In Defense of Bipedaled Sentience (Natalie Gallagher)
    Addressed with sincerity to the generally of beings,
    Pleasantries to the community of sexually attractive thems. We are here today, the entire community of mutually supportive microentities that constitute my deceptively independent corpus, to persuade constituents of all universes with which we currently maintain contact that bipedalism is not only the true history of sentience but also the future.
    We know, dear beings, that this is a controversial claim on both counts. At question is our lowest-common denominator value: efficiency. How could two legs be more efficient than our four? Even if it happened in the past, clearly the great evolutionary conscious guided us away, into our current pristine form. And yet, dear ones, we must protest. We will begin with evidence that past eons of sentient beings were, indeed, bipedal.
    First, shoeboxes. We have well established how shoes were erroneously used to cover obviously superior bare feet, in an era when Homo sapiens feared nature. However, a dismissal of their adherence to capitalism has led some along us to unwisely discount the crucial evidence of their containers - my dear friends, only two shoes could fit per box. To those who claim they sold back and front pairs separately, please see the slide behind me illustrating new decoding of the archaic lettering on the boxes themselves, indicating independent sale.
    Secondly, photographs. Much art before our current age was destroyed in the literal fires of revolution that ushered in our civilization. Until a few years ago, I believed that the remaining pieces depicting bipedalism were fanciful, images of sapiens wishing prepubescence lasted forever, that adulthood and the attendant growth of final appendages could be put off eternally. I no longer believe this. Look at today's radicals, my dears. Suspend, briefly, the hegemonic narrative that their digital reclamation of ancient artistic data is false. Try trusting them - Instagram was real. So was Facebook. And so were all the endearingly naive bipedals you can see throughout the reconstructed "world wide web."
    They were certainly flawed - the scary separation of sentients by reproductive role, the false impression of individual entativity and will, the lack of comprehension of physics, the total inability to communicate with even the close parallel universes - these were real errors. But our local-farm-grown offspring have these flaws, and we consider them beings, do we not? Why is bipedalism dangerous? Why does it scare us to the marrow of our bird-fragile bones? Think about our hospitals, our airborne cities, our complacency. Think about the pain of growing your third and fourth legs, how little you could do during that time, how much you loved and appreciated your surrounders, wanting to be them. We are here, in public, to suggest that quadrupedalism efficiently integrated us but degraded non-aggregate competence. Will you hear us?
    [restive noises from crowd]
    Ultimately last, we are here to tell you we bent the consensus-based guidances of communal conduct. We took a time-shifter into the ages of white noise, specifically 2018. We are sorry to tell you that you have all been deceived - travel then is not only possible, it is arousing and fascinating. By travelling with friendly people - called "carnies" in their own time - we were able to pass undetected and forge truly intimate relationships, with ubiquitous carnal connections but an honest exchange of feelings so shamelessly out of vogue today. One of the carnies we held dear agreed to come back with us, and has been quietly living in nimbus central for nine months. Today, right now, we present to you our perfect partner and the beautiful bipedal product of our personal coitus - the future. Dear ones, meet Argus and Phoebus.
    [gasps]
    [gunshot]
    [screams]
    Over the loudspeaker: leave now. The consensual committee cannot yet ascertain if it's clearly dangerous neurodiversity is contagious.
