In the early autumn of sixty-six After Divisions, after a year of intensive training, on the evening of the ninth day, at a grand celebration, all the creatures of the autonomous pouch community of A.Th.A.H.E participated to witness Choky receiving his first diploma. The impressive survival belt with pockets that would certify his specialization as an aquarist assistant.
Their leader, Manqui, believes in the power of logic but also in the existence of an invisible cause behind everything, so together these two tendencies constitute imagination into reality. In his own, he no longer lives in connection and struggling with the invisible; he had ceased to move substantially here for many, many years. Almost all his life, at least from the division onwards. Except for one time, when the trajectory of the kennel intersected with the trajectory of the Athahe community. Then he seized the remarkable opportunity given to him and made a minimal leap into the void, adopted little Choky, and hastily returned to start his training.
During the overwhelming period that followed, he gave countless battles training him, that now he shows the suppressed escape tendencies he accumulated. He’s not even sure about the destination he wants to pursue.
With the power of logic, he thought it was necessary to unblock and reward Choky with a dependency, full of tools for producing snacks, water storage positions, and machines for air oxygenation, power, and recycling. This way, he could trust him on his own and make the random trips he always dreamed of and lately, begged his own self to make. He hoped that the segments of Earth he would encounter could make him feel complete. However, the deep secret driving force behind everything is also fragmentary, and it has been for a long time, in a way punishing superficiality and sometimes controlling reason.
The cheerful and naive Manqui no longer cares about the consequences of his actions or doesn’t sit to imagine them, something that always costs him, psychologically.
In this regard, he should have anticipated before handing the belt with pockets to Choky that he was capable of rebelling on his own and leaving, leaving him helpless. Even then, though, the wait for Cho’s doubtful return, he couldn’t think how psychologically devastating the process would be, while the construction, to pass the time, of dubious value works of art, something that could rejuvenate him, and also he didn’t think how expensive the raw materials he needed would be. And all this for a solitary random journey into the unknown, he should consider.
Of course, neither does Choky sees any secret connection, nor does he remember it, without, however, ruling out that he knows and serves something, and ultimately it costs him too. After all, he had been selectively raised, due to his race’s unforgettable good instinctive memory, constantly reminding him of things that needed to be done even though he hadn’t learned anything about them yet.
The racist, nucleically acute, genetic information unlocking Choky’s mind to overthrow Manqui’s impulsive escape plans, gushes from many sources and crosses into new fields, ultimately ending up lost in the history of time.
Certainly, it gushes from the quadruped canines of the past, who were crazy enough to go out in the heat that occurred immediately after the rising of the Sirius star in conjunction with the sun.
It intersects with the ancient ground-dwelling Greek people who identified them with the hot star Alpha of Canis Major. They called the constellation Great Dog, and these days, cynic heats.
It gushes and intersects, of course, with the hundred-year-old photographic samples that Manqui found at some point, hidden in Reese Cerussite’s book, within his mother’s letters, inside a buried chest. Photos of the living room box of the Athahe community, that other, old summer afternoon, when Choky’s quadruped ancestor watched Vi Van helping Reese with the things he would take with him for his trip to the southernmost island of Greece.
At some point, or just before they took the photos, they had the idea to put a belt with pockets on their dog, so that he could follow autonomously, carrying his own food. Relieving his master, Reese, if needed.
After almost a hundred years, it was found to gush even from the lessons Manqui did not have time to complete, for their own ancestors, at that same time, when it was discovered that Sirius A of Canis Major belongs to the type of white stars and was only 8.4 light-years away from Earth at the time.
It still remains a binary star at a distance of 20 astronomical units, where 1 AU equals 150 million kilometers, from its companion, Sirius B, with the period of their orbit around a common center of mass, perhaps Sirius C, lasting 50 years.
Choky reacts as he thought his ancestor did, armed with nervous cynical instinct and a disposition to correct the mistakes of his birth, chooses to wear the belt with pockets and self-exile away from the oppression of the Athahe community.
“Center of mass? … I haven’t signed any contract to carry your load … I can’t even sign … I’ll be happy to break it, though!”
He experiences, uniquely, this unprecedented feeling of the unknown, more charming with each repetition, as he writes within him an unwritten law, to define an unquenchable desire to adventure on roads of freedom and coincidental randomness.
