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	Critters: A Pokemon Fanfic Scene 1: The Ogami Video People remember the circumstances surrounding traumatic events, sometimes with amazing levels of detail. For example, I remember with crystal clarity the moment when I heard about the Challenger disaster. I had been up very late the night before, working on a research paper that would partially determine whether or not I got my doctorate, and had just come staggering out of the bathroom and was on my way down the hall to the kitchen, in search of caffeine. My roomie, a chemical engineer taking a year off before going on to his doctoral work, stepped out into the hallway behind me, and instead of “Good morning”, or more likely “Nice of you to join us at this hour”, his greeting was, “Did you hear the news?” “Huh?” I managed, turning around without falling down, a feat that took pretty much everything I had at the moment. I glanced down at myself, drawing his attention to my clothing, limited at the moment to underwear and a beat-up old blue lab coat that I wore for a bathrobe. “Not awake yet,” I slurred, forcing the words through an uncooperative speech buffer. “The space shuttle blew up.” That got my eyes into focus long enough to see he was totally serious. I flipped into Grief, Stage One: Denial. “Say what?” He nodded, one slow bob of his head, and paced down the hall to where I stood. “On launch this morning. Something went wrong, and the shuttle exploded right after liftoff.” My knees went weak, and I sat down right where I was, on the arm of an easy chair that fortunately was behind me. “No way.” He nodded again, started to say something, then cut off with a twitch of his head, and strode around me to the TV. I moved to the threadbare couch at the far side of the room, dropped onto it heavily, fighting sleep and disbelief. And there was the network anchorman who was supposed to be covering the launch, fumbling with a plastic model of the shuttle as he tried to demonstrate what the network thought had happened. Mercifully, they cut away from him to a film clip of the launch before he embarrassed himself too badly. There was Challenger, on the launch pad, wreathed in vapor from its liquid oxygen-hydrogen fuel supply. The mission controller counted off the last few seconds, the engines ignited, and the shuttle lifted off the pad and rose through billows of steam like all the previous missions. Up, up, it rolled over onto its back in the standard profile – then a brilliant flash, and the massive contrail broke apart into half a dozen smaller ones, arcing off in different directions. A burst of static, then mission control came back on the air, stating that contact had been lost with Challenger. I can remember that moment, the smell of the apartment, the feel of the couch, the dim lighting in an apartment that belonged to a pair of academic hermits, the missing snap at the bottom of my lab coat, with no effort at all. It’s there, whole, complete, engraved on my brain by the association of that moment in time with the death of seven men and women and the destruction of one of four of America’s space fleet. Similarly, I can remember the moment when I first heard about the critters. I’d been up late the night before, but it was early morning, and I’d already made up for the short nap I’d had in lieu of real sleep with two cups of double-strength French Roast. I was at my keyboard, reviewing the parameters for that afternoon’s experimental run. Time was hard enough to get on the Fermilab main accelerator, but my experiment required twice as much setup and tear-down time as usual, plus a lot of recalibrations and adjustments, and it had taken me a lot of argument at each step of the process to get my protocol approved and entered into the schedule. I had a stack of printout from previous experimental runs to my left, my data and that of other researchers working in the same field, and a legal pad to my right, on which I was manually checking my calculations and the logic of my assumptions. Doubt of your research grows the closer you get to the deadline for its submittal, and while this wasn’t grant fever, I had gotten up so early because I just couldn’t sleep any more. Then my computer beeped, a soft chirp to let me know of an incoming call, and I banged the spacebar to accept the call without looking up from my notes. “Yeah?” I grunted, annoyed at the interruption and giving it as little of my attention as I could. “You’re going to want to see this,” Arnie said. I glanced up and saw him in a video window overlaying my equation processor, seated at his own keyboard. Arnie is one of the big anomalies in my life. Usually, the hardware and wetware types clique with their own, and Arnie’s a zoologist. In my sophomore year at Yale, however, I needed the money, and signed up as a tutor. Most of the people I worked with were artsy types who needed help getting through their math requirements, but Arnie was a hard science type who for some unknown reason had chosen soft science. He needed help with the physics part of his major, so he could go on to Harvard and their biophysics graduate program and eventually into research in neural function, studying nervous systems as if they were circuits. We got along well, agreeing on the important things, like beer (neither of us trusted a beer we could see through) and music (we both thought that the Hall of Fame wasn’t enough for John Lee Hooker, that he should have been canonized as the patron saint of the blues). Come our junior years, when we could move off campus, we split an apartment, and have been friends ever since, even after he moved in on an ex-girlfriend of mine the day after we broke up, then had the nerve to marry her. That’s been a running joke in our relationship ever since. My computer chimed again, this time for a popup window advising me that a.saknussem@fremen.stanford.edu wanted to send me a file, and did I want to Accept, Cancel, or click Options? “Right to the point,” I said, clicking Accept. “Must be major.” Arnie turned his head slowly to the side, then snapped it back straight with a shudder. “Oh yeah.” I watched the progress bar creep across. “Darn big file.” “Just watch it,” Arnie said, then the file completed and the media player popped up, with Loading… splashed across the inset video window. ===== The video blurred as the camera’s automatic focus hunted for the correct setting. A dark blob in mid-screen resolved into a young Japanese man in a dark blue uniform, sitting at a cheap metal desk strewn with paperwork. He spared the camera a brief frown, then returned his attention to the forms. “C’mon, Ito,” subtitles accompanied an off-screen voice, also male. “Smile.” The image zoomed in on Ito, who did not smile, or even look up again. “I have work to do, Senjei,” the subtitles interpreted his calm words, as he continued with the form before him. “And so do you. It’s your turn to clean the cages.” Now Ito smiled, perhaps a little vindictively. “Don’t be such a spoilsport,” Senjei complained, walked around the desk to photograph Ito from across it. The picture wobbled and shifted focus as he moved. “Besides, I need the practice with this.” The picture bobbed, flew completely out of focus, then hunted it back down once Senjei quit waving the camera. “You didn’t need the camera in the first place,” Ito retorted, emphasizing the verb. “You saw it in a shop window on the Ginza Saturday night and wanted it. You’re such a spendthrift, always broke before payday because of these expensive toys.” Ito signed the form, put it on top of a small pile of similar papers, then took another form off the top of a much larger stack. “At least I enjoy my life,” Senjei shot back, widening the focus and zooming out. A large Animal Control emblem, painted on the wall, slid into view behind Ito. “So do I,” Ito replied, still calmly working. “I enjoy looking ahead to veterinary school and a successful career. What plans do you have for the future, beyond your next paycheck and another weekend going out drinking?” A bitter edge crept into his voice, but whether it was condemnation of Senjei’s lifestyle, or jealousy of it, wasn’t immediately obvious. Senjei began a hot reply, but the telephone on Ito’s desk rang, forestalling him. Even he wasn’t so rude as to talk over someone else’s telephone conversation. He zoomed back in on Ito, with a muttered sarcastic narrative. “Another crisis arrives in the Animal Control office.” “Kamikawa Subprefecture Animal Control, Officer Ogami.” Ito frowned. “One moment, please. Your name?” He took a blank form from a box, pushed aside his prior work, and began writing quickly. “And your address? And you have a what? Where?” Ito glanced up at Senjei, and shook his head regretfully. “Yes, ma’am,” he told the caller, “we’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone with a sigh. The picture jerked, then settled as Senjei put his camera down on Ito’s desk. He reached into the frame, showing the sleeve of a similar uniform, and snatched up the form rather than wait on his partner to read it to him. “A big yellow rat in her garden?” Senjei asked derisively, accompanied by a crackle of paper. Ito shrugged, and stood, his head and shoulders vanishing out of the top of the frame. “Mrs. Yoshida is not given to fantasies, and she does not drink,” he said, striding off out of frame entirely. “You know her?” Senjei followed Ito across the frame and out of it. Sounds of rustling fabric followed. Both men came back through, wearing heavy field jackets and ball caps with the Animal Control emblem prominent on the front. “A good officer knows his area of responsibility,” Ito said officiously, obviously quoting from a department manual. “I’ve visited every house in town at least briefly. It’s called field survey, and it’s a requirement. You should read the manual.” “I’d rather read the manual for my camera,” Senjei replied, then burst out, “My camera!” Running footsteps approached, then the picture went black. A second’s delay later, the camera was turned back on outside a small, neatly-kept house in a row of similar homes, a typical low-level salaryman neighborhood. A high fence of woven wood strips enclosed the back yard, with a sign on the gate ordering NO CHILDREN in carefully-lettered red paint. Ito, seen from behind, stood at the door of the house, speaking with a middle-aged woman, a clipboard in his hand. She held a kitchen towel, which she twisted anxiously as she spoke. “Thank you,” she said, “for coming so promptly.” She gave a nervous glance over her shoulder. “It’s still out there, or was, when you arrived. I was watching it through the kitchen window.” Ito nodded, looking down at his clipboard and taking notes. “And you say it appears to be a large yellow rat?” The woman glanced off to her right, unable to say what she had to say and still maintain eye contact. “I know it does not sound right, but yes, a rat, the size of a small dog, and bright yellow, like Mrs. Chiba’s car.” She pointed across the street. The view swung around dizzily, briefly focused on a lemon-yellow Toyota subcompact, then swung back to Ito. Focus returned with the woman’s next words. “Please hurry,” she implored. “It’s eating all the tomatoes, and I told my husband that I would make bruschetta for dinner tonight.” Her eyes brimmed with tears as failure loomed before her. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Yoshida,” Ito reassured her. “We’ll take care of it.” He strode down the walk to a small truck, tossed the clipboard onto the driver’s seat, and opened a locker door on the side. As he pulled out a set of heavy gloves, he shot a look back at the camera. “Senjei, please stop playing with that thing,” he said, his tone not quite an order, “and get a carrier out of the back.” “Right,” said the cameraman, and the video again went black. The next scene was shaky, as Senjei walked behind Ito. The two proceeded up to the gate, Ito opened it, and they slipped quickly through, the picture blurring as Senjei turned, closed the gate, then turned back to his partner. Ito held a capture stick, a long metal pole with a loop of cord at one end and a handgrip with a large trigger at the other. He moved forward into the neatly kept yard with the noose held high, as if he were going to smash the offending creature on the top of the head. Most of the yard was taken up by Mrs. Yoshida’s kitchen garden. Herbs alternated with the leafy tops of daikons, and fully half the garden consisted of bushy tomato plants. Some bore large round fruits, some small tomatoes the size of grapes and growing in clusters, and two down at the far end held the oblong shapes of either Roma or pear tomatoes. One of these plants shook briefly. Ito moved sideways to flank the unseen tomato picker. Senjei moved at a right angle, and zoomed the picture out, shooting down between the rows of tomato plants to capture both Ito and his target. Sitting on its haunches between the rows, down at the far end, was indeed an animal with bright yellow fur, a yellow only found in nature in the feathers of parrots and on tropical fish. “That’s not a rat,” Senjei stage-whispered. “Looks more like a hamster.” Ito nodded, clicking the rod’s trigger a few times to reduce the size of the noose. The creature was wide-bodied and round, with a blunt muzzle. Its ears, though, were long and pointed, like a rabbit’s, and tipped with black. Its tail was also long, held stiffly erect, wider at the top than the bottom like the brush of a fox, with two large kinks that divided it into zigzag thirds. It held a partly-eaten Roma tomato in its forepaws, like a squirrel, and munched contentedly, eyes closed. Despite the noise Ito unavoidably made as he approached, the creature seemed totally oblivious to anything but its meal. The picture jerked, followed by a metallic clank and the picture returning to Ito and his target. “Carrier’s open and ready,” Senjei said. He zoomed in closer on the creature, bringing out details. Its belly fur was white, and it had a large round patch of red under each eye. The insides of its ears were also white. “We’re going to have to call Customs when we get back,” Senjei complained, zooming back out to see Ito again, this time much closer to the creature, reaching out slowly with the capture rod. “It must have jumped off a ship or something.” “From where?” Ito asked derisively. "The sea is eighty kilometers away, and Tomamae is no cargo port." He dropped the noose over the creature’s head, missing its ears, and squeezed the trigger hard to jerk the noose tight around its neck. A perfect capture. Or not. When the noose snapped tight, the creature dropped its tomato, and its eyes snapped open, revealing sclera as dark as corneas and pupils. It gagged, spat out a well-chewed bit of tomato, then grabbed the noose with its forepaws and tugged. “I don’t think so,” Ito told it, backing up and dragging his prey toward the carrier.” You’re going for a ride.” As the creature dug in its hind legs, resisting Ito’s pull, the red patches of fur on its face stood erect with a loud snap. It let out a cry somewhere between a fighting scream and a sneeze, and two brilliant arcs leapt from the red fur to the metal rod. Ito flew backwards, his arms flung straight out, landing two meters away in a flower bed. Smoke rose from his gloves and the sole of his left boot, and from a matching charred spot in the grass where he’d been standing. The capture rod flew high into the air, bouncing twice before coming to rest nearby, twisted out of shape. The creature shook loose the remains of the noose and bounded away, zigzag tail held high in indignation. It vanished through a hole dug under the fence before Senjei dropped the camera, and ran across the frame shouting alternately for help and for his partner. ===== The video file ended, the last frame sideways, showing only the garden. It took me a minute to respond, and I’m afraid I couldn’t muster an intelligent comment. “What the hell was that?” “Beats me,” Arnie replied. “I was hoping you’d have a guess.” “Santa Maria.” I grabbed my calculator and stared punching. “How many joules does it take to throw a man like that?” “For a static discharge,” Arnie replied, “you’re looking at the equivalent of a high tension line.” I gave up on the calculator, as the electromotive force was approaching a figure I wasn’t sure I wanted to see. “So where did it come from?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that, either. Arnie shrugged. “Again, I hoped you might have a guess. Biologically generated current doesn’t reach that level. The charge grounded out hot enough to char the ground.” I nodded agreement. “Yeah, that looked more like an industrial accident than an animal attack. Speaking of which, what was that thing?” Strike three. “Don’t know that either,” Arnie said with another shrug. “Do me a favor. Make a wild guess.” I shook my head, baffled. “That much electrical potential can’t be held by something grounded. Wherever the power came from, the critter generated it on the spot.” That brought up another bad thought. “Maria. It takes a Tesla coil five minutes to build up enough juice in its capacitors for a discharge like that. Your critter there went from zero to sixty thousand volts in less than a second.” “Well,” Arnie said, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head, “there is such a thing as a biological capacitor, or the cellular equivalent, anyway. Electric eels use them to store potential, and it works pretty well for something immersed in salt water.” “So you think this critter is one big mass of capacitor cells?” I raised an eyebrow. “No,” he admitted cheerfully. “I think it let off way more amperage than a living creature could carry, especially one that small. You’d need an eel the size of an aircraft carrier to tote that much electricity.” “So where did it come from?” I asked, quietly and more to myself than to Arnie. “You want to help find out?” That brought my attention back to him. “What’s the catch?” He grinned. Arnie always did enjoy situations like this far too much. “You’ll have to pack fast. The flight to Japan leaves O’Hare in about four hours.” I shook me head. “Arnie, I can’t swing a trip to Japan on that short a notice.” Not financially, anyway. “Don’t worry about it.” He waved a hand dismissively. “You remember Reiji Matsumoto?” I shifted gears to deal with the change of direction. “Post-grad, friend of yours, guy you used to go out with drinking saki and doing karaoke before it got popular.” “Right.” Arnie’s grin widened. “He’s at Kyoto now. The border group called him to try and identify the critter. He called me, and said bring whoever I want. We’re flying JAL at their government’s expense. Just say yes and you can pick up your ticket at the counter when you get to O’Hare.” That took me a minute to digest. Contingency plans spun through my head. I sorted through my project documentation, identified the people I could delegate to, and brought up my address book. If the Japanese government was covering the air fare, the trip became a lot more feasible. “Arnie.” He was already paying attention to me. I stated his name more for my attentional focus than his. “You coming?” he asked hopefully. “When’s the flight?” “Departs O’Hare at two-fifteen this afternoon.” Ouch. I wouldn’t be on-site when my run started. On the other hand, the data wouldn’t be ready until late tonight, and I could have that uploaded to my laptop. Bruce, my top grad student, was a responsible, methodical guy, and could handle the run by himself, without me looking over his shoulder. Probably be good experience for him. If the run wasn’t so crucial to my experimental series, I wouldn’t have planned to be on-site in the first place. I tapped a couple more keys on the calculator, got a rough estimate of the electromotive force the critter had generated, and that decided it. Anything that could turn that many joules on short notice had the potential of being more radical than my search for shadow matter. And if I could get an article out of this trip, a photogenic bright yellow rat would be a lot sexier in print than a series of graphs showing the gravitic effect of shadow matter on high-velocity bosons. “Yeah, I’m coming,” I told Arnie. I started shoveling papers into folders, some to go with me, some to go to Bruce, some to stay on my desk. “Bravo.” Arnie applauded. “Good choice. I’ll board the flight at the layover here, so we can have the in-flight time over the Pacific to go over the field data.” “You have a live specimen?” I asked incredulously. “No such luck. No sign of the silly thing since the video was shot. The Customs and Animal Control people have locked down the area, though, and Reiji’s overseeing the analysis. They’re already running soil samples, culturing the capture rod and noose, and all that.” I finished shuffling paper. “Okay. I’ve got to ship out some e-mail. Forward me the Japanese authorization, I’ll need that to send to my department chief.” “Check your inbox.” Sure enough, he’d already taken care of it. A consulting request had been sent from a .go.ni address I didn’t recognize, to me and to the research director’s office. “See you this evening,” Arnie continued, then reached off-camera. His video window closed, with a Remote Connection Terminated dialog box. I banged the spacebar to clear the dialog, and started composing an e-mail for general distribution. At the same time, I hit the speaker button on my phone, and speed-dialed the lab. Better give Bruce the heads-up by voice. I’d go by on my way off the campus to hand off the paperwork. Arnie was good at his word. There was a first-class ticket waiting for me at the Japan Air Lines counter. The security people were firm, but very polite, almost apologetic in their search of my person and baggage. Once I’d demonstrated that my laptop was fully functional, and surrendered a couple of sharp objects out of my hygiene kit (which they were kind enough to put into my luggage), I boarded a mostly-full plane, and found my seat. Glad I’d been afforded the VIP treatment, I slept on the hop from Chicago to Los Angeles, stretched out in the room a guy my size needs – which business class doesn’t have. Once Arnie was on board, we’d be tossing hypotheses around for a while, then discussing our misspent youth, catching up on the latest developments in each other’s lives, the usual stuff of old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while.

Critters: A Pokemon Fanfic

Scene 1: The Ogami Video

People remember the circumstances surrounding traumatic events, sometimes with amazing levels of detail. For example, I remember with crystal clarity the moment when I heard about the Challenger disaster.

I had been up very late the night before, working on a research paper that would partially determine whether or not I got my doctorate, and had just come staggering out of the bathroom and was on my way down the hall to the kitchen, in search of caffeine. My roomie, a chemical engineer taking a year off before going on to his doctoral work, stepped out into the hallway behind me, and instead of “Good morning”, or more likely “Nice of you to join us at this hour”, his greeting was, “Did you hear the news?”

“Huh?” I managed, turning around without falling down, a feat that took pretty much everything I had at the moment. I glanced down at myself, drawing his attention to my clothing, limited at the moment to underwear and a beat-up old blue lab coat that I wore for a bathrobe. “Not awake yet,” I slurred, forcing the words through an uncooperative speech buffer.

“The space shuttle blew up.”

That got my eyes into focus long enough to see he was totally serious. I flipped into Grief, Stage One: Denial. “Say what?”

He nodded, one slow bob of his head, and paced down the hall to where I stood. “On launch this morning. Something went wrong, and the shuttle exploded right after liftoff.”

My knees went weak, and I sat down right where I was, on the arm of an easy chair that fortunately was behind me. “No way.”

He nodded again, started to say something, then cut off with a twitch of his head, and strode around me to the TV. I moved to the threadbare couch at the far side of the room, dropped onto it heavily, fighting sleep and disbelief. And there was the network anchorman who was supposed to be covering the launch, fumbling with a plastic model of the shuttle as he tried to demonstrate what the network thought had happened. Mercifully, they cut away from him to a film clip of the launch before he embarrassed himself too badly.

There was Challenger, on the launch pad, wreathed in vapor from its liquid oxygen-hydrogen fuel supply. The mission controller counted off the last few seconds, the engines ignited, and the shuttle lifted off the pad and rose through billows of steam like all the previous missions. Up, up, it rolled over onto its back in the standard profile – then a brilliant flash, and the massive contrail broke apart into half a dozen smaller ones, arcing off in different directions. A burst of static, then mission control came back on the air, stating that contact had been lost with Challenger.

I can remember that moment, the smell of the apartment, the feel of the couch, the dim lighting in an apartment that belonged to a pair of academic hermits, the missing snap at the bottom of my lab coat, with no effort at all. It’s there, whole, complete, engraved on my brain by the association of that moment in time with the death of seven men and women and the destruction of one of four of America’s space fleet.

Similarly, I can remember the moment when I first heard about the critters.

I’d been up late the night before, but it was early morning, and I’d already made up for the short nap I’d had in lieu of real sleep with two cups of double-strength French Roast. I was at my keyboard, reviewing the parameters for that afternoon’s experimental run. Time was hard enough to get on the Fermilab main accelerator, but my experiment required twice as much setup and tear-down time as usual, plus a lot of recalibrations and adjustments, and it had taken me a lot of argument at each step of the process to get my protocol approved and entered into the schedule. I had a stack of printout from previous experimental runs to my left, my data and that of other researchers working in the same field, and a legal pad to my right, on which I was manually checking my calculations and the logic of my assumptions. Doubt of your research grows the closer you get to the deadline for its submittal, and while this wasn’t grant fever, I had gotten up so early because I just couldn’t sleep any more.

Then my computer beeped, a soft chirp to let me know of an incoming call, and I banged the spacebar to accept the call without looking up from my notes.

“Yeah?” I grunted, annoyed at the interruption and giving it as little of my attention as I could.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Arnie said. I glanced up and saw him in a video window overlaying my equation processor, seated at his own keyboard.

Arnie is one of the big anomalies in my life. Usually, the hardware and wetware types clique with their own, and Arnie’s a zoologist. In my sophomore year at Yale, however, I needed the money, and signed up as a tutor. Most of the people I worked with were artsy types who needed help getting through their math requirements, but Arnie was a hard science type who for some unknown reason had chosen soft science. He needed help with the physics part of his major, so he could go on to Harvard and their biophysics graduate program and eventually into research in neural function, studying nervous systems as if they were circuits. We got along well, agreeing on the important things, like beer (neither of us trusted a beer we could see through) and music (we both thought that the Hall of Fame wasn’t enough for John Lee Hooker, that he should have been canonized as the patron saint of the blues). Come our junior years, when we could move off campus, we split an apartment, and have been friends ever since, even after he moved in on an ex-girlfriend of mine the day after we broke up, then had the nerve to marry her. That’s been a running joke in our relationship ever since.

My computer chimed again, this time for a popup window advising me that a.saknussem@fremen.stanford.edu wanted to send me a file, and did I want to Accept, Cancel, or click Options?

“Right to the point,” I said, clicking Accept. “Must be major.”

Arnie turned his head slowly to the side, then snapped it back straight with a shudder. “Oh yeah.”

I watched the progress bar creep across. “Darn big file.”

“Just watch it,” Arnie said, then the file completed and the media player popped up, with Loading… splashed across the inset video window.

=====

The video blurred as the camera’s automatic focus hunted for the correct setting. A dark blob in mid-screen resolved into a young Japanese man in a dark blue uniform, sitting at a cheap metal desk strewn with paperwork. He spared the camera a brief frown, then returned his attention to the forms.

“C’mon, Ito,” subtitles accompanied an off-screen voice, also male. “Smile.” The image zoomed in on Ito, who did not smile, or even look up again.

“I have work to do, Senjei,” the subtitles interpreted his calm words, as he continued with the form before him. “And so do you. It’s your turn to clean the cages.” Now Ito smiled, perhaps a little vindictively.

“Don’t be such a spoilsport,” Senjei complained, walked around the desk to photograph Ito from across it. The picture wobbled and shifted focus as he moved. “Besides, I need the practice with this.” The picture bobbed, flew completely out of focus, then hunted it back down once Senjei quit waving the camera.

“You didn’t need the camera in the first place,” Ito retorted, emphasizing the verb. “You saw it in a shop window on the Ginza Saturday night and wanted it. You’re such a spendthrift, always broke before payday because of these expensive toys.” Ito signed the form, put it on top of a small pile of similar papers, then took another form off the top of a much larger stack.

“At least I enjoy my life,” Senjei shot back, widening the focus and zooming out. A large Animal Control emblem, painted on the wall, slid into view behind Ito.

“So do I,” Ito replied, still calmly working. “I enjoy looking ahead to veterinary school and a successful career. What plans do you have for the future, beyond your next paycheck and another weekend going out drinking?” A bitter edge crept into his voice, but whether it was condemnation of Senjei’s lifestyle, or jealousy of it, wasn’t immediately obvious.

Senjei began a hot reply, but the telephone on Ito’s desk rang, forestalling him. Even he wasn’t so rude as to talk over someone else’s telephone conversation. He zoomed back in on Ito, with a muttered sarcastic narrative. “Another crisis arrives in the Animal Control office.”

“Kamikawa Subprefecture Animal Control, Officer Ogami.” Ito frowned. “One moment, please. Your name?” He took a blank form from a box, pushed aside his prior work, and began writing quickly. “And your address? And you have a what? Where?” Ito glanced up at Senjei, and shook his head regretfully.

“Yes, ma’am,” he told the caller, “we’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone with a sigh.

The picture jerked, then settled as Senjei put his camera down on Ito’s desk. He reached into the frame, showing the sleeve of a similar uniform, and snatched up the form rather than wait on his partner to read it to him.

“A big yellow rat in her garden?” Senjei asked derisively, accompanied by a crackle of paper.

Ito shrugged, and stood, his head and shoulders vanishing out of the top of the frame. “Mrs. Yoshida is not given to fantasies, and she does not drink,” he said, striding off out of frame entirely.

“You know her?” Senjei followed Ito across the frame and out of it. Sounds of rustling fabric followed. Both men came back through, wearing heavy field jackets and ball caps with the Animal Control emblem prominent on the front.

“A good officer knows his area of responsibility,” Ito said officiously, obviously quoting from a department manual. “I’ve visited every house in town at least briefly. It’s called field survey, and it’s a requirement. You should read the manual.”

“I’d rather read the manual for my camera,” Senjei replied, then burst out, “My camera!” Running footsteps approached, then the picture went black.

A second’s delay later, the camera was turned back on outside a small, neatly-kept house in a row of similar homes, a typical low-level salaryman neighborhood. A high fence of woven wood strips enclosed the back yard, with a sign on the gate ordering NO CHILDREN in carefully-lettered red paint. Ito, seen from behind, stood at the door of the house, speaking with a middle-aged woman, a clipboard in his hand. She held a kitchen towel, which she twisted anxiously as she spoke.

“Thank you,” she said, “for coming so promptly.” She gave a nervous glance over her shoulder. “It’s still out there, or was, when you arrived. I was watching it through the kitchen window.”

Ito nodded, looking down at his clipboard and taking notes. “And you say it appears to be a large yellow rat?”

The woman glanced off to her right, unable to say what she had to say and still maintain eye contact. “I know it does not sound right, but yes, a rat, the size of a small dog, and bright yellow, like Mrs. Chiba’s car.” She pointed across the street. The view swung around dizzily, briefly focused on a lemon-yellow Toyota subcompact, then swung back to Ito. Focus returned with the woman’s next words.

“Please hurry,” she implored. “It’s eating all the tomatoes, and I told my husband that I would make bruschetta for dinner tonight.” Her eyes brimmed with tears as failure loomed before her.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Yoshida,” Ito reassured her. “We’ll take care of it.” He strode down the walk to a small truck, tossed the clipboard onto the driver’s seat, and opened a locker door on the side. As he pulled out a set of heavy gloves, he shot a look back at the camera.

“Senjei, please stop playing with that thing,” he said, his tone not quite an order, “and get a carrier out of the back.”

“Right,” said the cameraman, and the video again went black.

The next scene was shaky, as Senjei walked behind Ito. The two proceeded up to the gate, Ito opened it, and they slipped quickly through, the picture blurring as Senjei turned, closed the gate, then turned back to his partner.

Ito held a capture stick, a long metal pole with a loop of cord at one end and a handgrip with a large trigger at the other. He moved forward into the neatly kept yard with the noose held high, as if he were going to smash the offending creature on the top of the head.

Most of the yard was taken up by Mrs. Yoshida’s kitchen garden. Herbs alternated with the leafy tops of daikons, and fully half the garden consisted of bushy tomato plants. Some bore large round fruits, some small tomatoes the size of grapes and growing in clusters, and two down at the far end held the oblong shapes of either Roma or pear tomatoes. One of these plants shook briefly. Ito moved sideways to flank the unseen tomato picker.

Senjei moved at a right angle, and zoomed the picture out, shooting down between the rows of tomato plants to capture both Ito and his target. Sitting on its haunches between the rows, down at the far end, was indeed an animal with bright yellow fur, a yellow only found in nature in the feathers of parrots and on tropical fish.

“That’s not a rat,” Senjei stage-whispered. “Looks more like a hamster.”

Ito nodded, clicking the rod’s trigger a few times to reduce the size of the noose. The creature was wide-bodied and round, with a blunt muzzle. Its ears, though, were long and pointed, like a rabbit’s, and tipped with black. Its tail was also long, held stiffly erect, wider at the top than the bottom like the brush of a fox, with two large kinks that divided it into zigzag thirds. It held a partly-eaten Roma tomato in its forepaws, like a squirrel, and munched contentedly, eyes closed. Despite the noise Ito unavoidably made as he approached, the creature seemed totally oblivious to anything but its meal.

The picture jerked, followed by a metallic clank and the picture returning to Ito and his target. “Carrier’s open and ready,” Senjei said.

He zoomed in closer on the creature, bringing out details. Its belly fur was white, and it had a large round patch of red under each eye. The insides of its ears were also white.

“We’re going to have to call Customs when we get back,” Senjei complained, zooming back out to see Ito again, this time much closer to the creature, reaching out slowly with the capture rod. “It must have jumped off a ship or something.”

“From where?” Ito asked derisively. "The sea is eighty kilometers away, and Tomamae is no cargo port." He dropped the noose over the creature’s head, missing its ears, and squeezed the trigger hard to jerk the noose tight around its neck. A perfect capture.

Or not. When the noose snapped tight, the creature dropped its tomato, and its eyes snapped open, revealing sclera as dark as corneas and pupils. It gagged, spat out a well-chewed bit of tomato, then grabbed the noose with its forepaws and tugged.

“I don’t think so,” Ito told it, backing up and dragging his prey toward the carrier.” You’re going for a ride.”

As the creature dug in its hind legs, resisting Ito’s pull, the red patches of fur on its face stood erect with a loud snap. It let out a cry somewhere between a fighting scream and a sneeze, and two brilliant arcs leapt from the red fur to the metal rod.

Ito flew backwards, his arms flung straight out, landing two meters away in a flower bed. Smoke rose from his gloves and the sole of his left boot, and from a matching charred spot in the grass where he’d been standing. The capture rod flew high into the air, bouncing twice before coming to rest nearby, twisted out of shape.

The creature shook loose the remains of the noose and bounded away, zigzag tail held high in indignation. It vanished through a hole dug under the fence before Senjei dropped the camera, and ran across the frame shouting alternately for help and for his partner.

=====

The video file ended, the last frame sideways, showing only the garden. It took me a minute to respond, and I’m afraid I couldn’t muster an intelligent comment.

“What the hell was that?”

“Beats me,” Arnie replied. “I was hoping you’d have a guess.”

“Santa Maria.” I grabbed my calculator and stared punching. “How many joules does it take to throw a man like that?”

“For a static discharge,” Arnie replied, “you’re looking at the equivalent of a high tension line.”

I gave up on the calculator, as the electromotive force was approaching a figure I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.

“So where did it come from?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that, either.

Arnie shrugged. “Again, I hoped you might have a guess. Biologically generated current doesn’t reach that level. The charge grounded out hot enough to char the ground.”

I nodded agreement. “Yeah, that looked more like an industrial accident than an animal attack. Speaking of which, what was that thing?”

Strike three. “Don’t know that either,” Arnie said with another shrug. “Do me a favor. Make a wild guess.”

I shook my head, baffled. “That much electrical potential can’t be held by something grounded. Wherever the power came from, the critter generated it on the spot.” That brought up another bad thought. “Maria. It takes a Tesla coil five minutes to build up enough juice in its capacitors for a discharge like that. Your critter there went from zero to sixty thousand volts in less than a second.”

“Well,” Arnie said, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head, “there is such a thing as a biological capacitor, or the cellular equivalent, anyway. Electric eels use them to store potential, and it works pretty well for something immersed in salt water.”

“So you think this critter is one big mass of capacitor cells?” I raised an eyebrow.

“No,” he admitted cheerfully. “I think it let off way more amperage than a living creature could carry, especially one that small. You’d need an eel the size of an aircraft carrier to tote that much electricity.”

“So where did it come from?” I asked, quietly and more to myself than to Arnie.

“You want to help find out?”

That brought my attention back to him. “What’s the catch?”

He grinned. Arnie always did enjoy situations like this far too much. “You’ll have to pack fast. The flight to Japan leaves O’Hare in about four hours.”

I shook me head. “Arnie, I can’t swing a trip to Japan on that short a notice.” Not financially, anyway.

“Don’t worry about it.” He waved a hand dismissively. “You remember Reiji Matsumoto?”

I shifted gears to deal with the change of direction. “Post-grad, friend of yours, guy you used to go out with drinking saki and doing karaoke before it got popular.”

“Right.” Arnie’s grin widened. “He’s at Kyoto now. The border group called him to try and identify the critter. He called me, and said bring whoever I want. We’re flying JAL at their government’s expense. Just say yes and you can pick up your ticket at the counter when you get to O’Hare.”

That took me a minute to digest. Contingency plans spun through my head. I sorted through my project documentation, identified the people I could delegate to, and brought up my address book. If the Japanese government was covering the air fare, the trip became a lot more feasible.

“Arnie.” He was already paying attention to me. I stated his name more for my attentional focus than his.

“You coming?” he asked hopefully.

“When’s the flight?”

“Departs O’Hare at two-fifteen this afternoon.”

Ouch. I wouldn’t be on-site when my run started. On the other hand, the data wouldn’t be ready until late tonight, and I could have that uploaded to my laptop. Bruce, my top grad student, was a responsible, methodical guy, and could handle the run by himself, without me looking over his shoulder. Probably be good experience for him. If the run wasn’t so crucial to my experimental series, I wouldn’t have planned to be on-site in the first place. I tapped a couple more keys on the calculator, got a rough estimate of the electromotive force the critter had generated, and that decided it. Anything that could turn that many joules on short notice had the potential of being more radical than my search for shadow matter. And if I could get an article out of this trip, a photogenic bright yellow rat would be a lot sexier in print than a series of graphs showing the gravitic effect of shadow matter on high-velocity bosons.

“Yeah, I’m coming,” I told Arnie. I started shoveling papers into folders, some to go with me, some to go to Bruce, some to stay on my desk.

“Bravo.” Arnie applauded. “Good choice. I’ll board the flight at the layover here, so we can have the in-flight time over the Pacific to go over the field data.”

“You have a live specimen?” I asked incredulously.

“No such luck. No sign of the silly thing since the video was shot. The Customs and Animal Control people have locked down the area, though, and Reiji’s overseeing the analysis. They’re already running soil samples, culturing the capture rod and noose, and all that.”

I finished shuffling paper. “Okay. I’ve got to ship out some e-mail. Forward me the Japanese authorization, I’ll need that to send to my department chief.”

“Check your inbox.” Sure enough, he’d already taken care of it. A consulting request had been sent from a .go.ni address I didn’t recognize, to me and to the research director’s office. “See you this evening,” Arnie continued, then reached off-camera.

His video window closed, with a Remote Connection Terminated dialog box.

I banged the spacebar to clear the dialog, and started composing an e-mail for general distribution. At the same time, I hit the speaker button on my phone, and speed-dialed the lab. Better give Bruce the heads-up by voice. I’d go by on my way off the campus to hand off the paperwork.

Arnie was good at his word. There was a first-class ticket waiting for me at the Japan Air Lines counter. The security people were firm, but very polite, almost apologetic in their search of my person and baggage. Once I’d demonstrated that my laptop was fully functional, and surrendered a couple of sharp objects out of my hygiene kit (which they were kind enough to put into my luggage), I boarded a mostly-full plane, and found my seat. Glad I’d been afforded the VIP treatment, I slept on the hop from Chicago to Los Angeles, stretched out in the room a guy my size needs – which business class doesn’t have. Once Arnie was on board, we’d be tossing hypotheses around for a while, then discussing our misspent youth, catching up on the latest developments in each other’s lives, the usual stuff of old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while.