The Proteus Bridge Read online

  He looked at Doomie and Testa again, squawking at them. They ignored him. A flash of silver at the back of Testa’s head feathers told him what he already knew was true. Whatever had happened to the raven had been done to them, too.

  He saw the aviary with new eyes, gaze moving from the locked exit door to the divided wire cells where they were tested with the colored blocks, the symbols and shapes he had been arranging in pleasing ways all his life. The feeling settled in his mind that he was a prisoner.

  Crash stared at Testa. Her feathers were disheveled. Her feet were pale and dry looking.

  Do I look like that?

  a voice said angrily.

  Crash nearly fell off the branch. He recognized the human words, the human ideas of away/solitude/anger/me, me, me. The human words combined with the feelings he understood by simply looking at Testa to form a conflicting image of her: human superimposed on the being he had always known. Human-parrot. Human overshadowing parrot.

  His thoughts raced. Ideas and emotions rose and fought in his mind so quickly that, when he looked around again, disoriented, he no longer knew how much time had passed. Testa was no longer on the branch.

  He looked around fearfully, finding Doomie on a higher branch, swaying in a sickly way.

  Crash struggled with his changing perspective. He had understood the world before. He had seen connections that failed him now. But there was so much more. He was surrounded by meaning that had been invisible.

  They had done something to him…to all of them. If it was the same thing that had made the raven act out until Testa killed it, then Crash would need to be careful. He would need to pay attention so he didn’t do the same things. He had never thought of himself as more intelligent or better than the corvids, just different. He had thought of the beakless parrots, the humans, the same way.

  Now everything was different.

  He shook his head violently to calm his thoughts, clacking his beak. Above him, Doomie tilted his head, watching with a yellow eye. The silver thread trailing from the back of his head glinted as he moved.

  Crash said slowly. His mind approximated the sensation that had been her name, creating the human word, the symbol for something else like all their symbols.

  Why mark the door ‘exit’ if it only leads to another room where the ravens are also trapped?

 

  another voice said. It had to be Doomie.

  Crash asked.

  Doomie asked. He sounded older, more thoughtful than usual. Technically, Doomie was older than all of them. He had been in the aviary as long as Crash could remember.

  Crash said.

  Doomie agreed.

  Crash didn’t know what that meant. He was too worried about Testa to get lost in Doomie’s distractions.

  he asked.

  Doomie said.

  Crash tilted his head, opening and closing his beak. His tongue was dry. he said.

 

  Crash craned his neck, trying to see where Testa was hiding.

  Doomie laughed: a dry, ominous sound.

  The exit door opened and the three researchers walked in. They seemed more excited than usual, looking immediately up into the tree to point at him and Doomie. The curly-haired woman went to a cabinet and took out a flat piece of plas the size of her hand, which she tapped with a finger.

  Crash watched her curiously, then felt his body go tense. Before he could do anything, he was frozen on the branch. He was still able to watch the male researcher walk around the other side of the tree, then out of Crash’s view, then return with Testa wrapped in both hands.

  She looked so small compared to his bulk—her grey feathers a dirty splash of color against his white coat.

  The male carried Testa to the grey-haired woman, who banded Testa’s body with plas strips. Unable to move her wings, they laid her on a table beside the cabinet where the curly-haired woman stood. It was the table where Crash had counted colored blocks thousands of times.

  Crash asked Doomie.

  Doomie said.

  Crash clamped his beak closed. He didn’t want to escape. He wanted the aviary to go back to the way it had been before. Why had everything changed so suddenly? Had the ravens done something to make the humans angry?

  He stared at the logos on the back of the researcher’s lab coats: ‘Psion’ in blocky, red letters. They were applying more silver threads to Testa’s head, so that she seemed to lay in the center of a shiny spider’s web. She lay frozen, her yellow eye staring upward.

  Crash said.

 

  Crash hadn’t noticed the control unit before, just as he hadn’t thought to call the silver lines ‘wires’. Now the concepts took shape in his mind.

  Where is this information coming from?

  As he conceived of new ideas, they took root in his thoughts as if they had always been there.

  Doomie was right. They were in a room with exits to other rooms. They were part of some experiment, and when the researchers were finished with Testa, it was only logical that they would move on to him or Doomie.

  He also understood that the humans would most likely kill them.

  The idea of death entered his mind like a storm. He knew immediately he didn’t want to die. He also wanted to help Testa but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t move. He stared at the exit sign, thinking about the door and what must lay beyond it.

  The thread they had implanted in his mind was like a door. Information flowed through it, invited, it seemed, by his own rapidly expanding thoughts. If they had made a door to push things into him, couldn’t he take the same path out?

  Crash closed his eyes and focused on the new thoughts, the new words and concepts. They had a source, and the source was like the dead tree: branches that flowed back to a central trunk, and the trunk to a root, and the root was outside himself.

  He followed the root back, learning its name for itself: the Link.

  HATE HATE HATE

  STELLAR DATE: 05.08.2945 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: TMS Hesperia Nevada

  REGION: Terran Hegemony, (Hohmann Transfer) Point 364, InnerSol

  Time moved differently than it had before. Cut loose from the placid river of his previous days, Crash’s perception of the world now leapt and hung. Information and understanding exploded in his mind then froze him in place whenever the researchers shot him with the drugged darts. He woke from darkness with more gaps in his memory, time traded for expanded awareness.

  He woke from the most recent blackout filled with terror that he’d lost his hands. He flapped his wings frantically, smacking into a wall and then falling among the outer tree limbs, until he finally understood that he had wings and claws, that he could fly and grab and use his beak. The parrot memories pushed out the human, stabilizing his place in the world.

  But the human overlay persisted, making him feel wrong in his skin. His thoughts had grown too huge for such a small body, pushing him further back up the stream from the Link, into their databases and public informat
ion centers.

  He huddled on one of the highest tree branches, away from Doomie and Testa, flitting between rivers of knowledge, absorbing even as he grew more frightened that he had become something monstrous.

  None of the parrots were themselves anymore. Crash felt no joy in anything. He no longer flapped his wings for the pleasure of it, or preened, or spread his tail feathers. His head felt heavy on his neck, his beak sliding toward his chest feathers until he was forced to straighten painfully.

  The tests were no longer fun. There was no amusement in watching the researcher’s responses as he sorted cubes, or chose words from lists on a screen, pecking quickly with the tip of his beak.

  “I hate you,” he wrote. “I hate you. I hate you.”

  He stared at the shapes on the small screen in the curly-haired woman’s hands, meaning swimming away and then blaring back in his mind, as if the human in his head refused to be pushed away. The parrot in him wanted to bite her wrist, to claw at her face…but even those weren’t desires he had ever felt before. Those were the effects of human thoughts infecting his mind.

  As far as he could tell, they hadn’t put another mind inside his, like they’d done with Testa. She could barely hang onto a branch now, and often plummeted to the floor throughout the day, lying like a pile of discarded rags until one of the researchers picked her up and inspected her with a hand scanner.

  During the last episode, Crash had tried again to talk to her.

  he called.

  She answered with a sound that was rage and terror. Crash nearly fell off the branch himself. He stumbled, eye drawn by movement at the exit door as one of the researchers left the aviary. Through the open door, Crash saw one of the ravens looking at him.

  Without thinking, he asked,

  The raven didn’t answer with words. Their Links performed a complex maneuver that connected images and feelings, and Crash experienced a breadth of birdness that he had nearly forgotten. Visions of the other aviary flashed in his mind. He was surrounded by the black-beaked ravens, watching him with black eyes, raising and lowering their heads in slow unison. After Testa’s tortured wail, the new image filled him with hope rather than despair, despite how strange he found the raven’s thoughts. There was no joy in the ravens, but it was entirely possible they had been under the control of the silver threads for even longer than the parrots. They might all have voices whispering inside their minds like Testa, driving them mad.

  he shouted.

  Doomie said petulantly.

  Crash straightened his neck and flexed his wings for the first time in hours, looking for Doomie. Testa was still surrounded by the researchers.

 

 

 

  Doomie grumbled.

  Crash shouted. He leapt away from the branch and flapped his wings angrily, shooting over the heads huddled around Testa’s limp body. He landed clumsily on top of a cabinet, claws scrabbling for purchase.

  The grey-haired researcher looked up from Testa. “Dammit,” she said. “Crash is acting out. You’d better stun him again.”

  “I think it’s affecting the hardware,” the young man said. His hand hovered at the pistol on his belt. “Should I risk hitting him again? He’s getting more and more erratic.”

  The grey-haired woman shook her head. “They’re all losing integrity. We need to get the final scan data, and then it’s going to be time to pull the plug.”

  The curly-haired woman made a complaining noise.

  “Don’t give me that,” the older woman said. “We all knew this day would come. The implants are unstable. Besides, we don’t get new subjects without disposing of the old.”

  Crash understood what they were saying. The young man was going to shoot him with the pistol again, and after that, they would kill him. While he understood what they meant to do, he couldn’t grasp why. Unlike parrots, no emotion came off the humans. The way they talked about the actions they would take made them as lifelike as the cabinet beneath him. He wasn’t the monster; they were.

  He wished utterly he could go back to the way things had been, when he’d sorted colored cubes for treats, and squawked pleasure from the top of the tree.

  Crash quickly took stock of the room. He couldn’t see Doomie, but there were only so many places he could huddle out of sight. Testa was still on the metal table. The exit door was closed, and he had no way of opening it without human help.

  The young man drew the pistol and stepped away from the table. Crash hopped backward on the cabinet, sliding a little. He had learned the hard way that if he tried to fly right now, the researcher would hit him easily. The height of the cabinet forced the young man to hold the pistol at an awkward angle that made it hard to aim.

  Crash shouted.

  Doomie said.

  Crash’s left wing hit the wall and he stumbled, flapping to stay upright. He thought of the raven watching him, and immediately he saw the group again, their heads moving in unison. The silent vision filled his mind as he imagined he could hear the ravens cawing angrily. He blinked, turning one eye toward the door, and realized the sound was coming from the other side of the room. He saw both sides of the door simultaneously as the ravens launched into the air, flying in a tight spiral. One by one, they smacked themselves against a silver panel beside the door.

  He didn’t know what they were doing, and then, just as he had come to understand the box beside Testa’s head, the Link provided him with the information. They were trying to activate the emergency lock on the door. Made for human hands, they couldn’t get enough pressure to trip the release.

  “There you are,” the man said, squeezing off a shot with this dart gun.

  Crash dove off the cabinet. The dart hit the wall where he had been. Unable to correct his course, he shot directly into the grey woman’s head. He spread his wings to slow himself, claws outstretched, and caught the top of her head. She screeched as his claws raked her scalp. The sensation of digging into her skin conflicted with the ravens hitting the other side of the door.

  The woman swung her arms at him, shouting for the others to help. She caught one of his wings, and Crash found himself arcing down in a hard, unexpected motion. His head hit the side of the table where they had Testa, and he tumbled, wings limp.

  Without moving his head, he blinked at the white ceiling, watching the black shape of a boot align itself with his head.

  “Stop!” the younger woman shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “He attacked me. He’s obviously rampant. We need to nullify the testbed and assess the damage.”

  “And you’re going to do that by stomping on his head?” the young woman asked.

  “He’s a danger. I’m neutralizing the threat.”

  The abstract words bounced around in Crash’s mind. She was using soft words to say ‘kill’. She was going to kill him.

  “Stop her!” the young woman shouted at her male colleague. He didn’t answer.

  The boot rose, blocking out the light.

  Crash forced himself to keep his eyes open. The Link flooded his mind with information: death, pain, murder, neutralize. Testbed.

  He was a testbed. He didn’t matter. The test mattered.

  Did they know the Link was feeding him so much information? Did the Link have a mind of its own?

  The boot came down.

  Two things happened simultaneously. The exit door swung open, admitting a swarm of black ravens, and Doomie sank his claws into the grey woman’s cheek.

  Crash heard her screaming, and watched Doomie’s attack through the eyes of the ravens.

  Get up! Get up!r />
  In the mayhem, he flapped his wings until he had his claws back underneath him. He hopped away from the table, then shot into the air and came back around to get a look at Testa. She wasn’t moving.

  Crash landed on a nearby branch as the ravens cawed and spiraled around the researchers. An alarm started shouting from somewhere near the exit door, activated by one of the humans.

 

  He waited, controlling his breathing. She didn’t answer. Her head lay to one side, a little spurt of blood on the silver table from the back of her head. Then Crash saw the thread lying beside her body. Someone had pulled it from her skull, killing her.

  Doomie was still hanging onto the grey-haired woman’s face. She screamed and grabbed at him. Feathers and droplets of blood hit the white floor.

  Crash called.

  the older parrot said.

 

  The young man was standing to one side, fighting off ravens with his free hand as he tried to aim his pistol at the rapidly moving Doomie.

  Images from other ravens showed him more rooms, corridors, a bulkhead door hanging open, its heavy sealing mechanism retracted. They were looking for something, and it wasn’t until the Link showed him that the aviary was in a place he never expected, that their search made sense. The aviaries were but one part of a laboratory complex located inside the spinning cylinder of a space ship.

  Crash could only accept the decidedly human information as it filled his mind. If they were inside a space ship, where would they go from here? If he escaped this room, weren’t there more humans to capture or kill him?

  Despite his worries, he dashed for the exit. Doomie wasn’t coming with him. The remaining ravens were gathering to leave as well, and if he didn’t move now, he was going to take a dart in the back. The door loomed in front of him, a threshold he had never crossed his entire life, and then he was in the ravens’ aviary on the other side of the door. This space was long and narrow, with several trees for roosting, and wires running along the ceiling, where he had seen the ravens sitting together.