Cockroach Consciousness

Time. Time for the weather. It’s been thirty days. Forty. Days and nights. They have to go together.

The Prophet scuttles across my hardwood floor.

He picks up dust and grains of sand. Ask how many grains of sand are on my floor and he probably knows, dammit. I’ve forgotten to sweep today.

“How many grains of sand?” I say. I think I see him shrug. Just before my foot comes down on his carapace with a crackling crunch, like the breakfast cereal I ate as a kid.

I’ve got to stop giving them names.

Roaches are supposed to be one of those animals that can tell the weather. And earthquakes. Prophets.

Prophets, it seems, are best at forecasting doom. Ironic, in a way, given roaches that haunt my kitchen room can withstand so much. So much poison. So much radiation.

So much crushing existential angst?

Roaches are interesting as models for bottom-up artificial intelligence, you know. Program the model roach with a few simple parameters - seek food, go to/avoid light, hit a wall and by default turn left or right (nice political analogy there) - and the behavior that results, if unpredictable, is rather lifelike.

But where is the "soul" in which everyone wants to, needs to believe?

They need to add that the real ones breed fast, too--again, just like prophets. There's your spritual angle. Kill them all and they’ll still repopulate an area before you even have a chance to say, “What the hell?”

Sometimes I think it’s too simple. Barometric pressure tells you the weather. OK, maybe not the pressure itself, but the changes in it. Odd seismic vibrations for an earthquake. Vibrations that aren’t so small when you’re tiny enough for my foot to squash your carapace.

A barometer or seismograph can give you the raw data. So can my trick knee.

(Four operations. Major ligament reconstruction. What a trick.)

Roaches are supposed to be one of those animals that can tell the weather, and earthquakes. Must be that sixth sense.

If it’s so simple, how come the weather-guy can’t give a better prediction on TV? A barometer could give you the raw data. Or a seismograph.

(What d’you know? Here comes the next Prophet now. The psychics I always visit never seem to prophecy that I’m going to stiff them on their fee. Wonder if he knows I’m going to step on him, eventually?)

Do roaches just listen better? Or do we just cut them more of a break, when they guess wrong?

Hell, I cut mine a break all the time.

The Prophet--the latest Prophet, I mean--is scuttling about very agitated. I think we have a cloudy day coming tomorrow. Maybe rain. Maybe snow.

Things are changing. That much I know. Change is coming.

Wow. I’m good.

Best A.I. you'll ever find. Too bad I don't have a soul.

But maybe you always look like you know what the future holds, if you run around agitated, predicting change.

I should do it more often.

But all I know is change makes my trick knee hurt. Makes me irritable.

Makes we want to slam it down hard, on whatever scuttles across my floor.



Run, little Prophet, run.