My eyes were the Company’s eyes. I was their creature. I’d be caged again. I’d be chained. But I was a fox, nothing human, even now, and so I ran across that meadow like a blue flame. I ran and ran like something free and something natural and something that knew his destination. I hunted there in that strange place as if the past had never happened, could not touch me.

Until the next time. Until a hundred next times. Oh, I could not say there was no sting, no hind-thought, no scratch of leg on ear. But the grass felt so good. The grass felt so good.

By mistake, they’d gotten it right enough the first time.

Not the second. Not the third. Not the fourth.

A room is no longer there. Does it still exist?

All the false, wrong coordinates I would occupy. Occupying spaces I wasn’t meant to occupy. As they perfected the process. Screaming into the dirt. Screaming into space. Pulled under and through. Dissected. Disembodied. Sent out again.

They even made me like it, sometimes. They made me think of burrows. Of the underground. Of being an explorer. My first human thought. They petted me. They fussed over me. They made me feel brave. And when they tried to pry out my mind, instead they opened up theirs to me. Tunnels. Burrows. I dug my way into them and out into the light.

So I died and then they solved me again, as fox, and I lived again in time to be sent back, to another part of the map. As if I were compass and creature both. There came a whine in the tissue, in the sinews. I feel it still. From the stress of it. If I had not gotten free. If I had not stepped free of it. I might be dying still. Resurrected still.

I couldn’t stop them from extracting the intel like sapphires hidden behind my eyes. In my brain. Extracting them with pliers. I was the intent. Shining darkly on their sensors. Reporting back. Through my skin. Though I didn’t want to. Inhabited by the relics of worms and leeches and other things that lived inside of me. For a time.

But I grew strong in my invisible globe. They sought to un-fox me, but I out-foxed them. And in the end, they seeded their realities with me. By mistake. Too many microbes and parasites and symbiotes in their broth. Unintended ecosystems that spoke to me.

I remember Charlie, when I returned desiccated, husked, and they put me back together, gathered coordinates and data from me. Charlie did not in those days have an X by his name or over his eyes, sported not a bat head but instead a kind of smooth soft whiteness that wobbled like an imperfect satellite in decaying orbit.

“Was it beautiful?”