FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The first sensation Frederick Cattanzo ever experienced in his life was the sensation of pure white light, flooding in through newly-opened eyes. The second was a wetness against his fur, the level of liquid sliding slowly down his body as the device that had functioned as a womb released him blinking into the world.

The first thing that he truly saw, though, was the worried yet elated face of the man he would come to know as Doctor Mauro Cattanzo. As Freddie coughed, his lungs instinctually arriving at their function and propelling him to take in his first gasps of air, the doctor lit up with an expression of pure jubilation. He'd yelled a string of words that Freddie half-understood, and tried to embrace him, forgetting the layer of plexiglass that set them apart, his arms wrapping uselessly as his face smooshed and distorted against the clear material, fogging it slightly with his breath. And Freddie had laughed, a series of short, sharp barks, but easily identifiable enough. The doctor pulled back, beaming from ear to ear at the sudden laughter, sensing it even through the muting of the container. He pressed a button, the material slid away, and Freddie made his way into his world - or, at least, the very first part of it.

He learned, later on, that most children were never able to recall the circumstances of their birth. It was due, Mauro had said, to the fact that human babies, gestating for just nine months, emerged mewling and helpless, while Freddie had spent the better part of seven years - floating in a warm embrace, his mind growing and shaping and learning, preprogramming itself with a basic level of knowledge in preparation for his eventual consciousness. While all human babies could do was sit and wait for someone to help them, Freddie had walked from the very start, and it had only taken a few short days to put the jumble of vocabulary in his mind into an understandable context. From there, all he wanted to do was learn, about anything and everything, and each bit of exploration served to further connect the myriad bits of pre-knowledge into strings of related ideas, coming together to provide a sense of the world.

At first, though, there wasn't all that much to learn, besides language. The environment was simple enough - a series of corridors, painted the color white, with wooden doors spaced at regular intervals. A snippet of information came to him, informing that the doors were made of something called oak, but he didn't immediately know what that was - there was a vague notion of an image, of something called a tree, but he couldn't clearly picture it in his mind. So he simply associated oak with wood, dark brown - attempting to make sense of this world of knowledge within his own limited experience.

He had expressed his confusion to Mauro, a couple of days after he had figured out how to speak. Of course, he'd addressed the doctor by his official title, as the other humans normally did, but Mauro would have none of it. "You're my son, or close enough," the doctor had said, "and so you should call me by my name. I'd tell you to call me Dad, but... well, that's neither here nor there. Mauro will suffice." Freddie had noticed Mauro's voice waver, and the look on his face was confusing, an expression that he had never seen on any of the humans before that point. If anything, it only multiplied the confusion, but nevertheless he gamely tried to express how he felt - that it was strange to know so many things, but to be unable to make sense of them. Mauro had nodded sagely, his eyes focusing with interest as Freddie recounted how he tried to reconcile the concept of oak.

"I know it's hard, for now," Mauro had said. "You are the first... child that I've had, to tell the truth. There are other children out there, many others, even some who are like you - but you are the first from me. There will be others here, soon, but because you were the first to arrive, things haven't been fully prepared yet - and this is hardly a cheery place, even for adults. Just take it slow for now - you're barely a week old, and you have plenty of time to figure things out. Take pleasure in what there is, and as soon as I am able, I'll show you the world that your memory knows of."

And so went the first couple of weeks - sitting on one of a long row of beds in a room with white walls, behind one of the doors. Mauro had shown him how to press the glowing blue numerals on the keypad above the door handle - three five seven - to get back whenever he wanted, but what was there to do? Sleep, or stare at a wall, or at his short, thin body in the mirror on the closet door, a body so different than everyone else at the facility - pointy ears on the top of his head instead of the sides, light brown fur with occasional swirls of silver puffing out of anywhere not covered by clothes, his nose and mouth stretch forward to look slightly muzzlelike, and a fuzzy, white-tipped tail that had a life of its own. He looked more like a human than anything else, he guessed, but the only other thing that came close was an illustration of a cute red kitfox in one of the handful of picture books that had ben in the room for him to read. He didn't mind, though - even though Dr. Mauro and the other looked so much different, he was treated kindly by all of them, and he didn't think he felt different than any other kid - at least, as far as he knew, as he was the only person around who was his age. Some of the picture books talked about family, though, and he wondered what it would be like to be around other people like himself. More than that, though, he wanted to do something, anything, interesting - the books were okay, but he could only read them so many times, and by now he could recite them all by heart.

And so, in search of anything else to do, he often left his room and wandered the halls, looking carefully at everything that stood out - sockets, fixtures, vents - using the unlocking knowledge in his head to piece together their context. The bright lights that lined the corridors, that his mind told him were something called "fluorescents," used power, just like the other electronic devices that lit up, beeped, and did other interesting things when the humans plugged them into the receptacles low on the wall. His mind told his that a force called electricity ran most everything in the facility, and he surmised that it also generated the gusts of cool air that blew down from the metal vents near the ceiling, and lit up the oddly glowing keypads that worked the doors.

He was fairly diminutive, slightly over three feet tall if you measured to the tips of his ears, and the other people in the facility besides Dr. Mauro, mostly silent, stone-faced men and women in white lab coats, were friendly when they occasionally crossed paths, but otherwise paid him little heed. His mind had conjured up the fact that men and women were different, and had presented him with a series of confusing anatomical diagrams that seemed to resemble intricate flowers more than anything else, but he was able to observe little difference between them. The shapeless coats made everyone look mostly the same. Some of those who Dr. Mauro identified as women had faces that looked a little softer, and a few had gleaming bits of metal hanging from their ears, but everyone bore the same expression of earnest, no-nonsense seriousness, and generally kept carefully out of his way as they walked their paths from one nondescript door to another.

Because they paid little attention, hurried as they were at whatever important things they were doing, they didn't bother to watch as Freddie studied them intensely, taking note of everything they did - and especially the the codes that they punched into the keypads next to various doors. One door, which opened to a glimpse of a bank of monitors glowing blue in the darkness, was five five eight. Another, revealing metal racks loaded with plastic containers and emitting an unfamiliar, artificial smell, was nine zero nine. One in the middle of the hall, which showed a counter, cabinets, and a device called a "coffee maker," was eight nine three. But there was one door near the end of the main hallway, that revealed nothing but a blank wall and a bit of green light, where the people always used one hand to shield the keypad from view. He could only assume that the room was somehow important, but his curiosity was also tempered by his desire not to anger Dr. Mauro - and while he had never said anything specifically about any of the rooms, Freddie had a feeling that no one wanted him poking around and interrupting whatever they were working so hard at, to the exclusion of everything else.

A handful of days and nights passed, as his mind told him that the brightening and dimming of the lights was meant to denote one from another. He had a sense that the cycle happened differently in the outside world, in the places depicted in the picture books and alluded to in his thoughts. There was little else to distinguish them, save for the ever-increasing pace of the people in lab coats shuttling between the various doors. At the end of the week, the bustle was significant enough that Freddie couldn't sleep, and so he lay awake in his bed, listening to the hurried footsteps and hushed but excited voices exchanging barely audible sentences.

He eventually fell asleep, and awoke the next morning to the face of Dr. Mauro, standing over him with the same excited smile he had seen so many days ago.

"Freddie," he said, beaming as he reached down to pull him out of bed, "it's time to meet the rest of your family."