Becoming Animals

by Olga Werby

  “I’m ready too,” Lilly called from her portable vitals monitoring station.

  “So this will be a simple fly-in-formation exercise,” Will announced. “Go up to the Campanile, read the message taped to the bell, return. No claws, no beaks, no fighting.” The riders felt the pain of their animals—it was part of that backwash of feeling—so it was critical that no harm came to the birds, for both the birds’ and the riders’ sakes.

  “I have full control,” Kyle announced in a monotone.

  Toby saw her dad give Kyle a long look. In stressful situations, Kyle would have less control than he thought. And through her animal spy network, Toby knew that George, and whomever he talked to all the time on the phone, had something special planned for them today. She was ready…just tired. Everything was more difficult with her ailing lungs.

  “On the count of three, go,” Will said. “One, two—”

  Grock jumped into the air before the count was complete. Toby knew Grock hated waiting. She smiled and watched him climb into the sky. She and Cory were not in a hurry.

  Cory demonstrably picked something from her rectrices—the tail feathers she used for steering—and groomed her wings, aligning the barbs of her primary feathers. She leisurely clicked her beak and made a soft rattling sound before taking off from her perch just behind Toby’s shoulder.

  Toby closed her eyes and focused her attention of the perceptual information coming in from Cory’s brain. She loved to fly. Up there, among the thermals, she forgot that she couldn’t breathe, that she was drowning in her own mucous, her lungs clogged and glued shut with it. Up there, in the sky, Toby felt light and easy.

  The bird’s feathers produced sounds and pleasant vibrations during flight—a different tone and feel for each type of feather. The feathers on the nape, mantle, and belly were short and soft and made a fuzzy prrrrr sound. The longer and stiffer primary feathers of the wings felt almost prehensile, touching the wind and reading the airflow. Cory’s rectrices read the airflow as well and made hundreds of adjustments with each heartbeat. It was exhilarating.

  Toby could feel herself getting lost in the sensation. It was all about the now. All thoughts of the goal of the exercise were gone.

  Cory liked flying too. There was joy in it and the young raven played with air currents, rolling and catching the warm drafts and then pulling her wings tighter to drop down in a flash. It was fun.

  A buzz made itself known on the edge of Toby’s awareness. It wasn’t the feather percussion music; it was mechanical and made Cory’s mantle itch in an unpleasant way.

  Toby slitted her human eyes open. Kyle was still caught up in the revelry of flight; he hadn’t noticed the foreign sound yet. Good.

  Toby kept her human body still and made Cory look down at the Brats team. George was definitely staring at Toby…at her human body. She gave him a small smile. She was ready.

  Cory focused on the drone flying in from behind the Campanile. It made sense—George probably had some of his people up there. In fact, he probably had a lot of people in the vicinity, observing this experiment.

  Toby knew her dad believed Brats was just a small side project for George, but from everything Toby had overheard in the last few months, she knew the truth: Brats was a huge deal to the military. And her dad was about to lose control of it.

  If she were a good daddy’s girl, she would have felt bad for him. She would have told him what she knew. But she wanted…no she needed a new body. She wasn’t ready to die like her mother. Which meant her goals were more closely aligned with George’s than her Dad’s. Dad would just have to deal with the coming changes on his own.

  Cory cried a defiant caaaaaaaaw at the drone. The thing was just a toy, about two thirds her size, with four rotating blades at the corners and a camera suspended from its belly.

  She rushed the drone. It backed away from her.

  The thing about machines was they had limitations. Drones couldn’t fly upside down or dive at close to one hundred miles per hour. Drones weren’t as fast as ravens. Cory’s flight speed had been clocked at just under fifty miles per hour and that was when she wasn’t even trying.

  With her movement-sensitive eyes, Cory easily tracked each blade—what was a blur to a human eye was perfectly crisp movement to the raven’s vision. The drone was too dangerous to approach from above—its blades were vicious. But ravens could fly upside down and they knew how to clutch at an enemy from the soft underbelly, slash at it with their keen claws, and smash it with their sharp bills. And once the camera was damaged, the drone would be flying blind, useless.

  Plus, the drone operator, even a great drone operator, was only human. Humans didn’t have eons of evolutionary instincts devoted to flying.

  As Toby/Cory gained altitude, which she could convert to speed for her dive at the machine, Grock finally noticed the drone. The drone could only fight one of them at a time, so as long as Grock distracted it, Cory could take it out. She just had to find a way of communicating with Kyle to coordinate their attack.

  “Hey, Kyle!” Toby called out.

  She got no response. Toby opened her eyes and looked at Kyle. His eyes were squeezed shut in concentration. He wasn’t going to respond to a human-to-human signal. She shut her eyes again and focused on Cory’s visual field.

  Both birds were flying above the drone, circling it slowly. Toby considered her options. She felt the bird’s desire to attack the drone—Toby saw it as an enemy obstacle and the raven interpreted Toby’s emotions to conclude the drone was a threat. The emotional back-and-forth between the bird and human brain was difficult to control. Toby could see herself completely letting go and letting Cory take over in a fight—and in a real life-and-death situation, she might do just that. But this wasn’t a life-and-death situation; it was just a distraction. No need to cede control.

  Technically, Toby reasoned, the drone shouldn’t even matter. Their assignment was to read the message pinned to the bell. What would happen if they just flew toward the Campanile?

  Cory looked at the bell of the Campanile. With Cory’s superior long-distance vision, Toby should have been able to read the message from a hundred feet away. But no note was pinned to the outside of the bell. George clearly wanted them to go inside the tower or under the bell to look for it.

  Grock let out a guttural shriek and dove for the drone. The move took Toby by surprise. But she quickly flapped her wings and danced for the camera—perhaps her aerial acrobatics would draw attention away from Grock’s attack. The drone didn’t appear to have a listening device, it was all eye and for the moment its eye was on Cory.

  Cory danced closer to the lens, inciting the drone to move in and follow her. Toby hoped Kyle would take advantage of the opportunity she was giving him.

  The drone zoomed at her. It moved surprisingly fast, almost clipping the feathers of her left wing. Damn!

  “Is that machine attacking my daughter?” Toby heard her dad scream in the background.

  She watched as Grock maneuvered himself next to the back of the camera and tried to grab it with its talons. But the drone dipped down at the last moment and Grock had to fall back with it or be struck. Fortunately, they were high enough that the raven had time to recover before hitting the trees. He flapped heavily back up, trying to gain altitude again. Toby saw that one of his long wing feathers was broken off. That would hurt.

  More screams and arguments followed, but Toby was too busy to listen. The drone was trailing her now, matching her move for move. Whoever was flying that thing was good.

  Toby considered her options. Cory, left to her own instincts, would easily break away from the offending drone, but Toby needed to impress the unseen spectators of this Brats demonstration. She needed to take this drone down herself.

  When the drone’s camera turned away from Cory and focused on Grock, Toby made a quick decision. She dove for the Campanile. The drone wouldn’t have space to move around inside the bell tower easily and that would give Cory an advantage.r />
  Grock saw what she was trying to do and flew to join her. She wondered if Kyle would be willing to cooperate on this mission, or if his goal was to beat her by reading the note first. The first to speak the message to the people on the ground would win—and Kyle did not like losing.

  With her human ears, Toby heard the arguing escalate, but she wasn’t worried; George wouldn’t let them pull the plug on this demonstration. She managed a quick look from her human eyes and saw her dad storming into the lab building. That allowed her to relax a bit.

  As she approached the Campanile, two more drones came into view. They must have launched them from one of the top windows of the tower. That was an extra challenge, but it was also a challenge for the drone operators to avoid one another.

  “Groooooock!” Grock cried when he spied the new drones.

  Cory had one drone at her back and two more in front of the bell, blocking Cory’s approach. She flew straight at the two newcomers.

  The new drones just hovered there, in front of the oval archers at the top of the Campanile. Cory looked inside the bell enclosure. There were no people inside, but she spied several cameras, all swiveling to follow her movements. Not fair. She also saw the note; it was stuck to the bell’s underside, but there was nothing written on the visible side of it. The text must be facing the bell. Not fair. She would need to pull it off and take it somewhere to read. And if she held it in her beak, Grock would read the message before she could, thus winning the game.

  “Caw!”

  I totally agree with you, Cory, Toby thought. This game was rigged.

  She flew around the four walls of the Campanile. The two new drones followed her by flying though the bell tower to greet her at all four archways. The other drone monitored her from behind. She lost track of Grock. She wondered why the drones focused on her and left Kyle alone. Not fair.

  She orbited the tower a few more times, getting the layout and timing the drones’ speed. As she came around, she would have a second before they popped up to block her way on the other side. Cory could use that second to dive under the bell, but Toby worried she might trap herself in there. Then the drones would surround her and…

  What would they do to her? Surely George wouldn’t let her raven come to any physical harm? Except Grock had already gotten hurt. Still—that couldn’t have been on purpose. Could it?

  Toby slitted her human eyes open again and studied George. He was far from her, talking on his cell phone. He didn’t look happy. What if he hadn’t planned on the drone attack? Or if his plan had been changed? Escalated by someone else?

  For the first time that day, Toby actually felt fear.

  Cory cried out and backed away from the Campanile, echoing her dread. If Cory was angry before, now she was concerned. The drones were more than a nuisance; they might be a bodily threat. They hurt Grock.

  The drone that was shadowing Cory lurched toward the bird—and it was fast. Cory flapped her big wings, but in the shade of the Campanile she wasn’t picking up any thermals—she was too close to the building. Any progress she made would be due to the sheer power of her flight muscles. Damn, she’d allowed herself to get too close.

  “Caw!” she called—where was Grock?

  Another raven cawed back. An entire conspiracy of young ravens—a group of ravens was called a conspiracy—circled to her. They must have come from the population of ravens that lived around the university campus. Adolescent ravens tended to band together in packs before pairing off and mating at about one and a half. The adolescents were more emotional and easily agitated and, like all ravens, very curious. Cory’s cries must have drawn them near. Or did Grock go get some help? Ravens were smart birds even when not ridden by humans and they were known to exhibit empathy toward each other.

  Cory let out another distress call. A couple of the big birds circled in closer to check out what was going on. Cory was a female raven close to mating age, which made her very interesting to the large male birds.

  Cory continued to call as she climbed higher. Once she had the altitude, she could dive between the drones and the machines wouldn’t be able to match her speed. But she wasn’t high enough yet.

  “Caw. Caw. Caw.” She pulled up and up. Looking down, she noticed one of the ravens separate from the group and rush toward an open window below the top of the Campanile, a few floors below the bell. The bird turned and Toby spotted a dot of blue light on top of his head—Grock. So it had been Kyle. He’d used Grock to gather the other ravens and thereby confuse the drones. Good for him.

  Cory kept moving away from the building. The drones and the other ravens were following her. Perhaps the drone cameras hadn’t noticed Grock fly into the tower. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Was there even a way of getting to the bell by flying through the staircase column within the tower? If there was, she hoped Grock made it. The game had changed from a competition between the two birds to a cooperative effort against a common enemy. Birds against drones.

  Several young male ravens flew to her side. A damsel in distress, that’s me, Toby thought. She let out a screeching cry and led the drones and ravens, away from the Campanile. She knew there was a nice cushion of hot air rising from the asphalt of the basketball court where her human body sat in a wheelchair, so she turned and flew toward the Brats team’s staging area.

  She saw Ben and Lilly below, staring at their monitors, and Vikka and George standing nearby, watching her fly. Her dad hadn’t returned. She considered dive-bombing George—he deserved it after siccing the scary drones on her—but that wouldn’t win her the game. Subtly, she turned to put the Campanile back into her field of view without making the move too obvious.

  More ravens swooped in to join her. Some settled down on one of the streetlights surrounding the basketball court. Others flew directly to the ground. The scene was starting to resemble something from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. There were about three dozens of the powerful black birds down here now and at least another dozen circling with Cory. Toby enjoyed the humans’ look of discomfort on the ground.

  Suddenly the drones turned and zoomed back toward the Campanile. Grock flew out of the belfry, carrying a piece of white paper in his talons, and dove toward the ground. He was too low to pick up significant speed, but the drones were too far away to intersect. He managed to land under the picnic table in front of the entrance to the Campanile. The drones pinned him there.

  Toby looked around for something that she could use to hurt the stupid flying machines. Garbage! She swept down to the trash bins next to the picnic area right at the base of the Campanile and grabbed a mangled-up pamphlet in her beak. The other ravens, following her example, picked up paper cups and other discarded trash. Cory led her conspiracy of ravens toward Kyle’s picnic table. The drones were low to the ground and didn’t see the birds circling above them. Grock did. He hid under the table with his prize.

  Cory dropped her trash on the drones and the other ravens did the same, mimicking Cory’s action. Most of the debris simply bounced off, but a used plastic bag stuck to one of the drones’ rotating blades, knotted itself around the motor, and made that drone falter and skip into the grass. A glass bottle broke one of the propellers of another drone, putting it out of commission. That left only one drone active.

  Toby was thrilled. Her garbage-hurling ravens were winning against the military drones! It was too cool. She dove to get more garbage.

  And then there was a loud bang—and one of the birds dropped from the sky. Bang, bang, bang.

  Guns!

  Toby froze; she didn’t know what to do. Another bird dropped. And then the last drone was hit. Sparks came out of it and it spun out to the ground, with black smoke pouring out of it.

  Cory felt adrenal cortical steroids flooding her brain; she was scared. The ordinary ravens screeched and flew away in distress, leaving the dead bodies of their comrades behind.

  People were screaming. Someone fell on top of Toby’s human body, shielding her.

&n
bsp; From what? From whom?

  “Stay down.” It was George’s voice in her ear.

  But Cory wanted to go up, away from all the madness. She kept flapping hard. Away. Away. Her panic was Toby’s panic. Toby’s human brain was just as full of corticoids as Cory’s.

  A loud “Groooock!” erupted right next to Cory. Somehow having Grock near made Cory more confident. He was flying next to her, leading her away from the guns and violence. The piece of paper was still clutched in his left claw.

  Grock led her to the roof of another campus building. Cory couldn’t see the basketball court from here. She edged closer to her nestmate, while he stood protectively and scanned the sky.

  Drones! Toby had forgotten all about them. They had taken out the three that were attacking them, but there could be more. She started to scan the sky too. But there was no sign of the dreaded machines.

  Toby wished Cory could speak; she wanted to ask Grock what was going on. Kyle was military, so he was used to things like this, right? Grock certainly appeared calmer than Cory. He stood still, with no head bobbing or other signs of agitation. Cory, on the other hand, was fidgety, high on brain stress chemicals. She felt like every one of her feathers was crawling with fright, making the calami—the hollow lower parts of her feather shafts—itch. She pulled on her feathers, tearing a few out completely. It hurt.

  Finally, Grock looked away from the sky. Using his feet and beak, he straightened out the paper he retrieved from under the bell. He bent down to read the words, then pointed with his head for Cory to do the same. He wasn’t going to try to win this game by himself—he was sharing the information with her.

  She bent down and read:

  Good work! Welcome to the team.

  Toby didn’t understand. She was already part of the team—the Brats team. What did the message mean?