I was just another animal in a cage to be sacrificed. For a task that might or might not work. For the Company. They had to send the one, if they could. Get the one back. Start over if they couldn’t. Easier than building more. Open a way. Close a way. I should have gone insane but I was a fox, not a human. I was only made to last four years. I was used to death, in that way, through the generations.

I was intelligent already. They tried to make me more human. Intelligent in the way humans call themselves intelligent. So I held on deep to fox. They couldn’t risk a human, but they wanted a human response. Apes and dogs, rats and cats—all died. But a fox? A fox knows a burrow. A fox digs a hole in the ground, a fox jumps through the hole it created, pulls the hole in after it. Where is the fox now?

They made my brain more distributed. Stave in my skull and still my feet could think, carry me from danger, devise a strategy, chart the coordinates home. Turned me half into equation, one that could adapt to destination.

“All flesh is quantum.” One torturer to another, conversing over the half corpse. Who could hear them. Understand them. Could have leapt up and torn out at least one throat before the end.

But I was smarter than that.

As the aliens hovered above me, tinkering with me. Syringed. Rolled over. Shaved. Dipped. Banded. Sent forth.

Was I the first fox? Or just the last? I would never know.

Charlie in the Corner, I called him, once I knew what language was. Son of the head researcher. The one who always watched, recommended never did, back then. He was bright and white and shiny and fresh. Not yet monstrous in appearance. He must have thought himself fresh and full of life. To me, already, he was full of death. Burgeoning with maggots.

Charlie the Watcher. Scribbling in his journal. Good for nothing. Except he liked the guts of it. He liked to get in the guts. The autopsies of what went wrong. I noticed him for that.

The fervor. The enthusiasm. There were times I thought Charlie had created this “father,” that the father was just the son’s puppet, a mask or disguise.

It was from Charlie’s worm-mouth that I first heard Nocturnalia, but only later understood what he meant.

All the smells of death and decay in that place. I hated that place because it turned the smells foxes love into smells a fox could come to hate.