the evolution of Gatsby

"Let's begin with a primary subspecies", Prof. Mallard suggested.

"What exactly is cooking, Professor?" replied Gatteuse. His shiny yellow lab-coat made him look the golden boy that he was to everyone at the Ecole Poly.

"We're simulating one of the least studied branches of Middle Ordovician trilobites that followed the Cambrian explosion", the professor stated in a manner of easy erudition.

"Hmmm." Gattuese quietly tilted his head, as the simfield came back aglow. The professor switched on his tiny neural-field sensactuators and fixed his gaze. The student plugged into his.

"You see that? The marine-invertebrate repository. Let's look around a bit. Ah, there it is, the remarkable little critter!" he remarked in a rare gung-ho turn of speech.

For a moment, Gatsby, or sometimes Gats, as his classmates had half-mockingly christened him, was amused at the old fellow's odd little colloquialism, but his attention quickly flew to what emerged on the screen just then.

Jacques Mallard brought up a 3-D wire-frame model of the "critter" overlaid with holographic layers of bone, muscle and organs. Detailed annotations of dates, features, prominent geneseeks (geneek slang for gene-sequences) and other alphanumerical snippets of information were crammed into tiny rectangular boxes. The professor turned his mottled gray pupils to one of these boxes and zoomed up the text, as this pupil watched in studied silence.

"Did you notice?" he pointed to narrow crescent-shaped slits on either side of the creature's cheeks.

"Yes, the primal transparent compound eyes with hexagonal calcite lenses that supposedly triggered the Cambrian explosion 543 mya.", Gatsby replied with an air of even confidence. "North American. This one's from the Burgess Shale, right?"

Mallard nodded. With his brow still furrowed, he shifted his occursor further up the cephalon next to the antennae, and started editing another little box. Suddenly, a motley bunch of bulbous features mushroomed and covered what was smoothly textured surface only moments ago.

"What's that? I don't remember any other exoskeletal features in the pregabellar section?" Gatteuse Chabrol's expression changed.

"Horns, Gatteuse."

"Horns!?"

"Yes, like rhinoceros beetles. The ampyx raphiophorids were the ones that developed precursors of modern-day horns. I mean real horns, the fighting kind".

"But the raphiophorids were blind, if I recall correctly?".

"Well, not these babies!", the professor's eyes took on an expression of boyish mischief. This time Gatsby's conscious mind let this curious outpouring of adolescent Americanese slip by. His attention was captive to this little insect's body-plan.

"Wait, there's more of these. Look different - like dorsal spines, only these are anterior" he said, pointing to another distinct set of protuberances.

"Well observed, my dear fellow", the professor gleamed, "Spines indeed".

"Sexual appendages? Protective weaponry? Perhaps even hydrodynamic streamlining?".

"Perhaps all three, my young friend", Mallard looked directly from under his spectacles into his apprentice's eyes and that well-worn smile of academic beneficence spread across his face.

"Really?". Gats looked up in absorbed amazement.

"Yes. Why not? Most likely secondary sexuals, but one can't quite discount the others. Dimorphism isn't entirely unknown among trilobite clusters and that's usually a good indicator".

"Was it the ampyx alone with all that fancy headgear?".

"Not nearly. Some of the Devonian asteropygines even carried full-blown tridents. Quite formidable! They found them in the Moroccan desert a couple of years ago, you know. Hard to imagine all they did with them was forage".

"Tridents? That sounds like nasty business."

Suddenly the professor's newly reprogrammed neurophone, embedded deep inside his cranium, signaled an incoming call ("Look Ma, no ring!", he had exclaimed in juvenile glee after he got his first one lobbed inside a few years ago). He commanded his sensactuators to shut down with an explicit blink-code (proofing against inter-synaptic noise), excused himself and stepped out of the lab's transparent sound-proofed separation.

He walked down the brightly lit hallway and paused half-way through to one of the building's many fire-exits and stood there with his back glued to the bare white wall on the left, with his eyes closed and lips moving that Gatsby could read in the distance.

Yes, Gatteuse could read lips. He read "But Chloe (or Claude, he couldn't tell, for he was speaking in French), I need to do this right now. It cannot wait!". His face spoke of a peculiar sort of exasperation -- he was somehow certain it was the wife.

He finally grew weary of wallowing in his own virtuosity - deciphering the innards of his mentor's personal situation just wasn't that interesting. The professor had been gone for several minutes now. His usually pale, mellow, delicately-lined oval face had taken on the hue and aspect of a stumpy beetroot. Evidently, things were not going so well for the poor fellow.

He turned his attention back to the simfield. The ampyx lay still across the screen, unevolved since the professor left his desk.

Banishing all awareness of that pointless little exercise from only moments ago, Gatsby leaned forward and resumed his study of the viscera with rapt attention - once again muffling the cacophony that one's latent talents, however seemingly obscure or irrelevant to one's present station, play upon the psyche as each discordant strain pounds against the veneer of the acknowledged self and jostles for the singular vantage of consciousness.

Very soon, his sensactuators were abuzz with traffic as his eyeballs jittered to keep pace. He was being led down two separate but gradually converging paths of inquiry - one traversing the branches of the simulacrum's evolutionary tree and other peering down it's genetic lineage, evenly split inside his immerspace. Time was not quite of the essence in this world, for contemporary conductors of organic thought, augmented by powerful instruments of inorganic computation, deftly orchestrated a symphony of indescribable complexity.

He was onto something he had sniffed at during the professor's demonstration. Something about those calcite eyes with optical-doublet structures and refracting surfaces and lense walls to prevent interference. Horns and brood-pouches and tough exoskeletons.

"I can't put my fingurative on it yet", a third, autonomous, real-world thread sprang from somewhere - he had come to find such unsolicited punnies a welcome relief, even regard them as harbingers of impending creative ahas in his long hours of research at the Ecole'.

He wondered about the extreme selective pressures that must have brought about these adaptions. He noticed the patterns of erratic, frequent moulting within a single organisms' lifetime, each event a dangerous window to canny predators like the Anomalocaris.
All the same, the development of enrollment, the progressively refined interlocking of opposing surfaces during these rituals, the sly defense of a curled ball.

"Poof!", he went, as the crazy intricacy of it all gave him a hot, gooey frisson. His left hand mopped his brow. Then his fingers started pulling at his curled, golden locks.