Damage Control

1. The Mammal Cage

The first time, it was a rock.

Nobody saw how it got there, or even exactly when, but one day there was a knee-high hunk of grey rock sitting in the Gogue desert where it didn't belong.

The Gogue Quantum Research Laboratory had been in operation for only about five years at the time, and when a safety officer from the nearby village found it on her morning patrol, it never occurred to her to inform the Lab. She figured somebody had put it there for some mundane and useful reason, so it was more out of mild curiosity than any sense of concern that she started asking questions.

It turned out nobody in the village had put it there, and stranger still, the rock was made of granite, with little glinting bits of quartz and mica in it, which meant it had to have been shipped in from far away. Granite was simply not a stone that occurred naturally in the Gogue.

Eventually, more than twelve days later, the scientists at the Laboratory found out about the rock and came out and examined it. They asked lots of questions about when it was found and who had touched it and whether anyone had moved it, even just a little. They took measurements and images. Then they hauled the rock to the Laboratory and took samples and conducted experiments. But in the end they still couldn't say where it had come from or how it had gotten there.

Eleven years later, it was a tree.

The tree was found by a young villager on his way home from hunting, in the same area where the rock had been, maybe even the same exact spot, but nobody could say that for sure. It was just lying on the ground, roots and all, so he took it home and planted it. The tree bore a delicious fruit, and he called it 'sandfruit' and built himself a thriving business cultivating and selling it.

Ten years after that, it was a mammal...

Piper Craven went to sleep in her dorm room and woke up in a cage. For a split second she thought she was dreaming. Then she jumped up and tugged at the bars on all sides, looking for a door.

Nothing opened. The metal bars wouldn't even rattle or bend. After a while her throat hurt and she realized she was screaming. She stopped and just stood there until her breathing evened out.

She guessed the cage was a kennel made to contain a number of big dogs at once. There was a sort of square bucket in it, mostly full of water. She cupped her hands and drank. The water was lukewarm, but at least it was clean.

Beside the water was a strange-looking purple object on a six-sided plate. She sniffed it, and it had a sharp, pungent, awful smell. Maybe it was insect repellent. The only other thing in the cage was a large empty box with a hinged cover, possibly made of some sort of plastic.

The cage was near the end of a long, unfamiliar room. The walls were plain and painted white, not broken anywhere she could see by either pictures or windows. Maybe there were windows around the corner, though, because a soft light came from somewhere, and she didn't see any lamps or light fixtures. The ceiling was white, too, but exposed beams gave it a more interesting look than the walls.

The furniture—if it could be called furniture—was large and lumpy and Piper didn't know what to call it. It was not chairs or tables or couches or desks or bookcases or anything else that had a name. It was just four big shapeless soft-looking brown heaps and two highly-polished, heavy-looking wooden blocks with designs carved into the tops.

The floor was a mottled lavender color, and when she reached her finger between the bars and poked it, it turned out to be made of something rubbery. The bottom of the cage was lined in something similar, but in a dull brown color, and under that were the metal cage bars.