2

As we know, those who have been following so far, or even those who can intuit, or even those who can conjecture using different abstract set-points on the map, I am an ape who has traveled from very far.  Not all of my story is translatable or even coherent.  Thus, is the problem relating to a long-distance ape.  I came from far and yet I am here now, so everybody imagines here is where I’ve always been.  They couldn’t be further from the truth.

In truth, I was hurled out from a distant star, as yet unformed.   My lack of formation earned me many a dart of aggression, even condemnation.  I was deemed to be the super-formed ape, superlatively designed with ulterior motives and on the rampage.  Nothing anybody could imagine was negative or dire enough to capture my essence, for I captured and entranced everybody’s negative imagination and made them sit up and dream of hell (and me on the rampage).

Nothing could be further from the truth, as I was no hell hound, no Cerberus.  I’d barely been given the power to begin to walk, but even before this they were on my case.

What manner of Ape is this?  They proclaimed.  The likes of which the Earth has never seen?

I resolved to know nothing, since I had been taught nothing, but that was not enough for these humans, who put me in this cage, this concrete cage, where I have been forced to languish.   They took away my hopes and dreams and gave me nothing but bread and water.  And in the meantime I infested their worst nightmares and made them think of all the features of themselves they could not stand, which I  -- being an alien to this place – knew nothing of.

They took away my freedom and enforced captivity, in this space, only 12 meters by 16 meters in each direction.  Some may say I should be grateful for the generous capacity of my cell, but I only dream of open skies, of lush, clean grass, and of the ability to clamber far and wide wherever I choose.

The humans made me dream, all the more fervently of that which I desired, but I also found my dreams became entwined with theirs, so that I dreamt human dreams, particularly that of being able to transcend to Earth, to fly on upwards, through the power of technology and ingenuity.  Slowly and uncannily, within my head a computer scientist was being born.

This is the continuing saga of the ape who went to war.  He was caught between two levels of being, on one side the fact that he was an ape for all to see, and no disputing it.  On the other side, he aspired to be more than just an ape but to finesse his knowledge and facility with computing science.

He had lost all his friends and all his chances.  He was still in the same world, but this world no longer made any sense to him.  Each time he had thought he might have found a way to tunnel out of the fortress he was in, he had pursued the opportunity with renewed vigor, and the accumulation of scant resources – rats he had been able to trap with his bare hands, that gave him just a pittance of meat on his bones, and little bits of grain and greenery that he had found down in the cellar –he had met with a dead end.

His friends….what were friends?  In this time, this very destructive time in the world, friends were less than companions.  Externally, meek and yielding, internally tin policemen, these were not the friends one wanted in the world.  They did not approach any situation with delicacy.  Then again neither had he.  He’d had a mission to achieve, to get into the wider world where there was fruit, and trees and honey, and no longer this dank containment of just the basic room, himself and his computer.  He needed more, he wanted more.  He wondered why the others were content to remain in their own sequestered spaces, not of their choice, but build out of the hewn rock of necessity.   If need be, he wanted to fight for his rights, he wanted to go to war.

It was difficult to know which side to pick.  They were all raging at each other.  Not two sides, but several, with all stratifications of mental confusion going on in-between, which kept people fighting not against their enemies but against their comrades in arms, those closest to them, whom they had (in another life time) sworn to protect.   That other life time, when things were sweet and pure, when childhood embraced its own innocence, and had every right, was when this war first got going, he supposed.  It always starts in innocence, and then when innocence grows sinewy, and sinews become firm, so that they drive a hoe and set their ways, then all hell breaks loose, as hoes meet unsuspecting hoes from opposite of counterpoised directions, and quarrels start, manners imploding.

The ape – such as he was – still wanted to go to war, because despite all he had heard about the war out there, he had a noble desire, which was to side with freedom.  His clear idea of freedom was the innocence to hoe in the outdoors, to take a piece of land and keep it for one’s own, to have and to hold.   The memories of sun, butterflies, the advent of his species when the Lord Higher Ancestor had first learned to use the hoe, all burned an impression in his mind.   And like the Lord on High, he too wished to ascend, his desire for peace and harmony driving him to batter himself against the limits of the iron barred windows with great energy and howling pain.

Such was his enthusiasm for escape, he offered himself to his jailors as the facilitator who would break the enemy’s code.  In this rudimentary room, with one sadly outdated computer, he would be the one who produced the key to reinvent the space mission, directing cubicles of knowledge and their human cargo into the air at will, and preventing their crashing to Earth in a devastating vision, that was almost too extreme for animals to understand and certainly worse than your worst dream.

To embrace love, to embrace visions, to embrace hope, one had to meet that which stood there, where bliss turned into panic, where optimism had burnt dry, where love and laughter turned into hatred and fury.   This was where the two hoes met and land rights burnt the joy away and left one’s heart burnt out and in a fire of rage that never seemed to diminish.

Back to war, to sort this thing out.  But first, sell oneself into the power of one’s enemies, both mind and soul, since the body was here already, in this concrete building, over several years.  No way out.

I’ll give my soul to my enemies, he recounted, but I will win it back again.  I’ll go to war and fight, for apes also have reason, and higher intelligence, and humans know not how to keep their own human satellites at a height.

It took a particular manner of thinking, a very specific kind of computer awareness.  It took something primitive and yet strong, something je ne sais quois and yet knowable.  It took spirited defiance that had also sold itself out, as in this case for freedom, it took generosity of spirit whilst holding one’s cards close to one’s chest.  It took an outlook of a tormented, half defeated, but not totally erased master of aloneness.  It took an ape who was prepared to go to war.  This particular ape’s name was Jack King.