He's a meter-tall, dancing fur-belly with mono-molecular edged claws, an embroidered nose, and telomerase chains longer than your arm. He's an unnatural – a custom-coded gene-job, a chromo-tweaked talker gestated in a pickling jar and born full-grown in a pet store. The tag in his furry side reads, Teddy Da - StitchLife – Made in Tokyo.

It is his first day in that ancient city, and the outskirts, at least are the same as all the others. In the fringe-sprawl of all the great cities from Istanbul to Beijing, he has seen the same packs of feral children, the same hobo jungles and trash fires, and the same men that chase him without mercy or relent. None of them are old enough to have seen Osunculous, the sixty-meter-tall, armored bear that tore their cities to shreds, but they see his image in little Teddy Da, so they hunt him.

Teddy Da flees on padded paws through a near-deserted, back alley, criss-cross maze of broken buildings trampled long ago by giant monsters. He shouts over his shoulder in seven languages – begs to be left alone.

He stays just far enough ahead of his pursuer, so that when he turns a final corner and runs down a narrow, dead-end, meter-wide space between crumbling factory walls, he has a few moments to pick a spot, pant with his black tongue, and pretend he has fallen and can run no more.

Teddy Da is a coiled spring crouched at the end of a five meter puddle that reflects a watery, narrow strip of sky and clouds blown on fast moving winds. Back turned, hood up, fur bristling under yellow-dyed, cracked rubber, he waits in the wet. Flat-footed feet pause behind him before they eagerly slap at the puddle's surface, and when the ripples wave the watery sky underneath him, Teddy Da is ready.

His claws push out from padded paws. “Snicker-Snack,” he says as his larynx and lungs, his lips and black tongue all dance along. The whispered words are part of him. Chromo-engineered, hard-coded reflex.

A bamboo pole vibrates the air, humming in descent. Before the blow can fall on his furry head, Teddy Da spins, leaps upwards, and his unnatural claws slash first through bamboo, then through ill-cured leather, belly-flesh, and bone, too. Color sprays and spatters, as two fresh-cut bamboo poles fall then clatter on the ground.

The air tastes like a rusty nail.

Already he hears the dogs barking close, like they smelled the blood even before it was spilled. Teddy Da likes dogs, so he runs away.

In the sweat-hot grow-room of an Istanbul pet store, Teddy Da heard his name for the first time. It was the first sound he remembers hearing, and it was the last cry of a ragged, frail, hoarse-voiced old woman. “Teddy Da! Teddy Da! Calloo! Callay!”

Teddy Da opened his eyes for the first time, and through milky, pink, super-oxygenated amniotic fluid, he saw men push an old woman to her knees.

Then he heard another voice. “Hajume Oto, a.k.a. Li Mei Huang, a.k.a. Kitty Hawk, a.k.a. The Witch. For crimes against humanity, under Article 10 of the 2136 Tokyo Bioweapons Convention, you are sentenced to death.” She laughed at them, and when they shot her dead, she bled a bright blue fountain.

“She's a copper-blood!” one shouted.

“It's not The Witch! It's not her!” another yelled. “It's another goddamn copy!”

They set fire to the pet shop, but Teddy Da shattered his glass womb, cut the cord that ran from his belly to his hanging yolk sack, and escaped while a hundred jars like his burst around him.

He fled Istanbul. It was easy. Baaragor, the spiked turtle terror was sighted approaching the city, and confusion and panic reigned. The monsters were everywhere then.

Teddy Da wandered East through deserts, mountains, forests, and ruined cities, some still quaking with the earth-shaking footsteps of savage giants. He haunted the fringes of the fallen, trampled, burned cities. Baghdad, Tehran, Mumbai – they were all the same. Ruined and reeling from the Monster Wars, from the man-made terrors.

When survivors saw a creature like him, an unnatural, a little monster, they hunted him. They couldn't take revenge on the giant monsters, so they tried to take revenge on him. Teddy Da had seen the destruction. He didn't blame them.

He was happy in the jungle.

There he met painted primitives who kept him for a decade as a god. Instead of trying to kill him, they cherished him as an apocatropolyptic idol of protection against whatever giant, designer creature, whatever still-marching, gargantua of the Monster War might come for them. In the end, it was fifty-meter-tall Pollotux, the leather-winged terror who wandered over the jungle and, drawn by the smoke of their fires, made a light snack of them for each of his three heads. Teddy Da's little claws were no match for Pollotux. He ran away and cried for the dead.

Twenty years later, the monsters who had wrecked the cities and nested in their ruins grew old and died. Baaragor's bones rested in Jerusalem. Pollotux folded his leathery wings for the last time in New Mumbai. The Lizard King simply disappeared into the sea. The cities were open to people again, but so few remained to crawl back.

A hundred years later, they still hunted Teddy Da when they saw him.

He was captured once – awakened by a troupe of musicians passing his hidey-hole as they played. Their music ensnared him, and he was powerless to resist. Something inside overcame every instinct to flee and compelled him to dance in plain sight in front of the startled performers.

The musicians of Nha Trang played while they built a cage around him, and then they carried him to a spot near the long, cracked stone road that ran forever up and down the coast. Passers by tossed tarnished coin to watch the little monster dance.

The musicians got drunk, and while they slept, their hand-cranked music machine broke, too. Snicker-Snack, his claws cut through the bamboo bars that could never hold him. One foolish man tried to stop him, and Teddy Da cut through him, too.

Teddy Da fled North on blood-sticky paws.

The packs of feral children who roamed the outermost edges of Shanghai drew cartoons of him on the walls in the charcoal of their burnt and crushed city. They left rats for him. Little gifts. They left him the yellow slicker. To them, Teddy Da was a ghost of monsters past, a spirit, a local demon. He stayed there longer than he needed to, but he knew he had to go; the unstainable rectangle of silky fabric that grew out of his furry side didn't say Made in Shanghai; it said Made in Tokyo.

Teddy Da hides on the roof of an abandoned factory and his paws unconsciously tug at the tag in his side as he marvels at Inner Tokyo. Its spectacle is finally before him, and it is like no city he has seen yet. He knows his journey began in a jar in Istanbul, but Tokyo glows so beautifully in the night that he is proud of the words on his tag – the words that led him here. StitchLife – Made in Tokyo.

This rebuilt city's streets follow the path of the monsters that waded through it, but it is glorious in rebirth. Tokyo is awash in bioluminescence and every inch of it bleeds light into the night sky. Other cities he has seen lit with a thousand green methane flames, but Tokyo is not darkness speckled with dots of gaslight. Here, every surface, every wall and roof tile gives light like the full moon. It is as if the moon itself was made into paint and slathered on to silvery Tokyo in thick brush loads. Two rivers snake into the city like veins of darkness.

Above the shining city that resists night with every wall and rooftop there is another marvel. Strung between the broken, skeleton towers, in the center of the city, are illuminated bead curtains, hundreds of meters long and wide. They are made of luminescent drops, like sunlit dew on a spider's web, like strung beads of oil in candlelight. A hundred thousand beads, a hundred thousand drops of light hang in the night air, suspended by cables strung from one tower to the next, one facing each point of the compass. Images are projected on the curtains. Images and figures that move, like giant ghosts. His furry ears can hear their voices on the wind.

He knows they are pictures of things and people that came before. He can tell because there are so many people and there are fantastic things that can only be the glory of the time before his birth – the time before all the monsters were born.

Then his black eyes open wide with surprise. He sees himself. There are seven of him. Seven Teddy Da. Seven giant, furry ghosts dancing on the beads, dancing a jig over Tokyo. Clean, smiling, fluffed, linked arm in arm. For a moment he doubts his eyes, but as he watches them dance, music floats to him, faint on the wind. He cannot resist. He is compelled to rise and dance, compelled to cavort and dance a jig on the creaking factory roof. It is their jig. His dance and theirs are the same, and seeing that his motions match theirs makes his heart soar because he knows that he and they are brothers – their hearts and his must be the same.

There is a word dancing among them, too. StitchLife.

Finally, he has found what he seeks.

Teddy Da dances until the music stops, his brothers disappear, and he is left alone again, staring at the moonshine city.

The heart of Tokyo is a most dangerous place to go, but there is no choice. There will be no darkness to hide in. Night, day, it doesn't matter; Tokyo is always lit bright so Teddy Da chooses to go now.

He floats down one dark vein of the city's wide rivers in a stolen rowboat that smells of carp. It is raining, and he keeps the hood of his yellow slicker up as the heavy drops that pelt him wash away the mud and the blood and beat out an ever-changing rhythm in his ears.

Stealing the boat was easy, but rowing is not. The oars are difficult to hold in his paws, and when he uses his claws to hook them, the handles are cut like harvest wheat. The oars slip from their locks and float away. He groans, growls, and drifts – a prisoner to the river's current.

He floats towards the heart of the silvery city on the sea. Paddle boats full of passengers plod up and down the river past him, lit with warm oil lanterns, and he hopes their lights blind them to the lone, hunched, wet-furred creature staring wide-eyed from the darkness in a tiny rowboat. Bicycles, pedicabs, and wicker rickshaws fill the silver streets on either bank of the winding river's meander. All is painted in light, and the people are silhouettes and shadows against the omnipresent glow.

His tiny boat drifts under wrecked and rebuilt bridges made of red bamboo lashed to ancient stone and rusted steel. They creak under the weight of traffic above.

The current carries him past a bright river boat lashed to the banks. It smells of cooking, liquor, and perfume. Its freshly painted with the same bioluminescent bacteria as the rest of the city, and the glow trickles off the hull into the river in viscous, swirling, glowing tendrils of liquid light that follow the whorls and eddies of the current. Music from the river restaurant floats to him across the water and almost causes him to capsize the little rowboat with his jig. He hears laughter and sees figures waving to him from the moored boat before he floats downriver and is far enough away for the sound of the rain on his hood to drown out the sweet, siren melody.

Around a bend in the river, on a grand pagoda, painted on a hanging banner, he sees the word that danced among his brothers over the city, the word on his tag – StitchLife.

He's carried blocks downriver before his frantic, paddling paws bring his drifting boat close to anything he can grab. In the shadow of a creaking dock, he hooks his claws into slippery wood, moors the little boat and climbs.

Nobody passing on wheel or foot takes notice of the child-sized figure in a rain slicker that dashes across the riverside road and into an alley. Nobody looks up to see the silhouette that digs in claws and climbs six stories up the alley walls to the rooftops.

He leaps over narrow streets until his claws scrape on the glowing roof-tiles of the riverside road pagoda marked with the word, StitchLife. Teddy Da cuts his way through, digging down through layers of tile, wood, and plaster, until it all cracks beneath his weight, and he falls into open air, tumbling.

He falls into straw. While he lays getting his breath back from the two story drop, the clip-clop of little hooves on hardwood strikes his furry ears. As Teddy Da sits up, miniature horses with droopy, velveteen skin surround him. Their dark eyes reflect the bioluminescence that is everywhere inside, too. They sniff at him with embroidered noses, and before they clomp away, disinterested, Teddy Da sees the shining white cloth rectangles that grow from the backs of their crudely stitched-on legs. The tags proudly proclaim the word, “PantoPony,” on one side and on the other “StitchLife – Made In Tokyo.”

He is behind bamboo bars again, but Snicker-Snack, he's free, and as he steps out of the PantoPony gallery, he sees that he's in a prison, a zoo, a hall lined with caged creatures.

There are thirty saggy-skinned puppies that frollick and jump for his attention in a pen labeled, “NeverGro”.

There are upright monkeys in monk's robes, pacing in their cage while near-human, pig-faced companions rub their hungry bellies.

Miniature dragons in five flavors. Little Bigfeet. Blunt-horned Unicorns, only slightly smaller than the ponies.

Soon, Teddy Da thinks. Soon, I will free you all.

Drums and guitars, zithers and horns, all line the walls where Teddy Da's brothers are kept. There are no musicians playing, and Teddy wonders why his brothers sleep peacefully in the middle of their red bamboo cage when they could so easily escape. Snicker-Snack. Run free.

For minutes he watches their clean, furry chests heave in their deep slumber while he marvels at the sight of them. The same furry bellies and stitch embroidered noses. The same paws. The same tags. Teddy Da... StitchLife – Made in Tokyo.

Teddy Da slices a door into their cage then quickly withdraws his claws from sight. As he steps inside, one by one they stir, and look on him. Their eyes are deep black jewels like his.

“Happy time, happy time,” the closest one says. Then the others join in unison, “I'll be your friend if you'll be mine! Let's be friends!” They smile.

“Brothers!” he says, “For so long I thought I was alone!”

“Oh joyous day! Calloo! Callay!” seven smiling furry faces say, “Teddy Da, Teddy Da, Teddy Da-la-lay!”. One of them opens the lid on a small, wooden box, and it instantly fills the cage with music and melody. Teddy cannot resist, and he is pulled into a jig with his brothers. All worry, all urgency, all feelings except joy melt away, and Teddy is happy in his core, paw in paw with his brothers, spinning, dancing, and whirling inside the bamboo cage.

When the spring winds down, and the music stops, Teddy is dizzy with joy, but he remembers where he is and why. His brother begins to wind the box again, but he pushes him away from it. “Stop,” he says.

“Dance, prance, all day long,” they chant.

“No, brothers,” Teddy Da says, “We must-”

“Spin and twirl and jump and shout!”

He grabs his brother's paw and presses the pads apart. There are no claws. He growls.

Teddy Da hears a frail, hoarse, voice. The first voice he ever heard is in his ears again. “I forgot that I left the dance in your code. Come out of there, come out before you damage them with your vorpal claws, dear Teddy. My Chinese Monkey King is popular, but the dancing bears are still my biggest sellers.” An old woman in elegant, shining silk and jade steps forward into the light. It has been a century, but he still recognizes her.

“Hajume Oto,” Teddy Da says, “a.k.a. Li Mei Huang, a.k.a. Kitty Hawk, a.k.a. The Witch.”

“You remember!” She laughs. A thin, cackling cry from a shriveled throat.

“They killed your blue-blooded sister,” he says.

“A copper-blood copy. A half-script.” She shrugs her narrow, bony shoulders. “I had many once. Many.”

“Did she make me?”

“The copper-blood?” She laughs again. “No, dear Teddy, I made you. I wrote you and I rewrote you. I grew your first cells in a nanotube forest. I gestated you in a pickling jar. I fed you from a yolk sack. She could never make something like you. She was nothing but a hasty clone, a half-wit left behind to die so I could escape.”

“Why did they...”

“Kill her? Kill me? I wrote the Giant Monsters. I wrote the codes for all of them. The Lizard King. Baaragor. Pollotux. The short-lived kings of the Earth. I made them all. Kitty Hawk. The Witch. Ha! You and I are the only ones left who even remember the long-lost list of names you spoke.” She cackles. “The men who hunted me for the creatures I designed and birthed are all long dead, but we are both still here, thanks to the telomerase chain length longevity modifications I tested so long ago when I made you. I used them on myself, too, of course.” She steps forward, takes his head in her hands, and turns it left and right, scrutinizing him in the silver light. “No cellular regression. Good. You haven't aged much. Probably won't for another two hundred years.” She sighs with satisfaction. “Do you like glowing Tokyo and its E.coli.117.lux.c? I'm the one who gave the old city its new glow. Living paint!” she says proudly. Then she whispers, “So easy to make. Really.”

“It's beautiful,” Teddy Da admits. He gestures to the creatures that line the hall and asks, “What are they?”

“Products. Toys. Long before I made the giant monsters, I made toys. I wrote all the code for StitchLife, Incorporated. The dancing bears are old StitchLife code, the foundation on which you were written anew, so much improved. All the other creatures are new. StitchLife lives again! I have investors. Backers. The new businessmen of Tokyo. Some of them yearn to be Shogun, and I can give them the weapons they need. This time there will be no arguments about how my skills are used.”

“You will make the same giant monsters again? Lizard King? Pollotux, the Leather-Wing?”

“Hah. I will make them better than those mindless city-stompers. These won't be simple, raging beasts unleashed on enemy cities to run amok and die in twenty years. No. These will be smarter than that. Smarter. And long-lived. Like you. You were my first experiment in clever, quick-witted creatures,” she says. “The new giants will be as different from the old giants as you are from the facile toy creatures you called your brothers.”

“They are not my brothers. My brothers are unborn, giant monsters. Smart monsters.”

“Yes, clever little monster! And they will be glorious!”

“No, they won't. They will be a three hundred year plague.”

Silence. Her smile fades.

“How did you find me?” she asks. His paws tug at his tag, and her eyes flick down at it, remembering. “Ah, yes,” she says, “I never bothered to rewrite your tag sequence. Made in Tokyo. Is that why you came here? The words on that little tag?”

“I came to Tokyo to find you.” he says, and she smiles. “Hajume Oto, a.k.a. Li Mei Huang, a.k.a. Kitty Hawk, a.k.a. The Witch. For crimes against humanity, under Article 10 of the 2136 Tokyo Bioweapons Convention, you are sentenced to death.”

She cackles loudly as she bleeds bright blue.