gwax's rumblings

I first learned of the White Elephanoceros’ exis­tence when I saw him appear from nowhere, bru­tally slaugh­ter some­one and then dis­ap­pear like a ghost in the fog. After wit­ness­ing his ter­ri­ble might, I sought out infor­ma­tion regard­ing the White Elephanoceros and was able to ascer­tain only that he had a hit list he was work­ing through. Learning of the White Elephanoceros’ hit list and fur­ther man­ag­ing to fer­ret out that a friend of mine was on the list, I set out to end the White Elephanoceros’ ram­page of death. From what I had wit­nessed, it appeared that the White Elephanoceros was very much cor­po­real but also very nin­ja­like in method­ol­ogy; obvi­ously, I needed a very large ele­phant gun. Knowing I must be pre­pared for the hunt at all times, I kept my gun with me at all times.

Of course, few peo­ple know of the exis­tence of the White Elephanoceros, so I rapidly attracted unwanted atten­tion car­ry­ing an ele­phant gun around with me and was even­tu­ally accosted by an offi­cer of the law. The offi­cer said some­thing very much akin to, “What the Hell are you doing wan­der­ing around with a huge rifle like that for?” Making the safe assump­tion that this offi­cer knew noth­ing of the White Elephanoceros, I care­fully explained that one of my firends was in grave dan­ger and I needed to pro­tect him from a very large white ele­phant (on first inspec­tion you can­not tell that it is an ele­pha­noc­eros so I sim­pli­fied the descrip­tion). Surprisingly, the offi­cer responded by telling me that if I looked closer, I would have noticed that it has the hindquar­ters and hide of a rhi­noc­eros. I explained that I had neglected to refer to it as an ele­pha­noc­eros because I did not expect him to fol­low my mean­ing and inquired as to how he knew of its exis­tence. The man explained that in his time with the police he had encoun­tered many cases of the White Elephanoceros’ vio­lence, becom­ing a bit of an expert on the mat­ter and invited me to dis­cuss the mat­ter in greater detail. Following the pre­cept “know thy enemy”, I took the man up on his offer.

Hearing the offi­cer of the law’s expla­na­tion of the White Elephanoceros cre­ated more ques­tions than it answered. The most inter­est­ing mat­ter was that the White Elephanoceros was an agent of his own direc­tion and had not been hired to work through his hit list. The hit list was the cen­tral enigma to the work­ings of the White Elephanoceros; by killing the indi­vid­u­als on his list, the White Elephanoceros was engi­neer­ing the future in a very spe­cific man­ner. The spe­cific ori­gins of the list were not entirely clear, but the lead­ing the­ory was that it had been sent to the White Elephanoceros from a pos­si­ble future in order to either pre­vent or cause that future from com­ing about. A slightly less pop­u­lar the­ory pro­posed that advanced pre­dic­tions had been run to gen­er­ate the list (a la Foundation Series). There were, of course, other lesser the­o­ries but the com­mon theme was that the White Elephanoceros was car­ry­ing out tar­get­ted killings to manip­u­late the future. The dis­cus­sion then turned to the mat­ter of the ethics of inter­fer­ing with the White Elephanoceros; if he was enact­ing the planned will of a supe­rior sys­tem, my inter­fer­ence would inevitably cause more harm than good. If the White Elephanoceros was an agent for pre­vent­ing the apoc­a­lypse, killing him would be the doom of us all. The dis­cus­sion was quite lengthy and ended with dis­agree­ment between myself and the offi­cer. The offi­cer believed took the fate approach, fig­ur­ing it unrea­son­able to alter the proper course of events, whereas I don’t see the ends jus­ti­fy­ing the means. Being a rea­son­able man, the offi­cer said that inspite our dis­agree­ment, my actions were mine to make and he wished me the best of luck in what­ever I decided to do.

I will con­tinue to hunt the White Elephanoceros because I con­sider him a malig­nant force that must be stopped. And you, should heed this warn­ing, he is out there and he can appear with­out warn­ing; you may be on his list.

Side note: It occurs to me that the White Elephanoceros can, to some extent, be con­sid­ered an alle­gory for the Divine Plan.