During the best of times, the bird sang clearly. Its voice filled the air with unmistakable chords and harmonies, slicing through the industrialized, materialist melancholy that hung over society, like a katana sword cutting through moldy drapes. During the worst of times, the bird sang harshly, its voice just a bit off key, perhaps a side effect of the pharmaceuticals in the water supply or the radiation from the 9g towers.
Regardless, the bird sang. It was a Real Bird too, maybe the only Real Bird left. It had feathers and a beak and claws and the ability to sense direction and navigate without a phone.
Its ancestors were dinosaurs. It laid eggs.
It could fly.
And Theodore Multiplex was the only person who could see it or hear it.
“Sweet! What skins do you have for it?” asked Malthus one day as Theodore was relating his experience.
“It doesn’t have skins. It’s a Real Bird,” Theodore said. Malthus nodded his head and smiled, or at least the face mask on his headset smiled, which was supposed to mean that somewhere within the headset he really was smiling, and several thousand tiny little cameras were recording his smile, tracking the points on his face, reconstructing his facial expression with an animated 3d mesh, and displaying it on the outside of his electronic face mask. Or maybe he was really just grimacing, and had just purchased a virtual smile for this particular moment.
“Check this out,” Malthus said, oblivious to what Theodore had just said. He pointed into the air next to him, snapped his fingers, and a virtual 3d model of a bird appeared. It was wearing camouflage feathers and custom Kaliyuga brand sneakers. On top of its head it wore a limited edition ball cap with the logo from DroneStrike, the most popular live-streaming, multiplayer, preemptive-strike, group-chat, first-person, socially-connected, mass-murder death-delivery app in the world today.
“I still don’t think you get what I’m saying,” Theodore said. But no one did. Not Malthus, who immediately began swapping outfits on his bird and laughing hysterically as he did. Not Segway, the trans-human girl from down the hall (one part female, one part robotic exoskeleton, one part nineteen surgeries). Not even Keynes, the half-cyborg, half-grad student, half Lex Friedman worshipper who lived in the laundry machine next to the pronoun violation punishment room.
“You’re crazy,” Segway said over a bowl of Monsant-Os one morning in the cafeteria. “There’s no such things as real birds anymore, they’re folklore…hoaxes.”
“Superstitions!” Keynes shouted, spraying seed oils everywhere as he did.
“But that’s not true,” Theodore said. “I can see him with my own eyes, and hear him with my own ears!”
But Malthus, Segway and Keynes just laughed at him, and soon others began to do the same. Theodore tried to tell them all the wonderful stories of the songs and melodies; of the warm, authentic feel of the bird’s feathers. He tried to tell them about that time the bird pooped on his jacket, and how at first he was mad, but then he was fine with it, because it was real bird poop, not some fake polygon augmented reality version. But none of them would have it, none of them would listen. Nobody cared.
But Theodore did. In fact, the more everyone else told him that he was mad, crazy, insane, dangerous, stupid, or just outright wrong, the more Theodore realized something.
It wasn’t that they thought he was mad, crazy, insane, dangerous, stupid, or just outright wrong. It was that they were scared of the Real Bird.
Not just scared….terrified.
So Theodore stopped hanging out with Malthus, Segway and Keynes, and anyone else who felt the way they did. He began to spend more time alone, and when he did, the Real Bird would come to visit him and sing its beautiful songs. Theodore and the bird got tight. They drew pictures, wrote sonnets and read philosophy together. They did CrossFit together; the Real Bird showed him how to properly deadlift and his life was changed forever.
One night, the Real Bird brought over a few grass fed ribeyes and a bag of charcoal. They ate like kings. And then, after dinner, as they were burning extra charcoal just to mess with the globalist carbon sensors, something incredible happened. The Real Bird began to talk. And when it did, Theodore listened.
“Tweet, tweet!” The bird chirped. “This whole society is based on lies, tweet!” Theodore nodded his head. Somehow, he already knew.
“The people I associate with say you don’t exist,” Theodore said. “They say that you’re folklore…a hoax…a superstition.”
“Tweet…the people who run your world are lunatics involved in a massive conspiracy to destroy the human soul, tweet tweet! They lie about everything, and the people in your society compete with each other to see who can believe them the most, tweet!! The people you associate with are the ones who believe in superstitions! TWEET!!”
Again Theodore nodded. The bird was wise in many ways.
He looked up at the bird with sad eyes. “I know what you are saying is true. I can feel it in my heart. But what can I do?"
“Tweet, tweet!” The bird replied. “You have to find a way to escape! Tweet!”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Theodore said. “You have wings.” He pointed towards himself, made a flapping gesture with his arms, and then slowly shook his head.
But the bird would have none of it. Together, they formed a plan. And while they did, they trained, ate more ribeyes, and read Nietzsche, Jung, and Camus. They did shadow work and took cold plunges and wrote manifestos. They watched classic documentaries like The Matrix and They Live. They bonded like two atoms sharing electrons. Theodore felt that despite their zoological differences, he and the Real Bird had become like brothers.
And then, the Real Bird disappeared. Heartbroken and unsure of whom to turn to, Theodore returned to the social group he had abandoned. As expected, they humiliated him, calling him names and denouncing his character. But Theodore just sat there. Not because he was weaker than them, but because he knew something they didn’t - the truth.
Yet despite this inner knowledge, Theodore began to lose hope. The pressure to conform to society became greater and greater, and soon Theodore realized that his soul was heading towards a breaking point, a place where he would have to make a choice. A choice that would have consequences for the rest of his life. Live free…or acquiesce. Theodore wondered when that day would come.
Thankfully, it would not be long. One day in the cafeteria, a day like any other, Malthus, wearing his stupid smiling headset, made another one of his 3d birds appear. This one was wearing purple nylon track pants and the brand new virtual jersey of the Afghanistan Cluster Bombers, the NBA’s newest expansion team. Malthus made another gesture with his fingers, and as he did, Segway, Keynes, and everyone else at the table began snickering hysterically.
“Hey Theo….look!” Malthus said. As Theodore looked up, Malthus made the bird turn around and drop its pants towards him. “It’s the real bird!” he said, and the entire table burst into laughter. Theodore turned bight red, and realized that the day for him to make his decision had indeed come. But Theodore had no idea what to do, and panic and frustration began to sink in. The laughter got louder and louder, and Theodore began to get angry. But just when he thought he could not take a single moment more, a loud thud silenced the room. It was the sound of a pile of large books landing on the table - a massive stack of works by Nietzsche, Jung, and Camus.
Theodore looked up and his face lit up with a smile. There, standing over the whole table, was the Real Bird. He had gotten huge and swole. The bird had put on some serious mass, and not just physically, but spiritually and intellectually too. As the Real Bird flexed its avian musculature and let its newly aligned chakras cast a glow upon the room, the others seated at the table spun their heads around and their world came to a stop.
“You…you….you can’t exist!!!” Segway said.
“This violates my world view…the cognitive… dissonance….is….” Keynes said, his eyes rolling back in his head as he began to twitch uncontrollably.
But Malthus’ reaction was perhaps the most absurd; his headset, its thousands of inwards facing cameras unable to process the whirlwind of information his panicked face was providing it, began to flash millions of emojis across its screen, providing a dazzling display of pure gibberish that made absolutely no sense. As it did, the virtual bird he had spawned flickered away, fleeing from its virtual perch to the invisible realm of numbers and digits it called home.
“Tweet, tweet!” the Real Bird said. “I told you we’d find a way!”
Theodore smiled. “I never doubted you for a second.” He climbed on top of its back, wrapped his arms into the bird’s dense feathers, and clung tightly as the two of them soared out from the cafeteria and into the sky, flying away into the sunset towards adventures unknown.
This piece is my submission for the latest Symposium theme from the
. This month’s theme is “superstition.”
The thing I enjoyed most about this piece is that, while it swoops and dives into places of absurdity and exaggeration, it does so very gracefully and in a way that underscores a fundamental truth, namely that people are afraid of the unfamiliar, will go to great lengths to deny its existence, and take great pains to denigrate a person like Theodore who sees what they do not. Thanks for sharing.