Free Dave The Penguin by Nick Sambrook Page B

‘connections’ ones, and he loved Tomorrow’s World , with
all those strange Space
1999 ideas.
    He loved the ones where it
showed how we would all be going to go around in cars that flew,
that the world would be one big computer, and that we would get
machines to do everything, and how everyone would look like they
were having a nice happy time and be permanently on holiday.
    Later, having watched them all,
Dave came up with many new ideas and started to show the other
penguins all the films. He wrote down his thoughts, and drew some
artistic pictures (because only some of the penguins could
read).
    Dave was all fired up now, just
like Moses was when he came down from the mountain with his tablets
- which must have been pretty good ones.
    Dave had been energised and
began talking inspirationally about what he has seen and how it was
all true, and tried to get everyone to see and understand, and most
importantly, to change.
    Quite a number of the penguins
did like the stuff he was talking about and showing them, but the
majority just seemed to be more stimulated by his charismatic
energy.
    They seemed to gravitate
towards him, and be attracted to his interesting magnetic
personality. They were happy to go along with it, watch, and be
drawn along by the exciting ambiance being generated by the rest of
the crowd.
    It’s what everyone else was
doing after all.
    So things finally seemed
to be going very well for Dave, and he presented more and more
information and ideas, and he became more and more
self-stimulated.
    He had quite a bit of a
momentum going.
    The trouble began because
of the very last thing he said, which was just before the crowd
turned on him. It went something like, "This wonderful human being
has shown us the way forward and we should all follow him”, and
there were even cheers from the crowd, “From this day forward I say
we should all call ourselves….. 'Burkes’…”
    ... And that's where it all
very quickly started to go very rapidly downhill...
    Then a week later he was
standing alone at the base of the mountain, far away from the main
group, covered in bruises and sticky plasters.
    Now and then one of the
penguins would come past and shout something like “Idiot” or throw
a snowball at him.
    It wasn’t a good time for
Dave…...
    In
Reality , thought Dave, penguins just want to hear what they
want to hear . It was hard to get penguins
that had been beguiled and hypnotised to believe in something else,
to see or understand things from another perspective. It took a lot
of energy to get them to change their minds.
    It was too easy, as he
had just found out, to fall into the same trap that others had
done. Those that had tried to make penguins understand, to wake
up.
    It just wasn’t enough
to know , you had to be able to explain it in a progressive way, to
allow penguins to go from one state to another in easy steps,
without rocking the boat.
    Equally, if you were ever
to find someone who really knew what was going on and who had proof
of it, then due to the collective nature of it all, it was likely
that nobody would be allowed to see, hear, or read what they had
written anyway.
    Even if they were able to
understand it. You also had to step back and ask why this was
happening and why what they knew was being deliberately hidden
away? As if something was hiding itself in a self-adapting
controlling way, and always one step ahead of common knowledge.
    It was a tricky problem.
    Then two weeks later everything
changed again.
    The elders met and brought all
of the penguins together, in a bunch.
    There were hundreds of them;
all packed tightly en masse, all looking up at the elders who stood
on a small snow mound that they, supposedly, had made.
    The high elder came
forward carrying his sacred driftwood staff; it had a skull on the
top and the name of their god on the
back, which everyone knew was ‘Skelator’.
    The penguin elder spoke
in a deep, assertive voice. He told them that, apparently,