This is Theo, George’s cousin, being forced to say something for Raven’s little book. He’s only doing it because he’s scared of Michel and George. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even be acknowledging that he can speak English.
I have no idea why Raven keeps pestering me to talk about my childhood and my hobbies. I like eating chickens, alive or dead, and moths are always welcome food. I am closer than is normal to my Grandmother, but she is in Europe and I am here. We text or talk almost every day. It annoys her to use human language, but I think it is a sign of how wily and adaptable she is that she’s taken to it. She has chosen a strange voice to talk in. It is at the low frequency end of the normal woman’s voice range, and the accent stretches from Germany to the Greece, and while she is learning English, she still speaks Greek to us. I have no interest in talking further on these subjects, and prefer to return to the subject of why humans are inferior.
Humans don’t realize why we have the advantage in the matter of diet. I have given years of thought to this – although Georgios would mock me for claiming to think at all, such is his disrespect for me – and I’ve determined what’s destroyed humanity. You could have been like us, unhindered, wild and alone, but evolution forced you into taking the social route and you got into groups.
That was bad, but what really messed you up was agriculture. Once somebody moves you away from access to the food you require to survive and breed, you are a slave, and only your elaborate social networks, with their elaborate food related rituals, and the buying and selling and growing and storing and transporting and preserving and mixing of food in inane and endless processions of ways, prevent you from seeing this.
If the food supply stops, which happens from time to time, I move where my nutrition buds take me. For I, in my superiority to humans, have no taste buds. That would prevent me from eating what I need instead of those materials this body needs to sustain itself. Nutrition buds advise me that my body will feel better if I eat this. However unlikely, if it’s safe and it’s within the current dietary rules, I eat it. I have no moral qualms about eating a dead human, and have been freely offered more corpses than I care to document. I have been advised not to while being recorded. I can always tell if there’s recording happening so there’s no chance I’ll get Georgios in trouble doing that. Michel sat on me and told me he’d kill my babies, which is stupid because Georgios would never let that happen, but just in case I don’t eat dead humans.
If humans were much less fussy about their food they’d have more resources for other things, and maybe they wouldn’t need to work at all, since work is slavery with the beatings missing, as I can clearly see. Work! I’ve been watching humans work for more than a hundred years, and it’s always the same. Almost everybody works and the ones who don’t work are either free like me or are parasites like Georgios. I learned from watching that the people who were most like me, free, although most of them live in cities, which is stupid, since it’s safer outside of them, were considered homeless and therefore less than other humans. Why? Because they have no place to keep food. This must be the most stupid reason to think someone is less than you. Think them less if they can’t think for themselves, or entertain themselves, or successfully breed. Not having a place to keep food is not a sufficient reason to think poorly of someone, since that is the default position of every member of my species and to an individual we are better than humans by any objective measure.
The first time I watched what’s called rush hour in Vancouver, I stood on the bridge over the highway and wondered how much of the substance of the earth could be set on fire at one time and yet everything still seem normal. All this you humans can accomplish, while sitting in a car. I always prefer to sit on the roof, if I can have it, as I enjoy the feel of the wind, and the g-loading as I hang on is exciting.
I do like moving around better with airplanes and cars rather than walking and horsecarts and trains.
I do not care about any human hobbies, and yet I am asked about mine constantly. Nothing that happens to me is of the slightest interest to any intelligent human being. I can neither hurt nor help anyone, so why would anyone care what I do? Psyche was as persistent as you, Raven, and I don’t say that lightly. I tell them moths, and then they say, well what about moths? I look at them. I create habitats in my body for them. I study them through their life cycles, watch them come into life and leave it and make babies in the middle, I feed them and watch them fly and examine all their body parts in detail and create maps and itemize what they eat, and then I eat them. There is nothing in the slightest bit unusual about any of this and I have no idea why any human cares about it.
