Operant Conditioning

The pidgey prove maddening — fast, and quick to flap a thrown ball aside — so the three weigh their options, including renting a net launcher (a hundred-thirty dollars a day, five hundred to buy) against their pooled funds, before settling on a cheaper trap: a berry bush with bulbasaur hidden inside to bind whatever comes to feed. The snag is that bulbasaur keeps eating the bait, and Leaf turns the problem into a lesson, training him with operant conditioning. Red explains the framework — Professor Skinner's work on how reinforcement and punishment shape behavior — and is careful with the vocabulary: "positive" and "negative" mean add and subtract, not good and bad, so Leaf's spritz of water is a positive punishment (adding something noxious to suppress a behavior) and her PokePuff a positive reinforcement (adding a reward to strengthen one). What she's really conditioning isn't an aversion to berries but a reliable response to the word "stop," and within a few cycles bulbasaur sits obediently amid the fruit, then learns to seize a squirtle sent in to raid it.

While they wait, Red checks on his pokemon through the pokedex, watching charmander run preprogrammed battle scenarios and his new rattata drill basic commands inside their balls' dreamlike virtual reality — and remembers the childhood lesson that gives pokeball tech its dark edge. As a boy he'd asked why people couldn't simply step into a ball and learn everything through virtual lessons, and been told pokeballs are for pokemon. The fuller truth, learned later: balls can store humans, and always could, but atomizing a complex mind breaks it. Volunteers, and later condemned criminals offered the ball over execution, emerged at best regressed to a toddler's mind, at worst permanently catatonic. Storing a human became a felony of the highest order, on par with going renegade, and the research was buried — leaving Red to wonder what humanity might reach if it took more risks.

Red also lays out, for Leaf, the long climb ahead of him: publish a peer-reviewed article that verifies or discovers something to earn a Researcher license, grind up an h-index through Instructor and Associate Professor, demonstrate mastery of every species in the region, and finally write a dissertation that overturns an established theory before he can run a lab of his own.

The trap finally pays. A lone rattata is bound, tackled, and caught for Leaf; then three pidgey arrive together and the careful plan dissolves into a scramble — bulbasaur dragged from cover as the bound bird's flockmates savage him, charmander biting and tail-whipping (no ember, with bulbasaur in reach) until a beak draws blood near his eyes, squirtle walling off the third with water. Blue lands two thrown balls to bag one pidgey; Leaf catches the second from point-blank once charmander backs clear. Red, who wants a flier badly, gives up his claim to it — pidgey are common, and Leaf and bulbasaur earned the catch. She nicknames the bird "Crimson," an homage that leaves Red flushed and oddly unsettled when she hugs him, and they walk on toward Viridian under a reddening sky.