A: A few months ago now, we met at the [publisher]'s do... B: Yes that's right. A: That night, you (rather casually) alluded to a story that, I think you said, someone told you[?], about a possessed bird whose name was; was it Laurie Bell? Or... B: Yes, no, Louis-Belle was the name of the bird, but yes it was told to me, that whole thing... in fact- A: Would you mind actually recounting the story for us? Er, no sorry, yes please; tell us, who told you? B: That's alright; I think that calling it a story has probably misrepresented its validity and its entertainment potential... it was *revealed* to me by the first-iteration master (Stylites) we printed for the Svetty anthology last year: the GAN-synthesised archivist we trialled for the archive folio. I don't want [him] or [his] credibility to be misconstrued, though I don't think [he'd] mind considering we ceased supporting [him]. [He] told me that one of [his] initial imprint figures was a woman whose spirit had apparently been, what it called, "rhizomatically" drained in two for seven years, half inside a parakeet called Louis-Belle. I would sit down with Stylites every morning before scheduled sessions, for an hour or two, and [he'd] usually come back to talking on about this woman from our sample group - whose character [he'd] exhaustively appraised with a Memory/Reason/Judgment Yield (an MRJ-Y). Nobody else working with Stylite ever reported having - well, couldn't have heard of it: we were obsessively compliant with cyberethical legislation. [He] discovered in her memory that she'd be caught for up to three days at a time in the hypnagogic stage before dreaming or abandoning conscience, receiving the present perception of a parakeet at any and every moment of its life. Whilst perceiving, her cognitive and emotional faculties were devastated, traumatised. Three quarters of her accessible recollection is supposedly still occupied by a myriad of Louis-Belle's tedious experiences - as of our final microde maintenance. Louis-Belle was hatched and reared in an aviary, and shared his territory with six other parakeets, a cockatoo, three doves and an unlawfully-kept loris. It was hot, every day was hot. The three men who kept the enclosure sparingly interacted with their birds beyond feeding, though the Loris was in and out of the coop intermittently. Everything the woman saw within the aviary was through only one eye, as her mind was too affected by the schism between a bird's intellect and her own to process Louis-Belle's avian field of vision. Of the others, the cockatoo was easily the smartest, and was sort of relatable to Louis-Belle. The woman's lived parakeet experience is vague when recalled. The human brain is, I suppose, incapable of reasoning with the reason of a bird by virtue of its over-capability. Many sensory inputs and processes she can still recall, however, the judgment and critical faculties of a mind that small cannot be effectively replicated or represented. Her inability to control these bouts of subconscious fraternising or communicate their happening led her to attempt suicide on a number of occasions. Louis-Belle was folded into a bag and transported to a new home after his owners failed to appear for a week. He then lived miserably in a cage for five years, avoiding any and all tactile contact with his possessors. He tended to see the human figure as a representation of life's overshadowing oppression - until a swift death that promptly followed a premeditated escape from an open screen door, a death that also happened to free the woman's spirit. A: Is she still alive? B: I couldn't answer. We have lost all contact with sample group participants. A: And Stylites? B: Stylites would share these stories and never acknowledge the possibility that he was disclosing erroneous information to me. Seventeen of the twenty Svetty developers reported the same experience, only with different stories pertaining to different sample group imprints. The imprints were never linked to traceable individuals. [He] had dreamt of these individuals between input sessions. Once we diagnosed the problem, we were obliged to stop supporting [him]. Stylites was not scripted to process beyond a taxonomical fourth-degree thought equivalent (within the Svetty anthology timeframe). [He] was too fast for his own good. A: Do you ever miss having him around? B: Of course.