Becoming Animals Read online

  © 2017 Olga and Christopher Werby

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the authors.

  Printed in the United States of America.

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  Werby, Olga and Werby, Christopher

  Becoming Animals : a novel / by Olga and Christopher Werby

  ISBN: 1981404147

  EAN-13: 978-1981404148

  San Francisco

  www.Pipsqueak.com

  Cover illustration by Elena Dudina. www.elenadudina.com

  To Willy Werby

  who loves animals

  and has dreamed of

  becoming one.

  Chapters

  Prologue

  Part One: The Years of the Rat

  One: Year Zero

  Two: +18 Months

  Three: +30 Months

  Four: +33 Months

  Five: +36 Months

  Six: +42 Months

  Part Two: The Menagerie

  Seven: +48 Months

  Eight: +50 Months

  Nine: Next Day

  Ten: +51 Months

  Eleven: +60 Months

  Twelve: +60 Months & a Week

  Thirteen: +62 Months

  Part Three: Taking Flight

  Fourteen: +66 Months

  Fifteen: +67 Months

  Sixteen: 2 Days Later

  Seventeen: Next Day

  Eighteen: Minutes Later

  Nineteen: Same Day

  Part Four: Becoming

  Twenty: Later That Night

  Twenty-One: +67 Months and 6 Days

  Twenty-Two: Half a Day Later

  Twenty-Three: +67 Months and 2 Weeks

  Twenty-Four: Two Days Later

  Epilogue

  +70 Months

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Illustrations

  Note on Science

  Our Other Books

  Becoming Animals

  Prologue

  He could smell food. Where? The scent overlaid the environment like a map.

  Rufus ran in the direction suggested by slight radial variations in the strength of the odor. But the path had to be safe. Rufus always craved food, but when balancing hunger against fear, safety had to win out. Too bright! Stay in the shadows.

  Itch! Itch!

  The blue luminance on his head was a nuisance. Rufus was stuck in mid-action—his back leg raised over his head, next to the bright blue light, ready to scratch, his paw just quivering on the edge of action. He never actually touched the thing embedded in his brain.

  His stomach grumbled, returning his attention to food. Rufus ran again. He stuck to the edges, wary of the brightly lit center. But after he’d twice navigated the perimeter, Rufus realized the food was in a place he couldn’t get to without risk.

  He heard a sound and felt a familiar vibration of footsteps. He was used to the Big Ones—they provided food and water—but he knew this vibration pattern in particular. He paused, waiting to hear what would happen next. His ears turned in the direction of the sound, assessing its danger; his vision was limited to only what was right in front of his snout.

  “Hi, Ruffy!”

  The high-pitched voice raised Rufus’s anticipation of emotional contact and food. After a moment of excitement, he felt his heart rate slow a bit; his littermate was here. She was one of the Big Ones, but she could be trusted; they had grown up together. She smelled right—like home.

  Making himself limp so he could be lifted gently, Rufus settled against the warmth of his littermate’s hands. He could hear the slow rhythm of her giant heartbeat. Her breathing motions and the slight gurgling and hissing sounds that emanated from her—these were comfortingly familiar. He closed his eyes and relaxed.

  The voice made soothing sounds, repeating “Ruffy, Ruffy, Ruffy”—a sound combination he recognized. This behavior usually preceded feeding and cuddling. Despite the bright lights, Rufus was safe now.

  The change came on suddenly. There was brightness and clarity. Rufus raised his head above the fingers and looked around. There was still a lack of definition, but among the light and dark fuzziness that was the great out there, he could sense the functionality of the space. His home cage was placed up high—he had located it before from its odor, but couldn’t see it. Now he was certain of its location without the need to run and explore first.

  Rufus was held high off the ground and the littermate was gently rubbing the blue thing on his head, making it throb. That was good, for it had started to tickle and buzz.

  Everything got sharper, more focused. With all the new information flooding in, Rufus was most pleased to learn where the tasty little snack pellets were stored. He contented himself with the anticipation of their crunchy goodness, satisfied, for now, with the feel of his littermate’s touch.

  It had taken less than forty-eight hours for Major George Watson to get his rescue team to one of world’s most remote spots—a village on the slopes of the Tian Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. The drab olive-colored personnel carrier roared up the valley and came to a stop in what had probably once been the center of town. Now that the village had been flattened by a magnitude 8.3 earthquake, it was hard to be sure.

  Beside Major Watson in the stateside operation center, Lieutenant Kyle Davis watched the monitors. Seated on Kyle’s other side was Lieutenant May Flowers, his fellow drone pilot. The major barked orders into a microphone and, half a world away, the six members of the ground team fanned out. Each ground team member wore a camera mounted to their helmet and the bouncy video they transmitted showed hardly anything still standing. But they did show survivors—almost all of them urgently needing help.

  In stark contrast to the footage from the ground team, two other monitors displayed video that was serene. They relayed high definition aerial views from drones piloted remotely by Kyle and May. A third automated drone had gone straight up to clear the mountains. It served as a communications relay between the operations center, the drones, and the team on the ground.

  “Circle,” Major Watson ordered Kyle and May. “What’s the coverage area? Use your Zappers.”

  A bit of electricity, applied to the brain in just the right spot, greatly improved the performance of the drone operators, accelerating pattern recognition and accuracy sometimes as much as three hundred percent. The psychologists called the technique by its proper name: cranial electrotherapy. Everyone else called the things “Zappers.”

  Zappers didn’t seem to have any side effects and one couldn’t argue with the results. It wasn’t approved army tech yet, but Major Watson’s team had adopted it earlier than just about anyone else in the military. Because of the team’s positive experience with the technology, other units were starting to try out Zappers as well.

  Kyle affixed electrodes to his right temple and his left arm and pressed the button. The taste of metal flooded his mouth. With his brain zapped for efficiency, he strapped his helmet back on and zoomed across the mountainside. After years of flying, Kyle felt like his drone was a part of his own body, as much as his arms and legs.

  He swiveled around, scanning the leveled village. The surround vision inside his helmet made operating the drone incredibly immersive. It was more real than any video game, almost like being there in person, flying like a bird over the earthquake-ravaged landscape, sodden with heavy spring rains.

  “That’s an aftershock!” one of the ground team members cried into his radio.

  It was a substantial shaking, but clearly nothing compared to the original quake. In just a few quick moments, it was over and with no damage done. With nothing left standing from the original quake, there was nothing left to be damaged. But it clearly frightened the surviving villagers, many of whom could be seen on the video mutely appealing to the rescue workers.

  “Look there!” May cried out.

  Kyle pulled off his surround vision flight helmet and leaned over to see at what May was pointing at. As always, her view was displayed on a monitor above her flight station. It wasn’t a surround view, nor was it in any way as immersive, but it was sufficient for Kyle to see that she was flying high above the valley, near a mountain ledge that towered above it. May had spotted a large crack that seemed to be getting bigger.

  “And over there, sir,” she said. She turned and Kyle saw huge cracks appearing all over the escarpment.

  “Everyone out of there!” Watson cried. He screamed into his microphone: “Move! Move! Move! The mountain is giving way!”

  It was horrible to watch. Almost in slow motion, the movement transformed the rain-soaked mountainside into a sledgehammer. Kyle tried, through sheer force of will, to stop the avalanche of mud, stone, and debris from slamming into their people on the ground. They were all running now and their raw terror was obvious from their helmet-mounted cameras’ kinetic, jerking, jumbled broadcasts.

  “They’re not going to make it out,” May said quietly, her expression impossible to see beneath her flight helmet.

  “No,” Major Watson said.

  The impotence was almost unbearable. All they could do was sit and watch, in complete saf
ety and comfort, as their colleagues died half a world away. Kyle hated the safety of his job. He’d rather be down there with the ground team. But he was a damn good drone pilot. Too good.

  It took only a few minutes before all the helmet-mounted video feeds had cut out. The view from the drones showed a landscape that had completely changed yet again. The earthquake-devastated rubble of the village was gone, buried under a coat of liquid mud. It was like an Etch-A-Sketch had been shaken, erasing all evidence that people had ever existed on the face of that mountainside. Nothing remained, not even the truck that their team had arrived in. Nothing but mud.

  “Keep circling the area,” Major Watson ordered. “Swoop down low. Look for survivors.”

  They set their drones to fly in a search pattern, scouring the advance toe of the slide that had pushed everything in front of it like a plow.

  “It must thirty feet deep,” Kyle said. The craggy terrain was almost smooth now.

  Suddenly, the drone views blacked out. Their phone connection to the ground went dead too.

  “What’s going on?” the major yelled at the wall of video monitors.

  Kyle and May both restarted their workstations, going through the complete reboot procedure, but it didn’t help. The major did the same with the phone. Communications were down.

  “Get it back up.” The major paced in frustration and Kyle could see that he wanted to throw something. Major Watson’s feelings sometimes expressed themselves through physical actions.

  Finally, a voice came over the phone. The major picked it up. Their helmets off, Kyle and May turned to watch him. There wasn’t anything they could do from their flight stations anymore.

  As he listened, the major’s expression changed from frustration to incredulity and then to rage. He rubbed his face in a kind of agony as he finished the call. “They shot them,” he said in a defeated voice.

  “What?”

  “Some men from the village—I guess there were a few who managed to get out from under the landslide—they shot down the communications relay.”

  “But we were rescue drones,” May protested.

  “It’s hard to tell the difference between sniper and rescue drones from the ground,” Kyle said. He was horrified. Even if anyone on their team had survived the landslide, there was no rescuing them now.

  Major Watson ordered the deployment of helicopters from the closest US base. While nominally it was a rescue mission for the rescuers, it was grimly clear to Kyle that it was really a recovery mission.

  They wouldn’t be looking for survivors. They would be looking for bodies.

  Part One: The Years of the Rat

  One: Year Zero

  “You left the girl alone in there?”

  Professor Will Crowe looked past Major Watson’s inspection team at the tall military man. He paused before answering. “It’s ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Day,’” he said.

  Major George Watson watched through the one-way mirror as the eight-year-old girl adjusted the brain-to-brain interface cap on her head and continued to play with the rat. This was the lab rat the whole Brats project was designed around—the one with the brain implant that allowed the wearer of the BBI cap to control its movements.

  Will shifted uncomfortably. He looked ready to bolt for the door and retrieve his daughter. But Major Watson, not unkindly, put his hand on Will’s shoulder. Now that this unplanned experiment had begun, he was interested in the outcome.

  “That used to be your pet rat, is that right?” Watson asked.

  “It was Toby’s rat,” Will said. “The doctors told us we couldn’t have allergens in my wife’s environment, so I brought it to the lab. I couldn’t just kill it. But I didn’t think Toby would recognize Rufus…”

  Geez, the rat has a name! Watson tried to hide his irritation. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Rufus?”

  “Toby named him,” Will said.

  The professor was clearly nervous. He must have known how unprofessional this all must appear to the military people who funded Crowe’s brain lab. The army intelligence grant had paid for everything they’d been doing here for the last two years.

  Watson knew how much Will hated surprise visits to his lab, but he did it anyway. It was part of his job to stir things up a bit. But he had never expected something like this. Not only bringing a little kid into a top-secret lab, but giving her access to the equipment? The major was too controlled to let his face give away his displeasure, but he had to actively suppress communicating his disapproval. He believed his demeanor should never reveal anything about his internal thoughts and emotions unless he wanted it to.

  “I see.” The major noticed that he still sounded irritated. He was always irritated when visiting civilian-run labs—Dr. Crowe’s facility in particular. The man was so touchy. It was so much easier to conduct research when he could just issue orders. He hated cajoling. He wasn’t a babysitter.

  But he had to admit that Dr. Crowe’s work on direct neural interfaces was the most promising he’d seen so far. The BBI developed in his lab allowed humans to govern the rat’s movements—direction, speed, and agility—and even more impressively, Dr. Crowe thought human controllers would soon be able to get partial sensory data from the rat’s eyes and ears. Human brain-controlled rats, or brats for short, were a true breakthrough. This was computer-mediated control of an animal with the potential for complete sensory immersion. Thanks to Dr. Crowe’s work, the military would one day be able to send little ratty spies into dangerous or humanly impenetrable areas. This technology would be invaluable in search and rescue operations—collapsed buildings, tunnels, mine shafts—as well as more “delicate” assignments run by some of the covert military units. Human-controlled rats would be the most advanced mini robots on the planet.

  “Here, Ruffy,” said the girl, petting the rat. “See? It feels good, doesn’t it?”

  “Can she feel what the rat is feeling?” asked Sergeant Martinez—one of Major Watson’s people.

  “It looks like she can,” said Dr. Crowe.

  “Find out for sure,” Watson said.

  “Okay.” Dr. Crowe practically ran out of the observation center.

  “I want this recorded,” ordered Major Watson as the professor carefully opened the door to the lab, obviously not wanting to spook either the rat or his little girl.

  The lieutenant behind the camera nodded. Everything was being recorded.

  “Hey, Toby,” Dr. Crowe called softly. His voice carried easily into the observation room via a set of speakers.

  “Hi, Dad!” Toby greeted her father in the high-pitched voice of an excited eight-year-old girl. She was holding the fluffy black-and-white animal in one hand and using the other to scratch behind its brain implant, located just at the back of the animal’s head. She gently giggled at the motion. To Watson, it looked like the girl was able to sense the touch of her own finger on the fur of the rat. In essence, she seemed to be tickling herself.

  “Can you feel that?” Dr. Crowe asked.

  Toby nodded. “And I can see you too,” she said.

  Her back was to her dad, but Rufus was looking directly at Dr. Crowe, tracking the man’s motion across the lab as he approached his daughter. Interesting, Watson thought. If Toby could see anything at all through the animal’s visual perception, it would represent enormous progress.

  “How many fingers do I have up?” Dr. Crowe asked quickly, sticking his thumb up in the air and leaning in close—rats had poor eyesight.

  “None!” Toby laughed. Watson and his men behind the mirrored wall held their collective breath before Toby added, “It’s a thumb, silly!”

  Dr. Crowe glanced into the one-way mirror, at the unseen observers. “What else can you do with Ruffy? Can you show me?”

  Toby put the rat on the floor and let him loose. The professor looked back at the door to the lab that he’d carelessly left open.