That was how I learned that zombies become stronger as they get smaller. Think hydraulic yellow machine strong. Which is why the really old zombies still call submarines and deep sea diving bells “packed lunch”.
I call divers "liquorice"... a bit rubbery on the outside, but with a delicious salty-sweet taste on the inside, once you start chewing.
See, small as human brains are, it is still our best-tasting source of the glucose that keeps as sentient. Whale brains are bigger than human brains, but in taste, whale brains are salted pork while human brains are honey-glazed fat, ready to melt on your tongue.
But I digress. Back to them who don't want to make contact yet.
They are small, biped reptilians who have been quietly evolving in air pockets under the ocean in the 66 million years that passed after most of the other dinosaurs went extinct.
All dinosaur survivors have this in common: their ancestors could hide underwater while things burned on land. The ancestors of these theropods must have found large air pockets, and when their fellow survivors went back topside after the smoke had cleared, they chose to stay. As time went by they first found then later made more air pockets for their nurseries while the adults lived increasingly ambitious amphibious lives as far from the surface as possible.
Obviously, only the cleverest survived to breed.
Now fast forward many, many millions years to that unknown point in time when the first zombies discovered that a combination of cold and unrelenting hydrostatic pressure makes the best combination to keep our bodies from decaying.
Mix a need to be as far from the top as possible with a need for deep, cold water and you get why we met up with the very clever reptiles down here in the Mariana Trench. For those shy reptiles, no place is further from the surface than this deep gash in Earth's crust; and for us undead, no place offers an icier embrace.
We meet the clever reptiles only rarely though, when they open their hatches to flit to the top in their flying saucers; or to pick up more of the ancient polymetallic nodules that litter the deep ocean beds, the same nodules that Ur likes to use as stress balls.
We never speak. Instead, we relate with them much like you do with other intelligent animals. For the little reptiles certainly are intelligent – I rate them the cleverest species on Earth. But it is a cleverness as alien as that of any octopus, their mimicking minds as quick as any of the corvids and the cherry on top -- they are more telephatic than even elephants.
Which is why we think at them, instead of speaking to them. These thoughtful conversations are still very much hit and miss.
Gregory Bateson, the old "dolphin whisperer" on whose underwater machine I'm typing this, said it is like trying to communicate with octopuses that think in colour, or with crows that pack several layers of meaning in one squawk, or elephants that tap into the subsonic.
Our delicious human frontal lobes just ain't designed for such dialogues.
If all this makes the wee reptiles sound very civilised, be warned: They ain't.
Not that they are barbaric, I mean, they use the hydrothermal vents down here to make their very advanced metallurgic alloys and have algae producing oxygen in their comfortably warm nurseries. But theirs are old, cold-blooded thoughts on top of reptilian habits that are quite disgusting. And this is coming from me, an undead creature that will suck out your brains through your nostrils.
Most of my disgust comes from how these very clever little amphibious reptiles breathe and breed underwater. To breathe, they do like turtles, sucking water into their cloaca, in which two specialized sacs lined with blood vessels absorb oxygen. Think of it as a big wet fart, but in reverse. To breed, they join arse to arse in a “cloacal kiss”, the male transferring sperm to the female using the same muscular contractions that excrete waste.
For them conceiving, breathing and excreting all use the same sack. They really are supremely efficient creatures and their metallurgy is a wonder, but now the little power light on Greg's underwater typing machine have started flashing red, so I better get back to the main point: Don't try to find us.
Not us zombies, nor the clever little reptiles that you call "underwater aliens".
We will eat your brains and as any of the many sailors and pilots who saw the clever little reptiles or their flying craft will tell you, they avoid contact with humans.
From what Greg could deduce, this is because the primitive, hot thoughts from living humans give the telephatic reptiles something like the brain freeze you get from eating ice cream too fast. Greg made a living trying to talk to dolphins in the hallucinogenic 1970s, so his guess is more educated than most.
But I'm not going to beg.
Those of you who insist on trying to find us, please come. I have a powerful hankering for liquorice that needs sating.
