There Are No Cages Save For Ones We Make Ourselves

“Do you understand what happened to you? Why you are here now?’’ the little doctor says, reading from a clipboard.

There are lines in her voice just as well as the lines in her face. In front of her is a cage, a birdcage with whirring machinery on its front and its sides, and inside the birdcage is a little pigeon mottled in grey and white. The pigeon has brown eyes rimmed in gold. The little doctor has brown eyes as well. Hers are not rimmed in gold. They watch one another; the bird does not reply.

The little doctor was born with a very very slight destabilization of her own personal reality. It barely had an effect on her or her surroundings, except for a persistent sense of deja vu and reverse precognition (the ability to predict things after they happened.) The reality anchor attached to the birdcage is making her fillings throb in an unpleasant cyclic pulse. She wants to go home.

The little doctor would rather be anywhere else than sitting in front of this bird and waiting for it to talk to her, but here she is. There is a file somewhere on the computer in this warren of a site that tells her exactly what she is supposed to be looking at. The bird breathes in front of her, turning its head from side to side and then back again. One black eye, then the other black eye, then the first one again. It is supposed to be the purveyor of essokinetic reality-warping abilities so strong it killed almost a whole MTF containment team. It is sapient and has the approximate intelligence of an average adult human. With none of the morals. Because, well, it’s a bird.

It’s a stupid fucking pigeon.

Her hand is on the cage door before she really knows what she is doing. The pigeon watches, burbling a little in its throat. It’s a pigeon noise like anything you’d hear out on the street. The little doctor’s teeth have stopped hurting, but she doesn’t notice. She’s still staring at the pigeon. The pigeon stares back. Its eyes are bottomless. You could fall into them and be lost forever.

She reaches for the latch…

Incident Report 251218-A

A combination of personnel error and a mechanical fault in the mobile Hume stabilization device built into the anomaly’s mobile containment chamber resulted in catastrophic containment breach. The anomaly was thus able to fully utilize its essokinetic abilities while in contact with Dr. Riordan. This resulted in severe damage to the interview room, along with the death of Dr. Riordan due to the appearance of multiple pieces of enrichment apparatus from the anomaly’s main containment chamber inside her brain, lungs, heart, and liver. The anomaly was successfully recontained using portable Hume stabilizers.

Termination of the anomaly is to be scheduled, date pending.