Koradonda: Chapter 8, The Pattern: Part 1

Jones tries to find the root cause that is interfering with is plans.

chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Jones hadn’t exaggerated just how busy he was. Except for the one-hour lunch he had with Fords at noon, he appeared to mortals to be sitting motionless in a chair blocking the entrance, doing nothing. But his own people could see how busy he was and took pains not to disturb him.

The lesser thing, and the thing he would not have done had there been a viable option to it, was monitor his entire estate plus some distance beyond it. He listened with the ears and watched with the eyes of every single animal within that area all that occurred.

He knew the exact placement, as well as detonation codes, for each of the atomic bombs.

The humans out there had reason to worry concerning those. While they really could not be called missiles, they popped up to a distance of 100 meters before detonating. In the time it took them to reach that height, he, and every Beast Lord here, could watch them from a safe distance away, though using that kind of speed had consequences none of his people willingly courted if it wasn’t a survival situation.

A drawback to watching everything this way was that everything every animal saw, every animal heard, and the thought of every animal in the time he was watching this way would forever be a part of his memory. While his memory was virtually unlimited, it was weighty, and committing this much information to memory was added noticeably to it. Unlike humans, he could never forget what he committed to memory.

His primary focus wasn’t that, though. It was examining the pattern, and tracing why the things that had happened, had.