I asked him about the whole interspecies-cooperation thing, which has always and to some degree still does strike me as sheer sci-fi.

"Do you know Kropotkin's Mutual Aid?" he asked, and then, when he saw my blank look, added, "Read it. The book's been out of print for probably a hundred years, but you should read it. He documented hundreds of instances of this—separate species helping one another. Kropotkin's finding was if two or more species are exposed to a shared threat, we will also see shared defense. The only question concerns the mechanism."

"What's it all going to look like?" This was my question.

"Unrecognizable," he said. "People moving about in packs. Depopulation. We don't know how far down the chain this realignment of animal consciousness is going to travel, for precisely the reason that we don't how far down consciousness penetrates. The insects—will they be involved? The rodent classes? The reptiles? You're just making armchair guesses at that point."

I asked him which animal he was most worried about.

"That's hard," he answered. "I think about the dolphins, not because of their lethality—though it's underestimated constantly—but because I think they understand best, of all the species, what damage we've done to the planet. They get the immensity of it. The other animals are responding to sudden infusions of hormones and little instinct triggers, but I believe that the dolphins are capable of hatred and that their hatred of us is essentially bottomless.

You want to know what to be afraid of in the next fifty years? Everything. Everything that walks and crawls. Everything that moves. Because it hates us.

"Then, if you're talking scariest land animal to me, you might want to list the bear. Or rather, a combined chimp-and-bear onslaught, with a sort of Master Blaster power dynamic between chimps and bears. My God, bears can mess you up when they have a mind. Takes ten shots to stop one, routinely. Of course, by then we'll be firing on them with bazookas and whatnot. Hunting codes will be off. Still, fighting them is going to be the closest thing to fighting a human army. I fear the bears. Definitely. They know how to get into houses and cars. A species-wide rampage will be just... Fuck, man, part of keeping going in a professional capacity for me is keeping my mind off of stuff like that."

He adjusted his glasses and looked around.

"Think about it like this," he said. "In the early eighteenth century, there were massive combined populations of enslaved blacks, embattled Indians, and poor-white servants living in North America. If at any moment they had truly woken up to the nature of their plight, which is to say the commonality of their plight, and identified its cause as the agenda of the Colonial ruling class, ours would not now be a mainly European continent, genetically speaking. The animals are making the same discovery about themselves. And I don't think they'll squander it."

"So you would say bears are scarier than dolphins in the end?" I asked him.

"You want scariest?" he said. "Scariest is not the animals we know about. It's the animals we don't know about. Have you ever seen the statistics on estimated unknown species globally? We don't know half the crap that's alive on this planet, John. And I mean down at the very bottom of the ocean, in the Marianas Trench...that's an undiscovered planet, in terms of what's down there. And who knows what size those animals are, what they're capable of? Well, the animals may know. They may know what's down there, and they may know how to communicate with it."

Have fear: That's what Marc Livengood taught me. What he teaches us. And if I've in any way satisfied the expectations of this assignment, it's in coming away with that drop of distilled realism: You want to know what to be afraid of in the next fifty years? Everything. Everything that walks and crawls. Everything that moves. Because it hates us. "Why do they hate us?" Remember that? How quaint it already seems, when you think we were so recently asking that question about one another! And yet maybe the answers are the same; maybe we can apply the lessons of the one to the other. They hate us because they can't be us. Can't have our thumbs, our brains, our music, our beautiful flowing hair. Can't have it can't have it can't have it. And right now, sure, I say that I feel bad about that. But in the moment, in the moment when I'm letting explosive tracer rounds erupt from the mouth of my firemaker, just hosing metal right into the faces of a bunch of screaming giant eagles as they come for my daughter—and my cats, who will never betray me, not ever, or who have betrayed me and are scratching the dook out of my back while I struggle to aim—will I be thinking, "Ah, too bad, wish we hadn't fucked you like that"? Don't kid yourselves.