When Vivian Falbo arrived on Cuptor in early winter the last thing she had expected to find there was a pet.

 

Three days after her arrival on the planet she was invited to participate in a domcab hunt. She feared the worst, thinking that they wanted to play a practical joke on her by making her chase some kind of imaginary animal belonging to an exotic and non-existent local fauna. That idea took hold of her mind when they explained the critter's characteristics and the incredible hunting technique they used.

 

"It's something like a mixture of dog and cat," explained his host, Ziv Wities, "but in the shape of a bird."

 

Wities was her father's old friend. He had invited her to take charge of the resort he planned to open in that virgin forest world at the beginning of the following summer. Running a tourist establishment of such quality was a unique opportunity that a recent graduate in hotel management couldn't turn down.

 

"Yes, it has a large, rounded head like a pug's and a flat muzzle. Do you know that dog breed?" she was asked enthusiastically by a guy named Kit Coleman who seemed to be the ultimate expert on the subject. "However, its eyes and pointed ears are like a Siamese and its coat is brindle."

 

"It can stand on two legs, like a bird," Wities continued. "But it has short little hands that hide wings like a bat's with which it can make short, fast flights," Vivian gave him a puzzled look. "They're making fun of me," she thought.

 

"Over the years have become very elusive. To catch them, you have to go out into the woods at dusk and lie quietly in the grass with a brainwave amplifier. Try to sleep and, if possible, dream to attract them."

 

"Are you kidding me?" Vivian could no longer contain herself. "Surely you want me to stay out there all night alone, lying on the ground freezing, while you guys are out here having drinks and laughing your heads off."

 

"Far from it, my dear," Wities said indignantly. "The domcabs were designed to synchronize with the brain waves of the human hypothalamus to bond with their master."

 

"Designed? What do you mean, designed? Aren't they native fauna?"

 

"We should have started there," Coleman told his host. "Domcabs are the last At-will Phenotyping design before the company left our planet. They established an experimental genetic engineering division, specializing in pet development. But their chief engineer, an odd fellow, released them and fled into the woods to live like a savage. Nothing more was heard of him. In the wake of the disaster, At-will Phenotyping closed all its operations here. That was more than forty years ago. Now the domcabs have gone feral, but it's possible to capture them if they fall into the trap of allowing their brainwaves to synchronize with ours."

 

"They wanted to get the perfect pet," Wities clarified, "one that would react to all its master's mental desires. To achieve this, they mixed all kinds of terrestrial and alien genomes. Multum in parvo, was their motto, ­a lot in a little. Instead, the guy went crazy and almost ruined his company. Now, at Cuptor, catching those critters has become quite a sport because of the difficulty involved."

 

"Why don't you synchronize your brainwaves with theirs and capture them yourselves?"

 

"Because they already know us. We've already been linked and unlinked. They're able to identify each individual. They know if there has been a previous synchronicity and they don't repeat once it dissolves. That's why whenever someone new arrives we always take the opportunity to organize a domcab hunt."

 

"I see, and it's my turn. Won't it be dangerous?"

 

"Not at all, my dear. It's a unique experience. Seeing the world through another creature. To make it behave according to our wishes. Playing with it and playing at being it. You already see us. We've been bonded and we haven't become goofy."

 

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," she commented suspiciously.

 

That night Vivian, still reluctant, lay down in the woods as requested. A bed had been prepared for her that radiated warmth on the grass so that she wouldn't get cold. It was comfortable. She took a sleeping pill. She was assured that she would have many dreams in order to attract the domcab and that, if all went well, her pet would appear the next day asleep on her lap and synchronized with her. The experience intrigued her.

 

She dreamed intensely but without lodging anything in her memories. She heard herself moaning, somewhere between the pain of someone resisting and the most exquisite pleasure. She felt that she was a child and that she was going back to childhood and that, at last, she was going to be happy.

 

When she awoke, a strange critter with a round face and pointed ears looked at her with sad eyes. It tilted its head to one side and opened its mouth longingly in a characteristic gesture of curiosity and desire for acceptance. She couldn't help but smile at it. It was adorable. It was clear that it had been carefully designed to empathize with humans. The animal seemed to smile back and began to frolic happily.

 

She wanted to see if she was in her pet's control, and suddenly she saw herself through the animal's eyes. That shocked her. Then she felt an enormous urge to jump up and run around. A few seconds later they were playing and rolling around on the ground like two excited puppies. Then the domcab took off in rapid flight. She followed it with her eyes and felt the incredible sensation of flying freely until her pet perched on a branch. From there she watched the world from above.

 

She also felt her instincts, eating, urinating, hunting, playing, breeding, defending her pack. She could unleash her own passions without having to exercise the control imposed on her by acting like a human. As the days went by, she enjoyed more and more taking on the role of her new friend.

 

Sniffing was something totally new. She could distinguish each person's characteristic body odor and identify them even before she saw them. Some smelled of musk, some of sweat, some of stale and some of elaborate cosmetics. Some smells were passionate and appealing, others repulsive and disgusting.

 

Soon she also discovered what it was like to be in heat and the unbridled power of pheromones.

 

That critter made her happy in a strange and uncontrolled way, with a kind of happiness different from what a person could cause. It was something primitive and elemental. Almost like the mere pleasure of being alive, of eating or relieving yourself and enjoying that simple fact.

 

"Hi Vivian. It's good to see you. We haven't heard from you for weeks," Wities reproached her when, after being totally missing, she finally stopped by the resort.

 

"Weeks? It's only been a few days since I was at your house on the domcab hunt."

 

"I see you've bonded strongly with him," she was carrying her pet in her arms, who was looking at them with sorrowful eyes. "We've all been through this phase. They can be very absorbing," he assured.

 

"Well, I'm enjoying a few days of his company. I guess I'll get tired of him."

 

"No, we never get tired of them. We just miss them."

 

"Do you miss yours?"

 

"Very much."

 

"What happened? Why did you disassociate yourself from him?"

 

"I didn't disengage. It was him who left me, so to speak. Although, in reality, the bond is never completely broken. But after a while, they start to build up their pack."

 

"Their pack?"

 

"Yes, they are somewhat primal. They bond with the different humans that seek them out by exposing their brainwaves until they form their pack."

 

"Herds of humans?"

 

"Something like that. They handle other species' individuals first as part of their pack by establishing strong emotional bonds. Then, they disassociate themselves from each individual and handle them as if they were part of a flock, as a sheepdog would do."

 

"For them, are we their flocks? But what are these critters?"

 

"I don't know exactly. I know they have dog genome, cat genome, some kind of bird genome, along with a strong contribution of nault genome."

 

"Nault?" she asked alarmed. "Like those creatures with psychic abilities that control all humans who come to their planet? There was a terrible war against them!" she exclaimed in terror. "Besides, apparently they mixed their genome with ours."

 

"Yes, that's right, they produced human-nault with extensive psionic abilities. Very dangerous guys."

 

"I've heard they were even capable of producing specialized organs as needed."

 

"Our pets don't have that ability."

 

"But they can control people!" she shrieked in agitation.

 

"No, not people. To their world perception, yes."

 

"I don't understand the difference."

 

"You've had your pet for several weeks, but for you it's only been a few days. The domcab manages your subjective time perception," Vivian's eyes almost popped out of her head. "He'll be creating in you a strong sense of happiness so that when he disengages it will be like a drug for you and you'll feel anxious to reestablish the bond, just as it happens to me," Vivian's mouth dropped open when she heard this.

 

"But..." she stammered, "...then ... they're dangerous," muttered looking at her tender pet.

 

"Far from it. They're adorable. Besides, this relationship has its rewards, as I think you're already seeing."

 

"You guys got me into this," she accused him, raising a trembling finger.

 

"We couldn't help it," Wities replied with a shrug and walked away with a smile on his lips.

 

She glared at him furiously while unconsciously hugging the domcab lovingly to her chest. When she looked down at her sweet pet, she realized the flood of uncontrolled emotions inside her. She burst into tears. She didn't know if it was out of anger or love.

 

Her conscious mind was still working, but her feelings were crazy. The bond the domcab had established with her was the most powerful she had ever felt in her entire life. She was determined to find out everything, however terrible, about these creatures' origins. She wanted to know the true extent and implications of her strong attachment to her pet.

 

The first thing she did was to find out the name of the chief engineer at At-will Phenotyping who had designed them. He was one Hal Mlokeday. There were a multitude of legends about him, from those that said he had left the planet and become a renegade fugitive to those that claimed he lived secluded in the forest in a wooden house he had built with his own hands.

 

That At-will Phenotyping had filed a lawsuit against him for destruction of industrial property, with a search and arrest warrant that had never been executed, convinced her that he must still be hiding somewhere on Cuptor, since the powerful bioengineering company seemed to want to avoid any ties to the planet since closing its operations there.

 

It took her ten weeks and endless research sessions on the data network to identify all the places where supposedly, over the past forty years, the damned engineer had at one time or another been seen.

 

Again, she had the feeling that her time perception was subjective and that the domcab was probably stretching it in order to discourage her in her efforts. But, on the other hand, she felt a primal impulse impelling her to continue. It was a tenebrous storm of strange emotions. Could it not be that in reality it was her pet that, by a process of reverse motivation, was directing her search? She no longer knew what to think. This situation was driving her crazy.

 

She finally made a list of eighteen possible locations where to look for the elusive engineer, but only three of them, relatively close to each other, accumulated more than five testimonies from different and independent sources. So, she marked that extensive area as a priority search target.

 

When she shared her findings with Wities, he also tried to discourage her.

 

"It's only a couple of months before the resort opens. Now is when I need you the most to organize everything and you want to go looking for a crazy engineer who most likely died decades ago."

 

"I didn't ask to hunt a domcab," she replied bitterly. "Now I need to know where they came from and why I feel this way."

 

He looked at her silently, with a reflective face and sad eyes.

 

"Your bond is stronger than I imagined," he assured her. "Against a force like that nothing can be done," he said, giving up.

 

Vivian hired a hovercraft that took her and her inseparable pet to a mining camp she had located near the vast area she intended to explore. She contracted with the local mining company to conduct an extensive aerial drone survey. From the results, she drew a digital surface model with detailed topographic representation and high-resolution photorealistic models that she studied in great detail. Finally, she received thermographic cameras with the excuse of searching for wildlife.

 

She identified four locations that she thought might be inhabited by humans. The first turned out to be a den of endemic bipedal Ursids. The second was the hut of a hermit hunter who exploded in anger when he felt his privacy had been violated. Vivian and her native guide had to flee when, without listening to reason, this madman began firing his guns at them.

 

At the third location, Vivian thought she was rewarded for her efforts. She found herself in front of a wooden house that had obviously been laboriously constructed over the years. Inside, she discovered that it housed a small homemade biogenic laboratory. No matter how hard they searched, they found no tenants. So, Vivian and her guide decided to settle in and await the return of its owner.

 

At dusk on the second day, Vivian saw her guide running away like the devil takes the hindmost. He was screaming bloodcurdlingly and ran at full speed, jumping through the forest's thick foliage without making the slightest effort to avoid hitting his face and body on the dense vegetation.

 

Vivian rushed off in search of him, but soon lost sight of him. She could only hear his terrified screams, sometimes coming from one direction, sometimes from another, along with the snapping of branches breaking in his path and the rustling of plants and leaves as he ran madly.

 

"Amil! Amil!" she shouted again and again, begging him to stop.

 

There was no response. After a few minutes there was nothing to be heard in the forest but the faint sound of the wind through the leaves.

 

"Looks like Amil has lived up to his name," she thought, he had turned out to be unreachable. That was the ancient meaning of his tribal name, as he himself had explained it to her by the light of a fire in their makeshift camp a couple of nights before.

 

"Amil!" she cried out once more hopelessly.

 

Suddenly she realized that now she was the one who was lost. She didn't know in which direction she had started to run or where she should direct her steps to return to the cabin. Then she saw that she holding her pet, who was looking at her with tender and distressed eyes. She was unable to remember the moment when she had taken hold of him before starting to run.

 

She spent almost an hour wandering lost in the forest until night fell. A panic born of despair caused her to start having spasmodic convulsions. She burst into tears and suddenly, without knowing why, began to run again. First at a trot, looking backwards in search of some ethereal pursuer, then at a run. She felt a primal fear, an inexplicable terror that urged her to run away in a hurry without knowing from what or to where.

 

She ran with all the energy her body could muster. Her heart was pounding. Her lungs burned. The tingling in her legs told her that she couldn't last much longer at that pace. She breathed with her mouth open, gasping for breath, choking.

 

When she was at the limit of her strength, she had to stop. She was sweating profusely. She hunched over her abdomen to catch her breath. Still, she held her inseparable pet close to her chest.

 

When she raised her head, there was Amil, waiting for her. Standing still in the middle of the vast blackness of the night, his body lacerated and his face riddled with bloody scratches. Their eyes met. His were as cold as ice. Hers, restless with a thousand unspoken questions. When Vivian approached to check that her senses weren't deceiving her, he lunged at her and with one swift punch to the face knocked her unconscious.

 

Vivian awoke early the next morning. She was lying on a rustic cot. Neither her hands nor her feet had been tied. Her domcab was in her lap and he was snuggled affectionately against her body. She no longer felt fear or even anger, only a sincere desire to know what her role was in the whole mess. She was sure that, in one way or another, each and every person she had dealt with since her arrival at Cuptor had deceived her.

 

A man, who must have been the elusive engineer was sitting in a chair across from her, watching her. He was the oldest guy Vivian had ever met. His face was riddled with wrinkles and sunburned for years. His appearance was dirty and disheveled. His clothes were made of plant fibers, a far cry from the sophisticated waterproof, non-stick, fireproof materials she wore. From the moment she saw him she had the impression that it had been a terrible mistake to go looking for him there. Although something told her that she had had no choice since her domcab had taken it upon herself to lead her down that tortuous path.

 

"You have come a long way to tell me about your pet," the engineer broke the silence, looking with interest at the small animal. "You must have spent a lot of time and resources to find me. I'm not an easy person to find."

 

"You designed these pets," she justified herself by sitting on the edge of the bed while she carefully placed the animal on her knees. "I want to know what is the composition of their genome," as always, Vivian went straight to the point.

 

"What for? I see that you've already fallen under his influence. That's why you're here."

 

"I want to know what I'm involved in," she insisted, not quite sure what the engineer had meant by his last sentence, "and see if I can get rid of his control."

 

Mlokeday smiled sarcastically.

 

"You look like a determined girl," he said. "I think your domcab knows you very well. He has used your eagerness to discover the origin of these creatures to lead you here."

 

"To you? Why to you?"

 

"I didn't say to me, my dear. You still haven't understood what domcabs are and what they've become, have you?" her face reflected her confusion. "The name we gave these pets says it all," he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "They contain several small dog breeds' genomes, such as the pug and the Boston terrier. We wanted to make them affable and loving. They also incorporate common cat genome, Siamese and Bengali. They like to play and be cared for, they're affectionate but also very intelligent," he assured. "The most difficult part was to give them an almost bird-like shape and add the ability to fly. To do this, a bird genome was incorporated, of a snipe in particular, and of bats."

 

"And the m, what does the m mean?"

 

"Modified, mixed. Whatever you prefer," he said with a shrug.

 

Vivian gave him an indignant look.

 

"Did you take me for a fool? I know you incorporated nault genome."

 

Mlokeday looked at her again with an even more sarcastic smile between his lips.

 

"I see you're a smart girl. The pseudo-technical name we gave the creature was written like this," he picked up a slate from the next table and wrote with a chalk:

 

"do(n-n)ca-b"

 

"First, we incorporated a human-nault genome. The results were astonishing. The animal could sense its master and induce sensations, but the bond wasn't permanent and was limited. For example, it didn't allow the owner to enter into his pet's consciousness."

 

"I know what that is," she said.

 

"To achieve this, we needed a purer nault genome, like that of a first mother."

 

"Oh, my God! Did you incorporate the genome of one of those worm mothers?"

 

"Yes, they are prodigious creatures. They don't have a brain like ours, but their psychic capacities are the result of the combination of the whole set of nervous structures distributed throughout their body. We thus made a qualitative leap. Now the linkage could be permanent and there were no limitations. We made a double nault genome contribution."

 

"But something went wrong, didn't it?"

 

"Yes, the domcab, of course, also had free access to our consciousness and our subconscious and could induce instincts, perceptions, feelings and even condition our will."

 

"Are you telling me that we are actually the ones under the control of our pets?"

 

"I see you get the point."

 

"But then why did you let them escape?"

 

"I had to stop those experiments, they were getting more and more dangerous, so I destroyed a good part of the lab."

 

"But you released the pets!" she complained.

 

"I couldn't destroy them," justified the geneticist. "They were my creations, my children. They are part of me."

 

Vivian had a clear perception of what had happened to the geneticist.

 

"You also had your own pet," she said categorically.

 

"Yes, I did. She was a female, but I disassociated myself from her. I freed myself. For a while I thought I was the only truly free human on this planet," he stated.

 

Vivian saw that her domcab was clearly smiling with a sweet face full of irony.

 

"I was deluded," acknowledged Mlokeday. "I discovered that in reality the bond is never broken. The domcab makes it more or less intense depending on its needs. Would you like to meet the first specimen?"

 

A dark-colored creature, much larger than Vivian's, began to peek out from behind the geneticist's shoulder and curl seductively around his neck. Vivian eyed her warily.

 

"Her name is Prota," the engineer said by way of introduction, "Greek for first."

 

"I believe that your domcab, when she became aware of her power, used it to free her fellows," she affirmed.

 

"It isn't possible to dissociate my will from hers," he assured. "The truth is that we freed them," he used the plural, "and, with that, Cuptor has become a huge alien kennel in which we, the humans, are actually the pets."

 

"That's why At-will Phenotyping shut down all their operations here. They had condemned a world to slavery and wanted to hide their tracks."

 

"Clever girl!" the old man said. "But now she has a new plan that concerns you," Vivian raised an eyebrow. "That's why she has brought you to her, I'm only by her side. Yes, my dear, domcabs also stay psychically linked to each other so they can act cooperatively."

 

"Has your pet acted through mine?"

 

"That's right, and she has a mission for you."

 

"For me?" she asked in bewilderment.

 

"You won't be able to escape her power either. Surely, you're already feeling the intense need to organize your own domcab hunt."

 

Vivian was shocked, but that's how it really was. She felt the lively urge to invite someone to a domcab hunt, although she knew well that the name was in fact a pure euphemism.

 

"Prota wants you to include the hunt in the set of activities you're going to program for the new resort."

 

"But then all our visitors will end up bonded," she protested.

 

"That's right, and they can take their new pets with them when they leave our world."

 

Vivian's mouth dropped open in surprise as she understood what that meant, but she instantly smiled. She realized that, from that moment on, for some strange reason, there was nothing that could please her more.

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