“H”

            H is an intergalactic entity, an alien on earth if we were to impose on him our human-centered labels.  In actuality, he does not have a name or a gender.  We ascribe these concepts to more easily understand his story.  We are unable to describe him physically because he is not composed of anything our human senses can detect. The closest we can get to describing him is that he is a form of conscious and sentient energy that sees though all time.  It is the human conceit that keeps us from understanding that extra-terrestrials are among us.  Not only do we insist that aliens should be elongated, advanced and brainy hominids, we also believe that they can exist only if we can detect them with our meager senses.  In fact, aliens similar to H have been around us through all human existence, passing through our bodies and our lives on a regular basis: we just don’t know they are there.

            H is a special entity, though.  He is a student of life and he loves it in all its forms and because of his obsession with the beauty of life he is especially consumed with the planet Earth.  It is fact, not human conceit, that Earth is by far the most spectacular planet when it comes to organic life—the only type of life of which our limited brains can perceive.  The few places in the universe that support organic life do so only in short spurts and it rarely advances past unicellular organisms.  Earth, though, is a rich and complicated anomaly that H has watched with fascination for eons.

            Because he can see (again in terms with which we can relate) through all time, his experience with life on Earth is like a bourgeoning symphony.  Proliferations of colors like blossoming wildflowers flare and fade, organic life surging and swirling in churning mists in eternal beauty.

            He enjoys cycling life and doesn’t shrink from the brutality of existence and survival.  With neither the voyeurism of a sadist nor the self-indulgence of a masochist, he watches the dynamic of predator and prey with platonic clarity and comprehends the necessity of these relationships without the affliction of sentiment.  Unburdened with the human instinct to protect the large-eyed and soft he is unaffected by the snake striking the fox pup, the hummingbird stuck in the eager spider’s web.  Death and pain are ubiquitous as is birth and pleasure and H revels in the beauty of all, but he does have a sense of fairness and although he is a passive observer and student of life here on earth he finds himself at issue with, you guessed it, human beings.  H has no issue with the power of a lion over the calf of a gazelle, nor is he bothered by piranha devouring en masse an injured caiman 100 times the size of an individual fish.  If humans were to catch baby rabbits, snap their necks and devour them whole he would be fine with that too.

H’s issues with humans begin with whales and end with elephants.  He witnesses humans developing into creatures like no other with the capacity to kill creatures they shouldn’t be able to even approach.  Why should a creature with dull sight, terrible hearing, no real sense of smell, antennae, a creature that is slow, weak, with no sharp teeth, claws or even fins or wings for that matter hunt and slaughter a forty foot 130,000 pound creature that lives in the middle of the ocean, making the multitudinous seas incarnadine?  Humans can’t even swim for more than a few minutes at a time, yet they are able to destroy these magnificent behemoths.  They slice and powder the horns of dangerous ungulates with impunity.  Nowhere else in the natural world does this hold true.  Ants may gang up en masse on a larger creature, but they are built for it.  They have incredible strength and severe mandibles.  Bacteria multiply and destroy their host but that is their purpose.  But take as many men as you can find and have them, naked, with no weapons or tools, attempt to take down African elephant?  Good luck.  These clever buggers somehow found a way to do such things and for no other reason than for their entertainment.  Destruction of the environment and loss of animal life was acceptable for H.  He knew of the beauty that would rise from the ashes of mankind.  It was really just that humans shouldn’t have been able to do what they did to animals better than them.  That was what bothered H to the point where he broke his code of observation and took action.

He pinpointed a time in Earth to influence the course of events.  In what is currently Africa, Australopithecus were beginning to get cocky.  They were using tools, coming down from the trees, walking upright to see over the grasslands.  They were forming tightly-knit groups and advancing their forms of communication almost to the point of abstraction.  They were beginning to be a threat to the larger animals around them even though physically they were a joke. 

H intervened in the least intrusive way possible.  He found a moment when a matriarchal pachyderm had been startled by a lone, baby Australopithecus.  In this moment the large beast reacted aggressively, as they often did, and stepped on the young creature squishing it to death.  At that very moment H “passed through” her.  As I said before, H is a form of incomprehensible energy that cannot be detected by organic creatures’ senses.  But if he or one of any similar entities in the universe hesitates while passing through a creature, it can stimulate the electrical impulses in a brain and trigger physical reactions.  If you have ever randomly forgotten what you were about to say or do, you were probably “passed through” briefly. It happens all the time.  Other reactions include sneezing, hiccoughs, yawns, and epileptic fits.  And all it took was one pass through this matriarchal beast to change the course of human evolution.

H passed through and aligned himself in a way that produced an intense orgasmic reaction in the animal’s brain at the moment she stepped on that stupid little monkey.  The result was an epiphany.  From then on the giant pachyderm would step on small hominids every opportunity she had, reveling in the feeling it gave her to crush that warm, hairy mass between her toes.  She loved to hear the twig-like bones crunch and the snap and pop of spines and skulls squishing into the terrain.  Frankly, she hadn’t felt that good since early adolescence.  She did it with such glee and enthusiasm that the other deinotheriidae took notice.  Being the sentient and socially imitative creatures they were, others in her herd tried it and felt the surge of excitement and energy that comes with stomping on a little creature, just like kindergarteners with June bugs.  Soon, across the grasslands and in forests one could see elephants in ecstasy twisting a foreleg into the earth and letting out a joyous bellow.  Of course they couldn’t catch all the little monkeys they saw and they didn’t want to.  They still had their own pachydermic lives and concerns: feeding, drinking, protecting their calves from lions and such, as well as maintaining their complicated social lives.  But if one of those little monkeys strayed too far from a tree or was bold or stupid enough to ambulate challengingly across the plain, then that was another story.

The monkeys, for their part, soon realized the dangers in the deinotheriidae and stuck to the trees.  They were more on guard and less bold.  They couldn’t cover as much territory which meant less interaction with other groups, which meant a shallower gene pool, as they say.  They never developed any tools worth more than ones used to dislodge termites.  They never developed tools to injure themselves.  They never developed agriculture or had societies or churches or whaling ships.  They lived in trees, mated and sometimes successfully raised young and died at a decent age.  They spent their spare time eating lice and masturbating and throwing feces at each other.  And they were content.