Short Story: God Complex

It was when the fish started talking to me I wondered if I was losing it. Their voices were big and hoarse like of a butch human. It didn’t quite match their fish bodies.

I’ll leave you to decide if you believe my story or not.

“The Dome”, that’s what everyone kept talking about, but no one would tell me what it was, no one had any reason to: I was working minimum wage cleaning the offices. Eventually I was promoted to “assistant” and this took me inside. The Dome was gorgeous: it was like a miniature planet, a burst of life growing in secret between lifeless concrete walls. It somewhat resembled a zoo enclosure: there was a wide grassland in the centre, grand trees with vines for the monkeys to swing from and a lake around the rim, very deep, filled with aquatic life. A separate enclosure linked at the side, blocked by a gate, featuring desert land, for the lions to live in. A natural beauty entirely man made.

The lab circled round The Dome and meant you could walk around and see the enclosure from any angle. My first day I was sent to give files to the head scientist Dr. Theo. He was stood looking out to the chimpanzee camp. I handed him the files but couldn’t bring myself to leave. One of the chimps had injured its leg and another was wrapping a bandage around the leg and patting the chimp on the back. The other monkeys were sat in a circle passing bananas between them.

My job was simple, I’d carry equipment and pass files between staff, and it gave me lots of time to stare at the animals. The monkeys were exceptionally smart: they’d talk to each other through sign language and had built a camp with tents and small fires to sit around. They were calmer than zoo monkeys, a lot quieter too, and their eyes held depths that their naturally dorky big ears didn’t point to. I counted six lions in the smaller enclosure. They were less peaceful than the chimps: they’d roar and growl constantly, not angrily, more like they were filling the silence, and they always stayed on the move circling the area. Food was dropped inside which one lion would clench between its jaw and carry back to share out to the other lions.  

Another fascinating animal to observe at the lab was Dr. Theo. He’d arrive earlier and leave later than any of the scientists. His curly hair was always a mess and his shirts were riddled with stains and creases - every aspect of his appearance brought to mind excessive amounts of caffeine. He had the habit of talking incomprehensibly fast and could be heard grumbling things to himself when he believed nobody was nearby, which due to a lack of self awareness on his part was a lot of the time. Actually, most of his interaction with other humans was strange: he wasn’t awkward exactly, and it was visibly clear that the scientists who understood his technical jargon viewed his every utterance with awe, but he didn’t seem all there when he interacted with people. His eyes would glaze over as he became lost in thought and he’d try to end whatever interaction it was as quickly as possible, sometimes rudely. The only time I saw life fill his eyes was when he looked out onto the animals in The Dome.

My first early morning shift I found Dr. Theo there already, the only person in the lab. He was sat by a computer drinking a large coffee but less animated than usual, looking like he was staring out onto The Dome but really staring out into whatever was occupying his mind. I got on with clearing the workstations. He called over to me, the first time he’d ever spoke to me outside of pleasantries: “Hey, you got the early morning shifts now?”

“Just Mondays” I said.

“You got a lot to do?”

“Not much, just cleaning the place up before the egg heads get here”

“Good, leave that for a second and come downstairs, there’s something I want to show you”

I followed and saw the lab downstairs looked out to The Dome’s lake giving an underwater view of the fish. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they” he said.

“Yes, very”. They were. There was Marlins, Trout, Bass, Manta Rays, lots of types I didn’t know the names of. A whirlpool of living colours.

“Press your hand on the glass”. I did as asked. Some fished stopped swimming and one, a glowing red and yellow one, swam up to the the tank and looked out as if sizing me up. Then it pressed its body up against the glass where my hand was as if drawing a point of connection. “It knows you’re there” Theo said. “It might not know what you are but it understands you’re something very different from itself”. It swam away after that.

“How could it know that?” I said.

“Come sit in my office. It would be helpful to me, to get my thoughts straight, to explain to someone what’s happening here”.

Dr. Theo’s office was a car crash of paperwork and old laptops. As messy as his mind, one might imagine.

“What do you think we’re doing here?” he asked. I told him it looked like he was making super intelligent animals who get along better than those in the wild.

“This isn’t about intelligence, not exactly” he said. “Have you seen any trainers inside The Dome? People with treats to reward the animals when they’ve learned something new? No, everything you see the animals doing they’ve taught themselves. Let me ask, what’s the biggest mystery of human beings?” I told him I didn’t know. “I’d say it’s why we are as we are. I don’t know if you’ve ever put much thought to it. Why do we ponder our own existence, struggle to build societies, create a sense of “Self”? When all other animals don’t. It’s like animals are simply parts of the Earth, growing out of the plants, acting out the automations that nature programmed them with, while humans live outside of that, like we’re travelling on a line that runs adjacent to the natural world. And why? Nobody knows, that’s what we’re trying to figure out in this lab, with the animals in The Dome. The animals are under a lot of very different conditions than in the wild, the sort of conditions we believe prehistoric humans were under when their cognitive abilities evolved into what they are now. Only we’re speeding it up with the help of modern science”. He said that last sentence with a grin.

“And is it working?”

“You can see that for yourself. We’re a few generations into the animal families now and the results are starting to show”. Dr. Theo paused for a moment. “It’s amazing what the discovery of fire did. All meals became cooked, we gained a new craving for warmth, our initiatives became built around gathering wood and setting up camp. It’s what’s made the most progress with the animals so far”

“It’s impressive stuff” I said.

“Look out there into The Dome. Don’t look it like a zoo, look at it like a mini village, the species of the village isn’t important. Eventually it will be like a miniature version of our world. Imagine the things we’ll see”.

I spent more time observing the animal’s behaviours after my talk with Theo. They were learning fast. The monkeys started to communicate conversations through grunts and shrieks and before long a primitive system of language, spoken in similar tones as human speech, echoed out from The Dome. One ape, with bright auburn hair and a small slanted face, named Joshua by the scientists, was appointed leader of the chimps. Joshua was elected by a democracy, with all the apes giving a vote to any monkey in the camp they wanted. Day by day I got to see this democracy fall apart. Joshua felt his leadership should give him many privileges and soon he had two other apes acting as his guards, the three of them feasting on the camp’s food whenever they pleased and living in a bigger area of The Dome than what they allocated to the other apes.

The scientists thought it incredible that such a regime, with laws and hierarchies, had been set up in such a short time, but the whole thing looked to upset Dr. Theo even if he never much commented on it. Theo asked for more food and supplies to be sent to the apes, and began to show them videos on compassion and parenting, but it was no good: Joshua and his bodyguards took the extra food for themselves and started to tell the other monkeys which parts of the enclosure they could and couldn’t go to and when.

A few chimps protested the system. They’d huddle round and think of changes that needed to be made then one would recount their ideas to Joshua - who ignored all of them. Once the chimps got hungry the ways of the jungle started to set back in and the chimps would hurl things at the superiors and shriek unintelligibly. During one of these outbursts a monkey threw a banana which panged off Joshua’s face. Joshua sent a guard to smack the monkey’s head into the ground, a patch of grass being coloured in red. Anger bristled on both sides of the monkey divide. The language, the campsites, the systems, it was all forgotten as the chimps started to pound away at each other. Security men were sent in to shoot each monkey with tranquilizer darts. The monkeys awoke in a calmer state but looked badgered by an unsettled feeling which they never managed to escape from.

After this Theo began to take teams of scientists in to talk with the apes. Theo was always the first in; he’d stand twitching outside the entrance like a giddy child. I watched the first of these interactions from the lab: the size of the fauna really took shape in my mind seeing the smallness of the scientists among it. Theo walked toward the camp with a confident stride and the chimps reacted to him with a sense of awe and confusion. If you believe humans are the only animals who can wear an expression of disbelief on their faces you are wrong. Theo explained to them about The Dome and told them there was more things than they could imagine outside of it. The scientists all gave the chimps tips towards living.

After a few weeks an odd side-effect of these meetings started to emerge: the monkeys established what could be classified a religion. The monkeys used their most flagrant language to talk of the beings who sometimes entered their reality, cosmic beings, unlike themselves, who possessed great knowledge of things outside the confines of their world. Joshua, with help from all other monkeys, created a shrine at The Dome’s centre of straw and bark that made a vague sculpture of Dr. Theo. Theo was as fascinated as the other scientists to document this but really I think he got off on the whole thing. After this he’d sometimes enter and talk with the monkeys on his own. It was a common sight to see him shake hands with the monkeys and wave them goodbye as he left. One of my early morning shifts I arrived to see the monkeys sat around Theo, who stood in the middle, god knows how many hours he’d been there, explaining the concept of time to the monkeys. He told them how old the universe was estimated to be and how it would one day end, not that I thought they’d have enough understanding to comprehend this.  

But I’m forgetting about the lions. They grew smart too, and learned their own language, although the roars that made up this language, roars that bent and contorted into coherent speech, never failed to take everyone off guard. A test was done in which a live pig was sent into the enclosure. The lions stayed still, observing the pig as you might observe an uninvited dinner guest, not as a meal. The lions, without any system of rewards or Pavlovian responses, had seemingly learned to respect the life of other living things.

My favorite invention of the scientists was what they did to the fish: to make sure the acquisition of language wasn’t wasted on them the scientists inserted metal voice boxes into the fish, and at the side of the tank enclosure headphones were placed that picked up, and could zoom in on, these voice boxes. Theo beckoned me to give the headphones a try. As soon as they cusped my ear voices flooded in from all directions. They were simple words and phrases - where to swim, what to eat - but it was a glorious sound nonetheless.

Theo began to conduct interviews with individual fish. I sat near for one of these. “Do you enjoy the setting you live in? What some would call a tank”. The fish said the tank was too small, too bunched up. “I’d rather a place where I could swim forever”. Theo explained about the ocean, the vast freedoms but also the dangers it brings. “And why can I not be one of these fish?” Theo said this was because the fish, and the others around it, were the first of their type, first to feel complex emotions and comprehend their own existence like humans do. “Are you glad we helped make you this way?” asked Theo. “I don’t know”. The fish fell silent, then: “do you like being this way?”

The lions and chimps showed this same dislike of captivity (not that I’ve ever seen this documented anywhere). The scientists explained about the enclosures all over the world like this one, where animals lived inside and humans stared from the outside. The animals didn’t take to this knowledge happily and began to withdraw from the scientists. Theo began to change around this time: he no longer looked to The Dome with glee, if he indeed looked at it at all, preferring to quickly dish out plans to his workers before returning to the solitude of his office.

Anger became the overriding emotion of the animals; the religions that had blossomed in the camp were questioned then eventually ignored; scientists documented overheard Chimp conversations about a planned escape.

One monkey, given the name Dino, isolated himself from the tribe. He’d sit alone on high up branches, spending whole days not eating, only contemplating. He ignored the other chimps and they ignored him. Dino was the only living thing that brought Theo from his office: Theo entered and shouted up to Dino he wanted to talk, but upon questioning answered all of Theo’s questions with more questions. Why was he here? Why were the monkeys kept enclosed? Was Theo a “god”? Had Theo created them? Then what had created Theo? Would he (Dino) ever see anything but The Dome? Theo didn’t know how to explain, or maybe just didn’t want to, he simply gave Dino the stock answer that he’d feel better if he ate more and spent more time with the other apes.

The first animals to lose it were the fish. One fish, seemingly unprovoked into this behaviour, had pounded its body against the glass enclosure windows, a colouring of red blood floating from its overturned body. This started a trend among the fish; before long the lake’s surface was filled with bodies. The fish who didn’t do this began rejecting fish food once they realised the other fish tasted much better. Eventually so few fish were left that those that were left exhibited the same hysterical behaviours of humans left alone for large periods of time.

Theo regressed even further after this: skipping meals and letting go of staff as he deemed they weren’t needed for the upkeep of The Dome.

During this period Theo announced he wanted to conduct a different sort of test on the animals. On the tannoy to the monkeys he ordered one to move to the lion enclosure, which opened briefly and closed behind the monkey. The lions had been the most tame subjects: their predatory nature had vanished and they’d learned an advanced system of language. They enjoyed it when classical music was boomed into the enclosure. As expected, they left the monkey alone. Theo watched for around ten minutes then told the workers to leave the monkey inside and cease sending any food to the lions.

The monkey and the lions communicated somewhat, sitting near one another and chatting about their different enclosures. The lions were awed by the theories the monkeys had came up with about The Dome. But the lack of food began to take a toll. After three days the lions huddled together in a corner discussing something in hushed tones. About an hour later they ripped the limbs off the monkey and shared out the meat. I thought this would have depressed Theo, been “the last straw”, but he grinned as he watched the monkey being devoured. He ordered the lions only to be fed minimally from then on.

On arrival one morning I joined a large huddle who were staring into The Dome. Dino the monkey had wrapped himself a noose with camp supplies and hung himself from the tree he liked to sit on. There was a sense of total stillness, to the body, to all the other animals, to everyone watching. Theo only came to give a quick glance and then return to his office.

Soon after, the experiment was deemed over. Scientists packed up one by one, most leaving without goodbyes. I was still employed by the building so I got to see the end. I’d heard Theo had made a deal to sell the animals, to who I don’t know. But on the last day he opened the gate. The lions were starving. The chimps were ripped apart. Theo watched expressionless, his life’s work gobbled up by lions.

After leaving I only heard about Theo through passing rumours. Some said he was working to open a new lab, others that he’d given up and disappeared.

Years later in god knows where I saw him sitting at a bar. He’d grown the look of a man who’d sat at so many bars he blended in with them seamlessly. He bought me a drink and we made small talk. It was early but he was already having to support his body from falling from the booze. “Have a good one” he shouted as I left. I never saw or heard about him again.

Someone with a poetic mind would probably say something like at the bottom of each bottle Theo found the image of that monkey hanging there, but I’ve found myself in similar places, and I can tell you all you find there is yourself.