Dave The Penguin by Nick Sambrook Page B

thought she was a
reincarnation of a flying dolphin called Flipper.
    Which was fine, except that of
course everyone knew that dolphins didn’t come back as penguins,
not even ones from TV programmes.
    So everyone thought she was
mad, all except young Dave; after all she did seem to be the only
one in the family that had been happy, and the only one that had
interesting conversations with him. He thought that she just had
different ways of seeing things.
    Things then began
changing in the room; objects were being added, like in a
progressive dream.
    Dave looked up. There was a
large clock on the wall. The clock had two sets of hands on it; one
set was going forwards and the other was going backwards.
    Every time you looked at it,
the hands were not in the same place. The clock was clearly useless
here and didn’t seem to have any purpose other than to explain
something; obviously that time was irrelevant here, that it was
timeless, a state machine.
    He wondered why it didn’t
just have a sign saying that, instead of some cryptic animated
symbol, or perhaps it was unaware of the fact itself.
    But then that is why you
get representations like this in all those books, films, art and in
your dreams; it was trying to represent something in some way that
was understandable to you, giving you a story to convey parts of
the whole picture.
    Curiouser and
curiouser thought Dave.
    Dave thought he would try
something.
    “ What is the point of
that?” he asked of the elephant, and he pointed to the clock “It is
totally useless.”
    “Well,” said the elephant “time
doesn’t exist here. It is meaningless. This is a state environment,
and not defined by time. Things here just are, or are not. There is
no concept of ‘was’ or ‘will be’, other than that which is
projected by probability or remembered in memory, in which case
they are known and perceived into reality.
    “ Things just have an
informational state, but with projected future probabilities of
other states. Yet it knows ‘what was’, and ‘what is’ and ‘what
probably will be’, and ‘what will be’ changes the ‘what is’ and the
‘what was’ and vice versa. So you see it’s meaningless.”
    Dave was now wishing he hadn’t
asked, and he watched the clock intently and without blinking; the
hands moved in a gentle flowing motion.
    “But when I look at it, it
doesn’t jump around” said Dave.
    “ That’s because you are
giving it meaning by perceiving it; both time and the clock itself.
That’s what you are here for - to create meaning from the
meaningless; to organise stuff along a set of rules and guideline;
to evolve” said the elephant.
    “It still looks a bit weird if
you ask me” said Dave.
    “Well yes,” said the elephant,
who was now wearing a little blue and white dress, “but then
everything has errors - nothing is perfect - you just have to try
and make sense of things even though they are senseless.”
    That seems
logical , thought Dave. He had no idea why
the elephant was wearing the dress now though, but he was a
broad-minded and polite penguin, so he didn’t ask.
    There was now a full length
mirror on the wall. Dave went up to it and looked at himself in
it.
    It showed you everything that
you wanted to see, and in the way you thought you wanted to see it.
It was a reflection of perceived reality.
    Dave was pleased to see that he
looked just the same in it as he always did, his mental, or
‘higher’, ‘spiritual’ program blueprint looked good, although his
six-pack had lost some of its usual toned definition.
    He turned sideways-on to check
over his profile, and flexed his biceps.
    Then suddenly the room changed
around him. It was as if he could create any environment he wanted
just by thinking about it, imagining it.
    His imagination expanded and he
could envisage even sharing common game-type holograms with other
penguins’ minds in other rooms that they might be in. But the
change made him tired, it seemed to take