Behemoth - Message Lizard Room

“What is this place?” he breathed.
“It’s the barking lizard room, isn’t it?” Dylan whispered. “It’s where Dr. Erasmus takes care of the beasties.”
Alek swallowed, his eyes falling on a table where a dissected lizard lay pinned. Then he saw that the ceiling was covered with the gaping mouths of message tubes, tangled like railroad tracks at a station, “And it’s a sort of junction too, isn’t it?”
“Aye. Dr. Erasmus is in charge of all that palaver – origin and destination tags, emergency alerts, clearing up traffic jams” (83).

In this scene, Alek is trying to find an escape route due to the realization that the Clankers will be thrown in prison once their usefulness has been outlived. However, Alek gets lost and stumbles into the message lizard room where he meets up with Dylan accidently. Dylan, or Deryn, explains to him that the room that they are in is the lizard room where Dr. Erasmus operates and dissects the lizards for research purposes. In addition to that, it is also a room meant for relaying and delivering messages carried out by these lizards.

The lizard room that they’re in is similar to that of an intercom room, only the lizards operate more stealthily, while the intercom is just a large booming noise over the entire premise. I would actually prefer to have a lizard room in the context of school scenarios. The lizards can deliver specific messages to every homeroom rather than have every single message be read out to the entire school. Topics like Junior Variety practices could be delivered to junior homerooms only, while topics like senior fundraisers could be delivered to senior homerooms likewise. Of course, the dissecting part would have to be left out of the room, but other than that, it seems like a solid idea, barring fears of lizard creatures.

Going back to the previous post, this definitely seems to support Count Volger’s suspicion that the message lizards can be used as spies all around the Leviathan. In the context of the story, this passage seems to be meant for raising the question of the overall credibility of the Darwinists aboard the Leviathan, except for Deryn, who seems to be the only one who truly supports Alek, and it goes back once again to the whole saying of never judging a book by its cover. The passage makes the audience doubt even more the plans of the Darwinists for the Clankers and question what fate they have in mind for the Clankers once they have outlived their usefulness.

In a sense, this passage seems to be an indicator of how paranoid we’ve become as a society of other people. We feel we need to interfere and know about people’s lives, and thus the invention of Twitter and reality TV shows. Yet, at the same time, it can also be advocating the idea that instead of developing our machinery and consuming valuable energy resources here in the present day, we can devote our research time to evolving other species so that they can be used to benefit society and fulfill new purposes otherwise done by machinery.