Around a century ago, through arts no longer practiced, a player piano was taken apart, then reassembled as an android. Her wires were formed into something like sinew, and the miles of perforated paper which once passed through her body were elegantly folded into an ever-churning brain. A few transplants from other instruments helped to complete her anatomy; an accordion split in two formed her lungs, and segments of brass channeled an animating wind through her limbs.
During the first phase of manufacturing, jellybeans are perfectly transparent. In this preliminary state, they look like misplaced contact lenses, or raindrops that failed to burst on impact. These beans have no flavor of their own, yet contain the potential for all flavors; when bitten, there is only that familiar texture of a tender shell giving way, followed by that of semi-molten starch oozing apart.
“This thing’s a search engine?”
“That’s right.” The device looked like something of a pipe organ, with tall, brass pipes protruding from a central chassis, yet it featured a typewriter’s keyboard instead of ivory keys. An array of thirty-some enigma-like rotors could be seen churning within its glass case. “A search engine, and an entirely mechanical one at that. Type anything you want here, and it will search the world for relevant content, no wires attached.”
“So, you used to be a sphinx?”
“Well, to be more precise, my head used to be part of a sphinx,” she replied. “The rest of me came from other hybrids and chimeras. My skull was attached to a lion’s body, but my torso came from some creature with an owl’s head, and my legs came from something else entirely that had ninety-eight more.”
An alluvium of jade velvet can be seen swirling throughout the jar, occasionally catching a glimmer of sunlight. When shaken, the contents appear torn and tattered by the turbulence, yet eventually return to their stable, undifferentiated flow.
Grizzly bears spend their lives in oscillation between two forests: one inner, and one outer. During the summer months, they wander through the outer forest, foraging for anything and everything that their stomachs will accept. Once winter arrives, however, they succumb to hibernation, and retreat into the inner forest of the unconscious. As far they’re concerned, both of these woodlands are equally real.
For many years, human researchers have misunderstood the so-called “camouflage” of the cuttlefish. Much like a chameleon, it is allegedly capable of matching the coloration of its skin to the exact hue and patterning of any nearby surface. This is particularly interesting because the cuttlefish itself is colorblind. Despite being able to wear the palette of its environment perfectly, it is simultaneously unable to sense it altogether- its own skin seems to see better than its eyes.
The body of a sea serpent is most often seen as a sine wave. As it propels itself across the water, its length protrudes from the ocean as a series of archways between the tail and the head. When humans attempt to observe the creature from beneath the water, however, they discover that there’s nothing at all to be seen. For this reason, many have written off the mysterious beast’s existence altogether; despite the profound number of sightings over time, no physical specimen has ever been recovered.