Becoming Animals

by Olga Werby

  Love from the past,

  Tabitha, the Cronus Goddess

  Toby found it interesting how solicitous Kyle had been lately. Ever since they fought those unexpected drones together, he’d become Toby’s champion and protector. He wasn’t obvious about it, and Toby didn’t think too many people noticed the difference in their relationship, but it was there.

  Kyle had also been helping Uncle Geo and her dad with the research into moving her essence into a new animal vessel. It was a long shot, but Toby was happy how seriously they took the possibility. They had the power to save her. Maybe.

  Toby’s job was simply to play the innocent human girl for as long as possible. Sometimes she forgot her role and let the mask slip, but her disease prevented others from studying her too closely. She was the girl with cystic fibrosis, confined to a wheelchair with an oxygen tank in the back. She looked sick and people were scared of empathizing too closely. No one wanted to put themselves fully into the shoes of a dying girl with mucus-clogged lungs.

  Vikka must have known about Toby’s act, though. She knew Toby best of all and she was a psychologist. She didn’t say anything, however, and Toby was very grateful for that.

  Toby lived with Vikka, who was now Toby’s official guardian. They had been assigned a nice apartment directly on the army base that housed the Brats project. The place was equipped with ramps and other handicap-friendly additions, although Toby didn’t actually use the wheelchair when she was inside. Her legs worked just fine, it was just her stamina that was the problem.

  That, and dragging that heavy stupid oxygen tank with her everywhere. She had a smaller, portable pump that extracted oxygen from the air, but its generator was too loud and Toby hated it. Cory hated it too, and Twiggy wouldn’t even stay in the same room with it. So a tank it was. Vikka had set up a super long tube so Toby could walk around most of the living room and even go to the bathroom without having to lug the giant gas tank with her.

  “Research?” Vikka looked over Toby’s shoulder at her computer screen.

  Toby was no longer required to do homework or other stupid kid stuff—what was the point of calculus if she would never get to use it? But she continued doing research into animal psychology, brain function, and marine biology. Those were all very relevant to her life. At the moment, she was studying large mammals in ocean habitats. She wanted something substantial, but not too large. Definitely nothing blue whale sized—eighty feet long and three hundred thousand pounds. Although the blue whale’s life span of ninety years was very respectable. Toby wanted a very long life.

  “How about a dolphin?” Vikka asked when Toby failed to respond.

  Toby made herself focus on Vikka. She didn’t want the woman to worry. “I think they’d be too small. Too easy to kill accidentally,” Toby said.

  She had to worry about things like that. Many marine mammals were threatened or even endangered. Dolphins were often caught in fishermen’s nets by accident and killed as a result. Toby wanted to be larger than that. She wanted to be a powerful predator at the top of the food chain.

  “What about a killer whale?” Vikka pulled up a chair and sat next to Toby.

  “Perhaps,” Toby answered noncommittally. “But it’s really just a very big dolphin. Dolphins and orcas are Odontoceti—the toothed whale suborder of cetaceans generally. So technically they’re similar. But really it’s going to be whatever Uncle Geo can procure. It’s fun to window shop, though.”

  “You’ve been doing a lot of that lately,” Vikka said, giving her a little side hug. Toby didn’t mind.

  “Once it happens, I’m not going to have a lot of computer time to study up on my habitat and lifestyle.” Toby tried to give Vikka a bright smile. See? I’m still human.

  Cory was on a perch next to Toby’s computer. It was dark outside already and the raven was ready for sleep. But Toby was still riding her and Toby was wide awake.

  Staying awake at night was another thing that Toby assumed she would miss. Animals were never active outside their normal wake-sleep cycle, except in an emergency. Then adrenaline took over and temporarily removed the need for sleep.

  “Are you worried?” Vikka asked.

  “About what?”

  “About the transition. About being alone.” Vikka’s voice was hushed. Toby sensed fear radiating from her; she could almost taste it.

  “You’d still be here for me,” Toby said. It was a line she had practiced. She knew she’d have this conversation with Vikka, so she’d thought of just the right response. She needed Vikka to feel comfortable with the “transition,” as she called it.

  “Of course I will!” Vikka held her close and stroked her hair, dislodging the BBI barrette slightly. Cory cawed at the broken connection and Toby quickly readjusted her set. “Sorry,” Vikka said. She tried to help pull the barrette back where she thought it belonged, but dislodged it one more time.

  Cory bristled in annoyance. Toby quickly smoothed away her ruffled feathers via their BBI connection and the raven went back into a half slumber.

  “I would like to be a mammal that could potentially get close to land,” Toby said.

  “I’ll live close to the shore, close to wherever you’ll be. I’ll always be there for you,” Vikka said, her voice shaking a little. “You’ll never be alone, Toby. Never!”

  Cory gave Vikka a cold, dark stare. She saw the raw emotion coming off Vikka, but Cory oriented herself by Toby’s internal state. And Toby was calm and unaffected by Vikka’s outburst. So Cory stretched her wings, fluffed her feathers, and got comfortable again. She cawed at Toby one more time, letting her know that it was way past bedtime.

  “Cory doesn’t seem happy,” Vikka noted.

  “It’s getting late,” Toby said. “Why don’t you search for an animal for me? And we can talk about in the morning.”

  “Sure.” Vikka gave her another hug. “Love you,” she said softly into Toby’s hair.

  As Toby rose to go to bed, she saw tears in Vikka’s eyes. She pretended not to notice.

  Fifteen: +67 Months

  They removed the shiny blue light from the back of Grock’s skull. He now looked like a regular bird, even from a few feet away. The implant was still visible up close, but Grock was ready for stealth work.

  Cory’s implant stayed as it was. There was no explanation given for the discrepancy in treatment and both birds received bands on their feet.

  Toby didn’t mind much. She wasn’t planning on flying secret military missions with Cory anyway. But did they really think that Kyle was better at this than she was? Fools.

  The plan for today was to have Grock run a training test in the desert. A week earlier, Grock and Kyle together had hidden fifty items among the rocks and sage—computer parts, marbles, various mechanical parts—nothing too big. Then Kyle, independently of Grock, had hidden about fifty more. This morning, another team had gone to the same spot in the desert and hid yet another fifty items—and these were marked on a map. Grock’s job, and Kyle’s, was to find all the items and mark their locations on a clean map of the area.

  The test would measure the degree to which the raven-human team had augmented cognitive capabilities in both the bird and the man. Could the BBI connection boost cartographic comprehension in the bird and spatial memory in the human?

  The trick, Toby knew, was to transfer some of the spatial memory tasks to the bird. Toby knew her human brain could remember maybe five to ten hiding places at most, but ravens could memorize hundreds or even thousands of locations. If Kyle could visualize the position of each item on the computer map as a place out there in the desert landscape, then Grock would remember it.

  Toby, however, thought the whole test was a waste of time. Of course they’d be able to pass it. If Grock knew where the items were, so would Kyle. And if Kyle could read a map, so could Grock. It was a stupid test. But it wasn’t like she and Cory had been invited to voice an opinion.

  “Let the boys play,” she mumbled to herself.

  S
he sat in a patch of sunlight in front of the living room window. Cory was perched next to her and tried to match Toby’s mood with an equivalent raven emotion. But Cory couldn’t hold on to the negative emotion for long. Instead, she let out a very convincing rendition of one of Toby’s coughing paroxysms. Some ravens could imitate human speech and had even learned to sing operas—in falsetto, of course. Cory imitated the sounds she heard most from Toby—wet coughing fits. If she was in the mood, she could pull off a pretty good imitation of Lilly’s chuckling too.

  George spoke from behind them both. “Why the brooding?” he asked. “Feeling left out?”

  “No,” Toby said. Her voice was flat, hiding the defiance she felt on the inside.

  “Good,” George said. “Because we have other plans for you today.”

  Toby looked back and saw George smiling. “What?”

  “I thought you, Vikka, and I should take a trip. A mini vacation, if you will.”

  “Really? I’m allowed to leave the base?” The new Brats location, with its razor wire fence, felt very much like a prison.

  “I argued that it wasn’t right to make you work this hard without a vacation.”

  “And that worked?” Toby’s surprise transferred to Cory who stretched, fluffed up, and let out a soft caw.

  George winked at Cory. “There’s a hospital in Houston specializing in cystic fibrosis—”

  “Ahh.” Some vacation. Toby turned back to the window’s sun and closed her eyes. She wasn’t interested in more probing and prodding.

  Cory, though, continued to stare at George, so when George spoke again, he addressed the raven directly. Toby smiled at this; he was the only non-rider who truly got how the BBI worked. “That’s not the vacation part. We’ll only spend one night there, out of several days. The real point of the trip…well, I was hoping to take you out to the gulf and show you an option.”

  Toby’s heart skipped a beat. Had he found an animal for her? She turned completely around so that she faced him. “You mean that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What kind of animal is it?”

  “Let’s wait on that; it’s a surprise.”

  “Don’t make me wait. Please?”

  George smiled. “A marine park in San Antonio has two new killer whale calves. I think they’d be good candidates. But…it’ll be up to you. If you feel comfortable with the orcas, I’ll get access to the calves. If you like something different—a dolphin or a beluga, for example—I’ll have to see what I can do.”

  An orca! Toby could barely contain her excitement. “When do we leave?”

  “We’ll go the day after tomorrow, when Kyle is done with his mission analysis.”

  “Do you need me to help with that?” Toby knew her input could speed things up and she was anxious to go as soon as possible.

  “If you’re available,” George said, smiling.

  On the monitors in the control room, Toby watched the base of field operations out in the Arizona desert. Kyle was front and center, dressed in military fatigues plus a single black leather glove, as Grock’s talons could easily cut human skin. He and the other military personnel were examining a terrain map on the portable computer. Toby didn’t know most of these other people and the military uniforms made them all look alike to her.

  Grock was resting on Kyle’s arm, keeping an eye on the non-verbal interactions among the men surrounding Kyle. Toby knew what the bird was doing: he was looking for threats and he would communicate anything of note to his rider. Cory was very good at reading the emotional tone of the room like that too. A lot of Toby’s opinions on the new people around the facility were based on Cory’s sense of them. Potential threats were registered and Toby paid extra attention to those people when they were around her.

  “Do you have any interesting observations?” George asked Toby.

  George had stepped away from the other senior military people who were there to observe Kyle’s desert test. It was a good thing the new Brats control room was so large, as these days there were always officers gathered to observe. Ben was also there, of course, monitoring the riding gear. Lilly was focused on Kyle’s vitals, and Vikka was there too—probably for Toby’s moral support.

  “Grock’s neck feathers are standing up,” Toby said.

  “What does that mean?” asked a gray-haired officer.

  “It means you’ve put together a collection of males playing dominance games,” Toby said. Of course Grock could tell that. “Are the men with Kyle on the list for human implants?”

  “Some,” the man said noncommittally.

  “Well, Grock thinks they’re against him.”

  “Why?” George asked.

  “Posture, tone of voice, other cues. I don’t know. But Grock doesn’t like them.”

  “Really?”

  “Grock hates drones too.”

  Toby turned back to the monitors. The test was beginning.

  On some signal, Grock took off into the air. A drone followed him, but Toby noted that it kept its distance. The others must have realized Grock wouldn’t take kindly to a drone after the encounter back at the university.

  One monitor showed Kyle’s face. He had put on dark glasses and leaned back. Toby knew his eyes tended to roll into his head once Grock took to the air. Another monitor showed the locations of the hidden items—green dots indicated the ones hidden by Grock and Kyle, blue dots showed those hidden by Kyle alone, and red dots showed those hidden by the separate group.

  If this were Toby’s test, she would have gone straight for the items she and the bird already knew about—it would take some of the pressure off. But Kyle let Grock go high and make wide circles. He apparently wasn’t trying to retrieve any items yet.

  “What’s he doing?” someone asked.

  Toby didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like the man was asking her personally, he was just addressing the room. But George tapped her on the shoulder. “What do you think, Toby?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Perhaps Kyle is trying to match the map to the landscape?”

  “That makes sense.”

  After several high-altitude passes, Grock plunged down. There was a slight vibration on the tips of his wings as he converted his height into speed. Toby knew just how good that felt. Sometimes she made Cory dive down like that just to feel that thrill.

  On the arm of her wheelchair, Cory bobbed her head in excitement; she liked speed too.

  “Grock is going for one of the items he hid,” someone announced.

  That’s a mistake, Toby thought. Kyle’s memory of where he’d hidden the items would be fading fast. He should have made Grock go after those first. But she didn’t say anything.

  For the next hour, Grock located the items from the first set—the items he and Kyle had hidden together. He wasn’t required to bring them back to the base—that would just be a waste of time. He just had to land beside each one in order to get credit for finding it.

  Finally, Grock spiraled back up on a late-day thermal. He’d located all of the items that Grock himself knew about. But he hadn’t yet located a single one of the items hidden by Kyle alone or by the other team.

  “Toby?” George asked. “What do you think?”

  “It just proves that ravens have a phenomenal memory. But you knew that already,” she said.

  “But why didn’t Grock get any of the items hidden today?”

  “Perhaps it’s a translation issue,” Toby said. “Ravens don’t read maps. Their spatial memory is more relationship-based.”

  “Can you explain?” George asked. She got the feeling he was showing her off to his superiors, but she didn’t mind.

  “To a raven,” Toby said, “a landscape isn’t like a map. They see landmarks and orient themselves based on the landmarks and the paths between those landmarks—how long it takes, how hard they have to work to get there. It’s like creating ribbons through the space. Following those ribbons means they don’t have to think so much about the path. In a
n open space like this, the paths aren’t as important as they are when they’re in trees among a web of branches, but the ribbons still orient them in space.

  “Ravens are also able to sense direction,” Toby continued. “They can…feel north.” It was hard to explain. She wanted to say ravens could taste north, hear north, smell it—but none of that was precisely true. It was another sense for them altogether, a sensation that humans lacked entirely. Like bats and their echolocation, this sense of direction was not something that could be easily translated to human understanding. “Perhaps it’s magnetic, but Cory can feel a current as she moves through the field. That’s my guess anyway.”

  There was an excited murmur in the room. “We’ll have people look into that,” someone said.

  You do that, thought Toby. She had done a ton of research on the subject of animal perception and there wasn’t very much available. Humans weren’t good at understanding the senses of other animals, particularly those that humans didn’t share.

  “Can you sense direction when you ride Cory?” George asked. He always asked the right questions.

  “Yes,” Toby said. “And it feels wonderful.”

  The room was quiet for a while after that. Some people were taking notes, others just studied Toby as if she were some kind of alien.

  “He found one!”

  Toby looked at the screen tracking Grock. The raven was sitting on a rock, holding a small device, like some tag from an e-commerce site to keep track of products. “23” had been written on it with a silver Sharpie.