Nyar the Scientist

 Nyar the scientist

---Prologue---

A man of political importance hastily knocks the door of the local priest. After the priest calls him to enter, he allows him speak. The man reports that he needs the priest's help deciphering strange repeated messages that have been appearing over the last couple of days. He states, that kids had been fishing the messages out of the nearby river. The priest listens and asks the man to reveal the messages to him, which he then promptly starts reading. He thinks for a while and then starts explaining to the man what he understood from the text. 

The two are located in a circular, sacred shelter built out of thin tree trunks and roots, and overgrown with different types of vines. A small fire is burning in the middle of a room, blessing the two men with heat and light in the otherwise quite uncomfortable night. The two can be quietly heard, but not understood, by the small number of excited observers outside the shelter, as they are discussing their issue at hand with serious and lowly grumbling voices, in a monotonic but melodic sounding language. 

After about an hour of this discussion the man finally leaves, leaving the messages with the priest. As he is exiting, the observers pester him with questions, to which, with a serious face, he shortly responds by pointing out a public announcement he will make the next day at noon. 

"We have received messages from a man who calls himself Nyar. At first glance, I interpreted them as a threat, as the language used was a fair bit different from ours, and hard to decipher. As we have seen time and time again, outside influences usually do not do us well. But last night I consulted our priest, and he thinks that Nyar is a yet unknown god of the woods, bringing to us the possibility of a life more in piece from natures anger, if only we stat praying to him. The delivered text makes many predictions, two of which have already come true. The first was the death of one of ours to a nightly animal attack. As you know, one of our women has died 2 nights ago from a snake bite. Another is a strong but short rainstorm after a longer period of draught, which has also already come true this morning. Personally, I do not believe these predictions come from a god, but rather a man. Surely, these kinds of concretely useful predictions must come from a desolate genius scientist, with great intuition on the natural rhythms of life, and this scientist is speaking to us from the woods. Whatever he is, we shall be full of hope. Times of plenty are coming, if we only listen to Nyar's prophecies. Every two days, a new text has reached us, for the last 8 days now. We have only yesterday started to interpret them, and they are becoming increasingly difficult to understand with each message. We are just now trying to decipher the fourth one, which has arrived yesterday. Future texts can be expected to require even more time from us if we want to understand them. But according to the priest, the content of the prophecies and the understanding they document are also becoming more meaningful and more deep with every message. Let us all pray with great optimism that this blessing will persist. "

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We had hiked for many days, in an experimental expedition through the vast land which surrounded our home. We were explorers, keeping ourselves alive on whatever we could find. It was summer, and the fruits and huntable animals were plenty. We found a giant canyon and decided to make ropes out of nearby growing vines and use them to climb down the cliff to investigate it. After we made it down with great difficulty, we started roaming around and soon were in awe of the disquieting vastness of the canyon we had found. We found three dead animals that had apparently fallen down the cliffs into their demise just hours ago. In retrospect this could have been seen as an early warning, but at the time our excitement about this new found place overshadowed any doubt. As the night fell, we found shelter in a little cave and made a fire. I could not sleep much, as a sense of discomfort had been attached itself to me since we had entered this canyon. The night was starry and the little pieces of sleep I could catch were all full of nightmares. As I awoke in the morning, the others in my group reported similar experiences. The air was still and tense, and smelled of decaying cadavers. In our discomfort, we soon decided to leave this place behind. We packed our stuff and planned our ascent back to known land. After we finally reached the place which had served as our entry point to this canyon, we could not immediately find the vines we had used to climb down the cliff. One of our group members, to our great surprise, pointed out a vine lying on the ground around a corner, that had apparently been destroyed or chewed off by animals. We would have to find another exit, so we immediately started exploring the canyon further. We walked for many hours. 

In accordance with the adventurous spirit that drove our group in this dangerous situation in the first place, we did not allow ourselves to show any weakness or obvious fear. When one of ours voiced his concern regarding our limited food supplies, we just laughed it off. But when at the end of the day we had still not found an alternative exit, and we had to find shelter in the same cave we had already slept in the night before, I got even more tense than the first night. A feeling of mistrust surfaced in me as I was thinking about this vine lying on the ground, which was supposed to be our ladder back to freedom. The next morning we were hungry. We decided to start eating the three cadavers we had found two days earlier. They should provide us with food as long as they are edible, which would be another three days or so. We had ample water, due to a river flowing through the canyon. We had tried to follow the river to the outside, but it just disappeared into a hole in the ground. But I was concerned about the cadavers. We all knew it. They would start rotting soon. After that, we would only find very little food down here. Then, first hunger would set in. This thought was the first seed of our fear. No one admitted it, but it was clear to all. In particular, we needed to hold together to make it out alive. Any egoism would doom us all. This realization fed our fear further and with social cohesion grew mistrust.  

When I noticed that the cadavers had decayed too much to be safely edible and we were starting to get hungry, I immediately felt a heavenly pressure keeping us down in this forsaken hole we had entered. I did not know if it was the hunger, the stench of death surrounding us, or something else, but fear and confusion had grown ever stronger. All exploration was now done in the group. We moved everywhere together. But for another three days, we did not find much more food. The hunger grew more violent. As our paranoia festered like a wound, our efficiency in planning our escape was dwindling. Soon, our behaviour became more esoteric, less goal-oriented. More confused. We started thinking as one. Attempts of full sentences were  interpreted as manifestation of dangerous egoistic thought and consistently interrupted by the rest of the group. Instead of looking for more food and potential escape pathways, we just started singing to calm ourselves. There was loose coupling in our chants, but we all contributed our own part to the grand piece. Maybe some god of the woods would hear our cries, and carry us out of this misery. After a long time of chanting, a name appeared in our mind, promising us hope and filling me with joy. Nyar. But as soon as the god had called, tragedy was sure to follow.  

Some days further into our predicament, one of us found an exit. He returned with optimistic steps and marched into the middle of our chant circle, and he started telling us about his joyous findings. He described how just a couple of hundreds of steps in the direction we had come from, we had overlooked a crack in the walls which leads to a steep but probably manageable ascent to the surface. We all trembled in horror as we listened to his explanation. We promptly collapsed on him, broke his limbs with great speed, and one of us stepped on his throat until he stopped breathing. He had exited the collective continuum of thought, putting us all at great risk in the process. I was shocked at our own deeds. I looked in the direction in which he had discovered the exit. I thought for a moment of planning to take it. But I knew I was too weak. Reality had long become to thin to grasp, and would soon disappear completely as it would be perfused by the light of Nyar. It was from this exact moment on, that attempts to find an exit from the canyon were associated with devilish individualism and thus any escape had been rendered impossible. The echo chamber of our mind potentiated this association and therefore the unavoidability of our future. The realization of our fate was just the first of many intuitive insights which we would discover this evening, with chants, grunts and mimics as our only means of communication. Meanwhile, first plans of cannibalizing the corpse soon hatched out of our hunger-riddled network of thought. 

In grandios fever dreams we kept puking out ritualistic intuitions about our natural surroundings, which revealed ever greater truths. Mental dynamics appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and quickly manifested in everyone. A maladaptive hivemind, instead of surviving, we drowned in horrified, esoteric dreams. We still sang, but we all agreed on one melody, combined with a rhythm made by hitting sticks against each other. The hunger had grown so intense that the mind had consumed the hunger itself, by the power of the great spiritual insights it had acquired, but the product of this consumption was yet more confusion. Schizophrenic delusions were born in a sea of thought, and this sea ensured fast breading of those thoughts. Along with the confusion came an ever growing fear. Incapacitated by paranoia, we spent our days communicating with ever simpler phrases that finally degenerated into grunts, until we stopped talking altogether. But though our gaze and mimics, we held stable the connection that enabled us to communicate two things: The messages required for our creation of insights, and a never ending fear of these insights, and of what they are doing to us. 

Some time later, after the flesh of the individualist had already been consumed, his bones were harvested and made into musical instruments and erected as totems in front of the exit he had found to block evil spirits from calling more individuals out of the group into freedom. I shudder, as I carve a magical pattern into one of the shards of his skull. I am not aware of the origin of the pattern, but I know it is right to do. As we carve the bones, we realize the usefulness of human bones and in horror we accept that we need another death in our group, in order to build more spiritual devices. Not a word was said. Glances were exchanged around the circle we had formed around our fire. The glances converged to the weakest of our men. The man stood up, looked straight into the fire and started walking forward until he met his honorable fate as the group's first martyr. It was then, that we started writing down our findings, as brought to us by our savior Nyar. We used a simpler, purified version of our own native language, and carved its symbols into wood and human bones. We wanted to spread our thoughts. We encoded our self-reinforcing and self-reproducing seed of thought into bone and wood as an esoteric surgery, which had as a result potent a viral agent. We flushed this virus down our drain - the hole in which the river disappeared - for it to help the people in the downstream settlements to find the same fate as we have found.