Transmat World: Chapter 7, Episode 1
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Large Magellanic Cloud, planet Nebule; 897,473 B.C.
Stunperf lay supine on the tree branch for nearly five centoks, each centok being one hundredth of a rotation of the planet Nebule about its axis. A centok divided into a hundred parts was a centuk, a further hundred for a centik, the time it takes for spit to hit the ground.
Become one with the bark. Become one with the bark.
His hunting mentor’s mantra comes to him, and he stifles a laugh that would have come out as a high-pitched snort-whistle anathema to hunting. Old Pegula never would retire from hunting. One day, a dervich he was hunting ate him. Eventually he did become one with the bark of whatever tree the dervich crapped under.
For the fourth time he isometrically activated all the major muscle groups in rotation to stave off cramping. A soft sound and his nostril told him a dervich approached. With infinite slowness, he tilted his large, triangular head away from the branch and twisted it slightly to let his rear set of eyes get a view past the limb. The dervich pawed through debris on each side of the trail in an effort to scare up skreechees — small, rabbit-like animals that made tasty dervich snacks. The dervich was nearly as big as Stunperf: six-legged, sleek black fur, and the musculature of a lion.
Stunperf waited until the dervich stood directly underneath, silently rolled off the limb and aimed each of his ripping claws to each side of its throat. The dervich sensed something at the last split centik and rotated its massive jaw, but too late. The tips of Stunperf’s ripping claws were already piercing the dervich’s hide. Stunperf kept his arms stiff and allowed momentum to drive the claws deep and cut both main arteries to the beast’s brain. His body slammed onto the top of the dervich, the animal’s powerful, but collapsing, legs broke his fall like organic springs. He lay on top of the dervich and felt dying twitches as the animal bled out on the forest trail. Stunperf realized this is the fourteenth dervich he had killed with his bare hands, and he was bored.
They called themselves Kolpak, the hunters. Super predators that develop modern technology half a million years before humans traipsed about in furs, living to the ripe old age of twenty. The typical Kolpak stood seven feet tall and weighed 400 pounds at adulthood. Small, overlapping scales covered their bodies in mesmerizing, interlaced diamond and herringbone patterns of black, gray, tan, and light green. Two powerful legs ended in heavily padded feet with retractable claws. Torsos form muscular triangles sat atop bulging buttocks. They had no neck. Their head and shoulders described an inverted triangle atop the torso with the muscle groups going from the shoulder to the middle of the skull. A pair of eyes nested in the back of the head, protected by lids of scale. The slit of a mouth hid rows of needle-sharp teeth bisecting the lower front of the head. Another pair of eyes was situated above a six-inch prehensile nose an inch in diameter. The arms were long and well-muscled like the legs but ended with four dexterous fingers, an opposable thumb, and a retractable ripping claw. Genitalia retracted into a pouch at the crotch for protection.
Kolpak never let civilization or technology get in the way of a good hunt. Hunting to Kolpak was the human equivalent of golf, football, soccer, and baseball combined. It wasn’t a national pastime: It was a planetary obsession. Huge, circular hunting reserves dotted their world. The choice real estate existed at the edge of these reserves. As the Kolpak developed multi-story dwellings and places of business around these parks, cities resembled impact craters with lush, green centers encircled by the white stone rim-walls of tall buildings that tapered away to single story dwellings and, then, to light green savannas dotted with islands of dark green jungle. Oceans covered half the globe. Mountain ranges gave hint to tectonic boundaries–more than a hundred plates in all.
Kolpak had many animals of prey but three favorites. One was the aforementioned dervich, a cat-like creature twice the size of a Kolpak with much larger claws and teeth. A large, four-legged, antelope-like animal with a primate-sized brain, the mustoon, kicked like a mule on methamphetamines. The most favored prey of Kolpak was Kolpak. Criminals facing the death sentence had the choice of being prey with a possible commutation to life in prison if they took out their hunters–an unlikely scenario, but it happened and made for exciting hunts broadcast planet-wide. Only the extremely wealthy and powerful took part in these.
License, lottery, and bribes controlled access to the hunting reserves. The reserve system had existed for millennium, and few Kolpak were dissatisfied with it. One of those happened to be Stunperf. Stunperf’s prowess as a supreme hunter was well known. He hunted dervich and mustoon on bare pads and killed them with his hands. He was so good at hunting; it was not a challenge anymore. Stunperf was wealthy, but to buy a hunt for a fellow Kolpak was beyond his means.
They have automatic machines to wash my tunics, make my food, and till my soil. Why can’t I have one to serve as prey? muses Stunperf. He had the resources to make it real. He would commission an engineer to build a robotic prey worthy of his abilities.
Artificially intelligent machines had existed in Kolpak society for hundreds of Nebule’s circuits around its star, Betilon. They had invented “emotive” circuits, emulating Kolpak emotions. Machines were such an integral part of society the Kolpak had become inured to the dangers of artificial intelligence. Carefully written software protocols controlled by law had prevented a machine singularity; but modern robotic engineers viewed ancient and draconian laws as “old fashioned,” “extreme,” and “overkill.”
It just so happened there was a Kolpakian genius that Stunperf suspected could help him out. Mundeen’s obsession was artificial intelligence. Not an ordinary Kolpak, a rare genetic disease prevented Mundeen’s muscles from developing to full strength. He could not hunt, so he turned to intellectual pursuits. He was an eccentric, high-strung Kolpak who could be startled by a skreechee running across his path. Even with the gift for robotics, he had suffered greatly from the chiding, teasing, and outright insults at the hands of fellow Kolpak. He would rather write software for a robot’s brain, make a new robot appendage from artificial muscle, or devise a better robotic power source than hunt mustoon.
