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Unknown Transcription Found Earlier This Year
An unknown transcription found earlier this year without a year or transcriber. It was left as a note at one P.I. MushroomAlgae’s home. It reads:
To whoever gets this message. My mind is going and I can hardly make out what is what, so while I have time I must inscribe this before I can’t remember it correctly or the worst is to happen to me…
I was driving home from work one day, as I always do when I noticed the strangest thing. Amongst all the driving was a pack of cats. I know it sounds crazy, but it was a pack of cats. They were running in unison where a car should be in traffic. I know it sounds crazy, and it felt crazy, but it was the truth I swear it. I rubbed my eyes at a stoplight. Looked again: There. They. Were. No one else seemed to notice. I looked for anyone else who might see this as an oddity. This is not a normality for Fargo streets. We were in downtown Fargo! But before too long the light changed and the pack of cats moved with traffic. I was transfixed. I lost where I was within minutes. Turning this way, then that. When traffic sped up, the cats ran together. All of traffic was treating them like just another unit.
That’s when I realized… they were trying to lose me. At every stoplight, the cats, some of them anyway, would look back at me. They stared me in the eyes. Goosebumps crawled up my skin like a snake slithering its way down my arms to my hands and then tightening them to the steering wheel. I desperately wanted to call for help, but who would believe this? At the next light, they blew the red light, making a crazy turn in the middle of traffic so it was left. People steered out of the way but were yelling at the cats like it was a car. I had to catch them! Even though there wasn’t an accident, traffic got held up and I… I drove up onto the sidewalk and then back into the street to get past it. I had become crazed. Where had they gone? I was driving in and out of lanes until I saw them again. They were at full speed. My foot slammed into the gas like a brick and I caught up. But before I knew it… we were on the highway. I kept getting the warning stares from them, but I had to know if what I was seeing was real. We drove quite a way from the city and my gas was running low, but they turned into a dirt road. I followed them, never letting up my pace. But then… they had stopped. They were facing me. I had to come screeching to a hand and the car rolled and I must have hit my head.
When I came to I saw no cats. The car was flipped onto its top. I crawled out after breaking my window, I remember the cuts and scratches from the glass as I had to dig my arms into them and the dirt. Then I saw two choices. Up the rest of the road, which looked like it lead to nowhere… or a very small pipe. If I crawled, I could probably fit. A cat could definitely fit. Who knows what a mistake this would have been. As painful as it was, I pulled myself into the pile. The smell was terrible! But one glimmer of hope… cat fur. I had made the right choice. I crawled through the pipe and it couldn’t tell how long I had crawled. Hours… maybe minutes. It was as if time had stopped and I was trapped. I felt myself becoming hazy. I could barely stay awake, but when I finally found myself come completely to is when I fell out of the pipe. I pulled out my lighter and after several tries was able to get it to light. It must have previously been a sewer, but it was dilapidated and old now. The pain in my body and head was so intense. I took two steps forward and I finally realized how silly I had been. Something was wrong with me. There had to be no cats. I turned around… and that’s when I noticed. The cats blocked the exit. They were surrounding me. I turned back toward the entrance of the sewer and a very large cat, bigger than a wolf, stepped out into the light of my lighter and it… it spoke. “You know too much.”
It is not known why or if is even real that this message was left. However, after investigation, a missing man’s car was found near a pipe exactly how it was described in the translation. When investigated with cameras though, the pipe lead nowhere. It is still a mystery to this day.
Published in Literature
Joe? Joe Biden? What were you doing in Fargo?
I’d like to order a case of whatever transcript guy was drinking . . .
Something similar tried to lead me off the path in Sonora one time. Bats, I think it was made of, but looked just like Cybill Shepherd in a long black veil.
Have you heard of the Tanis podcast? A cousin of mine (Yes, Arahant, one of the weird Rhodys) recommended it to me. It’s got the same sort of feel that I’m getting off this story, detective.
Too many mushrooms…
And not enough algae?
A couple of the Monty Python episodes had a character named Algae, but I can’t find any video clips. Drat.
So, since the message was delivered to you, we surmise the cats didn’t just waste the interloper. At least not right away.
Have you read Prey, one of Michael Crichton’s later books?
Have you read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge? I think that’s the one with the little cat-sized creatures that are about as smart as a Democrat individually, but a six pack of them is more like Einstein riding Bruce Lee.
Yeah, that’s the one.
Reminds me of the story of a guy who was driving down the road somewhere in the Midwest when he saw a 3 legged chicken running alongside him at 35 mph. He sped up to 55 mph, and the chicken kept pace. He started to go even faster, and the chicken suddenly zoomed past him and went into a barn by the roadside.
He had to find out about this 3 legged chicken. He knocked on the door of a farmhouse nearby, and the farmer answered.
“Yes, that’s my chicken. We breed 3 legged chickens,” said the farmer.
“Why?” the man asked.
“Well, say you and your wife are having a guest over. You’d like a chicken leg. Your wife would like one. And maybe so would your guest.”
“Brilliant!” said the man. “So, how do they taste?”
“I donno. We’ve never caught one.”
(With apologies to Buddy Hackett.)
Funny, I watched a Carson clip just the other day with Hackett telling that one. And two others.
This election is getting to you.
I have not no!
Then I recommend them both to you. Crichton does an ok job with future nanotech, but it’s not his best. You’ll find that Vinge’s ideas resonate.
Near as I can tell Vinge is one of the sci fi writers who’s done the most thinking about what a genuinely superior intelligence would be like. You see that in A Fire in the Deep but also in his early cyberpunk story True Names. That being the extent of his stuff that I’ve read. The guy has interesting ideas though.
A Deepness In The Sky is about how superior intelligence can go very bad, among other things. Vinge understands how intelligence works as well as any non-specialist I’ve read.
Every Thanksgiving and every Christmas I go searching for the six-legged turkeys 🦃, but I’ve never found one. 😉
You need to shop where the Bundys do, and get the turkeys – or chickens I think, in their case – from Chernobyl Farms.