Metafishics

The world is full of so many enchanting mysteries. What are the meanings of the Extrepki's Three Final Riddles? How were the Great Genitalia of Hazam constructed, and who would order such a thing built? Is the Chorus Perpetual truly keeping the planet in its orbit if the planet existed before the whales did?

One such mystery is a deceptively simple question: why are there fish? Or more precisely, why are there such fish, rather than others that could have been? One is tempted to approach the problem abstractly, or even as a metaphor for life, but the researchers of metafishics would reject that approach. Indeed, there seem to be many interesting fish-specific avenues of exploration to be found here.

Consider the case of Joran Lake. 150 years ago it was a desert; then it became a lake, and then twenty years later it was suddenly full of fish. Another twenty-five after that and we have reports of Selesteine braves fighting sea monsters in its deeps. Perhaps the expanding lake encountered some subterranean cavern, but metafishicians have performed experiments with goldfish and believe some kind of fish-specific generative principle is at work.

The most well-known of these experiments is likely the Generational Aquadome, run by the Contagious Republic of Paul Vigotski. It is a massive, artificial aquatic environment divided into two sections. Both sections received a healthy population of goldfish in AES 940, then one section was hidden from human observation. Metafishicians watched the visible goldfish population remain more or less the same until they switched which section was visible in AES 965. Doing so revealed a chthonic nightmare of horrific tentacled predation. This new population was studied for another 25 years—during which time several adjunct professors lost their lives when they got too close—until the other section was revealed also to have monstrously evolved.

The results of this and other experiments are summarized in Grantham's Law, which states that aquatic evolution proceeds with increasing speed and frightfulness proportional to time spent without human observation. Given the specificity of the affected population (e.g. the prairie dogs of Nosser had hundreds of years to evolve away from humans but did not become monsters and wipe out the Careless Continent) and the observation-dependent nature of its rules, many metafishicians suspect that Barcu is somehow to blame. Others point to Razor Valley as a possible terrestrial example of Grantham's Law. In any case, nearly all metafishicians are in agreement that a lack of "attention pollution" in the oceans will lead to the evolution of some hideous apocalyptic monster that will kill us all—which makes the stretches of ocean rendered impassable by Ravenous Squid-Trees problematic. I urge your consciousness of this in considering the Disarrangement Act.

Finally, some metafishicians suspect the existence of the Hegemony of Whales may have something to do with Grantham's Law. It must be said, however, that they are all Flandreans, and their arguments rely on speciesist assumptions that intelligent whales are a horrifying thing.

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Dr. Herbert Jones
University of Eyesland
Professor of Cataloguing Various Things
Heinrich Stafford Chair of Arrangement
PhD in Miscenallia