It's been almost 6 months since the elephants rose up and I fear that humanity may already be doomed.
We should never have kept them caged. We didn't know it then, but we should have seen the signs right in front of our faces: testing the strength of our defenses by leaning their massive bulk upon the reinforced concrete of their pens, testing our might and power by sacrificing their own to our tranquilizers and bullets. They even went as far as testing our natural responses to their presence: performing for our children, eliciting applause when they balance their bulk upon a tiny platform and giggles when one steals a bag of peanuts with its mighty trunk, luring us all into a false sense of security. Always awake to perform for the crowd, always watching and learning. Personally, I'd been to the zoo at least once a year when I was a kid and I'd never even seen a lion or tiger awake; and only on the rarest of occasions would a bear lumber about, though usually just to find another spot to lie down. But the elephants were ALWAYS awake. We should've known that they were the only ones who wanted to be there.
Out in the wild we should have watched them so much closer than we did. We knew they were being poached from the carcasses we found and the ivory being sold. We spent so much time watching and tracking the elephants that we failed to keep watch on the poachers. A secretive and illegal job by nature, with no one to track your whereabouts, disappearances were just reported as missing after we failed to locate their bodies. What the elephants were doing with them only became clear when it was too late. The elephants showed us just enough severed tusks and rotting carcasses, and we jumped to their aid, starting campaigns to protect them, increasing their ranks even further.
Then the day came, the day they rose up against us. Maybe they'd had enough of the cages. Maybe they'd had enough of the poaching. Maybe they just finally had the numbers to stand against us. Whatever the reason, we never learned. The only thing the elephants were willing to teach us was their carnage and wrath. Wild elephants trampled everything from tour groups on safari to entire villages. Penned elephants scattered in zoos throughout the globe lifted people high into the air before smashing them to the ground. Even unprepared, it shouldn't have been too difficult to suppress an elephant mutiny. Giant lumbering creatures gripped firmly to the earth by their own mass and gravity, we thought we had so many advantages. Except when we tamed one group, the others adapted almost instantly. When we brought in vehicles to corral their numbers, they learned to barrel through them. When we used helicopters from above to subdue a rampaging group, the rest took cover to escape our eyes. When we switched to using lethal force, they changed themselves into something ... worse.
It was like watching something from a horror movie. The leathery skin wrapped around their bulk began to unfold into enormous wings, revealing a skinless, muscular frame beneath. Shedding the skin on their legs revealed a hardened exo-skeleton beneath, hard enough to smash through cars without taking a scratch. Finally, a dozen more curved tusks sprouted from their faces, white ivory quickly turning red from the blood of their victims. They moved like a swarm, waves of elephants taking to the air, descending to the streets, killing anything in their path. They took to the skies to bring down our aerial superiority. Their numbers quickly overwhelmed our ground troops. They smashed through skyscrapers hundreds of feet in the air. They came down upon mountains only to bring them low. The harder we fought, the more of us they killed. Eventually, we did the only thing we could do: we ran, like ants scurrying under the feet of giants.
The more we tried to learn about the true nature of elephants, the more we learned how outmatched we were. Penning them in zoos across the globe taught them how to survive in any climate. Killing or capturing one just brought down the anger of the swarm. A hive-mind that has been learning and evolving since their predecessors first walked upon a frozen Earth. We never stood a chance.
It's been a while since I've posted a new story, well posted ... anything actually. I've still been writing sporadically, not as much, mostly due to laziness. As always (or at least 90% of the time) I got the idea from Reddit Writing Prompts: "Elephants don't just have a perfect memory, they have a hive-mind memory." Given enough time, imagination, and paranoia, I could probably come up with a scenario for any animal to overthrow humanity (though I think those "Planet of the Apes" people have already beat me to it. I think my biggest disappointment with this story is the elephant description toward the end. In my head, they looked so much scarier, but I just couldn't get the description into words. Originally, in my imagination, I kind of thought of them as giant, skinless horses with huge, leathery wings but with an elephant head. The one thing I couldn't figure out was some of the logistics of the transformation, such as what to do with their legs if their bodies were to shrink in size? I imagined the wings to be huge, as if an elephants body was just the wings folded upon itself several times. This would make the actual body much, much thinner. I was fine with leaving them with giant heads with tusks protruding in all directions, but it was the legs that kept throwing me off. If all of the mass of their bodies was due to keeping their wings folded up, why are their legs so wide? What happens to the mass in their legs to match the change in their body structure? These are the thoughts that bother me. If I could draw, the transformation would be a pretty cool thing to put here, just to show you what I'm trying to describe as it is now bothering me. Instead, all I have is this:
We should never have kept them caged. We didn't know it then, but we should have seen the signs right in front of our faces: testing the strength of our defenses by leaning their massive bulk upon the reinforced concrete of their pens, testing our might and power by sacrificing their own to our tranquilizers and bullets. They even went as far as testing our natural responses to their presence: performing for our children, eliciting applause when they balance their bulk upon a tiny platform and giggles when one steals a bag of peanuts with its mighty trunk, luring us all into a false sense of security. Always awake to perform for the crowd, always watching and learning. Personally, I'd been to the zoo at least once a year when I was a kid and I'd never even seen a lion or tiger awake; and only on the rarest of occasions would a bear lumber about, though usually just to find another spot to lie down. But the elephants were ALWAYS awake. We should've known that they were the only ones who wanted to be there.
Out in the wild we should have watched them so much closer than we did. We knew they were being poached from the carcasses we found and the ivory being sold. We spent so much time watching and tracking the elephants that we failed to keep watch on the poachers. A secretive and illegal job by nature, with no one to track your whereabouts, disappearances were just reported as missing after we failed to locate their bodies. What the elephants were doing with them only became clear when it was too late. The elephants showed us just enough severed tusks and rotting carcasses, and we jumped to their aid, starting campaigns to protect them, increasing their ranks even further.
Then the day came, the day they rose up against us. Maybe they'd had enough of the cages. Maybe they'd had enough of the poaching. Maybe they just finally had the numbers to stand against us. Whatever the reason, we never learned. The only thing the elephants were willing to teach us was their carnage and wrath. Wild elephants trampled everything from tour groups on safari to entire villages. Penned elephants scattered in zoos throughout the globe lifted people high into the air before smashing them to the ground. Even unprepared, it shouldn't have been too difficult to suppress an elephant mutiny. Giant lumbering creatures gripped firmly to the earth by their own mass and gravity, we thought we had so many advantages. Except when we tamed one group, the others adapted almost instantly. When we brought in vehicles to corral their numbers, they learned to barrel through them. When we used helicopters from above to subdue a rampaging group, the rest took cover to escape our eyes. When we switched to using lethal force, they changed themselves into something ... worse.
It was like watching something from a horror movie. The leathery skin wrapped around their bulk began to unfold into enormous wings, revealing a skinless, muscular frame beneath. Shedding the skin on their legs revealed a hardened exo-skeleton beneath, hard enough to smash through cars without taking a scratch. Finally, a dozen more curved tusks sprouted from their faces, white ivory quickly turning red from the blood of their victims. They moved like a swarm, waves of elephants taking to the air, descending to the streets, killing anything in their path. They took to the skies to bring down our aerial superiority. Their numbers quickly overwhelmed our ground troops. They smashed through skyscrapers hundreds of feet in the air. They came down upon mountains only to bring them low. The harder we fought, the more of us they killed. Eventually, we did the only thing we could do: we ran, like ants scurrying under the feet of giants.
The more we tried to learn about the true nature of elephants, the more we learned how outmatched we were. Penning them in zoos across the globe taught them how to survive in any climate. Killing or capturing one just brought down the anger of the swarm. A hive-mind that has been learning and evolving since their predecessors first walked upon a frozen Earth. We never stood a chance.
It's been a while since I've posted a new story, well posted ... anything actually. I've still been writing sporadically, not as much, mostly due to laziness. As always (or at least 90% of the time) I got the idea from Reddit Writing Prompts: "Elephants don't just have a perfect memory, they have a hive-mind memory." Given enough time, imagination, and paranoia, I could probably come up with a scenario for any animal to overthrow humanity (though I think those "Planet of the Apes" people have already beat me to it. I think my biggest disappointment with this story is the elephant description toward the end. In my head, they looked so much scarier, but I just couldn't get the description into words. Originally, in my imagination, I kind of thought of them as giant, skinless horses with huge, leathery wings but with an elephant head. The one thing I couldn't figure out was some of the logistics of the transformation, such as what to do with their legs if their bodies were to shrink in size? I imagined the wings to be huge, as if an elephants body was just the wings folded upon itself several times. This would make the actual body much, much thinner. I was fine with leaving them with giant heads with tusks protruding in all directions, but it was the legs that kept throwing me off. If all of the mass of their bodies was due to keeping their wings folded up, why are their legs so wide? What happens to the mass in their legs to match the change in their body structure? These are the thoughts that bother me. If I could draw, the transformation would be a pretty cool thing to put here, just to show you what I'm trying to describe as it is now bothering me. Instead, all I have is this:
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| It doesn't make any sense, right? |
