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--Chapter Fourteen--

When the two soldiers left, they turned out the lights.

For almost half an hour, Cody sat in the dimly-sunlit room by himself. Unable to move. Unable to speak. Unable to do anything but think.

*****

Cody heard a door open.

He'd been sitting in silence for so long the sound startled him. Yet he didn't flinch or even twitch. He had been told to be still, and no matter how much he'd fought his own body with every ounce of will he possessed, he could not help but obey.

The Newbrain chair had been put back where it was before, beside Miss Vera's desk. Behind Cody was the blackboard. He stared out onto rows of empty desks, watching dust motes dance in the sunlight which made it through the room's half-shaded windows. The door was behind him, so he could not see who had entered. But he recognized the tap-tap-tap of their shoes as they came closer.

Vera didn't speak a word as she walked behind him and briskly snatched up her deskchair. She circled around. Dropped it in front of him with a small clatter.

His face was blank. But hers held a tight, pinched expression; a woman who has reached the absolute limits of her patience.

Her grey tail swirled around in a circle as she sat down backwards in her chair, arms crossed and resting on the seatback. For a few moments, she did nothing but stare into Cody's eyes.

He wished he could yell, spit, look away, anything. Her gaze felt like tiny hands reaching in and trying to open him up.

It was a long time before she spoke. Her voice was barely above a whisper when she did. "Well, Mr. St. John, you've succeeded. You have succeeded in killing any last hope I had for you."

She watched his eyes darting around in his still face. It wasn't fair to keep this up anymore. "The gas has already worn off," she told him. "Remember the post-hypnotic aftereffect I mentioned? It's the only thing keeping you stuck like that. You can move now."

He wasn't inclined to believe anything this woman told him right now, but it couldn't hurt to give it a try. 'You can move again,' he told himself. Nothing happened. It was like some mornings when he'd try to will himself up out of bed but his body wouldn't listen. 'Move! She said you could! Do it!! You've fucking been through this before!' He tried to twitch his fingers but it was like tiny weights were hanging from them. Finally, with a massive effort, he simply broke through. Both hands flexed, his head snapped forward and he let out a bray of release.

He moved his lips and tongue to make sure they responded, but he didn't reply yet. The fox woman probably expected him to curse at her or thrash around in his restraints. He defied her expectations purely for the sake of defiance.

Besides, he'd already thought about this. He was in a Newbrain chair. It was obvious what they planned to do with him. He'd thought execution at first, but no; the GPA worked by recruitment. Forced recruitment. The only good thing about being in this chair was that it was pretty good proof they hadn't already swapped his brain out. One less worry. But he remembered Vera telling Yolanda to keep still during the procedure. If he had to, when she cut the hole in his head and stuck the hose in, he would thrash and buck and twist his head back and forth and not stop for anything. It was his last chance. Better to end up braindead or retarded than become one of them.

Vera waited for a response from Cody, but all he did with his newfound freedom of movement was to stare back at her with the naked contempt an inmate shows an executioner. "We're not going to kill you for what you've done, Cody," she reassured. Her undertone conveyed, 'Even though some of us may want to.'

"I already figured that out," he said. He kept his words calm and well-enunciated. If everything ended here, he wanted to face it with dignity. "You don't want me dead. You want me to betray myself and join you. I'm telling you it won't happen. I will fight you until the last beat of my heart. I will fight you until I force you to kill me, if I have to."

Vera shook her head. There was a part of her that admired his bravery, and another part that knew bravery in pursuit of insanity is meaningless. "You've already proven that, Cody. Abundantly. I'm here to try to convince you one last time before we give up on you completely. It wasn't even my choice this time; my colleagues asked me to try one last go at it. Cody, I want to be done with you. You've hurt me too much."

He scoffed, almost a laugh. "I'VE hurt YOU!?"

Her eyes dared him to laugh again. "Yes, you have. From the first time you looked at me with burning hate, like all you wanted was to snap my neck. I just wanted to teach you and your classmates and ask you to help us fix the world. I'd hoped your rage would pass. I expected violence out of you from the start; I could see it in your eyes. And we've had violent company before. But you... You're something different. I don't have any idea what you are. I repeat, Cody: I Have No Idea What You Are. You are a complete mystery to me. I don't understand anything you do."

He looked at her like she was mentally defective. "What's there to not understand?"

Her hand curled briefly into a fist. "Everything! Nothing you do makes the slightest bit of sense to me! I have tried, time and time again, to predict what you'll do next, and I am always wrong! You drive me up the wall, Cody!"

He smirked. "You're welcome."

The vixen looked away from him, disgusted. Of course he'd take that as a compliment.

Was she actually serious? Was she just trying to make him reveal his secrets? Cody couldn't tell. If she was acting, she was doing a fantastic job. But part of him knew, he really had pushed her to the edge. 'Well then, fine. If I fall, I take you over with me.'

He spoke with massive intentional condescension. "If you don't understand me, then let me make it plain. I hate Preds. I will always hate Preds, and I will always fight against them. From the second you trapped me in here, I have been trying to get out. My plan has always been to escape and tell the world about you."

She ran a hand through her hair in exasperation. "That's my POINT!" she snarled. "You SAY that, but your actions tell a completely different story!!"

Cody snorted. "They do not."

"Oh really, Mr. St. John? Would you care to switch roles then? Educate me? Because when I look at all you've done, I see nothing but chaos. Random pain and destruction with no purpose and no goal."

Cody felt a fire light inside him. It started in his ribcage and burned along his spine until his whole face was red-hot. "Everything I've done, I've done for a damn good reason," he ground out.

Vera nearly jumped up out of her chair and left the room. She felt like they were just going back and forth now, swinging sledgehammers into a solid steel wall between them. "Maybe the problem's just miscommunication then, hm? Maybe all of this is my fault. I tried to manipulate you. I tried to predict your path and guide you onto a better one. But I also tried being honest. I've always tried to be honest with you. And that didn't work either, because you won't listen to me no matter what."

He grinned flippantly. "Say something worth listening to then." He saw her arm twitch at that. She'd really wanted to slap him for that one! Awesome! His grin's width doubled.

Vera's breathing sped up and she tried to force it back to normal again. Getting angrier would help nothing. Descending into a shouting match would help nothing. She had to remain calm and choose her words carefully. She knew she could not get through to him, but she was not about to let him make her give up trying while she still could.

She closed her eyes for a second to cool down. "Allright, Cody. Let's see if I can."

He tried to lean forward, despite the leather strap around his head. 'This oughtta be good.' What bullshit was she going to try now?

She looked at him again, trying to focus on her disappointment in him instead of that smug, infuriating grin on his face. "Let's see if we can at least understand one another, because so far we are clearly seeing two distinctly different realities. I think mine's right and you think yours is. Let me tell you what I see, Cody, and you can tell me where I'm wrong, okay?"

There were so many snotty things he could reply to that, but that would be expected. Instead he just smiled and gestured with his hand: 'proceed.'

A nasty little idea occurred to Vera then. Something that just might strike a nerve in him. And the best part was that it was completely true. "Cody, from my perspective, you are the most Preddish boy I have ever met in my life."

That did it. Cody's calm arrogance fizzled in an instant. He lunged against his restraints, hands balled into fists. "TAKE THAT BACK! YOU LYING FUCKING BITCH! YOU TAKE THAT BACK!!!"

It was her turn to grin. "Oh, I'm sorry. Was that a little too true for you to handle?"

"NO IT'S NOT! IT'S A LIE!!"

She cocked her head to the side. "Let me tell you why I think so. See if you can argue with me then."

Cody let all his muscles relax. He slumped in the chair, panting with exertion. He'd fought against the straps so hard they'd bitten into the flesh of his ribs, wrists and forehead. It didn't feel very nice.

"For starters, do you remember my lesson on dominant and submissive personalities? Do you remember talking about the common stereotypes of Pred and Prey? Cody, you are a textbook Pred. You are endlessly aggressive and fiercely independent. You refuse to conform under any circumstances. You have the mind of a hunter: a lone, fierce killer. I'm not saying that any of these traits are necessarily bad, but you have to admit, they're not the first things you imagine when someone says 'Prey'."

He glared at her. That was all true and he couldn't deny it, but it didn't mean anything. "You said it yourself, the stereotypes aren't always true."

"Oh, so you did pay a little bit of attention in my classes after all?" she sing-songed.

Cody gave her a grimace of disgust. "I act this way because I have to. My Dad trained me to think like you so I could survive you."

Vera 'hm'ed. "That at least makes sense in the context of your behavior. Although I meant it when I said your unpredictability drives me crazy. You've said umpteen times, with both voice and body language, how much you hate Preds. What makes me tear my hair out is how that attitude doesn't match your actions. Let's count the ways, shall we?" She held up her paw and started tapping off incidents.

"I remember watching you push your way up to my desk to threaten me after I'd said something you didn't like. I remember the hurt look in Trudy's eyes when you shoved her."

"I didn't mean to do that," Cody said, flinching a little.

"Perhaps. But I'm certain you meant what you did to Miss Tanondo. I wasn't there, but she described it to me. You hurt her as badly as shoving her down a flight of steps with what you said to her."

The chipmunk's cheeks flushed hot.

"Moving on, there was your first little rampage of destruction. You smashed the vending machines in your bunkhouse; I'm guessing as some sort of punishment against the others. Then you knocked over the Newbrain chair, which I'll concede is at least one consistent thing you've done. But then when a Pred caught you in the act, you ran right past him, not even touching him. Yet moments later, when you saw Rick Crosley, a Prey, running towards you on his morning jog, he told me you headed straight for him and nearly fractured his kneecap. Care to explain why? Because I'm baffled."

Cody tried to cross his arms in defiance, but the straps held them in place. He settled for looking as far away across the room as he could.

"Then you spent the day up in that old tower, and we let you because at least we knew where you were and you couldn't cause any more damage up there. Plus, I foolishly thought that maybe it would give you time to reflect and you'd come down repentant. Nope! Silly me! The first thing you did was jump on Walter Bennect and viciously beat him. He had a dislocated jaw and three loose teeth when we found him."

'If he'd kept his mouth shut, it wouldn't have happened,' Cody thought.

"Afterwards, I tried my last-ditch effort to reach you. And I was so happy. Even when you and Miss Penmark were beating the stuffing out of each other, at least it was predictable behavior! And then you seemed to be responding so well to the 'execution'. I saw real empathy in your eyes. I thought, 'This is it. He gets it. We might have another few relapses, but he's finally learned.'"

Vera sighed, and in her face Cody saw a depth of sadness emerge. It had always been there though, in the background. Her anger was simply gone. Burned out. No longer masking what she truly felt.

"Then I was told what you did after you woke up this morning," she said. "My heart broke, Cody. I had been so hopeful. I felt like I had been slapped in the face.

"You broke three of Tycho's fingers. You bruised up your friend Kenny so bad he looked like a purple eggplant. You split Jake's lip. You scared the living heck out of everyone else. And on your way out, for your grand finale, you managed to break Cameron's leg. I had to listen to him weep from the pain while we healed him, Cody. I had to listen to that."

Cody blinked. 'I don't remember that. She's just making things up again. Wait... Oh, shit. The bunkbed. I did hear a scream when I ran out...'

Vera continued. "When I heard you were headed towards the Pred side of camp, I thought, 'Oh no. This is it. He's going to kill them off like flies.' But again, I was wrong. On your journey over you managed two injure two more Preys, I'm guessing at random. But on the Pred side? No injuries reported. I was stunned."

Wait, no. He was sure he'd...

"What did you do instead? You hid for a while, then you saw the supply truck coming in and for whatever reason you decided to attack it. But you didn't do it alone. No, you asked for help. From a Pred! I thought you hated them, Cody?"

'No!' She was getting it all wrong!

"What exactly were you trying to accomplish with your little firestarter act, Cody? Trying to starve us?"

He looked at her, suddenly even more confused than before. "What?"

She threw up her hands. "You tell me. I don't get it."

"No; what did you mean, 'trying to starve us'? Were you gonna have a cookout with the bodies after you were done?"

She stared at him in utter incomprehension. "Cody, what are you talking about?"

He growled in frustration. "The GUNS, stupid! And stop looking at me like you don't know what I'm talking about! The guns in the crates! Why do you think I was trying to destroy them!?"

Her expression changed from confusion to disbelief to outright fear. "You thought there were guns in the crates... The crates on the supply truck?"

"YES!!! WHAT IS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT THAT!?"

She continued to stare. "Cody, those crates were full of food."

"BULLSHIIT!!!"

"Cody, they were LABELED! Each and every one! That's why Miss Penmark went looking for help. She'd believed you up till that point, but she saw for herself that the boxes were marked as being full of canned fruit and vegetables, and she led the guards away to get help stopping you!"

'Well, that explains that at least,' Cody thought hazily. His chest felt tight. There was no way the fox woman was telling the truth. He had looked directly at those crates. How could he have not seen the writing on them?

Or was it because he just wasn't looking? He simply knew what was in them, so there was no need to look?

He shook his head violently. "You're lying."

No more shouting, she noticed. The reality was starting to sink in. Vera forced herself not to feel hope and have it destroyed for the dozenth time, but she thought that maybe a few more pushes would force him to see. "You have hurt a lot of people, Cody. Think back and remember them all. How many of them have been your 'enemy'? With the exception of Petra, I can't think of anyone but Prey you've hurt."

His mind rejected that so forcefully it was like a migraine spiking straight through him. "NO," he said. "That's a lie! Stop lying! What about Walter!?"

"You hate him because he dares to call himself Prey, don't you?"

Fuck, was she a mind-reader!? That had been almost the exact thought that had just gone through his head! Cody's breathing had sped up and his heart was pounding. "Stop lying," he pleaded again.

"You wish it was a lie, Cody," Vera pressed on. "You don't want to face the fact that you're more of a Pred than I am. All the Prey you've hurt? All the punches and kicks you've thrown? What was the first thing you said when you arrived here? The very first thing? Tina told me. She said you looked right into her eyes and the words that came out of your mouth were, 'I'm going to kill every Pred here.' Tell me Cody, is that what a Prey does, or a Pred?"

"SHUT UP!!!" he screamed. He shut his eyes tight and shook his head and pulled against his restraints and ground his teeth together.

It was like watching a steam boiler getting closer and closer to exploding. Vera kept very still and spoke very clearly. "Cody... whose uniform are you wearing?"

Cody's eyes snapped open.

He looked down at himself.

Blue. Predator blue. Their color.

A dull, wavering moan came from his throat. And it rose. It intensified in depth and volume until it had become a feral scream of all-consuming terror.

Cody shrieked in short, terrified bursts of pure, maddened fear. He struggled as hard as he could in his restraints, trying to get away from the color that was on him. He kicked at the chair legs, looking like was trying to climb up out of his own skin.

Vera had a hand over her mouth, eyes wide in alarm. Had she gone too far? The boy looked like he was spiraling into permanent madness. He continued to scream. Vera worried her colleagues outside might think she was flaying him alive.

Cody's mind was a redblack void of flying, shattered glass. There were no thoughts. Mr. Rage was gone and this wasn't even Mr. Panic's doing. This went beyond panic. Cody had reached the absolute limit of the stress his body and mind could handle. Now he was simply free-falling. He felt like he was covered in burning acid and attacked by thousands of stinging insects. There was nothing in his mind except for an all-overriding desire to GET AWAY. But he couldn't. Not only was he strapped down, but there was no way for his consciousness to burrow out of his own body.

So he just kept on screaming until his voice gave out.

It was painful to watch. Agonizing. Vera's every instinct compelled her to stand up and stop this. She felt like a monster for sitting there doing nothing while this boy lost his mind. But she forced herself to keep sitting. Listening to his howls. Watching Cody suffer was her punishment as well.

With all that effort going towards an unattainable goal, Cody eventually succumbed to simple exhaustion.

One moment he was still struggling feebly to tear himself away from the proof of his ultimate failure, the next, he simply shut down. His arms and legs went limp. His head drooped onto his chest. A line of drool trickled down. If it weren't for the rise and fall of his breathing, he would have looked dead.

'An execution,' Vera thought. That's what it had looked like. Like watching someone get a few thousand volts shot through them in the electric chair: violent tension, then complete inaction.

She watched him breathe for a few minutes more. She had no idea what was going on in his head.

Then, against her better judgement, she stood up and moved closer. For all she knew, she might have just witnessed the death of Cody's rationality. At any second, his head might snap up and snarl at her with all the unthinking savagery of a rabid beast.

But, stupidly, she still wanted to hope that maybe it was his delusions that had died instead.

Trembling, she reached out her hand and gently patted his head.

That single gesture of comfort was what finally broke Cody completely.

She could not see inside his head. But she could see him stiffen up like a little bent statue. See his fists tense up. And see him start to cry.

He tried to hold it back. Tried not to allow it. Especially not in front of her. But he just couldn't anymore. His chest heaved. The stinging water came to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks like rain. He began to sob and sniffle and quietly wail with each breath. He had never cried this hard in his entire life, and he had also never tried this hard to stop himself.

For Vera, it was like watching a stone carving weep. Cody held himself rigidly stiff, trying to hold onto his dignity and masculinity. But his body had simply given up. In the end, it betrayed him too. In the end, like everyone else, it also got sick of carrying on his crusade, ceaselessly holding onto holy anger.

He simply couldn't take it anymore.

Vera stood beside him, nearly crying herself. She thought that maybe, her silly, impossible hope had paid off. Cody's sobs didn't sound like those of a madman. He sounded like someone who had just woken up from an achingly sad nightmare.

She patted him on the head again, then sat back down to wait.

She knew he would need some time to recover before he could speak again.

*****

"Are you calmer now?" Vera cautiously asked.

Cody had been quiet for a while now. He didn't look up at her.

"Yes," he said in a dead voice. He sniffed hard.

Vera got up and went over to her desk for a tissue. She held it below Cody's nose. "Here. Blow." He did, making a heckuva noise. She tossed the first tissue in the trash and wiped his nose with another. His eyes with a third.

Then she sat back down. "Maybe it had to happen this way," she said sadly. "Maybe you wouldn't have listened to anything else. Maybe you couldn't have. You're not a stupid boy, Cody. Far from it. You're very smart, and that's why you're so dangerous. Because smart people can take a bad idea and think of a million perfectly plausible-sounding reasons to keep on believing it. Despite all evidence. Despite anything anyone says."

Cody flinched.

"Did that hurt a little?" Vera asked.

A tiny movement that might have been a nod.

"It's not all bad, at least," she said. "The truck's a loss, but we saved some of the cargo. You didn't damage the Newbrain chair too much when you kicked it over. We were able to salvage the fluid. And it's not like we don't have several more chairs like this."

'I should have guessed that,' Cody thought to himself.

"Plus the vending machines you broke will be repaired and restocked by tomorrow." She lightly chuckled, adding, "Your friend Jayden is a bit of an opportunistic genius. We can't seem to prove it, but we think that he somehow discovered the broken machines before anyone else did, cleaned them out, hid everything somewhere we can't find, and has been selling it back to the rest of your classmates at a tidy profit."

Cody did manage a tiny smile at that. 'Jayden you amazing bastard.'

Vera had a momentary epiphany of her own. "Cody... I watched your reactions as I was listing all your various 'crimes', and the only thing I saw you seemingly deny was that you'd smashed the snack machines as a way to punish your bunkmates. It just occurred to me; you did it for purely practical reasons, didn't you? You planned to hide out in the tower all day, so you brought your own food and water."

Cody looked up at her, unsure whether he should admit to anything or not. Finally though, he nodded.

She blinked. "I almost have to admire the sheer forethought of that."

He cleared his throat. "Um... could I get some water?"

"Absolutely. Just give me a moment." She stood up and walked back to the desk. She always kept a little cooler there filled with water bottles so she could refresh her throat after a long lesson. She uncapped one and brought it to Cody. "I hope you'll forgive me for not letting you hold this yourself, but I'm not quite comfortable with unstrapping you yet."

He supposed that was understandable. He gulped gratefully at the nice cool water. He moaned in satisfaction. He hadn't realized till now just how thirsty he was. Sitting in the shady classroom had been kind of a relief after spending so long letting the afternoon sun cook him. And this was even better.

Vera held the bottle until Cody had drunk it dry. Some had spilled down his shirt and she moved to pat it with another tissue.

"Leave it. It's kinda refreshing," he told her.

She nodded and sat back down.

"How did you know I was up there in the tower?" he eventually asked.

"Oh, that's simple," she said. "We put microscopic tracking chips in all the food."

Cody's eyes bulged. "You WHAT!?" he shrieked.

His reaction startled the heck out of her. "Cody, no! I'm sorry, that was a JOKE! Oh, I'm an idiot... I shouldn't have tried to joke about that with you in this state. I'm sorry." She shook her head. "No, really, we knew about the tower because, well, we built the camp. We could have torn it down, but we figured we might have someone like you, who'd figure out how to climb up in it despite the damaged stairs. Someone who'd need a place to be apart from everyone else for a while." She smiled sympathetically. "That's why I argued with my colleagues to let you stay up there. I thought it might cool you down a bit."

"It did, actually," Cody admitted. "That's why I came down. That, and I was bored and my legs were all stiff. But then I saw Walter and I just... snapped. It was like what happened with Frank. I felt like someone else was in control of me."

Vera felt a ray of hope. He was starting to open up a little. "Cody, I'd really like it if you could tell me your side of the story. I don't want to punish you, I just want to understand you. There's so much I don't know about you, but I think I might be just starting to get a glimpse of your motivations. Please tell me. I promise I'll listen."

Cody looked up at her. She seemed sincere. And despite his brain's constant insistence that she was always lying to him, he couldn't offhand remember any specific time when she had. He thought that maybe he'd always assumed she was lying simply because she was a Pred, and that's what Preds did.

A new way of escaping this place occurred to Cody. It was the first time he'd ever considered it. Not by fighting or sabotage, but by just telling her his story. Telling her the complete, honest truth. Then maybe she'd let him go. Deep in his gut, he knew how unlikely that was. He knew it was possible she simply wanted information from him before her friends in the GPA had him for dinner.

But she was offering to listen. If it was manipulation, he had to admit she was good at it. It was an irresistible temptation. He'd felt so alone for so long. A prisoner in his own mind. He wanted to talk to someone.

So he did.

Vera sat and listened for a long time as Cody told his side of the past week's events. There were parts where she had to bite her tongue to keep from correcting the insane ideas he'd somehow accumulated. There were times when she had to sink her claws into the chair to keep from slapping him over some unbelievably hurtful thing he'd said about Preds. But the more he talked, the more she realized that this wasn't mere hatred she was seeing in him. It was belief. Rock solid belief. That was why it was so unshakable. Cody didn't just hate Preds, he wholly accepted it as a scientific fact that her kind were a constant threat to the life of everyone he loved. His hatred did not come from anger, but from a desire to protect. In a terrifying, tragic way, he believed himself a hero. And she found herself continuously surprised at the inarguably noble rationalizations behind some of his behavior.

Some of it was just plain terrifying though. His description of his rage as a separate entity, how it 'took over his driver's seat', chilled her to the bone. The boy was describing a kind of mental illness she could only describe as psychopathic. She realized that if it wasn't for his strong, if warped, code of morality, he could have done much, much worse things than he had. Panic and jealousy and frustration had driven him to near-unforgivable acts. Vera didn't even want to imagine what he might have done if he'd been committing violence for the sake of enjoyment.

When Cody got to the end of his story, describing why he had chosen to immolate the truck full of 'weapons', Vera found herself stunned at how easily he'd committed himself to giving up his life in service of what he believed to be a greater good. Where she had been seeing random, violent chaos, he had seen an attempt to save the world from evil.

She had walked in here prepared to excoriate this vicious child for all the destruction and suffering he'd caused. Now, she couldn't help but feel sorry for him. He had caused pain because he was so constantly consumed by it. It didn't excuse his actions, but at least she understood them now.

"So that's it," Cody finished. "Before you walked in, I'd just sat here scaring the shit out of myself for a while, imagining all the ways I thought I was gonna get tortured and killed."

"I hope you realize by now that's not going to happen," she replied comfortingly.

He nodded. Then he gave her a hard, accusatory glare. "...But I'm not in this chair just because you didn't have anywhere else to tie me up. You still want to pump my brain out."

She had nearly torn her hair out at his ludicrous declaration that obviously the GPA were giving everyone Newbrains to turn them into remote-controlled assassins. She'd wanted to go off on a rant, explaining to him all the ways that was not just wrong but impossible. But then she stopped herself. From his perspective, it really wasn't all that fantastical an assumption. She had to keep reminding herself that she and her colleagues had presented themselves as supervillains, and sometimes that choice didn't turn out so well when someone took them at their word.

"Yes, Cody," she admitted. "We're still hoping you'll accept a Newbrain. And after all you've told me about how your brain works, or rather how it sabotages you at every possible opportunity, I think you'd benefit from one in ways you can't even imagine right now."

He gave her a look that perfectly conveyed how very unconvinced he was.

She rolled her eyes. "Fine. I'll promise you this, Cody: I will not force one on you. We simply don't do that. But..."

"But you're going to anyway," he finished for her.

She snorted a little. "No. What I was going to say was that all of us reached a decision about you. All the first tier camp staff, that is. And I agreed with them this time." She sighed. "Cody, this is your absolute last chance. Absolutely final. We are giving you one more choice, and then that's it."

He narrowed his eyes. "What is it?"

"Our philosophy is, 'the fight is never over until your enemy is no longer your enemy'. And that has many interpretations. Our favorite one is where our enemies are no longer our enemies because they've become our friends. But it can also mean that we simply give up the fight and let them walk away."

Cody sat up straighter. He was right? They were actually considering letting him go? 'Shit, maybe I just caused so much trouble they think it's not worth trying to stop me anymore!' he thought.

Vera stood up and leaned slightly on her seatback. "Do you remember how I told everyone in our very first class that at the end of one week, we would reunite you with your parents, whether you'd decided to join us or not?"

Cody's eyes popped open. This was getting better and better!

Vera bristled at his eager smile. "Well, you've tossed that out the window."

She could practically hear his hope shatter. "What!?"

She held up two fingers. "You've got one last choice, Mr. St. John. You can either accept a Newbrain now, because that is absolutely the only way that any of us will ever trust you again, or we can simply dump you. By that I mean that we will not help you find your father. We will simply blindfold you, put you on the next helicopter we can smuggle in, and drop you at the closest Prey-controlled border."

Cody's cheeks got hot. "That's not FAIR!!" he bellowed.

Vera's face suddenly darkened. For the first time, he saw real, deep anger directed towards him. Not just frustration, not just irritation: FURY.

"Fair, Cody? That's not fair?"

She came closer until she was looming over him. She pointed her index finger directly in his face. "I have listened to you talk and I understand you and I sympathize with you. I even empathize with you. But you need to look at things from MY perspective now. Can you even fathom how much we've had to put up with because of you? You have made us work overtime treating all the injuries you've caused. You've cost us money to repair our equipment that you broke. I have no idea how much money we just lost on all the supplies you torched. Not to mention the truck itself! We actually have to go out and get a new one now, Cody. And considering that this is the middle of a war and both sides want to kill us, that's not exactly going to be EASY!!!"

Cody shrank back in his straps. Holy crap was she pissed!

Vera's muzzle drew closer and closer to Cody's until their noses nearly touched. Her voice had gone from sweet and soft to nails and sandpaper. "Do you have any idea what my friends risked to get all that food in the first place? So we can feed you all for FREE? Do you have any idea how much I've worried when people I work with and know and love go out on supply runs, and I don't know if they'll get shot to death out there? And did you think at all about the consequences that might have occurred if we hadn't been able to get that fire under control so quickly? Petra probably saved dozens of lives! If it had spread to the cafeteria or one of the classrooms..." She winced just imagining it. "Not to mention the smoke! That's one thing the wiredome can't keep in! If the fire had gotten just a little bit worse, that smoke might've made it past our perimeter and been seen by someone. They might have investigated, and found us, and called in the military. Either side's military. And either of them might have BOMBED US FLAT. Do you understand that, Cody!? Not FAIR!? You SELFISH LITTLE SHIT!!!" The vixen spun away and went to lean against her desk for a moment to regain her calm.

Cody was 100% petrified. He blinked, feeling like he'd just popped his face right through the door of a blast furnace. He had never seen her so angry at him before. He'd never heard her swear before either! He had really set her off!

"I'm sorry..." he said.

Vera's head popped up. She ran around the side of the Newbrain chair and grabbed the armrests. "What did you say? Did I hear that right?"

Cody gulped, worried he'd somehow made her even angrier. "I said 'I'm sorry'."

Vera collapsed in her chair. "You'll have to forgive me, I think my heart just stopped. I'm not hallucinating, am I? You actually just apologized?"

He blushed uncomfortably at her sarcasm. "Well... yeah."

The vixen sat up straighter, her expression becoming sincere again. "Did you mean it?"

Cody had to think about that first before he answered.

Was he sorry? He remembered asking himself that same question last night when he was strapped to the table with Petra (assuming any of that had actually happened). To admit he was sorry now was to admit defeat. Even if he'd been wrong about the truck full of weapons and the plot to kill all the Prey (which even now he realized was absurd because it conflicted with his Newbrain assassin theory), his heart had still been in the right place. He still believed that what he was doing was meant to save Prey lives.

But, at the cost of Preds.

Was he willing to admit to being wrong about that?

A sharp pain hit him out of nowhere as he asked himself that. It wasn't physical. It hit him in the heart, and it made him think of Dad for some reason.

"Cody...?"

He looked at her. "I don't know. I think... I think maybe I'm sorry for some of it, but other parts... I can't say that I am because I'm not. Like in that memory you guys wrote for me where Petra was trying to save us by apologizing and I said I couldn't. I can't lie. Not about this. I'm sorry I almost gave away our position. I would have lost my mind crying with regret if airplanes had actually shown up and started dropping bombs on everyone. But some of the other stuff... I was doing what I thought was right."

Vera nodded. "I can respect that answer. Also, you mentioned that implanted memory idea before and I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from correcting you at the top of my lungs. I almost started banging my head against a wall when you were telling me about how much you panicked when you woke up.

"Cody, are you seriously telling me that you forgot all about the Rejuvenators?"

The young chipmunk's brain exploded with a noise that sounded like a fart.

He stared straight ahead, frozen, unable to believe the laws of physics would allow a universe where he could have possibly been so fucking stupid.

"Everything that happened between you and Miss Penmark actually happened. After we cut your heads off, we popped you right in a Rejuvenator, then snuck you back to your bunks. And no, we didn't really turn you into lunchmeat. We put you back the way you were and assumed you'd figure out what had happened as soon as you woke up. None of us had any idea you'd panic like that!" She smacked her forehead, remembering herself and the other staff staring at each other in utter disbelief when they'd been given the news of Cody's bunkhouse freakout.

"Do you understand now?" she asked delicately. "That's why you didn't feel any pain from your injuries or-"

He lifted a hand to stop her. "I... I get it. I understand now. I feel like the biggest retard the world ever shat out."

She shook her head, trying not to giggle at that colorful description. "No, Cody. You might have been wrong, but I know you aren't stupid. You just had a moment of panic. Fear hinders rational thought. Fear seeks the most outlandish, grotesque explanations. Yet another reason why I hope you'll reconsider our offer to give you a Newbrain."

He grimaced.

Vera kneaded her hands together. "Cody... Every time you mentioned your father, I could see how much he means to you. I want to help you reunite with him. From everything you've described, I honestly think it's killing you to be apart from him so long. The stress is chewing you to pieces, you love him so much. I don't want them to just drop you off at the border not knowing how or whether you'll ever see him again."

Cody made a fist and clenched it hard, trying to hold back tears again. 'Dammit, you're good at this,' he thought. 'You know how to pull all my strings.'

She could see him fighting himself inside. She spoke very gently. "Another philosophy of the GPAs is that choice is wonderful, but choices have consequences, and they should have consequences. To choose one thing is to lose the other. I don't want you thinking there's a way out of this where you get everything you want, Cody. The choice is fair whether or not you want to accept that. You have given us a mountain of trouble to sort through. If we're going to help you, you have to do something to show us you're worth it."

"Why do you even want me at all?" Cody asked. "If you knew from the start I was going to fight you no matter what, why didn't you just kick me out days ago?"

It was a fair question. "I suppose that's my fault. Even when I didn't know anything about you, even when I felt nothing but fear towards you for the way you looked at me, I still wanted to give you the chance to change. None of us in the GPA want anyone to have to live with that much corrosive hatred inside them. And I still see potential in you. Your story helped confirm a suspicion I'd had that maybe your weird, chaotic frenzies had some kind of internal logic to them that I couldn't see. And now I realize that, for the most part, your intentions were admirable."

She sighed. "Cody, to be honest, some of your suspicions were dead-on. And by that I'm not necessarily saying your conclusions were correct, but that I can see how your reasoning led you there. I work with the GPA every day, so it's easy for me to see the best in us. All the people I love, all our big ideas and hopes. But from an outside perspective, I can understand how much we might seem like a looming apocalypse. We do want to take over the world. We do dress up in black and make scary speeches. And we've got mind-bogglingly powerful technology that people will inevitably be afraid of. We understand all that. We know that power corrupts, and if we succeed, we're going to end up with a lot of it."

Vera came closer to put her hand on top of Cody's. "If you joined us, I think you would be excellent at helping to keep us honest. Helping to make sure we keep to our ideals; to always do the right thing even when it's not the easy thing."

Cody was surprised by how appealing the idea sounded. "Like, internal affairs?"

She nodded. "Exactly. Right now, you've got suspicion covered. You get an A+ in suspicion." She chuckled. "A Newbrain would definitely help you differentiate between rational and irrational worries."

Cody looked away from her and sighed hard. He could not believe he was giving this idea the slightest, tiniest, most microscopic bit of consideration. "If I don't get one, I don't see Dad ever again, is that right?"

"You might," Vera conceded. "You'd probably be taken back to The Box, or somewhere similar. You'd have to wait until the war ends for him to come home. And... you'd have to hope that he makes it through alive. You know the GPA doesn't kill our enemies. But other Preds might."

Cody shuddered. Goddamn was this woman good at getting him right in the soft spots. He shut his eyes and thought, and asked his heart what the hell it most wanted.

Vera sat back down and gave him time.

He finally looked back up at her. His voice was quiet, but edged with titanium. "You have to understand something first, and you have to make me a promise."

She nodded. "I'm listening."

Cody looked down at the floor again. "I'm tired," he said simply.

"I can imagine. All that exertion in this heat-"

His look stopped her cold. His eyes told her to shut the fuck up and just listen to him.

She shut up.

"I'm tired," he repeated. "I can't believe I'm admitting this to you, and I feel like a traitor to myself for doing it. But I've been on red alert constantly for days now and I can't stand it anymore. Part of why I was willing to do a suicide mission this morning was so this would all just be over. If I couldn't go home, then at least it'd stop feeling like I'm being cooked alive all the time. I'm always afraid, always alert. I can't trust anyone. I treat my friends like shit because I'm so afraid they'll betray me. It feels FUCKING HORRIBLE," he exploded.

Vera saw the tension in his young body, coiled to self-destruct. She could imagine a molten core inside him, boiling and rolling and spilling white-hot metal everywhere. She could imagine the pain of it.

"So I want it to end," Cody said. "But giving in to you feels almost worse. Part of me would have rather burned to death in that warehouse than surrender to you. Because you're my ENEMY. You've ALWAYS been my enemy. And the very thought of ever giving in to you makes me SICK. I feel nauseous just considering it. It feels like, as much as I'd like to be able to relax and just be friends and let myself like you and believe you, I'd be killing myself if I did that."

Vera had a hand over her mouth in shock and sadness at his words. "Cody, I... I understand. I don't think it was anywhere near as hard for me as it is for you, but I had to turn my back on everything my parents taught me when I joined the GPA. I had to convince myself that my beliefs were more important than my relationship with them. I still love them, but they still haven't forgiven me, and it hurts like hell inside."

Hearing that made him feel a little better. At least she knew what it was like. At least she wasn't going to bitch at him for not wholeheartedly embracing love and trust and forgiveness. It wasn't that easy. Part of him did want to. He could admit to himself now how beautiful it would be if everything the GPA stood for was really true and they really did want to save the world. But to believe that would mean denying... well... everything he'd ever known.

"What was it you wanted me to promise?" Vera asked.

"It's more like something I need than a promise," Cody replied. "I need you to prove to me you're not lying. All the stuff you've said, as much as it makes sense... there's still a part of me that says it could all be made up. That you Preds could be hiding bunkers full of nerve gas and you're planning to wipe out all the Prey the second we let you take over. Give me a reason why I should believe you."

Vera considered that. She considered many ways of answering that request, and one by one she denied them all. A truly paranoid mind could find ways of disbelieving all of them. And besides, she'd already made some of her best arguments in class and they'd done nothing to persuade Cody then.

Finally, she decided on complete honesty. "I can't."

He'd expected a lot of answers out of her, but not that one.

"No matter what I say to you, Cody, if you want to convince yourself that I'm lying, then you will. No amount of facts would change that. I could show you every secret we have, and you could still insist we had more hidden. We've let you and the other Preykids wander freely around the camp, trying to show you that we're not hiding anything. And we still hear about rumors that we're doing experiments on people in the medical building, or there's a giant meat locker full of bodies underneath the pool."

Cody hadn't heard THAT one. "Wait... why the hell DID you have a beheading table in the medical building?"

She replied without hesitation. "It really is a butchering machine," she admitted. "Mrs. Lyubov and I used it to scare you, but that's actually the opposite of its purpose. It's made to be used alongside the Rejuvenator. We knew most Preys would be terrified by the idea of volunteering for meat, so the table was designed to kill painlessly. And there's two neckrests because we found that furs were far less scared to go through with it if they had a friend by their side for support. Ask Audra sometime if you don't believe me."

Cody considered that. It was possibly a lie, but she hadn't delivered it like one. She hadn't sputtered as if concocting something off the top of her head.

Vera thought of something else. "Say, why did you come around to believing me when I said you'd been acting so incredibly Preddish? I saw how fiercely you denied it at first."

Cody thought it over. "Because... Well... because all the stuff you were saying, I remembered doing it."

She nodded. "I guess that's my answer to your need for proof then. I've already given you all I can. Look back through your memories and decide for yourself how much of what I've said is true. You're the only furson you'll ultimately believe." She looked in his eyes, then shrugged. "I suppose, Cody, that you're simply going to have to trust me. As impossible as that sounds. Choose to, or not. There's nothing I can do to make it easier for you."

"Okay," he said softly.

Vera was utterly startled. It couldn't be that easy. "Okay? You trust me already?"

Cody gave her a growl of mock-annoyance. "No, I meant 'okay' as in, 'okay, I'll think about it'."

"I see," she said. She giggled slightly. "Sorry."

Cody waved it away. It was a fair misunderstanding.

Suddenly, Vera lit up like a christmas tree. Grinning brightly, she jumped to her feet. "I just had a fantastic idea! Cody, if you don't mind me spoiling the lesson I was about to give everyone tomorrow, would you like me to reveal the Great Predator Army's great big evil scheme for world domination?"

He blinked. "Um..."

She giggled again. "Sorry, just being dramatic. What I mean is, I'll show you our plans for how we're going to reconstruct society so that everyone's happy, and maybe that'll help you decide whether or not you want to be a part of it."

Cody 'hm'ed. "Allright. It might help. At least I can judge for myself whether it makes sense or not, and if it'll actually work."

"Exactly my intentions," Vera said with a smile. "Just give me a second to make sure I've got my slides in the right order." And with that she dashed to the blackboard.

*****

He heard her tapping away for a minute or so, then suddenly he was spinning around. "Whoa!"

"Sorry to startle you," Vera said as she finished positioning the Newbrain chair.

Cody looked up towards the blackboard. He wasn't sure what he was seeing at first. It showed a colored bar that stretched across the screen; blue gradually changing over to orange. Above, it was labeled:

The Sliding Scale Of Freedom And Comfort

At various points along the colored bar there were four labels:

FREEMAN, CITIZEN, WORKER and SLAVE.

Slave was at the far end of the scale, where the bar was fully orange. Cody knew what that color meant. "You're going to enslave all the Prey? THAT'S your idea of a society everyone will be happy with!?"

Vera giggled. "Not all Prey!"

Well, that was a relief. Wait...

"...Just some of them!"

"Are you fucking serious!?"

The grey fox nodded, still smiling. "I am. I know that sounds utterly insane, but just give me a moment to lay everything out."

Cody settled back in his seat. 'This had better be fucking good.'

Vera pointed towards the graphic's title. "Freedom and comfort," she said. "That's the big secret. That's the idea that's going to change everything. You remember the scientists who discovered the Newbrains?"

Cody nodded. Just because he didn't believe what he was told in class didn't mean he hadn't paid attention to some of it.

"They didn't think of trying to take over the world right away. These were just regular scientists after all. But once all of them had Newbrains, and suddenly they were all solving problems they'd been working on their whole careers, inevitably they started trying to find solutions to other things. They looked to their personal lives. They found ways to be happier, healthier, calmer. How to spend more time with the people they loved. And they looked at society, too. They saw it as a great big tangled problem that was actively resisting being solved.

"The scientists looked at news reports and opinion pieces and blogs and rants from both sides of the Fence. They tried to find something that was common among everyone. If you can find something both sides share, then you can emphasize it and get people to stop focusing on their differences. What they noticed was that both sides didn't want the other telling them what to do. That sounds simple, but it's so incredibly important!"

Vera laughed a little. "The great big idea that we hope will save society came about because one of the scientists watched a bad movie. He walked out of the theater appalled at the trash he'd just witnessed. He hated it. But then he looked around and saw that a lot of other people were smiling and laughing and talking, and had obviously enjoyed it a lot. At first he had a moment of thinking they must all be idiots. But then he had an epiphany. They would probably think he was the idiot for not liking the film.

"This was the big idea: that neither of them was wrong. He had his reasons for not liking the movie: they had their reasons for liking it. And it didn't make them 'bad' just because they had a different opinion."

Cody looked a bit confused.

"I sense you're not seeing where this is going," Vera said.

"Nope."

"Okay then, think of one Prey citizen and one Pred citizen. One of them hates a certain law, the other loves it. They fight and bicker and argue and demonize each other endlessly. But all of that ends the second you teach them that neither side is wrong. The law they're arguing over? The Pred might have his own reasons for loving it, because it benefits him, and the Prey might have his own reasons for hating it, because it's harmful to him. The solution is to stop forcing both of them to make the same choice. Don't take it away from the Pred to make the Prey happy; don't force it upon the Prey to make the Pred happy."

"...Let both of them have what they want so they're both happy," Cody concluded.

Vera actually did a tiny jump for joy. "YES!! Oh, Cody! I cannot tell you how happy I am that you're getting this! You of all my students!"

He blushed a little. "Well, it's not that hard."

She shook her head sadly. "You'd be surprised. This might be easy for people to grasp; not so much for governments. A government is a superorganism. Kind of like how an ant colony can accomplish things no single ant could do on its own. But this also means that, bizarrely, the superorganism can develop its own patterns of behavior, as if it were a single living thing. It will act in its own best interest, even if that's against the best interests of all its citizens."

Cody was suddenly completely lost.

Vera could tell by the panicked look in his eyes. "Don't worry, this is advanced stuff. You don't have to understand it fully. Just know that governments can sometimes do things that are bad for everybody, and they can even develop ways to ensure that no one can change the system. That's what we have now. The Prey and Pred governments are like two big, loud, greasy machines. Their ultimate purpose is to oppose each other. They will continue to do this forever, no matter how many citizens get sick of all the fighting. The governments have literally evolved to become this way. They'll never back down unless someone forces them to."

"That'd be you guys?" Cody guessed, a bit sarcastically.

Vera nodded. "There's no way to fix the system as it stands. It'll always find a way to 'repair' itself and go right back to pointless perpetual conflict. So, we in the GPA want to swoop in and chop off both heads of the beast, bury it completely, and set up brand new rules that fundamentally change how everything in society works. You can't just kill a weed by picking the green part; you have to eradicate the roots as well."

All this was starting to give Cody the willies. "And you want me to help you do this!?"

"Hopefully so," she replied. "We all hope that when people see our new model for doing things, they'll want it so much they'll help us put it into place."

Cody was getting a tad impatient. "Okay, so get on with it. Explain this sliding scale thing."

"I'm trying to, don't worry," Vera said. "Right now, not a lot of people have enough choice in how they live their lives. The economy's so bad on both sides that people have to take jobs they hate, sometimes multiple jobs they hate, just to make enough money to survive. And what happens when you're forced to do something you hate? You don't put in your best work, that's what. You're constantly distracted by unhappiness. People who want to work put in more effort and are far more productive. Almost everything in our society is based around forcing people to do things. Everyone's miserable, and we all wonder why."

Vera pointed to the blackboard. "So why not a new kind of society where everyone is exactly where they want to be?"

Cody winced. "You're telling me that people will want to be slaves?" he asked, pointing as well as he could to the orange end of the bar.

"Some will," Vera said without hesitation. "I can't imagine you wanting to, but that's because you're you. Someone else would have different values, different desires, different emotional states. You, Cody, are an overwhelmingly independent, free-thinking furson. Someone else might enjoy the comfort of simply obeying without having to think much about it."

Cody felt a little lightbulb go off: the sliding scale of freedom and comfort. "Wait, wait, wait. I think I'm almost getting this... I remember the movie theater metaphor. You're saying, I think I have this right..."

Vera held her breath.

"...that I prefer being free, and that's not wrong. But even if I think someone who'd want to be a slave is insane, they're not wrong either. Their choice is just wrong for me. Right?"

Vera whooped at the top of her lungs. Cody suddenly found a grey-furred ballistic missile headed straight for him. Vera nearly hugged the poor boy's lungs out. "Cody!!! I CANNOT BELIEVE I HEARD YOU JUST SAY THAT!!!" she shouted in total joy. She was actually crying from happiness a little.

Noticing Cody's stunned expression, she quickly disengaged. She stood up straight and pushed her hair back into place. "Um, I apologize for losing my marbles there but... Oh, you cannot believe how happy I am right now! I honestly thought this moment would never come. I never in a bazillion years thought you'd be on board with this!"

Cody had to admit, he did understand the idea and he did see the value in it. Though he still wasn't entirely convinced it could work. "If you're so happy, how about making me happy and undoing these straps?" he asked.

Vera hesitated. She looked him up and down, remembering the brutal things he'd done to other furs before. How he'd punched poor Walter's face into putty. How he and Petra had nearly killed one another. 'But,' she reminded herself, 'you are asking for him to trust you when his every instinct tells him not to.'

She decided to live up to her profession and teach by example.

Slowly and carefully, she undid the leather straps around Cody's head and then his legs. Keeping an eye on his teeth, she reached in to undo the strap around his torso.

Then, visibly trembling, she removed the restraints around his arms.

Cody could see how tense she was. She was expecting him to attack her the instant he got free. And yes, there was still a part of him that wouldn't shut up about how perfect an opportunity this was and that he was wasting it. He was free. His enemy was standing before him. There had never been a better time to strike.

But he didn't. He realized that she had just shown him an almost unthinkable amount of trust. In his heart, he knew that was something an honorable furson would do. That was not how an enemy behaved. An opponent maybe, but not an enemy.

When he was completely free from his restraints, he simply looked at her and nodded his gratitude.

She nodded back. "Thank you for not biting or punching," she said with a weak little smile.

He shrugged. "Hey, I'm tired."

Vera actually chuckled. Things were turning out better than she'd ever dared hope if they could actually joke with one another.

She went back to the blackboard while Cody rubbed his itchy wrists. "As you can see though, slaves are at one extreme end of the spectrum. And it's not the type of slavery you're thinking of, but I'll explain that in a moment. First I wanted to point out the middle." She indicated the word CITIZEN. "This is what everyone is right now, whether they want to be or not. We pay taxes, we go to work, we make our own life decisions. We have a decently balanced amount of both freedom and comfort.

"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, but it's very hard to have more of one without less of the other. Actually, we nearly titled this the sliding scale of freedom and safety. Safety is something a lot of people these days want more of. But safety is a form of comfort, so comfort's what we went with. We wanted to show that both things are desirable. All of us want freedom and comfort sometimes, and we all put different values on how important they are to us. Cody, you clearly value freedom over comfort. To a degree that's both admirable and kind of frightening."

He laughed a little. "Thanks, maybe."

"I hope she wouldn't mind me saying this about her, but you know your classmate Miss Logan?"

Cody blinked vacantly.

"Chloe-Sophia?"

Ohhh. "I think I know where you're going with this."

"She puts less of a priority on freedom than you do. She enjoys being led by Miss Kensington. And that's perfectly okay. The pair of them seem to form a very happy symbiosis. I had worried at first that Hydra was bullying the other girls into following her, but that doesn't seem to be the case. She has a strong, forceful personality, and like moons orbiting a planet, other people gravitate to her. It's a fantastic example of personalities coexisting by fulfilling each other's needs. That's what our whole plan is all about."

She pointed at the blackboard again. "There's four choices labeled here, but we want people to be able to put themselves anywhere on this spectrum. Anywhere they'll be happiest. Everyone will choose how free they want to be, and also how safe and comfortable they want to be."

"What's the 'worker' choice?" Cody asked.

"That one directly relates to the Newbrains." She smirked. "Watch this!" With that, she blinked, and suddenly her entire demeanor changed. Her face lost all expression. Her body became rigid. As Cody watched in mild alarm, she walked once around the desk, her every movement as perfect as a machine's.

When she was back to her original position, she suddenly became just as animated as before. And she looked quite happy too. "Neat, huh?"

"What was THAT!?" Cody hollered. "Did you just turn into a freakin' robot!?"

The vixen giggled. "Pretty much! It's one of many enjoyable side effects we discovered about the Newbrains; you can put yourself into a state where your conscious mind recedes to the background and you follow orders automatically. That probably sounds scary, but it's 100% voluntary. No one can make me enter this state against my will, and I can snap myself out of it at any time."

"But why!?"

"Think practically, Cody!" she lightly admonished. "Remember all the miserable people working at jobs they hate? A lot of those jobs are miserable because they require hours of monotonous, repetitive actions. Tasks that don't require creative thought. Jobs that would be so much easier if the workers could just sleepwalk through them."

Cody saw where this was going and wasn't sure he liked it.

"Did you know that the word 'robot' came from the word 'worker' in another language? It's why robots exist, Cody. Because there are jobs that can be done better if they're performed by unthinking machines. Forcing a furson to perform them is like torture. Imagine being an assembly line worker, or a garbageman, or a janitor, or a data entry clerk, or whatever job you can think of that's so gross or boring you'd go bonkers from doing it."

Roadkill removal came to mind.

"Now imagine going to your workplace and simply turning yourself off. You float in hazy dreams for a while, completely unaware of time passing. The next thing you know, your workday is done and you get to go home. It's like being paid for sleeping."

Admittedly, Cody could see the appeal in that. "Wouldn't there be tons of accidents though?"

She shook her head. "Most workplace accidents occur because people are distracted. This 'robot mode', as we've nicknamed it, isn't like being a zombie: it puts the thinking part of you aside so all of your attention becomes focused on your work. No talking, no daydreaming, no distractions. You follow safety rules to the letter without even thinking about it. Accidents actually decrease. Ever since the GPA started asking our low-level employees to try it out, efficiency and productivity have gone through the roof!"

The vixen laughed shyly. "I admit, I rather enjoy going into robot mode for personal reasons. I'll slip into it when I'm exercising, or just doing chores. I get more done and it's super relaxing!"

Okey-dokey. It didn't sound like his kind of thing, but whatever. Actually though, an idea occurred to him that might make it more appealing. "The Newbrain's a computer, right? Could you download games into your skull and play them while you're working? Maybe get internet in there?"

Vera looked more than a little alarmed. "Sorry if I seem startled, but we've actually been working on that. Not many people in the GPA even know about it yet!"

"Seriously? Can you do it?"

"Well... First off, don't think of the Newbrain as a computer. It's similar, but fundamentally different. Each nanobot isn't like a little tiny robot that has antennae and pincers and goes 'beep boop'. They're so small they function by chemical interactions, much like your brain cells do now. Their purpose is duplication of results. And they do that well. But due to their inorganic nature, we end up with a level of unprecedented control and malleability of function."

"...Short version?"

"They're not computers."

"Oh."

"That doesn't mean they can't be computers though," she said. "I admit this is terribly confusing without a full understanding of the science involved. What you said about video games and net connection? It's theoretically possible. We've done tests that show we can format a game to act like normal brainwaves, but we don't know yet if you'd be able to interact with it the same. It might just be a jumbled dream to you."

Cody nodded. "Oh, okay."

"Even if it does work," Vera admitted, "we're a little worried that if people could go online inside their heads at any time, they'd stay there permanently. Even if that is their choice, and we do value choice, it's kind of an unsettling thought."

Cody liked that she could acknowledge that. "And just to make sure: no one's going to be forced to get a Newbrain, right?"

"Never," she reassured. "Although we are strongly considering a law that you couldn't hold public office without one. We're hoping to keep away at least a few of the most greedy, sociopathic politicians that way. For everyone else, we'll simply make Newbrains available for free at special locations. It'll be considered a public right, like health care or police protection. We'll offer them up and let word of mouth do the rest. We think it'll be slow at first, but that a lot of people will start to want them once they see for themselves how much other people like them."

"And if you don't have one, you can't be a Worker, right?"

"Correct. You can still be a citizen, but you can't enjoy the benefits of getting paid for work you barely remember doing. That's another thing: being in robot mode is like meditating, so Workers need to sleep less. There's more of the day you can spend doing things you enjoy."

"Allright, I can at least see why someone would choose that. What's with the slaves then?"

Vera's hands fluttered about as she spoke. "First of all, it's 100% voluntary. This is not like back in human times when people thought they could own other people against their will. This is volunteering to give up your freedoms as a citizen in exchange for total comfort and safety."

'Okay,' Cody thought, 'at least you get something in return.'

"This option is basically for people who love being couch potatoes. I'm sure you've woken up some mornings and all you feel like doing is sitting around accomplishing absolutely nothing." Cody nodded. "Well, some people would love nothing more than for that to be their entire lives. Just lying in bed, snacking, playing games, talking with friends online. Every day. Everything taken care of for them. No decisions to make. Every day the same as the one before. For some people, that sounds like paradise."

Cody thought it sounded ungodly boring. But maybe doing it for a short time would be relaxing. Considering how madly in love the GPA were with choice, he guessed that someone could probably choose to spend a vacation living like that. "Wouldn't it cost a ton of money to pay for all these blobs to laze around though?"

"By now you should have realized that there's balance to every choice," Vera said. "If you were to agree to this, you would also have to agree to the government essentially owning your body. Remember when I first showed off the Rejuvenator, we talked about how it would revolutionize the food industry?"

Cody's eyes got wide. "You mean they'd be livestock!?" Suddenly the image of people lying around on couches was replaced by one of fat, lazy fursons all lined up at the slaughterhouse.

"We imagine it'll take quite a while before this really catches on. Most people's reactions will be like yours, and understandably so. But we've done some polls and a small handful of people absolutely love the idea, every part of it. Essentially you get to sit on your tush and have everything taken care of for you, but in exchange, once a day you'd be taken to a processing room where they'd turn your body into food and fur, then Rejuvenate you and send you back home. You can still be a productive member of society even without expending any effort. That's what this is all about; everyone contributes and everyone's happy."

"That's... kind of gruesome, but I guess I can't argue with the logic. I know some people will definitely bitch about that though. They'll want to do nothing and not have to get butchered all the time."

Vera nodded. "We expect that too. Given a balanced choice, most people will naturally try to figure out a way to take all the good and none of the bad. We're really hoping to encourage an attitude of 'that's not okay'. We're certainly not going to criminalize it, but we hope to make it socially unacceptable. The same as when someone says something openly prejudiced, or farts in an elevator."

Cody guffawed.

"You get the point. When someone complains about wanting the best of both sides without having to choose between them, we want that to be seen as shameful behavior. Something inexcusably selfish. Unpatriotic, even. Wanting to take without giving back."

She pointed to the blue end of the bar on her graphic. "That's where Freeman status comes in. When someone complains about where they are in society, we want the response to be, 'So choose something else and stop whining.' And if they don't want to choose anything at all, or go off on a rant about how much they don't like someone else's choice, we want the response to be, 'Go be a Freeman then.'"

"Is that like going off and living in the woods like a hermit?" Cody guessed.

"Ideologically similar, yes! Very good!" Vera replied. "It took us a long time to come up with this one, actually. We asked ourselves, 'If consensual, happy slavery is the extreme of comfort, what's the polar opposite of that?' And we found our answer when we thought about- you might have seen this on the news or online before- people who complain about taxes. Specifically, that they shouldn't have to pay any at all.

"The tax code is monstrously unfair and inefficient on both Pred and Prey sides. But taxes themselves are always necessary. They are a citizen's entry fee into society. It's like an amusement park: you can ride for free, but you have to pay to get in, plus your own food and souvenirs. That's fair, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Sounds okay," Cody said.

"Some people think it isn't. And so, in order to give them their own choice, there's Freeman status. No taxes. None at all. No obligations to society whatsoever."

"...But no benefits either?" Cody guessed with a smirk.

Vera grinned. "Correct, my star pupil!"

He blushed a little at that.

"That's exactly the idea. You can live completely independently from everyone else, but it also means you're completely responsible for your own well-being. You have to pay for your own health care with your own money. You have to drive your own garbage to the dump. Pick up your own mail at the post office. Homeschool your children. Pay the police or firefighters if you need their services." She tapped her chin. "...We did decide on making an exception if your neighbor's house catches on fire and the flames spread to yours; that wouldn't be your fault so you wouldn't have to pay."

"Fair enough."

Vera had to ask. "I'm very curious whether this sounds appealing to you or not. You're certainly a very independent person."

"Yeah, but I'm not stupid," Cody replied. "The Freeman thing sounds horrible. Like, why not just go all the way and live in a damn cave?"

"Well, it does have some upsides. If you don't pay in to the government, you also don't get bothered by them either. You'd basically be opting out of nearly all laws. Of course, you'd still be prohibited from harming or harassing other people. But Freemen are allowed to do basically anything they want to themselves and each other. Absolute freedom, with all the exhilaration and danger that comes with it. We envision whole Freeman cities popping up. Zones of purest anarchy. We expect a lot of artists and musicians to gravitate to them, and that they'll create extraordinary things there."

Cody had to admit, put that way it sounded pretty damn badass. Still a bit stupid though.

"So where would you be on this scale, if the choice was wholly yours?" Vera asked.

He didn't have to think hard. "Probably a citizen. Just normal."

Vera wasn't surprised. "We expect most people to be at first. We predict that it'll only be a small amount of outsiders who want to try the more radical lifestyles at first. But over time, we think the Bell Curve will assert itself the way it always does. Most people will be citizens or workers, or some hybrid of the two. Only a small fraction will live full-time as Slaves or Freemen, though we do predict more Slaves. A lot of people do seem to enjoy obeying."

Cody 'hmm'ed. "I really don't get that impulse."

"You don't? Never?" she asked playfully. "There's never been a time when it felt good to do as you were told? To make someone else happy, or proud of you?"

That struck Cody kind of hard. "My Aunt Cherise," he said quietly. "Helping her out in the kitchen. And of course, my Dad. I like it when he'll give me a challenge and I can live up to it." His expression switched from thoughtful to sour. "That doesn't mean I wanna be his slave though."

"Oh, of course not. I wasn't implying that," Vera defended. "I'm just saying that some feelings are universal. Some of us feel them more strongly than others, but if we try, it's surprisingly easy to find ways to empathize with one another. No matter how different we seem, there's always at least a sliver of common ground between all of us."

Cody closed his eyes and sat silently for a few moments. His stomach hurt. Not because he was hungry (though he was, now that he thought about it), but because his head had been a war zone for the past hour. The part of him that had seemed nonexistent just this morning, the part that wanted to believe Vera's optimistic ideas, was starting to gain ground. And the voice inside that had never stopped screaming for him to attack and run while he still had the chance, was starting to sound silly and desperate and powerless.

Cody looked up at the digital blackboard, trying to imagine what it'd be like to be each one of the four choices. He couldn't deny that he could see the appeal in all of them, not just the drawbacks. One had the freedoms he was used to plus the comfort of normalcy. One was similar enough, but with a 'get out of drudgery free' card. One was unlimited comfort without freedom, and one was unlimited freedom without comfort. He could actually imagine himself trying out any one of them for a short while. "You can change your choice, right?"

"Oh, definitely!" Vera said straightaway. "In fact we encourage it. We hope people will hop around from choice to choice until they find one that suits them. Or just switch around as they please. We're even working on technology to make it easier for people to switch species, or genders, if they feel like their outside doesn't match their inside."

Purely on principle, he wanted to object to this. All of it. It felt unnatural. Plus it was in his nature to not believe a Pred. But the ideas themselves... He couldn't find fault with them. It seemed like the GPA had really put a lot of thought into making sure everything balanced out. Cody thought hard, probing and poking and trying to find some flaw that would prove it all unfeasible.

Vera guessed what he was doing from his irritated yet thoughtful expression. "We've done lots of homework, Cody. We've extensively studied behavior and economics. We're confident this system will work."

"Won't there be people who try to exploit it though?" he asked, finally coming up with a potential problem. "I hear about that all the time. Business owners who cut pay and force people to work overtime, then fire everybody once they make a profit. And politicians just let them get away with it."

She nodded, impressed that he'd considered that. "That's why we'll have to be the government for a while. The GPA, I mean. We've thought it over and there's just no other way. We'll essentially have to be a dictatorship in order to make sure everyone can be free. Sounds insane, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Cody agreed.

"But there's no other way," Vera reasserted. "Businesses do those kinds of immoral things because they bribe the government to let them get away with it, and they also subtly influence media to make sure you believe that they should be allowed to get away with it; that fraud is only a crime when a poor person commits it. It's almost blasphemy to think that the needs of the people should come before the needs of a corporation. So we're going to rewrite the laws from scratch. We're going to look at all the loopholes that have been exploited so far and preemptively plug them. We'll make sure that both government and industry have enough obligations to match their power. No one will get a free ride anymore, no matter how hard they try. And we'll give citizens more power to have their voices heard. There's almost no one alive who doesn't use the internet nowadays, yet we still rely on models of representational democracy from centuries ago. There's no excuse anymore for not letting citizens directly vote on what laws they want to be governed by."

All that sounded great. But Cody had one more objection. "What happens when everything's in place but you guys don't feel like not being a dictatorship anymore?" he asked pointedly.

Vera was somewhat stunned. Cody was sharp as a razor. "That's where you come in, actually. We already know we'll need people to force us out if we get so complacent we won't go willingly. We've got a list of all the goals we want to accomplish, and once they're done, we have to turn democracy back on again, period. We know we're going to need people like you, Cody, who are smart and strategic enough to oppose us if necessary."

It was Cody's turn to be stunned. He'd been surprised so far by how easily she'd come up with answers to his objections. And they weren't bullshitty, on-the-spot answers either. She'd responded like someone who'd studied their material so thoroughly that it was second nature. The GPA sure as hell seemed like they'd considered every problem that could possibly make their plans fail, and either corrected for them or worked around them.

"It still won't be a perfect world though," he said softly. He looked up into her eyes, and she could see how much he wanted to believe. "No matter how much you plan, things can always go wrong. Look at me; I'm proof."

She chuckled affectionately. "But in the end, we figured out how to make peace with you too, didn't we?"

Cody smiled. Inside, he felt conflicted as ever. He still felt like he was a traitor to his own beliefs. He still felt ashamed for letting the enemy feed him their propaganda. But those feelings were slowly receding. It was getting easier and easier to ignore them. Cody was almost frightened by how quickly this was all happening. But in a way, it wasn't without explanation. All this time he had been like a flame traveling along a fuse. This morning he had reached the end, and exploded. There wasn't anything left to burn anymore.

Vera came over and knelt in front of him. She put her hands over his. "You're right, Cody. It won't be a perfect world. It won't be, and it can't be. Utopia is a myth; we know that. That's why we're not even trying for it. We just want to make things better than they are now. That's all."

Cody looked into her eyes and saw nothing but sincerity. There was so much hope there it almost made him flinch. He didn't know if he could ever feel a fraction of her optimism. His outlook had always been rooted in fear: 'The world is a dangerous place. I must survive it.' He didn't know if he could change. But maybe he didn't have to. Maybe it was enough to just help someone who saw things differently.

He looked down at his lap and spoke so softly it was almost inaudible. "Give me the fucking Newbrain."

Vera's ears perked up. Her heart quickened. "Did I hear that right?"

He looked up, bitter uncertainty in his eyes. "Don't make me say it again."

She was in awe of this sudden change in him. She gave his hand a comforting squeeze. "You don't have to right now. If-"

"I'm scared shitless," he growled at her. And for fuck's sake, was he crying again? 'You big baby.' As if this wasn't hard enough. "If you don't do it now, I'll never be able to agree to it again. This is the hardest choice I've ever made, do you understand that?"

It was rhetorical, but she answered anyway. "I do completely."

He spoke through gritted teeth. His heart was a jackhammer. "Then you know that half of me would rather die than do this. It's taking everything I have to say 'give it to me'. Do it now, before I slip and that rage thing happens again. Do it quick before I snap and chew your goddamned eyes out."

Sudden fear spiked through her. They had been having such a productive conversation, she had forgotten how violent he could be. "Allright." She reached for the straps. "I'll use the velcro this time, so you can break loose if you start getting panicky. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing this on you, not after you've been so afraid of this."

He looked her dead in the eyes. "No. Use the other ones. The stronger ones."

'Don't tell her! Don't tell her you stupid asshole! It's your last chance!!'

He swallowed hard, and completed his betrayal. "...I'd planned to thrash around when the hose went in, so the procedure would fail and it'd leave me braindead. Strap me in as tight as you can. Make sure I can't."

She suppressed a gasp. "Are you sure!?"

"YES," he growled. He sounded like a feral wolf. "I'm making this decision. Not my fucking paranoia. Do you understand that!?"

Vera started strapping his legs down with the leather. "Yes I do. And I think you're braver than I ever gave you credit for."

Cody leaned his head back against the chair. He closed his eyes tight, feeling the hot tears seep through. His nerves were pulsing and squirming. He had to physically resist the impulse to strike out, punch Vera in the ear, rip off the straps and run until he collapsed.

'NO,' he told his brain. 'I'M IN CONTROL NOW. NOT YOU.'

Vera worked as quickly as her quivering fingers would allow. She hated how tight she was pulling the straps. She must have been hurting him. But he'd ordered her to. She had to respect his choice.

Cody moaned in terror and pain as the last strap went around his head. He felt Vera hesitate, then continue pulling it tight. "Thank you," he breathed out.

She patted his shoulder comfortingly.

"Remember; tight as you can," he said.

"This is as tight as it'll get before it starts cutting off circulation."

He tensed his arm and tried to rip free of the straps. Same with his head. He struggled as hard as he could. He did not budge a millimeter. "Good."

He listened to Vera readying the fluid. He felt something metal touch the base of his neck. A flash of unthinkable terror paralyzed him for a moment, and he wished he really could die rather than go through with this. He screamed.

"Cody, are you okay!?"

"Yes!! I'm just shitting my fucking pants I'm so fucking scared out of my mind!!"

Seeing him like this was painful for her too. "Is there anything I can do!?"

He thought of something. His eyes snapped open. "Look at me."

She was around the chair in a heartbeat, kneeling before him.

"Tell me you don't regret getting yours," he begged.

She smiled warmly. "Never. I never have, not for a moment," she answered easily.

"Do you know anyone else who has?"

"Not really. Some complainers, but just from people I know who always complained about everything beforehand too."

"What about Yolanda?"

"She loves hers! She's told me so a dozen times. She's been trying to convince her father to get one too. Oh! I forgot to tell you! We managed to-"

Cody cut her off. "I saw the helicopter!" he shouted. "I was in the tower, remember? I saw the whole thing. He slapped her, then Hydra kicked his ass. What about Jayden?"

"He's still exactly the same as he was before, only happier. I did have to de-brainwash him a bit though. Your assassin idea had him pretty shook up. Tycho has a Newbrain too, by the way. So does Hydra, Chloe, Britney, Michelle, Carlos, Trudy and a dozen more from just your bunkhouse alone."

"Kenny? Frank?"

"Neither of them. Not yet. But Frank did ask me once what it was like. Oh, and Petra has one."

His eyes bulged in shock. "You're shitting me!!"

Vera shook her head, still smiling. "Nope. She asked for it just today."

Cody had a moment of giddy disbelief. He looked up towards the ceiling for a moment until his head stopped spinning. 'Well, hell. Looks like everyone else is getting the damn things. I may as well join in the fun.'

He shut his eyes tight and prayed to his father that he was making the right choice.

"...Do it."

"Allright, Cody," Vera said. She reached around to the back of the chair, about to start the process.

He looked across at her and pinned her in place with his gaze. "If you're lying about any of this, you know I'll kill you, right?" he said sadly.

She gulped. But she knew it wasn't really a threat. It was a plea. He was putting an unthinkable amount of trust in her right now. He wanted her to know that, if she broke that, it would destroy him. He would go right back to the state of insanity he'd been in before, never to return.

"Cody, if I were so evil and stupid as to lie to you now," she patted his paw, "then I would deserve any revenge you could imagine for me."

He nodded. His face showed incredible relief to hear those words, to know she understood. "Can you look at me the whole time?" He asked. And even though it was excruciatingly embarrassing, he added, "...and hold my hand?"

"I would be honored to," she said.

Holding his hand, looking into his eyes, she reached behind him and turned on the machine.

*****

The first sensation was pain. "Ow!"

Vera patted Cody's cheek. "That's just the machine making a little hole. It's the only part that'll hurt. You can hop in a Rejuvenator after we're done and it'll be like it was never there. Can you feel the nozzle?"

He tried to nod; couldn't of course. "Yes."

"The fluid's going inside now," she said gently. "It's getting to know you, learning all it can about you. It's going to do everything it can to help you be a better Cody."

That was nice but it didn't help. He had never been this scared before. And panic didn't count. This was the intractable terror of being five years old, lying in bed during a thunderstorm, staring at his window convinced that a murderous monster was about to lift it open and slither in to disembowel him. This was being a toddler in a giant crowd, looking around and realizing he couldn't see Daddy anywhere. This was being seven and playing in Aunt Cherise's backyard and stumbling onto a swarm of hornets, having to walk agonizingly slow while they crawled all over him and dreading the inevitable stings.

His entire body was stricken, rigid. He felt like he was alone in his house with an intruder downstairs. The house was his skull. The intruder was a complete unknown.

Vera could see him twitch and sweat. She could feel his heartbeat pounding as she held his hand. But through it all, he was silent. Not a word. "Cody, you are being incredibly brave. I'm sure your father would be proud of you."

He squeezed her hand. "Thank you." If anything could have made him feel the slightest bit better, that was it.

He knew the nanobot fluid was seeping around in his brain by now. Replacing his cells. Worming its way into every nook and cranny. Yet he couldn't physically feel anything happening. He had no idea how fast it was progressing. "Am I supposed to feel it yet?"

"No, it's very gradual," she reassured. "It won't be like a wave crashing through you. And the effects are subtle too. You won't wind up with any mental superpowers. You'll have the same brain you did before, with the same strengths and limitations. It'll just make everyday things easier. It'll get the little irritations out of the way so you can focus on whatever you choose to focus on." Something else occurred to her that he might be afraid of. "And don't worry about thinking too much or too little now, or anything like that. You can't do anything to make it fail."

He appreciated her trying, he really did, but it wasn't helping. Her words were about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. Fear's icy, slimy tentacles were slithering all along his neck and face. Wherever they touched, weeds of doubt grew. And with doubt came the last fighting swings of his rage.

As he held Miss Vera's hand and ran his fingers along her smooth pawpads, he tried to steel himself against the barrage of painful emotions his brain was assaulting him with. Every vicious thing he had ever felt towards Preds was dredged up and flung at him. Panic was setting off all his alarms. His instincts called him every insult they could think of. Failure. Traitor. Coward. Predlover.

The classroom receded. The chair itself vanished. Cody's world became his mind.

He imagined himself the lone pilot of a starship. His control room was huge, but he was the only crewman aboard. In the ship of his mind, he ran back and forth, checking every screen and readout. He checked his feelings, his memories, his likes and dislikes, the strengths of his friendships and his hates. Frantically checking everything for fear it would be stolen away the moment he turned his back.

The alarms kept blaring inescapably. The sound was a shrill nail driven through his temples. It pushed him to fight back against the Newbrain, to struggle against his straps, to scream until his throat bled. Anything but sit there and let the Preds destroy his mind.

'NO. Nothing's being destroyed. I have to hold onto that.'

His mindship seemed to be going faster now, speeding out of control. It was heading directly for the heart of a black sun that blazed with dark light. The hull shuddered and the alarms kept on shrieking.

Vera had to bite her lip; Cody was squeezing her hand so tightly it hurt. But she let him. She knew her tiny pain was nothing compared to what he was going through. His face was contorted into a grotesque mask of mania.

Cody's every molecule screamed at him to steer away from that black sun. It was the embodiment of the Unknown. Flying into it meant certain obliteration. At least, that's what his instincts wanted him to believe. All their old familiar lines circled around his head like eels: 'You can never trust Preds. This is what they want. You're giving them victory. You're not even fighting back. What happened to all your friends will happen to you too. You'll be controlled. You'll be their slave. They will take over and destroy everything and it will all be YOUR FAULT.'

The words were so deafening that they coalesced into a single voice. And Cody could finally see what that voice belonged to. It defined itself into an image: a mirror-Cody. A wretched creature so fear-haunted that it could no longer feel anything but hatred. It was ragged and haggard and its sunken, skeletal face was his own, but twisted into the long-fanged Pred he had always imagined in his nightmares.

Its stare glowed hot with accusation. "You're letting them take you. My father would piss in your face if he could see this."

Cody braced himself at his shaking control panel and stared back at the monster. "He's my father, not yours. You're not me. You're nothing. You're a bunch of misfiring chemicals, and I'm erasing you."

"You can't," it spat.

"I already am. The process is already started. There's no stopping it. You're already dead."

"No, YOU'RE dead!!!" it screamed, its face split open in a storm of teeth. "You're giving them exactly what they want! What they've been planning for all this time! HOW DID YOU TURN THIS STUPID!? Your corpse is going to end up on a barbecue grill by tonight, with all the Preds standing around laughing at you. How you fought and you fought and in the end they finally got you! And our father will never find us because all that will be left is a pile of SHIT AND BONES!!!"

Its voice was a tornado-loud swirl of echoing razors that nearly carved straight through him. But Cody stood fast and weathered it. This was his fucking ship.

Cody sat himself down in the captain's chair. The black sun was coming closer and closer. The stars outside were white streaks. He looked his noxious duplicate in its bloodshot eyes. "You're the only Pred I've ever hated."

"LIES!!!" it screamed.

Cody's face was calm as he felt confidence slowly filling him. "No Pred's ever hurt me as much as you have. You've killed my friendships, kept me away from happiness. You're my only enemy. It's always been you."

It swelled, tumors seeming to inflate beneath its patchy skin. "YOU'LL DIE WITHOUT ME!!!"

Cody sat up straight in his seat. He was in command now, and he would be forevermore. He stared down the beast that had birthed him. "You're worthless to me," he said.

"YOU!!! WILL!!! DIE!!!" it roared.

Cody watched vomit spill through holes in the creature's throat. Its eyes turned pus-yellow. Its fur bristled into black needles. Its ugliness was astonishing. It was trying to intimidate him, but all it was really doing was showing its true self.

It screamed in desperation one more time, louder than a trainwreck, louder than an atomic bomb. Cody felt the wind rustle his fur, but that's all it was. And now he saw what this beast was really made of. Desperation. Nothing more. Cody couldn't believe he'd ever listened to this Halloween freak.

"Shut up," Cody whispered.

And it obeyed.

Cody watched it smudge into a fading image the instant he spoke the words. His command tore a thousand holes through it. It was nothing but scraps of sound and fury, and then it was nothing at all.

Cody did not waste time mourning the ugly thing. He stood up and walked towards the viewscreen. The black sun awaited.

He barely noticed as his ship began to disintegrate all around him, just like his feardemon had. Cody didn't need it any more. Lights sputtered out, alarms dulled to silence. Huge chunks of metal tore themselves away and went flying off into the void. The ship itself, vast as it was, was too small to contain him now.

Serenely, he continued to walk forward. Standing on nothing but stars. His gait was slow and measured, but his speed increased exponentially.

He barely blinked as he passed through the black sun. It swirled away into wisps of smoke. It was never a threat at all. It was never even an obstruction. Only someone stupid and blind could have thought so.

Cody slowed until he chose to stop. Past the remains of the defeated sun were stars. An endless field of them. And they were all his. Each tiny, twinkling point of light was a part of his soul. All his ideas, all his dreams, all the people and things he loved, all the lessons he'd learned.

He could remember them all just like before, but the images were sharper now; the emotions as intense as he chose to feel them. And they were linked now, too. Whenever he pulled a star closer to imagine it, like a web it pulled all the nearby stars along with it. Cody could flit through them as easily as paging through a book.

Vera was right: nothing had changed. Only how he interacted with it. The only loss was what he chose to lose.

He was in command of himself in a way he had never felt before. Well, maybe 'never' was an exaggeration. Throughout his life there'd been sporadic, fleeting moments when everything would suddenly become clear. Whatever he was doing became as easy as breathing. Thoughts of seemingly impossible complexity or wisdom would occur to him out of the blue. This state of clarity was as fragile as a soap bubble. Thinking about it too hard made it vanish, and he could never predict when it would arrive again.

But now... He was in it. It was him. He somehow knew that the clear-feeling didn't depend on random chance anymore. It was his new normal. From now on, this was how it was always going to be.

Vera had knelt beside Cody the entire time. She'd watched him grit his teeth so hard it made her wince. She'd watched tears streak down his cheeks. She'd watched as his expression of agony had shown tiny traces of easing, and then slowly the boy's facial muscles relaxed, leaving him perfectly neutral.

The machine pinged. The process was complete.

Cody opened his eyes.

Vera felt hope. They were clear.

A peaceful smile came to the boy's muzzle. "You were right," he said.

She hugged him in relief and triumph. "You looked like you just went through Hell and back, Cody! I can't imagine what was going on inside your mind, but I've never seen a reaction like yours. It looked like you were tearing yourself in half!"

He chuckled. That was apt. "It felt like it."

Vera ended the hug, but held onto his hands. "How do you feel?"

He took a deep breath and surveyed himself. He felt completely new, yet the same as ever. Like he'd walked through fire and it had burned off everything unnecessary, leaving just the slim, pure essence of himself. All the garbage had turned to ash.

And the Newbrain itself hadn't done it. It had merely helped. It all happened because Cody had chosen for it to.

"I feel pretty good," he said simply.

"Are you sure?" Vera asked, her tail curling around her knees. "I've never seen anyone make faces like yours during the procedure. Did it hurt?"

He tried to shake his head; couldn't of course. "No. It was all in my mind. I had to face some nasty parts of me. I got rid of them though. I don't know if it was so easy because the Newbrain helped me, or just because I hadn't really tried to shut them off before. By the way, would you mind getting these straps off? They are REALLY starting to itch!!"

Vera chuckled and hopped up right away (her lower back let her know it was not happy she'd spent so long in such an odd position). "Sorry about that. I'll have you out of there in a jiffy." She circled around the chair. The first thing to do was power it down, then she reached for the little green first aid kit, which Kady had left there on the million-to-one chance their most troublesome camper would actually agree to the procedure. 'Looks like she'll be buying my dinner tonight,' Vera thought with a smirk.

The vixen disengaged the nozzle at the back of Cody's head and quickly slapped a bandage on. Then her fingers started fluttering about, undoing all his straps. The combination of stress, leather and sweat had indeed made them insufferable. Cody started scratching vigorously as each one came off. Vera nearly got elbowed in the nose by accident.

"How about we switch seats?" she offered. "My desk chair has got to be more comfortable than where you're sitting."

"Sounds good," Cody said. As soon as his legs were free, he stood up. Wow did that ever feel good! He'd been sitting there a helluva long time. Cody reached above his head and stretched his whole body. He grunted in satisfaction. He turned Vera's chair around and plopped down into it with a happy sigh.

Grinning at his obvious relief, Vera sat down in the Newbrain chair. She couldn't help noticing how soaked with sweat some parts of it were. She didn't say anything about it though.

Cody took in a deep breath. He had his head tipped back and a bigass smile on his muzzle.

"Wasn't so scary, now was it?" Vera said playfully.

"At first it was," Cody understated. "But now I feel great. Not smarter or better, just... clear. Like I can be at my best whenever I want. Like what Jayden said about the fog going away."

Vera knew exactly how that felt. One of the greatest joys of her job was sharing that wonderful state of 'flow' with others. "You do look a bit different though."

"How so?" he asked, still letting his head droop over the seatback.

She considered. "I'm not sure. Just something about you. You seem... Well actually, you seem a little more grown up now."

He smirked. That kinda made sense. He did feel a bit like he'd just stepped out of a cocoon. Something sticky that had kept him trapped for a long, long time.

He looked up at Vera, sitting there in the Newbrain chair.

And then he had a thought. A very cold one.

'I wonder what would happen if I turned it back on?'

All of a sudden, this seemed like a very interesting idea to him. It would be so easy, now that the fox woman's guard was down, to rush over and strap her in before she had any time to react. Jam that nozzle into her brain. Pump the silver shit in until it overflowed. What would it do? Would one Newbrain overwrite the other? Delete her permanently? This might be his perfect chance to escape and-

"GAH!!" Cody shook his head as if a hideous insect had just landed on him.

Vera saw a flurry of emotions cycle through his face. "What's wrong?"

Cody's calmness was suddenly obliterated. He shivered. Where the hell had THAT come from? "I don't know! Something happened! I looked at you, and out of nowhere I thought..." He blushed in shame. "...something not good."

She did not like the way he'd said that. "Um, do I want to know what it was?" she asked.

Cody shook his head. "I don't think so." He was confused and deeply unsettled. "I thought I'd already dealt with this! I thought I just got done telling my mind to stop pulling this kind of shit on me."

The fox spoke guardedly, watching his every movement, just in case this was a possible prelude to regression. "Well, if you mean your negative impulses, remember that the Newbrain doesn't muzzle your instincts. It only helps you keep them in control. Cody, I know that you have held onto anger for a very long time, and your progress today has been nothing short of astonishing. But you're not going to solve everything in a day. All bad habits take a while to die out. It always takes a while to practice ignoring them."

That made him feel a bit better. It made sense he'd have little relapses now and then. He supposed the important thing wasn't having the thought, but that he hadn't acted on it.

Vera thought of a way to potentially turn this situation into a positive one. "Cody, you've got a brand new shiny brain. Why don't you make it work for you?"

"Huh?"

"Try finding out where that unwanted thought came from. By now you should have noticed that you're more aware of how your thoughts form. It shouldn't be a constant intrusive stream of data. Just an awareness; there to focus on or not if you choose."

Cody hadn't actually noticed that. But then suddenly, there it was. And it had been there in the background since halfway through the procedure. It was like how his dreams sometimes started with all sorts of backstory included. As each flitting thought passed through his mind now, it left a trail. Easy to ignore so he didn't get overwhelmed, but there nevertheless if he felt like pursuing them.

"Allright, I'll try," Cody told Vera. He let the vicious thought come back into his mind, feeling uncomfortable now that she was smiling so trustingly at him. The thought had left clear tracks, and Cody could tell they went down very, very deep. He set out following them, like walking down a dark hallway with a flashlight. He came to a place where he encountered a momentary resistance, then he chose to step through. "I think... I think I just went into my subconscious," he said, a little awed.

Vera nodded. "Your brain won't keep secrets from you anymore," she said.

The hallway Cody found himself in now was very dark indeed. It felt like a sewer, dripping with mildew and filth. It was crisscrossed with many strings all along the ceiling and walls. Cody knew with a glance they all led to fearful, hateful thoughts about Preds. All his insane escape plans and justifications for hurting others. It all started here.

And when he shone his light to the very end, a tidal wave of confusion and heartbreak crushed through him. Cody pitched forward in his seat and buried his head in his hands. "No..."

Vera scooted closer to comfort him. How many ups and downs could the poor boy take in one day? "What is it?"

Cody's voice was muffled. "I saw my father." He took his hands from his face. A tear fell from his eye and he watched it land in a perfect circle on the tile floor. "I traced back the thought, and it led to him. But that doesn't make any sense! How could he be the cause of all this!? I love him! He's the best dad I could ever hope for!"

Vera whimpered in sympathy. As she thought about his revelation, a whole lot of things started making sense to her. "Cody, I think I may have an idea. It's just a theory though. I don't want to offend you if I'm wrong."

He shook his head. "Go ahead. If it helps, it helps."

"Well..." She spoke her next words with great trepidation. She felt like she was stepping into a minefield. "A day ago when I was still struggling to understand your behavior, I remember reading your files and finding out your father was a military man. Given your violent attitude and behavior, I thought at first that maybe... he was an abusive parent."

Cody looked up slightly, just enough to give her a small but menacing look of warning.

"But I realize now I was wrong!" she quickly corrected. "In fact, you did a thorough job convincing me of that earlier. Whenever you talked about him, I was taken aback by how incredibly strong your loyalty and love to him is. At first it confused me. But then..." She took a moment to figure out where to start explaining. "Cody, do you remember back in class when I talked about the distinction between Pred and Prey? How it's a lie, and always has been?"

He nodded, a little confused by the change in subject, but he figured she was gonna tie it in somehow. Then he had a sudden flashback to the insultingly boring historical novel he'd read. "But we needed that lie!" he remembered. "Back when it started, everyone was paranoid and axe-crazy. Everyone was killing each other everywhere. It was chaos! We had to believe in Pred and Prey. Otherwise, no one would have ever been able to trust each other. That lie saved us."

She smiled to see that he'd paid attention in other classrooms too. "Completely correct. The lie was started for the very best of intentions, and it saved an uncountable number of lives." She sighed. "But that was centuries ago. We've grown up now. We don't need it to save us anymore. It's fulfilled its purpose, and now keeping it around is choking us to death."

Hearing those words shoved Cody headlong into an epiphany. "Wait a minute... When we created the lie, it saved us because suddenly we could trust half the population instead of none. Because suddenly they were the same as us."

His eyes widened.

"But now, we have to get rid of the lie... so we can trust the other half! Because we're all the same!"

Vera thought she might faint.

To hear those words from Cody St. John, of all people. A boy who'd arrived in camp with an attitude of 'I'm going to kill every Pred here'. It was nothing short of a miracle. It was like a new sun appearing in the sky. Or ice cream cones growing on trees. Or the war finally ending once and for all.

She couldn't think of a way to say how proud she was of him. She simply hugged him.

"Thanks," he said quietly as he held her. It felt nice. A hell of a lot better than being afraid all the time. Letting go of all that had been the most difficult thing he'd ever done, but he was already feeling the rewards. Vera's hug reminded him of Aunt Cherise's. And Dad's. Which brought him back to the topic at hand. "So what's the big lie got to do with Dad? I already understand he didn't lie to me on purpose. He taught it to me because Grandpa taught him, and so on."

Vera gave him one last little squeeze before letting go. "Very good. There's something more though. All your classmates were taught the same things from their families too-"

"...But they didn't turn out like me," he interrupted.

She nodded. "Indeed. If you don't mind me hazarding a guess, I think that the strength of your hate has everything to do with the strength of your love."

He blinked. "Say what?"

Vera chuckled a little at his bewildered expression. She tried her best to explain her theory. "You resisted me, my colleagues and this camp, with every ounce of your will. Past the point of rationality. Past the point where you were harming yourself and others. Why? I think it's because you couldn't let go of that big lie. Your other classmates could, because they weren't so strongly tethered to it. But for you, it's deeply personal. It's almost a gospel to you."

That was certainly true. He remembered all the times his classmates would look at him weird for how obsessed he was with the Preds, and how he'd look back at them with equal disgust for not caring as much as he did.

"But even though you believed it with all your heart, you still knew it was a lie."

"Huh?"

"We all do," Vera said. "Consciously or unconsciously, we all know there's something wrong with what we're taught about Pred and Prey. The line between them is drawn so haphazardly, we can't help but doubt it. The problem is, nobody likes to feel wrong. So when we have these tiny microdoubts about an idea we've believed our whole lives, we rationalize them away. The more a cherished lie conflicts with the evidence of our own senses, the harder we have to work at those rationalizations. And the more work you invest into something, the more determined you get to protect it."

Cody got a few goosebumps at how pin-point accurate that felt for him.

"You put an extreme amount of work into defending your lie, Cody. Because it's not just something society taught you. It's something your father taught you. And you love him more than anything. To undo the lie would mean-"

He cut her off. "It'd mean betraying him. I had to hate the Preds, because he taught me to. And believing you instead of him would've been like slapping him in the face. Like cutting out his heart." He was staring into space, awed and terrified by the enormity of the revelation that had just slammed into him. "That was why it hurt so much..."

He slumped forward, breathing hard. "That's why... That's why I've been so fixated on betrayal. Feeling like all my friends are betraying me. Feeling like I'm betraying myself. It's all a smokescreen. It's all about Dad. About me being terrified of betraying him. It's always been about him..."

He looked up suddenly. "I miss him so much I wanna die sometimes," he admitted.

Vera pulled him close into another hug. She let him shudder as the foundation of so much of his life and personality cracked and crumbled into dust. She knew she'd brought this on him, and she didn't shy from the knowledge that it was her responsibility to help him rebuild now. An odd but precisely appropriate thought occurred to her: 'you break it, you buy it.'

The vixen patted her pupil on the back. "I'm guessing my theory rings true?"

He nodded mutely. She felt his chin rub against her shoulder.

"I'm also guessing that right now, doubts about your father are just starting to creep in. That's your greatest fear, isn't it? If your father was wrong about the Preds, what else could he be wrong about?"

He squeezed her, a little too hard.

"But don't look at it that way. Remember..." Here she knew she was guessing blindly. But her instinct told her she was headed along the right path. "...if your father was wrong, Cody, it was for the very best reason. From everything you've said about him, it sounds like you are the most precious thing in his life. If he taught you to always be alert to danger, he did it because he thought it was the best way to keep you safe. He did it to protect you, because he loves you so much."

Those words made a little light go on inside Cody. A warm light. His father didn't even have to be beside him now for Cody to know that his teacher's words were true. Dad had proved them already, all throughout Cody's life.

"Does that feel right?" Vera hesitantly asked.

He nuzzled her cheekfur gratefully. "Completely. Every word of it. Thank you. I feel a lot better now."

It did her heart a world of good to know she'd helped him. "You're forever welcome, Cody."

He reached up to wipe a tear from his eye. "Fuck... learning the truth about yourself is a bumpy ride," he said with a bittersweet laugh.

She laughed too. "It certainly is. It can hurt sometimes, but it's the nicest kind of hurt. Because you know you'll feel so free afterwards."

Cody leaned far back in his chair, feeling exhausted. But in a good way. "Definitely."

Vera took a moment to stretch, then smirked. "Something just occurred to me. Considering I already spoiled half of tomorrow's lesson anyway, I may as well go all the way. Would you like to know something else interesting about the Newbrains? Why we're so sure they'll help save the world?"

"Sure," he shrugged. "This is a classroom and you're a teacher; I don't think I can stop you."

She giggled. "Allright then. There's two major reasons, aside from everything else you've already experienced. Two side effects we discovered after working with them for a while. One is that Newbrains all but eliminate addictive behavior."

Cody made an 'oh really?' face.

"Addiction's a chemical process: the brain encounters a chemical, decides it likes it, and then wants more of it. But then it takes more and more of the chemical to produce the same pleasurable response. This doesn't apply to just drugs. The brain can become hooked on its own chemicals. That's how people can become addicted to anything that produces a strong pleasurable response, like food or gambling or even shopping."

"I know," Cody said. "One of my Dad's friends had a gambling problem. Dad told me the guy started small, but ended up losing his house and having to stay in a shelter for a while until he got some counseling."

"Exactly," Vera said. "Addiction escalates. And it's all because we can't consciously tell our brains how we want them to react. It's why so many people find themselves losing the ability to enjoy things they once loved. But with the Newbrain, now we can tell our brains to shape up and start giving us consistent responses."

Cody grinned. "So if I don't want to get bored with something I love doing, I won't!? That's awesome!"

Vera smiled. "Mm-hmm. And this is a big reason for that law I mentioned, where the GPA wants to make sure that politicians have to get a Newbrain before they can hold public office. A lot of politicians are rich people, and a lot of rich people are terribly addicted to wealth. Not just having money, but always needing MORE of it. You think gambling until you lose your house is an example of how bad addiction can get? Try gambling with the safety of a nation."

"That certainly explains some shit," Cody said. "My dad's told me a lot of times that he can't imagine why some of the other officers are always trying to squeeze more out of the budget for themselves, even when their units already have more than enough."

"I've heard it's an utterly miserable life. Never being satisfied with what you have. Always being afraid that someone, somewhere, might have more than you do." She took a moment to breathe and stretch. She noticed her throat was getting dry. She considered getting some water for herself, but didn't want to break her momentum. "So that's side-effect-that's-going-to-save-the-world number one. We know it won't get rid of ALL political corruption. That'd be like trying to get all the stupidity out of television."

Cody snerked.

"People will still have ambition, we're just hoping we can cut down on the number of people so power-crazed they don't care who their actions hurt. And what's going to cut it down even more is side effect number two. Remember how I said instinct is our greatest enemy? How it leads us blindly to make such poor decisions? What do you think instinct's most destructive weapon is?"

He blinked. "Ummm... emotion? Hatred? Jealousy?"

"All good answers, and it uses all of those. But the one that hurts the most people is dishonesty."

He raised an eyebrow.

"I'm completely serious! We simply don't think dishonesty's that bad of a sin, but almost all other sins grow out of it. Do you want to hear what I consider to be the wisest words ever written? It's from a Shakespeare play: Hamlet. Most people have heard the line, 'to thine own self be true', and they assume it means being true to yourself."

That seemed like a pretty safe assumption. "...It doesn't?"

"No, they're missing the meaning behind the full quote." Vera paused a moment to make sure she had the words right, then recited, "This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

Cody 'hm'ed. It certainly sounded smart. But he wasn't sure how the meaning had changed.

Vera noticed his unsure expression. "What it boils down to is, 'If you make it a priority to be honest with yourself, you'll automatically be more honest towards others.' I especially like the "this above all" at the beginning, emphasizing its importance. Willy knew what he was talking about."

"Okay, I like that. Not sure I'm seeing how it's the most important thing ever written though."

Vera smirked at him. "Well, just look at everything denial caused you to do, Cody."

THAT certainly slammed it into focus. He winced. "Okay, I think I get it. If I'd just been able to accept that the whole Pred/Prey thing was bullshit a long time ago, none of the bad stuff that happened here would have happened." And as he thought about the past few days, he began to fully see how much would have changed. It made his mind boggle a little. He might've had a blast all week, glad to be free of The Box, happy to learn from Vera and let Rick teach him more about archery. He could have gone rock-climbing with Kenny and Frank... He still felt like an asshole for not taking that opportunity. Best to change the subject and not dwell. "Are you saying the Newbrain somehow makes people more honest?"

"Well, it doesn't 'make' people more honest," Vera said. "The scientists tried their best to make sure the Newbrain was as unobtrusive as possible. But in this instance, what it does is amplify your own inner morality." She grinned. "Tell me a lie, Cody."

He shrugged. "I am eighty feet tall." Nothing seemed to happen when he said it.

The vixen snickered. "No, I meant a real lie. Tell me something as if you're trying to convince me of it, but in your heart you know you're being completely untruthful."

Cody said the first thing that popped into his head: "I've never stolen money from my dad's wallet."

This time the response was immediate. His cheeks burned red hot and he felt a lump in his throat. The memory replayed in his head in crystal clear detail: him being nine and stealing from Dad to buy that alien toy he'd seen at the store. His terror of being caught was gradually replaced by shame that lasted a long, long time. Made worse somehow by the fact that Dad never did catch him. He couldn't look at that toy for months without feeling like a worthless asshole. Eventually he gave it away. The same feeling of disgrace he'd felt back then consumed Cody completely for a moment.

The boy's reaction could not have been more blatantly apparent. Vera had practically seen 'I AM LYING' appear on his forehead. She didn't press him on whatever memory had inspired his lie. She could tell he was embarrassed enough as it is. "What did that feel like, Cody?"

"Ummm... like my conscience just punched me in the face from the inside."

"I'll have to remember that description, it's very striking! ...No pun intended," she chuckled. "But the Newbrain didn't do that to you; YOU did. Your conscience did, just like you said. The Newbrain simply tells your instinctual defense mechanisms to preemptively shut up. Lying is easy because our instincts throw such amazing tantrums at the thought of ever being wrong. So they tell us, 'Lie more! Never accept blame! Admitting when you're wrong is a weakness!' And it feels so much better to believe that than to feel the shame we know we deserve."

Cody gulped. "So am I gonna feel like that every time I lie?"

She nodded. "If you know you're deliberately not telling the truth, then absolutely."

"I guess I'm completely screwed forever then."

"Not at all!" she said with a giggle. "Admittedly, yes, you will probably find yourself wincing a lot more than normal for the next few weeks as you realize how much you automatically lie without even realizing it. And you'll even feel your Newbrain nagging you when you say something so ignorant that even you know better. We all do things like that sometimes; we get into a heated argument and are so desperate to get the last word in that all sorts of crazy things pop out of our mouths. From now on, Cody, you are going to be an absolutely terrible liar. Not only are you going to kick yourself every time you do, and you'll feel it a lot harder, but other people will see your reactions clear as day."

He groaned. "Like I said: screwed forever."

She lightly swatted him with her tail. "You say that now, but it won't take long for you to realize just how unnecessary lying usually is. Even before I got my Newbrain, I had an experience, a rather personal one, that made me vow to be as honest with myself as I could possibly be. And I have. I've worked at it with all my heart, and I have never regretted that decision. My friendships are stronger now. I talk difficult things over with people instead of just saying what I think they want me to say. I don't try to rationalize away my own bad behavior. When someone tells me I'm wrong, I think about it instead of getting upset. And if I really am wrong, I accept it gratefully, because I know I can't learn more until I admit where my knowledge needs improvement."

Okay, that all sounded reasonable. "What if I ever have to lie though?" He tried to think of a good example. "What if, like, I have to cover for a friend at school because he's got some family emergency he's gotta deal with? Or if some jerks come to the door trying to sell Dad aluminum siding, and I want to let him relax?"

"Then it'll be just like when you told me you were eighty feet tall; if your conscience knows you're not doing anything wrong, then it won't 'punch you in the face'," she said with a smile.

"Almost everyone wants to be a good furson, Cody. We all see ourselves as the main character of our life story, and with rare exception, we see ourselves as the 'good guy'. You can still lie with a Newbrain, but it'll never be easy again. And you'll always have to face the fact that you're acting against your own morals. No one likes that feeling of shame and regret. When they know they can't avoid it anymore, they'll be less likely to do the things that cause them to feel it. That's why the Newbrain is so devastatingly effective. You can always find a reason to justify why someone else's judgment about you is wrong. But from now on, YOU will be your own judge," she said, pointing right at his heart. "And your verdicts will be inescapable."

Cody felt a shiver run up his spine.

"I can tell I'm scaring the pants off you," she said gently. "But really, it's quite nice in the long run."

"No, it's just..." He rubbed the side of his head. "I'm already thinking about all the things I'm guilty of. I realize I've shat all over everyone here who tried to be nice to me. I know I'm going to be lonely and miserable for the rest of the time I'm here. And I deserve that," he said resolutely. "I deserve to be punished. I do."

She shook her head affectionately. "Oh, I don't think so. I think you've been through enough pain for a lifetime, Cody. I don't see any benefit in heaping more onto yourself."

He smiled. It felt good to hear her say something like that to him. "Thanks. There's a part of me that does want to feel better. Desperately. But then another part's like, 'That's the easy way out! You've been a pile of shit and you deserve to feel as much suffering as you've caused!'"

"That's very noble to feel that way. I'm glad to see you have such a strong sense of fairness."

Suddenly, an absolutely wonderful idea popped into her head.

A bright smile uncurled across the vixen's muzzle. "...But what if I could suggest an alternative?"

Her glee was intriguing. "Like what?"

She grinned even more. "Just you wait!" She patted her uniform pockets all over until she found her phone. She tapped out a quick message to her colleagues and eagerly awaited their responses. "I'm arranging a surprise for you, Cody."

His ears perked up. He knew he didn't deserve it, but if she was going to do something nice for him to cheer him up, it would definitely be welcomed. Hell, even a warm meal would be wonderful at this point.

Vera twirled her tail around her finger as she waited. Then she got a response. "Oh good!" Just what she was hoping for. "The surprise is on its way!" she announced.

"Can you give me a hint? How long's it gonna take to get here?" he asked eagerly.

She 'boop'ed him on the forehead. "You just wait, Mr. Impatient. It won't be long."

"Arrrrrgh," he deadpanned. He stood up and stretched again. He looked up at the windows and was a little surprised it was still sunny out. It felt like he'd been talking with Vera for hours. "Geez, what time is it?"

She checked her watch. "Getting close to dinnertime. Are you hungry?"

"Fucking ravenous."

She giggled. "The cafeteria should be open plenty long enough for you to run over there and fill your tummy after I get you Rejuvenated."

"Oh, right. I completely forgot about that." He rubbed the back of his head, feeling the little smooth bandage stuck to his fur. He was kind of interested to see what being in a Rejuvenator felt like. It was weird to think he'd already been in one, after being decapitated with Petra, yet he didn't remember it.

Vera looked the young chipmunk up and down. It was kind of astonishing how much he'd changed in such a short time. His tone of voice, his body language. An incredible amount of tension had left him, she could tell. "How're you feeling overall?"

He looked down at his shoes and fidgeted a bit as he thought. "Pretty good. Clearer. Way less angry. Kinda regretful but also hopeful at the same time. Also, kinda afraid I'll fuck all this up and be back to 'psycho Cody' by tomorrow."

She smiled sympathetically. "Not if you choose to be different," she said.

He nodded. Out of the blue, he suddenly missed his Dad more than ever. He wanted to hug him and share how great it felt to be so in control of himself now. "When're you guys gonna help me find my dad? You will, right?"

"Of course. A promise is a promise." The vixen walked over to pat him on the arm. "In two days it'll be a full week since you and all the other kids arrived. We have had a massive intelligence-gathering operation going on all this time to locate and keep an eye on everyone's parents. We're going to have helicopters and trucks and jeeps pour in and take everyone where they belong. Of course..." she bit her lip, "...you know we'll be asking everyone to help us recruit their parents. We won't force anyone, but we will ask."

Cody fully expected this, and was amused that at least one of his crazy suspicions had turned out correct. He sighed and tried to imagine asking his father to join the GPA. It was like expecting the sun to start revolving backwards. No matter how much Cody had resisted, Dad would resist more. And Dad had a lot more experience than him at violence, evasion and strategy. If the Preds took him to a camp like this, there would be bloodshed. No doubt about it.

"I'll consider it," he lied. And as Vera had warned, he felt it hard.

She saw the twinge of chagrin on his face. She didn't think he was lying out of malice, but out of worry for what might happen if he agreed to her request. "We'll see," she said gently. "We had a plan for him set up from the start. A rather elaborate one actually. But I won't ask you to participate in anything you think is doomed to failure. You know your father better than any of us do."

Cody was about to respond when he heard a knock at the door.

Vera's tail wagged a bit. "Oh, I nearly forgot! That's your surprise!" She held out her hand. "Shall we go see it?"

Her sudden sunny demeanor was a little embarrassing, but he didn't mind much. Cody took her hand in his. "Sure."

Together they walked across the quiet classroom. When they reached the door, Vera motioned for Cody to close his eyes. Feeling a little silly, he did. "Allright then..."

He heard her open the door.

"Surprise!"

Cody opened his eyes.

In the next room stood Walter, Frank and Kenny.

*****

Chapter 15