Untitled – Jesse Anderson

May 5, 2026

Their senses are more or less as reliable as our own, but because of the particular environment with which they must contend, they move about in a state of unremitting confusion and ignorance. Giant plumes of grey dust pass through interminably, and the light comes and goes with no discernible pattern. They have eyes, they have ears; but their eyes—though not invariably, as we’ll come to—tend to be shut tightly against the constant stream of dust, and because of the tremendous wind that carries it, they can only hear the loudest of noises.
        It’s not certain if the unpredictable variations in light are due to parallel variations in the thickness of the dust, or if they can be explained by geology. They could live in a cave. They could live in the shadow of an unusually shaped mountain. If their environment has boundaries, something to run up against, they’ve never reached it. Despite this—and despite the fact that they number in the tens of thousands—they behave as if they were confined to a limited amount of space and collide with one another ceaselessly.
        These collisions are painful and inherent to their way of life. If you were able to get a clear glimpse of them, you would think they were each engaged in their own unique sport or dance, for while they all move about with similar vigor, every member moves in a very precise, repetitive, and individual manner. No rules seem to restrict their movements, though they often consist of hops, raised hands, rolls, and sharp kicks.
        They communicate through a kind of primal cheer, a joyous shriek that—once begun—spreads within seconds throughout the entire community. The resulting roar is horrendous in its intensity, and it seems to silence even the wind. Besides the tasteless morsels of unnamed food that litter the ground, this cheer is their only commodity, their only currency and language. Without it, there would be no reason for them to go on hurtling sightlessly into one another, or battling the endless drift of dust.
        Anatomically indistinguishable from humans, their biology is nonetheless distinct, and their lifespan is much shorter. Copulation is accidental and confuses those involved. They’re born with the ability to walk, and they reach physical and mental maturity in less than two years. By their sixth month, they grasp the cheer’s meaning and importance.
        It was mentioned that their eyes are not invariably shut against the dust. This is because, every few days, the conditions are such that a single member of the community—it’s almost always a single member, but there are rare occasions when it happens to two members simultaneously—is able to get a clear vision of the environs and the tortured expressions of their compatriots. For this to happen, two conditions have to be met: the individual must be positioned fortuitously against the direction of the dust and wind, and the individual’s eyes must experience a spontaneous surge of lubrication—this flushing, which washes away the accumulated grime from their eyelids, occurs in a quasi-cyclical fashion for each member.
        Instinctually, the sight-stricken member knows what to do in the short period before sightlessness returns. They scrutinize, rapidly, the movements of the others, judging, looking for the motion that will set off an impulse to approve. And when they find it, they cheer.
        But not everyone cheers. There is always a small portion of the crowd that believes the cheers are directed at them, that whatever movement they happened to be engaged in when the cheering started was, in fact, the movement that inspired the cheer. So instead of cheering, they continue the movement with more alacrity, hoping to sustain the communal release as long as possible. They’re never proven wrong in their assumption. As it happens, it’s never even occurred to a single member of the community that the wrong member might take responsibility for the collective exultation.
Why a given individual assumes that they’re the cause for a specific round of cheering is a mystery. Every member does so at least once throughout their lifetime, but even if their linguistic capacities extended beyond the cheer, they wouldn’t be able to explain their reasoning. It seems to come down to a combination of timing, instinct, and an ephemeral sense of self-assuredness.
        When the cheering subsides—and it subsides as suddenly as it begins—those that believe themselves to have been the target of validation continue their movement even more frantically than before, desperate to reignite the roar. This happens only on the rare occasions when another member’s eyes clear very shortly after the initial cheer. Normally, however, the praise-seeker vainly repeats the motion for days, slowly exhausting themself and slowly forgetting the precise sequence of steps their motion consisted of. They eventually collapse into a deep, haunted sleep that lasts for several hours. When they wake up, the motion is almost completely forgotten. They are then forced to invent a new one, hoping with the whole weight of their being that, at some point, someone might find it aesthetically pleasing enough to offer it approval. Obsession sets in—once a member thinks they’ve experienced the group’s admiration, all they can think of is recapturing it.
        This will continue for centuries. They can’t imagine any other way of life, and even if the dust somehow abated and they could have—for the first time—a moment of shared lucidity, they would soon shut their eyes defiantly against the cleared air and then, euphorically, go on seeking the limits of motion.