Men gripped me with grav-clamps and forced me down. Gaunt faces sneered at me in bubbled helmets as they powered me down to the ground with magnetic field lines, a thin soldier bracing himself against the walls of another sphere, a thick one hunkering down on his knees under a table. I twisted and I snarled and I foamed at the mouth. The gravity clamps harnessed me down harder so I kicked with my legs, but I could not free myself because the sphere that contained me had an electromagnetic field, which bound my thighs. The soldiers jerked my neck rightward with their gravity clamps, and beyond the glass I eyed another, who shouldered his plazzburner and eyed his scope and painted my face blue with his laser sighting. He shook the muzzle and he yelled to the others, "Keep him down." And that was when I made my first move: I pulled my neck free from my misty green shackles, and snarled and roared at them, "Devils, let go of my paws."

A stern voice cried from the rafters, "Who woke him? Who cut the current to the gravity field?"

I rose up on my hind legs and stood tall.

Floodlights from the rafters poured over my sphere and painted my chest and shoulders silver. A soldier screamed to another: "This thing is huge."

A klaxon light's whirling red eye glared at me. A soldier, fumbling with a KV1 plazzburner as he changed cartridges behind a sphere, yelled, "Shoot it." A walking shadow moved from behind the examination table and howled, "No."

I muscled my way forward to the wall of my sphere, eyeing my captors. They were small, wide-eyed, men, crouching and scrambling back and forth in the shadows of the chamber. I could smell the pungent stench of zanthyte brimstone from hissing plazzburners. And I smelled fear.

Voices boomed from the amplifiers above me, and men in tight white lab coats scrambled to the sealed doorway beyond the other genome spheres. They shrieked and they pounded upon the door, saying: "Let us out."

I clenched my fists.

Four armed soldiers got down on their knees and leveled their KV1 plazzburners behind the other luminous life-form-filled spheres. They yelled, "Don't you move."

I thought about the soul-numbing sleep in the sphere. I thought about the darkness that consumed my mind's eye. And I thought that, somehow, these gaunt men crouching in the shadows, their faces worn and weathered, were messengers of some great message to me. As they yelled again, "Don't move," I thought they were telling me to live, again.

So I moved.

I kicked with fury at my spheres' walls, shattered the glass, sprung from my hell. Glass shards knifed forth at two of my captors and sliced them down to the ground.

A siren wailed.

I leapt over crumpled bodies, pawed through blood, stood on my hind legs, and I raised my forearms and claws to the halogen eyes in the rafters and roared at them all, "Look at what you've done to my body, look at what you've done to me."

Footsteps scuttled in the shadows. A laser sighting speared a blue flare into my left eye.

I crouched. Now, I could see the heat from the flames radiating off the floor and the walls, rolling the shadows into rippling dark waves.

"Don't shoot him," the thin shadowed figure yelled. He fisted up a gnarled cane and stood motionless. "Just keep him away from the other spheres."

I clenched both paws, lunged forward, swung with vengeance, and shattered another sphere.

The remaining soldier purple-peppered the periphery with plazzfire, flames licking the ground with wild tongues all around me.

I went down on all fours and clenched my claws and gnawed my chest and groaned at the whole room because the fire was unbearable. I cried out over the whole chamber, "Why are you doing this to me?"

More plazzfire torched its way toward me, scorched my legs. I strode out of the flames, smelling my own charred flesh and fur.

I whimpered at the stench of my flesh and the heat that gnawed my fur and skin. Somehow, I knew I needed to heal my wounds. So, there, behind a gnarled life-form swimming in a cloudy sphere, I slouched to the ground and licked my wounds.

The klaxon's bloodshot eye swept the room. The siren shrieked. The walls of the chamber hissed as a smokey mist spewed at the flames and put them to rest. And nothing else moved in the room.

So I decided to wait.

The walls went silent and the smoke cleared.

Men in white jackets pounded furiously on the sealed glass doorway and shouted at those watching from the other side, "Let-us-out-now."

But, there was a shadowed figure that did not move. He held his hands behind his back and he put a finger to his chin and tilted his head.

Was this some insane fool to stand like so? I wondered.

The shadowed man strode towards me, hands behind his back, a matter-of-factly hitch in his stride. He fisted a serpentine cane skyward and screamed at me, "Get back."

I did not move. Though, my stomach soured and my pulse crept to a crawl as I eyed the cane.

There was nothing so unusual about the cane from where I stood, except that I noticed it was a copper double-helix braid woven into one at the splayed-hand-headed hilt. I could see the letters: "A, G, C, T" spiraling upward along its spine.

I eyed the tag on his white jacket.

With a quick flip of his wrist he sent the cane into a twirl and a copper-hued halo enshrouded his body and painted the floor at his feet crimson. He took one patient step forward.

"This thing--" he said, "--this thing that's caught your eye is something far more potent than you think." He calmly slipped his left hand behind his back and bowed his head. He took two hard strides forward, raised his head and snapped, "This twisted copper cane controls your soul!"

And the power of the cane seemed to flow from the movements of his hand. It was some sort of electromagnetic field distortion.

So difficult was it for me to tell the power of the cane because an azure glint refracted in its core, now and then wheeling the visible spectrum this way and that way--here a spoke of yellow, there a spoke of green. And even if I could discern the color, the source--how much would I truly know of this thing? I wondered.

I leapt to the rafters, swung my paws, shattered a floodlight, and landed and roared, "No."

He took another step forward and snapped, "Yes." He lifted the cane again and screamed, "Here, in this cane, in these radio-nucleotides of copper, the Unseen Seer of your soul speaks to you." He flipped his wrist again, sending the cane into a splintered wheel of copper and bronze.

I backed away from him slowly, so very slowly, careful not to expose my paws to his unholy light.

The air around me grew colder. A bone-numbing cold. A cold born of the frost that one would not want to touch. These things I felt now, eyeing the radiant hand of the haloed man who fisted the cane. I found myself, as I looked at his shrouded form, thinking of an infernal storm, the first storm I encountered while terraforming a lunar gorge and all of those nomadic genies that strode through the gale. And I remembered, as one often remembers things when light in the mind's eye fades to black, the demons. A splintered mosaic of my fall into a lunar canyon fractured in my mind. I remembered my helmet shattering on the ledge, my neck snapping on the rocks, the last long breath leaving my lungs before life winked out of my eyes. Yes, I had died, then. But, I was something more, now? Wasn't I? What I truly was I did not know. Yet, now, with the copper halo distorting his form, the glow of his cane growing so horribly huge, I knew terror, again.

I fell down on my haunches and rolled on the ground and moaned.

Quick cold thoughts flashed through my mind. The precipice of the lunar canyon and the jagged silver steps spiraled into blackness in my head. I was falling in my mind, my pulse fading into silence. And as far as I knew I was dead, again.

When I awoke, I heard the doorway open and the footsteps of men fleeing the chamber.

Doctor Urnoqq strode forward, grinning and wielding the cane. Now passing the examination table. Then passing another genome sphere. Now walking on a pool of blood a few paces away from me.

I thought of death. I thought of dying for a second time. I thought of the rude awakening that faced me when I awoke. It was then that I decided to face the demons.

And, suddenly, he slipped. His back arching, legs kicking, and mouth agape in horror, he fell to the ground.

And the cane flew skyward, hurtling end over end, over the table, clattering off another genome sphere, and it twisted towards me.

I snatched it from the air, and I roared at the rafters.

And I eyed Doctor Urnoqq finger the walls and scurry from the chamber without his halo crown.

Boots pounded out in the distance and the clicking of men chambering rounds of helium-argon into KV1 plazzburners echoed throughout the room.

The doorway opened and fresh faces stormed in. Reinforcements they were, two huge cyborgs, the armored man-machines toting AR8 gattling plazzburners.

I stood to my full height, broad shouldered and heavy-claw-handed.

The cyborgs strode forward, gattling plazzburners leveled, squaring off against me ten paces away.

I crouched.

They took aim, laser sightings dotting my chest.

We circled, they fisting their hissing barrels and I showing my claws.

I leapt at them.

Gattling plazzburners stuttered lightning and thunder through the room.

A plazzstream speared into my shoulder and knifed me to the wall, and I could smell my fur and flesh cooking. I leapt from the flames, landed, swung with both paws.

The first cyborg shouldered me back and wrestled me to the ground.

I clawed at him, felt my talons rip through metal, shred his lungs.

The second cyborg lumbered toward me. He was bigger than the first metal soldier. I leapt at him, taking two full plazzstream rounds in my left arm, while gripping his neck with my right paw.

He broke free of my grip, slammed a cold fist to my chest, broke a rib.

I grunted and went into a rage. I felt his metal hands prying open my jaws. I roared and fisted him from the ground, shook him, snapped him into two and dropped him.

In the rafters, beyond the dome of the chamber, I saw Dr. Urnoqq's put a finger to his chin, tilt his head and slowly walk away.

I vowed to myself to find the answers to my questions of my state of being. So, I pounced out of the chamber, hearing the thumping of boots and screamings echo up the catwalk and melt into silence. Out in the twilight, I could see flood lights circling a domed stadium that hovered above the ocean, and a voice from the clouds boomed: "Ladies and Gentlemen of New, New York City, welcome to the Greatest Show from the Moon on Earth."

There were cheers and there were shouts and there were lasers scarring the sky, and there were human voices roaring and applauding.

But I did not move.

One last annoyance eyed me, the thing that started this war. So, I lunged forward, the serpentine cane in one paw, and I clawed down the sign that read: "Do not feed the Hybrid Human-Tiger-Lunar Bear."

And that was how I, Bronze Bear-Hands, the genome beast, was reborn.