Verre

I was a young man swimming at night in a bay. A storm had blown up, and for some reason even though I was already in the water I felt the need to take shelter from the rain, so I grabbed a tarp that was connected to a rectangular three-sided frame (so open on one side) and held it over my head. This didn't feel sufficient, so I found a second tarp, this one on a round frame. Propping both of these overhead, I felt sufficiently protected from the storm to swim back to shore.

When I reached the beach, I peered through the darkness for the friends I expected to find there, but it was quiet and empty. They must have all gone home when the storm began, leaving me stranded. At first I felt a deep sense of loss and abandonment, but after a moment I realized there was another way to look at it: I was now free. I didn't have to go back with them, I could go someplace new.

I swam back out into the water, feeling no need to hide under the tarps anymore, and went farther than I had ever gone. As I was about to swim out the far side of the bay, the ground came up close under the water, like a boundary. I could feel the rocks sharp under my feet and I almost turned back, but mustered my courage and pressed forward. Then I was swimming in what resembled a small inlet into a river, and I recognized that I was in another land.

It wasn't as dark here, and I could see a boat passing by in the main river. There were several people in it, who I took to be natives of this land. I was tempted to hide at first, afraid they might be hostile if they spotted me, a stranger, but again I kept my courage up and swam forward. Fortunately they were friendly, and welcomed me among them.

I think there was a male chieftain in the boat, although the main purpose of the boat was to take the pregnant daughters of the tribe to a special place where they could finish their pregnancies. I immediately bonded with one of the girls and realized that I wanted to go along and help her, if she would let me.

I was participating in the Tour de France, except there were no bicycles involved. At first I was swimming in a river. There were other people swimming around me, including little babies and their mothers. The babies were eligible for a special award if they could swim well on their own, but in one case we noticed the mother secretly helping her infant by supporting it from under the water, so it was disqualified.

I didn't like being stuck in a group of people, so I exerted some effort to swim ahead of them and find my own space. It made me think about the huge variation in human athletic ability. In a long distance race like this, some people were already hours ahead. I figured I was probably somewhere in the middle, and I was sure that there would still be people hours behind me. I didn't feel any pressure to compete against others or try to finish the race quickly; it felt like the sort of event that one could complete at one's own speed.

Under the water I could see seaweed in a form that resembled bundles of thick green ropes, stretching endlessly in the direction the river flowed. They looked like they were flowing along too, so I grabbed them to see if I could catch a ride, but they were moving slower than I could swim on my own so I let go again. The race course led me out of the river and now I was running on land down a quiet little house-lined street, like a small village.

I was still thinking about that strange ropy seaweed. It had reminded me of thick cables of the sort that might carry electricity or another kind of signal. What would it be like if our society used biological materials like this for our technological infrastructure? I decided to try out the material, so I manifested a hand made out of the same stuff as the seaweed. It resembled a human hand in shape but was not connected to a body, and was light green in color. Mischievously, I made the hand crawl up the porch of the nearest house and pull the string of the bell that hung on the doorframe.

The door opened, and inside I was surprised to see that the one who opened it was not a human but a chicken, an ordinary-looking hen. She must have been a Plymouth Rock, judging from her black and white barred plumage. It reminded me of a silly line I'd heard somewhere, so I joked, "There's nobody here but us chickens!" She didn't make any response—maybe she didn't know that one?—and I was still running so I soon passed by.