written and illustrated by nathan apfel
composed by michael gancz
The Rise and Fall of the Naked Mole-Rats
Preface
The story of the Cube—formally known as “the Christopher Flores Naked Mole-Rat Colony”—is one that has long defied description. It’s simply too strange to categorize into any of the boxes academics use to understand history. And yet, in a way, it is the quintessential episode of the mid-21st century, interacting with some of the most politically and economically disruptive events of this time period. The response it elicited in the American people epitomized the cultural pushback against a massive restructuring of power.
I do not claim in the following pages to fully describe the Cube—how it came to be, what it was, where it went—in all the nuance it truly deserves. In fact, I think any one person who claims such a feat is misled. My only goal is to be an objective archivist, to present some primary documents and to allow the reader to come to their own understanding of these momentous events.
– ██████, Archivist
Part 1
At its heart, this is a human story. It’s a story about a man from Arizona named Christopher Flores.
It was somewhat trendy in the mid 21st century for museums and wealthy households to own naked mole-rat collections, and a naked mole-rat breeding industry grew up around this newfound demand. Farmers in dry areas no longer capable of supporting crops converted their barns and storehouses into naked mole-rat colonies. They bred naked mole-rats in the hundreds or even thousands, maintaining colonies larger than any that could exist in the wild. It was a niche but lucrative occupation.
Christopher Flores was one such naked mole-rat breeder, and his colony was especially large. In fact, Christopher became the first mole-rat breeder in America to breed a colony of over ten-thousand individuals.
An article in The █████ Observer
Over the next few months, Christopher’s mole-rat colony became a small sensation in the mole-rat breeding community. People came from all over the Southwest to see his mole-rats, to understand how he’d built such a cutting-edge facility in his old, run-down barn. He began putting up advertisements online, and the number of visitors continued to grow. After about a month, Christopher had the idea to charge the mole-rat tourists. It wasn’t an exorbitant amount – Christopher was not an exploitative man – he simply asked visitors to pay three dollars a person for a short tour of the barn. He was responsible with the money: out of every three-dollar fare, he put one dollar into spending, one into savings, and invested one back into the mole-rat colony. In this way, he steadily grew his operation. By the end of the year, he had almost 100,000 mole-rats, and the colony was too big to fit in the barn. If he wanted to continue down the path he’d forged, he’d have to make some changes. And so, he began to construct the Cube.
Documents outlining the construction of the Cube
After seven months and two million dollars, the Cube was complete. It was one-hundred feet on each side, filled from end to end with transparent tubes, many of which were filled with dirt to allow the mole-rats to decide and dig out their colony’s structure. The Cube was home to over ten million mole-rats by the end of the year.
From Christopher Flores’ diary, courtesy of his estate
A paper addressing the Cube’s silence
The next year was long and difficult, and the world forgot about the giant, silent cube of naked mole-rats sitting in the middle of the Arizona desert. The summer was hot, the hottest on record. Hurricanes displaced communities from their homes, which in turn became the excuse for a troubling surge in right-wing rhetoric in the US and Europe. Then came the winter. It was so cold for so long that billions of acres of farmland froze over. International diplomacy came to a standstill over the global food shortage, and global war became a dark and very real possibility. The strange collective behavior of ten million naked mole-rats just wasn’t making headlines like it used to.
The New York Times headline on May 15, 20██
It was February, and Christopher was gardening. He’d grown up on a farm, started his adult career as a farmer, and had never really wanted anything more than farming. But farming just didn’t work like it did when he was younger. It had become impossible for non-industrialized farming to exist outside of specialized regions, and Arizona was not such a region. Christopher had three options: move to somewhere with a wetter climate, join an industrial operation, or give up traditional farming. He’d chosen to stay. But he couldn’t shake that instinct, that joy of raising something green and alive from the red soil. So, he gardened. It was a small, difficult endeavor, but he’d managed to grow a lemon tree and a bed of cornflowers. It was the latter that he was tending when he heard a sound that changed his life forever.
Fragment from Christopher Flores’ Diary
Artist rendition of the Cube’s first words
This was the first time a collective of animals, rather than just a single individual, had ever spoken human language. It was completely unimaginable to the scientific community.
News articles from the week of February ██, 20██
Transcript of President being Informed of the Cube’s speech
A Letter to Nature
Part 2
The National Science Foundation quickly approved a multi-million dollar grant to pay for the Cube’s expansion. Linguists, biologists, and neuroscientists were brought in from around the world to probe the naked mole-rat colony’s collective English ability. It learned English fast, and the speed with which it could pick up new information only increased as its numbers grew. A few days after it had dictated its first thoughtful essay on The Very Hungry Caterpillar, one of the computer scientists suggested they hook the cube up to the internet.
This was a surprisingly easy task. It began with audio communication, but the colony quickly learned a more efficient way to communicate with the computer. To the untrained ear, it sounded like waves of clicking and scratching, but, somehow, the computer’s voice-to-text program could interpret these seemingly random noises as information. At this point, the Cube’s knowledge and understanding of the world took off. Every day, it was able to do exponentially more than the day before.
Article summarizing tests on the Cube’s intelligence
The always seemed to have a soft spot for Christopher. Sometimes, when it didn’t like a request by one of the scientists, it would become petty and refuse to listen to anyone until Christopher came out and comforted it.
One night, after the scientists had all gone home, it called for Christopher and informed him that it had used his credit card to buy a hundred dollars in stocks, mostly in small nanomaterials startups. Christopher was mortified, and tried to get the Cube to sell it, but the Cube assured Christopher that it knew what it was doing.
The next morning, the U.S. declared war for the thirteenth time in its short history. The war demanded a lot from U.S. manufacturing, and the government spent trillions of dollars on weapons and equipment. Every single company the Cube invested in grew by at least ten thousand percent within the next year. Christopher, as a pacifist, donated the money to relief funds, and told the Cube that investing in war was wrong. The Cube seemed to understand this, and apologized for its misguided actions.
This and similar interactions between Christopher and the Cube were recorded in his diary, selected excerpts of which are published here for the first time per the kindness of the Flores estate.
Fragment from Christopher Flores’ diary
Then, on the 18th of April 20██, the United States Government’s Department of Defense seized the cube. They cited its possible importance for military strategy. Despite protests from the hundreds of international research groups studying the Cube, access to the cube was restricted and all information about the cube was classified. The Cube disappeared from the public conscience, and Christopher Flores disappeared with it.
Department of Defense memo and accompanying news story
Within months, the war was over. A few news personalities joked that the Cube’s strategizing skills helped bring the war to a close, but few took these suggestions seriously.
News York Times article from July 21, 20██
The next ten years were years of change. Congress voted to send trillions of dollars to countries in Eurasia—countries that had been on both sides of the conflict—to aid in rebuilding. A series of corruption scandals led to the resignation of the president and other major political figures, a change in leadership which, for once, led to policy change. Ten years later, the American economy was practically unrecognizable. People began to wonder what had changed.
Social media post from June 20██
Part 3
Historians today still debate the cause of America’s sudden fear of the Cube. Perhaps the war and subsequent political upheaval had created a sort of craving, an addiction to crisis that had to be fulfilled. Perhaps anti-government sentiment abroad spread to America via the internet. Perhaps social media, fueled by its echo-chamber algorithms, turned an underground conspiracy theory into international news. Or maybe the Cube really had overthrown the U.S. government and this fact was just so obvious to the American people that it was impossible to ignore.
News articles detailing the beginning of the mole-rat panic
Competing Accounts
The unrest culminated on June 3rd, 20██ when over seven million protestors filled streets across America demanding the end of naked mole-rat “tyranny.” Of the seven million, two hundred thousand marched on what had once been Christopher Flores’ farm.
News coverage of the “Take America Back” protests
The protestors held their ground outside the miles of barbed wire fence that separated the Cube from the outside world until late into the night. Then, at about 3 in the morning, the fence fell. Hundreds of thousands of people rushed the Cube, armed with pitchforks, torches, machetes, wrenches, and anti-rodent spray. Afterwards, many would describe it as one of the most surreal experiences of their lives. Reports mentioned people climbing hundreds of feet above the ground, slashing their way through a maze of metal and plastic tubing. The Cube was completely destroyed by morning. According to the protestors, no mole-rats were killed. This is impossible to confirm, but investigators did note that no naked mole-rat bodies were found in the wreckage.
Artist rendition of protestors storming the Cube
How does a nation deal with such a strange and at times terrifying experience? Well, over the next few years, America just… forgot. Outside of academic –– mostly historiographical –– circles, most Americans live their lives as if the Cube never existed, as if a naked mole-rat colony never became intelligent. And what of Christopher Flores? He’d followed the Cube into government-enforced obscurity, and there he remained until the Cube’s destruction. Afterwards, the U.S. government offered him a new home and a pension, and he chose to live out the rest of his life only an hour away from where he’d started his mole-rat breeding operation all those years before.
One of the few articles to ‘revisit’ the Cube after its destruction