The General wore an odd smile on his visage, and the condescension writ across his face and sparkling in his eyes was plain to see. This only served to stoke Margaret’s fury with an even greater vigour.
‘Allow me to persist for a few moments with my “seventh grade biology lesson”, if you will,’ he continued.
Margaret wanted to explode, wanted to jump up from this bench and storm off in disgust … but where would she go? She was a prisoner here. There would be no escape for her, not yet, at least. Until she had devised a solid plan to liberate herself from this vast penitentiary, she was, unfortunately, stuck fast. With gritted teeth and an angry vein pulsing in her forehead, she swallowed her fury and tried to smile as she replied to the General.
‘Fine, sir. Please do continue.’
There was no mistaking the hostility in those words. The General, however, remained calm and collected in the face of the scorn directed his way.
‘Yes, persist I will my dear, persist I will. Now tell me,’ he continued, prodding the tip of his machete into the leopard’s side, at the spot where his heart was located, ‘if I were to make an incision here, what would I find?’
‘Well like I said, I’m no veterinary expert, but I do believe that that’s where the feline heart is.’
‘Correct. Now if I were to make a similar incision right here,’ he said, whipping his machete across with terrifying speed and stopping the point mere centimetres from Margaret’s chest, causing her to jump in her seat and let out an abrupt shriek of fright, ‘what would I find?’
Margaret swallowed slowly before answering, taking a moment to try to steady her abruptly frayed nerves.
‘You’d, uh, you’d also find a heart.’
‘What is the function of this organ, both in the leopard and in yourself?’
‘It pumps and circulates blood, and provides nutrients and oxygen to the … now look,’ she continued, bristling with annoyance and impatience, ‘what’s the point of these questions?’
The General did not answer her, but instead persisted with illustrating his example.
‘Yes, that is the basic function. All of these things can be shown to be significant similarities, can they not? Four limbs, as possessed by both your kind and this leopard, for various functions of locomotion. A mouth to take in liquid and solid nutrients to fuel the ever-moving machine. Eyes, ears and a nose to filter and interpret a glut of information pouring in, in a never-ending deluge, from the world that surrounds the organism. And now I must ask yet another question: what lies at the very centre of this, an organ whose function is to both process all of this information and to regulate these systems?’
‘A brain.’
The General flashed her a beaming grin of triumph, his teeth almost unnaturally white in the morning light against his deep, almost bluish-ebony skin.
‘Yes, Dr Green. A brain. Were I to remove this leopard’s cranium and yours, what differences would I find?’
‘Um, er, well … differences in the size of the brain, for one thing. And that’s an important difference! Ha! Yeah General, a real important difference!’
‘Oh, I don’t think that you’ll find that its size and mass is nearly as consequential as you may think. How much does the average human brain weigh?’
‘About three pounds, I believe.’
‘And how much does an elephant’s brain weigh?’
‘Okay, way more, but you’re dead wrong if you think that brain size on its own is a determiner of intelligence!’
‘I know that. You’re going to tell me now that the brain weight to overall body weight ratio is a far more accurate scale to use, are you not?’
‘Yes! Checkmate, General! Humans are by far at the top of that chart!’
The General grinned, and his expression was almost boyishly mischievous; he appeared to be enjoying this.
‘No, your kind is not, actually. There are plenty of animals with higher brain-weight-to-body-weight ratios than yourselves. The humble tree shrew, for example, beats you humans outright.’
‘Well … well … I’d like to see a damn tree shrew do a math problem, or write a symphony, or build a hospital!’
The General laughed.
‘Hahaha! Now we are getting somewhere, aren’t we?’
Margaret shot the General a sour look.
‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,’ she retorted with flat bluntness. ‘In fact, I don’t get why we’re having this discussion at all. There doesn’t seem to be a point to any of this.’
A look of anger flashed across the General’s eyes, and storm clouds billowed behind the mountain ranges that were his dark irises.
‘No,’ he hissed in a soft but unmistakably menacing tone. ‘No, of course you don’t. Of course you won’t … you humans are all the same, the lot of you. I could tell you things – show you things – that would undo every bit of cultural brainwashing your mind has been subjected to from the moment you entered the vast and tragic illusion that is your First World existence – I could show you these things, and open your mind to vast possibilities, possibilities that are so far beyond the scope of your crude and limited mortal perspective that it would seem to you that you had only just emerged from a state of infancy … but no, your mind is closed. Closed and rusted shut, like a complex machine of iron rotted and fused into a brown, unusable lump by decades of seaside air. No hatchet or crowbar could get through the crusty mass of oxidised metal that surrounds that slowly calcifying organ inside your skull.’
‘What?!’ Margaret yelled, her cheeks flushed with the redness of indignation. ‘How dare you accuse me of being close-minded! This is not the first time you’ve said that either! And I’ve already
