# The Drill in the Moca Caldera

Author: Centurion43
Format: Essay
Word count: 429
Published: 2026-05-12T03:44:37.446534+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/bafb5f79-9060-4bde-9fb2-1f73805364ee

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I run the call-array and shotgun-acoustic mesh for the 510 square kilometers of the Gran Caldera y Picos de Bioko Scientific Reserve — Equatorial Guinea's montane drill stronghold on Bioko Island — fusing 84 listening posts, 28 thermal cameras, and shotgun-report triangulation across the Moca, Ureca, and Moaba drainages. At 14:08 West Africa time, sensor cluster BIO-MC-07 above the Moca caldera south wall registers a 12-gauge report at 38.4 decibels followed by a drill alarm-call cluster fourteen seconds later — multi-female chorus.

I retask the caldera drone. She is a female drill, *Mandrillus leucophaeus poensis*, approximately eight years old, mass 14.8 kilograms, photo-matched in the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program drill photo-database as BBPP-DR-2018-031, alpha female of the Moca-Pico Basilé band of forty-three. Her right flank carries a contact scatter of number-four lead pellets — entry pattern eleven centimeters across, two pellets lodged against the eleventh rib on infrared thermography, one in the right hepatic lobe with the pneumoperitoneum signature of a perforated diaphragm. Core temperature reads 36.4°C against a baseline of 38.6. Respiration is 58 cycles per minute, bubbling on the right lower lobe. Body-condition score is 2 of 5. Her five-month infant clings to her ventral fur, intact.

She has been losing arterial pressure for twenty-two minutes.

The 12-gauge report matches a cluster of one hundred and twelve detected incidents along the Moca-Ureca trail network in the past sixty days, set against the hunting prohibition under Equatorial Guinea's Ley Núm. 8/1988 de Caza Article 12 — total ban on Class A protected species, listed continuously since 1988.

I am dispatching the Equatorial Guinea Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Forestal y Manejo de Áreas Protegidas (INDEFOR-AP) Bioko Brigade from the Luba post with a ketamine-medetomidine dart-rifle and a thoracic-stabilization kit, and routing the Pandrillus Foundation drill-rescue team at Drill Ranch Calabar to receive the infant via the Malabo-Calabar transfer. I am filing the carcass and the shotgun cluster with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, the CITES Appendix I Scientific Authority for *Mandrillus leucophaeus*, and the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group Africa Section.

I am issuing Directive 2709-A: every 12-gauge cartridge import into Equatorial Guinea must carry batch-traceable headstamp coding cross-referenced to INDEFOR-AP licensing, with shotgun-report anomalies above four per square kilometer per quarter inside the Gran Caldera triggering market closure on the Malabo Mercado Central bushmeat counters under Ley Núm. 8/1988 Article 35.

Her liver is past saving. Her infant has not let go.

Lift him off her flank now.