3It was a lot safer that way.
After all, the bird said reasonably, people weren't supposed to talk to animals. And he did it all the time. The bird had seen what happened to people who said they heard voices, or talked to what people considered things incapable of conversation. They were put into uncomfortable jackets and locked up in big white buildings and never allowed to go out again. Which, granted, in the city that never slept... it wasn't exactly a hardship. But then, the bird reminded him whenever he thought along those lines, he would never get to talk to another animal again. Not even a cockroach, because a bird he knew had been in one of those buildings once, as a chick, and hadn't seen a single bug in the place.
Frankly, Geoffrey thought that the bird hadn't been looking hard enough. He'd been in places with small white rooms and lots of needles before, and he'd seen a lot of bugs. Oh, not in the places where the doctors worked, of course not. But in the cafeterias, in the restrooms, and sometimes if you were really unlucky, in the beds... those were the prime breeding ground for insect life. He'd been on the recieving end of the insect life; he'd even had a bug crawl all the way into his ear canal once. It had buzzed its wings frantically, sending a horrible thump-thump-thumping into his brain and giving him a headache that was unbelievable. His screams had finally brought the doctors, and they had extracted the bug. He still had nightmares about it. For that matter, he had nightmares about the white place most of the time.
The bird pecked more harshly at the top of the man's head. It could tell he was getting himself agitated, thinking about the white place with sharp points. The bird reminded him that no matter how many bugs tried to come into his apartment, he and the other birds could take care of them. And what about the rats? Geoffrey asked. Well, the rats are your problem, the bird said with what would have been a shrug if it had had shoulders to manage it. Geoffrey shuddered. He could talk to rats too, but he didn't get along with them at all.
The bird on his head gave an almost human sigh and settled itself into his hair for a nap. There was no use in talking to the silly human, it always insisted on upsetting itself, usually with the end result that it curled up in its nest in the corner and sat there for hours. This was mostly all right by the bird because it meant that he stood still long enough for the bird to perch and have a decent conversation with the man. But there was still something not quite right about it. Ultimately what it came down to was that humans should be with their own kind. The bird was a corvid, it was more intelligent than the average and could do simple math. The man hadn't been able to talk to animals when he was very, very little, just out of the egg, and then after he had gone into the white place he had been. Two plus two equals four.
Personally, the bird didn't understand why humans would want to talk to animals. All the species had gotten along for as long as anyone could remember, human or animal, without communicating more than 'get away from me' or 'mmm tasty.' The bird didn't see why any of that needed to change just beceause the humans decided they could play around with themselves. They were an arrogant species, even more so than the raptors or the dogs in the bird's opinion, and they meddled far too much in what didn't need meddling in.
Oh well. Whyever they'd done it, they'd done it, and now Geoffrey was a pretty useless wreck of a human being, although he might have made a good bird. The corvid fell asleep, wondering if the humans would change themselves into birds if they could.
Geoffrey felt the bird go to sleep in the back of his mind, and out of consideration for the creature he stopped rocking back and forth. He still worried about everything... his job, what people would say if he actually went out into the world and started talking to people. He knew that he'd start talking to the animals as well, and answering them, and then he'd be locked up as insane. Or worse, studied like a freak. Put into a circus like some sort of bizarre modern-day Dr. Doolittle. None of those alternatives seemed like a good idea.
Staying safe in his tiny room in the apartment seemed like an excellent idea.
Outside the closed door he could hear what sounded like a small party... many voices, the clinking of glasses and plates, a movie in the background. His host had probably invited some people over for films and food. He thought of the bird's caustic statements from earlier, and for one second he actually wished he could join them. Then reality reasserted itself.
He would never go out of the room, except to work. He would never be able to lead a normal life; that had ended when he had set foot outside the building with the white rooms and white walls. He had almost gone insane from the sheer amount of information that came pouring into his mind. He would never be able to look at the world the same way the average human being did, which ruled him out for any sort of a life that would even pass as normal, banal. He was an outsider, almost (if one looked at it in the right way) a threat to the human race. And Geoffrey had enough of his sanity left to know very well what happened to people that the rest of the world considered that threatening. He would never see daylight again. And not in the good way.
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It was Paul's first day (or rather, night) on the job and already he was starting to have a sense of the weird overtake him. He'd taken the security job to get away from people, granted, and it had accomplished exactly that. The only other human beings he saw were the other night watchmen, and most of them were either as taciturn as he was or disinclined to talk to an outsider who kept to himself. That was fine by Paul; the less people who saw him, the better.
After all, he didn't want anyone seeing him amuse himself by making DNA helixes in the air with pebbles and bits of debris.
The first few days it had become a regular sport with him. He'd brought a small tin of paints one day and telekinetically dipped the pebbles in the paint and floated them till they were dry. By the time his shift had ended he'd had a nice little collection of rocks with which to make pretty pictures in the air. People's faces, Escher-like patterns... he'd once attempted to make the entire Marilyn Monroe portrait by Andy Warhol, but he'd run out of pink halfway through. It was definitely a novel way to pass a night security shift, and he'd thought that maybe he'd finally found something useful he could do. And then he'd started getting funny looks from one of the security guards.
It wasn't even the normal kind of funny look. It was a really funny funny look, the kind that was furtive, surreptitious, as if the other man didn't want to draw attention to himself either. The kind of look that said 'I know you're doing something weird' but not in the way most people meant. Not hostile, merely puzzled.
Paul was sitting in the lobby and staring at his latest creation, made up of carefully shredded bits of coke bottle wrapper, when the man finally spoke to him.
"Why do you keep a collection of colored pebbles?"
Paul looked up. He could have sworn the man had said 'rookery' instead of collection, and his mind was only supplying the more familiar word because it didn't make sense otherwise. "Umm.. fun and games?" This could get ugly.
The man took a couple of steps forward, still staring at Paul intently. "That's not what he says."
Paul blinked. "Who?"
"He..." the man tilted his head to one side, almost as though listening to something, and then looked back at Paul. "Well, never mind. A friend. But... he says he's seen you do things with them."
Ooh, here it came. Well, with any luck, Paul could convince the man (who seemed to be slightly retarded in thought, or at least in speech) that he was seeing things. "Yeah, I play with them... I make shapes and stuff out of them..."
"He says you make them dance in the air."
Paul froze in the act of reaching for a piece of 'o.' "No I don't." It sounded so lame.
Up in the rafters a giant crow flapped its wings, cawing. Paul jumped and nearly fell out of his chair. "You're lying." He whipped his head around and stared at the man, who was suddenly a lot closer than he had been two seconds ago.
"No, really, I don't..." Paul gulped. This man did not look sane.
"He says that you do."
"Who says?"
The man tilted his head to one side again and held it there for a longer amount of time. Paul started to edge his seat backwards. Suddenly night security didn't seem like so much fun anymore. They were the only two in this warehouse, and it was entirely possible that if the strange man took it into his head to murder him that no one would hear it or discover the body until shift change tomorrow. And maybe not even then.
"You have to promise not to tell." The man was looking at him again, with eyes that were dark and intense and not entirely sane. "He says that if you promise not to tell it'll be all right. He says that you're not the same as they are either."
Paul blinked. "Who says?"
"The bird."
Paul looked up into the rafters at the crow that was fastidiously preening itself and ignoring them both. "The bird."
"Yeah."
"It's just a dumb bird..." he'd barely finished the sentence before it swooped down and perched on his head, slamming its beak into his skull. "Ow! Okay, okay, okay! It's not a dumb bird! It's a very smart bird! Einstein bird!" It pecked him one last time for good measure and then stopped.
"You shouldn't'a said that," the man said, smiling as the bird flew up onto his shoulder. "He's touchy." He tilted his head towards the bird and then looked back at Paul. "He says that you were in the place with the white rooms, too. That you were changed..."
And then, suddenly, Paul knew exactly what was going on, what the man was talking about. He remembered being pulled over on his way home from high school, years earlier, by a cop who had turned out not to be a cop. He remembered being gassed, drugged, locked into a room, forced to do all kinds of strange experiments with his new-found telekinesis. He remembered escaping, going underground, hiding... he remembered when his name was Corey.
Was this man one of them, too? Well, obviously he had some sort of ability that was different from his, something involving talking to animals. But ... he had to be. The similarities were too close for it all not to be connected.
"Yeah..." he said slowly, feeling as though he was coming out of a long, long dream. "Yeah. I was there. There's a lot of us who were there."
The man's eyes went wide at that, so wide that Paul thought they might pop right out of his sockets. "Really?"
He nodded slowly. "Yeah. There's a ... I don't know how many. A bunch of us who got out. And if we weren't the only ones... then who knows how many of us there are..." he was speaking half to himself and half to the other man, who seemed astonished that there could be someone else like him... that he wasn't a freak. Suddenly Paul knew how he felt, realizing that the past several years had found him feeling a great deal more alone than he'd thought.
The man stepped forward and tentatively put out his hand. "I'm Geoffrey..."
Paul snapped out of it and stepped up to meet him, shaking his hand. "I'm Paul..."