The Flock

Fiction by Andrea Ferrari Kristeller

When the mechanical flocks were launched, they were an immediate success. Our town, small and South American, was only able to acquire one after a few years had passed. The councillor bought it to raise his chances of being re-elected, and the little wonder of thirty metallic birds did the trick. It seems people do miss birds now that all of their species have gone extinct. Supposedly, some real ones remained in the few Reserves set worldwide before the Event, but only experts or otherwise privileged people would have been able to assert this. There was one to the north of us, in Misiones.

Our townspeople seemed to enjoy the illusion given by the mechanical flock as it glided over Coronda every afternoon, and they sat down to rest on their patios after their day’s work. The system that propelled them was solar-based and required little of the sun, which now always seemed to wane. They had originally been bright green—an untidy rendering of a European starling, I guessed—but time had left them looking mineral grey. Perhaps the manufacturers had deemed it unimportant to be loyal to original colouring, and the concept of exotic or invasive was an evasive one now. There were only old photographs or documentaries to compare with, but they were, of course, a bit depressing to watch. No one ever noticed the differences. Even if they tilted their heads and clicked their wings, there was a tail discrepancy, too, and of course, the ungainly landings or lift-offs.

I did notice, though, as I belonged to the very few bird watchers left in the world by 2145. I knew we were a bad joke, a group of maladjusted people (mostly men) with too much time on their hands who were unable to observe their subject of study. But then again, bird watchers in the past had not been very different from us. There was a forum where we met online, with avatars picked up from rather standard options, with which we sat at a meta café and discussed animatedly how penguins used to be, or condors, or any species brought up by any member in any country in the world we came from, set as the topic of the day. What joined us was the same collector’s interest of old, only now with the antiquarian’s touch. We all coveted and kept collections of old photographs of the birds we liked best, a bit like a child’s album, but with the sobering tinge of extinction in the corner of all our minds.

We seldom commented on the mechanical flocks and had developed a joint smirk in our avatars that we all made in unison when they were mentioned, as well as several memes and stickers to make fun of them.

The fact that these flocks were used for commercial advertising did not help much to uphold them in our consideration. The AI that made them work, a bit like if they were a flock of mini-drones, could be set to build a heart shape, a few words, or a brand name. It was not uncommon to watch their evening flights and see their murmuration turn into a paid anniversary commemoration, an ad, or a political logo, like those planes with banners in the old days, but with a sophisticated touch.

One day, as I was returning from The Plant along a dusty road that returned us to town, I saw the flock from a distance and noticed something strange in it. There they were, jointly creating an O for Oscar in silver shine reflected from a pale afternoon sun, when one of them, I noticed, persistently went out of formation and flew erratically around the O as if it were braiding the air around it. I stared and decided this merited my old antique pair of binoculars, one of my most precious possessions, though I knew it was most probably one used for old horse races due to its shorter range and leather-smelling case, a beauty in itself. It smelt like what I imagined leather to be, but I still don’t know if it’s leather. Nothing to compare it with.

There had been reports in our group of flocks malfunctioning, and we sort of collected these stories as a record check on human foolishness. There was this case in India where a flock malfunctioned and attacked a small French poodle, killing it. There was this bizarre occurrence in Sweden in which a flock had formed a clear rude sign in the sky, and no one had been able to find a programming mistake or culprit. There had even been one episode of a whole flock diving into the sea near the remains of what used to be New Orleans in a suicidal dive, which of course had ruined all their circuits and rendered them useless—a shiny group of corpses unretrieved from the bottom of the sea, floating as if flying underwater.

That evening, I ran to my device to let my group know what I had noticed in my town’s formation. I was met with a wall of sarcasm, but decided to stand watch on the flock every afternoon from then on. It could be managed if I asked for an early leave with an excuse, and it only entailed a small reduction in my salary.

The next day, I chose a watching point in the almost deserted park at the centre of my town, a place only used by retired people to sit down and watch the other few retired people pass by. I took a small folding chair, my mate drink, and stood guard like a soldier of old, determined to have the first news of any unexpected behaviour in the flock.

I didn’t have to wait for long, and what I saw that afternoon, in the daily red light of smoky sunsets, will remain forever in the eyes of my mind: the most utter impossibility flew in front of my eyes with that flock. In its original grey and spotted feathers, smaller, of course, in size than the fake starlings, a real bird pirouetted among them. This could not possibly be true, but to my jaw-dropping amazement, a sparrow was flying together with the mechanical flock, largely outnumbered and amidst the artificial gleam of metal, incredibly graceful in its hovering and swirling and diving in mid-air. It accompanied the flock as it landed in its fake grazing routines; people vaguely recalled this was part of bird behaviour and the flock imitated those huge communal landings, only that the pecking was useless against a tar ground as dull as their wings. With my binoculars, I could gaze at how this one did actually peck the dust and seemed to get something from it, perhaps small crumbs or leftovers in what was usually a well-kept, robotically swept park.

When I reported it that night, I faced all kinds of jokes and comments of disbelief. I understood, and I would have done exactly the same if a bird watcher (or should we be called ex-bird watchers?) in Oceania had reported a live cockatoo in a fake flock in his hometown. My next step was to promise evidence, so the following afternoon I had my device with me, and instead of wearing my binoculars, I stood from a distance and filmed the flock for two running hours. I have to clarify that these flocks did not fly away in fright like the ones of old were said to have done, but legally you could not approach them, and there was a fine if you did. Of course, some had been flung stones at, and usually a town council had to replace around ten birds from its regular flock per year.

The next night, all the group stared in silence at the film as I projected it on a shared screen in our virtual meeting place. I noticed their avatars were so immobile they looked creepy. Then Tony from South Africa said, in the middle of that heavy silence:

"It’s a sparrow, Passer domesticus". 

And he launched on the screen a report on the species, where the certainty of its existence was corroborated by the images’ detail as we all watched in awe. Then, as it comes with the territory, coloration or beak characteristics were discussed abundantly, so that what followed was a debate on its belonging to an ancient subspecies in the most animated manner; as if the argument over an impossible sparrow in a small ex-rural town in Argentina were even possible.

Then followed a controversy over what should be done about it. Some proposed authorities had to be informed for the proper protection of the only living sparrow that anybody in the world had heard of in more than a century. Others believed it was better to leave it as it was, as no one would notice anyway and the bird was better protected by general indifference. "Ignorance is bliss", Iria from Norway quoted.

After more than a month of debating on the sparrow, the latter position seemed to grow in adepts, and personally, I was of the same mind: leave the bird alone, let it merge in the false flock and be protected by it, stand by, observe. And report. We felt like members of an ancient cult, I guess, and I’m sure that, like me, they all dreamt at night of the flock roosting in its rusted calm on a council shed, holding amongst them this warm feathered thing, a brownish jewel between cold clanking wings.

Another month passed by in which I made detailed reports for my online community, and they waited for them as if they were manna from heaven. I have to admit I loved the attention. But I must also say that those afternoons, spent in real one-sole bird-watching, were the happiest in my life, and not due to the nightly gathering to share new details. There was something I now understood of the ancient art of the trade: the silence implied, the wonder, yes, the wonder in the observation of plumage, turns in the air, and sounds. Metallic Flocks did not produce but a vague imitation of a generic bird call—a finch call, we all agreed—and then, only one call. As all of us know in my group, the variety of bird songs had been surprising, and in the old times these were recorded, and you could even differentiate between alarm calls, mating songs, and the unaccounted-for singing at dawn, which had no explanation other than it being, apparently, the birds’ way of announcing the sun had finally and luckily come out. Ancient suns, in ancient blue skies, I thought to myself. This sparrow could sing as if the sunset needed courtship, and its trills and tweets still fill my dreams. Not one of the old recordings could compare to the fresh, tinkling quality it had, even if it had never been a species notorious for its singing prowess.

Yet after two months of this surreal happiness, a new turn of events altered my joy and our group’s frenzied talks on flight curves in mid-air, or the diet of sparrows. One afternoon, as I set my chair in my usual place at the park, the flock just did not appear. The retired people, who already greeted me with friendly nods every day, also noticed. We exchanged a few words about their absence, and some even rambled on about what their great-great-great grandfather used to tell them about birds in their yards in the gone days. All of them wondered about the flock.

I waited uselessly. I stayed until the lights in the park turned on in their ghostly white, still stunned. I fidgeted with the leather strap of my binoculars, wondering.

None of my friends wanted to hear this, and conjectures on government conspiracies and their detection of the anomalous sparrow filled that night. One member dared to suggest a migration but was sneered at. The following night, dejectedly, I had to report that once again the flock and its secret anomaly had not attended the park to perform their usual evening flight. The pensioners muttered to themselves in their benches, I could report.

Upon a suggestion from Mingo, in Brazil, we all agreed I would prudently ask the authorities the next day about what was going on with the town’s flock. I was advised to keep a low profile, not to mention our group, and provide a commercial excuse such as a desire to pay for a flock anniversary dedication to a wife I didn’t have.

It worked well, but I was dutifully informed by a council employee that the town council was actually at a loss on what could have happened to the flock. They were quite open about it. Upon my insistence two days later, they said that they had contacted the New China manufacturers to inquire about the possible failure of the system that made them work. He also mentioned that no metallic bodies on the ground had been reported anywhere nearby. In the following weeks, I returned thrice with the excuse of the approaching anniversary, and truly, they didn’t know and had no answer to what could have happened, as I reported to my group. The manufacturers said the solar chargers in the birds were reported as working by their system, but they could only provide a last vague geolocation of the flock heading north, at around 400 miles from my town, in their last detection. They argued they could not be held accountable for the failure, as there was actually no malfunction in the birds themselves, only that surely strong tropical winds had misplaced them. They did not provide retrieval services, but offered an attractive discount on a new flock model in orange colour, with enhanced song effects, which my town council quickly acquired as the new election period was not so far ahead, and people did not like changes.

Our flock was never heard of again, I’m afraid, and our group spent months conjecturing on its fate: a heavy rain affected their mechanisms, and they just dropped somewhere along the empty plains to the north; hail destroyed them; a hurricane must have swirled them into destruction; the sparrow could not have survived any of these catastrophes. One or two dared to pose the flock might have made it to a Reserve further north, in the province of Misiones, sparrow-led, but this last theory was booed as too hopeful.

I don’t know what to believe myself. I look at my recording of that sparrow´s brown-grey, erratic and free flight, and sigh. I wonder what the Reserve in the north looks like.