nop without a shepherd is helpless, sure to almost immediately killed off by wild predators. Yet nops live a life of bliss until their final and inevitable deaths at the jaws of their caretakers. So docile they have become, their once bright minds melted down to mush to simplify the daydreamers daily task of controlling them, that even as death comes the nop seems not to take notice. Pain, a sensation only really useful if there is a way to escape it, has dulled in them. They will graze and chew the grass until their bodies are too broken to physically go through the motions, even if predators are eating them alive piecemeal. The pastoralists, a moral animal, still kill them first in a kinder way as a matter of course - but the fate to any which escaped into the wild would be to be eaten alive.

Could the nop talk, it could argue its life is better - it is free of all worry and responsibility. The perpetuation of its kind is always assured. But the luddy can talk - and disagrees, valuing the most fraught freedom over a safe captivity. Very different evolutionary history has forged them into disparate beings, no longer able to communicate or recognize themself in the other. The nop now falls deep into the luddy’s uncanny valley - a frightening, wrong creature. The nop has simply forgotten how to communicate at all; with the language-processing centers of its brain atrophied, it cannot talk or even want to. Even its most basic instincts are reduced; mothers do not bond to their calves nor calves to their moms, simply instinctively feeding from any nearby adult which will spit up pre-chewed meals for them on reflex.

The nop’s personhood has been taken from it, no matter how happy it may currently seem to be with its lot. To do so was morally wrong by the standards of humans and is wrong to fishers, too. But is the perpetuation of an ancient, primordial sin still worthy of ire, when the nop itself no longer recalls being free, could not understand the situation, and can no longer take care of itself, being rejected even by its sister species as a veritable monster? Here, the two daydreamers come to their moral impasse.

above: a group of pastoralists lead a flock of nops through the sea-bamboo meadows, aggressively driving off any predators which might attempt to snag one of their wholly helpless livestock, which bumble around like beach balls, almost too rotund to swim.

It isn’t hard to understand, from the fishers’ perspective and life experiences, why they have disdain for the pastoralists, those hunting ecotype daydreamers which keep the luddies’ closest of kin as sheep fattened for the table. To a fisher, a pastoralist could be perceived as an unapologetic murderer that enslaves, slaughters and eats other people who are not able to defend themselves. And yet it is easy too to sympathize with the pastoralists, who only seek to be left alone to their relatively simple lives, not wishing to bother anyone else. How, at this point, are the nops any different from the fishes the fishers slaughter? Fishers to them would be judgemental extremists, eating only a tiny selection of the available food they could be eating for arbitrary reasons, and which have a bone to pick with any fellow daydreamer culture that hunts anything they deem inappropriate.

Both sides would be right. But both are also much more alike than they care to believe. Each too proud and holdfast in their beliefs to come to a middle ground on their own, they let their different beliefs divide them until their teeth reshaped and their languages diverged.

But when a grave new threat to them both rises from the open ocean beyond a shared, familiar homeland, just as an incarnation of their shared God itself appears from the land above the tide, their fates will again converge. They will only survive if they can remember that like others before them, they were stronger together.