The screen blinks again. Second tableau.
“My hypothesis: Curios are capable of understanding the principle of being recorded.”
The screen blinks. The word METHOD—green letters, black screen, as before—flashes three times.
The screen blinks again. Second tableau.
“My method,” Maya says.
“First, I cloned all four of my Curios. After John2, Paul2, Mick2, and Keith2 emerged from their marbles, I purchased a second PillowNest for them to sleep in. Three weeks later, id est once they were full-grown, I spent five weeks training them to pattycake, but I did not record them pattycaking, nor did I record them doing anything else, id est they never saw me use a camcorder.
“Once their pattycake training was complete, I rigged their PillowNest with a camcorder, just as I had previously rigged the PillowNest in which slept the original John, Paul, Mick, and Keith. I used the very same camcorder that, yes you guessed it, my father is using to film this very presentation.
“These conditions were applied for seven days and nights.
“I also rigged the PillowNest of the original John, Paul, Mick, and Keith using a different camcorder, one that I borrowed from my cousin Dev—thank you, Dev.
“These conditions were, of course, also applied for the same seven nights.
“Now how about the results?”
The screen blinks. The word RESULTS—green letters, black screen, as before—flashes three times.
The screen blinks again, and, as we watch a series of twenty-eight brief clips of four different cures squatting and rear-ejecting in various areas of their PillowNests, Maya speaks in voiceover.
“John2, Paul2, Mick2, and Keith2, none of which had ever seen a camcorder, all, as you can see here (and as you can also see on the tape marked ‘Raw Primary Data 1’) rear-ejected in their PillowNest each of the seven nights. This demonstrates that Curios that have no possible way of knowing what a camcorder is capable of are not rear-ejection-inhibited by the presence of a camcorder in their PillowNests, which in turn suggests that the original John, Paul, Mick, and Keith were inhibited by the presence of the camcorder in their PillowNest because they did know of what the camcorder was capable.
“In other words, my hypothesis—id est ‘Curios are capable of understanding the principle of being recorded’—seems to have been confirmed, doesn’t it? Well…I will, rest assured, explore this matter in greater depth at the end of my presentation.
“First, however, I would like to point something else out. Namely: unless we are to insist that the observer—in this case the camcorder—necessarily (even if we cannot imagine how) influences the phenomena being observed in significant ways, we can only conclude that the footage you have just seen establishes what the ‘normal’ spectrum of Curio rear-ejection behavior must look like. Which is, I should say, very exciting in itself, having captured such footage.
“Id est: a victory for science!”
The screen blinks. Second tableau. Maya is beaming.
“And now,” she says, “before moving on to my conclusions, I have something even more exciting to bring to your attention. You see, I have, to use a famous term from the field of Journalism, buried the lede. That is: I haven’t even discussed what happened in the other PillowNest, to the original John, Paul, Mick, and Keith. You must be wondering, yes? Of course. Any true lover of science would be! After all, these Curios, rather than being under the camcorder for just three consecutive nights—as they had been in the preliminary experiment that set this whole ball rolling—these Curios, I’m mostly certain I need not remind you, were, this time, under the camcorder for seven consecutive nights.
“Up until the sixth day, they all behaved as you probably would have expected, given how they behaved in that preliminary experiment. That is to say: for the first five days and nights, they did not rear-eject. But after that?…Well!
“Let’s talk first about Mick. On the sixth day of the study—after five consecutive nights without a rear ejection—Mick rear-ejected into its CureSleeve at some point late in the afternoon, between three and five p.m. The rear ejection was extremely large and misshapen, perhaps a bit shinier than usual, and redolent of tutti-frutti-flavored jellybeans. Upon finding it in the sleeve, I was so surprised—when was the last time you heard of a Curio rear-ejecting in the daytime? and outside of its PillowNest no less, right?—so surprised that, although I did show it to my father—”
“It was very large and misshapen!” Maya’s father interjects from offscreen.
“Thank you, Daddy. As I was saying, I was so surprised that I didn’t think to capture the ejection on film before flushing it down the toilet, a lapse I regretted, and still regret. It was not my finest moment as a scientist.
“That night, however, Keith did something in the PillowNest of even greater scientific value. Watch.”
The screen blinks. Overhead shot of Mick and Keith spooning on one side of the PillowNest, asleep, while John and Paul spoon on the other side of the PillowNest, also asleep. Keith wakes up, rolls to its opposite side, clutches its stomach, clutches its head, bicycles its legs, stretches its limbs, goes limp, stretches again, and finally sits up. Keith looks into the lens, looks away quickly, slaps at its face with both hands a couple times, then wakes Mick up with a kiss on the cheek. Keith stands, helps the sleepy-eyed Mick to stand, and leads it over to the corner of the PillowNest farthest from John and Paul.
Keith takes Mick by the waist and turns Mick around so that Mick is facing away from it. Keith crouches in the corner. Except for its bent knees and one of its shoulders, Keith is now completely blocked from the camera’s view—and also from the view of John and Paul, who remain asleep on the other side of the nest—by Mick. For ten or fifteen seconds, Keith’s knees and its visible shoulder shudder spastically, then Keith crawls out from behind Mick’s body, toward the spot where it and Mick had earlier spooned, and, as Mick, a moment later—without turning its head to look into the vacated corner—moves to join Keith, we see that the corner contains a rear ejection (Keith’s), which, inasmuch as it comprises two spherical termini bridged by a cylinder of the same shiny, black material, looks a bit like a dumbbell.
The screen blinks. Second tableau. “And if you think that is adorable,” Maya says, “I cannot wait til you get a whole load of John and Paul, the following evening.”
The screen blinks. Overhead shot of the Curios spooning in pairs on opposite sides of the nest, as before. Paul, the inner spoon of the John-Paul pair, twitches its shoulders and bucks its legs, just once, and John is suddenly pushed back half a Curio’s arm’s length by a rounded-rectangular rear ejection that has plunged out of Paul’s exit into its (John’s) lower abdomen. Paul remains asleep. John does not. It sits up, squints at Paul’s rear ejection, squints at Paul, then goes to the opposite side of the nest, spoons Mick, and falls back asleep.