A short story to wet your appetite

SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION YEARS AGO (POSSIBLY)

by David J Tate

You should be aware of what it is like to be top of the food chain, although, to be fair, you are somewhat shielded from the reality of food source and your enormous ecosystem size means that your chain is far larger than mine. Anyway, although I am probably top of the chain, I still find a need for a little protection, so I decide to make what you will end up calling a lorica and you might describe as an extra-cellular basket-like structure which will hopefully provide me with a touch of protection.

It feels chilly as I leave my lorica. I am tempted to stay put, but I have a great need to feed. I sense trickles of bacteria, viral columns, some strangers to me (but not an obvious threat), fellow family members, and, from a great distance above a changing of something, I am not sure what, but it could be an approaching demersal zone, snowball earth reaching the deep waters, my imagination or God finally calling.

Who, what am I? Well, if you are inclined and adequately knowledgeable you might label me as a choanoflagellate. If you studied me closely enough as I swim in the pelagic zone, you would see that I have an ovoid single cell body with one taillike flagellum surrounded by a collar of thirty microvilli and that I move or swim by creating water currents by rapidly shifting my flagellum in the cloudy nutrient saturated water. I do not have an individual name, it is not something that occurs to us, nor is it deemed necessary, we are as we are.

It is very quiet, eerily still, much colder and I am seeking food, my favourite bacteria, occasionally a plump nutritious virus or if lucky a pick and mix. I use cadherins to find my food and then catch it by thrashing my tail back and forth and driving a current across my fringe of microvilli, my food getting caught up in the current and sticking to my fringe, and I then pleasurably and ravenously engulf, what is on this occasion, my less than preferred bacteria. I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

As I am cautiously floating along in the water a recently familiar urge invades my senses. Is it a smell, a taste or an attraction? I’m not sure. It is more like an invisible siren (or to you, if you are informed, it is a compound produced by an Algoriphagus bacteria!). It has been happening to me more and more often lately and as on those previous occasions, I weirdly have the uncontrollable urge to join my fellow species in a crowd, to clump together into the shape of a rosette and in a silent vigil to wait until hunger pervades our bodies, at which time we once again split asunder to resume our singular life. This has happened countless times but today feels different, there is an anticipation of momentous transition, or is it, on my part, just my overactive imagination?

It is a while, for we move at a pedestrian pace, but we finally meet, a group of, maybe fifty of us, and we warily and slowly etch out our preordained rosette. It is as if I am being tugged into conforming with the wishes of a higher power, a kind of tractor beam drawing us towards each other, and I have no effective will to resist. It is ecstatic once the rosette is built and we hover as if joined by an invisible cord in our inducted configuration and delight in a lasting tingle of pleasure.

Come closer, my neighbour somehow conveys to me.

This has not happened before and I shudder at the ending of the long silence.

I cannot, I equally in some such way convey, for I have always had a magnetic aversion to any form of proximity, it is an alien concept decupled.

I sense a chuckle, a sigh, a frustration, a wanting, almost a sexual urge amongst our rosette.

Come, come, come, come, to us, I am urged, this time not only from my neighbour. The demand is multidimensional, a drug addict’s compulsion screaming for touch. Am I the only reluctant one?

I can sense it, they are using cadherins to pull us together. I now know what my prey feels like, it is an irresistible tug. Why are they doing this? It does not seem natural. We should be alone. We are singularities. I want to scream that I cannot do it.

Come, a different voice.

Yes, come join us, closer, closer, yet another voice.

Yes, yes, yes, join, join, a cacophony of sound desperately mentally tugging at me and my fellow hesitant swimmers.

The crescendo imbibes me, if one does not imbibe the culture one cannot succeed, and I edge, slowly at first and then, as if there is a magnetic attraction, I touch my fellow living cells, I become one.

I am blasted into a height of delectation as my fellow choanoflagellates refreshing awareness floods my pneuma, my breath of life is mountingly enhanced. The light is blatant and beyond the rainbow, the silence insolently abusive. My singularity, for a nanosecond, struggles for supremacy with the invading multiplicity, but I am too weak, I scrimmage unavailingly and my individuality is expeditiously vanquished.

It is serene.

Ecstasy follows, it is a heroin high on steroids; a pre-eminent ejaculation. For me, it is vitalizing, the esplanade to immortality.

I blackout, resuscitation follows slowly, it feels like a time of august jeopardy and vulnerability. There is obsidian darkness for what resembles eternity, but in reality, it is possibly microseconds. Darkness fades, light is born, singularity is culled.

I and my fellow choanoflagellates are remade as the rosette.

I am one small part of the rosette.

I am all of the rosette.

We have become one.

We are no longer fifty.

We are the first.

I am the first.

I am a multi-celled organism.

We are your ancestor.

I am your ancestor.