Virtual Quill

Ms. Eyeshine’s relationship with the mouse ran off the road when he discovered that his parents had become prey several years ago during a Caliban Academy hunting match in which her brother Sam was the coach.
One can hardly blame him. It was a tragic episode, but legal under the rules of our society. The action was anonymous, and the field of play was clearly marked. Within its boundaries, anything is fair game. That doesn’t make it any less painful for the families of the victims, of course.
Still, I would hope that the mouse would find some forgiveness in his heart. Aby didn’t kill them, nor did her brother. He was the coach; not the actual predator. (Who was? It’s possible, of course, that it was Rudy. Or Fiona. I don’t have that information and I don’t want to ask.)
Last night Dad went to the mouse’s residence with a plan. I’ll report next week on how that went.
Meanwhile, here at Beige University the sad news was made official that our poisoned oak trees will not survive and will have to be replaced. The plan is to replant new trees. As part of that process, we were visited by university representatives this week, who know that we had recently replanted a living tree in the area, with success. They just wanted to know how the process went, and if there were any unexpected details that arose. We were able to answer everything to their satisfaction and they left feeling upbeat.

While back at home Kell struggles with the prospect of losing her best friend (or at least having to share her), I’ve been given access to everything the birds know about instinct loss and how humans affect it.
All along I’ve been researching it from a genetic standpoint, while the bird scientists saw it as a “disease” requiring a “cure.” It certainly seemed serious when the portal was thrown out of balance around the time of Danielle’s wedding, and species all over the world began losing their instincts.
Thing is, no disease spreads that fast, and there was no vector to explain it. It had to be something that all creatures already shared on a genetic level, and the presence of humans was simply a trigger.
Here at Beige I’m given free lab time as part of my master’s degree studies, so I’m able to pursue this line of research. The birds did accumulate a lot of data that I’m able to apply to my findings which are leading in some promising directions. Hopefully (for both worlds) I’ll be able to pin down to exact mechanisms in play.

While all this stuff is going on with dimensional portals and such, life goes on back in Domain. The news there concerns Kell’s feline friend Aby Eyeshine, who seems to have fallen for a mouse. Another possible pair for the Inter-Species Relationship Support Group!
It started back in October when Mark Meadowvole repeatedly brought his Camaro to Aby with suspension problems. Aby, out of professional pride, couldn’t figure out why her repairs kept failing. She followed him one night and found the reason: he and other mice were racing their vehicles around corn mazes.
This fired her competitive juices, and she offered her services to transform his machine into vehicle capable of making 90-degree turns in tight confines. She’s spent the last three months giving the car a radical makeover, and in the process she and Mark fell in love.
Last night was the big race, and Mark won after his rival Sam Sewerrat was DQ’ed for using a GPS to guide him through the maze to the cheese. Aby and Mark...celebrated.
As you may recall, Aby is officially married to her career. Some have wondered if this constitutes infidelity, but I happen to believe it complements her relationship to her auto repair business. It may, in fact, raise it to another level. At the very least it opens up a whole new client base: mice who would have never previously considered seeking help from a cat.

I must admit that I was surprised by the squirrel’s choice. Before dawn when Fenton and I were about to go to bed there was a soft knock at the door. It was the squirrel, and he said he was choosing to stay in the Wild. And here I had a name and identity all picked out for him.
Still, it was his wish so we’re abiding by it. Even so, I explained that being allowed to stay on this side of the portal comes with certain responsibilities. He understood that; he knows he doesn’t belong here and that his presence is a privilege.
The first responsibility is a homing tag. It’s embedded in his ear, and it’s unobtrusive. You have to be looking for it to see it, and then it appears to be jewelry. We strongly suggested that he stay in the vicinity of the university and he said he had no problem with that.
The other responsibility is to be on call when Ms. Aura or other human has to visit our world. He would cross over to provide balance, and stay on their ship as a human until it was time to return. That’s it. Other than that he’s free to live the life of a tree rodent.
He left, visibly happy. I was perplexed, but then Fenton reminded me about what he said about hanging around the university. I then realized how many squirrels we see all over the place. Perhaps...he’s found a pretty young she-squirrel with a lovely bushy tail?
After his departure I checked our bank account. I was surprised to see a significant deposit made by the Group, and I assumed it was for the year, but when I asked my condor contact he said we’d be getting one every month.

Fortunately Fenton and I aren’t big party goers, so neither of us were hung over when a five-bird delegation showed up on our doorstep. They were led by my previous NASA mentor, the condor, and presented us with our first assignment as members of their Group.
They started by saying they prefer the term Group over other labels. Apparently some refer to them as a conspiracy, which seems to wound them. While secretive, they certainly don’t see themselves as having nefarious designs. (And judging by the condition of their vehicles they don’t seem to be in it for the money.)
Our initial job seems well suited for us. The squirrel that I harbored for years with my two mice turned out to be a former human. They’ve confirmed his former identity, and are allowing him to stay here. (Apparently someone else is balancing his presence on the other side of the portal.) They’d like to keep tabs on him, so that when a member of the human Group comes over for some reason, he can make a temporary trip over to provide balance during that time.
I lost track of him after he asked to be released a while back, but he’s currently living wild in the vicinity of the college. Our job is to contact him and ask if he’s like to join civilization. He’d be much easier to track that way.
After the delegation left, Fenton and I went directly to the hollow tree he was using as a home/storage unit. He was suspicious to see us again, but then he was always like that. (Now I know why.) We gave him the offer; he’d just have to report to the Species Registry and the bureaucrats would do the rest. The Group has arranged for a job for him if he desires.
Like us, he has one week to decide.

It’s Christmas Day, and as I write this we’re snowed in due to the storm that paralyzed the university. Only idiots would go out in such weather, which is of course what Fenton and I did last night.
Long story short; the storm knocked out the power to the bee hive in the elm across the street. Since the elm is (somehow) connected to Tree, Tree was able to warn us and we got the bees over to our place before they froze.
To pass the time until their power returned they built wooden toys. Fenton and I took to the air in the middle of the storm, dodging gusts, freezing temperatures and owls. At the termite orphanage we dumped the toys down the chimney, giving the termite children a very happy meal.
The bees are now back in their warm home, and we’re ready to go to bed. We’ve sent greetings to our families back in Domain, and found a nice gift of honey from the bees. It’s been a pleasant respite from the drama involving Ms. Aura and her Group, which will pick back up next week. For now, however, we sleep.

After Catherine departed, Fenton relayed to me the memories of his time at MicroTalon. I wrote it all down as they kept flooding back to him.
We can’t corroborate it with the late Vin Vulpen, and his deer co-worker has long since vanished into the anonymity of the Wild, but Ray Flambeau is still around. We called him and Tammy, and it seems that Catherine had just left their lighthouse before heading out to sea (and presumably, to the portal). She’d left a check for the same amount she’d given Fenton, but without an explanation. We professed similar mystification.
Fenton could even recall some of the code he’d written at MicroTalon, that is now somehow keeping our predator/prey society from tearing itself to shreds. Eventually his memory arrived at the moment we rendezvoused with him in Redmond WA on New Year’s Eve. At that point all of the gaps were filled in.
That left the decision squarely in our laps. After going back and forth for the past week, we decided tonight that joining the Group was our destiny. My life, with its bizarre coincidences and events (an accident at sea throwing me as an infant through the portal, as if I’d been aimed at it), seems to have led me to this moment. Fenton supported the decision, and we accessed the URL given to us.
An innocent-looking page asked for a Username and Password, and we followed the instructions given to us by Catherine. Our laptop’s webcam activated, and we found ourselves face to face with a condor. I gasped in surprise; it was one of my instructors at NASA when I went up in the shuttle.
He greeted me warmly and welcomed us to the Group. Our printer sprang to life, and two QR code images appeared. We were to laminate them and carry them with us at all times. Scanning those from any Smartphone would immediately connect us with the Group.
I asked what happened next, and he said they were taking the holidays off and would get back to us in January. Until then their website would display a game for our amusement.
Yep. Angry Birds.

I’ll do my best to relate events clearly and concisely. It’s hard, however, when one’s world is turned upside down.
Ms. Aura arrived at our house alone, looking the same as ever in her black feathers. She insisted that as adults we call her Catherine now, and gave us a summary of her life as a human on the other side of the portal. She showed photos of herself and Nigel as humans, and her human husband Greg (the counterpart of the bear captain who married Danielle and George Fennec). More importantly to Fenton and myself were the pictures of her six-month-old child Ursala.
Ursala is human in every way, except for having bear fur and an ursine nose. No one, including me, understands the logic that accounts for both her and the human Francis. Perhaps the portal crossing causes a completely random element to enter one’s genes as they’re passed to the next generation.
That was only a warm-up to the main event: the revelation that birds not only control access to and from dimensional portals, but that they pretty much control...everything. Or else, they used to, until they enabled computers to keep our predator/prey society from spinning out of control. I was aghast, but there was more to come. Fenton suddenly got a blank look on his face, and then yelled at Catherine, “You held me hostage for months!”
Wide-eyed, he recounted to me how he, Vin Vulpen and Ray Flambeau had been forced to work at MicroTalon with a huge team creating that very computer system. Catherine confirmed everything and gave him a check for his back pay, with interest.
I was livid, recalling my mental anguish when I thought Fenton was dead, and even worse, when I thought he was alive and no one would believe me. I don’t often lose my temper, but I did then. Catherine accepted and acknowledged every drop of my fury as I unloaded on her.
Eventually it was Fenton who asked, “What now?” Catherine told us we were now full members of something she called the Group, which until now consisted entirely of feathered species. She provided a list of contacts and passwords to their inner circle.
We asked why she isn’t worried that we’d simply tell the world about their secrets. She said we were free to do so, but no one would believe us. (Coming from a couple of SF geeks like us, true.) Fenton asked about our human friends Nick and Ki. She said she didn’t know, but we could tell she was deeply concerned about something to do with them.
Then she was gone. We have one week to decide whether to join the Group. It’s going to take longer than that to screw my head back on straight.

Ms. Aura is on her way. Next week.
She’ll be a turkey buzzard again, and traveling alone without Nigel. I assume she’ll be asking for any further information I have about that squirrel, but I suspect that it will be more than that.
For the past few weeks I’ve doing research on her, and the less I find the deeper I dig. I’ve finally unearthed some files linking her to MicroTalon. It was shortly after that discovery that I heard from her; it was as if that action on my part raised an alarm of some sort.
Fenton and I never discuss MicroTalon, and not just because all our equipment is Carrot Computer-based. Years ago, he disappeared and was declared dead by everyone except me. He eventually resurfaced at MicroTalon headquarters of all places, with no memory of the intervening period, under some rather unusual circumstances that have never been fully explained. He’s never been able to piece together any recollections; just some vague disturbing feelings. I don’t want to upset him, so I don’t press him on the subject.
That may no longer be possible, which concerns me as Fenton’s well-being is my top priority. I’ve arranged that our meeting be in a public place, a loud restaurant near campus. I don’t know what to expect.

I feel lucky to be alive as I write this, although I'm getting ahead of my story.
It all started when we all received an invitation to attend a Thanksgiving feast in the underground rabbit warren. This was a special event because previously, rabbits had never had anything to be thankful for...until Kell took over Herd Thinners. That led to her employees never catching rabbits since they knew she was married to Dad and didn't want to offend her by catching in in-law...an echo of her own situation when she first married him.
Elanor stayed home to cook a real Thanksgiving meal, and the rest of us headed underground (escorted by Wendell) for a carrot-based dinner. The other purpose of the feast was the dedication of the new Great Hall, built to accommodate the booming population that was no longer being hunted.
Amid thousands of rabbits, Kell felt enormously guilty since she never gave any instructions to her staff to stop hunting rabbits; they did that on their own. She was feeling like a total fraud when an earthquake hit.
It was a 5.8, nothing that folks on the West Coast even break stride for, but a major event here on the Eastern Seaboard. It nearly had tragic consequences as the new Great Hall wasn't built to code, and began collapsing.
The rabbits (except for Dad and Gran...interesting) were frozen in fear. That's when Kell truly became a hero...by baring her fangs and scaring the multitudes out of their panicked state and toward the exits. Everyone had made it out when the ceiling came down.
Lawsuits aplenty are already being files against the construction company, but thankfully none of them will involve a loss of life. Meanwhile, Kell's status among rabbits is now genuinely deserved.

To my utter astonishment I received a message from a person I assumed I’d never hear from again: Catherine Aura. A series of Emails originating from anonymizing IP domains contained details that effectively established her identity to me...and also made it impossible to trace her. That would be difficult anyway, since she says that she and her son Nigel are now happily human and living on the other side of the portal.
She then requested my help in finding out the identity of the squirrel I kept caged for a number of years. A while back I released him as soon as he requested that I do so, and I hadn’t had any contact with him since.
Apparently it turns out that he’s a former human just like myself and Danielle. The portal is currently balanced due to a female kestrel who has crossed, but Catherine would still like to know the squirrel’s former identity in order to find out how he accessed the portal.
Neither myself nor the mice who shared the cage with him were able to offer much in the way of clues; he was very secretive. I gave all the information that I could.
Then I started investigating Catherine. I found...nothing. It takes a lot to make someone vanish in this day and age, and I’m beginning to put together a picture of an organization much more extensive than I’d thought. I’d assumed she’d belonged to a small cadre tasked only with guarding the portal and maintaining the balance between the two dimensions, but what if it’s larger than that?

Trouble often arises when one least expects it, and this week it came just after Dad switched lawyers. As I mentioned last week, he needed to find a new law firm after the old one raised its rates. An alternative presented itself in the form of the parents of Coney’s friend Lin, the Lees.
They’re tigers, unlike most lawyers who are of the aquatic persuasion. They both showed tremendous fortitude in gaining their degrees in an underwater habitat. The wife, Mei Li, will do most the Hare Link work.
Almost immediately, Dad was sued by a bear that he rebuffed in a hostile takeover attempt. Traditionally, any prey species is entitled to use whatever means necessary to defend themselves, but this bear felt that Dad shouldn’t have used his fists. (I think what Dad mainly wounded was his pride.)
His rather novel argument was that Dad’s use of fists violated the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. What many people today use the original intent argument for is to justify their current positions, whatever that may be. However, what we're absolutely sure of is that the Founding Fathers wanted to create a living document that could adapt to changing realities. To this end, they brilliantly succeeded.
Mei Li came up with a clever way of getting the case dismissed, saying that the bear shouldn’t have used the judicial system to attack Dad. He skulked off to hibernate.

Hare Link has settled into a small, reliable existence as the ISP for Domain and its vicinity. It has a long-term contract to provide broadband service to the city government, and that seal of approval has led to a decent percentage of the local population using it for their hosting needs. Within its small pond it’s profitable.
Fenton and I still oversee its hardware and tech issues, which sometimes cause moments of panic but usually mean just regular maintenance. Our salaries allow us to have a higher standard of living than most of our fellow college students. (For instance, we’re free of student debt, for which we’re eternally grateful.)
Dad told me that one problem has arisen: the company’s legal arrangement. The law office of White, Mako, Hammerhead and Bull has been contracted by Hare Link since Dad started the ISP, but now their hourly rates have risen to the point where he can’t afford them any longer. (Having to drive all the way to the shore to meet with them is another expense!) But, a small business like Hare Link has to have some way of getting legal counsel, so what can you do?

In a small college town like Beige, Halloween is different from how it is in the suburban bedroom community of Domain. Back home, little kids prowl the streets from approximately five o’clock until nine, invading the normal sleepy routine of the neighborhood with their zombie-like candy demands.
(BTW, there was no Halloween celebration in the rabbit warren. Everyone down there is already ruled by fear throughout the year, so there’s no need of a special night to focus on it.)
Here at Bege, kids are in short supply and largely confined to the Family Housing Dorm which has its own self-contained Halloween parties. Otherwise, the offspring of university professors are the only ones going door to door with the classic trick-or-treating rituals, and sometimes I feel they’re all doing it ironically.
Nevertheless, we have our bowl of candy ready. Being nocturnal, we have to get up before we normally do in order to accommodate the first arrivals. Of course, the good news is that we still have that whole “day” ahead of us when it’s over.
I carved a pumpkin and stuck a number of my quills in it to make it look like me. I’m just not sure how to make one resemble Fenton.
Oops! There’s the doorbell!

Kell’s latest Herd Thinners initiative concerns the insectivores she hired in the spring. That strategy was a success, as it created a new revenue stream for the company in selling to those with my diet. The question was always, what happens in the fall when the insects die out? Instead of laying off the insectivores she’s established an extermination service to keep them employed.
Customers with an insect infestation (and who prefer not to eat the invaders) will call Herd Thinners and a crew of bats, shrews and hedgehogs will show up to devour the problem. A simple, elegant solution, and very much in a character for Kell.
Of course, there are many existing extermination services and they’re not happy, to say the least. Often, a new competitor in a market endures threats from the established entities. This is where the standard Herd Thinners employees come in, to provide protection for the insectivore staff. Nobody is going to argue with a wolf, especially one who is bored during the winter months after the herds have migrated.
Upon its announcement there were mixed reviews from the financial speculators, and the company’s stock fluctuated. However, it was a big success when it was finally rolled out, so as usual Kell had the last laugh.