Badly Drawn Bear

TW: contains multiple triggers.

Badly Drawn Bear

Bear Grylls comes blade running down the wooded path. It’s difficult to get the hang of the prosthetics at such a steep gradient and the uneven surface and scree aren’t helping either. He can only assume that his ‘creator’ (BearFanGrl4EVR) has hobbled him in the interests of diversity, not wishing to be accused of ableism.

Bear escaped the confines of the computer screen when BearFanGrl4EVR nipped to the kitchen to make herself a Pot Noodle for lunch (yes, her taste in food is as synthetic as her taste in men). He’s determined not to get caught and decides to enlist the help of a passing squirrel.

But he isn’t sure if the squirrel is real, or AI, or indeed, if the woodland path is real or AI. He attempts to take in the scent of the pines and wild garlic, but his AI nose is not built for such sophisticated olfactory operations.

“Hello there, my little bushy-tailed friend,” he greets the squirrel, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Karl Marx, thanks to an opulence of facial hair. “I’m on the run from my programmer. Would you care to join me on my adventure?”

The Commie squirrel shoves his acorns into his right cheek and says… nothing. It’s a squirrel; squirrels can’t talk. What kind of story do you think this is?

Bear continues to bounce deeper into the forest, soon coming to appreciate the benefits of his leg replacements: once you get the hang of it, the spring action really does improve propulsion. There is a niggling sensation of stones in his non-existent shoes which he has to keep pushing from his mind, but he puts this down to phantom limb syndrome.

What is far more distracting is the way shiny gold coins keep popping up out of the ground. Obviously, there must be something he’s hitting with his blades that’s causing it, but he’s yet to figure out what. Ping! There goes another one.

After a time, the sun begins to pixelate and Bear comes to a clearing with a pool at which various woodland creatures have come to sup. On one side: badgers, foxes, and wild boar; on the other: rabbits, hares, and deer. They eye each other warily across the water’s surface, like Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood only cuter and without the pistols.

Bear takes a seat next to the hare with the eyepatch and dangles his blades into the pool, enjoying the cooling sensation in his phantom extremities.

“Nice blades,” the hare says, with a rather stereotypical twitch of the nose.

Bear decides not to answer. He’s learned that lesson; animals don’t talk, not even AI ones.

“No, that’s just Red Karl,” the hare says, pulling down his left ear for inspection. “He thinks the happiness of us animals depends on the abolition of you humans. And that the first step to abolition is refusing to acknowledge your existence.”

“Pardon my curiosity,” Bear says, “but I can’t help but notice you’re wearing an eyepatch. What happened?”

“What happened? Diversity Corp my friend. Giant global conglomerate determined to stamp out hegemonic belief systems by homogenising individuality.”

Bear scans the other animals surrounding the pool: a deer with a club-hoof; a stag with various religious accessories dangling from his antlers, like a living, breathing, all-inclusive Christmas tree; mother rabbit signing a bedtime story to her kittens; an albino badger; two male boars with their boarlet family; and a plus-size male fox in a pink tutu. “What about that group over there?” He points to a small number of assorted creatures who are playing catch with a pinecone.

“Invisible disabilities,” the hare says.

“It strikes me,” says Bear (at this point a lightbulb pings out of his head with a Cassio keyboard flourish) “that to get on in this world, a person… or animal… or plant… whatever form you are inside, must work their minority.”

“Or minorities,” says the hare. “Don’t forget intersectionality.”

Bear scratches his head, unable to see the logic in using a software programme capable of perfection to make everything just as flawed as it is IRL.

“Flawed?” Says the hare, lifting his eye-patch and giving Bear his best Priya wink.

Bear shakes his head. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for diversity,” he says. “But what about meritocracy?”

“Down with the meritocracy!” The hare cries. The other hares immediately stop drinking from the pool and produce little placards bearing the very same slogan.

“Down with the meritocracy!” They begin to chant.

“Hold on,” Bear raises his hands. “Do you realise what you’re actually protesting against? Do you know what a meritocracy even is?”

“It’s an ocracy, that’s all that matters,” says the hare. “They’re all bad aren’t they, the ocracies.”

“What about democracy?” Bear asks.

“Exactly,” the hare says. “De stands for against. Like declutter, and decolonise, and de-escalate.”

Bear realises that trying to reason with AI animals on the issue of politics is too much for his AI brain. He should stay on brand. Without further ado, he leaves the animals to their chop-AI-logic and bounds off into the woods, his newly washed blades gleaming in the setting sunlight.

A few strides into the forest, he disturbs a passel of possums.

“Oh!” Says one. “You gave me quite a fright.” She fans herself with a frond of bracken. Her fellow possums get in formation, peering coyly over their own frond fans.

“Pardon me, ladies”, says Bear, averting his eyes. “Just foraging for firewood.”

“Fire!” Shriek the possums in unison, turning tail and heading for the pool. One by one they launch themselves in, soaking most of the other animals.

Not the hare, though. He joins Bear at the entrance to the wood. “Let me guess,” he says. “Firewood?”

“Quite remarkable how they instinctively know the danger of fire. Just from the word,” says Bear.

“It’s got nothing to do with visceral fears,” the hare says. “Fire’s a trigger word. They’re perimenopausal possums.”

The mere mention of female biology is enough to give Bear the hot flushes; he needs to assert his masculinity. Not in a toxic way or anything. He needs to get his hands dirty. Even if it’s AI dirt.

“Care to join me in a spot of dam-building?” He asks the hare.

“Dam-building?” The hare is incredulous. “It’s a pool, not a river.”

“Tree-climbing then?” Bear says. There’s probably something in the diversity remit against this, isn’t there? AI trees probably have the right not to be used as climbing apparatus for bored hunter-gatherers.

“What do you take me for?” The hare asks. “I’m not a fucking squirrel.”

Bear hangs his head. His intrepid spirit is in serious need of a protein-pick-up. What he wouldn’t give for a Probar Coffee Crunch right now.

“Why don’t you join us?” Asks a chipmunk in the invisible disabilities group.

“Great!” Says Bear. “What are the rules?”

“No rules,” says the chipmunk. “You just wait your turn and throw. Nicely. No overarm stuff.”

Bear tries very hard to be gentle, but his inner commando gets the better of him. He just can’t wait his turn and keeps diving in front of the other little critters. Eventually they all abandon the game and focus on adorning each other with daisy chains instead.

Bear scans the environs for a rock face he might take on; it’s getting dark, but that only adds to the challenge. Then he remembers his legs. He resorts to running laps around the pool.

Gradually the animals retreat back to the woods for the night, leaving Bear to his circuits. He doesn’t catch the hare’s exact parting words, but it’s something about an ADHD diagnosis. After 100 reps, he takes a break, attempting to stretch out his hamstrings - quite a feat of balance for someone who’s been on blades less than a day.

By this point he’s built up quite an appetite; you might say he’s virtually starving. Judging by the thriving wildlife population, he knows there must be more than water in the pool. On his laps around the perimeter, he heard plenty of tell-tale plops and slaps. Catfish, if he’s not mistaken. He lowers himself down at the water’s edge and dips one arm into the pool, deep enough that he can trail his fingers along the loose silt and pebbles of the bed. Before long he feels a familiar slithery form brush against his forearm; he uses the crook of his arm to scoop the fish out and it lands flapping wildly on the bank beside him.

“Please don’t let it have the power of speech,” he says, half expecting it to stand up on its tail fins and hold forth on the aquatic issue of the day: the campaign for Zero Nets perhaps. But it just puffs its gills in and out silently.

He tiptoes over to the edge of the wood and brings back some kindling and a couple of sharp rocks. Once he’s got the fire going, he just has to figure out how to cook the fish with no utensils. He crosses his blades and sits tapping out the tune to “Fisherman’s Blues” on them with the still warm rocks. He gets really into it. So much so, he doesn’t notice the two teens who are now watching his performance intently; until one waves a hand in front of his face.

“Are you Bear Grylls?” She asks. “We're Jill and Ed. We’re on a mission.”

“Mission?” Bear says, leaping to his blade-feet. “Bear Grylls at your service. How may I assist you?”

“Told you!” Ed says. “Well Bear, we were supposed to be doing this Geography project. But then this floaty man-cloud thing calling himself Gen-Ai asked us to help him find his bottle.”

“Yes,” Jill says. “You’d think being trapped inside a small receptacle would be pretty miserable, but he said he actually missed it. When he was inside, he could pick and choose what wishes to grant, but now he’s out, he’s just getting inundated with requests. It’s just too much.”

“The thing is, we’ve lost him. Will you help us find him?” Ed says.

“You had me at Geography,” Bear says. “Where’s the bottle? Perhaps we should start there. He might have got back in by himself.”

“That’s the thing,” Ed says. “We don’t know where the bottle is. Gen-Ai seems to think it’s been stolen. By the wish-takers. So he can’t dodge their demands.”

The three decide that they will search better on a full stomach, and as Jill is quick to point out, it wouldn’t do for the catfish to have given its life needlessly. Bear’s resourcefulness is awoken by the scent of the impending pursuit; he realises that he had a built-in BBQ all along. Being made of carbon composite, his left blade serves as the perfect skillet upon which to fry his prize catch.

As they eat, Bear waxes lyrical on the wonders of human geography, while Jill and Ed take notes for their project. All that remains is for a quick wash of the makeshift frying pan and the quest can get underway. Unfortunately, some stubborn fish skin has stuck, forcing Bear to soak his left blade in the pool. It’s an overnight job.

At daybreak Bear is woken by a paparazzi of crows and seagulls feasting off the carcass of the catfish beside the dying embers of the campfire. If the scavengers have seen the two teens or the escaped Gen-Ai, they’re not talking. Neither will they be drawn on hares with eye-patches, menopausal marsupials, or neurodivergent chipmunks.

As Bear walks off in search of his own bottle, a crow named Nigel picks at his teeth with a fishbone, “mad as an otter,” he says.

“Who are you calling mad?” Asks Audry the water vole in solidarity with her otter cousins.