Special edition
The full report, with extra links
Whither Walleye & Weatherby?
It is once again springtime in Weatherby, and our spirits rise with the sap as befits the quite lovely weather of the season. But despite our deserved good cheer, it has not been a season wholly without dark clouds and dreary moments.
Once such moment was the passing of Commander Piker’s @fintastic ward, a young Citizen Pretender named Walleye Crusher @Chewseen. The official cause of Death has been reported as dysentery, but that verdict elides certain pertinent details concerning the circumstances immediately preceding his death.
Reliable witnesses have reported that he was physically, but not mortally, injured prior to taking to what proved to be his final bed rest, and the lad himself claimed he was attacked by an angry mob convinced he was an agent of New Prussia! A notion that is, on the face of it, absurd, and a grave affront to Commander Piker who, as an officer of the United Federation of Oceans and Seas and a gentlesentient of some repute, would not be deceived for an instant by an impostor in such close company.
Clearly, the mob was mistaken. But how did they get that idea in the first place? It’s true that we’ve seen some opposition to the Nautical Echolinguistic Traps (from the the so-called “naught-NET-ers”) on general privacy grounds, but nothing that might warrant alarm. However, we’ve also seen a recent spate of letters to the editor, many of them explicitly pro-N.P., as well as some more subtly so, including a letter published in this very paper that seems to be the original seed of the vile conceit that these .NET devices were anything other than harmless scientific instruments. Combine the two phenomena, and I’m afraid we must at least consider the possibility of Agents Provocateur, of a veritable wave of New Prussian naught-NETs intent on swamping the popular media with messages of discord.
In such a climate of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, it would be all too easy for a well-placed Agent to inflame the passions of the crowd and set them upon poor Ensign Crusher. The great irony is that such fears are not entirely unjustified. The basic technology behind the .NET devices, as I understand it, could have many other practical applications, including wartime utility. With a properly funded lab, the potential for new discoveries would be quite expansive, indeed, and it would behoove us to keep pace with the research interests of our counterparts in New Prussia.
Perhaps worst of all, young Walleye’s final report to Commander Piker indicated that he’d discovered no evidence of sandfish sentience. Yet I am encouraged by the thought that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The .NET devices were echo-linguistic traps, that is, devices designed to analyze sound waves, and while sound is a common communication medium in water, there are myriad other possible avenues by which sandfish might express themselves.
Perhaps they communicate via gesture and posture, akin to the dances of space bees, but vastly more sophisticated. Or maybe they exchange chemically-encoded messages; long-chain organic molecules can have a surprisingly high information density and a simple lipid membrane would ensure their integrity in seawater. Nor can we rule out the possibility of telepathy or other extrasensory modes of perception. Indeed, at this time, the only thing we can be certain of is that more research is needed.
If we can make contact with these majestic creatures, they could prove to be powerful allies in the conflict to come (presumably, of course, as no rational sentient craves war). Some of them are quite large, as one may recall.
So let us not let young Walleye’s sacrifice be in vain. Much as the True Citizens of Weatherby have recently and so generously invested in the public enterprises of our fair city, we must continue to support and fund the institutions of Natural Philosophy and the minds that drive them. Our civic pride demands no less.
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