I gasped as my eyes sprung open. With a honk-like moan, I reached for the straps that had been holding me down and found none, so I bolted upright. All the medical stuff was missing. Removed. No, that wasn't right. I was in a new room altogether, sitting in a nest made of synthetic white straw. Like the type of nest a giant chicken man would use.

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

The notifications had cleared from my vision, but there were a bunch of new icons I hadn’t noticed before. I had no idea what most of them were for, but there were a couple I thought I could figure out. The little envelope had to be for messages, and the little bell must have been for those pesky notifications. I knew this only because the bell had a blinking red number over it. It was a big number, 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,” said the implant. “Yeah, that’s a lot of milestones. I had to mark all your notifications as unread to keep them from playing once you started having seizures. I wouldn’t try reading them all again. Aside from the convulsions, 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 milestones,” I said. “Are they... important?”

“Eh, debatable. Important to you, maybe. Garbage to me. They’re mostly regular life milestones, like learning to fly and mating for the first time and being a dick to all the other young ducks that just looked up to you like a father. Stuff like that. You have unlocked a few useful skills that may be important to the Trials, but we’ll go over those 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 find a safe way to go through them later, but right now I had a sinking feeling that 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.”

I eyeballed the number a little harder. 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 pursed my bill and tried to bury the urge to read them all.

I didn’t.

I screamed, “Why the cluck 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. “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 multimedia mush? But let’s start with the most important ones, first. Who the cluck 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 have to understand a little about the entire galaxy, and to understand a little bit about the entire galaxy, I’m going to need you to lie back down and put your 3-D 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.

“Golly, I’m so excited! I worked on this the whole time you were out cold. If you wore socks, I’d tell you to get ready to have them knocked off, Flap Merganser!”

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

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 3-D 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.

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 ship I now unwillingly call home. Once they unlocked something called the spaceflight skill, those big chickens moved across the galaxy, conquering system by system. The implant told me that conquering wasn’t really the best word for what they did, as there had been nothing to conquer on any of the planets they colonized on the early part of their star trek. It took a lot longer than five years, in case you were wondering.

Millions, even.

I hate that my understanding of Earth comes from movies and tv shows, by the way. It makes it really difficult to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. I have to search for context in all these weird memories of other people, and it's really clucking 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 to pull off.

Okay, let me get back on track. The residents of Dinos—Dinosaurs—were the other sentient race. And they had done the exact same thing as the Gallics in their arm of the Milky Way. Long story short, a series of territorial wars broke out over millions of years, which led to the first Galactic Space War, until both sides got together and struck a truce. The agreement? You keep your half, and I’ll keep mine.

Sounds reasonable, right?

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.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Listen, I know what you're thinking right now and the Squaartblaats did NOT come from Earth. Though we will get to Earth in a minute. The squids 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. They 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.

So, they called a meeting between the Gallics and the Dinosaurs and pretty much 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 developing 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 or so. They brought their disputes with them and the winners of the Trials got to keep whatever territory was being disputed. It grew to be so popular amongst both races that they started battling over every little thing they could think of, even between members of the same race. The various fringe Gallic clans starting using it to settle what amounted to Old County power struggles between the gang-like organizations.

Most of the inter-clan conflict happened outside of the regular Trials.

It was the perfect justice system for millennia, though, up until the Dinosaurs got sick and tired of the Gallics treating Earth—which was supposed to be a neutral location—like their own personal Western shootout set, so a faction of the Dinosaurs called the Sauropods took up permanent residence as a way 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. I wonder who came up with that.

But war was back on the menu, boys.

The Second Galactic Space War went for millions more years until the leader of the Cluck Collective at the time 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 which race would be forced 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 lost, 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 planet killer asteroid hurtling into the planet, killing every last one of them. Then they spent the next several thousand years conquering—and I mean actually conquering this time—every corner of the fragmented Dinosaur Empire.

The Dinosaurs were enslaved. They were killed.

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 was killed… right then. The impact covered the planet in ash and dust, sending Earth into a winter that lasted over a year and changed the climate forever.

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 that revelation, the next thing my implant did blew the top off 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 with the most badass lily pads I've ever seen.”

“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.” Then, unsurprisingly, my implant turned into a dumbass again. “Except for Russell Crowe… he’s not going to make it back.”

“Why?” I asked. That’s the second time I had heard that guy’s name. It sounded familiar, but I couldn'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 slides, I guess. I hate Google slides, but give me a few minutes and I can rush—”

I wasn’t in the mood to sit through another one of those presentations, given what I had just learned. “No, that's fine, implant. 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, no matter how futile or stupid.”

“That’s good news, I think.” 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! Not a thing. They just asked me to keep you from spilling the beans about you-know-who. To be honest with you, Flap, they don’t think you have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving the first level.”

“Good, then let’s—”

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

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

“I was serious about getting season two of Firefly. You need to get me season two of Firefly, Flap.”

I laughed. I actually clucking laughed at that. After all the gloom and doom from the presentation the 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. “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 A3467B56FD1RTY—”

“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 clucking 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? Do you even have a gender?”

“I don’t know. And no. No gender.” It sighed. “I couldn’t ever live up to one of those heroes. 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 meme about Putin to shame. “Oh, I got a name, implant. I got a name for you alright.”

It paused. "You're going to call me DIRTY, aren't you?"