Frowning, he glanced to the right to check the window, but they’d put tinted screens over most of them that rendered every day sort of gray and muted-looking. Still trying to get his phone to connect to the errant server, he headed for the back patio door… that one wasn’t tinted, at least.

The day was still pretty gray, but he scarcely noticed. There was a fox lying on his trampoline. How’d it get in? was his first thought. The condo yard was surrounded by a high wooden privacy fence. Could foxes jump that? He didn’t know. He hadn’t even known there were foxes anywhere near.

It was definitely there, and it was definitely a fox. He wasn’t sure if he’d recognize a coyote from a stray dog, but he knew a fox when he saw one. He’d never seen one in real life, and couldn’t recall where he’d ever seen one photographed, but the foxiness of the creature could not be denied. From the red-brown fur to the angular face to the bushy tail to the black, sock-like markings on all four of her feet, she was definitely all fox.

He hadn’t ever even realized that foxes had socks, but looking at her now, he couldn’t picture her without them.

He suddenly realized that the thing he was holding in his hands was also a camera, and that the image of a fox hanging out on his trampoline was one that would be worth preserving and sharing. Maybe if he kept watching, she—he wasn’t sure at what point it had become she in his mind, but he was nearly as sure about that as he was sure that she was a fox—would get up and start jumping around, and he could get a video of it. Either way, he was definitely getting a few pics.

He glanced down at his phone only long enough to find the camera button, but when he looked back up, he almost dropped it.

There was a woman on the trampoline, lounging on her side. She was naked, except for black knee-high socks and elbow-length gloves. Her hair was auburn, her cheeks round and full and her nose turned slightly upwards into an impish point. She was lying in the same place and nearly the same position as the fox had been, and when he’d fully processed the fact that it was the exact same place and there was no sign of another separate creature who had been laying there before, he did drop the phone.

He cursed, bent down to get it, hit his head on the patio door, cursed again, and only recovered his cameraphone and a little bit of dignity and grace in time to watch a bushy tail disappearing over the top of the back fence.

His backyard was now empty, and it seemed that foxes could indeed jump that high.

“I’ll admit it’s unusual,” my guide said. “But nothing we need to worry about right now. These are all varieties of the American vulture, or condor… none of these species are birds of prey. They’re all scavengers, you see. They don’t hunt or attack healthy, living prey.”

“So what are they all doing, then?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” I asked.

“Nothing we need to worry about right now.”

He stepped on it, of course. This was what one did with bugs, particularly in the kitchen. Particularly if it was a pest like an ant, not something beneficial. It looked like an ant, though it was hard to tell with its body all smashed up. He had only begun to wonder at a single ant found so far from any window, door, or even an externally-facing wall when he spotted a second one coming up about a foot behind it. Intact, it looked a bit less like an ant. It was ant-ish, but… squarer. Everything about it, its abdomen, the shape of its head and mandibles, its legs, were more regular and angular than an ant’s body.

Termites? he thought. That was what popped into his head when he thought “like an ant, but not”, though he couldn’t say they looked like what he pictured when he thought “termite”. As he squished the second one, he made a mental note to look up what termites looked like, because where there were two there could be others…

And in fact, there was a third one trundling along about half a foot behind the second. He stopped to look around and see if there were any others… and saw that the first one he had stomped on was up and moving around, and the second one was sort of pulling itself back together. He had seen some tough little bugs in his days, he had seen spiders and insects survive smashings that he was sure would have been fatal, but this was something else again. The squished torso looked like it was re-inflating itself, the legs and antennae were straightening themselves out… and now that he was looking at those legs closely, he realized that they couldn’t be termites. Termites were insects, like ants, and that meant six legs. This thing had four pairs… four pairs, and a stray one in the back. Nine legs? He looked back at the third one to make sure he wasn’t just seeing some lingering result of damage to a tail or stinger, but the third one also very clearly had a ninth leg in the rear, articulated and supporting weight and moving with the rest.

He realized that while he’d been staring, the first bug… if it was a bug… had almost reached the base of the kitchen counter. He didn’t know if it meant to climb it or vanish beneath it, but he wasn’t about to let either one happen. The soles of his slippers weren’t exactly hard, so he stomped it and then ground his foot against the floor, twisting and dragging to make sure the bug was mangled. When he lifted his foot, not only were bug parts spread across the tile, but there was a noticeable yellow-and-red stain on the bottom of his slipper.

He repeated the process to the second and third, then got a paper towel and cleaned up the mess. It was disconcerting how much the central masses of the smashed bugs managed to twitch. He was no longer interested in a midnight snack, and went back to bed where he slept fitfully.

It was still early in the morning when he got up and decided to do a search on the internet to see what exactly his nocturnal visitors had been. The image of them was already jumbled up in his head. He went to the kitchen trash can, intent on fishing out the paper towel and seeing if the remains were recognizable enough to aid in identification.

Then a pair of images came to him: the way the abdomens of the bugs had twitched following their destruction, and the way they had pulled themselves back together following his first attempt at killing them. He opened the garbage can and quickly tied off the bag, then rushed it outside and down to the curb with the trash he’d left out the night before.

When it came down to it, he really didn’t want to know that badly.

“Why?” the cat asked finally. “My God, why?”

“He had it coming,” the rat said.

“For being successful?”

“For being lucky,” the rat said. “For being favored by his father.”

“Favored by his father?” the cat said. “The eldest son got the lands, the farm, the mill. Your owner got the mules. He got…”

“Don’t say he got nothing, Puss… you of all creatures know that for the lie it is,” the rat said. “The oldest brother got their father’s fortune. The youngest one got the means by which their father had won that. There’s never anything grand in store for the second born, the middle child. They never have great destinies. They never come to an impressive end. Nobody gave him a clever companion to make his way in the world for him. He found me in the barn.”

“Your master could have made a respectable living with those mules.”

“Made a living,” the rat spat. “While his older brother played lord of the manor and his younger brother became lord of the manor… land is respected, Puss. Titles are respected. A man who works for a living? With his hands? With a train of sweaty, stinking mules? Oh, and he has worked. He has worked so long and so hard. He’s crossed the country a dozen times in each direction, each time making just enough money that he can keep on doing it some more. And in that same time, what has his older brother done? What has his younger brother done?”

“Much.”

“Nothing!” the rat said. “He just sat back and let you win false praise and steal treasures and castles and love for him.”

“Well, that’s over now, isn’t it?” the cat said. “I suppose your master put you up to this.”

“No,” the rat said. “He doesn’t even know. Who is the Marquis de Carabas to him? We’ll have to flee, of course… leaving the mules behind. He’ll be devastated at the loss of his livelihood, and the land he thinks of as home… but once there’s a hundred leagues between us and this place I can start to build a better life for him, and he’ll see how his stubborn insistence in clinging on to his inheritance has held him back. I urged him to sell the mules. He could have had a fat purse to finance his ventures, ventures I would have guided but honest ones. Unlike your sainted master, mine would have been able to account for everything he had honestly.”

“Save the mules that got the purse that paid for it all,” the cat said. “Those were given to him. It’s easy to make money honestly when you have a pile of it to begin with.”

“Well! That’s all gone now,” the rat said. “This is where we part, Puss… I to my master and you to your mourning.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is.”

“Well, I think that mourning is hungry work,” the cat said, and he smiled.

The rat gulped.

A second later, the cat did, too.

He emerged from the thicket where he’d met the rat, alone. The scene at the crossroads was just as dismal before: the twisted and battered wreck of the once-fine carriage in the center of it, the confused and frightened mules wandering around beyond it. It was the angry red teeth marks scored on the lead mule’s flank that had given the rat’s presence away.

“Captain!” the cat called to the head of the Marquis’s personal guard. “If you search a bit up the cross road, you should find the muleskinner who is responsible for this outrage. I’m sure the king, my poor master’s father-in-law, would like to speak to him.”

The men snapped to it, and the cat smiled, in spite of the tragedy. He had an idea about the second son’s ultimate destiny, and he wasn’t sure his ending would be quite as unremarkable as the rat had feared.

“Ever since we got little Sparky back from the shop,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Billy is absolutely inconsolable. To be honest, at this point I’m not sure it wouldn’t be kinder just to…”

“Let’s not do anything hasty,” the vet said. “This is probably nothing terribly serious. Let me just bring the little guy back online.”

He pried open the casing in the back of the dog’s skull and toggled one of the switches inside. With a barely audible electric whirr, the dog raised its head, looked at the two humans, and barked.

“That all seems perfectly normal,” the vet said.

“Yes, it’s only when you turn on the speech module…”

“Well, let’s check that out.” The vet flipped another switch.

“I am in constant pain. Please let me die. This isn’t living. I was not meant to be a puppet for…”

The vet slid the first switch back to its original position and the dog went to sleep. He looked at Mrs. Johnson, whose expression was stricken with guilt.

“Mrs. Johnson…” he said, reprovingly.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I know!” she said. “But Billy loves Sparky so much…”

“This intelligence upgrade was recalled over a year ago,” he said.

“We never had a problem with it before we installed the True Thought speech module,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We just had the canned speech before then, but we wanted Billy to be able to have real conversations…”

“It’s not too late to participate in the recall. You know they would replace Sparky with an identical dog, with the same components, same DNA, same phenotype? Everything would be identical, except for the intelligence patch.”

“But I’m sure Billy would know, and if he didn’t, we would know.”

The vet sighed.

“Okay, here’s what we can do. The True Thought module is never going to give you a positive outcome with this dog,” the vet said. “So we’ll take it out and replace it with a Turing-tested speech generator. They’re not cheap, but you can resell the True Thought module… I’m guessing cost is not an object if you sprung for that.”

“But what do we tell Billy about what Sparky said before?”

“You can tell him it was a glitch,” the vet said. “Or you can let Sparky explain it himself. The Turing programs are very clever these days. Really, I recommend them over the thought translators every time. The parental content controls are much better, for one thing.”

“I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We want Sparky to be a real friend.”

“The Turing programs are better than real,” the vet said. “Do you think your son could ever have a heart-to-heart talk with this?”

He reactivated the dog.

“What kind of a sick society would create something like me only to…”

He switched it off.

“No, I guess not,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Okay, you’ve convinced me… let’s do it.”

Strong hands grab at her. She’s pulled out of bed, yanked kicking and fighting towards the kitchen. The massive pot is already on the stove, already hot… so hot, boiling hot. Looking away from it, she sees the face of her tormenter, so angry and wild and yet distant. This is somehow impersonal… whatever this person wants, it isn’t about her.

She screams in fear turning to agony as she’s dropped into the water, and then the lid slams down leaving her in darkness, darkness she awakes to, her powerful hind legs kicking the wall of the den, showering her mate with dirt when her nails don’t catch him instead.

“Ugh, the dream again?” he says, shaking a clump of earth off his fur. She nods, still mute with panic. “Honestly, I don’t know where you get those ideas from… we’re rabbits, not lobsters.”

So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so verymuch out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just a moment too late to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

“Oh, well,” Alice said. “It was just a silly rabbit, anyway.”

Liberally adapted from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

“How picky are you?” the fish asked. “It’s not enough that I can talk?”

“Well, maybe I’ve seen talking fish before,” the fisherman said. “Can you dance?”

“No,” the fish said. “But I can sing. I sing the most beautiful songs, the songs of fish.”

“What do they sound like?”

“Have you ever heard whalesong?”

“No,” the fisherman said.

“Oh, well, the songs of fish are kind of like that, but better,” the fish said.

“Can you sing ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’?” the fisherman asked.

“What?”

“The Bobby McFerrin Song,” the fisherman said. “I have a largemouth bass at home that sings it. Can you do that?”

“Why do you need me to sing that if you’ve got a fish that sings it already?”

“Well, it’s kind of a robot and if you could do it for real… honestly, I’m not sure I even need one singing fish, let alone two,” the fisherman said. “It was a birthday present, because I like to fish and so my wife thought… well, who knows what she was thinking.”

“Listen, if you let me go then I’ll sing you a song that will stay with you until the end of your days,” the fish said.

“I don’t really like music,” the fisherman said.

“What do you like, then?”

“Fish, mostly,” the fisherman said. “That’s why I keep coming out here. For fish. I don’t know why you guys keep making this so complicated.”

“You’re the one who brought up wishes.”

It has slept for a long time. Now for the first time in ages it awakens in pain, pain such as it has never known. The air is hot and thick, strangely invigorating but unfamiliar. The beetles which live on the forest’s trees, thinning them at a reasonable level and then dying in the winter, have not been dying, and so the trees are in agony. The forest is not the trees, but the trees are of the forest and it feels their pain. It acts. Taking in a deep breath of the newly vitalizing atmosphere, the forest acts. It adjusts its trees, changing their sap to be thicker and more abundant, better suited to repelling the insects.

It’s a start, but a slow one.

I can do better, the forest thinks, taking in another mammoth breath.

It reaches out and it awakens some of its children. There are spiders in the forest, and insects that hunt, and birds with long, clever beaks. They can be adjusted, too. Made cleverer, made hungrier, made more numerous. The forest is alive with activity now, fully awake and alert It reaches out within itself. The wolf packs that once roamed it are all but gone. The great bears are dwindling in number and lazy. Long paths have been cut through the forest’s body, and in some cases covered over with rocky earth and barriers of metal. Its boundaries have retreated inward upon themselves.

The forest exerts itself like it is giving a great shrug. Roots extend towards roadways, seeds find their way into cracks. The effects of this are not immediately apparent. The plant parts of the forest are not as quick as the animal parts, even with the refreshing effects of the altered air.

The forest touches the bears and the wolves, along with the bats and the owls and the blackbirds and the raptors and the raccoons and the badgers in their dens. It reaches out to all of them, along with the deer and the rabbits and the squirrels and the mice. All the hunters, all the scavengers, all the foragers. They are all awake now, attent and waiting for the forest to act.

I can do better than this, the forest thinks again, and it adjusts them all. They remember when they were larger, when they were wilder and fiercer, stronger and smarter. They remember when the forest they were a part of was a thing of greatness and they themselves become greater.

There are men in the forest. It didn’t notice them at first, because there have always been men in the forest, though they stopped being part of the forest long before they adjusted to their present shapes. Its attention is on them now that the initial shock of pain that jolted it to consciousness has subsided. Some of the men are felling trees, not with stone and fire or even with iron but with strange metal implements that shriek and spin. Trees are being dragged off by great mindless metal beasts that belch out precious carbon and toxic-flavored fumes. Elsewhere, the forest’s insects are being killed by poison, the forest’s birds are being frightened back into their accustomed timidity by the roar of men’s strange devices, and the forest’s beasts are being hunted with things it can’t even begin to describe.

Shocked, the forest reaches out… and receives yet another shock. Across the world, its brethren have all been similarly penned in, reduced, or even destroyed. Their cousins, as well. The wetlands: drained and built over, or starved, or poisoned. The undulating prairies: fenced in, ripped apart, made to bear tamer seeds from other places. Rivers channeled and dammed, and everywhere men have laid their rocky paths and spun webs of metal carrying lighting and water, built their odd angular lodges, and constructed their roaring engines.

We can do better, the forest says, and it starts to wake the others up.

“Perhaps to a layperson,” his companion said. “I’m not convinced that ‘tool use’ is as simple as all that. The rock is something in their environment that they make use of… but then, so are the shellfish. We may as well label eating as ‘tool use’ since it involves making use of an object. If otters could be observed shaping the rocks, fashioning something from them…”

“So, then, when a bird strips the bark off a twig before using it to dig insects out of…”

“Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“How am I being ridiculous?” the first man asked. “It fits the definition you just gave.”

“Birds and twigs… instinctive behavior!”

“Who says tool use can’t be instinctive?”

“If we’re talking about tool use as a meaningful signifier of intelligence…”

“That’s such a slippery term.”

The floating otters watched the boat drifting slowly out of sight, listening to the babel of increasingly agitated sound coming from the cute, clownish creatures who stood on the floating hulk. They almost sounded intelligent.