by Olga Werby
“Caw,” Grock called softly. It was a small victory, because Grock wanted to screech as loud as he could. Grock loved the sound of his own voice and wanted to show off to the other ravens circling the courtyard above.
Will stepped into the courtyard. No one stopped him or paid him any attention. He walked casually to the tree where Grock was perched.
“Be careful, Dr. Crowe! Despite your name, you’re a target too,” a nurse chuckled from across the yard. She was bringing a roll of paper towels down to the guards.
Will waved to her with a smile and stopped to watch the guards work. Good man, thought Kyle. Act casual. Just follow Grock.
He made Grock fly over to a door adjacent to the kitchen that he’d seen a gardener enter earlier. He was hoping it was some kind of supply closet.
Will picked up speed. He didn’t shuffle or walk like a curious observer, he moved with purpose, like he belonged. He walked into the supply closet.
Less than a minute later, Will came back out. He wore green gardening coveralls, a tool belt, and a matching cap pulled down low to cover his face. He carried a rake. On his hips, Grock spied gardening clips—good man! Will would be able to cut through the fence to get out.
Will waved his rake menacingly at Grock, then walked purposefully out of the back gate of the facility, near the kitchen. As soon as he was out, Grock took off toward the perimeter fence. He chose a spot with a tiny bit of tree cover—it wasn’t much, but it was the best he could do.
Will followed. He dropped the rake and quickly cut the bottom few links of the fence, creating a hole just large enough to crawl under.
As soon as he was through, Grock flew to a set of bushes across the main road to the hospital. It was twenty yards away, out in the open.
This time, Will ran. He dove into the bushes and rolled into the brush underneath.
With his raven’s eyes, Kyle could see that Will had hidden himself inside a poison oak bush. Well, that couldn’t be helped. He was out and he was safe—for now.
He forced himself to return to Vikka. “Drive,” he said.
He started to move to switch positions with her. Vikka understood immediately. She crawled over him and grabbed the key.
“What about the solar array?” she asked.
“Do I have thirty minutes of power left?”
“Barely.”
“Then pull the wires. Will’s hiding inside the bushes on the west side of the hospital, across the street. Grock will show you where. Drive slow, then block him from view and let him inside.”
“Okay.” She turned onto the paved road, leaving the dirt road behind.
“I’ll see you soon,” Kyle said.
He slipped back into Grock. He was flying high above the hospital with the other ravens. The whole conspiracy was agitated, screaming and circling about each other. The guards had cleaned the lenses on the front gate and had moved their ladders and buckets to the back one. A security guy was yelling at the cook who’d fed the birds scraps of meat after the lunch meal. Ravens had no trouble telling humans apart by sight and they liked the nice cook who fed them. They didn’t like the man who was screaming at him. Kyle felt a strong desire to dive at the screamer, but he held Grock back. Then again…the birds were a great distraction; it wouldn’t hurt to draw more attention to them.
Kyle let Grock go.
Grock dove toward the man, claws outstretched. “Grooock!” He wasn’t just angry, Kyle realized. He was also showing off. Grock was a fine specimen of a bird, large and strong, with glossy black feathers—very handsome, if Kyle said so himself. Perhaps a female raven had caught Grock’s eye, or perhaps he just wanted to assert his dominance. Whatever it was, Grock was a born leader.
The other ravens followed his lead and attacked other guards in the courtyard. The men screamed and tried to dash inside. Again and again, the ravens dove to within an inch of the guards’ faces before spiraling out of the way. They weren’t hunting humans, just frightening them.
When the men threw themselves into the kitchen and slammed the door shut behind them, the ravens screamed in triumph.
Grock rose back up again. He saw the truck driving down the main road just outside the perimeter fence. Grock veered away and led Vikka to Will’s hiding place.
It took just seconds for Will to scramble into the bed of the truck—and then they were off. Grock followed above, watching for any sign of pursuit. They got to the main highway and still no one was after them.
Too easy, thought Kyle. He found it troubling. But he also knew they weren’t done yet. When Will was discovered missing, they’d spot the truck and its license plate on the security footage. It was time to swap vehicles for the next part of their trip.
Part Three: Taking Flight
Fourteen: +66 Months
“A canine unit?” Ben found himself screaming at the man in front of him. He was a lieutenant colonel with a silver leaf on his collar—the man George treated with deference.
In Will’s absence, Ben had been named codirector, along with Lilly. But Lilly always managed to hide away somewhere when the brass came—she wasn’t good at confrontation. And Ben hated being an administrator. He was happiest with his head deep into some tangled computer code problem or wrestling with some complex question of cross-species neuroanatomy.
It had been three months since they’d moved to Arizona and Ben hadn’t even had a chance to settle into the base housing he’d been assigned. He practically lived in the new lab. He felt himself drowning in the minutia of running the project. He was getting no research done and he wasn’t sleeping—who had the time?
George was standing silently behind the lieutenant colonel, his arms crossed. George wore an army uniform all the time now. The whole place crawled with uniforms. Ben understood that George was outranked by this panjandrum, but he still resented George for letting this guy come into their lab with a shopping list of demands.
“Ravens and rats are observational animals,” the colonel said. “Dogs could assist our people on the ground. They could help dig and drag survivors from dangerous situations; they could protect our people during an attack. Rats and birds just don’t have the mass for active measures like that.”
“Every rider has started with rats—” Ben started.
The colonel cut him off. “The military has been in partnership with dogs for a very long time. It’s a time-honored tradition. Dogs are versatile and very trainable.”
“Rats help us identify—”
“I’d rather we started with dogs. We have some very good candidates.”
This idea was crazy. Not only were dogs a bad idea, but the new rider recruits wouldn’t be able to handle them. Surely this man had seen the video footage? Not one of the new riders had exhibited the slightest talent for riding; they were a disaster at controlling even rats. They weren’t ready for pigs and ravens. Dogs? Forget about it.
George finally came to Ben’s rescue. “Colonel? Dr. Gray’s point is that every rider so far has started with rats.”
“I need to shortcut this,” the colonel said. “I don’t need an army of rat soldiers.”
“Toby might be able to help,” George said. “Maybe she could pre-train the dogs—like breaking a horse—so your recruits could get in the saddle faster. Problem is, she’s allergic to dogs.”
“What’s so special about Toby?” the colonel asked. “Undeniably she’s a great rider—with a gift. But can’t some other rider break in the dogs for us?”
“Toby’s more than just a great rider, Colonel,” George said. “We think it’s because she started riding as a child, before her brain finished cooking.” Ben winced at that remark, but nodded—whatever it took to get this man out of his lab.
“Obviously, we can’t recruit six-year-olds,” George continued.
“Obviously,” the lieutenant colonel agreed. But something in the way he said it made Ben shiver.
“So we want to work with young adult volunteers. Some will have an affinity for this kind o
f thing and some won’t. We got lucky with Kyle and May.”
“More so with Kyle,” the lieutenant colonel said.
“Indeed. But remember, it took years for those two to train themselves. Years! And while May can’t ride pigs or ravens, she’s really good with rats. Now she’s a very experienced rider and her training program will get good riders up faster than anything else we have. We want to focus exclusively on those volunteers who demonstrate talent.”
“I saw the progress reports.” The lieutenant colonel was obviously not pleased.
“It’s a good strategy, sir. But May can’t help train if you move to dogs. No one has ever ridden a dog yet. Let’s reconvene and continue this conversation in three months. I think you’ll be pleased with our progress.” George put his hand on the lieutenant colonel’s shoulder and guided him out of Ben’s office.
Ben watched them leave. Three months? Nothing could be done in such a short amount of time. Why hadn’t George pushed for a more realistic deadline? But at least the man was gone and Ben could go back to work.
God, he was tired.
Will was ensconced in a small house not too far from the new Brats facility in Arizona. George had managed to procure a house that was once a home-run veterinary facility. It had an actual surgery room in one of the back bedrooms and a fully operational lab. George had brought in a ton of equipment; he seemed to have access to almost unlimited funds. Will had all he needed—they hoped—to continue his work of developing the consciousness transplant process. And without the government breathing down his back, he’d have a lot more time to focus than he’d once had.
George and Kyle drove into the garage in the special car they used to visit Will. Satellite surveillance was intense over the new Brats location and they weren’t taking any chances. The major would drive his own car to the underground garage of a Walmart, then they’d slip out, change into jackets of a different color, and walk separately through the store to the gas station down the road where he stored this other car. They knew that these measures were only likely to work for a while, and then only if no one was paying too close attention.
“How’s Toby?” Will asked when George and Kyle walked in.
Will always asked about Toby first. He hadn’t seen her since his mental breakdown. He did get to talk with her on a disposable cell phone once a day, but it was clearly devastating him to be away from his little girl.
“She’s fine,” George said. “She’s been working very hard. You’d be proud of her.”
“Aren’t there still child labor laws in this country?” Will asked. It was his common refrain.
“It’s what Toby wants,” Kyle said. “She loves what she does. If we tried to keep her away from the lab, she’d flip out.”
Literally, thought Kyle. He knew personally the pull of this addiction. He found it difficult to be cut off from Grock for more than a few hours. Fortunately, George had managed to convince everyone of the necessity of keeping him almost continuously connected.
“I just miss her,” Will said.
Kyle knew Will was starved for human connection; he was going to get weird if he spent all his time alone. Unfortunately, they only had an hour to catch up with Will and figure out what he needed to continue his work through the next week. Any longer was too dangerous; they risked revealing Will’s location. As it was, Kyle was surprised they hadn’t encountered more trouble after extracting Will from that mental hospital. He had been sure there would be a manhunt. But the major had somehow managed to put a lid on it. No one came asking Kyle or Vikka questions. And now, after several months in Arizona, all was quiet.
Too quiet, Kyle thought. Too easy.
“How’s your progress?” George asked. Kyle approved of the major’s directness.
Will gestured for Kyle and George to follow him into his basement lab. There, surrounded by computer gear, he demonstrated the new animal implant he had been working on. He used a virtual reality set to maneuver inside a digital model of a whale brain and demonstrate the proposed model of a whale brain implant.
“On the human side, it’s mostly just a code upgrade,” Will said. “Obviously, we need to place the bulk of the computing power inside the animal. We’ll put in way more processing power and communication gear than we think we need—then, with Toby on the inside, we’ll reallocate the resources as we need them.”
“You mean you want to make a gradual transition?” George said.
“We’re talking about uploading Toby’s consciousness into another being’s brain. It makes sense to take that slow. We’re going to have to figure out how much control she’ll be able to exert over that other mind and see if it’s compatible.”
The whole idea made Kyle’s flesh crawl. What would happen when there were two Tobys? One inside her human body and one in some other creature? Who would be the real Toby then?
He wandered away from Will’s presentation and looked around the lab. It wasn’t as expansive as the new facilities at the army base, but it was well equipped. Kyle recognized some of the control stations that Will had put together. There was the computer chip modeling station and a dedicated Toby brain-rendering processor. There was a “clean room” station—it looked like a clear plastic glove box with a little airlock gizmo cut into it—for manipulating implant prototypes. And behind a heavy door with a window was the surgical room. It didn’t have any of the brain-imaging equipment needed to correctly insert the implants, but it was still impressive.
In fact, Kyle thought, in some ways Will was actually better set up to do the Brats work than Ben and Lilly were. And Will had a lot more time too. This was Will’s life’s work now, no distractions, no dealing with bureaucracies or personnel, no need to report progress to George’s boss, no messy conversations about the morality of the whole endeavor. Just a race against time to develop a way for Toby to live on inside another’s mind.
“Ready to go?”
George put a hand on Kyle’s shoulder and Kyle jumped.
“Are you okay?” the major asked.
“Fine. Just fine,” Kyle said, forcing himself to smile.
As they drove away from Will’s, Kyle asked, “Will he make it in time?”
“Perhaps.” George sounded thoughtful. “We’ll transfer something of Toby; I just don’t know how complete it will be.”
Kyle didn’t know what was worse—a full consciousness transplant or a partial one.
“We can’t do anything more now,” George continued. “Just as I promised Toby, we’ve set things up. But it will be what it will be.”
Kyle didn’t say anything. What was there to say? They were building Frankenstein’s monster—bits from two creatures stuck together. Kyle just hoped that their chimera monster turned out more like Toby than the one from the old horror story.
“Now we just need to find the right mind for Will to fit with the implant,” George said.
Kyle didn’t think they were that far along, but again, he didn’t say anything.
“I was thinking of getting another person involved. We need someone on the outside to scout around marine parks and research centers to find something appropriate for Toby.”
“Who do you have in mind?” Kyle asked.
“Not sure yet. Can you think of anyone we can trust?”
Kyle tried to think about it, but his mind was too fried after visiting Will. He kept on circling back to the same thought of partial humanity. Even if they were able to pour in all of Toby, wouldn’t it still be only partially her?
“Kyle?” George said.
“Sorry, Major. I’ll think about it and let you know.”
“Don’t take too long.”
Dear Future Self (or whoever is reading my diary),
Age is an interesting thing. I’m thirteen now, a teenager. But I feel old, a fully grown human adult. I think time is all about perception and point of view. At thirteen, I’m an adult raven, more than ready for a family. At thirteen, I’m a long-dead rat. At thirteen, the people at the lab
see me as a little girl. They couldn’t be more wrong.
I have time to give time some thought. I still remember vividly how slowly time flowed when I was in preschool. A day then seemed to last forever. And when I started to get sick, each instance of bed rest was a lifetime, a life sentence of pain and boredom. But then things sped up. Days still took their sweet time, but weeks and months flew by. When Mom was dying, each day was agonizing, but she died fast. A blink and it was all over. I’m worried my life will also go like that.
I bet old people think that. Each day flows in slow motion, while life just fast forwards at the speed of a rocket. I’ve read a theory about the “slowing down” of metabolism as an explanation for the difference in the perception of time between the young and the old. I also read that time seems slower when it’s packed with new experiences—if an old person lives a dull life, time seems to speed up. But I wonder if either of those explanations is really true.
Time flows differently for animals. Each day is the same in length. It is a concrete measure of the passage of seasons. There’s an awareness of time that’s concrete, as concrete as the smoothness of an ice cube in water or the burn of salt on the lips after nibbling on potato chips. As a rat, I know texture and I know salt. And I know time. It’s tangible. Cory wakes at exactly the same minute of the same hour every day. She doesn’t need an alarm clock. She just knows time. Feels it, like she feels the direction of the wind. It’s comforting to be so sure about time.
My time sense is concrete now too. It has to be—I spend most of my time as a raven. When Lilly says my eyes look old, she just means my experience of time is the same as hers. I’ll never get old as a human, but if I did, I bet people would tell me that my eyes looked young. But the truth is, they would just look the same as they do now. Now they make me look older, then they would announce my youth. Of course, it’s all moot. As I’ve said, I will never be old. I just hope to be old enough.
