text: Yoshito was meditating deep within his treasured memories. He focused on the pearl of greatest value to him: *The whole memory was of the koi and of his father. His father was already very old when Yoshito was born. He meditated and remembered that day, he was three and a half years old, merely two by his new American age.* *"We moved here when my son, you were born." Yoshito's father had said.* *He had stared at the fish and recalled his birth. Later when his father died he had stood at this pond and recalled the memory of when he was two, recalling his birth.* *This was a string of pearls, when he closed his eyes and dreamed or meditated. All of his very precious memories kept intact, perfectly and remembered.* The call came in that interrupted this thought from Yoshito. Since his desk phone was off, in his office, on his scheduled afternoon tea time, the call came in the form of his secretary, Mrs. Djan. "A call from Doctor Reese, sir" she said in English. "Okay." Yoshito said plainly. Only Mrs. Djan noticed that he sounded annoyed, his exact tone and speed was slightly different. A voice analysis might not have picked up the difference, but it took a human ear sometimes, Mrs. Djan didn't trust machines. Her boss took the call and she went out to her own desk outside his office. She simply used her phone for this message, she sent it saying: "Reeses-in-pieces" to her new boss. She knew when it was time to find a new job. "Reese, how are you? How is Carol? Is that squirrel still stealing from Annabelle's bowl on the back porch? Ha Ha Ha." Yoshito talked to Reese. Reese had a lot to say because there was silence as Yoshito listened. He was telling Yoshito that he had done work on soldiers similar to what Yoshito was working on. It had gone very badly, they had become berserk monsters, possessed by the singular thought to kill. The rest hadn't worked as well as before, with the canine subjects. Mrs. Djan heard none of this, but she knew the scope of what Doctor Reese might be saying. "Calm down." Yoshito told Doctor Reese. "You remember what I told you before?" "How not? I mean: I will tell you again, just so you know." Yoshito replied. Mrs. Djan eavesdropped to this, but then Harris came in. He was head of security in the hospital. "Doctor Yoshito should be informed that a Mr. Reese is here to see him." Harris said to her back, catching her eavesdropping. "Right." Mrs. Djan straightened herself out. "That will be all then, Harris?" "Yes Ma'am." he frowned and left. She resumed her eavesdropping and heard Yoshito saying to Reese over the phone, who was apparently also in the building: "I was studying all the time, very focused and very good student. I was cold and my manner was not warm enough for the delivery of babies. I got my first patient and as we spoke the nurses cared for this pregnant woman. She was having her sixth child and she kept reminding me that she knew more about birthing children than I did with all my study. She wanted some tea. I told the nurse to pour the hot water for her. The pregnant woman insisted that I pour the hot water. She stared very intently and I grew strangely nervous and my pour became unsteady. The more unsteady my pouring of the hot water grew, the more intensely I tried to correct it and the more it gushed into the cup. Finally some of the hot water dripped over the side onto the plate as I finished pouring. All that in just one escalating moment from one simple lack of preparation on my part. She fired me, judging me to be too green and incompatible with her next birthing. I had some money after college, such was my cold prudence. When other patients reacted similarly to her I went into retreat and visited a garden of stone where a master of tea ceremony is willing to teach. It was not irrelevant to delivering babies. I went back and I felt different, having stared into empty stone lanterns. I delivered countless babies but then decided to go back to school. It was the mind I sought, instead of birth. I studied the human mind and became world renowned as a neural surgeon, second only to you Doctor Reese." "It is a long story." Reese complained. "And I am tired of hearing it, word for word." He suddenly burst into the office of Mrs. Djan with Harris as a hostage at gun point. He had a zip gun. The zip gun was a weapon where a spring coiled around a nail in a thin pvc pipe was held by a vice-grip tool's trigger-release. It was loaded with just one bullet, but it would fire that into Harris if she reacted. Or that was what Reese was saying to her anyway. He had his phone on bluetooth, still talking to Yoshito who was in his office on the other side of the door. Reese shuffled past Mrs. Djan like she might be armed. "I sit." Mrs. Djan went to her desk and sat down. "No wait, get back up." Reese told her. She produced an uzi from her desk drawer. It was folded up into a little blue case, but she then showed the hidden automatic. It had a little clip in it with fifteen bullets. Reese's eyes widened in horror. Mrs. Djan was one of them! One of the spooks that had chased him here! She started shooting and shot the first burst of five bullets entirely into Harris. Two shots went clean through him and hit Reese. Harris fell over dead. "Sorry Reese." Mrs. Djan climbed up onto her desk. Her tight cyan office skirt was not a bad last thing to see. She shot up Reese with the next burst, aiming for his feet. "Damn that hurts!" he proclaimed. "Give me that!" Mrs. Djan went to go disarm him. Suddenly the outer door opened and two more security guards came into the room. They had the misfortune of startling Mrs. Djan and she emptied the clip, killing them both. Then Yoshito opened his door. The zip gun made one last gunshot after all the uzi-fire. It hit Yoshito alongside his head. *He found himself in the place where he kept his pearls. There they were his thirty-nine most precious memories, as polished and perfect as their age and value to him. Then there were only thirty, broken pieces shattered and forgotten. He watched it happening in horror.* *He was trapped in this place. He went and reached for one of the rarest memories and his touch shattered that one as well. In horror he recoiled. He could only stand and stare at them.* *Time seemed endless as he looked. He counted them. Now only twenty-nine. As he stared he heard one that he had neglected to look at shatter as well. Then another and another the same way.* *He stared at the memory pearls even more intensely until they started to crack from getting stared at too hard. One of the very good memories broke.* *Yoshito shouted in frustrated defiance and his voice shattered several more. He fell silent and the silence drowned another and it broke as well.* His eyes opened from the three-year long coma. Yoshito had a very long road ahead of him. Eventually he returned to the science of neural surgery, but it was as the trembling hands of tea-pouring. Nobody believed he was still able to do the surgery. In fact he was making even more money now and funding his own private research. This went on for a long time. Now he was into weapons. He didn't work with human subjects, but rather the insects and reptiles and dogs that he brought in throughout his work. All of it seized and destroyed by the government of Yoshito's homeland. Yoshito driven further into exile. Reese was safe behind bars in that country. Money will buy anything. One day two guards used a needle on him, given to them by Yoshito. He presented himself later, outside the prison waiting. A drug that soon would put Reese into a kind of special 'memory coma' and 'in a dog's body for laughs' Yoshito was saying. "You are a monster." Reese told him. Reese felt momentarily oriented to see a massive mural showing the evolution of Dogs, Chameleons and Fireflies backwards through bone fossils. He found it to be incredibly tacky. "Well I would say that 'monsters destroy their creators' to you because you shot me and I spent three years in a coma developing isolated amnesia, changing me into a very cold and ruthless supervillain-like person." Yoshito chuckled kinda crazily. "You would say that?" "I mean to say I am actually going to make you into a monster. I solved your problem with the scary soldiers you worked on. Solved it with you being the prototype, that is." Yoshito started wheeling his patient into the operating room personally. Soon they were in the operating room. "So what do you say then?" Reese was still drugged. "I say: let's just make a long story short: I am going to put your brain in the body of one of the special dogs. Well, your conscious mind anyway, surgically implanted into its mind." Yoshito grinned as he spoke. "In English?" Reese asked, smiling. "You will wake up as a puppy dog nobody wants with no memory how you got that way. Then I am going to sell you as a weapon." Yoshito explained. Yoshito's eyes twinkled with evil merriment. "I will be a puppy?" "Yes. A real puppy.