'On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you percieve and/or understand the animal in the scene?' The voice is robotic, uniform, and repetitive. It is the third time he's been asked the question, and whilst he is happy to earn the credits this month in what seems a relatively benign task, Rey feels irritated and impatient. The chair is uncomfortably cold. Short videos of extinct or threatened animals play across a large screen.

There is nothing else in the room. There is the screen, the chair, the keyboard, and Rey.

At first he does not feel anything at all.

This is not unusual, but generational - the post millenials are doped up, anaesthetised, jaded, unfeeling pricks, according to the press. They're not wrong. He cannot recall the last time he felt anything at all, but this was not entirely his fault. It is a protective mechanism to not feel in a world entirely ruined. They chose not to feel. It was both an imperative and a choice. The generation before them had suicided, cryo-froze themselves, chosen deep sleep in three hundred year flights off world. Anything was better in a world of nothing but the clock ticking the minute past midnight and the band playing as the world sunk.

Perhaps there are better ways to earn, he thinks. Knows. Last time he vomited for a week and as he had signed a waiver, he had to foot the medication bills himself. His mother had wagged her finger at him in despair. 'Rey', she'd said. 'You'll end up with two headed children' she said. 'Or worse'. Given that he was unlikely to have children, due to last year's experiment, this wasn't likely - but he didn't want to tell his mother that.

'On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you percieve and/or understand the animal in the scene?' Rey blinked. His eyes felt scratchy and dry. He wanted to rub them but his hands were shackled to the chair. His old scar itched, reminding him of the desperation he felt as he tried to escape the burning car. It seemed everything was burning back then - the fields, the forests, the sky. In trying to escape the flames he had driven his car wildly round mountain bends and then plain into a river, which saved him, granted, but left him with a ragged scar where he had cut his thigh on the broken windscreen as he had squirmed upward into the water and then the burning light. That was how it felt, looking at the tiger that paced to and fro in the cage on the screen. Like he wanted to break the glass. Like drowning.

'On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you percieve and/or understand the animal in the scene?'. Like the previous four times, he tapped a number on the small screen to the right of his hand. The image flickered and the scene changed. This time it was a wedge of geese flying across a violet twilight. Although there was no sound, only flight, he could hear their honks and barks. When he was five his grandfather had killed a geese with an ax, stretching the creatures long neck across the table and lowering the blade sharp and true. The warm blood had hit Rey's cheek and he had wet his pants with the shock of it. Many years later he would remember the horror of that moment when his sister was buried. The tears sliding down his cheek were like the blood of the geese, unexpected and warm. The raw grief of loss was the same in the child Rey and the grown brother, and in this moment, the feeling was the same as on the screen the geese fell from the sky in a hail of bullets, plumetting, plumetting, plumetting. His trousers were damp.

'On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you percieve and/or understand the animal in the scene?'

'Oh Rey', he heard his mother say. 'You can't save them all.' She had bent down to hold him and he sneezed from the dust that billowed around them, the hot wind and her sour smell which months later he understood to be the smell of his sister's dying. He had forgotton this childhood memory of his pup until this moment. He was watching the ducklings follow their mother across a busy highway on the screen. For a moment he felt confused, seeing the mother duck as his own parent, the heat of the road on his feet, the rush of traffic. He remembered the dying dog. He was the duck, and the pup. 'Mother' he quacked, then fell silent, embarrassed.

'On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you percieve and/or understand the animal in the scene?'

He tapped the board, over and over, sobbing. There was a metallic his mouth, the smell of feathers and fur, of stables, the guano in dark caves, the sweat of galloping herds, the fishy pungency of whales, elephant dung, the formic acid of ants, dogs barking, the caterwaul of possums, cockatoos, screeching macaws, wet fur, the dog dying in his arms, quiet whimpering, salt, blood, salt, blood.

'On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you percieve and/or understand the animal in the scene?'

'Oh Rey', his mother had wept, pulling him and the injured dog into her skirts. 'Oh Rey'.

And he stopped, then, feeling at all.

It's been a while since I've written a story for Hive - I've been away, and busy. I'm sorry if this one is depressing - I've been feeling a lot for the world of animals lately, and the mass extinction we're facing. This was written in response to the Ink Well prompt 'sympathy', and the image is co-created in Midjourney by me. I hope you enjoyed it.