The Cocoon of the Filter Free

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Lexie came running to me brandishing her sketching journal. ‘Mum, I found these weird numbers in my notebook. It’s written with my pen but it’s not my writing’. She looked at me and asked, ‘ What do they mean?’

It wasn’t the first time she had suspected that someone had been tampering with her notebook. Until now, Lexie assumed she must have made the markings accidentally. But this time it was obvious ...and intriguing. Was it a maths equation? Who had written it?

We walked up the stairs to my office overlooking the bush. She plugged the numbers into a search engine and it came up as a location. ‘Of course’, Lexie exclaimed as she stamped her fist onto the table in excitement, ‘It’s latitude and longitude. And it’s nearby! Can we go and check it out?’

‘Where is it? Is it walking distance?’ I asked, trying to buy some time. It sounded like a fun thing to do but I didn’t want to end up wandering around a strange place in the dark. Particularly as we didn’t know who had left the location clue. It could be just a prank, or worse.

‘Yes, it’s really close. It’s up on the headland, near to where I was drawing today on my bushwalk’.

‘Ok there’s no way we are going up there now ’, I spluttered. ‘Last time I went up there this late in the day I was eaten alive by mozzies. Let’s wake up fresh and we can get a days worth of supplies ready for an adventure. It’s Sunday tomorrow so we have all day. Also the bush is really dense up there - if we have to go off the track it’s too hard to see in this light’.

Lexie wasn’t happy about that. I understood why. It was overwhelming for her to get an idea and not be able to act on it immediately. It was the same for me although I had learned to work with it over the years. But things don’t go great for either of us when we are tired, hungry or getting bitten by those bloody mosquitos: all of which would be the case if we went at dusk.

We were out the door at 8am the next day. We walked down to the track by the beach and climbed up the rocky path until we came out on the headland and stopped to rest on a bench high up on the hill looking over the luminescent bay.

The location estimates on the phone guided us along one of the smaller bush walks so no bushwhacking was required thankfully. We walked for about 10 minutes, squeaking at each other every once in a while. Hotter, hotter, hotter, boiling....the map icon got closer and closer. Then, disappointingly, we came to a colossal tree fallen across the path. We couldn’t see any way past it. There were thick bushes all around it and spiky legged St Andrews Cross spiders with their thick webs reinforcing the blockade. It was very unwelcoming.

But my Lexie had not come all the way here just to give up. She started to charge up over the tree but wasn’t able to climb very far and kept slipping off. I knew I would have to ride this one out and just hope that she wouldn’t get hurt in the process.

While she took a break from her efforts, her favourite sketch subject came swooping in to sit on the trunk next to her. The magpie warbled loudly and as Lexie looked over in its direction, she straightened and said excitedly.

‘Look Mum, I think there is a gap between the bushes at the lower end of the tree’.

She scrambled down and squealed with the sound of success as she squeezed herself through the gap, pushing through the spiderwebs. I followed even though I struggled to see the gap but as I started to push myself through, it became clearer and easy to slip past the tree.

Once we were beyond the tree, we had entered a glade. It was a completely different mood from the scrubby hot bush we had just left. The trees formed a thick canopy and blocked out much of the sunlight. It felt calming. We found ourselves taking deep breaths and just standing there in the stillness and coolness. The clearing had mossy green ground cover which felt soft and springy.

‘Mum, look’ Lexie exclaimed as she pointed over to a little path meandering off from the clearing. To our astonishment, two small figures approached. They were smiling and waving their arms as if they knew us.

‘So you found our little clue then’, the smaller one laughed.

The pixie-like Nina and Mina introduced themselves. They were barefoot and draped in soft green clothes.

‘We love exploring the bush around here and we have often seen you doing your drawings up here on the headland walks’ Nina trilled.

‘So were you the ones who drew the smile on my bird and made the markings on the cover as well?’ Lexie asked. She took our her journal and indicated the raised dots which were indecipherable against the jet black cover.

‘Yes’, they smiled with delight, ‘They are the location estimates in Braille. We have been trying different ways to draw you here. We thought finding the right type of people would be the hard part but getting you here has been quite an experiment’

‘The right type of people? I asked guardedly. ‘How do you know so much about us?

Tina explained that they used temperament technology to monitor the regular bush walkers in the area. They were looking for some safe and trustworthy people to help them with a project. She reassured me that the only thing they knew about us was that we walked around the headland a lot and that the monitors indicated we were unlikely to harm the people that live here.

‘So who does live here?, Lexie asked.

‘Well, we call ourselves the Filter-Free. We operate a little differently than the average human beings,’ Mina said with a wry smile, ‘That’s why we have secluded ourselves up here.’

‘What do you mean by Filter-Free’, I asked, ‘Does that mean you just blurt out anything you feel like without filtering it?’

‘No, that’s not it,’ Mina explained, ‘It describes the way our brains and senses work. We take in everything in our environment. We don’t have any filters on incoming information. It’s great because we can tap into so much around us and our intuition is extremely sharp. But since we don’t have filters to block out these inputs like sounds, smells and strong emotions we need a special environment to work in. So we have that here - its called the Cocoon.’

‘‘I want to see it’, Lexie said, eyes wide and hands shaking out her excitement. She was not at all phased by this unusual information, and even though it was a lot to take in, it actually made sense to me as well.

‘We were hoping you would’ Mina beamed as she uncovered a panel of electrical equipment on the sandstone wall behind them.

There were monitors with red, blue and green zones on a semicircle clock face. They looked just like Fire Danger Rating signs. They instructed us to stand barefoot on the testing mat and all of the screens tested in the blue zones. Immediately the ground opened to reveal a dark staircase.

The doors closed over us as we went down and when a door at the bottom of the stairs opened, we were flooded with light. We were in an area the size of a small paddock. The ground was above us, the ceilings were made of glass and you could see all the roots of the trees and plants. There were large skylights with sunlight beaming in. Most of the floor was covered in the same grass as the glade and it felt so comfortable and soft under our bare feet. Other parts were covered in polished concrete with what appeared to be workstations holding laptops and monitors.

There was all sorts of equipment on the grassed section; a basketball hoop, a slide which came down from a skylight all the way to the ground, monkey bars, flying foxes, rock climbing walls, swings and hammocks. Along the wall through which we had entered, there were scooters and other gadgets I had never seen before. There appeared to be other areas but I couldn’t see clearly into them.

And the people! All dressed in flowing clothes similar to Nina and Mina. Some of them were whizzing around on hoverboards. All of them looking at us with anticipation and excitement on their faces.

‘Welcome’ they all said at the same time.

Someone whizzed down the slide and landed in front of us. A dark haired woman with hair tied back in a white scarf introduced herself as Trinity.

‘Hello. We are so happy to meet you. I need to tell you that you can stay with us only for a few minutes today. This is the first time we have done this. Some of us can only be around your levels for a small amount of time and we need to protect the collective.

‘Welcome to the Cocoon - our place for recreation and creation,’ Trinity waved her hand around with a flourish, ‘It took us a long time to develop this space and we can’t wait to tell you it’s history, take you on a tour and answer all of your questions. But today, we have a proposal for you. We develop positive technology here, advances we really think will be able to make a difference in the outside world. We have food replicator devices, free energy, human personality readers and so much more. But we can’t survive out in the normal human environment in order to implement them. And we have grim experience with the technology falling into the wrong hands with our online dissemination attempts.’ Trinity’s face went grave. She blinked quickly and took a deep breath before continuing.

‘We need people on the ground, people like you who have enough filters to operate in the world but not too many filters which can block intuition and empathy. Our Goldilocks team. What do you think - would you be open to giving it a go?’

I could see Lexie twirling her hands and I knew what her answer would be.

‘What would it look like? Can we do a trial?’ I asked.

‘Sure, she said, ‘You could start with testing our plastic recycler. It transmutes plastic back its original natural elements which you can put in the compost or garden. We know it works but we need to understand how easy it is to fit in with your daily life. It has to be worth your time so here is $20,000 to start and plenty more when you need it’. Trinity took a couple of steps to a black crate and motioned to rows of gold bullion and notes inside. She handed over some wads of fifties to us.

‘PLEASE SAY YES’, came a chorus from 30 green clad smiling people.

Trinity explained that we had to go now and we were then led up the stairs and out into the bush again. I had so many questions. Who were these people? Where had they come from? Why couldn’t they be around us for long? What happened if someone stumbled across the compound? What was in the other zones? Where did all that money come from? Why didn’t they work with people online? Did I even want to do this?

Lexie, on the other hand, had just one question. She grabbed my hands and engulfed me with her blue-gray gaze, ‘When can we start?’