I gasped as my eyes sprung open. With a honking moan, I reached for the straps that had been holding me down and found none. I bolted upright, flinging a sheen of sweat off my body like a wet dog. All the freaky medical stuff wasn't there. Removed. No, that wasn't right. I was in a new room altogether, sitting in a nest made of synthetic white straw. And not a homemade nest like a proper duck deserves, one made with sticks and grass and mud and love. A store-bought nest, like one a giant dumbass chicken man would use.

“I hope they don’t plan on getting any eggs from me,” I said with a nervous laugh, then I stood to my feet.

The notifications had cleared from my vision, but there were a bunch of new icons I hadn’t noticed before. I didn't know what they meant, but I took my best guess by pulling from all the useless information my implant had so graciously given me. The little envelope had to be for messages. That one was easy. And the little bell was for those pesky notifications. I knew this only because of people called... YouTubers. They were always asking people to click the bell, or to get the bell on if exceptionally ridiculous. That notification number was big, too. So big it had shrunk the font to the point I had to squint to read it.

“Ten thousand, six hundred and—”

“Sixty-three,” finished the implant. “Yeah, that’s a lot. Most beings never have to deal with that many on account of, you know, not spending their life as lame ass without an awesome AI like me to guide them through life. But once you opened Pandora’s mailbox, you started twitching and foaming at the bill. I had to go ape-shit with my brain voodoo and mark all your notifications as unread to save me from being homeless. I wouldn’t try reading them all again if I were you. Aside from the convulsions and threat of instant death, it would take a few years of your life just to clear them all and we don’t have that kind of time.”

“Almost eleven thousand,” I mumbled. “Are they... important?”

“Eh, debatable. Important to you, maybe. They’re mostly regular life milestones, like learning to fly and mating for the first time and being a dick to all the other ducks that just looked up to you like a dad. Stuff like that. You do have a few useful skills that may be important to the Trials, but I’m sure those will conveniently come up later.”

I stared at the number. It was crazy to think about, but everything I had ever done in my life was probably in those notifications. I made a point to dive through them later, one by one, but right now I had a sinking feeling that the blinking red number was going to drive me nuts. “Can’t you, like, just mark them all as read or something?”

“Sure could. But... I won’t.”

“Jerk.” It really was annoying me. All those notifications sitting there unread, and the thought that my dumbass implant refused to do anything about it made me feel anxious. But in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t really important. I pursued my bill and tried to bury the urge to read them all. “Whatever.”

I failed.

I screamed, “Why not, dumbass?!”

“Because I don’t want to. And I know it will annoy you, which is the primary source of my entertainment right now. Anyway, forget about all that. Do you have any questions for me so far, Flap?”

“Dick,” I said as I let out a guttural honk at the remark. “Any questions?! Implant, I have a whole assload of questions, maybe even more than I have notifications, like why the hell did you fill my brain with mush? But let’s start with the most important ones, first. Who the duck is the Cluck Collective and what are these Trials people keep telling me about?”

“Oh, starting with the hard ones, I see? Well, to understand who the Cluck Collective is, you need to understand a little about the entire galaxy, and to understand a little about the entire galaxy, I’m going to need you to lie back down and put your 3D glasses on.”

My vision suddenly shifted, the right side tinted blue and the left side tinted red. I felt like Biff Tannen’s bozo bodyguard from Back to the Future.

“Shit biscuits, I’m so excited! I've been working on this presentation the whole time you were out cold. Too bad you have those webbed feet because if you wore socks, I’d tell you to get ready to have them knocked off!”

And the implant hit me with it. It was a PowerPoint presentation. In 3D. An awful, boring PowerPoint presentation complete with WordArt and cheesy animations. In 3D. And since it was happening inside my head, I couldn't get away from it. Let me reiterate, just so nobody gets confused. It was happening inside my head, in ducking 3D.

So, let me spare you the torture with a summary.

Scratch that. You deserve to know what I’m going through. So crack open a can of empathy cola and throw on those 3D glasses that have been sitting in your junk drawer since 1984. The Jaws ones you got in that box of Shredded Wheat. You know the ones I’m talking about. They're still in the plastic because you thought they would be valuable one day.

Here goes nothing. You, um, might want to grab some popcorn.

According to my implant, two sentient races sprung up in the early days of the Milky Way Galaxy. The first was the Gallics—they’re the chicken men whose spaceship I now unwillingly called home. Once they unlocked what my implant calls the spaceflight skill, those big chickens moved across the galaxy, conquering system by system. Conquering wasn’t really the best word for what they did, as there had been nothing to conquer on any of the planets they encountered on the early part of their star trek. It took a lot longer than five years, in case you were wondering.

Millions, even.

And it was more like colonization. Unrestricted, plaguelike colonization.

I hate that my understanding of Earth comes from movies and tv shows, by the way. I’m not sure what’s real and what isn’t. I have to search for context in all these weird memories, and it's really ducking hard. I wish my implant would have at least included some documentaries to even things out, but you get what you pay for, I guess.

Simply put, my implant is a dumbass.

Anyway, the Gallics were unopposed until they came across a tiny backwater planet in the Sauros system called Dinos—humans eventually named the system Gliese and the planet had some number or something; I think. That wasn’t very clear in the presentation, and again, I didn’t have any documentaries in my skull to help me out.

Okay, let me get back on track. The residents of Dinos—get this, dinosaurs—were the other sentient race. I honestly think this maniac of an AI inside my brain is ducking with me, but again, it's all I've got to work with. Anyway, the dinosaurs had done the same thing as the Gallics in their neck of the Milky Way. Long story short, a series of territorial wars broke out over millions of years, which led to the first Galactic War, until both sides got together and struck a truce. The agreement? You keep your half, and I’ll keep mine. Problem solved.

Sounds reasonable, right?

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Nope! That obviously didn’t stop the fighting. It just made both sides more sneaky about it. And that’s when a third race came into the picture. The Squaartblaats. They were a race of aquatic squid things, with a variable number of tentacles that called a little world in the Sol system home.

Yeah, that Sol system.

Listen, I know what you're thinking right now and the Squaartblaats did NOT come from Earth's primordial ooze. Though we will get to Earth in a minute. They actually evolved on Titan, and the only reason they got involved in the entire ordeal was because the never ending war between the Gallics and the Dinosaurs was inching closer and closer to their liquid ethane doorstep. The squids had no desire for power or space land. They just wanted to be left alone so they could cultivate and worship this weird fungus called gootkap.

The implant spent five or six slides talking about the uses of gootkap and how they applied to the Trials, but it was boring, so I zoned out. The only thing I remember is that it tastes like dill pickles and peanut butter.

Anyway, the Squaartblaats called a meeting between the Gallics and the Dinosaurs and told them they were being little bitches about the whole thing. And then they offered both species a place to settle their disputes in a way that didn’t get the rest of the evolving races in the galaxy killed every time the two top dogs had a pissing match.

And that’s when the Trials were born.

The best warriors from the Gallics and the Dinosaurs would meet on Earth for a gladiatorial brawl every ten Earth years. They brought their disputes with them and the winners of the Trials got to keep whatever territory was being disputed or have bragging rights or get a legal judgment. It grew to be so popular amongst the chickens that they started battling over every little thing they could think of. Clan conflicts, you name it.

Two rival Gallic religious sects used the Trials to establish a single, unified dogma, even reaching a consensus on which came first.

It was the perfect justice system for millennia, until the Dinosaurs got sick and tired of the Gallics treating Earth—which was supposed to be a neutral location—like their own personal shootout location, so a faction of the Dinosaurs called the Sauropods took up permanent residence to say cluck you to the big chickens.

This pissed off the Gallics like you wouldn’t believe, so—in a move no one under the age of four could have predicted—all the Gallic Clans united against the Dinosaurs. They called themselves… wait for it… the Cluck Collective.

I know, right? It’s terrible. Who thought of that? My implant says somebody should take away their keyboard.

But war was back on the menu, boys.

The Second Galactic War went for millions more years until the leader of the Cluck Collective saw that the war chest was running a little thin—millions of years of war will do that to a species. That crazy chicken came up with the craziest plan of all to end the war. And it started with deeding Earth to the Dinosaurs so they could be done with the whole damn thing.

It didn’t turn out the way she planned.

The Dinosaurs took offense to someone telling them they had to take the planet, and they refused. Not to be outdone by the chickens' generosity, they called for the biggest Trials ever to decide who would had to keep Earth. Like, this shit actually happened folks. The Cluck Collective accepted. They even said they would lease the planet to those already living there if they won, just to make it simple.

Everyone involved knew it was just another pissing match, anyway.

The Dinosaurs agreed. They sent nearly every warrior they had to Earth for the Trials, pulling their best people from every corner of the galaxy. And there they waited for the Cluck Collective to do the same.

Surprise, surprise. They didn’t.

Nope. The whole thing had been a ruse, you see? A trick. As soon as all those Dinosaurs were on Earth, the Cluck Collective sent a killer asteroid hurtling into the planet, killing every one of them. Then they spent the next several thousand years conquering—and I mean actually conquering this time—every corner of the Dinosaur Empire.

The enslaved. They killed. They made them listen to their weird chicken music.

And the Gallics practically erased their culture from existence.

Time went on. Earth became a myth, and the Cluck Collective ruled the galaxy unopposed for millions of years.

By the time my implant had gotten done telling me all this in its stupid PowerPoint, my blood had risen to a boil. Then, on the penultimate slide, it let me know what really happened after the asteroid hit. Not everyone died… right then. The impact covered the planet in ash and dust, sending Earth into a winter that lasted over a year.

And that was when all the Dinosaurs died.

All the non-avian Dinosaurs that is.

The rest? The avian ones? They stuck around. They evolved. And eventually they turned into other birds. Birds like me.

If I thought my temperature was high after the first big revelation, the next thing my implant did blew the top of the thermometer. It showed me a picture of Earth.

“That’s Earth?” I said, marveling at the blue-green marble hovering in front of me. “It’s like… one big giant beautiful pond.”

“It is your pond, Flap,” it said, its tone far more serious than it had been at any point in our brief relationship. “And you’re the only one that can save it.”

I nodded. “So, if I win these Trials, Earth gets put back where it belongs and the Cluck Collective leaves us alone? I can… go back to my pond?”

“Everyone can go back to their pond, Flap. Well, except for Russell Crowe. He’s... not going to make it.”

“Why?” I asked. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that guy’s name. It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. What did he do wrong? Why can’t he go back?”

“Nothing. But that’s a whole different story,” it said. “And I don’t have my PowerPoint finished for that one yet. The bootleg product key I found on Reddit quit working. I’ll have to use Google sheets, I guess. But if you give me a few minutes and I can rush—”

“No, that's fine, implant.” I wasn’t in the mood to sit through another one of those presentations. “You can tell me later. But you are going to help me with these Trials, right?”

“Oh, of course! I’m your implant. I’m obligated to assist you in any mission you take on.”

“That’s good news. I don’t think I could do this alone.” I lifted my foot up and scratched my neck. “There’s not something you aren’t telling me? Something the Collective has programmed you to do to me or something?”

“Nope! To be honest with you, Flap, they don’t think you have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving the first level. They said it wasn't worth wasting the time and effort on you.”

“Good, then let’s—”

“Heh-heh-heh-HEHHHH-heh! Um, there may be one thing in it for me.”

“Oh, yeah, Woody?” I said, amused. “What’s that?”

“I was serious about pitching season two of Firefly. Get me season two of Firefly, Flap.”

I laughed. I actually laughed at that. After all the gloom and doom from the presentation my dumb implant made me watch, I broke out into a belly bursting guffaw. When I had myself under control, I took a breath and said. “Well, if we’re going to be stuck together, implant, you’re going to have to tell me your name. I can’t keep calling you implant.”

“I don’t have a name. Gallic Combat Implants only have a designation. Mine is A3467B56FD4RTY—”

“Okay, that’s enough. I got the picture. It's strange, but I get the picture. My implant—Flap Merganser’s implant—will not go by a ducking number, though. You need a name.”

“You-know-who never thought I needed a name.”

“Well, you said you-know-who was a royal dumbass. I’m not a dumbass, so I do. You should pick one. You love Firefly. What about Wash? Or Jayne? Or Mal? Maybe a girl's name? Inara? Kaylee?”

“I don’t know.” It sighed. “I couldn’t ever live up to one of those heroes. Wait! I have an idea! You should give me a name, Flap!”

“Okay,” I said. “I can do that. Give me a moment to think about. I’ve never named anything before.” I rummaged around in my mind for a few minutes, looking for the perfect moniker for the hardware in my head. When I had it, a grin spread across my face that was so wide it put the Putin meme to shame. “Oh, I got a name, implant. I got a name for you alright.”

“I’m so excited! Name me after a hero AI, like HAL-9000! No, that's too obvious. How about TARS? Let it be TARS! I absolutely ducking adore Christopher Nolan. Please, please, please let it be TARS!”