I
The portable surgery unit hulked at the edge of a tract field, ringed by four-by-fours and a lone Jeep. Sean’s environmentally conscious subcompact had given up the ghost a mile out from the GPS coordinates. She left it stuck in a truck-sized rut and trekked the rest of the way in her new pair of Timberlands. Oncoming blisters burned her pinky toes. In the distance, the seam between tree line and farmland marked the outer rim of their wolf pack’s territory. Outside of the behemoth medical trailer her lab assistant Alex fiddled with his phone in a camp chair. Generators roared loud enough to mute the birds, and the insects, and anything else alive. Alex hadn’t heard her approach either.
“Have they started?” she called out.
He jerked, phone catapulting from his startled fingers. Without breaking stride Sean plucked it from the grass near her feet, still playing a music video. She dropped it onto his outstretched palm and grinned at his mildly reproving expression.
“They’ve been in there a while. Page ’em and see,” he said.
The light on the unit’s lift glowed red; surgery in-progress, or about to be. She paged through the walkie-talkie attached to the railing and said, “Hey, Dr. Kell-Luddon here. Apologies for the delay, my car couldn’t take the off-roading. Am I too late to scrub in?”
A delay, then an unfamiliar voice replied, “Frances thinks yes, too late. We’re underway with the animal. The team can handle it, though, no worries.”
“Well, shit.” She flopped onto the grass next to Alex’s chair, stomped flat for seating where the mobile surgery unit’s incursion hadn’t churned the earth to sucking mud.
“You would’ve only been observing anyway,” Alex said.
Sean propped her forearms on her knees and flexed to crack her neck, back, hips. The crunchy pop at the base of her skull set off a lancing, residual throb through her temple. She massaged the pink weal of scar tissue, stiff and slick in the midst of the bristled hair growing back around it. The surgical procedure she’d undergone for the project was minimal. Neural intervention for the animal was—more significant, as the grant phrased it.
“Which one did we trap, do you know?” she asked.
“Kate, I think,” he said.
Sean skimmed through her field observation notes. Kate: adult female approximately four years of age, structural member of the pack, hadn’t ranged off on her own or whelped despite sexual maturity—unsurprising, given the brutality of the previous winter. Out of the whole spring litter, the pack had only sustained one pup through the cold months. Sean laid her phone facedown on her knee. The sky overhead yawned blue as glass with the promise of another bad season, but the freeze hadn’t come yet. The golden chill of November fields from her teenage years was no more. Even in north Minnesota she wore only a lightweight flannel to keep cool as the warmth of fall staggered on, and on, and on. But each successive cold snap hit harder than the last.
“Are you excited?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “More curious nerves, I guess.”
“Groundbreaking use of advanced technology, affective observational perspectives, cutting-edge conservation,” he parroted from the press release, poking her shoulder with each phrase.
“God, shut up.” She laughed.
If her project succeeded, she’d be a rock star in the field: publicity, publication, funding ever at her fingertips, name-recognition firmly cemented—assuming her colleagues and recruits did their parts to her specifications. Inside the surgical unit were two of her researchers, two from the field biology team, plus a surgeon and a veterinarian. Disciplinary crossover at its finest, according to everyone but her wife, Riya. While the red light glowed, Sean flicked through videos from the trap-cameras. “Kate” was a rangier female with pale cream belly fur that shaded to smoke, lit with blazes of rust-orange around her ears and snout. The platonic ideal of a gray wolf, though just as underweight as the rest of her pack—one of two wild family groups remaining in the state. Her coat was more brindled than those of her parents or her siblings.
“The light’s off,” Alex said some time later.
She stood and brushed dirt off her jeans as the unit’s bay cranked open with a garage-door grind. Charles Grant stood with his surgical-bootied feet level with Sean’s chin, peering down from the top of the lift.
“Step on, doc,” he said.
Sean mounted the lift platform and bounced her heel as it raised ponderously. The surgical unit’s central hub housed a desktop computer and a set of imaging readout monitors, a few cabinets, and a single entry into the containment/prep room. Through there, she assumed, waited their wolf. Charles’s hands were freshly washed and damp when he shook hers, but his scrubs still carried a fine mist of blood. He’d worn her blood the same way, a few weeks back.
“The neural mesh slid right into place, as expected. June is wrapping now with sutures and cleanup, so you should be able to release her in the morning,” he said.
“No complications?”
“None at all. Easy sedation and easy surgery, though she’ll be a bald doggie for a little while,” Charles said.
As Charles sat at the computer, she ducked into the prep room to scrub up. Bald doggie. Sean’s matching shave had read as a fashion statement with her already close-cropped hair. Despite all the buzzwords she’d deployed in the cash flow application about becoming in-kind with an animal, the slim differentiation in practice—the same surgeon inserting her neural receiver and the wolf’s transmitter—remained unsettling. The secure door opened and her mixed team trickled out, eyes smiling over sterile masks. Sean slipped by to greet the veterinarian who stayed behind, then paused on the threshold.
On trail cameras a gray wolf could pass for an oddly colored husky or shepherd mix, long of leg and broad of jaw. But in the flesh, her barrel chest rising and falling at the pace of the ventilator tube lodged between her teeth, Kate filled the room. The furry triangle ears and narrow snout reminded Sean of her own dog, Miller, but the paws—lax and spread with one hanging off the edge of the table—were almost the same size as her wife’s hands. Sean wrestled with the urge to stroke the wiry gloss of her coat.
“Impressive, huh,” Dr. June said, stripping her gloves off into the trash.
“She’s so big,” Sean muttered.
The imposing physical reality of her subject flung her imagination back to childhood, the solitary library nook where she devoured books about girls raised by wolves, girls running with the pack—and later, in a fancier library hundreds of miles away, books about women who studied them. Through all her funding applications, public and private alike, Sean had held the significance of her first flush of attraction close and quiet, burrowed ventricle-deep and thereby protected from the rest of the gamesmanship. Nonetheless, June gave her a knowing glance.
“You can pet her, just stay away from the head,” she said.
“Am I that obvious?” Sean asked.
“Nah, everyone wants to handle her.”
Sean laid a loose palm on the wolf’s radiator-warm haunch. The fur was coarser than she expected; her fingers sank deep to scritch. The meat-and-disinfectant stink of surgery combined with stale breath and wet dog. Sean’s stomach roiled. At the base of Kate’s skull, stitches and suture-tape formed a puckered black-and-purple mouth.
“We were able to ease the mesh in with minimal disturbance to bone and tissue, so honestly, she should be good to go. I’ll apply a sealant film over the stitches in an hour or so, then cover that with a patch to keep her from chewing them,” June said.
“And if she wakes up fine tomorrow, we release her?” Sean confirmed.
Dr. June hummed her agreement, leading Sean from the room where the wolf remained unconscious—waiting to be cleaned up and put to rights. A shiver of secondhand vulnerability tripped across Sean’s nerves. Though she’d been sedated all to hell and stuck in a surgical vise to keep her still, at least she’d been alert for her procedure. Kate lay dead to the world. On the cusp of the anteroom, she cast another backward glance at the lonely animal on the cold steel table; unaware of her hesitation, June said, “Once she’s loose you’re free to turn your magic machine on.”
1 year prior
The popping sizzle of paneer crisping was muffled by the lid of the sauté pan. Jaunty blue apron bows at the first notch of Riya’s spine and the dip of her waist contrasted her rigid posture. Sean laid her face in her hands, grant paperwork exploded across the kitchen table, and said, “I’m sorry, hon, but you know the deadline is tomorrow.”
Without turning Riya replied, “I’d like to enter into the record that, miraculously, I have kept our date nights free of my students, my grading, and my proposals for sixteen months running.”
“I appreciate you,” Sean said.
Riya snorted. The rising household tension provoked by her workload over the past few months had become palpable, but private grants were the last shot for funding her sure-to-be groundbreaking project. Failing to secure institutional support stung. She was asking for a fairly astronomical sum to pilot a neural linkage between the bodyminds of human and animal to—how had she phrased it?—approach a shared understanding of the fears, drives, and desires of one of the last remaining wild packs in the American north. Surely, Riya could understand how toothsore those rejections had left her—but regardless, Sean acknowledged defeat and scooped the printed emails from her intended teammates, photos of rangy wolves, and field notes into a messy stack.
As she crossed the living room to the hall, she patted their fluffy herding dog where he lay on the couch watching muted cartoons. His tail flopped a lazy two-beat in response. In their shared office, her whole worktop was covered in detritus; she added the fresh pile on top. A kitschy HERS & HERS sign hanging from their bookshelf split the room. Riya’s side stayed neat, besides the travel knickknacks on all available surfaces, but Sean’s had become a graveyard of La Croix cans and teetering paper. Maybe in the fall term she’d be able to bribe a TA to organize her research hoard.
“Food’s ready,” Riya shouted from the kitchen.
Sean returned to paneer fried with chiles, tomato, and greens alongside a steaming bowl of rice. Riya dropped into a seat, apronless, button-up’s sleeves rolled to the elbow and incongruous paired with her love-busted sweatpants. Miller’s toenails clacked on the floor as he took his customary spot on his bed in the corner, alert to the possibility of misplaced food. Silence dragged on for a minute too long while neither woman moved to start eating.
“I am sorry,” Sean volunteered, once it became clear she needed to.
“I just—we’ve talked about this shit. You know how I feel,” Riya said.
“We agreed to reserve time, and I keep fucking that up, yeah. I’m the worst.”
Riya poked at her dinner. “I’m your wife, but I’m not your wife, you understand?”
A refrain Sean had heard, filed for future consideration, and promptly forgotten multiple times in recent months. The first bite of the paneer, savory and well-spiced, filled Sean’s mouth with warmth. She groaned. Her partner was a great cook, no doubt about that. And despite the initial tension, Riya’s stiff spine had begun to melt by degrees. Wrinkles peeked at the corners of her eyes, the ghost of a smile that hadn’t quite formed, as she absorbed Sean’s vocal appreciation of the meal.
In further peace offering, Sean said, “I’m turning the files in tonight, double-checking the confirmation tomorrow morning at the office, and then it’s done.”
Riya tapped her fork on the edge of her bowl. The tink-tink perked Miller’s ears, tufts bouncing.
“What are your chances for this grant?” she asked.
Sean said, “Honestly, good. Between me, my team, and our signers-on in bio, I think we’ve got a solid mix. And corporate types love to bankroll science with a feel-good vibe.”
“I wouldn’t argue that a team with no social scientists, people in sustainability, or ethicists is particularly mixed. And spying on the brains of some starving animals sounds more horror movie than heart-warmer to me,” Riya said.
“Hey now,” Sean rebuffed. “You know what I’m doing and you know why I’m doing it. At least with my project they’re funding conservation instead of lobbying for a drilling extension in the Arctic. Or, like, trying to build a sex robot.”
Riya pursed her lips. “For some measure of the word conservation, darling. I’m sure they’re just as interested in the environment as they are the proprietary opportunities for your team’s brain-fuckery, which will have nothing to do with VR porn.”
Sean swallowed another mouthful of sauce-thick rice.
“Does it matter what motivates them, if their pocketbooks are open?”
“Of course it does,” Riya replied, fully frowning. “And you can call those wolves collaborators or ‘mutual subjects’ all you like, you’re still using them as objects of study. Which is, well, whatever, but it’s gross to pretend anything otherwise.”
“That’s what you think about my whole field, the subject-object power dynamic stuff. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t producing good and important data—”
Riya interrupted, “Focusing all your resources on these individual animals to determine what makes them so special distracts people from addressing the systems that killed all the other goddamn wolves in the first place, but we’ve had that argument before too.”
Sean closed her jaws around her canned venture-funding interview responses, things like, observing the behavior of the animal is insufficient without understanding of the interior being. The truth was, she still chased the same curious desires she’d first nursed as a kid streaming the defunct Animal Planet channel, filling the empty house with chatter while her mom was out working, or playing, or whatever else she did besides parenting. What was it really like to be a wolf among a pack, running freely with constant, unguarded companionship?
As the years rolled on, Sean built herself a real life—hollow spaces spackled over with top degrees, a respectable career, and a marriage that made her colleagues jealous—but the dreaming, the longing, stayed steady. No one could show her what it was like, aside from the animals themselves, and finally she had access to the tools, the opportunity, to see.
So for what felt like the four hundredth time since she and Riya first fell out over her proposal and her failure to clean the bathroom, she said, “Won’t the becoming-wolf part get people to care more about the systemic problems, like, in a literal emotional sense? I’ll be experiencing, for the first time on earth, another creature’s thinking, feeling self from the inside. You’re constantly talking about how useful stories are for building empathetic understanding—isn’t this project a sort of storytelling together with the animal, for everyone else?”
Riya snapped her teeth clean through a bite of paneer. The interior flesh showed cream-pale, held aloft on her fork. One fat red drop of sauce plopped onto her plate. Silence settled across the table; gingery greens stuck in Sean’s throat as she swallowed. Whenever her wife paused to organize a full response, the outcome wasn’t going to be good. She’d taken delight in watching her dissect other people’s flawed arguments more times than she could count; having the brilliant edge turned on her was less pleasant.
Collected and precise, Riya said, “If the fact that we’re destroying every habitat on this godforsaken planet hasn’t stuck with the corporations whose money you’re begging for by now, then you doing some brain-in-a-jar bullshit to say how a wolf feels about dying won’t matter either. This wolf can’t consent to being studied by you, which involves a nonconsensual surgical procedure. The presumption you’re making in claiming to report on its real feelings, so you can make a name for yourself, violates its sovereign dignity. It can’t correct you when you put words in its mouth. So, yes, as an ethnographer I fucking disagree with the entire premise.”
Sufficiently eviscerated, Sean pushed her chair from the table and crossed her arms over her stomach. “What’s your solution, then, do nothing? Resign and sit around petting the dog, moping about the end of the world?”
“God, Sean, you are so astoundingly, myopically self-centered it shocks me. I don’t know if it’s getting worse or if I ignored it before.” Riya stared at her, a deep maroon flush blooming across her brown cheeks. “I’m tired of listening to you talk about what this’ll do for you without an ounce of ethical consideration. You’re grabbing for cash that could be spent on pragmatic interventions for actual habitat stabilization, or assisting with disaster refugee displacement, or whatever else, but those projects aren’t as sexy. It’s all appearances with you. This grant could fund my department’s grad researchers, who I will remind you are almost all working with peoples and places whose experiences of climate catastrophe are on the knife’s edge, several times over. And why are wolves your focal point, anyway? Why not rats, they’re better survivors. Because people think wolves are cool.”
“You’re not from here. The wolves surviving means something about us surviving,” Sean said, then bit her tongue immediately at the startled grimace that washed over Riya’s face. Not from here. “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Wow, no, you’re done talking,” Riya said.
Without another word she picked up her bowl in one hand, her plate in the other, and left the kitchen to sit on the couch. Miller trotted after. Visible through the wide-mouthed entrance to the other room, her squared shoulders radiated anger. Sean sipped her water, embarrassed. That fight hadn’t felt the same as the last six or seven—or ten. The debate beginning with her research dove through to a nastier set of problems underneath. It’s all about appearances with you stung in her chest. After Riya failed to return to the table for another half hour, Sean slunk to the fridge to store her leftovers and retreated behind the closed door of the office.
Four weeks later, the grant was approved to ample fanfare in the pop-science press: neuroscientists to study how iconic remaining wild wolves think, ushering in a promising era of connection between human and nonhuman animals. The head of the committee who’d denied her internal funding sent a congratulatory email, which she cracked a fresh bottle of scotch to gloat over. The savor of victory soured a fraction when Riya refused to come to the department celebration on her arm, citing unfinished grading. Sean found a therapist’s business card on her desk the following morning with a short note reading, make an appointment.
* * *
Over four monitors spread throughout the lab, the team watched Dr. June and her assistant return Kate to the forest via ATV, secured across the safe-rack like a huge swaddled child. The trap-camera captured one angle and the assistant’s cell phone another. At the tree line, the pair of them hustled the wolf’s ungainly body to the ground. The assistant unwrapped the animal and swept her from tail to snout with the camera. The patch-film Dr. June had applied was roughly the same shade as Kate’s skin below her coat, hiding her stitches.
“She’ll be alert in fifteen to twenty minutes,” June said to the microphone. “We’ll wait with the ATV until she starts to come ’round, then we’ll book it. The pack should approach her soon.”
Sean sipped a cold brew, monitoring the unconscious wolf and her team at turns. Alex and Dahye paced the length of the dimmed lab windows in muted conversation with one another, Christian idled at the coffee maker waiting for their fourth refill, Aseem spun his studio chair at precise 180-degree turns with a kick of each heel, left-right-left-right. Two research assistants, one technician for the interface, a fellow neuroscientist, and herself, the researcher-subject.
A commotion startled them all as the ATV revved and Dr. June announced, “There she goes!”
Kate’s left hindquarter flexed, paw scrabbling at the earth. Her ears flicked and her jaw muscles tensed. As engine roar filled the lab, the RA’s prurient camera zoomed in on her half-alert face, tongue working across a row of yellowed teeth while one eyelid fluttered. Aseem stopped spinning. Sean held her breath. If they’d damaged her …
Kate lifted her head on an unsteady neck and growled.
“Go,” June barked to her RA.
The assistant passed her the camera and drove them away while Kate receded from view. Her legs wobbled under her as she stood, sat, stood again. The trap-camera broadcasted her stagger into the woods, loopy from sedation but promisingly mobile. Sean sighed deep in her gut. The chip tracker showed Kate moving farther into the forest; matching blips for the remainder of the pack ranged a few miles out, nearer the creek than the field-line.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Aseem groaned, echoing Sean’s own worries.
“We’re about to find out,” Christian responded. “Ready for setup, boss?”
Sean drained the last milky gulp of her coffee and thumped the mason jar onto the table. On-screen, Dr. June and the RA began breaking down their field surgery site. In an hour there would be no record of their presence aside from the ruts in the field, the neural mesh in the wolf’s skull, and the data Sean intended to broadcast into her own. And if she failed, there might as well be nothing at all—just her wife’s I told you so and her public career crash.
“Let’s do this thing,” she said.
At the south end of the lab, Dahye unlocked the interfacing room first with the physical key and then with the digital access code. Alex bounded into the room with his sterile prep kit to wipe down the “magic machine,” as June had referred to it. Aseem tapped away on the lab’s main computer, shifting camera feeds to program feeds, research notes, and the interface’s readout. Its cursor blinked eagerly on an otherwise blank screen. Christian stood beside Sean’s chair, silent for a beat, as her fingertips tapped nervously on the armrest.
Steadying, they asked, “Are you comfortable with the procedures, Dr. Kell-Luddon?”
“I remember them,” Sean said.
She thought her skin would vibrate off her bones if she had to wait for much longer, pretending to be calm. All the sacrifice and uncertainty of the past twenty-six months had led to this moment; her team bustled through their first execution of protocols, turning like a well-oiled gear. But what use was a performance of competence if the results fell through? People remembered failures longer than successes. Sean steadied her breathing, five-counts in through her nose and out through her mouth.
“I think we’re good to go,” Christian said as Alex gave them the thumbs-up.
Sean followed them into the hospital-bare cubby containing the machine’s interface: a giant padded recliner resembling an upscale dentist’s chair with gnarled limbs of cables sprouting from its headrest, arms, and frame. The helmet looked like a salon blow-dryer—the gentle padded restraints for the subject’s limbs, not so much, unless it was a very particular kind of salon. Christian wheeled their tool cart to the desk in the far corner and gestured for Sean to settle in. As they wiped her scarred temple with a sterile pad, astringent scent invading her nostrils, their pale gray eyes flicked to meet hers.
“We’ll activate when the map shows her approaching the pack,” Sean said.
“Aye-aye,” Christian agreed.
The plush recliner sucked her into its embrace. Though the prep was painless, Sean’s physical reaction to being strapped in belied her discomfort—racing pulse, cold prickling washes of nerves. Christian’s hands were sure on the restraints, firm on her wrists and ankles. Their brow furrowed with concentration as they adjusted the neck brace and lined up the edges of the helmet before lowering it and locking the mechanism into place. The visor screen was blank, sensory deprivation plunging Sean abruptly into nothingness. No sound, no sight, nothing outside of her thrumming flesh and blood. The fact that the Chilson-Reed interface had originally been designed for treating post-traumatic stress and degenerative memory disorders made her darkly, briefly chuckle. Aside from the wildly prohibitive costs to the uninsured, Sean had a feeling being trapped in a sensory void while a machine reprogrammed your brain’s chemical functions might be traumatic enough on its own. The three trial runs she’d gone through to test her own uplink hadn’t been pleasant.
Through the helmet’s speakers, Christian said: “Comfortable and secure?”
Sean gave a sideways thumbs-up. Leather stuck to her stress-wet palms.
“Your readouts are coming through normal, though elevated general arousal, obviously. Reception is at standby-active, you’re in the machine,” they confirmed. “I’ll give you a countdown once Kate starts to approach. Her transmission is broadcast-active too, FYI, but until we flip the proverbial switch your interface won’t import it. No errors so far.”
Only in the emptiness could Sean, edgy and nauseous, admit to herself, I’m about to pipe another brain into my brain. She would become the researcher-subject, the every(wo)man scientist hero, unless the first attempt scrambled her gray matter bad enough to sink the whole project. Animal trials had gone fine, humans using the original program were fine, safety protocols were in place. And yet, she was abruptly terrified. Riya had given her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek over a pot of grits that morning, and Sean hadn’t told her it was launch-day; she hadn’t said, hey, I love you, in case I die or something. Too focused on preparing herself for the big event.
“Approaching,” Christian announced crisply. “Five, four, three, two—”
Copyright © 2023 by Lee Mandelo
