1 April 2018 5:54 AM (dream)
A bolder than normal starling perched on me, so I brought it inside and started remaking it to be smarter and more independent, until it could both disagree with me and have a point. We'd spend time chatting, it listening to my speech and 'speaking' back in a Pharyngeal song-speech. it could also type on a specially adapted keyboard (No. Not ‘hunt and peck’. I love my creations too much to submit them to bad ergonomics.) It also seemed to have developed an excellent aptitude for working around information security.
For some reason, people were really put out by this and kept trying to convince me I was subject to a scam. Like I'd suddenly find myself on TV and the announcer would say “But Azure is about to find out that his work with a starling was actually just a fake created by our ornithological behaviorist!” Except that usually ended up failing because the real starling basically found the remote controlled animatronic ones and ripped them apart.
I managed to talk it into selective breeding. Mostly because it thought natural birds were stupid and annoying and liked the idea of its descendants replacing them. I feel a bit bad for appealing to contempt. (Though I couldn't really claim I wasn't looking forward to the idea of my improved version out-competing the natural one.)