Xanioascus canadensis

[Kermit]

Michael was having a pretty fun time.

Looked like the little guys in the tank were having a fun time too. Just floating around like little spaceships in the empty black abyss of space.

One of them was opening up, presumably to engulf a few particles of nutrient. Its shimmering protuberances swooshed back and forth through the void, creating rainbows out of darkness.

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...They weren't spaceships.

They were ctenophores!

Michael crossed his arms and smiled wistfully, watching the comb jellies float about. This was nice.

This was really, really nice.

[Cicada]

?

Beryl observed the ripples of a spaceship disturbing and warping the fluid of space time.

Drifting into and out of her eyeball were visions both real and not so. She contemplated a rough and pulpy pad of paperboard sandwiched sketches. She contemplated a shakily drawn wobbly outline of a jelly-like creature and then her eyes turned upwards to skirt over the outline of a jelly like creature- humanoid- and then she saw a couple of fully automated jellyfishes sewing holiday cheer through a dimly lit water tank.

And then she looked back down at Michael, the trajectory of her eyes lazily reversing. When she contemplated his hair, turned a sickly neon glow in the room's ambient light, she was reminded of an old friend and an old place in time and space.

Her sketch of the ctenophores remained lazily balanced on her knees, both knees in turn stacked up onto her bench beside her. She waved Michael over, silently for a second, before also helpfully speaking out:

"Michael!" She sung with a slightly teasing inflection, like a school yard rhyme, "How are you?" She remained not too loud, almost barely piercing her voice through the deep bassy ambiance of their surroundings.

[Kermit]

Michael froze whe—

Oh hey that was pretty funny

Michael froese when he heard someone whisper his name in a weird spooky way. His head reflexively twitched towards the source of the sound and his eyes flitted over a waifish figure, but he couldn't make out a face and then to avoid seeming like a starey weirdo, he looked back over at the not-fish tank. Oh God, were they talking to him? Michael was like, literally the most common name in the universe. It could be like, anyone named Michael. Maybe Jackson, maybe Jordan, maybe Richardson. He could look back over at whoever the "Michael"er was but then it'd be like, weird and stuff if it wasn't someone he knew.

He adjusted his glasses. Oh God he hated this now. He wished he could be one of those little things in the tank. Floating around brainlessly, only controlled by the need to consume and the need to breed.

"How are you?"
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Oh that was just Beryl. Well, okay. That made things a whole lot easier. That was like, a mega-coincidence but not really because they were both biology weirdos.

"Beeeeeeeeeeeryyyyyyl?"

He turned around.

"I'm okay, I guess." He coughed. "Hi."

[Cicada]

Michael Froese. Current status Froesen, prior status one of her several beloved lab partners from eleventh grade biology. Advanced placement, as in, the biology was advanced placement, though Michael himself was also quite smart and interesting! Beryl vaguely recalled this very sort of behavior and atmospheric effect preceding him in the murky past of school year previous. Like, um... a cornered mouse, though actually now that Beryl thought it Michael's aura also had a mild veneer of ribbit-y frog about him. About to jump away and hide away, which was perfectly alright but Beryl did want to try talking to him at least a bit before acquiescing that such an event occur!

He responded,





Beryl responded after quietly staring for a second.

She adjusted her glasses back at him. It seemed to her some sort of tautological variant of some other means of greeting, a two-finger gesture with the tip of a hat, or curtsy of a dress, or radically cool pop of a collar.

"Beeeeryyl.." She repeated back at him with an only slightly truncated delivery, oh and also dissimilar with softer tone with no evident surprise.

With an exuberant whorl of energy she suddenly tossed herself off the bench in an explosion of fluttering and flailing locks of hair. Every single strand of silk settled wrong, moving her hair as a singular unit to be plastered over one side of her face. She came to stillness, decelerating from hundred to zero instantaneously, nursing the mildest case of sudden onset vertigo, though she couldn't imagine why.

"I'm okay too! And.. I also guess. That, sometimes it's hard to know those things, for sure. Possibilities abound, like.." A brief pause, where she stared at somewhere next to Michael instead of actually at him. ".. You're just vibrating really really fast, instead of me being slightly dizzy. Huh! That happy to see me..?" She offered a her tongue on a stick, as in, stuck out at him.

[Kermit]

Beryl was fun because she acted high even though she wasn't high. She was like, high on life. Yeah. That sounded pretentious enough to make sense, probably.

Beryl adjusted her glasses and then said the same thing Michael had said. It was like looking through a mirror. A really weird mirror. Come to think of it, you didn't really look throughmirrors in the first place. You looked at a mirror and then all the photons bouncing off the mirror traveled back through your cornea and into your-FUCK

Michael jumped back a bit at Beryl's sudden movements, stopping himself just close of the ctenetank. Okay so Beryl was also feeling spooky today because Jesus F. Christ what. She did some talking about like, how you could never really be sure what you were seeing or whatever, some post-modernist thing. Michael got that. How like, those ctenophores in the tank really were spaceships, or that the universe started existing last Thursday, or that the earth was flat. The thing was, though, you could discount a lot of that stuff based on evidence and likelyhood and how many assumptions you make to get there. Not discount it entirely, because, well, it could be true, but use your observations about the world to classify the chance that the idea was true. Like for example, 9/11 being this whole big government conspiracy. There was a common talking point of the conspiracy theorists about how one of the hijacker's passports was found on the ground after the collision, about how unlikely it would be for a passport to survive a plane crashing into a building, and the fact that it would've been "physically impossible" for the passport to have traveled the distance it had (according to a guy who probably wasn't a physicist). In Michael's belief, that proved that the government didn't do 9/11. The theory assumed that the government was both competent enough to crash fucking airplanes/holograms/missiles/?????—it depended on the theory—into the twin towers, and keep everyone involved quiet about it, but be incompetent enough for like, some CIA intern get distracted during his coffee break and remember that he was supposed to be planting the passport at ground zero, but then one of the towers collapsed before he could plant it (because of the coffee break) so then he was just like "fuck it" and threw the passport some dumb place. What really happened that day was a bunch of shitheads hijacked airplanes and committed mass-murder, and the government (which had received information that something like this might have happened) was just like "Oh fuck we didn't think they'd actually do it" and that was that.


Michael hadn't taken his ADHD meds that morning.

"You know I'm famous for my excited vibration abilities, Beryl." He responded. "Heck of a coincidence this, uh, is, yeah?".

[Cicada]

Michael bounced back a bit, visibly, audibly, palpably. He was, surprised, or disturbed, or inspired to mirror Beryl frame-by-frame? She didn't know but she could certainly imagine the possibilities, something like

An instance of reality certainly existed. Wherein, on a sunny and clear Tuesday morning in the frigidly dead grasp of Mother Nature's winter, Beryl Mahelona- alternative names abound, Feldy Mahelona if born biologically male for example- and Michael Froese- alternative names infinitely variable, per extant nonexistent information- would exist in a superposition aggregate of a variety of increasingly dubiously likely states of interaction in front of a tank of jellies that may or may not have been spaceships. In said reality the various actions of the sentient Michael Froese may or may not have had a variety of odd logical origins, most of them generally unimaginable but perhaps specifically relevant depending on the genesis of the scenario: for example whether or not Michael/??? and Beryl/Feldy/etc. were arbitrarily in an involved relationship, bitter enemies, ex-convicts on the run from the law, so on and so forth. In this alternative dynamically definable model of an alternative reality Beryl's meandering memories could perhaps land point and center onto: a series of texts sent back and forth between herself and a certain Lyra Doyle concerning one (1) shared robotics project that may or may not have involved daringly futile plans of mass drivers to scale (roughly, the size of a spoon? thereabouts? firing ~9.00 gram cuboid projectiles at a range of ~300.00 millimeters?); a few quips of gossip between herself and Miss Sierra Cook concerning the oddity of people who used the art room for tangential purposes to it's defined purpose; various other whimsies of her mind that were probably profoundly irrelevant.

Beryl also wondered, with equal lack of succinct successes, if she was just distracted.

A long moment passed between the two, both indefinably lost in their thoughts.

"You're my little oscillator, yes!" A nickname to perhaps save for the sake of posterity, for all time, or at least until forgotten. "Is it a coinky-dink, hmm..?" Beryl stalked a bit closer, pacing in a tight circle at an angle to the aquarium tank, still forgetting poor Sketchbook abandoned on her lonely perch. "You typically like marine biology, me less so.. but, yes, I still am so engaged. I'd say, statistically, there is a, say.. modestly small chance per-diem of us meeting, maybe like.. Once every six months or so in an arbitrary," breathe Beryl remember to breathe, "mutually exclusive event." She'd spoken a bit faster, excited to positively mild eagerness by the equation she'd drudged through the depths of her gray matters.

[Kermit]

Oscillation. "Oscillation". Michael was an oscillator. He was made up of little oscillating particles made up of little oscillating particles made up of little oscillating particles. Without oscillation you'd have the heat death of the universe. Which was bad, probably.

Y'know, he usually wasn't like this. Maybe Beryl's like, mind beams were affecting him. Or not, that'd be dumb.
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Right so anyways...

"Right, but 6 months is still like, a hundred-eighty-something days. So that's still a one-in-hundred-eighty-something chance that today'd be the day." Man, he hated it when he started waxing philosophical. Preferred to keep it all bottled up for year-end English exams so he could unleash max pretentiousness. Oh well. He continued "I mean, if you think about it like that, there's no such thing as coincidences. Just odds."

What were people but meat computers? Like, okay they have "free will", but that's subjective. People were extremely predictable. The only thing was that nobody knew how to predict them.




Michael was starting to regret not taking his meds.

"So, uh, yeah...How's, like, life going?"

[Cicada]

It was interesting that Michael was going along with her natural cadence, normally it was the other way around... Or perhaps there was no clear source of causality in either direction, perhaps they were both somewhat off-kilter et cetera.

But this was somewhat fun, yes.
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"Oh!"

"There's, after all, a normal distribution of events likely to happen in any arbitrary time frame. Whether life is.. deterministic, or not, events would consistently occur at, well. A given probability. Those events could or could not be mutually exclusive.. um, either way." That was to say, Beryl trying to chug the train of her own meta-cognition, that probably, there was no extant case to disprove via thought experiment. As she saw it, whether or not events had a specific arbitrary causality or not... like, they were still governed by mathematical chance by lieu of being non-certain events to begin with. Hmm... that made sense?

"So I think the coincidence doesn't exist, though I guess.. you could just define a coincidence as particularly fantastic odds anyways. Fantastic, as say, our meeting! Here, and now."





Her brain AKA meat computer AKA locus of control skipped a few synapses as it reboot. Their conversation seemed, somehow, phenomenally slow.

"Life is..." Literal life as in her biological status of being alive? "Excellent..." Figurative life as in the memory-ark built of her experiences as interpreted through the filter of myriad barely coherent emotion? "... And excellent, likewise.. Grandpa's left the house for a few weeks to visit Grandma's family down south. And, people are telling me I should throw a party while he's gone. Do you, perhaps, think I should?" Michael's was an opinion with as much weight as any other, and, more in this particular moment given his extremely convenient proximity!

"And what about you?" She let the various threads of conversation float free as jellies in the dim-lit tank behind them. "Homeostasis confirmed? Lively existence, perhaps..?"

[Kermit]

Jeez Louise it was like talking to his own brain. Wacky.

Beryl did some Beryl-eque rambling that only she/the voices in her head would truly understand. Michael tuned most of it out, the words turning into a droning, cicada-like buzz.

"WordsWordsConfusingBerylWordsThoughtsDeterministicProbabilityWordsBuzzingCicadasBerylWordsCausalityMathematicalHmm.. that made sense?"



"Yes.", Michael replied, nodding his head. He could see a different ctenophore tank from the corner of his eye, and it was so very, very pretty.

His mind clicked into focus when he heard the word "party". Parties were always interesting, both the social gatherings and the political entities.

"Yes, parties are fun, unless they're The Nazi Party, in which case they are decidedly unfun.", he replied.

He wondered exactly what kind of party Beryl would throw. It wasn't like Michael ever attended, well, any parties, but a "Beryl party" would probably be like, a quiet evening spent staring at modern art while sipping on milk dyed purple with food colouring.

Aw darn, he was pretty sure Beryl was asking him how he was doing, or at least that's what it sounded like. Michael was perfectly content to just, like, let whoever he was talking to at any given moment be the one talking, because if they were talking, Michael wasn't. That meant less talking for him, and talking was like, hard and stuff.

"Yeah, I'm alive. Last time I checked, I was, anyways. I've been okay, life's pretty normal, which is like, a good thing because life being abnormal means something abnormal is happening and that means in rare cases something real good's happened, or that something shitty just happened."

He waited for her response, if any, and then continued on with another question, something to keep Beryl talking and to help him figure out if he would partake in this whole party affair. "So, what kind of party are we talking about here? Like, a rampant drug and alcohol abuse party or like, a dinner party?"

[Cicada]

Beryl listened to her own brain child as it echoed at her back through her own skull.

Sometimes she just had to contemplate what it was like, listening to herself in the probably different-size shoes of another person. What was it she was even saying? Was her muddled, inert noble gas of a voice annoying, perhaps? Such rhetorical questions invited reflection, in a certain manner:

????words???hypothesis???control variable??? false positive???? probably didn't make sense?






Beryl noted a slight drift in Michael's gaze and followed it into the majestic beauty of the blocky blah of the ceiling. Somehow that didn't seem right but she didn't question it.

"Oh, what about the Communist Party of Kampuchea?" Beryl replied in turn.

Her mind dredged up the reference at random, briefly coalescing a definite concept from the fuzzy electron cloud of her intellect. She wondered if, given the ever fluid and meandering definition of the 'present' based on a chaotic coalescing of infinite possibilities, if there was ever truly an 'unfun' idea.

Perhaps, for example, there was a fun idea for a party involving some manner of quiet contemplation and oddly avant garde drink, but Beryl assumed the strict majority of a random sample of George Hunter's population would express strong disapproval.

Beryl hovered in an indiscreet position of space time, floating on one foot and then the other in a slow cadence that could likely be accurately redefined as 'walking in a circle' while wondering about the security camera in the room. If she, the camera, consciously observed the awkward teenagers in her field of vision.

"Likely you are medically alive," Beryl contently affirmed, "barring some odd one in an exponent exponent-ed miracle." Exponent-ed was not a word, probably, but she liked it all the same. "And I dunno. Odd things that disrupt the status quo could be as good as they are bad. Like a lottery windfall, maybe?"

Beryl waited for her response to have a response, which it did promptly.

"A dance party hearkening to the days of stereotypical disco flicks." Beryl's thinking aloud raced far ahead of her thinking not-aloud, that was, internally she'd already groused on it and decided to stamp the idea with a wax-sealed 'NOPE'. Retractable anytime, of course. "It could be any sort to begin with, but I have observed over time that parties tend to meander in the direction of wild and crazy and mildly to severely orgiastic."

Beryl then...

... waited.

Even more than she had already!

[Kermit]

Michael responded to Beryl's response in response to a short awkward silence characterized by a lack of responses.

"Yup, that's pretty much it."

Beryl then responded to his question, giving an answer Michael responded to by momentarily furrowing his eyebrows. A 70s party? Oh no. Michael'd have to make his hair into an afro, and that would be bad news for all parties involved. Also, 70s equaled cocaine. Beryl plus cocaine equaled at least two fatalities.

Oh what

Okay so it wasn't a 70s party, which was good, probably. No cocaine for Beryl. It would still be wild and crazy and -

...

- and...

His eyes widened in shock.

Was Beryl inviting him to an orgy? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Okay, he'd probably say yes, but still, this was probably just Beryl regurgitating a thesaurus.

"'Scuse me what was that last part?"

[Cicada]

The ever evolving chaotic system of increasingly awkward pauses continued to evolve.

"... Wait, which one's it? I, uh, sort of lost track of the conversation already."

Where had it gone? Beryl swore it had been there in her head just a second ago. Michael looked bothered, Beryl looked bothered that Michael looked bothered or at least she would have if her face hadn't been particularly inert as usual! She continued to stare dreamily into space, her pupils slightly offset from one another by a few degrees of an angle apiece.

Drifting...

She followed the lazy drift of a comb jelly lazily bugging her peripheral vision. It turned into a game of keeping the jelly perpetually a blurry, colorful blob on the edge of her vision.

This way...!

That way...! Carefully, or she'd lose it...



The moment passed forever ago.

"Wait, um. Which last part..?"

Last part... What, again, was the first part? ... Communist Party... ??? had been involved somehow? She glanced down at her hairband choked fingers. Two reds on her left index, a baby blue and a different darker shade of blue- indigo?- on her left middle finger. Did she have homework due? Oh. Uh... Yes! But, that wasn't the relevant part.

She stared blankly at Michael for a second longer than had been awkward as of seconds prior.

"Orgiastic? Mildly? Severely? Michael you know George Hunter students are teenagers..! They happen to, well.. like sex and stuff."

[Kermit]

...so...

...huh...

...so...

...hmm...

...what?...

Michael stood, still as a statue. He avoided making eye contact with Beryl because what the fuck!?, a perturbed look upon his face. He opened his mouth and words came out.

"I, uh..."

"Uh..."

"Did..."

He finally managed to smush the words flowing through his brain together into a comprehensible form.

"Did you just invite me to an orgy?"

[Cicada]

... Left...

... Right...

... She almost lost it!

But jelly paused...

Just in time, for her to slow the microscopic pivots of her eye. She was actually vaguely curious if, to an outsider's perspective, it looked like she was moving her eye at all.

She didn't have the information memorized, she was pretty sure. 'Eye biophysics'. Didn't even sound like a formal terminology.

Michael was being...

... Focus...

Multitask...

Beryl immediately snapped back with a smile audible in her tone. It was the familiar, slightly condescending (dependent on individual interpretation of course) mode of address for 'silly gooses'.

"I specifically think I said... uh, not that I can remember for sure? .. But I think I specifically said that an orgy was a possibility. Probably very unlikely to happen." Come to think of it, had she even invited Michael at all in the first place, explicitly? Hm! So many words in the script she had to memorize...

"An orgy... most likely was not the premise under which I hypothetically invited you, to a yet unplanned party."

[Kermit]

Y'know, out of all the places this conversation could be happening, the ctenophore room was a pretty bad choice. Oh well, it wasn't a choice. It was a coincidence/whatever noise Beryl's larynx had decided to produce.

Michael tried to focus his mind on something other than the current conversation. This felt like something out of a movie—some wacky Seth Rogen comedy or something—and that meant that, oh God, Michael was the Michael Cera character.


*INTERNAL SCREAMING*


Beryl opened her face and oh no she was doing that voice which meant that things were going to get, well, to tell the truth things couldn't really get much weirder than they already had, so things would probably get the same. Apparently there was a possibility that she'd just invited him to an orgy, but still a small possibility that she had, but also the possibility she hadn't.

Yeah so that was a conclusive "Who the fuck knows?" on the whole orgy thing.

Okay then.






Michael's brain didn't work too good for a few seconds, but then a hideous self-portrait manufactured in whatever portion of his mind was dedicated to goofery and annoying people popped up in his mind's eye, and he couldn't help but smile. Right, he should probably be saying something.

"I'm choosing to interpret that as a solid no. Okay so that's good then!" He cleared his throat in an over-exaggerated way, and continued talking, now in a much louder voice. "YEAH SO HOW ABOUT THOSE CTENOPHORES THEN, HUH!?"