I wake up with a sense of general unease. I know what you're thinking, I'm not talking about General Unease® which Pfizer has been unable to bring to market due to problems in R&D with finding words for the side effects which make them sound as if they're not worse than the indications. Their thesaurus budgeting had to be tripled, then when that failed, the linguists at the Oxford English Dictionary had to be soundly persuaded that "exuberance" was actually first used in a 1558 manuscript to describe the feeling of being disemboweled on the battlefield and feeling one's own intestines slithering about blithely in your own cold palms after a night of swilling strong mead and having a bit of a hangover to boot. I'm talking about that feeling you get that's not yet trademarked when you wake up and stuff just isn't quite right though you can't exactly explain why. Well, I'll give it a shot.
I look about the room and my cormorant Aldous is posed precariously on the ficus in the hallway again, impotently flicking his tongue in a suggestive manner. He was never quite the same after we had to take him in to the vet for a hard reset. Took him almost 30 minutes to bend the paper clip just right to reach that goddamn little fucker of a button up his asshole. But anyways, when we got him back he just kept staring off and walking all shakily on both wings and legs chasing flies around the house. So we took him back and the vet just says, "Yeah, happens sometimes with Cormorant .96, I've seen it once before. Must have overloaded the sodium or calcium ions on the reset, seizured the cortex and then, since .96 is based off of Chameleon 6.0 it reverts back to the old code. Really shouldn't have bought in Beta, but no matter. Just be glad it didn't jump all the way back to Frog 5 Final or it would've thought it was a tadpole and stopped breathing till you threw it in the bath and found it a snorkel, no, you got off pretty easy. You'll have to force feed him fish since a few flies and beetles won't really cut it for his diet, gotta keep those beautiful wings nice and strong! If that doesn't work... well I guess I could sell you live mackerel by the pound since they can be easily flashed with our old copy of Fly 12 which is now no longer under patent. You wouldn't really need any of the features of the new Fly packages, they really just make 'em harder to swat and update some of the idle mandible movements with counterclockwise variations. Then all we have to do is mod Aldous so he identifies mackerel as flies by sight, just a simple visual cortex recog/traspo, I'll just write a few lines in ATCG+, load it into a syringe and shoot him up, shall we go ahead with it?"
What could I say? I was still deeply attached to the bird even if he could no longer show me any outward feeling, since the chameleon mind expresses its internal existential dilemmas through skin color foremost and not through feathers. Clashing patterns of red and yellow for anger, and that certain shade of blue-green peppered with black for that feeling of being alone in the world even though you're a solitary creature and though you don't really understand the concept of "friends" you sort of wish you had them with non-specific reptilian cognizance because what you really need is for someone to get you in that certain way which you wish they would: your unspoken passion for staring at blank walls for hours at a time. Yet Aldous would only be able to turn this shade of blue green in his soul subroutines, and I might never be able to apprehend his suffering, except through a ridiculously expensive proprietary bio-uplink scanner only available through the manufacturer at incredible mark-up. Instead, I'll be damned to hire one of those trans-speciest psychologists, which luckily San Francisco is packed with, so specialist counseling can be had for very reasonable rates... but the point isn't the money, it's that no matter how cheap it is, the process is still an incredibly heart-wrenching emotional roller coaster for both man and beast-that's-not-specifically-the-sort-of-beast-it-actually-looks-like.
Of course, the vet hadn't told us that we'd have to buy reverse scuba suits for the fish so Aldous could catch them since chameleon hunting techniques are seldom used under water. He probably had an understanding with the local Water Creatures Protection Program (WCPP) whose proprietors are helping marine life to immigrate to land and assume terrestrial identities after the last tanker spill, which hemorrhaged 6 billion gallons of caustic Febreeze: Kitty Odor Neutralizer Formula into the pacific when it hit a low floating blimp filled to the brim with hydrogen puffed organic marshmallows. No continent has escaped the carnage. But I don't know why I'm telling you this, it's only the single worst ecological disaster in the history of this last month.
In the end, it was all just the oldest trick in the book, the old reset some sucker's cormorant and secretly overload it to step it back down to basic chameleon so you can offload the extra mackerel that you keep over ordering since the computer automatically re-orders a metric ton of it every month instead of a kilogram because you chose the wrong units the first time and you can't figure out how to change it and you're too embarrassed to go to your computer programmer because she's also your ex-wife and though you know she could fix it you just couldn't stand that subtle little hint of a derisive smirk that she would surely give you when she heard what the problem was and you don't really feel totally comfortable with a new programmer since she did everything for 15 years and you're still emotionally involved with her and in some way want to prove your internal worth to yourself and so you're secretly taking programming classes at the community college with the money you get selling off the extra mackerel to saps who bring in their cormorants who've got nothing wrong with them that a veterinary chiropractor couldn't fix with a couple of brief adjustments and in addition you're thoroughly in cahoots with the WCPP, which is just totally corrupt in case you didn't already know. I feel like a fucking simp.
So, long story short, gettin' a new vet.
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