Diddles are all around, but
very small, on the order of the follicles of a peach’s fuzz. They often borough themselves on the stems of
leaves, in paint cracks in doorways, getting uprooted and re-settling wherever
they must after being blown around by a moderate wind.
They are observant creatures,
watching with the exhausted and bewildered expressions that remind one of Fred Armisen’s
impression of Penny Marshall on Saturday Night Live. However, they are not non-thinking beings. They take in their surroundings and
communicate their experiences on small instruments made of twisted and braded
dust particles, called Deedles, over which they draw their legs the way a cricket
does to make his chirping sounds. The vibrations
produced from the Diddles’ Deedles constitute their music, or Doddles.
It has been noted that rather
than simply playing what they see, they build their music based on past
experiences interwoven with current perceptions. So in this way, the Diddle’s music is a sort
of oral history of their species. Deciphering
the Doddles has not been an easy task.
Researches endured
painstakingly long hours of rigging up the most sensitive of recording
equipment to archive the musical communications of the Diddles. The sounds are so minute and are of such a
high-frequency pitch that an enormous amount of post-recording work has been
needed to extract the musical sounds from unwanted background noise.
By seeing what the Diddles
saw, and reviewing the recordings of their music, these researchers were able
to begin to build a vocabulary of their communications, a sort of encyclopedia
of the musical motifs which made up groups of common communications. Working backwards then, the scientists have
been able to build a historical knowledge base of the Diddle’s past. Not all is yet understood since this is an
on-going project.
But a mosaic from their Doddles
has indicated that they are a species that first came into existence from a
scientific experiment at a university gone awry. The knowledge base of the Diddles’ Doddles
and old hymns seem to all point to a “great escape” from a laboratory setting,
probably only a few years ago. Their
descriptions allude to a sudden “big bang” in a sterile white clinical setting
that begin an exodus of their species out into a much larger world. This would likely indicate that some sort of
scientific test of fungi or other minute life form had gotten out of it’s
containment due to human error.
The amount of time estimated
for their existence as being “a few years” was roughly calculated by unweaving
their historical hymns and comparing them to their current music. Using the backwards trajectory of the
Diddle’s rate of increased vocabulary in their Doddles over time pointed to a
somewhat focused span of time at which their doddles began. This indicates rough idea of when they became
a conscious group entity. From a petri
dish culture of likely just a few hundred thousand, today’s estimations of
Diddles playing their Deedles is around 80 billion strong.
And why the overwhelmed,
Penny Marshall type gaze in most of their faces? This is still unclear, but the researchers
think that it is a species reaction to all that the world is. One has to remember that the Diddles, though
not created in the petri dishes, were harvested there first and therefore
probably gained their group consciousness in this quiet setting. Upon their escape from the laboratory, the
unexpected slammed into every one of the Diddle’s faces. The loud, changing light, changing colors,
dirty busy outside world. Their
shock-ridden faces may simply be their inability to completely ever digest the
world in which they now live.
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