3C Cicada

The periodical cicada (Magicicada species) is a North American insect renowned for its extraordinary life cycle, spending 13 or 17 years underground as nymphs feeding on root sap before emerging in synchronized broods of billions to molt, mate, and sing in a thunderous chorus—detonating time into sound after precisely counting prime-numbered winters in the root vault.

These prime intervals (13 and 17 years) serve as evolutionary armor: by emerging on cycles that rarely align with the life spans of predators (whose populations fluctuate on shorter, non-prime rhythms), the cicadas minimize predation through sheer overwhelming numbers in off-years for enemies.

Different broods and species maintain staggered prime clocks to prevent interbreeding, preserving genetic isolation and ensuring their emergences remain desynchronized across regions—a mathematical strategy mapped across the eastern United States.

Yet even this prime defense has a dark counter: the zombifying fungus Massospora cicadina, which infects emergents, hijacks their behavior, turns abdomens into spore-dispersing masses while keeping them hyperactive for transmission, and ultimately kills them in a grim microbial override of the cicadas' ancient timing.

3C Cicada

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C, C, C,, Three C, Cicada

I was etched into bark
    a pale notch, egg-thin, then
        gravity drew me down

down, to the root vault, with
    Sulcia and Hodgkinia
        my two cell-bound friends

they drip amino acids
    into our xylem broth
        this keeps me thinking, but barely.

I count winters—tree pulses,
    sugar ebb, sugar flood
        thirteen; sometimes seventeen in the cold

primes you cannot divide,
    armor made of arithmetic;
        fox, thrush, wasp — none, can track us.

When soil strikes eighteen degrees,
    billions of us breach dusk
        time DETONATES into sound.

You hear my clan-song:
    Decim’s long whistle;
        Cassini’s castanet;

Decula’s soft rasp—
    three passwords preventing
        race crimes and clock drift.

Predators gorge; we persist.
    Excess is defense—simple
        but effective mathematics.

Yet bad-luck wears a white mask
    Massospora hollows a few,
        turns them into walking zombie-spores;

I name that fate, not failure.
After our brief thunder
we fall dead, as leaf-litter coins,

paying phosphorus forward.
    Oaks will return the favor
        in acorn mast years.

But a handful of us miscount,
    surface four years off
        such lonely mathematicians;

In these, some perish, a few may start
    an unused prime chapter.
        Waiting, counted rightly,

Egg-scar, root-dweller, sky-singer—my three-beat life.
    Primes defend; microbes feed me;
        I lay down sacrifice, voiced in clock-ciphers no predator can read.

I am Three C, Cicada

This is the 3rd animal in the memory music project.