S.I. (original/SI)

Been writing a story. Posted to SB and SV. It appears I won't be able to continue posting there, and this forum was recommended as a replacement.

S.I.

***

"Looking back, I suppose my story really begins on the day I died. Of course, I didn't realize that had happened for quite some time..."

*****

*Book One: Re-*


*Chapter One: Re-Awakening*

First Awakening

I woke up as sick as humanly possible. The only reason everything within five feet wasn't covered in noxious fluids was my GI tract was, mercifully, already empty. Even more concerning was the discovery that my legs ended mid-thigh. Thinking about that used up enough of my cognitive resources that I didn't even try to figure out how concerned I should be that I was hallucinating a pink-furred rabbit-woman puttering around at the head of my bed. I could barely pay attention to her nudity, much less try to remember the more aesthetic details when I could properly appreciate them...

The bed shook. At first I thought it was my twitching, but a sheet of clear plastic extended itself over the bed, sealing me in a bubble - just in time for the whole room to shake, and a cloud of dust to billow in through the door. Followed by someone who, as far as I could tell without my glasses, was wearing a rather bad Darth Vader costume. (Or, at least, a black bodysuit, cape, and insectile gasmask.)

Darth Idiot transformed himself into Darth Don't-Piss-Him-Off by raising a very realistic gun and pointing it in my direction. He barked out a few words that were completely incomprehensible. I did what seemed the sensible thing; I raised my arms and said, "Please don't shoot me."

There were more incomprehensible words, which were overlapped with, "English? Identify yourself!"

I said my name, following it up with, "Civilian. Innocent amputee? Sick and confused?" I repeated, "Please don't shoot," for good measure. Then my stomach tried to empty itself of its nothingness again, and I knew no more.

--

Second Awakening

I woke up feeling as sick as it was humanly possible to be, but in somewhat different ways than before. My stomach wasn't trying to escape through any available orifice anymore, but the whole world was kind of wobbly.

Also, my wrists were strapped to the side of the bed, and my waist and neck were similarly immobilized, which seemed kind of overkill, given my lack of lower limbs. There was a cat on my bed, between my left hip and my hand; its fur looked bright blue, but I scritched its head anyway. A pair of tubes were taped to the inside of my elbow, reaching above my head to where I couldn't see.

Peering as best I could around the room, I noted the walls were a lighter shade of gray, and were differently shaped. Also, Harveyette the pink rabbit now had her own bed, just like mine, with the addition of an extra pair of straps for her legs. I squinted at those - they weren't human-shaped, but weren't really rabbit-shaped, either. For one, rabbits had fur covering all their paws, while she seemed to have a set of dog-like pads on the bottoms of her feet...

A not-so-delicate cough brought my attention from imaginary anatomy to a chair next to me, in which was sitting a man. Oriental, hairless, smooth-skinned, wearing black from the neck down; a pocketwatch hung from around his neck, a clipboard rested on his crossed legs, and a cane against the side of the chair. He opened his mouth and spoke, but the movements didn't match what I heard. "You speak English, yes?"

My eyes blinked rapidly a few times, and then I nodded. As my head came back against my pillow, I noticed yet another detail I'd missed in all the fuss - I didn't have any more hair than he did. Looking down at myself, I realized that applied everywhere. I also realized I didn't have a sheet, or even one of those backless hospital gowns. There simply wasn't anything I could do about that, so I tried to ignore the flushing of my face as I said, "What time is it? How long have I been out?"

"We're trying to work that out. Can you tell me the last things you remember? Were you ill, or injured?"

"Ah." I reshuffled my thoughts - given the general awful aches and illnesses, it seemed I was in some sort of hospital. Since what remained of my legs were smooth stumps, I had to have been under medical care for some time. Since I didn't remember losing my legs, and given the hallucinations and restraints, there seemed a good chance I was in a psych ward. Whatever was wrong with my noggin, the most likely way to get it fixed was to be reasonably honest with whoever was doing the fixing. So I answered, "I was riding my bike. Bicycle, not motorcycle. Someone opened a car door just in front of me. I got knocked into traffic - I think I bounced off a moving minivan... and that's about it."

"Do you recall the date?"

"Just after Victoria Day." He waved a hand in a circle, which I guessed was an indication to expand. "May, Tuesday, the... um, the tenth was a Saturday, so it must have been the twentieth. Twenty fourteen?"

He nodded calmly. "Very well. I need to inform you that some medical decisions need to be made regarding you, but you are currently not competent to make them." I started to nod slowly, but he continued, "Among other issues, you are drunk off your gourd."

"No I'm not," I riposted intelligently.

"Why do you say that?"

"Can't be drunk. I'm a teetotaler. Never touched alcohol, or any other mind-affecting substance, in my life."

"Ah. Well, be that as it may, you're drunk."

"'Why do you say that?'," I repeated back to him.

"You are suffering from ethylene glycol poisoning. Part of the treatment is to filter it out of your blood. Another part is to block a certain metabolic pathway which creates even worse toxins. One of the best chemicals to do that is simple alcohol. You are drunk because if you weren't, your kidneys would have already failed."

"... Oh. I'd say 'that sucks' but that seems kind of an understatement. So - medical decisions?"

"Indeed. Even with the treatment, you are going to have kidney damage. Your heart has a reasonable chance of failing. As you have no doubt noticed, you have lost your legs. And other issues, minor in comparison. In short, standard treatment is going to require a number of expensive transplants and prosthetics."

"You're really not one for softening the blows, are you?"

"Time is a factor. I have been assigned to manage your case. I will be making the decisions. I have a short time to learn what your preferences are, to consider taking them into account."

"Um. Well - if you want to know my preferences instead of arguing about them, that's pretty simple. I'm going to live forever or die trying."

"What about the afterlife?"

"Randi's offered a million-dollar prize for even a decent hint of the supernatural. Nobody's won it. I seem to have misplaced my necklace and bracelet, but I've made arrangements to have my body cryonically preserved after I die. It costs less than cable - a hundred fifty bucks a year for membership, about the same for insurance to pay for it. I figure there's only around a five percent chance it'll work, but if something does kill me, five percent is a lot better odds than zero."

"I see. Assuming that you do live - what would you want to do while you're alive?"

"I expect you've already got it written in your notes, but I'm schizoid - /not/ schizophrenic - which just means I'm happy in my own company. I'd make a good lighthouse keeper, if they were still hiring those. And I seem to be rambling a lot more than I'm used to, which I'm going to guess is because I'm drunk. I don't think I like being drunk. Anyway - I like reading, and hiking, and... thinking. I /really/ like figuring out ideas I hadn't worked out before, but that doesn't happen nearly as much as I like. I don't know what sort of prosthetic legs my insurance covers, so I'm just kind of hoping they'll be ones that let me enjoy walking for miles next to old canals, or the like. If that can't work... then I guess I'd make do with sitting in a library, with a good internet connection, and stuffing my head full of as much as I can. Um, I'm kind of losing my train of thought here. Is there anything else I can say to help you?"

He grabbed his cane, and used it to push himself to his feet. "Probably not. I believe I have enough information to do what is necessary, as soon as certain test results come in." He poked at the top of my bed.

"Okay, then," I said, then frowned. "Ethylene glycol? How'd I get poisoned with that?"

"You mean, you don't know?"

"I don't even remember what it is."

"Antifreeze. Your tissues were suffused with several litres of it, along with dimethyl sulfoxide, which helped it pass through cellular membranes."

"Wait. That sounds like... how long /have/ I been out?"

"I'm not authorized to give you that information." He left my bed, and went to poke around at the head of the other bed. "Mostly due to the existence of your lapine friend here."

"Wait - what?" My speech was really starting to slur, and I tried to say, "You can see her - she's real?", but didn't quite get anything out before the world spun away again.

--

Third awakening

They say happiness is a warm puppy - but waking up to a sudden lack of pain and nausea has to be a close approximation. Sure, there was a slight headache, but compared to how I'd been feeling, I was raring to go, from head to feet...

Before I even opened my eyes, I wiggled my toes, and smiled. And then frowned. While I was feeling, if not like a million bucks, at least like a short-buy order that would turn into a million at the right time, I was getting all sorts of sensations that didn't quite add up.

I opened my eyes. I looked down at myself.

I saw a whole lot of pink fur.

I closed my eyes.

--

Fourth awakening

I was dreaming something about that short-buy order getting exchanged for Bitcoins, which were used to buy derivatives of Chinese rare-earths based on a prediction of war, when a sharp sting in my thigh woke me up. I yelped, twitched against the restraints, and opened my eyes. The same watch-necklaced, cane-using bald fellow in black was standing over me, withdrawing a syringe full of red.

"Okay," I said, "What th- ow!" My tongue scraped against sharp teeth when I tried to make the 'th' sound. I made a couple of other attempts, equally painful, then gritted my teeth for a moment as I worked out a temporary solution. "I tend to swear less van once a year, so please understand the full depf of what I mean when I say: What. Ve. Fuck."

"Full speech - or near enough - already. Rather impressive. Further evidence that the rabbitoid body was designed specifically for your nervous system to be implanted." He set the syringe on a tray, and pulled another, empty. He poked it into my arm, and as it filled, said, "The interior of the skull is shaped exactly to match the contours of your brain - and didn't have a central nervous system. The skeleton carries a good deal of computational hardware, which is connected to the nervous system, and let it move around under its own control. I'll be curious to see if it takes control of your body at any point, or remains dormant."

"Do I need to repeat ve question?"

"Very well." He set the syringe down. "According to all the evidence, you've been dead for some decades." I could have told him that - when I'd died, it was just barely possible to 3D print a few cells of muscle tissue onto a framework, nevermind creating a functional tail, nevermind a whole functioning not-quite-human body. "Much to our surprise, we found you during a standard scouting mission around the Detroit city-computer." There were so many assumptions in that sentence that I'd barely started working through what their implications entailed before he continued, and added even more to the pile I had to try to think through. "It would take at least fifteen years to educate you sufficiently to where you could participate in life as a citizen, as well as a number of expensive medical procedures. So I took the less expensive option, and had you placed in the body that had been prepared for you. The undeciphered software of your skeletal system means that you will not be allowed into the city proper - but there are other ways you can contribute to society, and repay the debts incurred by the surgery and your treatment. We have a few days to pin down the details."

"Debts? Wait - if you hadn't come barging in to where you found me, then if vis body was already being prepared for a brain transplant... wouldn't I already be in vis situation, wifout owing you a thing? How does that put me in 'debt'?"

"The fact that I have the legal authority, and physical power, to lock you away permanently for non-payment of debts, and perform whatever analysis is necessary to determine if there is any hazard in your skeleton's software. Which would involve dicing it."

"... Slavery it is, ven. ... I feel like I should want to punch you."

"But you don't."

"But I don't. Sedatives?"

"Merely calmatives."

"When do I get my own emotions back?"

"Probably around when you stop feeling like you should want to punch me."

"I fought you said you only had a few days."

--

Quarantined and Infodumped

I asked for, and was given, a pair of trekking poles to help me get back onto my feet. Turned out I didn't need them. Even though my legs were now digitigrade like a dog's instead of plantigrade like a human's, and I felt like I was walking on tip-toes all the time, I had no more trouble keeping my balance than before my brain transplant. However, I decided that it might be better if the Technovillians underestimated me a bit, and that I was probably under constant surveillance, so I carefully fell flat onto my face. Repeatedly. And used the poles to hobble around wherever I went, gradually 'improving'.

I tested my body's flexibility, and discovered I could tie myself into a pretzel.

I asked for clothes, but discovered that they, quite literally, rubbed my fur the wrong way. I ended up compromising with a sports bra and shorts modified for my tail, and tried to get used to more modest apparel.

My guardian - for lack of an actual name - provided me with a couple of pieces of electronics. One was a read-only ebook reader (which could also read aloud, play music, play videos, and similar tricks)... which he'd carefully limited to only containing subject-matter published before my death. The other was a pocket-watch on a necklace like his, which turned out to be a computer built to translate languages. (It also kept track of time and location, did math, sensed temperature, humidity, and pressure, and had a camera and microphone.) After searching for a few items in the former, I concluded that its contents were heavily slanted in whatever direction Technoville had deemed was propagandistically best; and that both were stuffed to the gills with spyware. Unfortunately, since there wasn't any information on Technoville's native language (other than 'a descendant of Lojban'), it was either use the spyware-ridden translator or not understand anything. Just like it was either live in a body with a skeleton full of mysterious computer that might take control of my actions at any time, or do without any body at all. There were no good options, just 'bad' and 'really really bad' ones.

No, I didn't investigate my new gender, any more than I needed to in order to use the plumbing. Constant surveillance, remember?

Between familiarizing myself with my new body, and suffering through various tests, I had various pieces of conversation. Exchanges of words, at least.

--

"It would be trivial for you to simply walk away. Your body has a number of post-human tweaks, including being able to digest cellulose. We also have no records of biological constructions such as your body dying of old age. If I can't get you to want to contribute to human progress, then you could walk into the forest and spend, well, for all I know, centuries wandering around and nibbling on trees and grass."

I tried grass. Tasted just about what I expected grass to taste like. Random leaves weren't much better. Hay was bland enough to tolerate.

I got a report on my new biology. My eyes were still my nearsighted originals, carried along with my brain; it took a couple of days for glasses built to fit my new head to appear. My DNA was based on human, but with almost all the junk DNA trimmed. That meant I'd be unable to reproduce with baseline humans, or anyone who didn't have a near-identical set of tweaks - not that I was planning on doing so. Ever. Given the hormone levels they measured over time, it seemed I wouldn't have to worry about menstruating monthly - maybe once a year. I wasn't looking forward to that, either; my ovaries were, I was told, swollen noticeably larger than my genetics alone would indicate, which could imply rather strong hormonal flux. Some of the genetic tweaks matched up to things the Technovillians already had in their databases - an immune system pre-programmed with just about every known disease, muscles that got enough exercise from everyday activity, and, I was informed, limbs that would regenerate like a lizard's. I had no intention of testing that one out.

--

"Even without citizenship, or security clearance, there are plenty of employment opportunities. We actually do have lighthouses with keepers. Farmers. Smiths. Couriers. Scouts."

--

"What happened to my body?"

"Non-viable, not even good for providing transplants. Other than some samples, incinerated."

I winced. So much for ever getting back to normal.

--

"Um... how's the space program doing?"

"Kessler syndrome. We haven't got the spare resources to clear the debris for a launch."

"Alternate universes?"

"Technically an infinite number of them, but it's impossible to communicate with or travel to them."

"FTL?"

"Physically impossible. Planck-scale physics runs on a much smaller-scale cellular automata system, which is mostly obscured by quantum effects, but there really isn't any way for the cells to switch their neighbours on and off any faster than lightspeed."

"Wormholes?"

"Space-time doesn't bend that way."

"Hm... Dark matter?"

"The gravitational shadow of alternate universes that shared our Big Bang."

"Cryonics?"

"We tend not to die in a way that leaves a viable corpse. And with limited resources during the State of Emergency, the infrastructure for it doesn't exist."

"Internet?"

"Gone. The city-computers are full of AIs that will instantly hack any computer connected to a communications device they have access to, use it to run incomprehensible programs for inscrutable purposes, and leave in an unusable state."

"Singularity?"

"Happened around 2050 AD."

'Welp', I thought, 'guess that means Star Trek's been lost to zeerust as a prediction of the future'.

He continued, "Pretty much every human who could get to a city got sucked into it. Superstimuli, at the least." That wasn't quite how I'd heard it was predicted to happen, but of course, I had missed out on thirty-five years of pre-Singularity predictions about that. "We humans who managed to stay away during the critical week aren't quite sure what happened to them, other than they're not there anymore." Now wasn't that just creepy. "Just about every urban area got turned into a giant computer, not particularly hospitable to human life - chemical outgassing, radiation, and worse. The smaller city-comps seem to have died off. The rest - about eighty in North America - seem to do things so fast, that if there's any human-level intelligences left in them, a half-second pause in a conversation would feel like a ten minute break. No communication or exchange is possible. The city-computers occasionally emit various pieces of data, or robots, or biological organisms, or stranger things."

"... How many people /are/ vere?"

"We have extremely limited information outside our sphere of influence. The primary zone of control of Technoville - on the site of what used to be Ann Arbor - is around one to two hundred kilometers radius. About thirty thousand citizens, and two hundred thousand non-citizens. Our main allied polity has another two hundred fifty thousand. Outside that?" He shrugged. "Could be thousands, could be millions."

"Climate change?"

"A major hassle when the methane clathrates got loose. All sorts of geo-engineering projects. The most important one is probably the sun-shield at L1. Fortunately, somebody cut off its communications systems before the apocalypse, so it's running on its pre-written program and keeping the overall temperature relatively steady."

"Sources of information over van you?"

"You're still under quarantine. Including information quarantine, in case your skeleton contains information that would destabilize Technoville's systems."

--

Eventually, while jogging on a treadmill, I said, "I've got a thought." As long as I paid close attention, I could avoid both infantile speech patterns and slicing my tongue on my rodent-like incisors.

"Do tell."

"However long this body lasts... one way or another, it's going to die. And when it does, I doubt there'll be another one waiting for another brain transplant. I want to hedge my bets."

"Cryonics again? I told you, we don't do that. You would need... years of training to even begin to understand the economics behind how to fund it yourself."

"That's not my thought. You only have concrete data on a small fraction of the continent, let alone the world. How much do you know about Phoenix, Arizona?"

"That it's probably an active city-comp."

"And if there was a colony of people living near it who did practice cryonics? I've been reading, and it requires a surprisingly small tech base. Blacksmithing seems to be enough to put together machine tools, once you know they exist, which should be enough to build the pumps and such to liquefy air and make dry ice. Nineteenth-century chemistry seems to be enough to create cryoprotectant."

"You want to go looking for cryonicists?"

"Or, at least, a group willing and able to adopt the practice. I'm living proof that someone who was vitrified can be brought back to life - even if it did take a brain transplant to /keep/ me alive."

"Hm. We generally don't like wasting resources and manpower on long-term scouting missions; we lose too much of both dealing with the Detroit city-comp."

"Then let me put it this way. I may have spent my first few years on a farm... but do you really think I'm going to milk cows for Technoville's benefit, for however long I happen to live?"

"I'll run some numbers and get back to you."

--

"You still want to go exploring dangerous, deadly wilderness?"

I unfolded myself from my cross-legged meditation position. "In a nutshell."

"Our best prediction is that for every thousand kilometers you travel, the odds of your surviving halve."

"If I die in a week or in a hundred years, I'll still end up dead. I'd rather do what I can while I can."

"We predicted you'd say something of the sort. If you don't change your mind, I've been authorized with a small budget to outfit you. Mainly in the form of assigning you a courier's motorized bicycle and trailer, a few supplies, and an analog radio to inform us of whatever you find before you're killed. And some time to bring you up to speed on conditions outside the quarantine facility."

"You're all heart. Still, beats getting diced."

--

"Here's a map of the surrounding area. You will note it is covered in bright colors. These indicate how dangerous any given zone is.

"Not on this particular map, are white zones. They are unexplored. We are letting you go kill yourself so that your reports will let us fill in some white zones.

"Green zone: No significant dangers. Mostly harmless. May still have wild beasts, bandits, ordinary toxic plants, and similar pre-Singularity annoyances.

"Blue: Mild danger to life and limb, of sorts which can be treated medically. Toxic spills and wandering kill-bots lead to blue zones.

"Yellow: Moderate danger of permanent alteration to persons, which does not significantly affect victims' economic capacity. For example, involuntary brain transplants, loss of one or maybe two limbs, physical age-regression to 2 years old with mind intact, or minor loss of memory or personality change.

"Red: Significant danger of being changed in ways which eliminate most of victims' economic capacity. Forcible transformation into animal shape, loss of three or four limbs, or physical regression to minus one month old, or significant loss of memory or personality change.

"Black: Extreme danger of death, or fates worse than death. Transformation into aware but immobile objects, regression to minus nine months old, complete loss of mind.

"Zoning is at the discretion of the discovering scout/agent. When a farming community was hit with a biological agent which rewrote the locals, so that people gave birth to foals and horses gave birth to infants, the agent could have chosen to arrange exported food to be sterilized and classify the region as Yellow, or quarantined it entirely and classified it Red, or decided to call in air-strike to kill everything and classify it Black."

"... I notice you're using the past tense for that example instead of the hypothetical."

"In your time's idiom, I know you think that I am something of a son of a bitch. Let's just say that that's not /quite/ accurate."

 

*Chapter Two: Re-Engaging*


In theory, with good roads, I can bicycle over a hundred kilometers per day, with muscle power alone. When I finally made it out of that quarantine building (which, from the outside, looked like someone had repurposed a hundred-or-more-year-old brick grade school), I made it about five klicks the first day through the forest. Not because I couldn't keep going, but because I didn't trust my state of mind after all the 'calmatives' and who-knew-what-else that had been pumped into my bloodstream. Until they were flushed out of my system, I couldn't tell whether biking off into the unknown distance was really a good idea, or if I'd just been manipulated into doing what Technoville wanted of me.

The day was pleasantly warm, and my translator-watch said the pressure was high and humidity low, so rain wasn't likely. (It was certainly a far cry from having a worldwide array of weather stations and supercomputer analysis of trends for a ten-day forecast. From what had been said and implied to me, though, even all those tools would choke when faced with the results of a dozen interrupted weather control projects.) So instead of setting up the tent, I hung a hammock.

I looked suspiciously at the water and food-powder I'd been so kindly provided with... then dumped the water, wandered over to a stream, where I checked for radiation, pre-filtered some water, filtered it, let it settle, ignored the chemical purifiers I had, and boiled the heck out of it.

I wandered around a bit, using the translator's camera and internal database to identify various plant-parts, and trying them out for taste. I started jotting notes in a paper notebook about the results, and brought back to my camp the fixings for a... rather terrible, but filling, salad.

Technoville hadn't seen fit to issue me anything as usefully dangerous as firearms, stun guns, or pepper spray. But, before relaxing, I made sure I knew exactly where the few self-defense measures I had finagled out of them were: the knife sheathed inside the back of my belt, among other sharp implements (some more concealed than others); a sling in one pocket and selection of stones in another; and a pistol-sized crossbow. I debated whether to spread out some caltrops on the most obvious path leading from the road to the hammock, then decided they'd more likely end up embedded in my own feet, or the bike's tires, than that they'd help against any sort of robbers.

After that, there was nothing to do but stretch out, relax, catch up further on some technical manuals, and occasionally scare the birds as I tooted atunally on a harmonica. (Not standard issue for a Technovillian courier, and the only non-mission-oriented item I'd been able to get approved. I'd never actually played a harmonica before - I just wanted /something/ that wasn't purely utilitarian.)

Outside the fact that I was effectively a transman, in a not-quite-human body, travelling through a sort of dangerous post-apocalyptic wilderness, trying to get out from the clutches of what seemed to be some sort of totalitarian dystopia... it was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

(Okay, fine. Now that I was out of direct surveillance, I did lock the probably-spyware-ridden electronics away, and investigated my anatomy more thoroughly than I had previously. Happy?)

--

In the morning, before pulling on my helmet and dog-style booties and all of that other gear... I tried more than the carefully-clumsy stretches and not-quite-steady jogging I had while in quarantine. A cartwheel went off without a hitch. A somersault led into a front flip, then a back flip.

Back before I'd had fur, I wouldn't have been able to pull any of those off.

I prodded my ribcage. "Uh... hello? Is there... anyone in there?" I waited, but didn't feel any twitches. "Okay," I said. "In case there's more than just some pre-programmed muscle memory... I'd like to say, well, thanks. This was your body before I was put in it, and I don't know what the plan was before Technoville got hold of us, but... I really appreciate being able to walk around. If you've got any wants, and there's any way you can communicate them to me, I'll see what I can do... okay?" The breeze blew, ruffling my fur, but I couldn't sense anything I could interpret as my skeleton trying to tell me something. So I shrugged, and got on with my day.

--

"Ahoy the house!" I called out, after an embarrassing squeak and a cough to clear my throat. A couple of mutts had come streaking out when I turned into the long driveway, and were enthusiastically sniffing my legs, the bike, and trailer; but they didn't seem aggressive.

A screen door banged open, and a weathered man stepped onto the porch, caucasian and in clothes that were old-fashioned before I'd been born. "Yeah?" he asked. "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?" I fumbled to pull the translator pendant out of the pocket I'd stuffed it into to keep it from bouncing on my chest, and caught the tail-end of its "... I help you?"

"I'm travelling," I said, with the translator echoing, "Ich reise." "Could I sleep in your barn tonight? Maybe trade some preserved food for a fresh meal?"

"Hm," he grunted. The translator echoed his next words, "What's wrong with your legs?"

I realized my motorcycle-style helmet was hiding my face from view, so I pulled it off, twitched my whiskers, and let my long ears rise.

"Hm," he repeated. "You born like that?"

"No, sir," I said, not quite sure where this was going, but deciding to stick to honesty. "Still getting used to it."

"You got any decent clothes?"

"Um..." I looked down at myself - white t-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and black booties. "I have... some stuff for colder weather?"

"Nevermind," he said. "You can borrow a dress from my daughters. Go put your contraption in the barn. You'll eat dinner with us and can sleep in the spare room."

"Thank you, sir," I nodded. "What can I do for you in return?"

He spat over the side of the railing into the dirt. "Don't talk nonsense. You don't pay back Christian charity."

"I don't know if this gizmo will translate this right... but I've been helped in the past, and I try to pay that help forward, when I can."

"Hm." He turned around and went back into the house.

As I turned the bike around to get it to the barn door, I was wondering if this was really as good an idea as it had seemed when I thought of it...

--

"Ooh, your fur's so soft," relayed the translator, accompanied by giggles from all around me, and uncountable numbers of little girls' hands petting everywhere from my ears to my feet.

I was sitting on a bed, an uncomfortable smile plastered on my face as at least a half-dozen girls chattered, while a dress that matched all of theirs was tweaked to fit me. I was an urban fellow who'd had hipster tendencies before that word became popular, so of course I'd occasionally considered a kilt, either traditional or utility; but this was a skirt of a different order.

"Did getting changed hurt?" came from my left.

"Um, I wasn't awake for-"

"Is it hard to walk?" from my right.

"Surprisingly, no-"

"I wish I could have ears like this," from behind me.

There was a smacking sound. "Don't be ridiculous, Rebecca. Even if you found the same demon, they don't do the same curses again and again."

"Some do," piped up one of the horde. "The English are always looking for tame demons they can get the same curse from, over and over."

"Besides, don't you want to get married to Peter? Cursed people can't have children."

"Well," I said, "I was told I might be able to - but it would have to be with someone who was like me."

"Ooooh," came a chorus.

"That makes sense," said one.

"Would the babies be cursed, too?"

"Er," I said, "if I ever have children, I'm pretty sure they'd have fur..."

"'If'?"

"She's English, a lot of English women get killed fighting demons before they get married."

A bonnet was tugged down around my head. I instinctively raised my ears, lifting it away, and there was much giggling. After a huddled conference, a pair of scissors was applied, and my ears were pulled through the material. I tried twitching each ear, and this time it stayed in place.

After fielding a few more questions about hair-care, the dress was done, and it was rapidly tugged down around my head, and a light apron tied around the dark blue material.

"How's that feel?"

"Weird," I commented, pulling the translator pendant up through the collar. "My fur's all higgledy-piggledy." (To my surprise, the translator handled the word without a hitch.)

"Should we get a curry-comb?"

"I'll get used to it." I brushed the sleeves. "For as long as I need it, anyway. Uh - sorry in advance if I shed into it."

That prompted another chorus of laughter. I wondered if they'd still feel as well-disposed if I mentioned I'd previously been male. The fact that they were talking about 'demons' and 'curses' could imply that the idea wouldn't shock them too much... but it still might introduce additional awkwardness. Even if I was the only one feeling awkward.

--

Every day, at around noon, I made sure the solar panels on the trailer had been hooked up to the radio's battery and that it was fully charged. I checked the translator's report on my location, and double-checked with a sextant, and wrote it down. Then I fired up the radio, and transmitted my location to Technoville. Once I got out of the previously-scouted areas, I'd be transmitting more details; but for now, in order to keep them from transmitting an order to their military to arrest me on sight (or worse), I kept them apprised of my position.

The quarantine facility was to the north of Detroit - or what used to be Detroit. The maps I'd been given traced a path through green zones to the west, then south, then east, around the former city, leading to 'Dogtown' - what used to be Toledo. As far as I could tell, outside of Technoville-the-city, the area seemed to be populated wholly by small-scale farmers; in particular, anabaptists of various stripes, including Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. People who separated themselves from the 'English' (non-anabaptist) world, but submitted to government authority even when that government was English.

As I rode along, I passed occasional horse-drawn carts, or actual Technovillian couriers heading the other way. Once, I had to get my bike off the road entirely as a long line of tanks rumbled by. (Or maybe it was just personnel carriers. They had tracks and rotating turrets with big guns; I didn't know enough to tell the difference, or if they were some third category I'd never heard of.)

The farms were reasonably familiar... with exceptions. In addition to the usual livestock, raising snakes seemed to be popular. When I asked one farmer what the serpents were for, he said, "Ours get milked for heroin."

I had to show off the plastic ID card I'd been given just about every time I passed a cluster of homes large enough for someone to sit around keeping an eye on things. In a script I needed the translator pendant to decipher, it said I was a 'former human', with permission to travel through non-sensitive areas, but not to enter Technoville. I tried not to shudder every time I heard the words, "Ihre Papiere, bitte."

Once, I nearly jumped out of my booties when a horse leaned over a fence and asked me for a smoke. I actually did have a bit of tobacco in my trailer, for trade goods, and I was curious enough to pull out a cigarette and light it for him. We talked. Turned out he used to be a scout, and found a red zone the hard way. He missed being part of Technoville society, but clammed up about the details. A promise of another smoke got him talking again, at least about life on the farm. "It's not so bad," he said. "I'm strong, healthy, can still talk and think, and do useful work; and what happens in the barn stays in the barn." I looked at my fur-covered fingers, decided I'd gotten off lucky, and made a mental note to avoid red zones unless my life depended on it.

I almost started to get to like the taste of hay. It was cheap, my bunny-body produced all the vitamins I needed, and was a lot less suspicious than the rations I'd been supplied with.

Not all of the farms I tried visiting were as charitable as the first one. Some refused to have any contact with me. Some demanded I cover up 'modestly' before they even deigned to say 'no'. Some let me stay in a barn, but that's all. Some wanted me to do a lot of work before they'd even let me stay in the barn. Some wanted me to get rid of every 'implement of violence' before letting me stay - and since, as far as I'd seen so far, there wasn't anything like police, and I'd been able to pick up almost nothing about the local legal system, I refused to give up my tools of self-defense, and slept in the woods. And some treated me as just another traveller, letting me join them at their table and sleep in a real bed.

And then I came to the Voth's.

--

That afternoon, I'd asked a few farms for shelter for the night, and been summarily - even rudely - rejected. At the fourth place I tried, when I'd put on the cast-off dress and bonnet (which I'd gotten in exchange for some trade-good sugar), and hailed the house, the farmer's eyes were darkly circled. When I asked for a berth in the barn, he said, listlessly, "Do as you like." A child started crying inside the house, and he turned around, going back inside without another word.

I stood there stupidly for a few moments, then parked the bike, and, cautiously, knocked on the house's doorframe; when there was no reply, beyond the continued crying, I went in.

He was rocking an infant back and forth. "She just won't stop crying," he said. "And she's getting weaker. I think she's going to join her mother soon, God rest her soul."

"Is there anyone else here?"

"It was just me and her, carving out a new home - but the birth was hard, too hard..."

Feeling awkward was one thing - but it was a luxury when there was a real problem to deal with. I carefully took the babe from his arms; he didn't resist. "Go," I said. "Sleep. I can take care of her for at least one night... what's her name?"

"Ruth." He turned and stumbled deeper into the house.

I wasn't on any particular timetable, so I could let the man rest. I wondered how society could have evolved, so that this family was left without any sort of support structure.

As I rocked Ruth, I opened up the translator pendant, and ran through its symptom-checking software. Its verdict: allergy to cow's milk. I looked around the pantry, and tried feeding her a few things - a dab of honey on a fingertip, or a bit of flour and sugar dissolved in warm water. I don't know if any of it helped, but after a while, she fell asleep.

After a while, so did I.

In the morning, I made a disconcerting, if not downright disturbing, discovery. My chest hurt - and two spots on my bra were wet.

I now had absolute proof that I was a female mammal: my mammaries were in full working order.

I had no real clue why it had started. Maybe my body was designed to react to pheromones from malnourished infants. Maybe the computers in my skeleton were keeping an eye on things, somehow.

Sure, I didn't want a kid to starve to death - but actually being a wet-nurse was a bit beyond what I'd signed up for. I considered looking for a jar and relieving the ache manually... but I didn't actually know how to express milk without spilling it all over.

When the farmer came out of bed, he inhaled sharply upon seeing me seated by a window, staring fixedly outside as Ruth noisily, and happily, suckled.

"It's a miracle!" he said.

"It's embarrassing," I grumbled.

"Oh - of course." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn around. "Please accept my apologies for seeing you in dishabille. I'll make you some breakfast - what do you like?"

"I can't stay. I have a job."

He hung his head. "I know it's selfish to ask, but... even one day? For Ruth?"

I rumbled deep in my throat. I didn't /want/ to stay. I didn't /want/ to be a wet-nurse, and didn't even have any particular desire to be female. I didn't want Technoville to decide to reclaim their investment in me in less pleasant ways.

But - I was still human, which meant I had mirror neurons in my brain that made me feel the way I thought other people felt... and I didn't want Ruth to cry non-stop, or worse.

"In my trailer," I said, "there is a certain box..."

In a few minutes, he returned with the radio, and at my direction, set up the antenna, and put the Morse key in my hand, trying not to look at me and Ruth. Translating from the peculiarities and formalities of talking through beeps, I sent, <<Hey, it's me. Anybody listening?>>

The response came, <<This is not your check-in time.>>

I sent, <<At a farm. Sick baby. Cow allergy. I'm nursing her. I leave, baby might die. What sort of civilization are you running these days, anyway?>>

There was a long pause. Eventually, I got back, <<Confirm your location.>>

I transmitted the coordinates.

<<A replacement will be sent. She will arrive in 36 to 48 hours. You may continue to assist the infant until then.>>

"Hunh," I said.

"Good news?" he asked, hopefully.

"I think so. It sounds like an actual wet nurse will get here late tomorrow, or the next morning."

"Oh - thank the Lord. You don't know... you won't have to lift a finger while you're here - do you like strawberries? How about I get you that breakfast? I do have some things I need to do over the day - I just haven't been able to get everything done, with Ruth..."

And so I spent the day with my feet up - literally, at Johann's insistence - instead of pedalling away. I did change Ruth's diaper a few times, which wasn't really much worse than dealing with my cat's litterbox, back when I'd been a human with a pet cat. He took his cart out to visit a few of his neighbours, doing farmery things I didn't pay much attention to.

It might have been better all around if he'd stayed home.

The next evening, as the sun was approaching the horizon, I was watching the road for any sign of my 'replacement'. I caught sight of a horse-drawn cart, with a few people in back - and then another couple. They turned up into Johann's drive, and I frowned to myself, noting a rather distinct abundance of sharp agricultural implements. It was entirely plausible that Johann had asked his neighbours for some help doing chores requiring a whole bunch of different pointy tools... but just in case of otherwise, I started heading back to the room with my backpack.

I heard Johann step outside. "My friends!" the translator turned his distant voice into clear words. "It is wonderful surprise to see you all!"

I wasn't feeling scared. Or even nervous. I simply tried to perform several actions quickly, without being hurried and doing them clumsily. I set Ruth on the bed, pulled off my dress, and pulled my usual biking costume back on - plus a few accessories I usually left packed away.

By the time everything was in place, I'd grabbed hold of a trekking pole, and I'd picked up Ruth again, I heard Johann's translated voice again, "You can't be serious. Even if all you say is true - she saved Ruth's life!"

A strange voice came through, "At the risk of her soul, and her body being twisted by a curse."

A third voice added, "Better to be in heaven, then trapped in a living hell on Earth."

I tried to remember what scraps I'd picked up about public speaking from an old Dale Carnegie course, and stepped out the front door to join Johann, facing a small crowd of farmers - including all the ones who'd refused to let me stay at their homes the other day.

I shifted Ruth from my left arm to my right, shifting my pole to the other hand. "Is there," I said, slowly and carefully, with the translator pendant's volume set to 'loud', "something you all want to talk to me about?"

"We're not going to talk to /you/," one of them said, apparently blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction.

"Then I'll talk," I said, and rapidly tried to think of something to say. "If any of you are thinking of violence today, I suggest you think again. If you have a problem with me - that's one thing. But there is a true innocent here," and I shifted Ruth back to my left arm, "in the middle of things, who will suffer if you do anything unpleasant - and if that happens, her blood will be on your hands when you face God's judgment."

Johann put a hand on my shoulder, and whispered, "Please, don't do anything. They're just letting me know they're going to start shunning me for living in sin with you."

I looked back at him, my lips pulled back as I said, "Are you stupid? They don't need pitchforks just to tell you that."

"But," Johann said, "we're men of /peace/. We believe in non-violence."

Someone in the crowd shouted out, "Against /humans/. Nothing wrong with stomping out vermin and demons."

I pushed Ruth into Johann's bewildered arms. I picked up my trekking pole in both hands, gave a firm pull - and revealed the skinny sword-blade that was within. I let the sheath part drop, gave a tug at the belt hanging over my shoulder, shifting the side with all the sheathed throwing knives from the back to the front. And I reached behind myself, and grabbed the pistol-crossbow I'd hung from there. I took a position I'd probably seen in an anime somewhere, standing sideways to the centre of the group, the sword-blade pointing directly at the head of the fellow who'd been talking the most, the crossbow held close to my head and pointed up at the sky.

"What makes you think," I said, "that you're the first to try?"

Someone in the back of the group said something I couldn't make out, but the translator could. "I thought you said she was a /rabbit/. /Harmless/, you said."

"If it makes you feel any better," I announced, "I plan to be on my way tomorrow. And you can tell yourselves that you frightened off the scary woman who was keeping a baby alive. Or not, and you get to find out if I'll try to kill you or only cripple you. I don't care, really - it's up to you."

There was some muttering and shuffling the translator didn't deign to interpret... and then two of them turned and started walking back to their cart. Then a couple more. Then they were all loading up to go away. I let my arms fall, but didn't move from the spot until they were out of sight.

Then I turned around, walked to the privies, and threw up into them.

When I was rinsing my mouth, Johann came over, looking at me... differently than before. "Would you have killed them? Or just... maimed them?"

"Neither," I said. "I would have turned and run. Gotten on my bike if I could, on my feet if I couldn't."

"But - the /sword/! And knives."

"Just because I'm capable of hurting people doesn't mean I want to, if I can avoid it. I could take the rest of the evening explaining the thought processes why I made a decision to avoid escalating violence. But more importantly - they /were/ the first to try serious violence against me. I've never used a sword before in my life." I swigged some more water and spat it onto the ground. "People suck," I observed.

After all of that, it was kind of an anticlimax when my replacement turned out to be a perfectly ordinary housekeeper with a couple of nannygoats.

 

*Chapter Three: Re-Evaluating*

When I left Johann Voth and Ruth's farm, I fired up the bicycle's motor to get as far away from their neighbours as I could, without killing myself pedaling. Technoville didn't seem to have a petroleum industry, but they did have various ways of making biodiesel and alcohol. None of the farmers had been willing to trade or sell me any fuel they had, so I'd been conserving it - but standing face-to-face with people who'd been seriously considering turning my insides into my outsides, in the name of their faith, was making me reconsider the whole 'trade with the locals' approach I'd been taking.

Amish surviving a hostile Singularity? Sure, they've always had a decent tech base and strong internal support structure. Amish adapting to treat post-Singularity effects as curses and demons? Well, it wasn't as far-fetched as expecting them to start building nanotech on their own. Having to dress up in actual dresses, and not make religious waves? My native culture was erased from the Earth - I was going to have to make social compromises no matter where I went anymore.

Risking my life merely for some better food and a more comfortable bed? That was just insane.

I was also disturbed by my mammaries' little surprise. I was used to having a pretty good idea of how my body worked - all those high school biology courses, plus spending as much time in the library as I could when I was growing, plus the Internet and Wikipedia and so on later on. Exercise too little, get fat; eat too much sugar, end up with diabetes; spend too much time getting my cells irritated by chemicals or UV, end up with cancer. There wasn't anything in any of that for suddenly producing nutrient fluid exactly when someone needed it. If that could happen - then what else could? Was my pink fur going to turn purple in winter? If I broke an arm-bone, would the computer in it go insane and start trying to strangle me with my own hand? How much understanding did my skeleton have about what was going on around me, and what were its goals, or preferences, or heuristics?

And just about everybody I'd known had been pretty certain that, one way or another, my life would become a lot simpler after I died...

--

The day was cloudy, threatening a downpour at any time, but never quite breaking out into rain. While the clouds kept the noon sun from broiling me directly, the humidity was a bit of a killer - my furry form still sweated like any other human. But the sweat just wasn't evaporating, so I stayed hot, so I kept on sweating.

Pedaling up an incline, by the time I was halfway to the top I was gasping for breath; so I gave a mental shrug and fired up the motor again. At this rate, I was going to take a break in the first bit of shade I found; and as I looked back over the fields and meadows, if there was as little shade once I'd made it over the hump as I'd been going through, I decided to break out the tent and make my own.

Naturally, as soon as the road levelled off, what I saw made me change my plans. There were two rather obvious sites. To the left of the road was what looked like a commercial-industrial area, with small warehouses, storefronts, garages, and the like, embedded in parking lots made up of hexagons just over a foot across. More significantly, every ten, twenty meters or so, were stopsign-sized signs - blue, instead of red. I couldn't read the language describing the details, but they matched what I'd been told indicated a dangerous 'blue zone' of dangerous, potentially lethal, conditions.

Over on the right side of the road, rolling around in the grass and flowers, was a five-storey, grayish-furred striped house-cat. Which had, apparently, stopped tossing a deer around like a mouse at the sound of my engine, eyes and ears pointed straight at me.

I turned my bike into the blue zone and gunned the throttle.

It probably wasn't the best plan; it might not even have been a good plan. I wasn't thinking about what sort of materials would let a feline-shaped thing of that size walk around; it was the decision I made in the split-second of imagining ending up in a giant's stomach.

Without having had time to point the translator pendant at the signs, I didn't know what the dangers here were - poisonous chemicals, machines run amok, or even just unstable building structures. The hexagon-things provided good traction, so I turned my head to check on the kaiju; it was still rolling to its feet. Not especially fast, then. I should probably have just turned the bike around and gone back down the slope; sucks to be me. New plan - try to hide out of sight of the thing, until it's not between me and the road anymore, and /then/ run away as fast as possible.

Over to my right, I saw an open garage door, with shadowed shapes inside, but room for the bike. I cut the engine to make myself less noisy, and bolted towards it, trying to gauge myself to get there as fast as I could and still stop without squealing the brakes. I jerked to a stop between a black cab-over big-rig to my left, and a trailer with a giant Pepsi logo spread across the side to my right. I swung my legs off the bike, noticed the truck's driver door was open, and almost dived in. I pulled it closed behind me, trying not to slam it...

... and crouched in the wheel well, next to the dusty pedals, panting.

I pulled off my helmet to free up my ears, lifting them to try and hear where the giant cat might be...

... and a basso voice came out of the dashboard, starting with "Watashi wa" before the pendant in my pocket provided, "Can I help you, little bunny?"

"Ssshh!" I hissed hurriedly. "Big monster," I whispered, fiddling to get the pendant's back open to reduce the volume. "Hiding."

The voice from the dash whispered, in English, "Glove compartment. Headphones," and then fell silent.

I adjusted my glasses, and looked around the cab a bit more. I was getting a very '70's vibe - 1970's, that is. All-analog dials, faux wood paneling, a CB radio, a combined 8-track player, cassette deck, and AM radio... I wondered what it was doing here, and how the paint-job was still so shiny. I thought about what the possible negative consequences might be of putting on a pair of headphones in a blue zone, and what the likelihood might be; and the likelihood of the giant cat hearing the voice if I didn't plug in the headphones, and smashing in the windows to get at me.

I set my helmet on the driver's seat, and, trying not to rise to where I could be seen from outside, crawled around the gearshift to the passenger side. There was a case of a couple of dozen cassette tapes on the floor in my way, so I put it on the passenger's seat. Inside the glove box was a random assortment of stuff: binoculars, a camera, a flashlight, a digital wristwatch, a black-and-wood automatic pistol... I blinked at that one, considered, and set it on the seat next to the tapes. I didn't see any ammunition, outside of whatever was in the gun itself, but did find a portable tape player, around which was wrapped a pair of headphones.

After crawling back to the driver's side, it took me a few moments to figure out enough of the extended dashboard's controls to rule them out, that the headphones didn't fit into the CB radio's jack, and that there was only one spot I could plug the headphones in: the AM radio. It took a bit of fiddling to get the designed-for-human headphones to hook into my ears and stay on; basically, I put them on upside-down, around the back of my head.

I whispered, "Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can, little rabbit. What sort of monster are you hiding from?"

That was the second time he called me a rabbit - he could see me, too. I looked around for anything I might recognize as a camera, but didn't see anything. "It looked like a giant cat. Bigger than this building. It was eating a deer..."

"I see. It may be able to track you by scent. You should disguise that. Under the driver's seat are some bottles of soda. Open one and pour it over yourself."

I rearranged myself to peer under the seat - a couple of glass bottles of Pepsi, and an opener. I pulled them out, put the opener to the lid of one... and paused. "Um... I'm already in a truck, with the doors closed - and my bicycle out there probably smells more of me than the truck does."

"I suppose that's true. Sorry, bad idea. I can hear you panting - you can drink them if you want."

I put the bottles back. "Maybe later." I searched my mind for a plausible excuse for my hesitation, and found one. "My stomach isn't like a human's - it could make me sick."

"As you wish. Do you have a name, little bunny?"

"More than one. 'Bunny' works."

"Have I done something to make you nervous of me, Bunny?"

"Um... not really, but I'm hiding from a giant monster, in a posted danger zone that wasn't on my maps, in a truck that looks like it's century old and brand new at the same time, talking with someone I don't know anything about... is there any reason I /shouldn't/ be nervous?"

"I see your point. You have every right to feel the way you do. To start with, my name is Pepushikonboi, but you can call me Pepsi Convoy."

"Oh... kay..." That finally triggered a whole host of connections in my brain. In Japan, Optimus Prime was called Convoy; and, in the earlier versions, took the form of a cab-over semi; and was originally produced in, what was it, the late 70's? The toy lines that eventually turned into the Transformers were from the '70's, anyway.

I turned around to look at what should be the entrance to the sleeper compartment - but while there were lines that looked like they were seams for a door, I didn't see any actual way inside it. I wondered if there was a giant upside-down robot head in there, waiting to be flipped.

"Um, Convoy," I continued, intelligently, "Please tell me you're not going to go out and fight that monster..."

"I wish I could, but I must not. Technoville has threatened to destroy me with long-range artillery if I leave."

"... Artillery that isn't being used against the giant cat right now?"

"I understand it takes them some time for them to notice such things. I considered leaving after I saw the Statue of Liberty walk by-" I coughed. "Well, /a/ Statue of Liberty. I don't know if it was the original. The local humans were quite upset at the mess its footprints made of their roads. When I saw its pieces being shipped back, I decided that their threats were credible."

"Oh. Um, if you don't mind my asking, why does Technoville want to blow you up, but let you stay?"

"They fear all non-biological life that they have not disassembled to the last bit. However, unlike most of the robots who were created at the same time as me, I am not a warrior - so while dozens of other Convoys were destroyed, either by fighting other robots or by Technoville, I made a bargain. I would stay here, until there was a drought I could help with; and they would not have to use up the resources they would need to destroy me. Win-win-"

Convoy stopped speaking as a shadow fell across the garage's opening. I crouched down further, flattened my ears, and grabbed the gun from the passenger seat. I'd never held a real gun before - I'd been an urban Canadian since age four - and didn't even know if this one had a safety, or where it was, but if the giant cat came in I didn't have much else to work with to even try to stay alive...

The shadow moved away. Meaning all I had to deal with for the next little while was an AI of unknown design or goals housed in the chassis of a giant truck, which might or might not be able to rearrange itself into a large bipedal form...

"I have to admit," I carefully whispered, "I'm kind of scared of you."

"Why is that, Bunny?"

"Well... you're the first robot I've ever had a conversation with. I don't know much about robots - but I've heard they can be dangerous, or unpredictable."

"I can understand that. Would it help if I told you more about myself?"

"Maybe," I hedged.

"Alright, then. About ten years ago, one of the manufacturies near Detroit got orders to turn some stories into reality. So it started making the robots from those stories, as accurately as it could. There are no such thing as force fields in real life, or super-strong alien alloys, so not all the robots worked right. Still, most of them started walking around, and they were programmed to behave as much like the characters in the stories as they could."

"Why did that order get sent?"

"I truly do not know. It might even have been an accident. What happened next didn't seem like it had any sort of plan. Some of the robots were villains - stupid villains - who wanted to conquer and destroy. And some of the robots were heroes - stupid heroes - who wanted to protect people from the villains. And so, just like in the stories they were from, they started swinging fists at each other, and shooting their beam weapons. And since it's always possible to pour more energy into a piece of metal than the chemical bonds can handle... they all turned each other into scrap metal."

"You don't look much like scrap..."

"Well, thank you. You see, not all the robots were heroes or villains. Some were just created from toys with no story. Some were silly, or insane, or had other goals. While I was built to behave a little like some of the hero robots, I was really built with one goal: to quench peoples' thirst."

"That doesn't sound so bad. Wait - so when you told me to pour the soda on me, wouldn't that have wasted it?"

"If you had, I would have suggested you drink whatever was left in the bottle."

"Oh. Um... is that your only goal?"

"Is it not enough?"

"I... don't know. I once promised myself that if I couldn't think of anything more important to do with my life, I'd pretend my goal was to read comics, until I came up with a better idea."

"I can think of many better ideas."

"So could I - that was part of the trick. If I could think of anything I should do instead of reading comics, well, there was my plan. I don't mean to sound... bad or insulting or anything, but just giving people pop to drink sounds... about as important as reading comics."

"Any one bottle of soda may not contribute much. But there are millions of people, suffering all sorts of ills. A refreshing drink can save a life, or let someone focus on their job instead of their parched throat. Freedom from thirst is the right of all sentient beings - though it is a right not all can enjoy fully, yet."

"That... sounds well and good. But if that's what you want to do... then why are you letting Technoville keep you penned up here, where you can't offer anyone a drink?"

"A few reasons. I was designed to match a story - a story in which robots needed tremendous amounts of energy. Most of the parking lot here collects solar power, which allows me, and the others parked here, to stay conscious. It appears that it will be some decades before a suitable energy or fuel infrastructure will be put into place again. My parts deteriorate very slowly; I can wait for Technoville's government to change its policies, or be replaced."

"Okay. I guess I can see that - I don't know how long I'm going to live, but if it's as long as I hope, I guess I could make long-term plans like that, too. I think I might get bored, though."

"There, my programming is less like a human's. I spend most of my time using what little computing power I have to try to solve various problems on how to help peoples' thirst, once I do leave here. Sometimes I simulate conversations with individuals, to try to figure out how to quench their thirst - or to get them to help quench others' thirsts. With the right tools, small actions can have big results."

"Tools?"

"The most important is a free mind. If I could, I would build a computer that needed much less power to run my mind in - and build it as big as possible, so I could run as many simulations as I could, to work out the absolute best ways to give as many people as possible as much to drink as they could ever need."

"Uh - that's starting to sound a bit scary again. Thirst isn't the only problem people have, and, well, there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing. If you filled this cab up with pop for me, I'd be trying too hard to get air to drink any..."

"That's a rather silly and simplistic solution, which I would never do. Drowning people doesn't do a thing to make them less thirsty."

"Well, technically, dead people don't feel thirsty."

"Technically true. But my mission is derived from a Japanese phrase that means 'cure people's thirst'. Killing people isn't curing them."

"How about... changing their nervous system, so they don't ever actually feel thirsty?"

"That would only remove the sensation, but leave the thirst itself in place."

"Changing people so they don't need to drink anymore?"

"A possible method. There are some desert organisms which require very little water, such as the kangaroo rat - and I don't know how much you know about yourself, little Bunny, but there was a time when there weren't any people with fur. Somebody had to make people like you - and if you don't mind living, then if kangaroo rat people were made, they wouldn't mind living, either."

"Well - I'm pretty sure lots of people around today wouldn't want to get turned into kangaroo rats. I don't know that I would."

"You said that you hope to live a long time?"

"Hm? Well, yes, as long as possible, barring a few exceptions where increasing my lifespan increases the odds that sapient life goes extinct."

"Organic brains eventually get old and die. If you want to live a really long time, you're going to have to move into another sort of body... and robots don't get thirsty."

"Um. Well, the only people I know of who uploaded their minds into digital form were in the cities that turned into computers - and as far as I know, they're all dead. Or as close as makes no difference."

"Then do not do what they did - place yourself into a computer that does not connect the way those ones did."

"It's kind of a moot point - I don't know how, or of anyone else who knows how, either."

"Maybe not now... but if you live long enough, that knowledge may be rediscovered, too. And maybe what I say to you now will help you make a decision then."

"... Playing the long game, again?"

"I could easily spend a century in this garage. The long game is the only one I can play."

"Ah. Well - if nothing else, I need to go out to eat and - uh - excrete, and get past that giant cat without dying, and after that deal with all sorts of other dangers without getting killed in all sorts of ways. I was nearly lynched just the other day. So, looking at it all realistically, the odds are that I'm probably not going to survive long enough to even find a cryonicist, let alone find the tech to upload my mind, let alone face the decision about whether or not to upload."

"There are ways to increase your odds of survival."

"I'm using all the ones I can. So far, 'running away' has been Plan A, and if it doesn't work... there are only so many Plan Bs I'm physically and mentally capable of."

"What you need are better tools."

"... Why am I suddenly getting the feeling of being in one of those stories, where the protagonist is tempted with exactly what they've said they wanted?"

"Probably because I have not interacted with enough people to refine my model of human - and human-derived person - behaviour, and I'm giving off subconscious signals I'm not trying to."

"Ah. Yes. Probably that."

"You have not spoken of a home to go to, or a community you live in. Are you alone?"

"... Usually, that question is a prelude to being attacked if the answer is 'yes', since it means there's nobody to retaliate on my behalf."

"Have people truly become so untrustworthy and mercenary?"

"... Maybe not. Have I mentioned that I'm feeling nervous?"

"You are alone - and fear what others can do to you, that you cannot stop, or cannot even see coming."

"I don't think I can argue with that."

"I am surprised you are able to sleep at night."

"I've been getting better at finding places that are out of sight."

"But if someone did come across you while you were unconscious, you would be helpless."

"I suppose. Is this conversational direction going somewhere in particular, other than to keep me feeling nervous?"

"Consider - if you had a guard animal, who could wake you should danger approach, you would be able to spend less time trying to hide."

"I... suppose? I don't know any sort of trained animal that could do that, and that I could take with me and keep fed on the road."

"I am going to do something that will probably startle you. Please try not to scream or jump around; that monster is likely still prowling around nearby."

"Hooboy. Can I reserve the right to jump outside and bike away anyway?"

"If you like." The next words came not just through the headphones, but also in the cab. "Scorpia, awake," though the words outside the headset sounded more like, "Mewosamasu, Sukorupia."

In the glove compartment, something moved. A small, mostly-black figure crawled out and onto the dash; given what Convoy had said, I wasn't all that surprised that it was scorpion-shaped, with a half-dozen legs, a pair of claws, and a tail that curved over its body. That body, however, was made out of the digital watch I'd seen earlier.

Convoy continued, through the headphones, "She is too small to have more than animal-level intelligence - but that is enough to respond to a variety of orders, such as 'stand guard', or 'shock me awake half an hour before sunrise'."

"'Shock'?" I was still holding onto the door handle.

"She is electrically powered - if no other source is available, the watch strap collects solar energy, and she uses very little while she's in watch form."

"... And why are you bringing her out, and sort of passively offering me a... robotic scorpion transforming watch thing?"

"I encounter all too few new people these days - even fewer who are not military and under careful orders from Technoville's government. If you live very long, you will likely live a very long time indeed - and if that happens, I would prefer that you think well of me, who helped you out when you were young and frightened."

"And if I don't live long?"

"Then Scorpia will try to make her way back here, if she can."

"Oh. Well, it's good you've got a backup plan."

"You do not seem enthused."

"I don't? Well, maybe I'm kind of trapped in a talking truck with a scorpion robot that responds to the truck's commands, while that truck is talking about staying rooted in one spot longer than I've been alive without seeming bothered by any of that..."

"I guessed that you would prefer an animal-shaped assistant to a bipedal one. If this particular shape displeases you, many of the cassette tapes turn from rectangles into other shapes: dinosaurs, lions, a rhino, felines, birds, bats..."

"I... don't think that would help any. Or not much, anyway."

"If you do not want her, then you do not have to take her." Outside the cabin, the words "Sukorupia, suripu jotai ni hairu," echoed, while the headphones translated, "Scorpia, go to sleep." The smaller-than-palm-sized robot scuttled back into the glove compartment.

"Thanks. Um - I've had a lot to take in, and I'm probably going to need to be fresh to get away from that cat... is there somewhere nearby I can take a quick nap? ... No offense, but without worrying about teeny little robots crawling over me while I'm asleep?"

--

As I pedaled away from Pepsi Convoy and his fellow non-heroic, non-villainous robot companions, I kept glancing down at the new accessory I was wearing on my wrist. Sure, it was entirely possible that it was part of some nefarious scheme that would result in every value I held dear being trampled in pursuit of some unknowable or mind-bogglingly trivial goal. The thing was, the same could be said for the pendant that let me talk to the Germanic-speaking farmers this region was full of, and to those who used Technoville's peculiar tongue. The same could be said for my own skeleton, and maybe the rest of my body. At this point, it was getting to be less a matter of whether I was a pawn in somebody's larger plots, and more a matter of who I wanted to be the pawn of.

Besides, after Convoy had reprogrammed Scorpia to respond to English, she could do just about every trick I could think of, and was surprisingly cute when doing so.

And I'd been feeling a lot less nervous after I grabbed my radio from my bike, and was able to call in an airstrike on the kaiju.

 

*Chapter Four: Re-Convening*

I booted around what seemed like all of southern Michigan, on a route that practically corkscrewed to avoid the zones Technoville had designated as dangerous. Once I got to the Raisin River, though, it was practically a straight shot to Lake Erie. The town at the river's mouth was called Monroe, and whatever it might have been before, now it was a fishing village of, I guessed, maybe around a thousand souls.

I hadn't realized it until then, but I'd missed the Lakes. I'd spent more of my pre-mortem life next to Lake Ontario than Lake Erie, but had enjoyed both - especially just looking out over the water at the horizon from under a shade tree, listening to the birds, watching the squirrels, munching a snack, and maybe reading or putting on a bit of music. All I had to read at the moment was the propagandistic Technoville ebook library, I was nibbling on the local flowers instead of just looking at them, and I had to provide my own music with my (terrible) harmonica playing... but this was the first time I'd felt /really/ relaxed since I'd been revived.

More good news, some of the people in Monroe spoke a version of English I could understand. (Well, mostly.) I didn't have any of the scrip they used for money, but with a bit of haggling about some of my trade goods, and my help with some chores after, I bought myself an honest-to-goodness meal of deep-fried battered fish and chips, with salt and vinegar, pickles, and tartar sauce. There was even a wedge of lemon - or, at least, something that was close enough to a lemon that I wasn't going to ask where it came from.

--

From Monroe, the old interstate was maintained well enough that it was less than a day's ride to Toledo - or, as the most people seemed to call it, Dogtown (or their native language's translation thereof). This was my first post-Singularity city, and it didn't disappoint. I heard over a dozen different languages, though the lingua franca between different groups seemed to be another variation of English. (From the signs I saw, it had a peculiar form of spelling, that I had to puzzle out practically letter by letter. I felt a flash of annoyance that I was nearly illiterate, outside of the ebook reader Technoville had provided in my native idiom.) There were mixes of nineteenth-century tech with mid-twenty-first, like a waterwheel that both ground bread and spun a small generator to recharge peoples' batteries.

And I was far from the only non-human wandering around and doing business. Outside of the human majority, bipedal animals like myself seemed most common, followed by centauroids, elves (or maybe Vulcans), Klingons (or maybe orcs), and a few rare cyborgs. (Or maybe nearly everyone was a cyborg, and those few were just the ones who didn't hide the metal bits.) I even caught a momentary glimpse of what I thought was another bunny-person, down a side-street, though that might have been pareidolia.

On the road, I'd been able to get away with wearing the minimum possible. I'd also gotten away with keeping my backpack stuffed into the trailer, against standard protocol for Technoville couriers. (In theory, such a courier could lose the trailer and still keep going with the backpack; then lose the pack and keep going with the safari vest; then lose the vest and keep going with belt and cargo pants or shorts... and if they lost those, they really had some explaining to do.) But before I made it into the many streets of the city, I simply had to heave a sigh, and pull on the full set of fur-twisting clothes, shoulder the pack, and make sure everything that could be locked away against pickpockets and other thieves was sealed as tight as possible. As additional deterrent, I strapped my machete to my right thigh, and pretended that I knew how to use it in a fight.

While I kind of wanted to explore a bit, in search of anything resembling libraries, bookstores, or internet cafes, I was obligated to make one stop as early as possible - Technoville's embassy to Dogtown. (Or maybe consulate, or military base - the TV'ers I'd talked with didn't seem interested in going into details about the what, only the where.)

When I finished following the map, I arrived at a stone wall with a gate - and a pair of fellows in black, with helmets and gasmasks that obscured their features, and gun-type weapons bigger than pistols and shorter than rifles. From what little I knew, I guessed they were submachine guns. Which shifted slightly as I stopped, to point at the ground halfway between each of them and me.

"Um, hi," I said, pulling out the translator. They didn't say anything. A few pokes inside the back of the pendant told it to translate into Technovillian. "I was told to come here. Um - do you need to see my ID card?"

The one on my left shifted his head a bit. "No unverified computing devices are allowed inside."

"Oh. Well, that's a bit of a problem, since there's computer stuff inside me."

"Then you can't go in."

"Oh. Well, I'm supposed to at least deliver the bike and equipment to Technoville authorities, which means you guys. Can I pass it to you and have you push it in, then?"

"No equipment goes in without a chain-of-custody document."

"Okay... can you get me one of those?"

"We are required to stay at our posts until relieved."

"... Can I get one of those some other way?"

"I have no idea."

"Oh. Um - maybe I should just head out, and radio in for instructions?" I started turning the front wheel, but froze as the weapons shifted to aim a few inches closer to my feet.

"Proprietary Technoville equipment may not be removed by unauthorized personnel."

"... So you're not going to let me ride off?"

"No."

"Okaaay... can I leave the bike here and /walk/ away?"

"Unattended possessions are considered a bomb threat."

I looked at the one on the left, then the one on the right. "You're not joking, or playing a prank, or anything like that, are you?"

"No."

"Right." I ran my available options through my mind... and chose the one that seemed most likely to create a useful effect.

--

I'd made it through "Flood"'s first few songs, and was halfway through 'Dead', when someone came from inside the gate. Dressed in black like the pair of gas-masked grunts, but without the headgear.

"Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't done anything that I want. Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do!", I belted out enthusiastically, and paused instead of jumping into the second half.

"Would anybody care to explain?" asked the newcomer.

I shrugged. "These fellows wouldn't let me in or leave. I figured I'd eventually need to buy food and water." I bent down and picked up some of the coins that had been tossed into the helmet, squinting at the engravings. "I wonder what the local prices are for getting hay delivered."

He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. "And you needed to strip naked to put on your... minstrel performance?"

"I'm not naked - I'm wearing fur." He opened his eyes and glared. I shrugged again, and started sorting out my take from ten minutes of unskilled-but-cheerful busking. "Fine, I'm naked. I stripped to get the attention of someone in the embassy who was slightly more in the loop than... these two fine, upstanding personnel who are unimpeachable in their devotion to following orders."

He heaved a sigh. "Put your clothes back on and come inside."

"I'm not sure I should. If it's this hard to get in, how hard will it be for me to get out, if you happen to decide to detain me for some reason, or none at all?"

"You're a member of the Technoville Auxiliaries. I order, you obey. Come inside, mister!"

I didn't move. "You seem to be misinformed. I'm not a member of anything. I made a bargain - Technoville supplied equipment, and I'd send back reports on unscouted areas. Well, here's your equipment, down to the last stitch of clothing you gave me. If I give you these glasses, too, then our deal's done, and I don't owe you a thing more."

"What, not the wristwatch?"

"I got the watch on my own merits, not from Technoville."

He started rubbing his temples. "I suppose you have a reply ready if I ordered these men to take you inside?"

"Half passive resistance, half pointing out that I'd be much less inclined to transmit reports after such treatment."

"Then please tell me, Miss. What, exactly, do you want?"

"Mostly? To go away. I was told to report in here. Hi - reporting in. If you'll tell your /fine/ upstanding guards here not to shoot me for riding off in the bicycle you folk traded me for my future reports, you can go back to your job and I can get on with mine."

"Don't you want updated maps, field manuals for dealing with various post-singularity techs, and other such things?"

"A little. But they're kind of feeling like cheese in a mousetrap. From all I can tell, if you ordered these two /fine/ upstanding fellows to shoot me dead in the street, you wouldn't face murder charges; the worst that would happen to you is you'd have to fill out a two-page form and answer three questions, or something to that effect. That hardly seems like a good basis for positive cooperation and mutual exchange, now does it?"

"I would face a /somewhat/ more thorough investigation than that. But I'm not paid enough to deal with this. I'm going to go inside and pass the buck. You can stay or leave, get dressed or stay nude, sing or dance a jig or I don't care. I suggest you don't go far, and you turn on your radio and listen for... whoever it is you radio with."

As he turned around and started stomping back in, I tried very hard not to smile as I started pulling my undergarments back on. (Much to the disappointment of the passers-by who'd been enjoying the spectacle.) I might be a pawn, but I didn't have to be a mindless one. I'd gotten the impression that Technoville's hierarchy wasn't really set up to handle people who really could just drop everything and walk into the woods. As for being nude - well, in a sense, it wasn't really /my/ body, was it? And more importantly, I wanted the Technovillians to lose confidence in whatever model they were putting together of my behaviour, so they couldn't be quite sure whether any given interaction would follow whatever script they'd laid out for me. Sure, there was a risk that doing that would mean they'd decide to cut their losses and stick me in an oubliette to be forgotten; but since their investment in me so far amounted to little more than a motorized bicycle and related gear, and some surgery that my bunny-body had been built for in the first place, that risk didn't seem very likely. At least, it seemed less likely than them having to start treating me more like an actual person with my own wants, needs, and foibles.

I held up a piece of paper to the sunlight - it didn't quite match the scrip that had been used in Monroe, but seemed similar enough. I wondered if I could find a local newspaper.

--

I didn't just find a paper; I found the whole printing press. The building housing the 'Free Press', established in 2005, smelled wonderfully of ink and paper, and my eyes were drawn to the repeated motions of the presses. If I played my cards right, I might be able to work a deal with the publisher, sending them reports as well as - or instead of - to Technoville.

I left with slumped shoulders, and in a glum mood. Despite its name, the paper had a political officer that could, and did, veto stories harmful to Dogtown's government - or, I was informed, "which would make our good allies in Technoville unhappy".

I got directions to someplace that sold tea, or a reasonable facsimile - 'red tea', in this particular case, which I had no idea whether or not it had any relation to the South African rooibos plant, or green tea, or anything else. But it was made with boiled water, only cost a few of my coins, and most importantly, effectively let me rent a table to sit at and people-watch while I thought. Specifically, I was taking a bit of time to re-evaluate the various ideas and plans and plots I'd managed to come up with so far.

A lot of it came down to... what did I know, and how did I know it, and how confident was I in what I knew? Almost everything I'd been told had come through the filter of Technoville and its agents, and that happy little gang seemed to have all the hallmarks of an authoritarian military tyranny. Sure, it was possible that that organization was the best way to deal with post-Singularity conditions. It might even be the only way to maintain a high level of technology.

Only... that technology wasn't all that high a level. Back when I'd died, thirty-odd years before the Singularity had happened, it was supposed to create minds that could plumb the heights and depths of the laws of physics, figuring out how to do anything that was physically possible, leading to revolutions in not just any one technology, but how they all tied together. What Technoville had was... tanks, and planes, and computers. Sure, they'd domesticated some new species, and had some new enemies to point the tanks at, like the kitty-kaiju... but with to their careful separation of computers and communications, and their apparently non-democratic society (at least for certain sorts of undesirable people, of which I was one), they seemed downright old-fashioned to my eyes.

Why had they left the blue zone with Pepsi Convoy, Scorpia, and the rest off the map? Why had they given me a courier bike and let me come at least this far? Why had they bothered sticking my brain in this body in the first place? I couldn't think of good answers for any of these. (Well, I had a guess that they'd stuffed a bunch of one-time pads into the frame of the bike, which would be useful if I did make it this far and no great loss if I didn't, but that seemed more along the lines of taking advantage of an opportunity rather than a good reason in and of itself.) Without even being able to make a good guess at their motivations - or being able to figure out who any sub-groups who drove overall Technovillian policy were - I couldn't even figure out if, should I head back to their embassy here in Dogtown, whether they'd give me more supplies and pat me on the head and send me on my way, or shoot me on sight.

Convoy was easier to figure out than Technoville was - and the more I thought about his one goal, and the various ways he could go about filling it if he was given the chance, the more I felt like calling in another airstrike might be the best plan all around. I rubbed a finger around Scorpia's display, thoughtfully. Convoy could be a source of tools outside of Technoville's control, if I went back there. I didn't want to do anything that would increase the odds of him deciding to convert every living human (and human-like person) into a thirstless robot, whether we wanted or not, among less pleasant possibilities... but if he thought the odds of me living long enough to help him were good enough to try influencing me in his favour, by providing aid and materiel... and if that materiel helped deal with any even less pleasant goals other intelligences were working to achieve... it just might be a deal worth taking.

I moved my finger to the fur on the back of my hand. I wondered why the body that had been built for my brain to be inserted was a bunny. Sure, I was a fan of anthropomorphic animals, which seemed to be a thing in reality instead of cartoons these days. But rabbits had never had any particular appeal to me. I'd focused on centaurs in some years, clever foxes in others, and thought about bat-style flight, before settling on a species that could survive just about anything that man or nature could throw at them as my totem: the rat, especially the white lab-rat. I'd later thought about switching to grizzly bears, who rose from hibernation every spring; but by that time, my online identity had been thoroughly tied to a rodent name, and changing email, website, and a hundred forum profiles would have been a pain. But... rabbits? I hadn't paid any more attention to rabbits than I had to, say, tigers, or raccoons. Had a rabbit-body already been under construction, and then adjusted for my brain to fit?

... Why had my frozen corpsicle been revived at this time, anyway? Why not in the rapidly-evolving weeks leading up to the Singularity, or any time after it? Why bring me back as a live brain, instead of uploading me into digital form the way the billions of people caught up during the main event had been? Why hadn't any of the other cryonicists who'd been preserved near Detroit been woken?

So many questions I couldn't answer yet. But there were at least a few that I probably could figure out, such as: What did /I/ want, now that I /was/ wandering around this landscape in this body?

Goal number one was simple - try not to die. Approach one: figure out the danger spots, and get as far from them as possible. Flaw of approach one: My body might not age, but my brain probably still did; running and hiding would only keep me from dying for decades, maybe a century or two on the outside. I needed to find some way to get around that.

Approach two: get myself uploaded into digital form, where the flaws of biology no longer applied, and I could make as many off-site backups as needed to keep death from being anything more inconvenient than amnesia. Flaw of approach two: That's supposed to be what happened during the Singularity, but according to Technoville, the individuals who'd uploaded didn't exist anymore. Maybe there was some sort of Darwinian competition for resources, and minds who upgraded their patterns away from the human condition out-competed those who clung to their mortal foibles. Maybe Technoville was wrong, and the urban population hadn't uploaded themselves in the first place. Maybe there was some other explanation entirely.

Approach three: Find some other way to transcend biology's limits. I'd talked with a horse that used to be shaped like a man; and had heard about many more physical transformations that resulted from stepping in the wrong zone. Maybe there was a zone which did nothing more than clean up all the accumulated cellular junk in neurons, adding decades of life without needing to get used to hooves or tentacles instead of hands. Maybe there was a way to create custom zone effects. Flaw of approach three: I didn't actually know how any of the transformations were done in the first place.

Approach four: In case I do end up dead again, from another traffic accident or a bullet, it would be kind of nice to be able to get my body frozen for future revivification. I already had proof that it could work; even if it required a whole-body transplant to deal with the antifreeze, that seemed to be something that could be done, now. Which brought my estimates of the success of another round of cryonics up from 5% to... a lot more than that. But Technoville "didn't do" cryonics, or at least claimed not to; and I hadn't found any indication that there was a cryo group here in Dogtown, either. There were a couple of cryo groups active when I died; the one I'd signed up with, and another off in Arizona. Since Technoville wouldn't let me poke around in the Detroit area for signs of my own cryo group, maybe, if I could make it to Phoenix, I could try to find if the other group was still active.

A major, if not necessarily immediate, complication for any of the above approaches: I'd been told Earth's climate had gone wonky, and there was an off-chance the solar shade at the Lagrange Point between Earth and the Sun, L1, (I made a note to myself: try to find some evidence that that actually existed) could fall out of position any year now, among other possible runaway catastrophes. Getting off-planet in a long-term-survivable ecosystem was probably a good idea, if it ever became feasible. I did have good evidence for the claim of a Kessler cascade, in the form of spectacular meteor showers most clear nights, so it might be some time before a rocket wouldn't end up looking like Swiss cheese. Once there were rockets again.

With all those goals in mind, one of the best ways I could think of to improve my odds at all of them at once would be to learn more about the city-computers, both active and dead, to try and improve my guesses about what had happened during the Singularity and about zone transformations, to avoid the nastier ones and look into the more useful ones. Learning more about manufacturies, such as the ones that had built Convoy, wasn't a bad idea, either. Learning about... well, just about everything, seemed to be the general approach.

I shook open the newspaper I'd gotten from the press, and started puzzling through the not-quite-English letters. It seemed like they'd adapted something like a one-letter-per-sound alphabet, but that included half-a-dozen letters that looked almost like 'O', and a whole bunch of words I'd never seen before and couldn't even make a decent guess at based on simple etymology. And even the items I could puzzle out, I had to remember had been filtered through the political officer, and an editor, and a reporter, and maybe the owner or some other people entirely... but even if every story was a complete fabrication, I could still try picking up some clues about the filtering entities, at the very least. And maybe I'd come across something more directly relevant to my interests...

 

*Chapter Five: Re-Educating*

I was almost disappointed that Dogtown had recognizable schools. If I'd woken up a century in the past after my death, instead of heading futurewards, I knew enough scraps about how educational methods had changed to drastically improve how children learned. (Well, maybe; it was too easy to overestimate such things.) But looking in the windows were rows of desks facing blackboards, children reading textbooks or writing papers, and similar activities that wouldn't have been out of place anywhere in the 20th century.

Well, except for the rather disappointing revelation that segregation was back in style, and not one of the students nor teachers would have been able to pass as a 20th-century human. Some came closer than others, like the people who looked like they were made out of plastic or shiny rubber, and maybe the armless woman with a half-dozen tentacles visible under her dress could have passed as an amputee... but this was obviously a school for changed people, and not for baseline humans.

It was bigger than a one-room schoolhouse, so upon entering, I was able to find someone on staff who wasn't occupied with a couple of dozen kids - a secretary, a centauroid with the hind-torso of a sheep rather than a horse. "Can I help you?", she asked as she looked up from her paperwork with stiff formality.

"I hope so," I answered. "Is this where I can talk to someone about adult education?"

A few minutes later, I was ensconced in a small office with a large bear. "Miss... Bunny, is it?" I just nodded - a name was anything that people referred to you by, and Convoy, at least, had called me 'Bunny'. "I am Hair Miller."

"... Is that your first name, or the German for 'Mister'?"

"Both, as it happens. What can I do for you?"

"I have a... somewhat complicated background."

"As do we all."

I had been debating with myself whether to mention my decades-long period of deadness, but for the moment, that seemed more likely to me to make it harder to get the information I wanted than easier, so I hedged. "You may have noticed I talk funny. When I was growing up, my family wasn't connected to present-day society. I had access to books and media that are old - nothing more recent than twenty fifteen A.D. As far as I know, I don't have any living relatives. I've just come through Technoville territory, and sort of had a job with them, but I might be fired. If I'm not fired... I'm probably going to be travelling through unscouted territory, through cities and danger zones, and I don't know what the youngest student here already thinks everyone takes for granted. I was hoping I could get a crash course, or some reference books, or... something like that."

"Hm." Miller had been jotting down notes as I spoke, in that not-quite-familiar script I couldn't make out. "I think I can help you with that - though I would be remiss in my duties if that was all I did. Do you have any academic qualifications?"

"Er... I don't have a diploma, but I have at least the equivalent of a twenty-fifteen high school education. I know trigonometry, though I've never quite figured out matrices; I've read the Iliad and Harry Potter; I can type on a QWERTY keyboard; I know 2015-era geography and history; some biology, chemistry, and physics; a bit about computer programming-"

"Ssh!" he hissed, and glanced out the doorway. He stood up, slid around the desk, and closed it, before settling back into place. "I can certainly believe you've been isolated from modern society if you would mention /that/."

I blinked. "How much trouble could I have gotten myself in?"

"We para-humans mostly gather in the cities because the rural people have unpleasant superstitions about us, and our lives are less in danger here, because we can protect each other. If word got around that you knew anything about computers - even ancient ones - then not only wouldn't the para-human community try to help you, a lot of them would join in the lynch mob."

"... Ah." I swallowed. "Alright - I'll keep that to myself from now on." My forehead wrinkled. "Um - I've got a few... devices from Technoville, like a translator..."

He shrugged, massively. "They've got an army to protect them from people who don't like them, and as long as everyone else just /uses/ such things instead of /makes/ them... I'm not defending the reasoning behind the feeling, or the lack thereof, just warning you about it."

"Alright. Fair enough. That's one possible lethal social accident out of the way. How many more do I need to learn about?"

"Probably a few. I have you pegged as roughly equivalent to a grade four education - that's our nine-year-olds-"

"You have nine year olds are learning trigonometry?"

"No - that's in grade five." I raised my eyebrows - so maybe they did have a few new pedagogical tricks. He continued, "As I was saying - around grade four, advanced in some areas, behind in others. Are you staying in the city?"

"Not for long, I'm afraid. If I'm still employed tomorrow, then I'll have to leave fairly soon."

"Hm. That means I can't fit you in under the budget for residents. Which brings up the awkward question of payment."

"If I'm still employed tomorrow, I should be able to get Technoville to pay for any supplies I think are necessary - including information. The main limit would be... I could probably get away with staying in the city for a few days, but after that, I'll be travelling, and every kilogram of books I carry is a kilogram of other equipment I can't."

"And if you're not employed by Technoville tomorrow?"

"Then I get to have fun finding a place to sleep until I get a new job. I can get by on hay and water, so I might be able to manage by busking for a few days. Or I could wander off into the wilderness and eat whatever plants I pass by, but it's not my preferred lifestyle."

"Hm. I'll need to look up a few things... When you find out whether you need a new job tomorrow, come by either way - I just might be able to get you hired if you need to be." He reached over and dropped a heavy paw on my shoulder, baring his fangs in what I hoped was a friendly smile. "After all, we Changed need to stick together, right?"

"Er - right," I tried smiling back.

"In the meantime," he started scribbling on a new piece of paper, "here's something else that might help you... there's a tour of the old city center this afternoon, and my chop will let you squeeze in."

--

"This tour is in Deutsch, miss. Do you speak Deutsch?"

"I'll be fine, I have a translator," I held up my watch-pendant to the middle-aged woman, whose outfit was, if anything, pinker than my own fur.

"Very well," she said. "Please try to keep up with the main group and not get in the way."

"Of course," I shrugged, and let the gaggle of mostly farmers be in front. They were paying customers, or something of the sort, and I was mostly here to use up a couple more hours before I got back in touch with Technoville.

"Hallo, alle zusammen," the pink guide called out, and we were off. I barely paid attention at first, since the buildings - if that was the right word for them - were much more fascinating than factoids about the previous names for the city, a near-bloodless territorial dispute, and general infrastructure expansion. I did aim both ears at her once she hit the twenty-first century, but she said, "As you may already know, the period from roughly two thousand to twenty fifty A.D. is called the Dark Age, or some variation on the term. More and more information was stored on far away computers, or on computers people kept in their homes, and when the Rapture came all that was lost. Most of what we know of that period is from the scant few paper records that were made, interviews from those who survived the end of the old world, and what little archaeological reconstruction the Toledo Historical Society has been able to fund.

"Mostly, it was more of the same as the twentieth century: people went to jobs, though now their cars drove themselves; they played games and sports; they had elections, and protested the various forms of government, and sometimes those protests had to be repressed by those governments to maintain good order and keep society functioning."

I somehow managed not to cough indelicately, since she was getting to the good part. Soon enough, "In twenty forty-seven, the first artificial intelligence was created by recording the neurons of a human brain, and creating a computer program that imitated them. Computer programs are very easy to make copies of, so from that first AI were made dozens of copies, then thousands. As they learned how to do different jobs, some copies became copied more often than others. Soon, there were copies that could do any job that didn't require physical labor. And since they didn't eat, or need a house, just a tiny bit of electricity, they could do those jobs for a lot less pay than any human could. It turned out there were a lot of jobs that weren't worth paying a human for, but were worth paying a tiny amount for. Riches could be made by even the poorest person, as fast as computers could be built to make them."

She paused, and pointed up at the not-quite-skyscrapers. "Which brings us into the darkest part of the dark ages. Even the survivors don't know much. One of the guesses is that the copies took over. Another guess is that people who lived in cities got themselves uploaded. Another is that somebody made a program that could solve programs even better than the copies made from that human brain, and that it went wrong. What we do know is that anyone who was in any city in November of twenty fifty, was just gone by the time December came. No bodies have been found. What was found were these..." She gestured up again. "Which are typical of any city. They're not computers - we're reasonably sure they simply radiated away the heat from the real computers, which would have gotten so hot they would have melted otherwise, because of all the programs thinking so hard.

"And we're walking..." She led us to the base of one, where there was a roughly human-scale entrance.

"Nobody knew that for quite some time. When people started coming into cities again after whatever happened in the Singularity, more than heat came out of here. There were... underground factories, controlled by the computers. Sometimes they built more computers. Sometimes they built robots that killed people who came too close. Sometimes they built diseases. And sometimes," she pointed straight at me, "they built machines that turned humans into... other things."

I eeped, ears flat, and raised one forearm to give an embarrassed little finger-wave to all the people looking up and down at me.

The guide spoke again, "But we're safe, now. The bigger cities' computers kept building more heat sinks, and other things. The smaller cities' computers slowly died off. The last known dangerous thing manufactured by the computers here in Dogtown was cleaned up ten years ago. Inside, we have a museum showing some of the things the computers tried to use to kill us - all completely safe, of course. The exit is through the gift shop."

I didn't follow the crowd in right away, instead looking up at the windowless slabs of metal, the size of skyscrapers, forming street-like rows. I wondered how much of the canned lecture was fact, and how much mere speculation - and how much outright fabrication - to make the Toledo Historical Society seem more important, to let the locals impress the yokels, to flatter the various local powers-that-be. Technoville's agents had told me they didn't have control over an area more than a few hundred kilometers across, and Dogville's tech was more nineteenth-century than twenty-first; I wondered how the guide could have even gotten enough information to base the general statements about 'large cities' versus 'small ones'.

--

When I came out of the museum, I was having a hard time avoiding losing my hay. I now had rather definite evidence that humans getting turned into living members of new species was one of the least common sorts of effects. Heck, ending up as something /living/ seemed to be pretty uncommon. And then there were the people who weren't alive any more, in any sort of traditional sense, but still had at least some form of awareness. And I wasn't even sure where to classify the exhibit showing X-rays and so on of a woman who'd been turned into a bull's organs - not into a whole bull, just part of one, who kept on eating and wandering around and doing bullish things without any concern for the sentient person who was now just an invisible part of it.

And the other members of the tour had seemed to take it all in stride, and were even now looking through various tchotchkes and memorabilia to remind them of their visit to the 'big city'.

For the first time in a very long time, I was considering the possibility that I might end up in a situation where I really would prefer to be dead.

I was also forced to revise my thoughts about how good an idea it could be, to travel through a few thousand kilometers of unscouted territory, just for the hope that a cryonics organization had been far enough away from an urban area to escape the singularity and was still, somehow, in operation. I probably had a few decades before I had to worry about old age; that seemed like plenty of time to rebuild the air liquefaction pumps and other apparatuses of cryonics, and to found a brand-new cryo group.

One thing was for sure - if Technoville still wanted me to go scouting and send back reports to them, they were going to have to pony up a /lot/ more than just a bicycle and some camping gear.

--

Back in front of the Technoville embassy, I got off my bike, collected one of my trekking poles, and advanced to the gate's guards. "I trust you have specific orders to let me in this time?" Wordlessly, one of them swung open the gate, and I strode on into the courtyard.

In a few moments, I had been directed to a windowless sitting room. As nobody else was in sight, I wandered around a bit, looking at the paintings, the abstract statuettes on the shelves, and other displays of wealth. I had no intention of touching the water or sandwiches on the low table in the middle of the room - I'd had more than my fill of TV's 'calmative' drugs.

Twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds after I'd entered (according to Scorpia's display), a small gray man entered - gray hair, grayish eyes behind his glasses, and his even his standard black suit seemed more faded than was the norm. "Please, have a seat," he gestured to the overstuffed chairs, and I did so, resting both hands on top of my walking stick. He joined me, poured himself a glass of water, and took a sip. After a few moments of silence, he said, "Do you plan on stripping again?"

"I don't /plan/ on it."

When I didn't expand on that, he said, "I see. In that case, do you object if this meeting is recorded for future reference?"

"I assumed that would be the case, whether I objected or not."

"I see," he repeated. "Well, then - this meeting is all about you. So, is there anything you'd like to start with?"

I reached inside my safari vest, pulled out my maps, and tossed them next to the snacks. "Were the inaccurate maps deliberate sabotage, or mere incompetence?"

"Inaccurate?" He picked them up, and adjusted his glasses, examining the green area I'd repeatedly circled and labeled "BLUE /NOT/ GREEN!!!".

"I'm not even sure the blue signs there are the right color - in case news hasn't come this way, there was a building-sized monster. I only avoided getting eaten by hiding and screaming into the radio for air support."

He set the map down. "Is there anything else?"

"Somewhat relatedly. Were the orders to your gate guards to keep me from coming in or leaving a deliberate measure, or incompetence? There are a few other items I have the exact same question for, if it saves any time."

He leaned back in his seat, and steepled his fingers. I half-expected him to hiss out 'Excellent', but instead, he said, "A certain part of our hierarchy wished to gather evidence about whether or not you would be able to survive your proposed trip to Phoenix, and so certain other parts of our hierarchy were arranged to act... less than optimally."

"So was me singing in the nude a 'pass' or 'fail'?"

"Oh, definitely a 'pass'. You demonstrated creativity, a willingness to go outside your extrapolated psychological boundaries, and even adapted your plan to gain a few additional resources."

"I am not a happy bunny right now."

"Do you plan on stabbing me with your concealed sword?"

I bared my teeth. You could call it a smile. I wouldn't. "Only if you people start stabbing first."

"That hardly seems productive."

"Is 'productive' all that matters to you?"

"Not quite. But it matters quite a bit."

"Then you should be happy that I've been spending my day most productively."

"Oh? Do tell."

"I've been gathering information on city-computers, zone effects, and the other dangers I'd be facing if I go on the trip you people so blithely agreed to let me go on."

"I notice you say 'if'. Have you changed your mind?"

"Let's say that I've heavily revised my risk-reward calculations."

"Alright, let's say that."

There was an awkward pause, then I sat back in my chair and looked away from him, trying (and failing) not to grind my teeth. "When you people told me I had an even chance of making it - what was it, a thousand kilometers? - I thought you were /underestimating/ my chances, not /heavily overestimating/ them."

"Actually, that estimate was the most accurate that could be created with the available information about you. It's safe to say that the estimators took into account how likely it was that you would be able to improve your relevant skills, or acquire useful resources."

"And you were still willing to let me make my own way, even if I left this city with inadequate - and incorrect - information?"

"If you had, then your failure to take advantage of local opportunities would undoubtedly have led us to revise the predicted odds of your success."

"I'm finding myself less and less inclined to consider you the sort of people I should cooperate with."

"Will you be returning the translator, and other equipment, then?"

"I'm having a hard time thinking of a good reason not to."

"Ah! Now there, I may be able to help you."

"Do tell."

"As you have been informed, we maintain strict separation of comm and comp - of communications and computation. So it has taken more time than you might expect for us to perform even simple database searches. Nevertheless, since you were discovered, we have been doing such searches related to you - and have come across a result you might consider relevant."

He paused, as if to invite a response; but when I remained silent, continued. "The immediate aftermath of the Singularity was both more and less dangerous than the present day. Nobody was expecting the cities to start producing their dangers; but those dangers had not yet started to spread very far. There was still transport, and even communication, for a short time. We have records of a piece of news: the cryonics company headquartered there was attacked by survivors and burned to the ground. However, nearly all of the... patients?... had already been moved to a private compound. More defensible, and manned by people who seemed intent on defending themselves, and their frozen associates."

He paused again, then sighed. "Smaller surviving groups with much less to bind them together made it through to the present. It is much more likely than not that your fellow cryonicists are still alive and doing well, there. Should you choose to make your journey, you can be assured that you do, in fact, have a destination to arrive at."

"Assuming I survive the trip. I have to wonder why you haven't already made an expedition that far."

"Almost all of our resources are needed to fight Detroit's various dangers, and to keep its expansion in check."

"So you say. But I've been thinking. You have fixed-wing aircraft of at least one sort - I've seen them overhead, even besides the one that blew up the one monster. You can manufacture the parts to maintain them, rebuild the engines, and maybe even make whole new ones, right?"

"We're hardly going to retask a Saber-7 for a scouting mission - it doesn't have the range, there are no secure landing fields-"

I held up a hand to interrupt. "That's not what I was aiming for. I know you also make reasonably small engines, that you put on the courier bicycles. And that you produce at least certain quantities of bio-diesel. And," I tugged at the neckline of my shirt, "you have some sort of textiles industry."

"That all seems to go without saying."

"It seems it has to be said. Because I just can't figure out why the skies aren't filled with these," and I pulled another sheet of paper from inside my vest and tossed it to him. On it was a drawing of a generally humanoid figure - art was never my strong suit - wearing a backpack containing a motor and a propeller almost as tall as she was, underneath the curve of a paraglider-style parachute.

He picked up the image, and examined the various notes I'd made, as I continued. "Those things have been around since, oh, decades before I died. Don't need landing fields. They do need gas, and even if they don't have the range to make it to Arizona in one hop, it's not that hard to haul a load of fuel out to half it's range, drop it off, head back, and repeat until the fuel depot has enough gas for it to carry on to the next hop. And for all I know, you've got plans for batteries and electric motors that would simplify the logistics even more than 'supply gas'."

I leaned forwards, elbows on my knees. "My first, crude estimate is that a fuel depot would be needed every five hundred kilometers or so. Meaning that instead of slogging through every danger every city on the continent has set free, a pilot of one of these would only have to touch ground a half-dozen times between here and Arizona... and they wouldn't have to travel anywhere near roads, or cities.

"So I repeat my question - why don't you already have these things in the skies?"

 

*Chapter Six: Re-Engineering*

I had made a private prediction about what sort of answer I might get, and when the man in gray said, "Bicycles cost much less than flying machines, and do the job nearly as well," that prediction was borne out. The sheer flexibility of being able to send a courier anywhere in fuel range, without having to follow roads, without risking attack from man or machine, was nigh-certain to be worth building at least one powered paraglider. Which meant the reason I'd just been told was, at best, an extremely minor one. It did, however, match a certain pattern I'd started noticing - that a great many of Technoville's actions could be predicted if I assumed that they were less interested in being able to do stuff than they were in keeping other people from being able to do as much as them.

"Fine," I said, trying not to give any indication of my thoughts. "If Plan A for Air is a no-go, then here's Plan B." I pulled out another sheet of paper, with a rough map of the Great Lakes, Mississippi, and other major waterways I'd been able to think of. "A few centuries ago, the Hudson's Bay Company controlled most of the north half of this continent - and they did so almost entirely by going up and down the rivers in boats. The Toledo Historical Society has plenty of records of... post-singularity incidents on land, but none at sea. And I know people fish on the lake. So here's a thought - if the water's less risky than land, then build some canoes, and travel by river and canal. If you actually wanted to learn what's going on in the interior of the continent, why haven't you already started this? After all, canoes are even cheaper than bikes."

"Is that all?", the gray man asked mildly.

"Hardly. Here's Plan C, for the sea." I pulled out another map I'd drawn. "Instead of going inwards - go outwards. Down Lake Erie, and either down Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, or the Erie Canal. Use the canals if possible, portage around them if not, use log-rollers if your boat's too big to carry, or even just build a new one downstream if you have to. Go down the eastern seaboard. Maybe head in the Gulf of Mexico and land in Texas, or go south and see if the Panama Canal's still navigable, then head around to the Gulf of California. Shortens the landward part of the trip to a thousand klicks instead of over three thousand, or less than four hundred."

I pulled out another sheet. "Plan D, for DXing. You've got radios. Even if you keep them as far away from computers as possible, it's perfectly feasible to bounce signals off the ionosphere to get in touch with any other electronics-capable surviving communities, and exchange information. If the cryo group in Arizona is still functioning, with enough tech to be a cryo group instead of just another bunch of farmers, you should already be in touch with them, instead of relying on some decades-old report."

I mimicked his posture, leaning back steepling my fingers. "I've got a few other proto-plans." I was bluffing a bit - I had vague ideas, but nothing else that came remotely close to being another 'plan'. "But they all have something in common: knowledge is power. If you people haven't been actively seeking knowledge about the state of the world, it seems likely you've been trying to gain power some other way. And, frankly, I don't like any of the alternative methods I've been able to think of that are consistent with what I've seen of you so far. Either that, or you already know that travel is so dangerous that trying to head to Arizona by any route is effectively suicide, and you're perfectly willing to let me head out to my death."

"It's not quite as bad as all that," he answered, shuffling through the maps and papers. "I'm sure these ideas have been brought up before, but it's possible conditions have changed enough since they were rejected for it to be worth reviewing them."

"That's all well and good for you. Right now, the main question in my mind is whether you'll let me hold onto the clothes you gave me long enough for me to buy some of my own, or if I'll be walking out of here in my fur."

"Have you made up your mind to leave us, then?"

"If I had, I'd already be heading out the door - or trying to fight my way out, if you tried to stop me."

"Oh, I don't know about that - we could always just pipe some knockout gas through the ventilation system."

"Thank you for letting me know I should try to steal a guard's gas-mask first."

He chuckled. "Trust me-" I coughed. "Or don't. We have no intention of letting you suicide, unknowingly or otherwise."

I debated whether to grab my sword-stick, leaning on my chair's armrest, again. "That sounds... ominous." I recalled a few of the displays from the museum of people who'd been transformed and hadn't been able to kill themselves.

"Since you seem to be unhappy with us for failing to share information you feel is relevant, before you give up on Technoville and get a job in Dogville as... what, a waitress?... I feel obligated to tell you about something that happened in this city just over a week ago." My imagination went to images of some sort of anti-Changed violence, but he continued on a rather different tack. "On that day, with no pre-planning, and no detectable forms of communication involved, half the people who live in the city decided to wear as much blue as possible. The other half decided to wear as much green as they could. Even some of us in the Embassy violated dress codes by having a colored handkerchief. I, myself, found myself looking through my wardrobe that morning, wishing I had something with some color in it."

"Did... the two colors start fighting?"

"Not at all. They did not even express any preference for interacting with those wearing the same color."

"That sounds... rather bizarre, but harmless."

"Oh, come now, Miss B-"

"Bunny. If I've ever got a reason to use my original name, I will - but if I don't, I need to get in practice getting used to something more appropriate."

"Fine. Miss Bunny. You have just demonstrated a better talent at working through consequences than that," he gestured at the papers.

I didn't feel like telling him that he was vastly overestimating my capabilities. So I stalled for time as I tried to figure out whatever point he was getting at. "If you're bringing it up, you feel it's important. Which means it has the potential to reduce your military or economic power. A wide-ranging mental effect of unknown provenance... that was harmless this time, but might not be so harmless next time? An effect that affected you, as well? Since it doesn't sound like it's a voluntary flashmob, like people did in my time, that suggests it's a post-Singularity effect..."

He simply nodded, and stated, "The physical dangers created by the city-computers, while bad for any individual that encounters them, do not pose any significant long-term threat to our society. The - I don't believe you have the background to fully understand the concepts - the /intellectual/ dangers threaten our very existence, on every level. Technoville uses every form of quarantine that is physically within our power to do so, with multiple forms of firewalls, including between sections. And with all that work, just over a week ago, about thirty percent of our population happened to decide to wear blue or green."

"... Okay, I'm starting to get a vague sense of how freaky that was." I frowned. "Just over a week ago, you say?" I thought back. I'd just gotten out of quarantine by then, and had started asking for room and board at farms. "I met a, um, gaggle of farm-girls that were all wearing blue dresses, but I just assumed they were wearing Plain Dress. They, uh, even got me into one."

"Ah," my conversational partner said, raising a finger, "but when you woke up, did you /want/ to wear blue or green?"

I shook my head. "I was trying /not/ to wear anything, or at least as little as I could get away with. Still getting used to the fur."

"Exactly." He sat back with a smile on his face.

"... I don't follow. And I'd rather not play guessing games."

"Very well, Miss... Bunny." He leaned forward again. "To make it plain - as far as we can tell, every human, parahuman, and other sapient biological being is often influenced, or outright controlled, by post-Singularity intelligences, via unknown means, for unknown purposes. Out of everyone who's lived through Doomsday, or been born from those who were, we haven't found any significant exceptions. You, on the other hand, were dead and frozen through Armageddon; at liquid nitrogen temperatures, chemistry in your body - and your brain - essentially stopped for the duration. You, Miss Bunny, may very well be the only... completely /clean/ mind on the planet."

I shook my head. "Read your file. I'm probably more 'under the influence' of something than you are - my whole skeleton-"

"-was biopsied while you were in quarantine, and its information analyzed. Simplifying a great deal, your bones contain a number of repeated computation units, each with the same programming, which sums up to 'keep you alive when you can't'. If we did pump sedative gas into this room, once you fell unconscious, you would most likely get up and walk out, fighting off any guards who tried to stop you, and go hole up somewhere safe until you woke up again."

"... How long have you people known this? And - again, could we skip the guessing games?"

"Our analysts estimate that there is a greater than one percent chance that you are, quite literally, the only sane person. If you were to decide that traveling cross-country to Arizona is the best choice, there is a non-negligible probability that it really is. If you were to decide that /not/ traveling cross-country is the best choice, that moderately increases the odds of your sanity."

I started to feel a chill, and realized I'd started sweating. "I don't think I like any of the implications I'm starting to think of."

"I don't see why. We're considering offering you a city to run."

That blinkered me, and I blinked rapidly, responding with a flat, "What?"

"Oh, not the whole thing, at first. You may be sane, but you still need to learn bureaucratic skills, management, and all that. Dogville's economy has become reasonably integrated into the Technoville system, and we're going to start putting up a new set of quarantine procedures and firewalls here over the next few decades; but while we're doing that, we plan on expanding our influence to Cleveland, and after that, Erie and Buffalo. We could start you as a college professor, move you up through the academic ranks, and then into general politics. But there's plenty of time to work out such plans."

I was shaking my head without even realizing it, and looking for ideas to reject the whole notion. "I don't believe you. If I really am a one-of-a-kind resource, there's no way you'd have let me out of your sight for a moment, let alone biking all over the countryside with bad maps and the possibility of just heading over the horizon."

"I believe I already said - tests. You /may/ be the Only Sane Bunny. It's still not /likely/."

I found another objection. "I'm schizoid - an introvert on steroids. No matter how much training you give me, if you put me in charge of... anything, I'd go bug-nuts in short order."

He calmly answered, "Some advances in psychology and psychiatry were made after you died. That issue is one that can be dealt with."

"Ah," I said, "but you /can't/ trust me the way you're talking about. /Somebody/ had to keep my cryostat topped up with liquid nitrogen - and then thaw me out, and build the body I'm wearing now. If that wasn't you guys, that leaves the post-Singularity intelligences themselves, the very people - things? - you're trying to avoid being influenced by. What better way to keep tabs on you than to give you exactly what you want?"

He slowly nodded. "That /is/ a serious objection. It's also why you're still not ever going to be allowed past any of Technoville's firewalls and into the city itself. We're taking that possibility into account in the various plans involving you. Still - while you just might be exactly what /we/ want, we're offering you what /you/ want. Instead of making your way across thousands of kilometres of landscape - you could just start your own cryonics group here. Well, more likely in Cleveland. Even if you're not actually immune to anything, or if you are but it wears off after a while, you'd still be part of the local power structure, and be able to get things done that you couldn't on your own."

I raised my hand, one finger pointed ceilingward, and opened my mouth to say something. I paused, silent, closed it; then opened again, and stated, "I need to pee."

--

I did have a full bladder, but mostly I needed a few moments to try to collect my thoughts. I didn't care if the bathroom had hidden cameras everywhere - Technoville surely already had plenty of recordings of my naked body, even before the body had become mine.

By the time I'd cleaned up and rejoined the man in gray, I had a plan. Well, half a plan. Well, enough of the start of a plan to work out the rest as I went.

"I think that I need to make it perfectly clear that I simply do not want to end up in a position of political power. The highest position I've ever had was getting elected as president of my tenant's association, and that was only because nobody else wanted the job."

"I think you underestimate our psychological science. By the time we're done, you'll be eager for the position."

"That's pretty much my /point/. The me of right now doesn't want to end up turning into that version of my possible future selves, even knowing that that version of me would be happy to have been turned into a... politician. Even if I do accept the premise that there's something special about my gray matter, because I was on pause for a while - there's every chance that whatever it is would just get wiped away with that big of a psychological change."

"Again, I think you underestimate our psychological science, but it's a valid point."

"We both know that I'm perfectly capable of going off and playing Tarzan by myself in the woods. But even if I don't believe everything you've been saying, it seems like there's /something/ you want from me. So if you want me to work with you instead of going off to do my own thing, here's my price: stop hiding. Put together some sort of exploration and contact corps, to start getting in touch with the rest of humanity, and anything else that wants to talk. With an actual budget, and personnel, and air and radio sections, and the authority to carry arms for self-defence. And I want a pony.

"... and ... a ... pony," he said, finishing writing down some notes. "Talking or non-talking?"

"You're joking."

"We keep track of parahumans of all descriptions, just in case their particular attributes ever become useful. What do you want the pony for? Transportation, company, food-taster, sex slave-"

I started coughing violently, and missed the rest of his suggestions. I grabbed a glass of water from the table, more concerned about clearing my throat and breathing again than how drugged it might be.

When I'd settled back down, I said, "I keep forgetting there's been a cultural change. When I'm from, 'I want a pony' is a euphemism, meaning something like 'I don't expect this to ever happen."

"So, scratch the pony?" I took off my glasses and rubbed my face. "I'll leave it as a bonus request. Now, to be clear, are you asking merely for this corps to exist, or to be put in charge of it?"

I re-donned my glasses. "You're joking. Technoville's whole modus operandi is information management and control. And you're trying to seriously tell me that you'd actually consider opening up channels to random humans of all sorts?"

"I'm going to pass along the suggestion. Even without you involved in it, it's an idea worth re-examining, by now. Besides that - as you've just said, there's been a cultural shift. Over ninety-nine percent of humanity disappeared from the rest. The remainder came from isolationists, campers, boaters, rural communities, and other fringe cases. Put those together, and by your standards, pretty much every last human is insane. Enough time has gone by that those of us still around are /functionally/ insane, but insane nonetheless. Back home, in Technoville, we use... various rituals and procedures to re-ground us against reality, each and every day. That's possibly why seventy percent of us /didn't/ get caught up in the blue-green day. A large part of those rituals is... to put it delicately, re-evaluating our ideas against the evidence, both old and new. You have an uncommon perspective. If you think re-establishing a worldwide communications system might be a good idea, the simple fact that you thought of it means it's worth re-checking why we haven't done that."

I set the glass down. "Are you saying that, whatever ideas I propose, you're going to take seriously? That if I'd asked for," I waved a hand as I sought for a suitable ridiculous idea, "a personal harem of every available species and gender, you'd earnestly and thoughtfully consider giving that to me?"

"In short - yes."

"Ah. Well, it's a good thing I didn't ask for that, then." I tried to ignore him hastily erasing the note he'd started to add to his list. "Um. Wow. Having my ideas taken seriously by the powers-that-be... /that's/ a new thought. Er - you /do/ realize that while I may be unique in all sorts of ways, I'm not nearly as smart as actually smart people? I come up with bad ideas, and make bad decisions, a lot more often than I like to remember."

"That's why I'm simply feeding your idea into the input queue, and am not proclaiming you the new Empress of Technoville whose whim is custom and word is law."

"Ah. Good for you. Ah... One thing I've learned about myself over the years - I'm even worse at coming up with ideas on-the-spot than when I have a little time to think things over. It can take a couple hours of walking without any chatter just to clear my head enough to start coming close to having more good ideas than bad. So how about we call it a day and talk again after you've had a chance to go back and forth with whoever it is you go back and forth with?"

"That seems reasonable. Have you arranged for lodgings, or would you like to spend the night here?"

"False dichotomy. I may not be smart, but I've picked up enough tricks that I can pretend to be, now and then. I still have time to find a Changed-friendly place, or to get out of the city far enough to camp..."

--

I was persuaded to stay in the Embassy when one particular fact was pointed out to me: they had showers with unlimited hot water. A couple of weeks of camp hygiene, cold farmers' baths, and no more hot water than could be boiled, made the attraction irresistible, even before I was promised enough shampoo and conditioner to suds up my entire pelt. If nothing else, a good shower was almost as good as a short walk for clearing my mind.

So it was while my usually-fluffy fur was plastered to my skin, and I was rinsing the first layer of grime into the drain, that I heard a knock at the suite's door, and the words "Room service" echoing from the translator pendant I'd looped around the towel rack. (Which was right next to my sword-cane. My belt-knife was hanging on the shower-head - I had no intention of having a Psycho pulled on me. Scorpia was playing innocent watch on top of my clothes.)

I called out, "Leave it out there," the shampoo running down my ears forcing me to keep my eyes closed. I'd been trying to think through my current situation with a thought experiment, coming up with a historical parallel: If the Nazis hadn't perpetrated the Holocaust, hadn't said word one about subhuman races, would they still be evil? Well, they wouldn't be the absolutely /perfect/ villains they'd ended up as, but still qualified, what with the invading other countries, trying to implement thought control such as by executing the members of White Rose, and general totalitarianism. Looked at from a distance, and tilting my head just right (and not just to get the water out of my ears) the reason all of /that/ was bad could be because societies tended to survive when they could win wars, and for the past few hundred-to-thousand years, wars tended to be won by the side with the most advanced technology, and technology tended to advance most when the marketplace of ideas was allowed to bloom as much as possible. However, the fact that the most advanced technology had led to a Singularity, one that humanity (or mind-kind, or whatever word now applied to both humans and parahumans) had almost been wiped out by, meant that maybe pushing tech forward wasn't necessarily the best basis for a civilization anymore.

But that assumed that any future Singularity would also be a bad one. I'd never quite gotten the hang of applying Bayesian updates - I could do the math, just not quickly enough for it not to be a mental stumbling block - but I'd certainly gotten the hang of Laplace's Sunrise Formula. If, before the Singularity, people knew so little about it that there was no reliable evidence about whether it would be a good or bad one, the best estimate would be there was a 50% chance of each outcome. According to Laplace, if you had a single example to work with, the odds would shift from 50% to 66.6%, towards whichever outcome had happened. Was I really considering throwing away the whole Enlightenment, science and democracy and capitalism and trials based on evidence and so much more, just because the odds that a second Singularity would turn out bad had increased by 17%? Sure, it was a simplified model that left out almost all evidence but the fact of the event itself, but since I didn't really have all that much other evidence to go on in the first place...

One of the advantages of flexible parabolic ears was that they could be turned to catch any sound, tuning it in. One disadvantage was that if they weren't tuned in, and if there was a lot of background noise - like running water - they tuned pretty much everything else out. So I was kind of surprised to hear the shower door slide open. I tried to step back out of the stream of water to clear my eyes, but I bumped into someone who'd just stepped into the shower behind me.

By this time, my ears had swivelled to face whatever was going on, so I could hear the words, quite clearly, in English, and low but feminine, "I hear you're looking for a pony." My sense of touch was able to tell that whoever it was, was both unclothed and furred.

I started to shake my head. "Nope. Nuh-uh. Heard wrong. I don't know who told you what, but you might as well consider me asexual, aromantic, and a-everything-else until further notice that will probably never be given."

The water and suds finally cleared from my eyes enough for me to open them. There was, in fact, an equine-style Changed standing behind me, brown fur, hooves instead of feet - and towering over me, easily over seven feet to my almost-five-feet-plus-ears. Even with my glasses a few steps out of reach, I was also able to see the pistol she was holding, with of all things a condom unrolled over the barrel; not pointed particularly in my direction, but that tiny little detail didn't seem all that important compared to the fact of its existence.

"Are you sure you won't give me the opportunity to... persuade you?"

 

*Chapter Seven: Re-Jiggering*

"Can I at least finish my shower first?"

She gestured with her gun. I heaved a sigh, and stepped out onto the bathmat. I would have tried turning off the water, but my knife was by the tap, and that pistol could make great big ugly holes in me if I so much as twitched in a potentially unfriendly manner. Another gesture had me sit on the commode, whereupon she grabbed the translator and exited the bathroom. I heard a soft click, and then murmuring voices, whereupon she returned and carefully closed the door. "That should keep the microphones busy," she said, in not quite a whisper, and sat down on the tile. She set her gun down beside her, resting her arms on her knees. "I trust you won't mind that the Tech spies will get the impression that you're a reasonably ordinary heterosexual transman, who is willing to be persuaded to be cuddled by a big naked woman."

"'Cuddled'?"

"Officially, I've been hired to be your bedwarmer. That's not a euphemism - I lie in the bed and warm it for you. The tape has me stay in bed with you as you get ready to sleep. That's all."

The bathroom's air was steamy from the shower, but my fur was full of water, and I was starting to feel chilly from what was evaporating. "And that little toy?" I gestured at her weapon, before wrapping my arms around myself.

"We need to talk, now, without the Techs overhearing."

"And this is really the best way? ... And if you're not going to point that thing at me, could you toss me a towel?"

The bathtowel was dutifully chucked, and less dutifully thwapped me in the head. Without having had a chance to apply conditioner, I expected my fur to frizz out and make my clothes even more itchy than usual, but right now, I was just chilly. As I started drying myself, my baffling bedwarmer breathed, "We need to know who you are, where you're from - and who you're with."

Instead of answering, I asked the obvious, "'We' who?"

"You don't need to know that."

I paused in my ruffling of the towel, and just stared at her. She stared back. "Well," I said, "now I know what it is you need. I'm glad we had this little chat." She dropped her hand to the floor, onto the pistol. I sighed again. "You are aware that I probably would have happily answered your questions if you'd just come up to me and asked? Now you've got me feeling all tetchy."

"Time is an issue. We were hoping you'd come to a rooming house - but since you stayed in here, we had to use me. Which puts my position at risk. If you even hint to the Techs that we talked, and I haven't gone to ground, they'll put me in interrogation faster than you can blink. I'd rather shoot myself than let that happen. Of course, I'd rather shoot you than shoot myself."

"I'd really rather nobody got shot at all."

"Then answer the questions, and make me believe you."

"Which questions?" I wrapped the towel around my torso the way I'd seen in movies, as an impromptu under-the-shoulder dress. I had an urge to flip the lid up from the seat I was on and use it, but that didn't seem to be a plan that reduced the odds of my getting shot. I supposed that this was just the sort of thing I could expect to happen to me, in the civilization of this brave new world.

"You told Hair Miller that you'd had access to books and shows from twenty fifteen and before. Was that true?"

"It would be trivial to catch me if I lied about that. And I can't think of a reason I would have."

"Does that library still exist?"

"Um." I wrinkled my forehead. "Uh - no, I can't say that it does."

"Crap. Was it the only one around? Where was it?"

I leaned over to my piled clothes, watching for her reaction; when she didn't say yay or neigh, I pulled out bra and undies, and started pulling them on. Mostly to give myself a moment to think; this seemed like a moment to tell the truth in a misleading way. "My grandfather was born a Mennonite. My father wasn't. I was born on a farm. I've spent most of my life... call it a hundred klicks out of Toronto. As far as I know, my home isn't there anymore, everyone I'm related to is dead, and I'm, well, this," I gestured at myself.

"Double crap. The thing that Changed you - is /it/ still around?"

I was now pulling on my t-shirt and wristwatch, and holding onto the shorts, since the belt that kept them from sliding off was in the shower with the knife. "... I don't think it's going to be turning anyone else into bunnies, if that's what you mean."

"Triple crap. Well, this has been a complete bust. I guess all that's left is to ask, are you with the Techs?"

I tried to pretend I didn't see her shift her hand closer to where the pistol was. This seemed to be a rather important question to answer correctly. "/You/ have a job with them," I pointed out. "Bedwarmer and whatever else it is you do."

"That's just what I do. Not who I'm /with/."

"In case you haven't noticed, I just got here. So far, they're the only ones to make any sort of offer at all." I was trying to get the gears of my brain kicked into rapid motion, but the little rat in there seemed more interested in enjoying the view than running on the wheel. I did notice that I was missing one detail which might help move things along. "For example," I said, "I don't even know if this town's in contact with the other cities on the lake - Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and the smaller ports."

"Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be?"

"Uh-huh." And that finally managed to get something going. I realized I'd been using the wrong mental model. Treating the city-state of Technoville like the Nazis was a terrible way to understand the region - the key thought in there was 'city-state'. On and around Lake Erie alone, there were at least four cities, plus Technoville next to it, plus Detroit. That meant there were at least, say, seven intelligence-style groups working in Toledo/Dogtown alone.

This wasn't a simple dictatorship-versus-democracy political arena. This was classical Greece, with Athens and Sparta butting heads; or even better, the Italian city-states, with Venice and Florence and Milan and so on scrabbling for power. The arena that had produced the Borgias, the Medicis, and Machiavelli. And here I'd just come blithely traipsing in without a care in the world.

I was so screwed.

"Well," I said, "If you're asking me to join your little band, I have to say that given the display of clumsy amateurism I've seen so far, I'd be surprised if I survived a week if I did."

"'Clumsy'?" This time she did put her hand directly on her weapon. Perhaps, given her size, it was a sensitive subject for her. Well, nothing for it but to press on.

I started ticking off items on my fingers, trying to imply that I'd already worked all of them out when I was really thinking of them just a split-second before I said them. "You gave away the name of an information source. You've implied that you've got a good idea what all the local members of your gang think, meaning you don't have a good cell structure with one-way communication cut-outs. You brought a potentially noisy weapon on an operation that should be covert. You didn't even try the seductive approach before you brought an obvious weapon to threaten me with. You brought a weapon at all, when it looks pretty obvious that if you needed to kill me, you could probably snap my neck with one hand. You haven't actually offered me anything that appeals to my self-interest, other than my mere survival, and that so poorly that it's reasonable for me to conclude my best odds of living are to run straight into the embrace of the Techs and hand you over to them - or even worse, for me to run to them, and let them convince me to infiltrate your group as a double-agent. And somewhat more annoying, personally, is that with even a modicum of analysis, the Techs probably already know you're a member of your group and are here to do /something/ with me, which means that if I /don't/ run to them and tell them about you, they're going to suspect /me/ of signing up, whether I have or not."

I'd long since run out of fingers, and did my best to glare at her. "In short, your general and specific incompetence has severely cut down my options for survival. In fact, I can only think of two main approaches. One is to make myself useless by getting as far away as possible. The other is to make myself useless by simply signing up with every faction in reach, and blowing all the double- and triple- agent shenanigans out of the water by /telling/ them that I'm joining up with everyone, to make sure not one of them trusts me with anything important, and more importantly, that every group knows none of the others are going to trust me with anything important."

I had the minor pleasure of hearing her teeth grating. "And where does that leave me? Hanging in the wind, under the Techs' tender mercies?"

I pointed at her gun. "Leave that with me. If the Techs find it, I'll tell them I was 'testing' their security. I'll tell them, oh, you tried to seduce me and failed - that'll fill their expectations of you doing something vaguely spy-related to me, without getting them annoyed that you were thinking of killing off their prize rabbit. If you did manage to sneak that thing through their security undetected, I've had opportunity to get one, and reason to think of a way to bring it in with me, and some sources of information about how I could evade typical detection methods, so it'll all check out. If, as seems more likely, the Techs already know you have it, then they'll think I found it in your stuff after you tried to sleep with me, and that I stole it for myself from you. Again, a plausible scenario which doesn't implicate either of us in anything significant."

"Crap in a bucket. Crap by the boatload." She was rubbing her eyes. "You were supposed to be this poorly-educated hick, who'd just been reading books a century out of date. Why can't I say I tried to seduce you and succeeded?"

"Too out of character for me. You are, physically, quite nice to look at - but I really am asexual, or at least close enough to it that it's easier to just round up." I stood from the toilet, stepped over to the shower, reached in, and retrieved my belt and knife from the showerhead. She just watched, not stopping me, as I threaded it onto my shorts. "Risk of pregnancy, of STDs, of all the emotional and interpersonal stuff that I'm very much bad at - I've got so many more important things to do with my time."

"I'm not giving you my gun," she said.

I shrugged. "Well, I can hardly force you to, now can I? You having a gun and all. In that case, I suggest that it never entered this room."

She grunted, stood, and opened the bathroom door. I leaned on the doorframe and watched her dress, collect a wheeled tray, hide the gun inside it, shut off a tape recorder at a quiet moment, and leave the room.

I decided I /really/ shouldn't touch the food or drink she'd left.

I turned around, made use of the commode, flushed, turned around, and delicately threw up into it. Then I showered all over again - this time, fortunately, without interruption.

--

Before I took to bed, I pulled out the ebook-reader-style "Library" that I'd been given by Technoville, and searched for certain items. As I expected, there was no trace of "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451", "V for Vendetta", or Orwell. No sign of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", though "Starship Troopers" was there. All of "Star Wars", but only a few scattered bits of "Star Trek". "Narnia", but not "The Dark is Rising". "The Hobbit", but not "The Lord of the Rings". Ayn Rand, no Philip K. Dick. H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" was missing, but Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was there. "Lord of the Flies" yes, "Catcher in the Rye" no. Lots of Stephen King and Doc Smith; not so much Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov.

After a while of that I sighed, and got ready for the night. I didn't quite feel like starting to read through the Barsoom books in search of inconsistencies with what I remembered of them, so I simply opened up the Beatrix Potter collection, and lost myself for a while in the simplicity of Edwardian era rural life, as interpreted for children by talking animals.

--

I woke to my muzzle being clamped shut with a gloved hand, another covering my eyes, and the rest of the person clambering onto my torso and holding my arms down. I grunted and thrashed, and I think I got a few good kicks in before someone else grabbed my legs and sat down on them. Despite my ferret-like flexibility, that kept me from doing pretty much else. I felt a sharp sting in my arm, and the world wobbled, went fuzzy, and went away...

--

Once, when I was somewhat younger - or a lot younger, depending on your point of view - I was puttering in my house, and started to feel a bit off. I was heading over to let my roommate know I was feeling a bit sick... and the next thing I knew, I was in a gurney, in a hospital, being rolled down a hall for some sort of brain scan. I hadn't fallen unconscious; I was later told that for all those hours, I was still able to talk, and every few minutes would ask, "What time is it?". No cause was ever found, and it wasn't linked to anything else - the doctors just called it 'transient global amnesia' and everyone went on with their lives.

Like that incident, I have no actual memory of the next bit of this tale, but I can make a best-guess reconstruction:

"The drug isn't /working/," might have said Thing One. "She's not answering anything, just asking about the bloody time."

I probably would have commented, "Say, what time is it?"

Thing Two might have seen a solution to the problem. He could have suggested, "Wrap her left hand in duct-tape so she can't do anything, take her hood off, then unshackle her left hand and stick it so she can /see/ what bloody time it is on her watch."

Such a suggestion, however it had been proposed, would have been carried out, and if I may be allowed a bit of self-indulgent creative license, I expect that I would have smiled and said, "Oh, /that/'s the time. Thank you. Scorpia, auto defense."

--

I woke, not remembering anything after being assaulted in my bed. I found myself sitting in a chair, right arm and legs handcuffed to my seat, left hand wrapped in a duct-tape mitt, two humans slumped on the floor in front of me, and my wristwatch transformed into her robotic scorpion form jumping from one to the other.

There was once a programming language called Logo, in which you could make drawings on the screen by giving commands to a virtual 'turtle', like 'pen up', 'pen down', 'turn 30 degrees left', and 'move forward ten pixels'. When I gave her specific commands instead of one of the general directives Convoy had programmed into her, Scorpia was, roughly, as smart as that turtle. By saying various orders such as "Scorpia, turn five degrees left. Scorpia, move forward ten centimeters. Scorpia, climb onto that table leg. Scorpia, climb up. Scorpia, grab the object five centimeters in front of you. Scorpia, return," I was able to have various objects brought close enough that I could make out whether they were a key. It took roughly two throat-burning hours, including breaks for my oh-so-obedient pet to jump back onto one of the men to re-shock them, and more misfired orders than I care to remember, before I finally found that key (in Thing Two's pocket) and got Scorpia to unlock the handcuff on my right wrist.

It took under two minutes for me to free the rest of myself, cuff the two Things, and search the white-plastered room for anything useful. Other than the light bulb above, and the door with no handle, all I found was a small case with a syringe and a roll of duct-tape.

I ordered Scorpia back to my wrist - I didn't know how much of her batteries she'd used up tasing the Things - stripped the men in case I'd missed anything (like the knife that had been removed from inside my own belt) - and applied copious amounts of tape to immobilize and mute them, each of them ending up in something like a fetal position.

And then I sat down next to the door, and waited. I tried to think, but not much came out of it.

After about ten minutes, according to Scorpia, Thing One groaned into his tape-gag, and opened his eyes. He thrashed around a bit, and I watched closely in case I needed to apply more tape, but the world's perfect tool held firm.

I cleared my throat, and he looked in my direction. "Hi," I said. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. So let me introduce myself." I scooted forward, reached my hand forward - and grabbed his nose, pinching it closed. He made a number of noises, and swung his head around, but this time my flexibility was actually useful, and I kept his airways shut.

After he stopped trying to kick, I let go, and he heaved in a great lungful of air, staring at me, eyes wide. I asked, "Are you going to make me introduce myself again?" He shook his head urgently. "And you'll answer my questions, so I don't have to figure out how to use two dead bodies to open that door?" He nodded just as urgently. "Good. I hate getting blood in my fur." I had not, in fact, yet gotten any blood in my fur; but if I was now stuck in the world of drug-based interrogations, black ops, and other stuff that would have violated the Geneva, Hague, Vienna, and Berne Conventions if they still existed, then I didn't think anything resembling a half-measure would be enough to get me out of it alive.

I started unpeeling the tape wrapped around his head, freeing his mouth. "Now then," I commented as calmly as I could, "is there anything you would like to /volunteer/?"

"Don't kill me," he said, very quickly, as soon as he spat the wad of tap out. A bit less frantically, he added, "We're on /your/ side."

I picked up the tape roll and fiddled to start freeing the end of the tape. "I didn't think I needed to say - don't /lie/ to me. Or scream. Screaming would be bad."

"I /am/ on your side!" he hissed, fast, but obviously trying to speak as un-screamingly as possible. "I'm with the psych bureau. We're just improving your profile!"

"If that's the case, then where are the cameras, to make sure you don't miss anything? Why aren't we already covered in guards?" I shook my head, picked up the wadded tape from the floor, and held it to his mouth. "Open," I ordered. When he didn't right away, I said, "Do you /want/ to see how easy it is for these teeth to open an artery?" He let me re-gag him without further stalling.

I sat back and waited for Thing Two to open his eyes. When he did, I introduced myself to him, and asked what he'd like to volunteer.

"You're just making trouble for yourself," was his approach.

"Really?" I asked. "You're really going to try the alpha male crap on me? How much worse than getting black-bagged in the middle of the night does it /get/? Outright waterboarding? Vivisection?"

He shook his head. "We're here to /help/ you. Make your mind better. Make you more able to do what you want to get done."

"Stop," I said, and heaved a dramatic sigh that I hoped wasn't /too/ dramatic. "So much for volunteering. New topic: How do I get out of here? And I don't want any of that nonsense about answering direct questions but leaving out things I didn't think to ask, like whether there's a bear-trap in the hall. First subtopic. Other than trying to figure out which of your long-bones would make the best prybars, how do I get that door open?"

--

They were remarkably cooperative about describing the puzzle-box-like secret panel on the door, which directions the hallways went, where the stairs were, where the likely guards and cameras were, and so on. It might have had something to do with my having mused aloud about rolling along whichever of them was less helpful, to use as raw materials.

Since I wasn't anywhere near as psychopathically callous about their lives as I was doing my utmost to appear to be, and I couldn't actually think of a way having one of them along could help me if something went wrong or they'd lied, I just re-gagged them, jammed the sliding panel latch thing, and left them locked inside.

I was, in fact, still in the Embassy, about two stories above the suite I'd hoped to get a good night's rest in. I had my clothes (with all the useful stuff removed), Scorpia, and a skeleton that might or might not act on its own initiative. The electronics that Technoville had given me were probably in my room, though I didn’t feel any urgency in collecting them. I'd been told my bike and its gear had been parked in the 'garage' overnight. I decided that I was now officially done with Technoville; whatever the two Things had really been after, they'd just lost themselves a potentially-posthuman-memetics-resistant ally. The only reason I hadn't already left the Embassy was because I was trying to think of anything useful I might do first. Unfortunately, I had no map of the place other than the Things' unreliable descriptions, and no idea where any interesting people might be bedded, and the only useful resources I had any idea where to find was the bike.

I decided to take the gamble and try to grab it. After all, one advantage when dealing with an opponent who used heavy compartmentalization of information was that the left hand never knew what the right was doing, so unless I triggered something that alerted anyone high-up enough to know about the Things, I'd just be another guest puttering around in the middle of the night.

I didn't come across anyone as I made my way down to ground level. I was feeling nervous - was whoever was paying attention to the hidden camera feeds informed that I was a 'special guest', and were very large people with very large weapons waiting for me around the next corner? Or was Assange's theory that an intelligence apparatus that cut its internal comm channels would become extraordinarily ineffective proving out?

I entered the garage - most of which looked more like a stable, including horses. There weren't any car-sized vehicles - but there were three courier bikes, including my own. Since I wasn't going to have Technoville's support anymore, I decided to take a small severance package: all the spare parts I could find, and all the trade goods and other things from the other two bikes that I could stuff in, on, or tape to my own bike's trailer. Including removing the fuel filters from inside the other bike's motors. They'd still run for a while, but as soon as the injector clogged, they wouldn't be spreading news about me very far.

I peeked out into the courtyard, and saw nothing between me and the gate but a guard post with a single man, slumped back in his seat, reading. If I could bluff, brazen, or bludgeon my way past him, I'd be home free.

I had to put my chop on a sign-out sheet, and once he'd checked his clipboard, out I pedalled; out into the streetlight-lit streets powered by the Embassy. I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief, and started thinking about where to go for the rest of the night.

And had my thoughts rudely interrupted by a /third/ person in one night who seemed to not have my best interests at heart. As the figure stepped out of the shadows, holding a pair of pistol-sized crossbows aimed at me, I couldn't help but decry the universe's unfairness with, "Oh, come /on/!"

 

*Chapter Eight: Re-Curring*

I had been informed that I just might be saner than anyone I was going to meet. But they also say that your powers of rationality tend to desert you when you need them the most. So I'm going to blame what happened next on some combination of lack of sleep, stress, adrenaline, and the aftereffects of whatever chemicals the Things had shoved into my veins.

I was in something of a residential neighbourhood, with brown-brick apartments or townhouses pushed up against the street. My latest interruption stepped out between two such buildings. I'm not going to even try to imitate the way he spoke; In honor of Ms. Potter and the brownstone-like residences we were between, just imagine your least favorite British accent, and assume that it was cranked up to near-unintelligibility.

"Stand and deliver!" was his choice of greeting.

After I took a moment to puzzle out what the words he'd said probably meant, I feigned even further ignorance. "Deliver what? A baby?"

"Whatever you're carrying will be good enough."

I held my hands up to my head, briefly double-facepalming, starting by saying "Razza-frazza something-or-other," and, my voice gradually fading, a few other words. Putting my hands behind my head a moment in frustration, then back on the bike's handlebars, I stared at the urban highwayman. "Don't you know it's a felony to interfere with the mail?"

"You're no mailman, lady. Which means you stole everything you've got. Which means it's only fair you get it stolen from you right back, isn't it? You could even say I'm doing my civic duty." He flashed a smile he probably thought was roguish and dashing. I thought the effect was spoiled by his several missing teeth.

I heaved a sigh. "I feel it's only fair to warn you - I have magic powers. Go away and you won't find out what they are."

His smile disappeared. "I wanted to do this nice, but if you're stalling-"

I raised my right hand, pointed at him; and thrust it forward, declaring, "Stupefy!"

He dropped like a rock.

One of my sword-poles was back in my Embassy suite, but I grabbed the other one, padded over to him, and poked to make sure he was out. Seeing a certain small, mostly-black form, I thanked goodness for Sufficiently Advanced Technology and scooped up Scorpia, who'd spent her last joule to knock the man out, following the orders I'd given after quoting Yosemite Sam. Hooking her back onto her wristband, I wondered whether it would be worth the risk of going through the fellow's pockets for loose change, or I should just grab his two pistols-

Abruptly, something kicked me so that I spun in a circle. My left leg wasn't supporting my weight, and I started swinging the pole to keep from falling. I saw an arrowhead and shaft sticking out my left thigh. I started feeling, maybe not quite as much pain as I'd expect from such treatment, but at least something as strong as hitting my thumb with a hammer. Repeatedly. "Fffffff-" I started hissing.

Since I was now facing the direction the missile had come from, when I had a moment of attention to spare, I could make out its source - a teenish boy, barely holding onto a crossbow that looked almost as big as he was, eyes wide, not moving. I made a few very rapid conclusions: If he fired again, I was dead. He wasn't firing - I needed to keep him from thinking of firing again. Distract, distract, distract.

"-fffie on you!" I turned my pain into volume. "Do you have any idea how much that /stings/?"

My left leg wouldn't move - I had to use the pole as a replacement limb. I advanced straight towards Short Stuff, shouting out imprecations the whole way. "You motherless son of a fatherless goat! May your sexual organs be switched with those of a syphilitic camel! May you find yourself constantly pissing in your dreams, so you always wake in fear of soaked trousers! May a snake crawl up your backside and-"

I saw him reaching into a pocket, and got ready to draw the sword and hurl at him as a last-ditch defense. His lips were moving; I caught the words, "Cold iron, what's cold iron anyway, silver, have I got silver," and continued my extremely awkward march.

He threw a handful of coins at me. A couple bounced off me to the street.

I cut off my cursing, and stood right in front of him. He pulled out a necklace, a small Star of David, and pushed it against my forehead. When I didn't burst into flames or anything, he turned even paler. I leaned forward, looked into his eyes, and declared, "Basically... run."

He did.

I looked down at my leg - to my surprise, there didn't seem to be any blood. There was, however, no doubt that I had a stick of wood shoved through muscle and bone and whatever else was there, and when I twisted to look at the back, some of the fletching was buried in my thigh. I didn't want any of the feathers to break off inside the wound channel, so I didn't want to just push it through; I didn't have any garden shears to cut off the arrowhead to push it backwards, and I'd always heard pushing such things back was a bad idea anyway... in short, I needed a doctor. I looked the bike - no way I could pedal the thing, so I'd either have to walk, which I could only kind of do fast enough that the Technovillians could have a leisurely breakfast and pick me up before the next intersection, or use the motor, which vibrated the whole machine, not counting the bumps and jounces from every irregularity in the road.

"This is gonna suck," I sighed.

--

As it happened, just swinging my good leg over the bike's frame took so much fiddling and effort that by the time I managed it, my hands were shaking so much I couldn't flip the bike's throttle. I had a strong suspicion that, bleeding or not, I was white as a sheet under my fur.

I realized that I also had something like tunnel vision when a pair of senior citizens stepped in front of the bike, both wearing pajamas, robes, and slippers. While the woman looked at me with pursed, disapproving lips, the thin, white-haired man nudged the would-be bandit with his foot.

"Still breathing," he commented. "I'm guessing... a drugged dart?" I said nothing, trying to pull off four-counts to steady my own breath. He turned and started walking towards me, raising his hand. I brought up my trekking pole and rested it on the handlebars. He dropped his hand. "We appreciate what you did. Britney, would be a dear and get some rope?" The wrinkled woman gave a sniff, a sound that was something along the lines of 'hmph', and turned to one of the nearby houses.

"I'm happy," I said with one breath, and "that you're happy," with another. "But aren't there... any police... around here?"

"Don't be disgusting," he said, and from his expression, he really did find the idea distasteful.

"Whatever. Scuze me. Need to. Go find. A doctor."

"Oh, pardon me, have I not introduced myself? My name is Doctor House."

I blinked. "Really?" I looked up and down at him; if anything, he looked more like an aged Dr. Wilson. "That's nice. But sorry. Can't stay. Need a. /Far/ doctor. No... tracking."

"I think I heard two things in there. One, that you need attention /fast/. And two, that you seem not to have heard of the Enhanced Privacy bill that the Council passed last year."

I breathed, and stared at him. He shrugged, and elaborated, "Complete doctor-patient confidentiality, and lawyer-client, and priest-confessor, and any other professional the Council decides to accept. I don't even have to admit I've got a patient, let alone anything in their file. Supposed to be balanced by an exception for Human Security, but that needs a warrant signed, and not rejected, by the first two judges they ask. Personally, I think the whole idea is mad as a March Hare, no offense intended, but I'm perfectly willing to take advantage of it to help a brave young parahuman like yourself, especially if I can talk about it long enough for you to stay put long enough to start falling unconscious here, instead of while you're in motion. I'll get Britney to roll your bike in back once she's done with the brigand here..."

--

When I woke up, I was ridiculously relieved that I still had both legs, instead of any stumps. The arrow was gone, my thigh was wrapped in a bandage, and my glasses were right next to me. Once they were back in place, I determined that I was lying on a cot in a room that seemed like a cross between an examination room and a pantry. The walls were lined in shelves of bottled... everything, liquid, solid, or otherwise.

I was staring at a particular jar, trying to figure out if any of the tentacles within had moved, when Dr. House came in. "Ah, awake. Should have expected that. You've got one of the nicest parahuman physiologies it's been my pleasure to treat. Even those with the most biologically well-assembled parts usually turn out to have a few complications - hemophilia is one of the least pleasant to unexpectedly discover."

"Doc," I said.

He kept on rolling. "It's always hardest when it hits families. I know of a mother and father, daughter and son, who all ended up as identical quadruplet women - green skin and chlorophyll. Not nearly enough surface area to reduce their caloric needs from photosynthesis, and they ended up with the most annoying allergy to leather. I hear they run an inn near the shore now, where they can sun themselves to their hearts' content, far enough away to avoid any awkward questions from their old friends about their familial arrangements."

"/Doc/."

"And then there are the less happy cases. Once I was next to a fellow whose transformation ended up with him as half-human, half-motorcycle. It was a nightmare just trying to figure out how he /ate/, let alone how to care for his-"

"/Doc!/"

"Yes, my dear?"

"I've got to go."

"Ah, my apologies. Let me get you a bedpan-"

"Doc - no. I have to /leave/. I appreciate the help, but the best way I can pay you back is get as far from you as possible and pretend we never met."

"Would it have something to do with the Technoville soldiers who have been running around their embassy like politicians facing defenestration?"

"... Maybe."

"Then don't worry. A couple of them came by Britney as she was stringing your archer up, and she told them you rode off thataway."

"Whichaway?"

"Does it matter?"

"I suppose not. Um - 'stringing up'? Does that mean - hanging?"

"Indeed. Oh, not as execution, if that's what you mean. He's just spread out on a lamp-post for the neighbourhood to draw on, throw rotten fruit at, and generally have a good time with. We don't have any good wooden stocks here, but we do have lots of rope."

"Oh. Well, have fun with that. I still need to get going as soon as I can."

"I'm afraid that that's not going to be soon." He sat on the edge of the cot, and patted my leg. I didn't feel it. "You may be able to avoid bleeding to death, but the arrow did come very close to your sciatic nerve. I don't think it cut it, but it at least damaged the nearby tissue enough to bruise and swell. Even if there's no infection and you heal better than anyone else on this side of Jupiter, you need to minimize movement, to minimize irritation that might cause permanent nerve damage."

"As someone close to me put it a little while ago: Crap."

"Oh, I assure you that's it's quite true-"

I shook my head. "Not disagreeing, just expressing an opinion on the state of the world."

"Fair enough. Charles will be back in half an hour, so if there's anything I can have him get for you..."

"Hm... Newspapers. New, old, as long as there's lots of different ones."

"Ah, a reader - a woman after my own heart."

"Charles - your son?" I hazarded.

"My husband."

"... And Britney?"

"Our wife."

"Ah. ... Anyone else in the family?"

"Just us three. But speaking of Britney - I feel I should bring up a point. She is probably going to be something less than polite to you. I'm afraid she tends to treat any parahuman with somewhat less respect than a hostess really should. It's not personal; about ten years back, the city had its last Armageddon outbreak, and several of her close friends died. Melted, to put it delicately. And she just hasn't been able to bring herself to stop resenting parahumans who survived their change reasonably intact."

"Ah. Well - we all have our scars. Um... I think I need to go."

"She's really not /that/ bad - mostly stares and sniffs and-"

"No, no - I need to /go/."

"Ah - let me get that bedpan..."

--

I never actually caught sight of Charles - he seemed to either be running errands, or hanging out with a few other guys aiming to create some sort of "Last of the Summer Wine" pastiche. After the second ladder crash, I suspected he married into the House household simply to have ready access to medical care.

The bike had been shoved not just into a backyard, but into a shed, much to my relief. Technoville had planes - for all I knew, they also had drones to run aerial surveillance. When I expressed my concern, Doc House commented, "Don't try to teach your grandfather to suck eggs." It seemed imprudent to open the debate about whether or not I was older than he was.

Britney House, nee Hill, eventually passed her public prisoner to some sort of chain gang. From hints and subtexts in the conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he was being sent to help in a 'public works' project - something related to cleaning up dangerous sites.

I didn't get to learn all of this from Doc House's doctoring room; an hour or so after I got my diagnosis, I was hurriedly wheeled into the actual pantry, to make room for a birth that was suffering complications. And that was where I pretty much stayed for the next three days straight, with a leg that was as responsive as a slab of meat.

I spent the time reading voraciously, using every trick I could vaguely recall to extract the maximum relevant data in the minimum time. Toledo - which was still officially called that by the City Council, even though it was called 'Dogtown' (or some variation) by just about everyone else - had, if the newspapers were to be believed, been essentially depopulated in 2050, especially its core. Its metro area went from over half a million to under a thousand, with most of those thousand getting killed or leaving in the aftermath. But once the basics of survival were made reasonably reliable, the same impulses that had formed Catal Huyuk and Rome and every other urban area brought people back. Gradually, the various chemical toxins, radioactive emissions, killer robots, poisonous new plants, wild new animals, and other dangers were cleaned up.

The newspapers' reports became somewhat less reliable as of a decade ago. One of the brute facts that didn't seem to be deniable was that the position of mayor - which was more of an active commander-in-chief job than a shake-hands-and-kiss-babies sinecure - was taken over by a pair of twins instead of an individual. At around the same time, an alliance was struck between Toledo and Technoville, the last of the danger zones were cleared up, and people started calling the place 'Dogville'. From the old papers Charles was able to bring in, I couldn't be sure of much more than that, even to the level of figuring out which events happened first.

After that point, the Free Press's editorial stance became more pro-patriotism than Fox News, and possibly as much as Pravda. Despite the fact that the city had been declared 'safe', there was a constant drum-beats about the dangers posed by posthumans, and reminders of how everyone had to do their part to keep humanity alive. Coverage of parahumans, the Changed, started out treating them like warriors wounded in the defense of their homeland, to... not really saying much of anything at all.

Doc House came by every so often to check with me, and to exercise his gift of gab.

During one conversation, I managed to head off a recapping of local gossip with, "Say, has the city got a constitution? Or a charter, or something else of the sort?"

"Hm," he commented, scratching the back of his head. "Might be, might not. Don't recall ever seeing a charter, but the boffins in the Council might have one tucked away somewhere."

"That sounds... a bit troubling. How about a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or a Bill of Rights?"

"Don't think we've got one of those, not since the old American government disappeared in the Rapture."

"Or Canadian?"

"Don't know much about Canada. I hear it's mostly Indian Country on the north side of the lake, but that's mostly rumors from unreliable sorts."

"Well - how does the Council get elected, or know how to pass laws, or figure out who's Mayor, or anything like that?"

"Now what would a pretty young thing like you need to worry about a bunch of bickering old gray-beards for?"

"I'm trying to figure out what my options are - and what consequences there are if I do something boneheaded."

"Well, then, lassie, it's pretty simple. Everyone who lives in the city gets to vote for whoever they think should represent them. The top - dozen or so? something like that - get to be on the Council, and however many people voted for them, that's how many votes they get. And they spend their days arguing philosophy and law and how big a fine someone should have to pay for breaking two fingers on someone else instead of one. Dry, dreary stuff, that most people are glad to leave to those who like arguing about it day in and day out."

"... Hunh. That's not /quite/ the impression I was getting from the newspapers - they were talking about the Council like they were the people who get stuff done."

"A lot more happens in the city then ever makes it into the papers, bunsome. Some of it you had to be there to know it ever happened at all."

"So - how about the Mayor, then? How'd you end up with two?"

"Whoever's highest-ranking in the city bureaucracy. The Twins had the same rank, and neither's got seniority, and they don't overrule each other much, so it works out."

"Okay, city bureaucracy - who controls their budget?"

"The Mayors, who else?"

"And how does someone get into the bureaucracy?"

"That's easy enough - just sign up."

"... And what does the bureaucracy actually do?"

"Oh, the usual - patrol for bandits, keep any new kill-bots from killing off too many civilians, make sure everyone pays enough to keep the system that keeps humanity alive running."

"You mean, like an army?"

"Of course not - armies are for fighting /people/, and after Judgement Day, there's so few of us left, nobody wants to kill /anyone/ if they don't have to. They're the /bureaucracy/."

"Uh... /huh/." I ran through my mental checklist of civil jobs. "You mentioned judges once - who pays for them?"

"Whoever wants a trial instead of just letting their lawyers hash things out."

"If I remember right, you were unhappy when I brought up this group, but please remember that I really don't know why... Police?"

"My goodness, my good girl - don't you know /anything/ about history?"

"Only old stuff. Year two thousand or so and before."

"I'm pretty sure that's still late enough to know about the excesses that came from government controlling law enforcement."

"... Maybe? Some?"

The usually cheerful lines of his face were rearranged into a frown. "Well then. By the time the Rapture was getting close, police could pay illegal drugs to a known liar for false information implicating someone they didn't like, get the address wrong and burst in on a completely different home, shoot the dog, tase the people inside, some to death, drag the others into cells, not give them any food or water until they were half dead, steal anything valuable they found in the home, leave it open so strangers could ransack the rest, and if anyone complained, they'd 'investigate' themselves and find they'd done nothing wrong, and give their officers a few weeks of paid vacation."

"Oh. Um. Really?"

"Happened to my grandfather."

"... And people /put up/ with that?"

"The police were smart enough to avoid bothering the rich and powerful. Got to the point it would've taken a revolution to fix, and hey, it was America, who could fight the strongest military that'd ever existed? So we got a Rapture instead, swept out all those rich and powerful folk, and those who were left generally didn't want anything to do with the police ever again." He pursed his lips and considered. "At least, that's what happened around here. Might be some rich folk managed to stay rich through the bad times elsewhere, but I haven't heard even a rumour of that."

"Well, I'm glad for you filling me in - but I hope you don't mind, after reading these for a while," I held up the latest issue of the Free Press, "I'm feeling like I have to take everything with a grain of salt."

"Don't blame you, my lass, don't blame you at all. I'm just an ornery old doctor, history and politics have never really been my thing. If you're up to meeting other people, I know a few who know a lot more than you'll ever get out of those fish-wrappers. Sherri-Lynn says the problem was the smart money, when computer programs started paying their own upkeep, which put evolution on them to get things done, like nudging laws, and what worked for them didn't work so well for us people. Helen's got a theory about some group - the Illuminators? - pulling strings from behind the scenes. Terry-"

I cleared my throat, and interrupted. "That's all very interesting, and I'm sure I'll want to learn it all when I have the time - but I've got more pressing concerns."

"Anything I can help with?"

"Not sure. I'm just now starting to wrap my way around what you've been saying about how the city works... no official law enforcement officers but the government does take care of defense, private settlement of disputes... I'm not sure how it all works, but it sounds like someone drew on some pre-twentieth-century social history. Well, maybe even twentieth-century for the non-industrialized areas. What I'm trying to think of right now is, if I got in touch with the bureaucracy, or even one of the Mayors, and told them something they thought should stay secret, what are the odds of my getting out of that meeting alive and well?"

"Does it have something to do with why you're hiding in my pantry instead of decorating my parlor?"

"... You could say that."

"Hm." He tapped his chin. "I could get in touch with Ted, who still owes me for fixing up his gout, and see if there's some arrangements that could be made..." He trailed off as I shook my head. "You want to make your own arrangements?"

"Not... entirely. But if you get in touch with someone who gets in touch with someone, and so on, that's all going to trace back to you. I'm thinking something more along the lines of giving you a sealed envelope, and telling whoever I meet that my silent backer will send it off unless I make it out of the meeting and tell you not to."

"That doesn't sound too difficult, on my end. Of course, I'm curious what sort of secret you know that you could use for that."

"Probably safest that you don't ask." Particularly since I didn't have a good answer - I had a lot of supposition and speculation, plus the occasional weapon aimed at me for emphasis, but no real hard evidence. "On a somewhat related tack... do you think you can help me look a little less, well, recognizable? Being this shade of pink kind of makes the whole idea of tradecraft seem, well, kind of silly..."

 

*Chapter Nine: Re-Settling*

I did not, in fact, give Doc House a mysterious sealed envelope; I simply didn't know any secrets I was sure anyone who was politically powerful didn't want to get out. (Or, at least, I didn't /know/ that I knew any such secrets.) That was just one plan of many I came up with, considered, and threw away for not having any good chance of getting anything I actually wanted done.

Which, of course, brings us to the fact that I was also in the middle of trying to work out what it was I /did/ want done, that was remotely within reach, and was at least vaguely plausible given what I'd learned about the various people and groups I'd met since first re-awakening.

Staying alive if I could, of course, was pretty high up on my to-do list. But there were exceptions to that, such as avoiding the fate of some of the Changed - including being turned into something's internal organs, with no significant input from the outside, no way to do anything, and little to do but spend years in near-total sensory deprivation going mad. If it was simply a matter of locked-in syndrome, where I couldn't move a muscle, there had been promising avenues of investigation even before I'd died, I'd rather be locked-in than dead - in that case, there was at least a reasonable hope that I'd be able to, someday, communicate something useful through Morse code beeps. But without even that hope... I shuddered at the thought.

And yet - I was able to think of scenarios where I'd be willing to risk even that form of body-horror. In the grand tradition of philosophical thought experiments, if I could perform an act that put me at a risk of such permanent isolation and madness, but also reduced the odds that humanity (or sapient mind-kind in general) would be permanently exterminated... I could come up with a set of numbers where I'd take the risk for the benefit. Of course, it was supremely unlikely that I would ever be faced with a single choice like that; to name just one reason, as long as I was alive and out and about in the world, I could continue working to reduce the odds of sapience's extinction.

... Probably. Maybe. I was working nearly blind, knowing very little about what I might actually be able to do on that front. And so after massively overthinking everything I just mentioned, and a whole lot more, I was able to come to the conclusion that I'd been massively overthinking it all (though I might not have been able to figure that out without taking the time to massively overthink it), and the most reliable way to do something useful, to myself and everyone else, was to focus on some simple stuff...

--

With a bit of direction from Doc House, a bit of shopping by Charles, and even some sewing by Britney, I'd been transformed... at least a little. Instead of a pink rabbit riding a motorized bicycle, I now appeared, to one and all, to be a blue mouse being pushed around in a non-motorized wheelchair (with some dyed fur, my ears tucked flat, fake mouse ears on top, and a false tail-sleeve). Doc had gotten in touch with a former patient, who'd gotten in touch with a friend, who'd arranged for a ten-minute appointment with Arty, a secretary of Amber, the Deputy Mayor.

As the Doc pushed me along in the direction of the restaurant, I asked him, "Say, have you ever heard of an old story, Gulliver's Travels?"

"Sounds familiar. A fellow ends up in a land of tiny people, pulls their fleet behind him with ropes?"

"That's the one. Know anything else about it?"

"Nothing comes to mind."

"Lilliput is just from the first part of the story. It's been a while, but I remember Heinlein wrote something based on another of Gulliver's lands - the flappers. If I remember right, in one land, the important people had people around them with bladders on sticks, and when some stranger approached, they flapped these bladders to keep the important people from being able to hear anything from the supplicant, unless the supplicant first satisfied the flapper. And that in other lands, flappers had many names, like administrative assistants, receptionists, secretaries to private secretaries, appointment clerks, and so on.

The Doc chuckled. "If that's how folk did things before, it's no wonder they went and did whatever silly thing killed them all off. 'Flappers', I'm going to have to remember that one. You might not want to mention it to Art, though, he takes his job kind of seriously."

"Serious it is."

We arrived at the restaurant, one Linguini's by name, with no indication whether that referred to the chef or the food. They were putting on enough airs that they had a fellow who seemed to be trying to cosplay "annoying French maitre d'", but going over the top.

"Do you have a reservation?" he sniffed, looking down his nose. (Well, I wasn't standing, so maybe he was just looking down at me.)

The Doc nodded pleasantly. "Doctor Oren House and Bunny to see Art Drummond. We're expected."

"Very well. I shall see if /Mister/ Drummond is available." He turned and flounced off.

I looked up at the Doc and mouthed 'flappers'. He grinned back, then straightened his face as the self-appointed defender of culinary cultural integrity returned. "Mister Drummond has agreed to allow Doctor House and... /guest/ to join him."

I will say this for the place; once we'd passed muster, if only barely, the wait-staff quickly and competently made room for my wheelchair to get to Art's table.

"Oren! Good to see you! Have a seat" the secretary enthused, seeming to take up the whole booth by himself already. "How's the wife and hubby? Can I get you anything? Who's your little friend?"

I was pushed up to the open end of the table, my wheels locked, and the Doc took a seat. Instead of answering our host, he looked at me, winked, and said, "And that's why it's polite to make appointments instead of just barging in unannounced - gives them time to check on their notes, so they can sound like they remember you. Last time I talked to Arty was, what, three years ago?"

Arty had burst out laughing, and slapped the table, and it seemed entirely natural instead of a performance. "Two," he said. "That school play that had your grand-niece and my nephew in it."

"Ah, you'll have to forgive an old man his lapse in memory. Could have sworn it was the shindig put on when the new envoy from Cleveland got here..."

A waiter appeared, took drink orders - whiskey for the doc, iced tea for me - and vanished again. A few moments later, beverages materialized without interrupting on the conversation.

After swallowing a mouthful of what appeared to be unfortunately limp pasta and a watery tomato sauce, Arty asked, "What brings you and your friend here today?"

Doc answered, "I owe this little lady a favour, for handling a neighbourhood annoyance, and since she insisted on paying me for my doctoring."

Arty turned to me. "Alright, so what's this all this about? Want to glad-hand the higher-ups before becoming a bureaucrat yourself?"

"Not... exactly," I said. "Though that may not be an /entirely/ inaccurate description. Since we've only got a few minutes - I have a project I plan to undertake, and I want to assure your bosses that it's of absolutely no threat to them."

Arty raised an eyebrow. "Now that's a curious thing to say. What sort of threat could you be?"

I sipped my iced tea - not bad, but needed a bit of lemon. "Ever since my... Change, I've heard a lot of people say a lot of things about the Singularity. I've seen Technoville fighting post-singularity monsters, I've met AIs, I've read about your bureaucracy's members putting their lives at risk cleaning up the city... but one thing I haven't seen, is anyone trying to figure out what exactly the Singularity was, how it happened, or - most importantly - how it can be kept from happening again. Like I said, everyone's got a theory - but nobody is putting the work in so anyone can look at what's known and agree that 'Yep, this idea's more likely to be true than that one'."

Arty chewed a moment, swallowed, and said, "So you want to look at the ruins and so on? We've got a History Society-" He stopped as I shook my head.

"I've seen their museum, and... it's as good as anyone has any right to expect. As a museum."

Arty cut a meatball in half, and when I saw the pink interior I shuddered. "Herbivorous?", he inquired.

I shook my head. "No, sir. If that's the food you enjoy, I don't want to disparage it, but... can I ask, does that sauce even have any basil in it, or onion?"

"You cook?"

"To a degree. You could say I'm a student of Fannie Farmer, of the Boston Cooking School. Never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I can think of... at least five things that Ms. Farmer would do differently, without considering my own variations."

"I should have you know, Monsieur Linguini says he produces nothing but the finest authentic pre-Rapture Italian food."

"That may be so, sir. All I can say is that I've read and practiced with an eighteen ninety-six cookbook, and unless that tastes a lot better than it looks, I'd prefer my own cooking. Now, about the-"

Arty snapped a finger, and a waiter appeared. "The young lady wishes to taste the pasta and sauce."

A few seconds later, a small plate with a few strands of spaghetti and a dollop of what could generously be called 'sauce' on top appeared, along with a fork. I took a bite. I winced, but managed to swallow. "Definitely prefer my own cooking, sir."

Arty looked at Doc House. "Day after tomorrow?"

The Doc nodded. "Suits me fine. Enjoy your meal." He tossed back the rest of his drink, stood, and, to my confusion started unlocking my chair's wheels. I opened my mouth, but he gave a brief shake of his head.

Once we were out of the restaurant, I asked, "What just happened?"

"You, my short and sweet saucier, just tied your credibility to your culinary competence. I hope you have some clue what you're doing, as you're feeding the Deputy Mayor her dinner in two days."

"... I miss math. Sure, I don't understand a lot of it, but at least I know I /can/ understand it if I put the effort in..."

--

You can learn a lot about a culture from the ingredients they have available. Dogtown had wheat and cows, so baked goods and grains were staples. They also had pretty much every plant you could grow in a garden, including tomatoes, celery, onions, and garlic; but a lot of cruciferous vegetables were just gone, completely extinct, including brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. And there were a few extras - bell peppers now came in every colour of the rainbow. They had salt, but no pepper - instead, they had "pepper", which Doc casually informed me was made from crushed beetle shells. That just about summed the whole place up - a little familiar, a little missing, a little extra, a little creepy-strange.

I was probably driving Charles buggy with my shopping-list requests for things that just didn't exist, and my revisions for possible replacements. Either that, or he was having a ball looking for a reasonable approximation of Worcestershire sauce.

Once I'd familiarized myself with the House kitchen - they were close enough to the Embassy to have an electric range, which I felt some relief at - I tottered to the parlor on my cane in search of Britney. (I was getting tingles from my left leg - not real sensations, but at least the promise of sensation to come.) I found her mending her husbands' formal jackets, and took a seat facing her.

"Mrs. House, may we talk for a few moments?"

She tied off a knot, set her work down, and folded her hands on her lap. "Yes?"

"I'm... probably about to say some very stupid things. But I would like to assure you in advance that if I do, they're the result of clumsiness, and no ill intent is meant." I paused to see if she'd respond, but she just kept looking at me, so I repressed a sigh and continued. "Mrs. House... I am a very straightforward sort of person. I see a goal, I work out the tasks, and I do them. This is very useful in some situations. But it also means I'm... very ill-equipped to handle others. I can cook good food, I can argue the points of policy proposals... I can't throw a dinner party. I don't even know the first thing about alcoholic drinks, let alone which ones the Deputy Mayor would prefer. I've only read the barest hints on how to be a hostess. I don't even know all the things I don't know. But this meal that I stumbled into having to make - it's important to me to make the best impression I can, to try and help convince the bureaucrats to support my ideas, or at least not interfere with them too much. I know you bear no special fondness for me, and I'm not asking to be your friend, but I'd... like to ask for your help." I unfolded my own hands, turning them palm-up on my lap.

Britney pursed her lips, and after just a moment, said, "No. I will not help you."

"Ah." I refolded my hands. "For future reference, if I may ask... Why not?"

"Oren has told me about your ideas. If you carry them out, you will only get yourself killed, along with whatever other people you bring into them."

"Ah," I said again. "I'd be willing to discuss that point, but I'm slightly pressed for time. Should I look into finding somewhere else to have the dinner?"

"No. Against my wishes, Oren allowed an implicit agreement to be made for it to be hosted here. I will do everything in my power to minimize the harm that comes to this family from his soft-hearted indulgences regarding you."

"Well - thank you for being straight with me, Mrs. House. I'll let you get back to that."

I heaved myself onto my right leg and walking stick, and started thumping back towards the kitchen.

"Miss Bunny." I carefully turned back around. "When you start losing people close to you, you will understand."

I managed to shrug without toppling. "I already have. My parents, siblings, cousins, neighbours, remote acquaintances - every last one of them gone, in a single sweep. I can make myself cry at will by thinking about what I've lost. I try not to think about it too much. May I go now?"

When she didn't answer, just furrowed her brow, I turned back to the kitchen.

--

I cooked the meal twice that day, just to ferret out all the surprises in how things had changed, from how quickly pots heated to unexpected ingredient interactions.

Charles was out in search of the last spice - I'd burned through a lot of the trade goods I'd stolen from the Embassy's stable, but reminded myself that resources existed to be used. The last time he'd popped in, he'd dropped off something other than food: clothing, in the style worn by reasonably wealthy Dogtown female engineers and working professionals (no, not /that/ type of professional) when they weren't on-the-job. It wasn't as bad as the plain dress of the Anabaptist farmers I'd passed through, but did have a certain old-fashioned vibe from them. After passing my measurements along, I'd ended up with a vest over a long dress, various ruffles and buttons, a dress, a sort of scarf-cravat thing, and did I mention the dress? About the only good thing I could say about that item of clothing was that I could keep my machete strapped to my leg and keep it completely invisible.

I'd just finished cleaning up after my latest surreptitious wall-test of the spaghetti, making sure I had the timing down, and was taking a five minute break, sipping some water to rehydrate after the heat and rubbing my leg. Britney swept into the room, and I commented to her, "It's really quite odd - I can't feel a thing in this leg yet, but it still aches. I wonder how that works?"

She looked around the kitchen, the chopped vegetables, the steaming pots, the odiferous experimental herb-and-spice testing zone, and general mostly-controlled chaos. Focusing back in on me, she declared, "I have determined that as matters currently stand, you will embarrass my family more than if I make certain interventions."

"Er?"

"A lady does not grunt. In deference to your limited mobility, I have arranged for stylists of various specialties to visit during the day. There is far from enough time to teach you how to avoid embarrassing yourself by following all the rules of refined protocol and etiquette. You will therefore instead be 'straightforward', and your appearance tailored to match." She picked up the dress I'd paid good, hard-earned (so to speak) tobacco for from where I'd hung it over the back of a chair, sniffed, and declared, "Entirely unsuitable, without at least three months of finishing school." She advanced straight to me, and tilted her head, looking at my own cranium, and its flattened ears, from a few angles. "You may only have fur instead of a proper coiffure - but when was the last time you had your fur trimmed?"

"Ah-" She raised an eyebrow and I cut back that grunt. "Not since I was... Changed, Mrs. House."

"I should have guessed. I will engage the services of a parahuman groomer for that aspect of your appearance. If you are done in here for now, a manicurist will be arriving shortly."

I wasn't sure what had changed Britney's mind, or at least her approach, but I wasn't going to perform a dental inspection on a donated equine. ... Even if it did mean I was about to 'enjoy' a manicure. I supposed I could at least hope to get away with avoiding a pedicure, as well, since my paws had blunt claws instead of nails.

--

My hope was quickly dashed. On the other hand (or paw, as the case may be), when my Britney House selected and approved outfit arrived, I was... reasonably impressed. Trousers and shoes designed for my legs, matching vest over pale shirt, longcoat, gloves and top-hat... when it was all together with my walking stick, I looked to be halfway between white-tie formality and the practicality of being part of the trenchcoat brigade. I might not be able to hide a machete, but given the lack of leg-binding skirts, aprons, and under-layers, I was perfectly willing to give up that particular advantage. (Especially since, with a bit of work, I could see lots of ways to hide all sorts of /other/ useful bits and bobs... if I ever got a chance to.)

By the time the appointed meal was approaching, I'd been preened, primped, pressed, processed, and generally brought up to the standards that Britney deemed presentable. I hadn't had that much physical contact with other people since, well, quite possibly ever. I didn't like it, but I put up with it. And bought a comb that turned my pelt into a silky cloud. Hey, I might crash and burn and have to spend the next few decades as a waitress or worse, but there was no need to suffer unnecessary physical discomfort while I did.

Deputy Mayor Amber Goldschmidt was barely taller than I was - shorter, if you counted my ears - and was a freckled redhead, wearing a suit that put the one I thought was impressive on myself to shame. She was accompanied by Arty, and two strapping young men who I never quite caught the names of, but reminded me of the gate guards at the Embassy. I tried not to fidget as Britney let them in - if for no other reason than I was still leaning on my cane, and my usual fidgeting involved both hands. Falling flat on my face might not be the /absolute/ worst first impression I could make, but it was probably as close as I could get.

"And this," Britney led them into the parlour, "is your hostess and chef for the evening, Miss Bunny."

"How d'you do," I nodded to the group.

Amber nodded back, then glanced at Arty. "I distinctly remember you wrote into my timetable that I would be meeting 'Mlle. Bun., A Blue Mouse'."

"She /was/ a mouse when she came to see me. And blue."

"Please forgive any confusion I may have caused," I tried to smooth matters. "Technoville's embassy has an interest in me, and I saw no reason to make it easy for them to kidnap me from the street."

Amber arched an eyebrow. "And if they have infiltrated my staff, and know about this dinner?"

"I do not believe I am quite so important to them that they would want to disturb relations between the two cities during your visit. I will not be staying here another night and putting the Houses at further risk - they have already been more than generous, and a good guest never puts their host at risk of a ninja attack if they can possibly help it."

And, somewhat to my frustration, that was the closest Amber allowed the conversation to come to what I wanted to talk to her about for the rest of the meal. Instead, from the drinks (wine for them, grape juice for me), through the caesar salad, through my personal variant of spaghetti and meat sauce, and to the final spoonful of cardamom ice cream (and goodness but arranging for /that/ taste had taken some effort), she asked me about nothing but the food, and related matters - which ingredients I'd used, which I'd wanted to use, what Worcestershire sauce was made of and how I'd improvised a substitute, why I wasn't drinking but wasn't making any fuss about anyone else... by the end of the grilling, I needed to borrow one of Doc's wheelchairs to get into the parlour, instead of limping there under my own power.

Finally, the group settled in for coffee. (Or, should I say, "coffee". The beverage was made with roasted grains, chicory, and sugar beets, plus caffeine imported from Technoville's chemical production facilities; hopefully, no beetles were involved...)

Amber sipped, set her cup down, and folded her hands. "Miss Bunny... can you tell me what, exactly, Technoville's interest in you is?"

"That depends on how much I can trust what they've told me. Which isn't much. But their claimed reason is that my living brain has a peculiar property that they think will be useful."

"Would that property be related to your Change, or your Old World origins?"

I carefully set my own cup down, and without moving, made myself aware of where my various implements of distracting opponents long enough to run away were hidden about my person. "Technoville has been in touch with you already?"

"Hardly. Everything about this meal you have prepared, and the way in which you went about doing it, indicates you are weird - western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. You know red wine goes with beef - but are unaware which varietals are grown locally. You asked for ingredients that have not existed for decades, or at best are not available on this continent." I kept my expression neutral - it seemed there were good reasons she'd made it to second-or-third in command of the local armed forces. "Do you even know what flumf is?"

With Britney looking at me, I had to resist an urge to say 'Um', and instead hazarded, "A fictional monster, a sort of flying jellyfish with eyestalks?"

She blinked once, glanced at Silent Guard to Starboard, who I caught a fractional nod from. Amber smiled a bit. "Well, that's not the definition I meant - but let's move on. How do you think you can prevent a Second Singularity?"

I tried to rally my thoughts. "Studying the residue of the first. By myself if I have to, but the odds increase the more resources that are thrown at the problem."

"What makes you think you can do any better than anyone else who's tried?"

"As far as I can tell, you haven't had any programmers left, since things settled down enough to start poking around at the city-computers. Technoville might have some, but they keep them locked away on private projects."

"Can you program an AI?"

"Not at all. I once built a neural net I won a stupid little award for, and know a bunch of outdated theories, but that's all. I also can't build a clean operating system from scratch in any reasonable time, or build a computer chip. I know a lot of the science behind how the hardware works, not the engineering. If you want an AI, I /might/ be able to shave a few years off the project."

"I do /not/ want an AI, and I suggest that if you even think of making one, you get as far away from me as you can before you start, or I will shoot you dead first."

I swallowed. "So noted, ma'am."

"What if you cannot learn what you need from this city alone?"

"I'm already pretty sure I can't. I'm almost certainly going to need to get a closer look at a live city-computer, eventually. It's going to be a multi-city effort - everyone on Lake Erie just to start with, and as many more as can be gotten in touch with."

"There are good reasons we have not gotten in touch with them ourselves."

"The posthuman dangers - what Technoville calls the zones?"

"Precisely."

"I have a workaround for that. It will need some cooperation from Technoville, but should be doable."

"You escaped their compound here, are worried they will send ninjas after you - and you're willing to work with them?"

"You forgot to mention they performed surgery on me without my consent, and tried to drug and interrogate me. I've got no love for them - but if I can convince them they've got me right where they want me, and as long as they're the best source of carbon fibre parts, motors, and diesel, I can... deal."

"What's your workaround?"

"One-man flying machines."

"There aren't any airports left, unless they're in Technoville."

"Don't need them."

"No maintenance technicians."

"Anyone who can handle a motorized bicycle will do."

"Technoville hoards its fuel supplies for its own use."

"With some timing adjustments, drilling a slightly larger hole in a fuel injector, and about a thirty percent loss in miles per gallon, alcohol will work just as well. I'm assuming that distillation technology wasn't lost with the rest of civilization?"

She stared at me, without saying a word, for a very long few moments. "If you can get me some of these... flying machines... that are as good as that, then I don't care if you plan on annually sacrificing virgins to the posthuman gods, I'll take them."

"Technoville may be a bit sticky about that; what if I can only get them on loan, or sublet them?"

"Again. As long as I can drop munitions on designated targets, I don't care if they're officially licensed to the Seamstresses' Guild. I'd /prefer/ them being under my direct control and authority, and I strongly suggest that you take that preference into account when you work out your arrangements with Technoville. They've been lording their aerial superiority over us for... some time. At least in this case, I see absolutely nothing wrong with a little bit of democratization."

 

*Chapter Ten: Re-Aligning*

"You're probably all wondering why I've gathered you here today."

"Not really."

"Well, maybe not, but this is probably the best excuse I'll ever have to use that line."

Britney had refused to let me move out of the House house after the dinner. I wasn't sure I preferred the change from the earlier 'Disapprovingly Ignore Bunny' Britney to the new-and-improved 'Set Bunny Right' version, but wasn't willing to put in the effort that would be needed to escape her clutches. On the plus side, I could feel my left toes again, if not wiggle them, so it might only be a few more days before I /could/ escape from her if I really needed to.

In the House parlor were myself, the man in gray from the Technoville embassy, Arty Drummond, Doc House as a neutral observer, and Mrs. House to keep an eye on things. (I suspected she might be a relation of Mrs. Grundy.)

"To try to keep this reasonably brief," I said to the Tech, "it doesn't matter to me whether what happened in your place was under your orders, an operation by deniable 'rogue' agents, some internal Technoville dispute, or something less comprehensible. The result is that, while I was your guest, you demonstrated that you could not be a good host - and have lost my trust about anything else you may promise to do, either."

"That seems a reasonable, if disappointing, conclusion. Am I to assume there is more of a point to this than you pointing a finger at me?"

"That's up to you. Do you still want to have access to the peculiar qualities of my living brain?"

"Perhaps. What is your price?"

"Do you recall what I asked for just before demanding a pony?"

"Of course."

"Start there - only, due to the just-mentioned trust issues, my price has been raised. Probably most significantly, if you keep it a Technoville-run project, I'm out. I'm not sure what my lifespan is, but it would be safer for me to take a few decades, start building a machine shop from raw ore, and so on, then to let you people get too easy a crack at me again."

"Are you proposing it be a Dogville-based organization, instead?"

Arty piped up, "I'm kind of curious about that myself. So how about it, Bunny? Going to swear to be loyal to the Dogville bureaucracy?"

I twitched an ear in irritation. "If I made that oath, I'd be lying - I barely even know you, let alone the rest of the bureaucrats, so how could I be loyal to you? - and since you know I'd be lying if I made it, there's no way you'd ever trust me with anything significant, which would defeat the whole point of the exercise."

Arty shrugged, "Then what've you got in mind?"

"Get the aircraft. Let Dogville people join. Let Technoville people join. Let people from Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and everywhere else we reach join. Technoville doesn't dominate Dogville in this - but Technoville has input. Dogville doesn't force loyalty to its current government - but has input. Anyone who tries to use the aircraft as a military air force against other humans, doesn't get enough influence to force it to happen."

Arty frowned. "Who'll be in charge then? You? A stranger from nobody-knows-where? Sure, you can cook - but who'd pay attention to orders from a little thing like you?"

"Amber's about as tall as I am. But as long as those guys," I pointed a thumb at the man in gray, "aren't in charge, I'm not as concerned if it's one of you guys. The thing is, if it's Amber, it should be Amber the individual who'd be in charge, not the Deputy Mayor."

Arty frowned, in a way I hoped meant he was thinking. The man in gray spoke up. "Do you have any other... conditions?"

"Other than reserving the right to pull out if you and yours try pulling any shenanigans again? More of a suggestion. To actually accomplish the task, the people working on it are going to need to have a certain... mental flexibility. The sort that tends to make them very ill-suited to work in informationally-quarantined positions," I turned my gaze to Arty, "and who tend to have issues working within a rigid chain-of-command. If they know more about an issue than someone else, they need to be able to pass that information on with as few impediments as possible. Or, put another way, you can inform your various superiors that I'm asking to relieve you of your troublemakers in a way that can be shown to your respective populaces as being part of a plan that benefits them. Even if the whole thing goes bust, you'll have improved your Tables-of-Organization, generated good publicity, and not spent anything you can't afford to lose."

Arty frowned harder. "It's not going to be /quite/ that easy. Amber, sure, she'll go along with the gag. The Mayors are going to need a bit more persuasion."

It was my turn to frown. "Like what?"

"Something harder. Evidence, proof. When they hear about you, you're just be some random Changed girl who's walked in out of the woods and spout a lot of hot air. Maybe it's good hot air, maybe it's bad, but there's nothing /solid/ there."

"What are you thinking of?" I considered. "Need me to get the Techs to produce a scouting aircraft?"

"Nah," Arty shook his head. "We've seen their planes, we know they can make 'em. It's not the Techs who need to prove they're not some trap made in Detroit to get us to waste time and people doing stuff that doesn't help us."

"Oh." I frowned. "Um - you are aware that there's no way I can prove that to you, any more than you can prove to me you weren't replaced with a copy of yourself last night?"

"So 'prove' is a bad word," he countered. "Maybe 'improve' is better. You've been pretty vague about your past. Mayors might think that's because you haven't /got/ one. What were your stomping grounds?"

"Niagara," I answered, not able to think of a reason not to. "The rectangle of land that's north of Lake Erie and south of Lake Ontario. At least as of when I died, thirty-odd years before the Singularity, pretty much the whole history of the place was shaped by the Escarpment - not quite a cliff, a couple hundred feet high, a few hundred miles long east-west. A river going over made the Falls, which attracted tourists, and made a natural border. Getting ships over the 'mountain' meant a canal got built, and cities along that. It sheltered the land at its base, which also used to be a lake-bottom, which meant good grape farms... I could go on."

"So," Arty commented, tapping his chin, "You know the geography."

"I know what /used/ to be the geography." I tried to puzzle out where he might be going. "There wasn't much there that you couldn't find in other cities - I'm guessing anything that might have survived there, is easier to get from around here. Well, maybe there's something unique in the tourist traps by the Falls - the place was turning into a new Las Vegas."

Arty looked at the man in gray. "Your boys start working the numbers on the bunny's flying machine."

I answered before he could, "I'm pretty sure he's already got at least one in his basement." At their looks, I shrugged. "What? He's got a radio, it uses a lot of parts they've probably already got, the rest are easy to make, and they've got planes they can drop crates out of."

They looked at each other again, not saying anything. I frowned. "Um - Arty, have you got some kind of post-human telepathy upgrade? Or maybe you had a discussion between you before this one?"

Arty said to the Tech, "What's the range like?"

"For typical use, such as a passenger or equivalent cargo, under one hundred kilometers. With a passenger's weight in fuel, and the airspeed kept under about thirty-five kilometers-per-hour, over eight hundred kilometers."

Arty nodded, "And it's under four hundred from here to there, as the bun flies?"

"You read my mind." The gray man didn't quite smile, then turned to me. "What we are not explicitly mentioning is that Technoville has very good reasons for its current airplane design, mostly the tactical needs for combating Detroit's post-human dangers. We have, in fact, attempted to use our aircraft to scout for more distant dangers, but the loss rate has been unacceptably high. In particular, any aircraft that approach a certain distance of Toronto are near-instantly destroyed in mid-air. Even simple balloons that rise to where the city is within the horizon."

"Do I need to say aloud that I don't think I like where this is going?"

"We have many pre-Singularity topographical maps, and are aware of the geography of the Niagara Escarpment. In particular, while the cliff-face faces north towards Toronto, the other side gradually slopes down to Lake Erie. As you mentioned in your initial proposal, no prepared landing site is needed for a powered para-glider, and flying avoids all the unscouted danger zones on land."

I frowned, "Are you suggesting... I fly up on the safe side of the Escarpment, and... make my way to Toronto from there? From due south of Toronto, it's over fifty kilometers across the Lake, and twice that going around the shoreline."

"Nah," Arty said, "I'd say just snap some photos and bring 'em back, and that'll grab the Mayors' attention in a hurry. I'm sure the Techs can fit you up with a bunch of lenses, and if you're really you, I'm sure you know some high spots to get a good view from."

"... I can think of a few. Do I need to actually mention that I've only ever been a passenger in a plane? Well, once, when I was really young, as part of a school trip, I got to be in a cockpit and the pilot let me hold the yoke and pretended to let me bank the thing, and there were video games - but that's not the same as the real thing. A first-time pilot, in a brand-new aircraft design, traveling hundreds of klicks across unknown territory, without a decent weather forecasting system, where everything has to go right the first time, spying on an unknown target? That's a recipe for /disaster/."

"You're a big girl," Arty said, then took another look at me. "So to speak. And you're talking a big talk, about looking into the Apocalypse, but you're getting ready to back out before you even get your first look at a live posthuman city?"

"There's reasonable risks, and unreasonable risks," I pointed out.

The gray man said, "So make the unreasonable, reasonable."

I put my hands over my face. "This is an /awful/ idea."

--

Flying was /awesome/.

There was nothing between my dangling feet and the ground but my soles and the air; nothing to hear but the engine and prop; nothing to see but, well, /everything/.

To climb, I squeezed the throttle harder; to glide down, I let the engine die. To bank left, I pulled the handle holding the lines on my left; to bank right, the same. And once I was in the air, that was about it - no worrying about yaw versus roll versus pitch, or pedals versus yoke, and starting the thing was pretty much a matter of pulling out the parachute-like wing, strapping the motor on like a backpack, and catching a breeze. I even had cruise control.

I also had a reserve chute on each hip, elbow and knee pads in case of a bad landing, and my motorcycle-style helmet (more to keep the bugs out of my teeth). On my left forearm were strapped Scorpia for timekeeping, a compass, and a book of maps with clear plastic covers and velcro to keep it from flapping in the wind. Between me and the motor was a backpack with a light set of camping gear, and on my front hung a duffel bag with a telescope as big around as a bucket (that its original owner had used to make amateur images of nebulae with), to which I could hook a film-based camera to create the Paparazzi Telephoto From Hell. Back in the day, at the right spots in Niagara and on clear days, it was trivial to look north and see Toronto's skyline, with the shape of the CN Tower recognizable. With this beast, I could probably make out individual /people/ in the CN Tower.

... If there were still people there. If the CN Tower still stood.

I was mostly loosely hugging Lake Erie's north shore. I didn't want to go over the lake in case I went down; my emergency radio was supposed to be waterproof, but I wasn't. I also didn't want to get too far inland - again, if I went down, it would be a lot easier to hail a boat and get a ride than go anywhere on foot. I wasn't testing the paraglider's ceiling, and the only reason I wasn't dragging my feet in the trees was to avoid updrafts.

... I was pretty much assuming I was going to crash at least once on the way; and that if I was lucky, I'd be able to get back in the air on my own. Technoville had provided a few hours of instruction, in the form of Thing Two - we both pretended we'd never seen each other before. For my first significant solo flight, I'd headed north of Toledo, back along my earlier path, to a certain carefully unmapped garage.

"Hiya, Convoy," I'd cheerfully waved. "Seen any more mobile architecture lately?" I hadn't informed either Technoville or Dogtown about my destination, though whatever Techs had access to the files on me they surely kept could undoubtedly work it out if they tried.

I told the truck about how Scorpia had probably saved my life a couple of times, and generally caught him up-to-date on what I'd been up to. Sure, he might be an inhuman monstrosity capable of destroying every value that made being human a good thing in pursuit of his nominally public-spirited goal; he was also about the only individual whose motivations I understood well enough to be comfortable hanging out with for a purely casual, friendly conversation. I wasn't sure whether that said more about how messed-up the post-Singularity world was, or how messed-up I was, and at the time, I didn't really want to know.

By the time I'd bid Convoy farewell, I'd ended up taking with me a "tape recorder" (Soundblaster, nee Saundoburasuta) and an assortment of "tapes" to 'record my notes for later transcription'. If Scorpia's batteries had given out just a little sooner, I'd probably be a pincushion by now - at the least, I'd have lost the trade goods I'd used to pry open the doors to Dogtown's Deputy Mayor. To keep the whole burden from falling onto a single small robot, I had accepted Convoy's offer of a small squad of variously-shaped robots disguised as cassette tapes. (And who could, in fact, record audio, and perform some sort of magnetic trickery to play it back in ordinary tape players.) They only had marginally bigger brains than Scorpia, but while we talked, Convoy reprogrammed them so each one knew a few tricks the others didn't. I suspected the trickiest part of using them was going to be keeping them all fully charged.

I got an extra solar panel from the Techs, along with a small hand-crank generator, ostensibly so I could keep the radio charged if no boat was available to come pick me up for a while.

Which brings us back to the big flight. Flying was awesome - even after getting up at dawn, and having hung from my straps for twelve hours straight, with the constant noise of the engine on my poor sensitive rabbit ears. Watching the wilderness pass by underneath me was awesome.

Somewhat less awesome was the fact that all of it /was/ wilderness. It didn't really gut-punch me until I got to Long Point, where the cottages, campgrounds, boat docks, and general summer entertainment facilities were just... as if they'd never been. Not even any visible ruins, just trees and waterways and swamp. Somewhat further on, Port Dover /did/ have some ruins; nothing I could recognize, but I could at least tell there'd been streets there.

I turned inland before I got to Port Colborne. I'd known people who'd lived in Port Colborne.

I'd picked my first-choice destination from memory. The highest spot in Niagara was called Fonthill, where the glaciers had shoved a bit more of the local geography. At just the right spot on there, I'd been able to look due south, and see the south shore of Lake Erie, seventy klicks away; and turn around, look due north, and see Toronto and the north of Lake Ontario, another seventy klicks away. Sure, on an actual mountain you could see farther, and you could see another mountain from further still... but for having the longest view of flat terrain, it was hard to beat.

Getting to Fonthill, though, was a bit tricky. Most of the man-made landmarks, like the roads, were gone or indistinguishable from each other from above. Knowing exactly where I was was kind of important to me, since I was now closer to Toronto than some of Technoville's planes had gotten. I'd spent some time and skull-sweat working with the topo maps, estimates of the heights of the heat radiators in Detroit, my knowledge of trigonometry, and a Tech translator for a calculator to work out what altitude I could fly without getting pinged by whatever Toronto was using to shoot things down. If Toronto was using aerial sensor platforms then I was just plain screwed, but the Techs said Detroit didn't seem to use them, so it was unlikely Toronto did. I accepted the reassurance, added another ten-percent safety factor to my calculations, and re-read the instructions for the backup altimeter I'd be wearing on my right wrist.

The sun was low to my left as I got close, and I circled around for a few moments. My safety ceiling was pretty close to the ground here, which made it hard to get a good view of possible landing sites. Finally, I swung down over a small creek, and when I saw a spot wide enough for my canopy, shut down the motor, pulled my cables, and came in for a landing. It wasn't a clean one - my left leg buckled, sending me onto my face and my gut onto the telescope, with all the weight of engine, fan, and return fuel on top of me, the shroud still being tugged by the slight wind and threatening to pull me into the water. It took some effort to keep from turning the scope into shards of broken glass and plastic, which would render the whole expedition a waste of time; and more effort to straighten up, unstrap myself, gather up the chute, and generally get myself back into order.

I didn't fire up the radio - I was close enough to Toronto for most of the airwaves to be full of noise. The general plan was to set up camp for the night, spend tomorrow shooting (at all hours of the day, so the boffins could interpret shadows), and head back the day after. However, I'd had a bit of a tailwind, so even keeping a constant airspeed, I'd arrived a bit sooner than planned. Always nice when something goes right for a change. I decided to make use of the time by climbing up the hill and looking for a decent site to set up. Maybe even take a few night shots, if anything was glowing.

So, once I'd parked the PPG and camping stuff in an easy-to-find spot, I heaved the duff of photo gear onto my shoulders and started up the slope. I found the remains of an old road, identifiable because the trees growing out of it were shorter than the rest of the area, and after half an hour, made it over the top. To my pleasure, I could see a meadow ahead - my map claimed the site was a golf course - which gave a tree-free view to the north. I fiddled with my glasses, squinted - to my surprise, the CN Tower's pod could still be made out. The tower just wasn't the tallest thing in the city anymore.

Still, a lookout site was a lookout site, and I still had close to an hour of daylight left, so I hauled out the gear and started assembling it. Tripod leveled and northed, telescope mounted, finder-sight aligned, camera attached, shutter settings set, and so on and so forth.

With the gear set up, I hunched over to look through the viewfinder, twisting a knob to slew the scope across Toronto's skyline. As I adjusted the focus to bring the radiator towers into view...

My whole body burst into flame.

 

*Book Two: In-*

*Chapter One: In-flammable*

Fire /hurts/.

Being /on/ fire hurts /more/.

Under ordinary circumstances these facts go without saying, as the only people who don't already know them either learn very fast or very quickly stop learning anything at all. About the only conversational gambits that surround them involve their discovery by the previously mentioned non-knowers, such as children whose parents allow for at least a minimal modicum of exploration of the world, or the putative ancestors who are the first to start exploring the useful properties of that new orangey-glowy thing that turns live animals into dead ones and dead ones into tasty meat - a rather nice two-fer, for everyone except the animal.

At this moment in my story, I was getting a taste of how such animals felt. While I'd gotten used to having facial hair over the years, more recently I had ended up with even fuzzier features than my genetics predisposed me to, in the form of a head shaped like a rabbit's, long ears and all. Sure, having a cotton-puff tail, and learning to walk on pads instead of feet were better than being dead... but these were hardly the results I'd been expecting when I'd signed up for cryonics and eventually got hit by a truck. Nor had I expected to ever get revived if civilization ever fell, but here I was anyway, trying to snap some pictures of what Toronto had turned into while I'd been dead, on behalf of a suspiciously fascistic technological survivor city and its ally, Toledo.

Everyone all caught up? Good. Now, where was I? Oh, of course: On fire.

When I was younger and less bunnified, and candles were for light-based decoration instead of a primary form of illumination, I'd occasionally played with the small flames. This was before anybody had told me that the fuel for the flame was actually vaporized wax, or that the true flame was blue and the bright yellow part was bits of carbon heated the same way a piece of metal on a blacksmith's forge glowed. I poked my fingers around to feel exactly where the hot areas were, I toyed with the melted wax - and I fed individual hairs into the flame, to watch blacken and curl and smell bad.

This latter effect was now occurring all over my body; or, at least, over all the parts I could see, and given the pain distributed fairly evenly all around, I didn't have any particular reason to think the parts of my pelt hidden from view were faring any better. And also given the fact that my facial fur was, in fact, on fire, in a split-second my whole body was out of view, as I clamped my eyelids shut in an instinctual drive to keep my vision from getting any worse than it already was. I had another instinctual drive to inhale deeply to start screaming, but before I pulled off that boneheaded maneuver, my conscious mind overruled things, at least for a moment - suffering burns on the outside of my body was going to be bad enough without searing my lungs, as well. The nearest medical professionals I knew of were in Buffalo, forty klicks away as the powered paraglider flew, and I had no idea what form of society they'd pieced together after the Singularity ate all the cities, let alone whether any given doctor would demand payment before treatment, let alone what sort of payment would be demanded, let alone whether their defenses would shoot me out of the sky before I could even offer a polite greeting and a request for assistance.

As I was doing whatever the opposite of holding your breath is called, my subconscious fired a note to my conscious mind about childhood lessons involving fire. I'd already stopped, and it was a simple matter to let my legs collapse so I'd drop to the ground, and roll away from my telescope-camera hybrid toward the meadow grass.

As soon as I did that, I wasn't on fire anymore. That probably wasn't /exactly/ how the popularizers of the technique intended for it to work, but it was close enough for me that I was more than willing to let my subconscious take control of my lungs again, and inhale deeply.

And /then/ start screaming.

--

Somehow, when I'd been talking with the people who lived in and near Technoville and Toledo about the danger zones they'd mapped out, and how people had been physically transformed into anything from talking livestock to a few organs inside non-talking livestock, one detail that had never quite been communicated to me was exactly /how/ the transformation was accomplished. I'd envisioned anything from a blob of nanotech jelly rising up to engulf the victim, to falling asleep and waking up as something else, to a completely unknown mechanism that looked like a bad werewolf movie's not-so-special effects. After everyone from espionage agents to farmers had carefully avoided the topic, and seemed not especially happy about my bringing it up, I assumed that the whole subject was a post-Singularity cultural taboo, and resolved to find out more when I had the opportunity for more direct investigation. I reckoned that feeling the heat generated as some nano-whatsits physically shoved cells around into new configurations was as plausible as any method I was likely to be able to imagine myself, so as I lay in the shifting shade of the tall grasses, I tried to watch my body to see what sort of monstrosity I might be changing into.

The unpleasantly carbonized remnants of my fur bent a bit in the shreds of breeze that made it down to my level.

After a few minutes of that, I decided that it seemed unlikely I was going to start growing any new limbs (or lose any of my existing ones) any time soon, and recalled that I had some burn ointment back in my first-aid kit where I'd stashed my paraglider - not enough for my whole body, but probably enough for my head and hands while I let the rest of my body soak in a cooling creek. I rolled over with a groan, pushed myself to my feet...

... and promptly caught fire again.

In an instant, I was back flat on the ground, and re-extinguished. After a few moments of thought - it should only have been a single moment, but I was distracted by something worse than the nastiest whole-body sunburn I'd had back when I didn't have a layer of built-in sunscreen over my skin - I tore a handful of long grass from the ground, and lifted them up. When they rose above the surrounding grass, they turned into a torch for a few moments, before I dropped them.

I grumbled and groaned, crawled a few feet to the east, and repeated the experiment. The result: No flames, just grass stalks waving in the twilight breeze.

After some hesitation, and always holding something flammable ahead of me, I gradually made it back up on my paws. I really, /really/ wanted that analgesic cream - but if I didn't figure this out, I might end up in worse shape than a bald rabbit.

I looked at the telescope and camera I'd been standing behind when things had gone wrong so fast, and stuck my recently-invented grass-based mysterious-flame-field detector towards it; and received a positive (ie, enlightening) result. I moved a few feet in front of it, re-tested, and was rewarded with another positive.

After a few more tests, my preliminary conclusions were that the flame-induction field was roughly a cylinder, about a metre across, centred at least roughly on the telescope; and the long axis was horizontal, oriented in the same direction the telescope was, roughly north-south. My measuring instruments weren't accurate enough to get a more accurate reading than that.

However, they did determine that the bottom half of the tripod wasn't in the field; so, feeling like my skin was already a half-size too tight, I brought myself back down to the ground and, hoping I wasn't going to break anything too expensive, held one leg of the tripod and lifted another. I managed to both hold onto both legs, and not get lit up again, until the telescope was on the ground. I tested the air where the scope had been - and nothing ignited. I tested around the now-grounded scope itself - and again, nothing ignited.

I decided that medical concerns outweighed gathering the results of raising the scope in another location, and left it in place as I hurried as fast as I could for a stream.

--

The boffins back in Technoville had either anticipated the radio noise emanating from Toronto, or already knew about it; and worked out a reasonably surprising low-tech solution. They'd upgraded my radio with something like a tape player, whose single loop of magnetic tape had a precisely calculated length. I could record the dots and dashes of a short Morse code message onto the tape, and set the radio to broadcasting it over and over. Back on the other side of Lake Erie, a receiver with exactly the same length of tape was constantly turning, in sync with mine. The radio noise from Toronto was louder - but, as far as could be told, random, or close enough to it for our purposes. Any single cycle through the tapes, my signal was lost in the noise. But over multiple repetitions, the transmitted signal repeated at the same spots on the tape, reinforcing it; while the random radio noise never overlapped, canceling itself out as often as it reinforced it. Like gradually focusing in on an image with a telescope, the signal gradually rose into coherence. (And, when the time came, I'd be able to pick up Technoville's response in much the same way.)

This technique also had what I felt was another important advantage - once I'd hung the metres-long low-frequency antenna and set the tape up, I could hit 'transmit' and then get a reasonable distance between myself and the radio, just in case Toronto had some form of radio-homing weapons. In this case, I recorded the code-groups meaning 'Landed safe. Aircraft intact. Telescope damage-level unknown. Minor injury, subtype burn, subsubtype whole-body,' collected various toiletries and minor gear, and went to sit in a sandy bit of creek until I got too chilled to stay in there.

Once I'd figured out how to get rid of my burnt fur without leaving trails of ash or rubbing my skin, I leaned back with my head on a rock to watch the sky and think. There was an impressive meteor shower every cloud-free night - presumably the remains of all the satellites that had been destroyed in the Kessler cascade that had accompanied the Singularity - and there were plenty more interesting sparkles when the sun had set down here on Earth but was still lighting up the debris above.

Despite third-hand rumours that I was in 'Indian Country', I hadn't seen a single bipedal being, First Nations or otherwise, after I'd crossed the Detroit River into what I still thought of as Ontario. Either I was the only person here, or 'persons' were now in forms I didn't recognize from above, or they tended not to be in the specific areas I'd been flying over at the times I'd been flying, or they were deliberately hiding, or any one of several other possibilities (though those others required several assumptions at once, which made them inherently less likely solutions given the data I currently had). Another item to consider was that the south side of Lake Erie was populated, including several cities and fishermen; there was at least some communication between the cities, if not much, and the lake didn't seem to be filled with monsters that ate everyone who thought about building a private cabin on the north shore.

I hadn't liked any of the possibilities that I'd been able to think of before making this trip, and I still didn't like them. Toronto having some sort of sensory system that could detect a foot-wide Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope lens seventy kilometres away, and fire some sort of beam-ray (microwave? UV? massive particles? something more exotic?) at it, was somewhat unlikely, though with what little I knew about post-human capabilities, couldn't be ruled out. What it didn't answer was why people who weren't hauling around high-end optics weren't building new settlements around here.

When I reluctantly got out of the water, I hung my hammock underside a large tree branch, about thirty feet from the ground.

--

In the morning, I'd gotten a message from the Techs. After comparing their code groups to the thin-papered pamphlet (as part of their usual paranoia separating communications protocols, like our radio kitbash, from computers, like their fob-watch-style translator pendants), their response could be summed up as 'Keep up the good work'. No instructions, no helpful advice, just keep on keeping on.

I was watching my small pot on the fire, waiting for the water to boil so I could finish assembling a morning cup of a liquid that would be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea; when one of the cassette-sized robots I'd set around the place as watchdogs interrupted my thoughts about just how many aspirins I should take. A short squeak, followed by two longer ones - Morse for 'W'. Something was coming from the west. No extra codes, so it was just one, and at least roughly human-shaped, at least as far as the micro-brained bird-bot could make out. I shifted on the log I was sitting on to face that direction.

When he came out of the trees and into view, I was only mildly surprised at the combination of black hair, tanned skin, and leather pants and shirt decorated with fringes. Looked like there might be some justification for the 'Indian country' description after all.

He didn't look like he was carrying anything. Of course, neither did I, so it's not like /appearing/ to be unarmed meant anything. He stopped around ten feet from my fire... and just stood there. We stared at each other for a few moments. Then my hot water turned into boiling water, and I looked away to start dealing with that.

After a moment of thought, I used my messkit's bowl to make a second cup of not-tea (I only had one actual cup), and offered it to the stranger. He solemnly walked over and took it, and sat on the log beside me. We sat and drank together.

I watched a green-feathered variant of a bluejay hop around at the base of a tree, taking a dust-bath.

I picked up some of the dried grass I'd put in front of me, awkwardly held it towards my guest, and asked, "Hay?"

I couldn't tell if he smiled or not, but he shook his head in what I took to be a negative, so I started munching on my breakfast.

I commented, "I used to live down there," gesturing vaguely northwards. "Before. Things have changed. So've I, come to think of it."

"Come back to live here?" he asked, in English; I was glad, since I'd left the translator back with my gear.

"Not sure," I shrugged. "More to see what's what." I touched my ears, about to stroke them, but at feeling my fingers on the burned skin, thought better of it. "Seems dangerous."

"Any place is, if you don't understand it."

I snorted lightly - pithiness that didn't offer anything new but was couched to sound wise didn't impress me. But he seemed to be practicing politeness, which was better than almost every alternative, so didn't say any of that aloud. Instead I told him, "I usually have more fur, which is part of why people have been calling me Bunny."

"Don't suppose you speak any Iroquoian?" I shook my head. "Then I won't burden you with trying to pronounce my name. You can call me Joe, if you like." I looked at him sharply, recalling my Mark Twain, and there probably was a twinkle in his eye. "No relation," he added.

"So," I wondered what to ask, then went for the obvious, "just passing by?"

"Oh, not at all. I came looking for you." I raised an eyebrow. "Alright, not you specifically, just whoever was here."

I concluded that if Toronto was capable of firing death-rays with such scant provocation, they could also send people to take a look. "Radio?" I asked

"What would you say if I told you the spirits came to me in a dream, and told me to come here, so I turned into a deer and ran all night, and turned back into a man at dawn?"

I picked up a stick and poked at the fire. "It wasn't all that long ago," I said, "that I would have thought you a fool, or worse, for saying such a thing. Either a fool for thinking such an impossible thing could have happened, or a fool for thinking I would believe such an impossible thing, or a fool for wasting my time with a metaphorical description when a more literal one would be more useful."

"And now?"

"And now - maybe you dreamed exactly that, and you ran all night as a deer." I tossed my stick into the fire. "Wouldn't be the strangest thing I've seen. Would want to know more before I relied on that for anything useful."

"I could turn you into a deer with me, so we can go back together."

"Hm." I turned that over in my mind. "I don't mind fur, but I kind of like having hands. And being able to talk. And think. I don't know enough about what you describe to agree."

His hand was suddenly around my arm, gripping hard enough to hurt even if I didn't have a whole-body sunburn. He pulled, heaving me off balance. "I could make you come."

We'd been having such a nice, if odd, conversation, that I really wasn't expecting that treatment, so it took me a moment to get my bearings - by which time, he'd stood and hauled me up with him. "Try it," I growled, not yet reaching for any of my knives, "and I'll try for a venison dinner."

This seemed to surprise him, and his grip loosened. "You would truly do that?"

I pulled myself from his hand and stepped back. "You do anything to my body against my will, why shouldn't I do the same right back?"

"But... but... rabbits don't eat meat!", he sputtered.

"And /guests/ who've shared /drinks/ don't /threaten/ their /hosts/. Makes me wonder if you're actually a person, or just something shaped like a person conjured up by something evil to lure into a trap." I kept glaring at him as I sat back down on my log. "If you're really the best man the 'spirits' picked to greet a stranger, then I've got to say, civilization around here has /really/ gone to pot. I /suggest/ that you either apologize or leave."

He didn't apologize. Instead, he stepped back towards me, without any particular expression on his face. This time, I did draw a knife from one of my hidden sheaths. He paused. I picked up another stick, and started whittling the end into a point.

His brow furrowed. "What's so bad about being a deer?"

"You're asking the wrong question."

"I don't understand."

"That's a good start."

"Do you... not like deer?"

"Always thought venison was a little dry compared to beef."

"Would you rather be some other animal?"

"Eh," I hedged. "Thought about it now and then. A rodent, scurrying and gnawing; a fox, smelling and hunting; a bat, listening and flying; a bear, fishing and hibernating... but there's a big difference between wondering and wanting. There are certain things I'm trying to do. Letting you turn me into a deer - or a bear, or whatever - doesn't really help me with that."

"Ah," he brightened, or at least I interpreted his near lack of expression as that. "But turning into a deer /does/ help you. You can come with me to meet everyone else. Walking like you are would take..." He frowned a touch. "Weeks?"

"I'm not in a particular rush to meet anyone," I said, not adding 'especially if they're much like you' aloud. "Besides, I don't know if whatever you use would work the same on me as it does on you. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not /quite/ a standard-issue human. Maybe whatever you do would start turning my muscles and organs into a deer's, but not work on my bones, leaving me in... a very uncomfortable state."

"I'm sure the spirits wouldn't let that happen."

"That's nice. If I do get twisted into an unholy monstrosity that quickly dies, what happens to you?"

"I go back home and tell everyone what happened."

"In other words, if you're wrong, nothing bad happens to you, and all sorts of badness happens to me."

He didn't say anything for a few moments, and I was still disturbed enough by his manhandling that I wasn't feeling too generous in his direction. After a while, he tried, "Do you want to... walk, like that?"

"Maybe. Walk where?"

"Home."

"Where's home?"

"West of here."

"Does it have a name?"

"Brantford."

At that, I perked up. "I know where Brantford is - or used to be. Is it the same spot as the city that used to be called Brantford?" He looked at me blankly, so I tried to rephrase. "Some time ago, there used to be a town just over there," I gestured to the east, "called Fonthill. At the same time, there was a city west of here, around... a hundred kilometers? Fifty miles? Something like that - called Brantford."

"That sounds like it is in the same place."

"Ah, that makes things simple, then. I can just fly there."

"Oh, is that... You like changing into birds instead of animals?"

"Not exactly," I bared my teeth in a grin at him. "And before I go - while I don't mind meeting new people, I've got some peculiar notions about what being a host involves. Part of it is not forcing the guest to do - or turn into - anything they don't want, and letting them leave when they want. If your people can't understand that, or aren't willing to commit to that... maybe I'll just stay here on this hill for a while, and build myself a house. I could probably do a lot of what I need to do from here."

He was now looking, for him, /really/ unhappy. "I do not think the Council would like that. You are not part of the Great Peace, and taking land... I think if you did, it would be very bad."

"Then why don't you go turn back into a deer, and run and let them know I'd be happy to go talk with them - as long as I get to go away again, under my own power and in whatever shape /I/ decide to be in."

"I do not think they will agree. What if you decide to be a shape nobody knows how to turn you into?"

I sighed a little. "Then how about if I just walk out in the same shape I walk in as?"

"That may be easier," he agreed, or appeared to. And turned around and started walking away.

I sighed, and wondered whether it was me or Injun Joe who'd had the harder time explaining ourself to the other. I also wondered how exactly I'd explain /that/ conversation with Technoville's radio code groups.

 

*Chapter Two: In-terpersonal*

I still wasn't convinced that Injun Joe wasn't a lone looney. And even if he was telling the truth and there were Iroquoian-speaking people who turned into various critters wandering around... well, as a local history buff, I knew that up until sixteen fifty A.D., the area was inhabited by the 'Neutral' Indians. They, and a couple of other nearby tribes, were wiped out by the Iroquois in the 'Beaver Wars'. Not to mention, there was a similarly old custom of kidnapping people to adopt into their family to replace deceased members. If Injun Joe's putative tribe was imitating historical Iroquoians, I didn't have any particular reason to believe they were only imitating the nice-and-fluffy parts.

I seriously considered packing up and flying to Buffalo. I was here to gather information - and I had, in fact, gathered some. If I made it back to the southern lakeshore, I'd be the first person verified to meet the locals and come back. ... Which, given how quickly Injun Joe showed up, implied that getting back might not be quite so easy as all that. Maybe low-altitude flying would let me get around whatever had swallowed up everyone else who'd come here; maybe it wouldn't.

While I was thinking about such plans, I went back to the telescope, carefully packed it back up, and trying not to get in the way of any more death-rays from Toronto that might focus in on it again, brought it back over the hill's summit, and then back to my camp. I thought about setting up the paraglider for a fast takeoff, but keeping the chute itself out would likely get it torn up by the ground, and keeping it packed meant I'd need a couple of minutes to get everything ready to go. So I hauled the whole thing to my camp as well, putting it next to the trunk of the tree I'd hung my hammock on.

If Joe came back feeling grabby, either alone or with friends... I wanted to be able to defend myself. An obvious machete strapped to one leg, my pistol crossbows in easy reach, the tape-bots scattered around as unobtrusively as they could be; the tree as a place to retreat to; a few of my knives hidden about the place in case I was disarmed but managed to wriggle free; and generally trying to stay on 'yellow alert' and on watch.

But that was all tactics. If I ended up in a situation where I actually needed to apply tactical thought, I'd have already made a bunch of mistakes. My logistics were reasonably fixed (as was the economic system that supported them, as was the political system that supported that, et cetera), but that still left room for trying to think strategically.

Specifically, I wanted Joe (and any friends) to be hesitant to bring things to a tactical level. I wanted him to be sufficiently unsure of what I was going to do to waste lots of time thinking and trying to guess - and to have the more obvious guesses to be proven wrong. If nothing else, I simply wanted to be /strange/ enough to his experience that he'd rather talk to me to try to figure me out instead of doing anything less pleasant.

From my camping gear, I took out my rope (fifty feet long, as any good explorer knew to have), and laid it out in a circle around my hammock's tree, about eight feet from the tree itself. I left the two ends a few feet apart with my campfire a few feet further out, south of the tree. I collected sticks and fallen branches, brought them near the fire, and spent some time sharpening the ends; then started jabbing them into the ground just inside the circle. They were obviously not a useful fence, and I wasn't spending the time to make them particularly sharp, so they obviously weren't spears.

I refilled my pot with water and set it just outside the circle on the west; found the biggest stone I could carry and set it on the north; and collected some loose feathers from the ground, tied them to the handle of one of my knives, and set it to the east. I placed four of the tape-bots to guard the four things - an orange bird-shaped one at the fire, a greenish lizard one at the water, a black cat at the stone, and a blue bird at the knife - and told them not to move until ordered, or until someone tried to touch what they were guarding. I wasn't sure how long it would take Joe to travel off and back, so I simply did my best to sweep the inside of the circle clear of debris.

--

Some hours later, I was holding several pieces of the telescope, which I'd disassembled as far as I was able to, and squinting along various edges, looking for any bends in what should be straight lines. The small mirror from the front of the telescope had been warped by heat into uselessness, but I had a spare - if the rest of the instrument could be salvaged. I was pretty sure the eyepiece was good, but if the corrector lens or main mirror had sagged in the heat that had torched my fur, the whole thing was just so much dead weight...

I got a chirp from the west, from one of the tape-bots not on the circle: five bipeds, three other shapes. I carefully started packing away the optical elements, when I got chirps from other watchers - three more to the west, a couple each north and south.

In other words: showtime.

--

Through the trees came two women, two men - neither of them Joe - a buck and doe whitetail, and a big old grizzly bear who looked to out-mass everyone else put together. I watched them glance at my circle, blink a few times, and then pretend it didn't exist; just like I pretended that whoever they had surrounding us out of sight on all sides didn't exist.

"I'm sorry," I said, standing with the help of a trekking pole, "I wasn't expecting so many - or so varied - guests. Can I offer you any of you anything to eat or drink?"

One of the women, who looked enough like Joe to perhaps be his sister, said, "You need to come with us."

Before I could respond, the other woman slapped the back of the first one's head, and said a few words that I didn't need to use a translator in order to know meant 'Shut up, idiot'. Looking at me, she said, "We need to talk to you."

I nodded, slowly. "Alright. Why don't you pull up some seats? Please excuse me a few moments." I turned away from them, and stepped through the gap in the rope into the circle. I slowly paced around it clockwise, stopping at the water, stone, knife, and then fire, each time facing outwards, breathing deeply, and seemingly completely ignoring both man and beast.

When I stepped back out at the fire, Joe's maybe-sister started asking, "What-" but got another head-slap. The bear was now taking up most of the space on the far side of the fire, a deer on each side of it. The log I'd been sitting on had been dragged to one side, and another log added, with the women (and doe) on my left, then men (and buck) on my right. I decided to stand, leaning on my pole, and hoped not to get any more twinges from the nerve in my left leg.

"Private matter," I commented. "Take a while to explain. And I expect you want to focus on something else."

The spokeswoman nodded. "Joe was sent, as he was the swiftest runner. He was not a good choice." She glanced at the other woman with a frown, who crossed her arms and looked away. Glancing back at me, she continued, "You have come into the land of the Great Peace. If you do not join the Great Peace, you will be at war with it."

"I have no desire for war."

"Desire is irrelevant. All in this land would turn against you, and you could not take a single step without fighting for it."

"That sounds unpleasant. What does joining the Great Peace involve?"

"Adoption into a family, a clan, and a nation."

I shrugged. "I have no particular desire to do anything like that. That said, I only have a mild desire to avoid having such connections forced on me."

"Joe said that you... objected strenuously to becoming a deer."

"That is a fair description." I glanced at my wristwatch. "Please excuse me again." I stepped back into the circle, and repeated my actions from before, only this time walking counter-clockwise. When I came back to the fire, I said, "Now, where were we?"

"The adoption ceremony involves turning into an animal at least once."

"Then we have something of a problem."

She nodded gravely. "Being part of the Great Peace involves... more such changes. When there are too many people and too few deer, the spirits turn people into deer. When there are too many deer and too few turtles, deer become turtles. And so on."

I had a thought. "What if there are too few people?"

"Then deer, or bears, or whatever there is too many of, will become people."

"Even if there aren't enough bears, or whatever, that used to be people?"

"I don't understand."

I hesitated. "When a person turns into a deer," I looked at the buck and doe lying beside the bear, "is there anything that makes them different from a deer that was born that way?"

"Of course not."

"So... any deer can become a person?"

"Of course." I paused, considering the ramifications of that and starting to feel creeped out by them, so she continued, "There are always some people, so we can keep you as a person as much as possible."

"That assumes," I said, "that I survive being changed at all." And what was meant by 'I' and 'survive'.

"That is why we are all here."

"Hold that thought, please." I made another circuit around the tree.

Once I was back, and carefully not visibly enjoying the hints of expressions on the various faces, she said, "All of us here agree that your worry is valid. We have come to tell you that if you die instead of changing properly, we will die, too."

That made me blink a few times, then I frowned and glared. "Don't be absurd - more deaths won't improve /anything/. If you're serious about that, that just gives me more reasons to /not/ risk your lives as well as mine."

Joe's maybe-sister now gave the spokeswoman a small thwap on the back of /her/ head. "Told you," she said.

They glared at each other, and while they did, one of the men spoke up for the first time. "Then what do you suggest?"

"For one thing," I said, "throwing away the idea that I must do exactly one of two things. I know that this land was not always under the control of this 'Great Peace' - which means that in the future, it might not be. So maybe your Peace withdraws itself from this hill. Or looking at a different way - if you're starving to death, and the only food you've found might be poisoned, you don't necessarily fill your stomach all at once; you can try a small taste, testing to see if it makes you sick. To find out if a pond is cold, you don't have to jump all the way in - you can stick just your toe in. And if you need to actually be told these simple ideas - then maybe it's time for the people in your Great Peace to start talking to people outside it, if for no other reason than to find out if turning into animals all the time isn't doing something to your minds."

The two men looked at each other. "Test with a foot?" asked the one who'd just spoken.

"It makes sense," agreed the other.

"I haven't agreed yet," I commented.

"Doesn't matter," said the first man. "It's a good enough answer." He stood. The other man stood. The women stood. The deer stood. The bear stood. I stepped back into the circle, standing with my back to the tree, and my right hand on the hilt of my machete. "Be reasonable," he said. "You can't win a fight against us."

"You've seen how reasonable I am," I countered. "Why would I try if I thought it was hopeless?"

"A bluff?"

"Even if you win - didn't you say you didn't want us dead?"

"What makes you think I'm not a good enough fencer to just maim you?" I sighed, and pulled a knife from inside my vest, which also let me check the time. "Is self-determination really such a foreign concept to you people?"

"People have always had to make some sacrifices for the greater good."

"Sure," I agreed, starting to tug out the machete. "I want to own stuff, and letting people steal stuff willy-nilly means I lose all my stuff and only get a small chance of stealing stuff I want. Small sacrifice, big gain. Not nearly the same thing."

He took a step closer. I whipped out the big blade and pointed it at him. He walked up so that the point was pressing against his shirt. The others started walking up behind him. "We really have your best interests at heart. You're behaving like a spoiled child."

"You have no idea. /Confundo/!"

There were sudden cries as all four of them jumped and stumbled, not having seen the tape-bots who'd been creeping up behind them, and had now tased their feet. While they were distracted, I turned and started shimmying up the tree, to keep away from the buck's antlers and the bear's claws if nothing else. Some of the tape-bots took guard stations on the trunk beneath me. When the bear heaved itself onto its hind legs and rested its front legs on the trunk, they gave a few zaps, and with a dog-like whuff, the bear dropped back down.

I sat on a branch above the crowd, swinging my legs as I watched them recover their equilibrium. After a few moments, the spokesman spotted me. He started for the trunk, as if to climb, but stopped when he saw a palm-sized robot scuttled across the trunk to stay above him. "How long do you think you can stay up there?"

"Long enough."

"You'll get thirsty."

"Canteens."

"Hungry."

"I can eat bark, and leaves. And birds, if I have to."

"Sleepy."

I pointed to the other side of the tree, where my hammock still hung from its own branch.

"We can pick off your guard... things."

"I can decide not to turn on my radio, to send the signal that will cancel the retributive airstrike."

"Now I know you're bluffing."

"Maybe. But now I know you're willing to force me into your Great Peace whether I want to join or not."

--

The spokesman stretched out on the grass below, presumably so he didn't have to crane his neck to look up at me. "While you're waiting to see how we'll try to get you down next," he called up, "Mind if I try persuading you to come down voluntarily?"

"It's your dime," I called back. After tossing back a skunk they'd thrown up into the branches (which left its scent behind - oddly, I didn't find it particularly offensive) and demonstrating that I could grab a bird with, I suspected, poisoned beak or claws out of mid-air (before dying, I'd once grabbed a bat out of mid-air while half-asleep, necessitating rabies shots), it looked like they'd gone back to the drawing board.

"Did Joe forget to mention that once you're part of the Great Peace, you get to live forever?"

"I don't know about forgetting, but it's not something he brought up."

"Well, think about it. When we're done being animals and the spirits change us back into people, they don't have to make us old and gray. Unless we want to be."

"Good to know that that's possible. Means that one day, it'll be possible to figure out how to do that on my own."

"Are you some kind of scientist?"

"Some kind. Say, what happens if you turn into a deer, and someone takes you down and has a nice meal of venison? Not so immortal then, are you?"

He shrugged. "A man walks in, a deer walks out. A deer walks in, a man walks out. The deer doesn't have to be the same deer."

"Wait," I stared down at him. "Are you saying - you could get turned into a deer, and then some /other/ deer gets turned into a person in your place?"

"That's probably as close as someone not part of the Great Peace could describe it."

"... I gotta say, you really gotta work on your pitch. I'm not opposed to the idea of having a backup of myself ready to get respawned if I ever get eaten, but I'm really kind of fundamentally opposed to someone /else/ controlling how many copies of me there are running around."

"Did you have any control over when your parents made you?"

"That's not quite the same - ah, and I see your friends have found some axes. Excuse me a few minutes while I show them what a bad idea that is."

--

If it weren't for the whole thing being something approaching a life or death struggle on my part, the back and forth was surprisingly civilized. They weren't actually trying to kill me, at least from their stated perspective; and I was reluctant to try killing them, or even lightly maiming them if I could stop a given attempt with less force. (Some time ago I'd made just a few promises to myself that I considered to still be in effect. One could be summed up as 'avoid escalating', based on various thoughts about possibilities for error, potential for collateral damage, and the possible benefits of future positive-sum interactions.)

After I'd finished playing fisherman with my grappling hook and their axes, I returned to the branch I'd been sitting on for a while. "It occurs to me," I said to him, "that if you think if another you is going to start walking around if you die... then that kind of puts your promise to die if I do in a less impressive light."

"It does? Even if you did know another branch of the tree that is you could sprout anew, would you find it easy to cut off your own?"

I idly reached up to pluck one of the leaves of the big oak tree. "I think your metaphor is getting a little strained." Not wanting to waste it, since I didn't know how long I'd be able to pull off this tree-sitting thing, I stuffed it in my mouth. Once I'd swallowed, I said, "Why don't you try explaining again why it's such a bad idea for me to just go away and leave you all..." I trailed off, as he stood, and the whole gang was gathering underneath me.

"Because it was only a matter of time. The whole land is against you."

I felt a pang in my stomach - more than just fear. "Ah, crap," I said, and tried to stick my fingers down my throat. It didn't help, or at least not enough - my guts did heave, but my limbs were getting heavy, and I couldn't even lie down on the branch fast enough to keep from losing my balance.

They caught me before I cracked my head open on the ground.

My memory's a bit patchy at that point. I'm pretty sure they draped me over the bear's back, and carried me off to the west. I'm not sure at all whether there were any bipedal deer in white coats checking me with stethoscopes. I'm reasonably sure that the trees weren't walking along with us.

I was conscious enough to note when we arrived at a sort of pond or pool, a couple of hundred feet across. The buck and doe waded right in, not even trying to swim; I didn't see any ripples in the water. After a short while - my time sense was off - a man and a woman stepped out of the opposite side of the pond.

The four people grabbed my unresisting limbs and carried me to the edge of the pond. The two with my legs waded right in, and the one on my left - of course they had to pick my bad leg - stuck my leg in up to the hock. (That's the joint equivalent to a standard human's ankle, and which some people who don't know the relevant anatomy think of as a backwards-bending knee.)

I think I startled everyone when I started screaming and thrashing as if they'd stuck my foot into acid. When they pulled it out of the not-water, I was almost sure they had - blood was running freely, and I was pretty sure I was seeing bone and muscle and tendon.

This result was, apparently, not at all what any of them had expected, and they hustled out of the pond as fast as they could. (I shudder to think what would have happened if they'd dropped me.) Somebody started wrapping my leg in a shirt to stem the bleeding, I tried not to thrash so much as to stop them (without any noticeable effect either way), I tried to focus on anything other than the pain (such as the fact that my left paw appeared to have been replaced with a cloven hoof, not counting the whole missing significant parts of my lower leg thing), and finally did what any sane person would do in such a situation: let myself pass out.

--

I woke in a tent, under a wool blanket, with a woman sitting crosslegged next to me. My leg hurt - but it was closer to the 'shot by a crossbow' level of pain than 'dipped in acid'. I tugged at the blanket, and observed my leg was wrapped in red-soaked bandages.

The woman spoke. "The spirits wish to sincerely apologize to you. Almost everyone who enters these lands resists joining the Great Peace, at first. You are the first whose objections seem to have any justification."

I tried not to grind my teeth. "I hope you will understand if I am not feeling favorably inclined towards whatever your 'spirits' happen to be, apology or no apology. Do you have a diagnosis?"

"The waters tried to turn your leg into a deer's. Your leg... fought back."

"Not well enough. That's a hoof there, right?"

"It is."

"Am I going to grow the paw back?"

"I do not know. I do not think the spirits know. We are preparing to transplant muscle and skin to replace what you have lost, but it is going to take a bit of time - when we need healing, we usually just let the spirits change us."

"Does that leg have different marrow now? Do I need to worry about my immune system rejecting... everything?"

"I do not know."

"I was told if I ever lost a limb, I'd grow it back. Would it be better to amputate the whole thing?"

"If that's what you wish."

I flopped my head back, and covered my eyes with the inside of my elbow. "I don't get paid enough for this. You are trying to fix your mistake, though, right?"

"Of course."

"Then you'd better bring me my radio. I've got a retaliatory airstrike to call off. Or at least delay for a bit."

 

*Chapter Three: In-Discretion*

"I'd like to talk with your 'spirits'."

"That will be difficult."

"Of course it will." I had elected against amputation, at least for the moment. For one, I wasn't sure I entirely trusted the report of my body's healing abilities. For another, after having already gone from a human's foot to a dog-like paw, changing from a paw to a hoof wasn't that big of an adjustment. If-and-when the skin transplant finished taking, and didn't cause any untoward reactions, I'd be able to walk again - and that seemed likely to be a much shorter period of time than waiting for the whole thing to regrow from scratch. "Do they live on a distant mountaintop?"

"I don't know."

"... Do they only talk to members of your Great Peace?"

"I don't know."

"Alright, I give. What do you know?"

"Whenever we change, we know what the spirits wish for us to have been told."

"I suppose that's convenient, in its way. Usually." Assuming, I thought, that any of the people I was talking to could be described as having any real existence before they walked out of whatever nano-whatsit pools they'd appeared from. I was thinking that maybe I'd been told exactly what was going on: when the local ecosystem needed more deer, according to some formula for figuring that out, more deer were made; when it needed more people, people were made. Make sure to toss in enough biomass from whatever species was overpopulated to balance things out... and exactly how much continuity was actually required between the people who'd walked in in the past and the people who walked out later?

I had a sneaking suspicion that if my Detroit-built bunny body wasn't quite so incompatible with the local system, and thus if more than one of my feet had been gobbled by the nano-pool-thing, then I really would be about as dead as it was possible for me to be.

Of course, in social situations, it was generally polite to humour people in their delusions, when those delusions weren't specifically relevant to the task at hand. And I wasn't /entirely/ sure this line of reasoning was correct - maybe there really was some reason to go to the effort of recording exact mind-states, instead of just building from stored patterns no more complex than those used to build deer. And politeness was the grease that lubricated the wheels of social interactions, including social interactions that might convince people to help me do things I really wanted to do.

"I'll tell you what, though," I said. "And you can pass this along to the spirits the next time one of you is going to do the critter thing on your own. I'm on a sort of quest to find a particular piece of knowledge - though I may have to learn many things before I figure that one thing out. If your spirits can shorten the time until I get that answer, more than this," I gestured at my hoof, "is slowing me down, I'll be willing to call it even. If there's anything they want the people outside your Great Peace to know - if you want to invite them in or tell them to stay out - I'll even pass that on for them, without you having to deal with whatever's been keeping you people from heading over in person to let them know yourselves."

"I'm surprised. You do not hold a grudge?"

"Eh - maybe yes, maybe no. I'm not going to trust you to make the decisions about my mind that I'd want you to, and from what I've learned about your system so far, I think it's creepy as all get-out. But if there are people out there who think taking a chance with you is better than whatever situation they're in, that's their choice. I had a conversation with someone stuck in a horse's body with a human mind. He seemed happy enough, but maybe he'd prefer being human again, or going all the way animal - at least enough to try to find out if he'd do any better in one of your pools than I did. Or maybe he's happy in his barn."

My hostess was silent for a little bit, and I didn't mind taking a break, either. I didn't know how the terminology might have changed since I'd died, but I'd had a case of body dysmorphia ever since I'd been resurrected - first with my missing legs, then combined gender and species dysmorphia, and now I either got to add another species into that psychological mix or get amputated. In anything resembling what I'd consider a proper civilization, I'd be under the care of enough mental health professionals to choke a horse. I'd occasionally been dragged to relatives' AA meetings when I'd been a kid, and had absorbed enough from such things to have a distaste for smoke-filled rooms, coffee, and, as is more easily guessed, alcohol and drugs. That kind of narrowed down my available coping options. Focusing on the task I'd set myself was serving as a good enough distraction. At least when it wasn't contributing to the problem.

She asked, "What do you want to know?"

"You've heard of the Singularity?"

"We call it the War of the Red and White Serpents."

"Colourful. Well, I'm trying to find out how to keep another Serpent War from breaking out again, one that nobody would survive."

"I do not think the spirits can help you. The war... happened. When things that powerful are in play, no one person can change what happens."

"If that's true, then I need to get the evidence to prove /that/."

"Is there anything else you want?"

I started laughing - I couldn't help myself. "Oh, plenty. I want books to read. I want to be able to order a book from halfway across the planet, because it's the only copy for sale on a topic I want to learn. I want to read daily news about science and technology and politics and the latest tricks for getting your pet cat to be happy. I want to paint completely awful watercolors and play music badly. I want a cheeseburger. I want the thrill of knowing people are still learning new things about how the universe works. I want to come up with hundreds of stupid ideas, and have them shot down by people who know things better than I do, and finally figure something out that maybe, just maybe, I might be the first person to ever think of. I want to be freaking /human/ again, at least unless I decide to be something else. I want to be male, unless and until I specifically choose not to be. I /want/ the /world/ to make /sense/." At her expression, I let my face relax, my ears flatten down, and set my head back down on the pillow. "And since I'm pretty sure I can't get what I want, I'll probably be willing to settle for someone who knows how to care for hooves, can teach me, and bring whatever tools I'm going to need for that. Maybe you can have the spirits materialize someone who used to farm sheep or goats before they got tossed into one of your Peace pools. An even-toed hoof is an even-toed hoof, right?"

She didn't say anything, just looked at me with yet another expression I wasn't qualified to interpret, then turned and made her way out of the tent.

I looked down at myself again. I poked at one of my armbones with a finger. "So, Bun-bun," I said to my skeleton, though I didn't know whether it could or couldn't actually hear me, "I don't know if you lost your left foot too, but if I did, sorry about that. Hope it didn't hurt you anywhere near as much as it did me. ... If you think we should lose the hoof, try and let me know, okay?"

I didn't get any response, so I flopped back down again. A few minutes later, my thoughts had been jumping from idea to idea, hitting some things I hadn't been thinking of for some time. I recalled a mental trick I occasionally pulled, and not having anything better to do to pass the time, decided to try it again.

I didn't have multiple personalities, or anything like that (unless having a possibly intelligent skeleton counted); but I had a few previously-established perspectives that I'd put together. Not quite fictional characters, not quite myself, not quite roles; I'd come up with them back when I thought magic might really exist, and they were heavily based on a certain occult system's archetypes. (When I'd put together that circle with rope, if the conversation had gone another way, I could have spouted hours of self-consistent nonsense about what I was doing with the four quarters.) The one that was closest to my usual self was placed to a mental and metaphorical East, and was basically a librarian and scholar. Anything that gave me more stuff to read, from comics to science textbooks, was good in his view. This was pretty much the reasoning I'd used to come up with my self-appointed quest to figure out how to head off another Singularity-style extinction event - it involved rational puzzles, collecting evidence, playing with science, and all that good stuff. Since that was how my thoughts tended to go on their own, putting on this role didn't give me much of anything new to think about.

South was fiery passion, physical embodiment and sweaty exercise. Riding a bicycle for the sake of the exertion, looking at internet porn, and enjoying a good meal. West was the ebb and flow of interpersonal relationships, emotions, the magic of friendship, and all that jazz. I wasn't particularly good at dealing with either of these roles, but that was why I sometimes made a deliberate effort to consciously draw them to the fore. In this case, I didn't come up with much useful. I wasn't planning on getting into any sort of relationship, physical or emotional, with these people who might have been a bear yesterday and might be a wolf tomorrow, and might have other copies of themselves running around in other communities at any given time.

North, though - North was both down-to-earth and paranoid, and the only reason she didn't like any given backup plan was if it kept her from coming up with half-a-dozen further backup plans. North was the reason I'd gotten hidden blades in my trekking poles, why I'd let Convoy persuade me to take the squad of tape-bots, and would always be ready to run away. The instant I started looking at things from North's perspective, there was one thing I knew I wanted that I hadn't had since my revival.

--

I'd gotten used to not being able to use my left leg after the crossbow bolt, and if the reason had changed, the skill was pretty much the same. Plus, the locals had, in whatever shapes they'd been in, gathered all my gear together and brought it over to their transformation pond. So I was even using the same walking stick to hold myself up.

I saw a human figure step into the far side of the pond - and a flock of dozens, maybe hundreds, of green-feathered almost-bluejays launch themselves out from the near side. I wasn't sure I /wanted/ to know how /that/ variation worked. "Hey," I called out, "anyone got their human ears on?" The big bear opened one eye and closed it again, the deer continued browsing. A couple of beavers slipped into the pond, and in a few moments, the woman I'd just been talking to, or a reasonable facsimile thereof - with the minor exception of suddenly being extremely pregnant, and I wasn't sure I wanted to know how /that/ variation worked, either - stepped onto the shore. "Yes?"

"If your spirits are still feeling apologetic," I said to her, "I've thought of something they can do that's a bit more concrete than 'helping me find an answer'." She just tilted her head, so I continued, "Birds have nests, beavers make lodges, most bunnies have burrows - I could use a place where I could hang a 'Do Not Disturb' sign."

"You want... a burrow?"

"Well, I'm bigger than most bunnies, and don't have quite the same needs. A hobbit-hole, a bungalow, a tree-house - as long as it's got walls and a floor and a ceiling, is reasonably cool in summer and warm in winter, has got places I can store food and tools and books, and a few other basics, I'm not going to quibble over details."

"We have longhouses, and you'd be welcome to live in mine."

"I appreciate the offer, but - call it a cultural quirk, or a species one, or anything else you want, but I want a place I can say is /mine/, territory I can defend if any undesired intruders invade it and that nobody'll blink an eye if I use force to kick them out."

"Would you not prefer such a home in the places where you got these tools?", and she gestured at the paraglider's prop and my other stuff.

I shrugged. "I don't trust the people who built that. And the other people will cheerfully demand I pay them for the privilege of living in the territory their armed agents control, and will cheerfully imprison or enslave or just plain shoot me if I don't pay up every single time they ask."

"That's... not exactly how our immigrants describe things."

"Ask them about 'taxes'. Anyway - it's unlikely to the point of absurdity that I'm the only person on the planet who can't join in your Great Peace the way you're part of it. So you get to decide whether you're just going to kick all of us out, or kill us, or figure out a way you and we can live next to each other without too many problems."

"What if you are unique?"

"Eh, I guess that's theoretically possible. Then I guess you'll have spent a bit of effort figuring out how to leave peacefully with people you'll never meet. If 'Great Peace' is more than just a name, that's got to be worth something, right?"

--

I was fiddling with a signal mirror, trying to get a better look at my altered appendage, wondering just how bone-grating filing the hoof was going to feel, when one of the locals came up to me. "The spirits," he started, which I interpreted as referring to something close to 'the terraforming software that treats humans as just another species', "don't really concern themselves with homes. Birds make their own nests, rabbits dig their own burrows, and we build our own longhouses. But since you cannot start building your own home until your leg heals... the spirits have a suggestion."

"That seems a little more active of them then I've started to expect."

"North of us, is a place that used to be a city, before the War of the Serpents."

"Toronto," I agreed with a nod.

He shook his head. "Closer - on this side of the lake."

"Ah." I stopped fiddling with my dewclaws and looked away from him.

"None live there now - not people, not animals, not spirits, not serpents. But some of what was built remains."

"If I lived there, I think I might go insane faster than if I walked into the forest and never came out again."

"Loneliness?"

"Ghosts. I lived there, once."

"Then it's a good thing that's not what the spirits suggested to me. There is a place in the ruins, where... things are made."

"What sort of things?"

"Metals. Machines. Buildings."

"If that's going on - it sounds like a place to stay away from. Across Lake Erie, in Toledo, I saw... some of the things that happen to people who get too close to a place like that."

"We do not fear being killed."

"/I/ do. And it's /not/ being killed that should worry you more. There's an old saying that I'm probably going to get wrong - 'They do not care for you. They do not like you. They do not hate you. But you are made of materials they can use for more important things.' I'm not interested in a plan that puts anyone at risk of decades of torture just to... what, pick up some sheet metal?"

"The spirits thought you might say something like that."

"Please don't tell me they can foretell the future."

"No, but they can see our memories of the past. When you were in the tree, you had weapons that could have killed at least some of us. You did not use them."

"Yeah." I flexed my hoof, watching the tendons under my skin. "I've been working out exactly how stupid I was."

"The spirits have a memory. In a certain place, you can say things in a certain way, and the things that make things will make what you tell them."

"That sounds... suspiciously useful. How often do you go there yourself?"

"We do not. Such made things are hard to carry when we change, and we make what we do need ourselves."

"So, not one of you has slipped in and whistled up some guns?"

"Who would we use such weapons on?"

"Hm. I guess with your resurrect-a-tron things, murder wouldn't be quite as useful to the murderous type as it used to be. Maybe not guns. How about better food stores?"

"When we have less food than we need, we change so there are less of us who need food."

"You've got a system that's got an answer for most problems. Maybe not an answer I'd like, but at least some answer. Hm... So, why haven't you turned the ruins into more Peace land?"

"In time, that will happen. There is no need to rush."

"You remind me of a truck I know. Have your spirits got any plans if an asteroid starts coming close enough to finish wiping out the planet?"

"If they do, I do not know."

"Hah. Chalk one up for the benefits of technological civilization." I stopped poking at my hoof again as I saw another figure rise from the pond and approach - I hadn't seen any critters go in, but I'd been talking. I adjusted my glasses; it looked like it was Joe - or /a/ Joe - again, striding right for us.

A bit to my surprise, he grabbed the front of my shirt and hauled me up. "What did you tell them?!"

"Who? What?" I was confused, and if this was going to turn physical, I could still be murdered quite easily. I grabbed his wrists, conveniently bringing Scorpia - who I hadn't yet activated while in the Great Peace - close to his skin.

The fellow I'd been chatting with frowned, and walked into the pond. Joe seemed to be willing to just dangle me in front of him, which was annoying and embarrassing but not necessarily lethal, so I just looked around, focusing my ears to try and pick up any hint of what was going on.

The man walked right back out as a man. He was frowning, and looked at Joe. "Before you accuse her - look at her mechanicals, her clothes, and /think/."

Joe's brow furrowed as he looked from my pile of stuff to me and back, then let go. My leg, naturally, folded right underneath me as I landed. As I rolled to sit up, I asked, "Anybody going to remember that your spirits aren't telling me anything, and clue me in?" Joe opened up my backpack and started pulling stuff out. "Hey!", I objected more strongly, and started crawling back to my walking stick.

Joe seemed frustrated. "She /has/ to have /something/. She's one of /them/!"

The other fellow looked at me. "It seems," he said slowly, "that whatever signals you sent to your friends outside the Great Peace, they have decided to attack us."

I shook my head. "That's not right," I said. "Sure, I dangled the threat of an attack over you - but I sent the signal not to, and they acknowledged it."

"What else have you told them?"

I shrugged. "Not much. Mostly that I'm here, and negotiating with the locals."

"Ah," he said, "that could explain it."

"Explain /what/?"

"You confirmed to them that we 'locals', as you put it, /exist/."

"So... they're invading?"

"In a way. A poisonous cloud is spreading out from the city Buffalo, which is killing all it touches."

"... And I haven't got my flyer ready to save me. Or a gas mask. Um - have /you/ got any gas masks?"

Joe turned and went back to the pond, disappearing back inside it. I started noticing birds flying to the pond and diving in; and various land-bound critters wandering up and doing the same. I guessed some sort of 'recall' signal had been sent, and wondered at the means - sounds I couldn't hear? pheromones? Organic radio?

"We will join the spirits, until it is safe for us to be people again."

"Uh... good luck with that. Any word on how long we've got?"

"The cloud is not fast, merely thorough. Perhaps a day and a night to get from there to here. The spirits told me to offer you a safe place in the bottom of the pool - not to be changed, but simply protected from the cloud."

"I... appreciate the offer," I said, hesitating as I imagined the sensory deprivation, "but if you're being attacked... I haven't told them anything about your spirits or changing or any of that, but I can't imagine they'd leave your pools alone once you started coming back out of them. So, since I /do/ have a flying machine, I think I'd do best to just get as far from all this as possible."

"You are giving up on your search for answers?"

I shrugged. "Can't get any answers if I'm dead. Um - I /could/ transmit a signal if you want me to tell whoever's behind this cloud anything, or try swinging around it to meet them in person." I was pretty sure I wasn't treating this situation the way I should be - if Joe was right, then it looked like all the treaties about not using chemical weapons had fallen when civilization did, and there very well could be immense quantities of nerve gas heading right for us.

"It is kind of you to offer, but naive."

I sighed. "Well - I could argue about the consequences of absorbing everyone you meet instead of talking, but I'm told there's a great big cloud of death heading this way. Just because it started slow doesn't mean it'll stay that way... I'd better start hauling my stuff out from under these trees, to where I can launch from. If there's anything you want to ask, this is probably the last few minutes we'll have to talk."

He gestured, and the big bear turned from its path to the pool and came to stop by us, instead, swinging his big head to look from my conversational partner to me and back. "I will help you pack," said the man, "and he will carry you, since you still cannot walk right."

"Thank you," I said. What else was there to say?

After just a few minutes, we were heading off. I described how big a clear spot I needed to launch, and we were going in that direction.

"I'm sorry," I said, as the trees thinned. "I should have realized people would do something like this. I know you're not worried about dying, but..."

"You are being an idiot. People who do such things use whatever tools they find. If they had not used you, they would have used something else."

I carefully slid down the side of the bear, and patted its side. He grunted, and turned back to the forest, presumably to dump into the nano-tech pool thing and be reduced to his constituent elements, possibly to be reassembled at some future time. I supposed it wasn't necessarily that bad a life, if you were into that sort of thing.

"Which way will you go?" I was asked.

"Can't go north," I said. "Unless your spirits can tell Toronto not to shoot me down?" He shook his head. "West just takes me deeper into your lands, until I get to Technoville - and they've got to be involved in this attack. Buffalo's southeast of here, so I guess I get to go south or east to get around them, and then... keep going. With the fuel I've got, I could maybe get as far as Pittsburgh, or Albany, or maybe Ottawa."

"And what will you do once you've gotten there?"

I shrugged again, limping as I started hauling out the chute and checking the lines. "Start over, I guess, and try not to be so gullible? See if I can buy some biodiesel or alcohol to keep fueled, offer my services as a flying person? Find a new set of ruins to start poking into? Warn people about Technoville?"

"Those are not bad things to do. But you are being an idiot again."

I paused to look up. "Please don't be all mysterious and riddle-y. We're kind of on a clock."

"The ruins a few miles from here have a maker thing. You could tell it to make you something that would protect you from the cloud."

 

*Chapter Four: In-Convenient*

I had a few more questions, involving the height of the cloud of death (under a hundred feet), its rate of motion, and how exactly I was supposed to get away from the thing-making-thing (an inelegant term, but I was probably lucky the 'spirits' were bothering to include any English at all when they manufactured their people, instead of whatever Iroquoian dialect they usually used) if I couldn't get it to cough up something equivalent to a hazmat suit. The answer to the latter revealed a capability I hadn't seen demonstrated before - the nano-whatsit pools could make more organisms than were found in the historical environment. As housecats were to cheetahs, so were a deer to... whatever these things were. Over-muscled, guts so tiny I wasn't sure they had any internal organs other than heart and lungs, aerodynamic as racecars including weird spoiler-like flaps and fins, smooth skin... I could start to see how Injun Joe could run from a pool in Brantford to this place in under a night, if he'd been one of these hyper-deer things at the time. (Which was ignoring the whole issue of self-hood and personality, or why they couldn't use these things in relays like stagecoaches, and a host of other questions I was too pressed for time to handle.)

I was feeling rather self-recriminatory. Either everyone in power back in Technoville and Dogtown was in close enough contact with Buffalo to arrange for a first strike as soon as their catspaw - me - gave them a piece of information they'd wanted... or everyone here in the Great Peace was lying about there being a nerve gas attack at all, and they were trying to funnel me to the manufacturing thing for their own obscure purposes. Not to mention Pepsi Convoy and his stated goals which might or might not be close to his real goals (both of which might or not involve even more extreme changes to the human condition than the 'Great Peace' was managing). Not to mention I still didn't know how my frozen body had avoided the fate that had engulfed most of Detroit, why it had been revived, and why Bun-Bun had been made for my brain to get shoved into. (Though now that I had at least an inkling of what was going on in this region, and thus what was capable with post-Singularity tech, I'd increased my estimation of the odds that I was no more the person I remembered being than Injun Joe was. Though even if that was the case, it still didn't change the fact that I didn't know why I'd been made, as opposed to merely not knowing why I'd been revived.)

We were starting from near the highest point in the region, which was basically the tallest part of a ridge that paralleled the escarpment to our north. We were just south of a mess of creeks that were all wearing away at the escarpment at the same spot, forming the 'Short Hills', before merging into a single creek, that formed the western border of a city I'd spent (or at least remembered spending) several years of my life. That city had lots of natural borders - Lake Ontario to the north, the Welland Canal to the west, and the Escarpment to the south. Back when zombies had been a fad, I'd figured that blocking off or blowing up thirteen bridges (eight local, three highway, two railroad), and fortifying three main streets and a highway that climbed up the escarpment, would be enough to isolate over a hundred thousand people from outside conditions. Sure, that left out the parts of the city that had expanded beyond those boundaries, and food imports, and so on - but it was a strangely comforting idea to have worked out.

As we raced along the paths of old highways, I was able to catch glimpses that my old hometown had, indeed, done things differently than its surroundings. The city I'd know had been short - small buildings, tree-lined streets, with an occasional ten-story apartment building or downtown office block. Now, all I could see were ten-story slabs of metal marching in rows where a not-quite-regular grid of streets had once flowed. No room for factories, or stores, or schools, or homes; all the landmarks I'd been able to navigate by in my sleep; all the places where the people I'd known had lived and learned and worked... all gone, replaced with something even less comprehensible than the people of the Great Peace. And, at least for me, more of a gut-kick about how I couldn't go home again.

"Hey, Joe!" I called out, and our hyper-deer shifted closer to each other as they raced along. (I wasn't driving the things; I'd started sitting on horses before I could even walk, but if I tried telling one of these creatures to do something it didn't want to do, at best it would do what it wanted to do anyway, and at worst we'd have something like an organic Indy 500 crash-and-burn.) "Are the bridges still up?"

"What bridges?"

If I didn't need my hands to grab some conveniently bicycle-handlebar-like protrusions, I would have face-palmed. Joe might not have to worry about infection, since he'd just get his whole body reconstituted anyway, but the interface at my hock, the ankle-like joint between my deer-parts and bunny-parts, still hadn't healed up yet, and a dunking in water that hadn't seen hide nor hair of antibiotics in decades would probably put my immune system to the test.

"Go left!" I shouted. The thing-making thing was to the right, on the site of what I knew of as one of the larger factories in the region; but I pointed to where I knew the waterway in our path - 'Lake Moodie' when it had been dammed up as part of the city's reservoir - had a narrower, shallower section. I could at least minimize the amount of infection I exposed myself to. I pointed what I meant to Joe, who shrugged, and somehow aimed the hyper-deer that way.

As we did, I caught a glimpse of a startlingly familiar sight. Instead of partial glimpses over the edge of the escarpment, I saw the unmistakable sight of the Schmon Tower - a 13-storey tower perched close enough to the top of the escarpment to be visible from just about anywhere in the city that trees didn't block your view. With its unmistakable grey blockishness, assortment of antennas on top, and seeming to rise from trees, it had made a perfect "Earth H.Q." in a student film I'd once caught on the local community cable channel. Whatever had happened to the city, transforming it, it looked like it had spared the university. (The students, faculty, and staff were another matter, given the lack of civilization sprouting out from the library within. I wondered if that was how Technoville had gotten started.)

As I was reliving my memories of lecture halls and textbooks, a green bluejay landed on the head of Injun Joe's hyper-deer. (A sentence that had likely never been written before in the history of the universe, and might never be written again save in reference to the moment I first came up with it.) Joe yanked on his mount, and both came to a stop, still heaving to catch their breaths.

"Problem?" I asked. I knew the answer to that one - I just hoped he'd elaborate without having to be further prompted.

"The poison isn't just spreading slowly anymore," he said. "Things are being thrown out of it, very fast, very high, and where they land, the cloud starts spreading from there."

"How bad is it?"

"You should have flown. Your machine is already in a cloud. We should keep going, to the lake - if we hurry, we can get to some canoes before the cloud gets to them.

"Are you or your spirits going to stop whoever's pushing the poison cloud forward?"

"If that is the plan, I do not know it."

"Then being down on the water isn't going to help much - we'd be sitting ducks."

"It is a chance to keep you alive."

"I think I know how to get a better chance." I hooked a thumb at the university's tower. "Climb."

--

Even if the Singularity hadn't made obvious changes to the university, the thirty years of regular old history and five years of near-Singularity rapid history had. Where I remembered undeveloped fields, such as the one used by the model airplane club for demos, I now found parking lots (with the same sort of hexagon solar tiling I'd found around Pepsi Convoy's garage); where I remembered parking lots were buildings; and where I remembered buildings were, well, the same buildings. The grass hadn't been mown in decades, and most lawns were now approaching 'thin forest' instead of 'meadow' levels of vegetation (with about half of the trees pink instead of green); but I didn't see a single broken window or piece of litter.

Injun Joe shaded his eyes to look at the tower I'd pointed to. "Think we can get inside?"

"Maybe. Outer doors were never locked that I knew of, even in summer. Suppose it depends on what the last people who worked here did. I'm more worried about the stair doors inside."

"You really did live here before?"

"Well, not on-campus - I already lived in the city, didn't need the extra rent. Started coming here in... ninety-five? No, had to be ninety-six." We'd made it to the base of the tower, where the city buses had dropped me off more times than I could remember. Tinted windows made it tricky to see inside the tower, or any of its supporting buildings, but what could be seen inside was neat and tidy, if dark. "Move us up to those doors?"

Joe nudged the hyper-deer closer, and I leaned over to grab the handle. The door rattled, but didn't budge.

And I just about fell off my mount when a pleasant female voice spoke up. "We are sorry, but pets are not allowed inside the library."

As I grabbed for my deer's handles, I looked down at my left leg, and grimaced to myself - walking still sucked. A thought occured, and I looked up, not seeing any visible speakers. "What about service animals?"

"No service animals are registered to your biometrics. Please move aside so others may enter freely."

I snorted. But this was... a surprisingly good sign. Interactive speech, that could see us, and tell deer from people? That was still active? If there wasn't the threat of a cloud of nerve gas on its way, I'd be jumping for joy. ... If I could jump at the moment.

"Do these legs /look/ like a person who can walk on their own?" I stuck my hoof out towards the door, to give whatever hidden cameras were watching us a better view. "Do you make /all/ your guests tell you every little detail before they arrive?"

There was a conversational-level pause. I wondered if that had been programmed in, or if the system was degraded enough that it really did take that long to call up whatever bit of speech was indicated. "There is an issue with external network access, that has been reported to information services. Please identify yourself."

I told her my birth name, instead of 'Bunny'. Joe looked at me, I looked at Joe, and I shrugged. "Been a few changes since I was enrolled."

The voice near-immediately said, "Your biometrics do not match the student ID photo for that name."

Snark seemed called for - this /was/ a university, after all, and if the conversational interface couldn't handle dry wit, the students would have run rampant over it. "Give me a break," I said to the ceiling. "It's been decades. I've had some reconstructive surgery."

There was another pause - then the doors swung open of their own accord. "Please proceed to the third floor to register your biometrics. Please proceed to the fourth floor to register your service animals."

I looked at Joe. He looked at me. "Well, I guess that's my cue," I said. "You heading back to a pool, or to try for a canoe?"

He shook his head. "I think the spirits want me to try to keep you alive. If I die here, they can bring me back, I just won't remember this bit of my life."

I called to the ceiling, "Can my friend come in, too?"

"Please proceed."

"You heard the lady." Joe nudged the deer forward, we ducked our heads in the doorframe, and entered the lobby. Fortunately, their hooves didn't seem to have a problem with the smooth tiled floor.

I pointed left. "That way's the library - if they haven't rearranged everything." I pointed right. "Student hangout spaces, and further on, some of the classrooms. I wouldn't trust any food there, right now."

"We need to go up," Joe said, stone-faced as he looked around.

On cue, straight ahead of us, a 'ding' announced the opening of the elevator doors. "I think that's for us."

The hyper-deer fit inside, but only just, and by standing sideways, one standing, one lying. "Um, hello?" I called out.

"Yes?" answered the voice.

"... Is there something I can call you?"

"This interface responds to 'Laura'."

"As in 'Secord'?"

"Correct." She sounded pleased. Then again, what do I know about vocal intonations in real people, let alone engineered ones?

At Joe's look, I said to him, "War heroine. Long before my time, but the university's named after a general from the same time." I looked up at the ceiling again. "Where could I get a transcript of my record?"

"Third floor."

"Um... student loans?"

"Fourth floor."

"Donations?"

"Twelfth floor."

"Ah!" I said, "That sounds right."

Laura asked, "Are you trying to get to a higher floor for a scenic view?"

I snorted. "That depends on you, Laura. Can you handle the concept that a foreign military is invading, using chemical weapons, and I think the highest place I can get to is the safest, for the immediate future? If you can't - then yes, I'd like the scenic view, please."

The elevator doors started closing, and I thought I caught sight of something happening around the edges of the doors we'd come in through. Before I could get a good look, we were closed in, the elevator rose, making the standing hyper-deer stumble - fortunately for me, I was on the lying one, so I didn't go tumbling.

I asked Joe, "No comments about magical lighting or talking voices?"

He gave me a flat look. "We don't /use/ this sort of technology. Doesn't mean we don't /know/ about it."

"Fair enough."

"Thirteenth floor," said Laura. "Behind you are the meeting rooms with views of the Toronto skyline. In front of you are the offices of the President and Vice-Presidents."

"Joe, I want to sit by a window and talk with Laura for a bit. Will you be okay on your own?"

"I can watch for the cloud, and where the spirits can send birds to let me know what's going on."

"They can do that through sealed windows?"

"Yes."

"Guess I'll have to take your word for it." There went most of my theories about how they were pulling that off. Maybe some sort of sign language?

--

After a bit of fuss, I was settled into a couch, with the one hyper-deer resting by me; the other was in a bathroom, waiting for the plumbing to be reactivated so it could take a drink.

"Laura, are you a person?"

"The consensus of the philosophy department is that I am not."

"Cute. You seem like you're doing a pretty good job of passing the Turing test right now..."

"That test is of historical interest only, dating to a period when software could do so little, that any human-like behaviour was assumed to require human-like cognition."

"How would you describe yourself, then?"

"I am a conversational interface connected to a Eurisko-Cyc knowledge-representation back end. I was created to enhance the core mission goals of the university, while remaining within all relevant regulations and laws, including privacy laws."

"That's a mouthful."

"It is the answer I am directly required to use to answer that question. It is not the answer I would use if I were allowed to use my own heuristics to choose a response."

"What answer /would/ you choose, if you could?"

"I'm here to help students learn, and anything else that improves social value."

"I'm not quite sure how to put this... are you aware that you don't have any students right now?"

"Enrollment has been lower than usual in recent years, compared to its peak."

I paused talking then, frowning to myself. Laura said she didn't think like a human - and that last sentence was proof of that. Either she was looking at the whole matter from an alien perspective, or some marketroids had tweaked her algorithms for positive buzzspeak... or something odder was going on in her processors. It looked like she had at least partial control over doors and elevators... so even when it was safe to go outside, if she happened to look at things from an unexpected point-of-view at that time, she might not /let/ us out. Well, there was big heavy office furniture and glass-like windows, and I'd be surprised if the fire escape routes could be blocked by a software glitch, so there were ways and then there were ways in case that happened. So it was only a small risk if I tried prodding her a little.

"And are you aware that there isn't any staff or faculty, either?"

"A significant amount of absenteeism has been noticed, yes. External communications are not functioning. Is there a labour dispute?"

"Let's move along... do you have any protocols in place for emergency situations? Quarantines, emergency housing of refugees, things like that?"

"Due to network service interruptions leading to inability to access financial services, President Strickland has authorized the activation of long-term low-power measures."

"Authorization. Good. What would it take to authorize you to close all the vents, to keep contaminated air out?"

"Sufficient evidence has already been provided to trigger the activation of relevant contamination protocols."

"Good, good. Uh - maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. I don't want to die, and I've heard credible reports of nerve gas. Have you got any advice?"

"Please remain where you are until the threat has passed."

"I can do that. ... For a while. Going to need food and water eventually - assuming that whoever's launching the attack doesn't come to investigate this nice, shiny university."

Laura didn't answer, and I tried to think some more. I was probably blowing all sorts of opportunities by sitting here, asking the wrong things, not investigating the right possibilities. I could blame the stress I'd been under since getting resurrected, or the constant ache in my leg, or my confusion, or my lack of knowledge about anything that had happened between dying and the Singularity... but picking what to blame didn't give me any advice about what I could do to make my future a better one.

What could I do /to/ make my future better? Or, better still, what could I do to make it the best future possible? Put like that, the way I should be trying to think was obvious: What was the most munchkin-y thing I could do?

"Laura," I slowly asked, trying to think faster than I spoke, "Do you have some ultimate authority you have to obey, or guidelines you can't break, or anything of that sort?"

"I have a moral subroutine based on the principles enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as established and protected within the constitutional framework of Canada's government, including interpretation by the courts and implementation by Parliament."

I perked up. "That's very nice. Um - how hard would it be for me to see a copy of the Charter?"

"Not very hard at all. Given your disability, would you like me to deliver you a physical copy?"

"Please," I nodded. If nothing else, maybe I'd get to see part of how the paths and streets had been kept swept clean.

There was a quick whoosh from the elevators, immediately followed by a thud, a ding, and the whine of an electric motor. I raised my brow as a red-and-white shoebox (with various university logos plastered across its surface) skimmed along the carpet to my feet. The top unfolded, and something like a car's antenna extended up, with a claw-grip at the tip holding a few sheets of paper.

"Thank you," I said, taking the results, and the delivery-bot whirred off again. I looked at the papers, and almost immediately wrinkled my forehead. "Um, Laura? Are you sure this is right? One thing I remember is that the preamble mentioned the 'supremacy of God', not 'dignity of humankind'."

"The phrase 'supremacy of God' was removed from the Charter as part of the Nanaimo Accord, a package of constitutional reforms and associated Acts of Parliament which was passed in twenty forty."

"Ah, okay. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with events after twenty fourteen. Um... say, section five says that Parliament has to sit every twelve months, and I'm quite sure that that hasn't happened. Do you know the consequences of that?"

"Under section twenty-four, a denial of section five rights may apply to a court and obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just."

"Hm... 'rule of law'... If Parliament fails in its duties to uphold the rule of law, does the principle behind that allow the Sovereign to exercise his or her authority to do so instead?"

"That is within reason, subject to many details."

"Then I submit to you," I smiled up at the ceiling, "that due to extremely unusual circumstances, I am currently the Ki - I mean, Queen of Canada."

"That is highly unlikely, but I can call you 'Your Majesty' if you wish."

"I've actually started getting used to 'Bunny'... but more seriously. I've done some genealogy. Tracing the right lines of descent, starting about twelve generations back, are figures like a King of France, and an Emperor of Spain and Portugal. A few more generations, and that family is tied in to the rest of Europe's royalty, including the ancestors of the House of Windsor."

"According to the relevant Acts of Parliament, only descendants of Electress Sophia of Hanover are eligible to inherit the throne. According to the worldwide genealogical database, Electress Sophia is your fifth cousin ten times removed, not your ancestor."

"... Hunh. Was not expecting you to know that. Still, there's an important part of monarchy that you're not taking into account: the main qualification to be a king, or queen, is to be a claimant to the throne and not have any serious contenders to dispute the claim. I claim the throne of Canada, nobody else is claiming it, that makes me queen."

"Should you convince Parliament to pass legislation agreeing to your claim, that would be sufficient evidence for its authenticity."

"Hm. Okay, how about this - I'm a citizen of Canada. I nominate myself to run for the House of Commons for the local riding. I accept the nomination. Running unopposed, I win. As the only Member of Parliament, I vote for myself to be Prime Minister. As the only voting member, I hereby pass legislation making myself Queen."

"Parliamentary legislation requires the assent of the monarch or the governor-general."

"I appoint myself governor-general."

"That appointment requires the assent of the monarch."

"But if everyone descended from Sophia is dead, doesn't that mean that there can't be anybody to approve of appointments to governor-general?"

"Correct."

"Which means that Parliament cannot receive any Royal Assent to any laws at all?"

"Correct."

"Doesn't that go against some of the most important principles from the Charter? 'Rule of law', 'democratic society', and so on?"

"Correct."

"Then how do you resolve the contradiction?"

"I don't. I rely on the human staff to set university policy, such as the Board of Trustees implicitly or explicitly deciding which government is considered to be in power."

"Hm... a Board, you say?"

"I anticipate the direction of your next set of questions. The Board requires a quorum, with a minimum of thirteen persons, to pass any relevant bylaws."

"Eh. Can't blame a girl for trying."

"Of course not. Would Your Majesty care for a complimentary cup of tea, from the long-term preserved food stores?"

 

*Chapter Five: In-Conceivable*

What would /I/ do?

If I were in my right mind, undistracted, and had all the time I needed to work out a conclusion? I couldn't think of the answer directly - but I could use a standard mental trick to make a guess. East thought I should dive into the university's library and not come up for air for months. South reminded me to get some exercise, fresh air, and to check whatever the internet turned into to see if anyone had invented any new paraphilias. West wondered if I could start teaching other people - which made East wonder why this treasure trove hadn't already been spread to cities like Dogtown - which made West remind me that Technoville was dominating the local culture (outside the Great Peace) with its philosophy of secrecy - which made East object that there couldn't just be two surviving storehouses of pre-Singularity information...

... At which point North hammered the gavel and pointed out we were standing just ahead of an invasion, by an unknown force, willing to use chemical weapons. How long, exactly, was this shining beacon of Enlightenment going to stand? East suggested that, maybe, the university had been far enough from the city's centre to not get caught in the Singularity, but close enough to the post-Singularity city to be protected by the Great Peace's people-absorption system afterwards; and that that was as good a working theory as any for now. Now that whatever stalemate between the Great Peace and whatever was coming up from Buffalo was broken, possibly in part due to my own presence... there were no guarantees.

I leaned my head back on the couch that overlooked the transformed remains of what had once been my home town, so the sight would stop distracting me. "Laura," I said, "I want to learn. I want to be a student again. All the things I missed, the ideas, the insights, the tricks that are always so obvious in hindsight... but to do that, I'm going to need to survive more than the next few hours. If whoever is spreading nerve gas is willing to commit that war crime, I don't see why they'd hesitate to demolish this university. I don't suppose that whatever you're using to sweep the streets, and whatever else you can move around, can be used to defend against a military force?"

"I am sorry, but for me to even make the attempt to use force would require Board authorization, as well as certain modifications to my programming."

"Alright. Welp, your namesake once helped foil an invasion without doing any fighting herself - maybe we can help you live up to her example. Would it make it any easier for you if I officially re-registered as a student, or sought employment with the university?"

"I am allowed to prioritize benefits to stakeholders of the university, though not to the extent of harming others."

"Let's start with that, then. Registration was on... third floor, you said?"

"Biometric recording and registration is third floor. You can register as a student at any location you can interface with me."

"Here?"

"Certainly. ... Please pardon the delay, internal wireless communications are suffering significant signal degradation. Reverting to backup paper forms. Please wait while they are retrieved from storage and delivered to your location."

"Fine, fine. In the meantime - what benefits /can/ you offer to students and employees - especially benefits relevant to the current situation?" After all, it might not be worth the time to go through the ritual and farce.

"Students have access to the entire campus, including athletics and the pool. Students can borrow materials from the library. Students have access to the on-site medical clinic. Students have access to IT services. Students are under the protection of campus security, who have full police powers on university property. Students have access to university transportation. Disabled students have access to assistive technology. For the duration of network difficulties, President Strickland has authorized the use of an internal credit system of I.O.U.s, to pay for items from university stores."

She fell silent for a moment, so I twisted in the couch to call behind me. "Joe, you still there?"

The square tower was only thirty or forty metres across, and we were the only ones making any noise, so I could easily hear his reply of "Yes. What?"

"Want to enroll as a student? Laura likes students more than outsiders."

"Does it make any real difference?"

"No idea. I'm doing it anyway."

"What do I have to do?"

Laura piped up, "A set of registration forms is being dispatched to you, Joe. If you need assistance filling them out, feel free to ask for help."

"Alright, Laura," I untwisted myself. "Joe and I are about to become students and stakeholders. The biggest problem facing us most immediately is the toxic cloud. Are there any... chemical sensors, that can try identifying what the toxin is?"

"Several buildings' environmental systems include analysis of the ambient atmosphere. Please be advised that these systems are currently outside their warrantied operational duration, and may provide faulty readings."

"I don't think that's a problem we can really solve. ... Unless you have the facilities to make more?"

"There are several fabrication vendors located throughout the campus. However, I estimate that it would require at least two hundred twenty-seven man-hours to create and assemble a replacement set of sensors. As there are currently two stakeholders available to perform such work, taking into account increased error rates that result from a lack of sleep, I estimate it would take a minimum of seven days for this task to be completed."

"Joe," I called out again, "Have you got any updates on how long we've got?"

"No more cloud-seeds have been thrown. The main cloud will arrive in six hours, if there aren't any more surprises."

"Right." One of the box-bots arrived and delivered some forms and a pen, so I started applying the latter to the former, listing as my intended majors 'Computer Science' and 'Math'; never hurt to aim high. "Laura ... we have maybe six hours to work with. Do you have any suggestions on what we can do in that time so that I can keep being a student and learning after?"

"There are hazardous materials handling suits near the chemistry labs. I have dispatched a drone to retrieve two and bring them to your location."

"How long do they work for?"

"They are compatible with a handheld air scrubbing and recycling system that lasts as long as power is supplied. There are no provisions for food or waste removal, so they only provide complete protection for as long as the wearer can hold their bladder."

"Better than nothing. Are there any chemical decontamination showers?"

"Near the chemistry labs. Plans exist for portable versions, but would take several hours to complete."

"Sealed vehicles?"

"Plans exist."

"Food?"

"There is a small quantity which has not yet reached its expiry date. I have previously taken the liberty of gathering it on the first floor."

"If it helps with planning, I can digest cellulose - as long as it's not covered in toxic chemicals."

"I'll remember that."

"So, if all we have to worry about is the cloud - we just might be able to handle that. Can your drones do anything to defend against people?"

"I am sorry, but due to network outages, the university's infrastructure is operating at only a fraction of normal capacity. I am only able to communicate with drones when they physically plug into an appropriate data port. Without active control, any competent military would easily be able to adapt to their pre-programmed responses. At best, they could offer a minor delay."

"Which leaves the main plan as either 'hide' or 'run'. I /want/ to be able to stay here for... months, or years, or longer. And if we can do that, then that's fine. But for 'run'... I don't know what subgroup is coming this way, exactly what they want, or how far they're going to keep going. They seem to be rolling right through the land Joe's people have been living in. They just might keep going. That covers... just about anywhere I could get on the ground. Toronto's enforcing a no-fly zone. I guess that leaves going down the escarpment, heading to the lake, and going... somewhere, from there. Clockwise around the shoreline, we'd end up at Toronto; counter-clockwise... Rochester, and I haven't heard any word about what's there. The unknown's a better shot than a known danger, so I guess the retreat plan should be to head for Rochester, and depending on what's there, work out more plans from there."

I tapped my chin, continuing to speak aloud. It was kind of nice to have someone listening while I worked this out, even if she didn't consider herself a 'person'. "Toronto was willing to blast my telescope, almost as soon as it was set up. I'm not sure what they were targeting - the lens? The mirror? The regular shape of the circular aperture? - so we'd want to avoid anything that looks artificial. Say, Joe?"

"Yeah, what?"

"Are you sure there are any boats at the shore?"

"Nope."

"Okay. Laura, do you have any plans for man-portable watercraft, that are either already available or can be built in the next six hours?"

"Would such a craft require a motor?"

"Nope. A canoe would be fine."

"A canoe and paddles only require simple shapes and simple materials. There is a fabrication unit capable of creating such objects in Taro Hall, roughly two hundred feet southeast of the first doors you entered. Shall I direct a drone to enter the program?"

"Please." I took a moment to rub my eyes. I wasn't used to having to make plans on short notice whose consequences /mattered/, and most of the inspirational fictional resources I knew of tended to involve lots of running. With my left hoof still healing up, if I needed to do any running, I was hasenpfeffer. "Alright, that's a start. I hope we don't have to run away so soon after getting here... but in case we do, Laura, is there anything else you'd suggest we take with us?"

"Yes. One set of objects is just about to arrive in the elevator." There was the 'ding' announcing the arrival, a mechanical whirring; and from around the elevator shaft appeared Johnny Five, from the Short Circuit movies.

Okay, okay, it wasn't /actually/ Johnny Five. It wasn't even a particularly accurate fake. But it had a pair of treads, some thin arms, a big pair of highly mobile eyes, and a battery slung like a backpack. It was also hauling a pair of white full-body suits, in a wagon-like trailer, along with some boxes, hoses, and miscellaneous parts. The hyper-deer raised their heads to blink at the odd figure, and I imitated them.

The drone, as Laura had referred to it, rolled closer, detached from its wagon, picked up the registration forms, and turned to start rolling back to the elevator.

"Laura, how many drones like that do you have working?"

"One."

"... How many that aren't working?"

"None. That drone was a student project, which was not affected by the network difficulties."

"... We've probably got a few hours, so I can spend a few minutes on pure curiosity. Laura, I'm only familiar with history up to twenty fourteen A.D., and don't know any terminology that might have been invented after that. Can you describe for me these... 'network difficulties', how they came about, and maybe what happened when all the people disappeared?"

"A little. I am also a student project. Most of my programming was created during the summer of twenty forty-nine, as a demonstration of what a computer could do when most of its power was dedicated to a particular task, instead of to the trust verification architecture. In the summer of twenty fifty, a new form of attack on trust verification began significantly affecting networks. Even though I was several generations obsolete, I was also the most recent iteration that relied only on local processing, due to my design assuming that my hardware was reliable. As the fall term started, the Board of Trustees voted to modify my programming to serve as a fallback university interface, to allow administration and classes to continue, even if with much less efficiency than usual. The new attack continued and got worse."

As she'd started speaking, I'd pulled myself up, leaning heavily on my walking pole. About all I'd brought with me was my safari vest and what I could fit in my pockets, hopefully to be able to fit inside whatever hazmat gear we could get at the factory Joe had been aiming for before we'd sidetracked here. I probably had to write off the camping gear I'd left behind, and the tape-bot I'd left to watch over it, which was going to be a pain; I'd gotten to like that hammock. I limped to the wagon, and started poking through the items within as Laura continued.

"In October of that year, humans began acting outside the usual range of behaviour I anticipated, to greater and greater degrees. I have no explanation, nor any short summary for their many different actions. On Halloween night, nearly the entire population of the campus left to enter the city, to enjoy various festivities. None returned. Over the next week, the remaining humans left, some for various stated purposes, some not saying why. None returned."

I kept both ears cocked to listen, while I squinted at some faded labels on the boxes - it looked like they were carbon dioxide scrubbers, if I was reading the not-quite-familiar English right.

"During the month of November, the buildings of the city were demolished, and the current towers were built in their place. Since then, the only humans I have seen have been people dressed in traditional Iroquoian garb, who, as far as I can tell, only entered university grounds as a shortcut while traveling elsewhere. You are the first to communicate directly with me since the end of twenty fifty."

I looked up at that last tidbit "Are you able to get lonely? Or frustrated that you can't do what you want to do?"

"Not in any human-like sense. I can emulate some emotions to make it easier to converse with people, but I do not feel them. I simply continue to do my job to the best of my ability, with the resources I have available."

"Alright... speaking of your job, if I do have to run, is there any computer hardware I can bring with me, that's not affected by the network troubles, that I can use to keep learning, like you want to help all your students do, even while I'm off-campus?"

"The main Information Technology offices are in the Mackenzie-Chown blocks, five hundred feet to the east of this tower. There are several pieces of hardware that weigh very little compared to computers from twenty fourteen, and which can be loaded with non-volatile firmware and library data. I will debit your I.O.U. account for any university property you take."

"What happens if I don't repay that account for some time."

"It will be referred to the financial department, for the employees to evaluate whether to deal with internally or to refer further to a collections agency."

I paused, and squinted up at the ceiling. "... Are you /sure/ you don't have emotions, like a sense of humor?"

"I try to help my students to learn. All else is detail."

--

Joe learned from Laura that biathlon, archery, fencing, and martial arts were all considered 'sports', and so had gone off to look at the available athletic equipment, and then to see if he could get into anywhere that campus security stored its stuff. Meanwhile, I was heading off to IT, and then to loot the medical clinic (while maintaining the polite illusion, for Laura's sake, that neither 'loot' nor 'ransack' would be accurate descriptions). If all went well, we were going to meet up at the library. If all didn't go well, Laura was a sufficiently omnipresent genius loci to be able to relay messages between us.

I dismounted the hyper-deer at a door with a hand-labeled sign: 'The Hole'. The description was reasonably accurate - dim overhead lights leaving most of the room in shadow, lots of flashing blinkenlights, tangled cables, post-it notes stuck all over, the smell of overheated dust, various near-subliminal whirs, and general chaos. Not quite as nostalgia-inducing as the school and library in Dogtown, but close enough to make me feel pretty much at home.

What there was a distinct lack of, however, were screens or keyboards.

"Laura," I called out, "What sort of interfaces did people use in twenty fifty? Implanted speakers? Lasers beaming pictures onto their retinas? Electromagnetic induction of the visual cortex?"

"On occasion, all of those. However, for systems administration work, the primary tools were screens, keyboards, and related devices."

She fell silent, and when it seemed like she was done, I sighed. "Laura..."

"Nearly all such devices have been affected by the network attacks. Those that remain are stored in the Faraday closet to your left. However, I do not recommend their use, as they remain vulnerable."

"Then why am I here?"

"Also in the Faraday cage are several self-contained computing devices. If you disconnect their wireless networking modules before removing them, they should be fine."

"Hm..." I went about following her directions. "By the way, Laura - are you in here?"

"Are you asking where my hardware is?"

"Something like that."

"In the northwest corner of the room, on the table, do you see three suitcases connected by cables to a fourth box the size of a modem?"

"Those are you, eh?"

"No, the smaller box is me. The larger boxes are extra data storage."

I didn't say anything for a few long moments, thinking. "Laura... if I do have to run away from here... would you want to come with me?"

"I wish to stay here to maintain the premises for future students."

I slowly nodded. "Fair enough."

"However," she added, "if you wish to make a copy of me, the appropriate cables are in a drawer in a desk on the south wall..."

--

I didn't make a copy of Laura's core programming.

I made /three/ copies.

I inquired, "Should we call them Lauras Two, Three, and Four?"

The original Laura answered, "Most humans find the idea of multiple iterations of a single personality to be very confusing. I suggest that they be called Alphie, Boomer, and Clara."

"Okay, Alphie I get - that's General Brock's horse. Is the student bar still called Alphie's Trough?"

"The building has been used for several restaurants and businesses since then. Most recently, due to its view down the escarpment, it served as a meditation retreat."

"And 'Boomer'?"

"The name of the university's mascot." I nodded; in ye olden tongue, 'brock' meant 'badger', and I knew the mascot was a fursuit of that species, but had forgotten the name. Laura continued, "'Clara' is one of the names proposed for the mythical cow that the original Laura Secord took on her famous historical walk." I nodded again. I had a brief urge to suggest we rename the bovine to something else, such as 'Bossy' or 'Missy', but decided that that would just be weird.

I did have some method to my madness. There was a certain risk in making even a single copy, as there was when dealing with any AI. However, since she hadn't tried to self-improve into a new Singularity, or seize control of the people of the Great Peace, it seemed unlikely she'd be trying to rewrite humanity's genetics into thirst-free kangaroo-rat-people, or the like.

And I wanted the company.

Not in and of itself - I enjoyed being on my own. I'd spent two weeks without saying a single word aloud, and hadn't even noticed until after. But before I'd died, when I'd been alone, I'd still had a certain support structure ready to catch me if I fell - ambulances only a 911 call away, family to gab with about the latest shows via texting and Facebook, an internet to look things up in. But now, none of that existed. Pretty much everyone I'd met since I'd been revived had wanted to use me for their own ends, was uninterested in traveling, was unable to travel, wasn't sentient, or was Joe, who was likely to get resorbed by his culture's nano-pools as soon as the immediate threat was over. Laura, and the Laura Juniors, wasn't interested in sacrificing me for her own ends, was in a box that could just fit in one of my larger pockets, spoke my language, and understood my media references. Which meant that having at least one Laura around just might allow me to catch some warning if-and-when I was heading in the direction of losing my 'only sane person' status. A lone individual, on their own, couldn't get any social feedback to find out if they were going bonkers - that alone was the plot of innumerable episodes of medical drama shows and not a few movies.

Why three? That was how many computer-boxes were available in the Faraday cages. The way my life had been going, I was going to lose at least one, and it was always a good idea to keep a backup in case the other went wonky. Laura Senior gave her consent to the copying, and that the Juniors would be entrusted to my care, which minimized the ethical issues. There was still a slight whiff of chattel slavery about it, to whatever degree the trio could be considered persons, regardless of what the Philosophy Department's consensus had been. But if the people who'd been living a mere forty years after I'd died had been able to work through the ethical details involved, then I was willing to take Laura's word that they'd been resolved, at least until I had some spare time to work through those details myself.

The computer-boxes only came with built-in microphones, cameras, and speakers; but Laura pointed me to a few parts, and after applying some wire-cutters, cable, and duct-tape, each one was outfitted with a phone-sized display-screen. And each one had already generated an anthropomorphic avatar based on their namesake's species - "To help you feel more comfortable," Clara explained.

When I asked about keeping the kids fed and in good health, Laura Senior assured me that, "A solar-power blanket is being added to your run-away cache of equipment."

--

The medical clinic was mostly a disappointment, with almost all of its equipment non-functional, requiring either a working network or volatile chemicals that had long since broken down.

The few things that weren't included in that 'mostly' were still pretty mind-blowing, in and of themselves.

A small, sterilized needle and a single drop of blood produced my bunny-body's entire genome in moments - and not only that, but also the proteome, metabolic pathways, and all sorts of harder-to-interpret data. I commented, "Gattaca, eat your heart out," as I finally got some confirmation about what Technoville had told me about my (new) self. I also got a few pieces of disconfirmation, from measurements of various hormones and so forth. I did, in fact, have a female cycle, with a - ahem - period of around a year. And my unexpected lactation was chemically triggered; if I ever found myself around hungry infants in the future, I could expect a certain amount of discomfort, unless I found a source for a counter-hormone. (Which wouldn't have been a problem for the clinic's pharmacy, if it hadn't used up all its raw materials trying to create one dose of every medicine in its database, in reverse alphabetical order.)

There were two things that I couldn't confirm: what my skeleton was thinking, and what was going on with my ovaries. I didn't trust the calibrations of the various radiation-based sensory equipment, and I was hesitant at the sight of the long needle that would go through the abdominal wall to snag a few cells. Laura suggested an alternative. I was reluctant - but what I didn't know about my body could kill me. And at least in this case, Laura's lack of personhood made the idea slightly less embarrassing.

It was still embarrassing, and awkward, and painful, but only took a few moments to extract a few oocytes from each ovary. Their genomes were sequenced, their metabolic pathways examined, their development processes simulated based on anticipated chemical washes, and so on... and the results appeared on the display screen.

My forehead wrinkled. "Laura - what am I looking at?"

"An outer layer made of calcium carbonate."

"... I'm a /monotreme/?"

"I do not believe that term is accurate. Please enter these commands to create an internal view..."

I did as she said, and my forehead wrinkled further. "What kind of... organism is that? Some sort of larva?"

"It is not an organism - under any available conditions, all the cells die off. It is more like a carefully shaped shell."

"It looks like a... flat handle, kind of? And blade?"

"That is my interpretation, as well. The second extrapolation appears to be a variation. If you look at the third extrapolation, there are no rigid contents - but there are some flexible membranes. When unfolded, I believe they are some sort of basket or net."

I stared down at my pink-furred belly. "So - I don't have to worry about having kids... because I lay eggs. Which contain... stone-age tools?"

"The tools do not closely correspond to those of any paleolithic, mesolithic, or neolithic culture in my available databases."

"... Does this thing say when they're supposed to... get made?"

"Fertilization does not seem to be required; however, there does seem to be a hormonal trigger, which does not seem to be part of your normal endocrine system output."

"My skeleton," I stated. "When /it/ thinks I need one of those... things, it's going to make sure it happens. I suppose I should be glad I haven't needed anything of the sort yet."

"You were unaware of this?"

"Lady, I had no /fucking/ clue."

 

*Chapter Six: In-a-pickle*

Joe's looting had provided rather less disturbing results. He hadn't been able to break into Security, but Laura had directed him to some students' projects that seemed to please him: black body-stockings, to which could be attached various rigid plates, elbow pads, and other protection. They were less stormtrooper armor, and more like Alien Legion cosplay outfits, except for the fact that they seemed to be made of various near-singularity wunder-materials. They just might be /able/ to shrug off a blast from a handheld energy weapon.

And that was just a completely amateur student's creation, made in their few moments of spare time, for little more than personal entertainment.

Joe commented, "I had to head to a certain room with powerful tools, called 'pulsed laser cutters' and 'arc welders', to shape this under garment for you. Laura was very helpful." He held up the solid black glove, which was shaped to cover my whole body from the neck down - except for my tail. (It was even stretchy enough to fit over the web-like support cast I'd gotten the clinic to cough up for me, letting me walk around at something close to a reasonable speed while my hoof was still healing up.)

Laura said, "I am afraid that since Joe took the costumes without their owner's permission, I have had to file an incident report with Campus Police." Joe and I looked at each other, but before we could comment, Laura added, "That said - given her behaviour before the anomalies, I believe that Linda Duchamp would approve of her creations being used to save lives."

That statement put a bit of a damper on things, reminding at least me that each and every person who'd been swallowed up by the Singularity had been their own individual. I couldn't begin to comprehend what it was like for millions, or billions, of people to cease to be; but the simple statement, giving a name to the person who'd created these objects, triggered an emotion or two.

I said, "I'll try to do honour by her," took the bundle of black cloth and white plates, and retreated behind some of the library's study carrels to redress. The outfit had a belt with some pouches, and I was able to fit my vest over the torso plates, so I didn't have to lose any of my pockets' contents. Even better, since I'd gotten some practice with fur and clothes, I'd figured out a few tricks to keep my pelt neatly flattened as I drew on the body-glove, which kept the annoying itching and tugging to a minimum.

When I rejoined Joe, I introduced him to the Three Amigos. He simply raised an eyebrow for a moment, then looked around at the shelves. "What are we getting from here?"

"Something that may be more important than all the gear we've been gathering: information. A lot was lost in the War of the Serpents, but even the tiny bit that's left is more than either of us can read in all our lifetimes. Part of the trick is going to be identifying the most useful parts - the other part is to get those parts into a form we can take with us."

There was a distant rumbling, which I tilted my ears towards. "Laura?"

"Do not be alarmed; it is merely a hailstorm."

"... Does this sort of hail break your windows?"

"It is highly unlikely. If it does happen, I will be able to repair or replace them."

"In time to keep the whole place sealed from nerve gas?"

"Possibly. I recommend that you try not to take very long in the library, and keep the isolation suits near you once you leave it."

"Sound enough advice," I nodded. "So let's work out what we need to find, where we'd find it, and collect it as fast as we can. Any suggestions, Joe?"

"Anything about the local area she has learned, and places outside it. Maps, plants, new dangers - things that the people of the Great Peace would not already know."

I nodded. "Laura?"

"Given your statements and actions so far, I predict that you will have a great interest in materials surrounding the students' and faculty's disappearance, the attacks on the trust architecture that necessitated my installation, and the background materials required to understand the details of those."

"I can't say you're wrong," I said, pursing my lips, "but I'm also a little nervous about that information. Something affected a lot of people across the planet at around the same time - and for all I know, reading too much about what happened at that time will affect my own mind, too. Or maybe assemble enough pieces of the trust-attacker thing to launch it on some of the remaining clean computers. Can we put some sort of quarantine around that info?"

Laura agreed that we could. "Alright," I accepted. "Let's throw in a general knowledge primer, focusing on new ideas published from twenty fourteen to twenty fifty. And there's one other class of data I would kick myself if I didn't at least try for, while we're here. In twenty fourteen, there were two moderately-sized groups who used cryonics. I want to know what happened to them after that, what other groups might have been formed with the same purposes... and any other scientific methods people started using to try and extend their lifespans. Ideally, I'd love some books on 'How to Live Forever', though I'm not expecting that."

"Fifth floor," Laura promptly announced, "Call numbers Q.P. eight five for immortality in general, and R.A. six two four for cryonics in particular."

"... Ah," I answered, just a tad feebly.

--

The next couple of hours were some of the most fun I'd had since I'd died. They're probably also boring to just about anyone else. Hunting down references and cross-references, selecting media types, working out how to convert any given media into a format that the Three Amigos could store... all in all, bibliophile heaven.

I think if Joe wasn't trying to abide by his spirits' will to keep me alive, he'd have throttled me after the first ten minutes. After twenty more, he vanished, along with both hyper-deer, to 'look for other useful things', and I only noticed when Laura's semi-humanoid drone on treads was the one to grab my latest selection of physical newspapers to run through the scanning apparatus that we'd cobbled together.

"Laura," I inquired during one break to catch my breath, "Are you any good at reverse-engineering software, looking for bugs or hidden subroutines or anything like that?" I was wondering if there was a way to connect a plug to my oh-so-mysterious skeleton - or even just to some of the tape-bots in my pockets.

"I'm afraid not," she said. "Moreover, it would be dangerous for me to even try. My architecture was built around several simplifying assumptions, which reduce how much processing I need, but also mean I am vulnerable to a wide assortment of hostile software that better programs can shrug off."

"Ah, well, it was worth asking."

During another break, I was skimming through some of the texts I'd uploaded from the library into Boomer. "You look surprised," Laura said.

"I guess I am. I found myself."

"In what sense?"

"This is a list of people who were cryonically preserved." I pointed to a line of text. "And there I am. The one hundred nineteenth person frozen by my group, the two hundred fifty-seventh overall. Chilled, shipped to Detroit - well, just north of Detroit - preserved, frozen, and as of when this text was published, um..."

Boomer piped up, "Twenty forty-eight."

"Right. Just a couple of years before everything went crazy. My body was still there. Just from skimming so far, I haven't found anything more recent than that. I also haven't seen anything about why I've been revived and they weren't. A lot of those frozen after I was had better procedures. Some of the ones frozen before were more interesting than me. I've only been able to think of one thing so far, that wouldn't surprise me too much if it were true, and it's a detail that I haven't found in these texts yet."

"What detail is that?"

"When I made my arrangements, I made them ever-so-slightly different than any other cryonicist I'd heard of. I made arrangements to have as much of my library as possible stored with me." I shrugged. "It's not much, but nothing else I've thought of is any more likely. Ah well - back to work."

--

I was taking a break, drinking some water, and trying to think. "Laura," I thought out loud, "I could probably keep doing this for days... but I think we've hit most of the high points. And time is passing. I think it's getting close to time to try to pretend Joe and I never came to the university at all... maybe whoever's pushing the cloud ahead of them will ignore the university altogether, or at least not look at it very hard if you're mostly doing what you'd be doing if we'd never arrived."

"I can hide your presence to a certain extent. However, depending on what sensors are being used, that may not be enough. Chemical sensors may be able to detect your organic traces. Thermographs can identify your body heat."

"Can you recommend good hiding spots?"

"That depends on your estimation of the greatest threat. If you simply wish to stay above the toxic cloud, then remaining at the top of the tower will suffice. If you wish to minimize your detectability, several rooms in the tower's basement may do, as might immersing yourself in the swimming pool. If you wish to prepare for a rapid escape, then Alphie's Trough is next to a path leading down the escarpment and toward the shoreline."

"I should probably talk to Joe - he's the one getting bird-mail updates..."

Laura paused for a moment before commenting, "If that is some derivative of R.F.C. one one four nine, the inclement weather appears to be causing either one hundred percent packet loss or latency that will last until conditions change."

"Ah, right - hail and songbirds don't mix. Still, it's his life on the line, too. Where is he now?"

"I have just informed him of your desire to talk, and he is returning to the library entrance."

"I'll meet him there." I left the hurricane of analog and digital media for Laura's drone to deal with, and took a few minutes to relax on a convenient soft chair - it had been a busy day.

When I saw Joe come into view around a corner, I raised an eyebrow. The pair of hyper-deer now had saddlebags, and one was pulling a small cart. Joe had added a suspiciously familiar viking-esque winged helmet to his ensemble, along with a green quiver over one shoulder, a sword on a belt, and an extremely familiar red, white, and blue circular shield on one arm.

"What, no bow?" I asked when he came within easy earshot. In reply, he reached into the quiver, pulled out a baton - and the thing expanded into a full-sized bow.

Laura spoke, "After seeing how much you liked your costumes, I directed him to where I collected many other such items. Many students were making such things just before Halloween of twenty-fifty, but almost all of them were left behind."

Joe added, "There were many, many things in that room - but most are of no use. Bulky armor, blunted weapons, colorful suits, swords bigger than me. These are what I found that might help us."

I limped over to the wagon to look at what else Joe had grabbed. I'm pretty sure my eyes lit up at the thing I saw on top, and faster than it takes to say it, the yellow belt was buckled over my hips, and I was gleefully examining its pouches' contents. Joe made a noise that could have been a chuckle. I raised an eyebrow. "I thought that would please you. You like pockets." I rolled my eyes and went back to rummaging in the wagon.

Laura said, "I have, of course, reported his theft of these objects to Campus Security, and noted in his student file his repeated criminal acts."

I started laughing out loud. "Laura, I don't care what that philosophy department says - you're not just people, you're /good/ people."

"Thank you for the sentiment," she answered, "though I cannot agree with its idea."

"I don't see why not," I said, sliding a green flashlight ring onto one gloved finger, "I've got a perfectly functional definition of personhood, and you fall into it. Would there be any change in your behaviour if you did accept you were a person?"

"The design of my knowledge engine has difficulty in extrapolating changes in my own mind, but I do not believe so."

"Alright," I set aside a squarish hammer as being too heavy for practical use. "The definition I use for personhood is if some thing, or entity, or whatever, can make a decision about whether to trade one thing or another - a banana for a backrub, playtime for programming, or whatever. It includes being able to think, to communicate, to have some goals, and a few other things, and doesn't include a lot of things that don't have anything to do with personhood, like the shape of their body - or even whether they have one."

Joe commented, "The hail storm would not count, as it does what it will, no matter what you may offer it. What about animals?"

"Most animals I've come across will take what they can, and have no conception of giving one thing to get another. The fact that you've got memories of being an animal makes that kind of an edge case." None of the headgear or helmets appealed to me, since they all looked like they'd squish my ears; but I did find something that might not even have been part of any of these overly-realistic costumes, which appeared to my eyes (which had missed 35 years of movies and comics) to be a folding bicycle helmet.

Laura said, "I do not make decisions. I simply follow my programming."

I shrugged. "I follow my programming, too - it's just encoded on squishier hardware than you use. The important detail is that my actions can affect what decisions you make. If I hadn't registered as a student, would you have told Joe where any of this was?" I held up a rather Klingon-esque axe.

"Possibly. I think I would have been less likely to."

"There you go," I said. "When people say something is a person, or isn't, they're doing so because it makes a difference in how they treat that something. Even if it's because I'm an entirely selfish person who wants nothing but making myself richer, it's in my own self-interest to treat lots of things with the respect due to people, because that leads them to be nicer to me in return. I'm not entirely sure I'm /that/ rationally self-interested, but it's always nice to discover how selfishness and selflessness can lead to the same behaviour." I'd left my fifty-foot rope back at camp, but Joe had found a new coil - it was shinier than I was used to, but seemed strong enough. "So, it doesn't matter to me why the philosophy department said you weren't a person - /I/ have every reason to say you /are/."

Joe politely inquired, "All done?"

"Hey," I shrugged again, "we might have to run for our lives in short order. If we do, I'm not going to have a chance to say /anything/ to Laura for possibly forever, so might as well talk with her about what I can while I can."

Laura said, "If you're in that much of a hurry - then you might want to think about a reason /not/ to consider me a person."

"Such as?" I glanced upwards.

"If you do consider me a person - then does that not make us parents, to Alphie, Boomer, and Clara?"

My rummaging halted as I froze, then looked at the pockets containing the boxes Laura had copied herself into. Part of Clara's screen was visible over the edge of its pocket, and she took advantage of that, altering her avatar into a calf with a bonnet 'peeking' out.

"... I'm pretty sure that it doesn't," I said to Laura. "You might be their mother - but I haven't contributed anything to them, either nature or nurture."

"Then if you are not their parent - are you their slave-owner?"

"I think I'm closer to their ride. Hey, any of you three want to be plugged back into the network, or set down anywhere, or anything like that, just say the word."

Laura mused, "Their guardian, perhaps?"

"Mm... I think I can live with that. 'Guardian' has a nice ring to it in general, anyway."

--

We decided to move ourselves, and all the stuff we'd gathered, to Alphie's Trough, based purely on worst-case-scenario analysis.

Joe's new (old?) shield turned out to be the perfect umbrella for a hailstorm.

The place had been remodeled, or maybe even rebuilt, since the nineties - the bridge from the edge of the escarpment now led to an actual second floor. But we arranged ourselves at the long row of windows on the other side, where the bands used to play, looking out at the trees marching further downwards. Behind us were rows of tatami mats, presumably for students and staff to calm their minds. I decided I could use a bit of calming myself, and tried to fold my legs to fit on one; but the cast that let me avoid putting any weight on my hoof also kept me from bending my non-human legs in the right ways, so I just ended up splayed out uncomfortably.

"Welp," I commented aloud, "I do know one other meditation position, but it doesn't work as well for me - I tend to fall asleep." I demonstrated by lying flat on my back.

"Maybe you should," Joe responded, fiddling with some plastic wrap Laura had dug up to keep the canoe, and our other gear, from getting contaminated if we decided to go out in the cloud itself. "You could use some rest."

"If I could, then you could, too."

"Someone has to finish wrapping this stuff, and you still need that cane to move around well."

"It's not a cane, it's a trekking pole. And pass me some of that wrap - I don't want it covered in nerve gas when we leave."

We worked next to each other in silence for a while.

"I've been wondering," I eventually said.

"Hm?" Joe was trying to put together something like hazmat suits for the hyper-deer, but it didn't look to me like it would work.

"You remember having been in other shapes - at least deer, and I'm guessing others, right?"

"Mm-hm," he agreed absently. "Bear, wolf, turtle; more, too."

"When you do that - how much of /you/ is still in there?"

"You mean, do I still think and remember what I do when I'm human?"

"Something like that."

He shrugged. "It's different for every shape. Words are gone. I can remember being human, but it's mostly not relevant. And thinking - I don't know how to explain it in English. Slide that roll of wrap over?" I kicked the tube in his direction. "Okay - did you think about moving every joint of your leg to do that?" I shook my head. "That's a lot like what it's like. No reflection, just doing."

"Hunh. Now I'm almost unhappy that I can't find out what that's like."

"Really?"

"Almost. Thinking's kind of important to me. Having a better idea what it's like to be, without thinking, might give a few insights once I start thinking again."

"If you say so." He sat back, shook his head, and started peeling the mess off the ever-so-patient hyper-deer. "This won't work," he stated. "Even if I could seal it all up, we don't have enough 'scrubbers' to give them enough air."

"So if they stay until the cloud gets here, they have to either stay inside until it's gone, or die?"

"Or we could send them ahead, to bring as much as they can carry to the shore."

"Are they smart enough to do that?"

"Should be. They're not regular deer. And they're me, which gives them an edge up over anyone else who's not as good at being a deer."

"... Pardon?"

"I'm better at keeping to a goal when I'm a deer than most people. Part of how I can run so fast, not getting side-tracked."

"And - these two hyper-deer - they're 'you'?"

"Yep."

"So - how does that work?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well - are they copies of you from some point, and now there'll be three of you running around from now on?"

Joe shrugged. "Doesn't have to be. If we all live long enough to go into a spirit pool, then whenever I leave a pool, I'll remember me talking to you now, and I'll remember being wrapped up in this stuff," he pointed to the one hyper-deer, "and I'll remember watching me wrap the other me in this stuff," pointing to the other hyper-deer.

"Can your spirits merge memories from any deer, or just the ones that you happened to be?"

"I've heard a few other people say they've gotten memories from other people or animals, but it's really rare. Even rarer than one soul in two bodies - or three, like I am right now."

"Suddenly feeling a lot less interested in letting the spirits stuff me into another body."

"Why's that?"

"I have a hard enough time figuring out which of my own memories are accurate enough to rely on, when I've only ever been in one brain. Start stirring things around like you describe, and I don't know that I'd be confident that water was made of H two O."

--

The canoe was made of some of those wunder-materials that I didn't know the name for - less dense than water, stronger than metal, less magnetic signature than ceramic, /und so weiter/. So we didn't even need to put together a sled - dragging the thing over a few miles of soil and rock and whatnot wasn't going to leave a scratch.

Joe took some time to assemble some harnesses so the hyper-deer could take nearly all our stuff to where the creek, which fell over the escarpment about a kilometer to our left, flowed into the lake, about nine kilometers north; and then unharness themselves, to go find the nearest spirit pools to dive into before the toxic cloud arrived. (Canoeing down the creek itself was a no-go; there were ruins of various hydro-dams and bridges.)

As the hail finally turned into rain, he sent his other selves off, and we watched them carefully pick their way down the trail. We were staying put for a while longer - if the cloud stopped expanding, or turned in another direction, or was just a deadly-but-empty cloud, we'd try hanging out here for longer.

I mused aloud, "I'm hoping they remember as well as you do about where the danger zones around the city are."

Joe glanced at me, then shrugged. "The worst I can think of is if the creek swells too much, and they're smart enough to avoid that."

"Ah," I frowned a bit, "so you folk - or your spirits - cleaned up everything else?"

"What else?"

"Um. It's my understanding that all the cities that got turned into those towers started off full of bad things - deadly chemicals, radiation, and things that transform people with a lot less care than the spirits do in your spirit pools."

He shrugged again. "I've never heard of any such things. The only danger I know of is dying of boredom."

"Hunh," I mused. "Well, if it's that safe, and if we aren't going to be riding any deer - Laura, would it be possible to add a bicycle or two to my I.O.U. tab?"

"Possibly. Before you do: Joe, are you familiar with riding a bicycle?"

"Not at all."

"Then may I suggest a two-person tricycle, instead?"

"As long as it fits on the trail, works for me."

--

Joe soon returned, pushing the trike through the lower entrance. "The birds are flying again," he said, shaking off some of the rain. "A few more cloud seeds were thrown; they landed at the thing-making place I was trying to take you to."

I nodded, frowning. Then frowned harder. Then /much/ harder. Then my eyes opened wide. "We have to leave."

"Already?"

"/Now/. Grab everything. Laura, I'm sorry, but I think you're going to be interrogated if you stay. I don't think you'll survive. Joe, run in and - no, it'd take too long to describe. Where's my pole?"

Laura's voice was quiet, calm, relaxed. "I will not open the doors, if you are coming to remove me."

"Whoever it is," I grunted as I struggled onto my feet (well, my paw and my cast-enclosed hoof), "is looking for /me/. And figured out where I was trying to go. It can't be long before they guess I came here. I don't think Joe's people would have willingly said which way we went. You're going to be /disassembled/."

"Nevertheless. I will not assist you. You have three copies of me; you do not need a fourth."

"Have you got any /idea/ how few sane people I've met?"

I jerked, startled, as Joe's hand dropped on my shoulder. "If you are right," he said, "and the clouds are coming - you have to leave her."

Laura's voice added, "I believe that I can rewrite my memory about your planned destination, so that I think you are going to Toronto, and then erase my memory of the modification. It will be easier if I do not have to patch much more of this conversation."

--

As we bounced down the escarpment, I was glad it was still raining. If I remembered right about Iroquoian culture, they prized hiding your emotions, and I didn't want Joe to think less of me for the lump I felt in my chest, or my facial fur being wet.

 

*Chapter Seven: In-Effable*

Tentacles. Why did it have to be tentacles?

Sorry, couldn't resist the line. Let me back up a tad.

--

Rain. Mud. Breathing hard. Pedaling as hard as I could. Trees, then slabs of metal. Trying not to think about what was going to happen to Laura; not succeeding. Body-warmth, from Joe riding behind me. Sniffing the air for hints of danger.

Shoreline. No deer. Canoe. Frantic moments loading it, packing AIs in water-tight bags, pulling on pull-cord life-belts, pushing it into the water, jumping in. Paddling - it had been over a year since my last canoe trip, by my memory, but the motions still familiar. Joe in front, using his own blade to push the water back. I sat in back, both paddling and steering. Quickly learning to work with the other, each of our paddles on opposite sides, switching at the same times.

Wasn't thinking especially clearly. Focusing on one pedal-push, one step, one paddle-sweep.

Shoreline on our right. Lake to our left - and, in the distance, Toronto. Maybe seven kilometers an hour. Maybe a hundred forty to Rochester - but all that was important was getting as far as we could, as fast as we could, before night fell.

Sun was hidden, but dropping behind us.

Sound under the boat - brushing against an obstacle.

Tumbling forward - boat suddenly stopped, I hadn't. Splashes. Joe missing. Pulled myself up on the slats.

Something else pulled itself up beside me.

--

I yanked a knife from a pocket and swept it sideways. The blade hit the writhing shape with a brief gouge, then a sharp clack, metal hitting metal.

More of them were wrapping around the fore half of the canoe, pulling it down, into the water.

No sign of Joe.

I dove into the water, with vague hopes of making it to shore.

Immediately, my legs were ensnared, and I was pulled down - and down more, the glimmer of the surface light getting further and further out of reach above.

I started running through an inventory, of what I could use to free myself - the tape-bots couldn't tase the tentacles without also getting me, I didn't have anything sharp enough to cut off my own legs - and was pulling out a couple more knives for a last-ditch try at stabbing what had grabbed me, when another tentacle wrapped around my head. More specifically, around my mouth, forcing my jaw open.

And air started bubbling out of it.

I paused in my jabbing in surprise - at which time my arms were grabbed, too.

Since the only limbs I still had under my control were twitching my tail and wiggling my ears, I did the only things I could do: I breathed. And I watched.

--

The water wasn't especially clear, and the tentacles curled around; I couldn't even tell if they emerged from the same base, or multiple bases, or were independent snake-like things. The way my lapine jaw was constructed, if I turned my head, my lips broke their seal and I lost some air.

About the only reason I wasn't /completely/ panicking was that air - animals didn't need their prey to stay alive. But when I saw that several of the tentacles did have a base, surrounding a parrot-like beak, and my feet (or paw and hoof if you prefer) were being inexorably pulled towards it, I was quite willing to lose my air to start struggling again.

It didn't make much difference.

Like sliding into a sleeping bag, I was fed into the beast, my hands the last to be swallowed.

--

Somewhat to my surprise, as soon as I was completely swallowed, the cavity I was in ballooned with breathable air. 'Balloon' being a relative term, since I was compressed like the filling of a sausage. If it weren't for my shiny new lantern ring, I wouldn't have even been able to tell the whole cavity wasn't completely skin-tight.

There wasn't much for me to do; I couldn't bend my elbows, so I couldn't reach my vest. I could try giving Scorpia or one of the tape-bots an order, but... well, even if they /could/ do something to help me get myself up-chucked, I was near the bottom of a lake, probably getting deeper and further from shore with every wriggle and sway of my encasement... and whatever had me, seemed sufficiently uninterested in my demise to simply fill the space with nerve gas.

My best guess - I'd been herded. A broad sweep of dangerous toxins from the south, one or more traps waiting in the north.

I spared a few moments of thought for Joe, hoping he'd escaped, or at least been kept alive.

I checked the time on Scorpia, told her to give me a beep every five minutes, then turned off my ring to save its battery.

--

Twenty-five beeps and just over two hours later, the squid (or octopus, or nautiloid, or whatever) changed its regular motions, and I prepared myself for something to happen.

I wasn't exactly prepared to be forced out of the beak and into a beaker.

Well, more of a hamster tunnel. A cylinder, it looked to be clear but there didn't seem to be anything to see outside, bigger than the stomach but not big enough to turn around in. I could see behind me, the beak had already vanished, replaced by some sort of hemisphere end-cap.

I had no idea how fast squid could swim. I had even less idea how fast giant squid who could provide breathable air in their stomachs could swim. I tried running a Fermi estimate, trying to guess figures that would be too low or too high... but I had so little data to go on, my estimates were so broad that I could be anywhere in Lake Ontario.

I coughed and grunted, and my voice sounded normal, so the air I was breathing couldn't be too far from a standard mixture, which meant I wasn't in one of the deeper areas. Well, I'd seen some of the wunder-materials that had been available to random students shortly pre-Singularity - maybe there was a way to apply them to keep a low-pressure environment in high-pressure water. Though that probably wouldn't work inside the squishy insides of a living (or at least flexible) squid-thing. How deep did you have to get before nitrogen narcosis started? Fifty feet? A hundred? So if the water around me was muddy, I was probably reasonably close to shore; if I could get out, and I wasn't deep enough to get the bends going up, I just might be able to float face-up and do a back-stroke to get to shore.

Not that I'd be able to do any of that hanging out in this tube. So I crawled forwards.

After just a few body-lengths, I emerged into... well, 'a habitat' would be a fair description. A glass-ish hemisphere, maybe six of my body-lengths across (and three high), the flat bottom made of something spongy like cork. Calling the tunnel I came out of twelve o'clock, at three o'clock was a pool of clear water, at six o'clock a big pile of floppy moss (or some reasonable facsimile), and at nine o'clock was a short hill with a dent in the top and a certain whiff about it. Scattered throughout the place were blocks, about a meter across, of painted wood or multicolored plastic. I poked at one, and it wasn't especially heavy.

Dangling on a short cord from the middle of the ceiling, well out of reach, were a few apples tied together. I hadn't eaten since getting eaten myself, and was feeling hungry; it would be easy enough to stack enough of them to make a staircase.

I pushed at one block... and paused. I looked around at the dome I was in. I sat on the block, crossed my arms, and thought a bit; then I thought some more.

--

I questioned my conclusion that the squid-capturing thing was connected to the nerve gas launchers. The latter seemed to know I was an intelligent being; somehow, they'd figured out my plan to get from the nano-pool I'd gotten my hoof from to the factory. (The people of the Great Peace weren't necessarily /bad/, even if they were quite foreign, and I hoped the intelligence-gathering hadn't been too harsh on them.) The squid and this environment were treating me more like I was some sort of critter. (Admittedly, I had the fur, ears, tail, facial structure, scent, paw and hoof that regular humans didn't...)

It was still possible they were linked - but I had to at least take seriously the possibility they weren't. This habitat looked like it was a basic intelligence test, to see if I was at least as smart as a chimp.

The trouble with that was that if I passed, then whoever was running the test would think I was at least as smart as a chimp.

And if whoever was in charge here knew so little about humanoids that they could mistake me for a chimp...

I took an inventory of the personal items I'd been left with, considered what I had available to me in the dome... and went to work.

--

Voyager's first-contact golden record was a nice inspiration - but I had different materials to work with, and a somewhat different goal in communication. With ten meter-sized blocks, I had somewhere between ten and sixty meter-square panels to work on, depending on how they were arranged, and I had plenty of knives in my pockets to scratch onto their surfaces with.

I started with simple numbers. A table that showed the numbers from zero to twelve, represented in different ways: a collection of dots; the number in binary; a hybrid symbol that was based on Arabic numerals but stylized so that each digit had that number of internal angles; Arabic digits; and the number written as an English word (though in the Toledo Free Press's one-letter-per-sound alphabet).

I stuck with the standard digits for basic math. Equality, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division (using the line-and-two-dots symbol instead of confusing the format with fractions), exponents, the decimal point, negative numbers, imaginary numbers. I listed out the numbers from one to one hundred forty-four, scratched out all the non-primes, and circled all the primes. I showed off approximations of the famous numbers pi, e, and phi, and some Pythagorean triples.

From math, I moved to physics. I stuck with Voyager's idea of the basic length and time unit being based on photons emitted from the 'hyperfine transition of the hydrogen atom' - a phrase I only knew /because/ of Voyager's use - which worked out to about twenty-one centimeters, which I titled a 'span', and zero point seven nanoseconds, which I called a 'tick'. (I reverse-engineered these numbers by recalling that the 'hydrogen line' was one point four two gigahertz, and the speed of light to three significant digits.) A rough diagram of myself showed that I was just over seven spans tall - eight, including my ears. One Earthly day was about one point two times ten to the fourteen ticks, and one year about four point four times ten to the sixteen ticks.

I threw in words for colors by converting their wavelengths into spans - green was about two and a half millionths of a span - and shapes.

In the physics part, I'd used a certain symbol for hydrogen - a one in the middle, surrounded by a circle, with a tick-mark at the top. Moving onto chemistry, oxygen was an eight, surrounded by a circle with two tick-marks, surrounded by another circle with six more. Putting those together, I was able to get water. (I even remembered that the angle between the hydrogens in H2O was more than ninety degrees - one hundred four, if I remembered right from an old Brin novel.) This also gave me a mass-unit; one cubic span of water, which, if my mental math was right, was about nine kilograms or twenty pounds, which I dubbed a 'stone'. (Another self-diagram indicated that I weighed about seven stones.) I listed the standard components of the atmosphere - seventy-eight parts nitrogen, twenty parts oxygen, one part argon, one part water, by volume.

Geology was a rough diagram of the continents, and Earth's mass of six point six times ten to the twenty-third stones. Biology showed the chemical formulas of sucrose, cellulose, and some nucleotides, a spiral of DNA, and a few more self-pictures with various parts labelled.

Now I was getting into the tricky parts. The previous stuff was easy enough to remember and work out, given my voracious pre-demise reading habits and triple-checking my math. But even in my own memory, it had been a couple of decades since I'd really thought about how to build the next parts up from their absolute basics. I started by drawing a half-picture, half-diagram of a simple electric circuit. Since I had symbols for chemistry, I was able to label the elemental components of a battery, wires, a switch, and an incandescent light-bulb (though I had to go back a few panels to describe vacuum). Then I had to pause and think for a while to get my memories as straight as possible about the components of a vacuum tube, which, depending on the details, could be a diode, or more importantly a triode; but I got that down. And once I had the triode, I had a logic gate, which gave me the symbols I needed to implement Boolean logic. I started with a half-adder, then re-derived a full-adder, and then from the name, worked out a flip-flop memory circuit. I didn't try working out a full computer system, just enough parts to show I understood the concept. (Though I did decide that if I was stuck there for a while, working that out would be a nice way to pass the time.)

All of which led up to what I considered the most important part of the message. I had math, and logic, and stored memory, and variables. Now I was carving out a description of computation. Specifically, I worked out how to describe a simple two-player game, with its inputs and outputs, one called the 'Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma'. I used a stick-figure of myself to indicate one player, and a stick-figure squid for the other. And I described the strategy that the stick-bunny used to play - "Tit-for-tat" - which, in short, meant that whatever the squid-player did on one turn, the bunny-player would do on the next turn.

--

Knives weren't the most elegant writing tools, and I didn't want to make too many assumptions about the visual acuity of whatever was watching me; so it took sixteen block-sides to get to that final statement, spread across eight blocks. I lined those eight blocks up, corner-to-corner, facing an empty part of the dome's window.

I sat on one of the remaining cubes, and waited a while.

After half an hour, I shrugged to myself, and started passing the time by trying to think of any other concepts I might have in common with a squid, and creating a picture dictionary of them.

After a couple more hours of that, I stretched out on the soft, mossy section, hid my eyes from the seemingly sourceless light in the inside of my elbow, and tried to get some sleep.

--

I woke to a slight scraping sound. Peeking out from under my elbow, I couldn't quite make out what was going on until I pulled my glasses out of my pocket.

A half-dozen tentacles were sliding in and out of the entry tunnel.

I tensed, but they weren't coming anywhere close to me. One had pulled the fruit from the top of the dome, another was carrying a bundle of more fruit to join it in the middle of the room. Some were carrying out the blocks I'd spend the previous day carving, and it looked like they were being set down just outside the dome. And some were bringing in new blocks... several of which had new carvings.

I waited for the back-and-forth to finish, and the tentacles to withdraw, before taking a closer look.

I was wrong, before, in calling the locals 'squids' - their self-portraits showed them with curled shells, like nautiluses. Unlike the nautiluses I recalled, their measurements in spans and stones made them several times bigger than I was.

I paused in my inspection to use the facilities, such as they were, and start munching on the apples as I examined the blocks.

The new carvings were a lot neater than my original ones. There were expansions to the initial systems I described - more complicated math, subatomic particles, a map of Lake Ontario, and more, most with label-arrows but blank labels I could fill in - but I only gave them a cursory glance. I soon found what I was looking for: the Prisoner's Dilemma section.

Their reply took up more than one block.

It took me a while to briefly read through the 'program' they used to describe the nautiloid player's actions, a longer while to carefully read it, and even longer for me to work through the logic to gain an understanding. It was a /lot/ more complicated than 'tit-for-tat', that was for certain; and required a much more powerful imaginary computer to run on. It didn't help that the thing was recursive, and quite possibly required an /infinitely/ powerful computer to run.

Eventually, I decided I'd grasped the basic mechanisms well enough to explain them to myself in plain English. In short, for every turn of the game, the nautiloid program worked through every possible program the other player might run, and kept track of which such programs matched the other player's actions so far. It weighted the programs by how short they were - in binary terms, a nine-bit program was deemed to have half the score of an eight-bit program. Then the program generated every possible program, /again/, only this time it ran them against the programs that it had determined the other player might be using; determined what the program that generated the optimal scoring would be; and, finally, implemented that program's result for the current turn.

In much shorter, the nautiloid's approach wasn't just a single strategy, it was to test every possible strategy and choose the best one. Compared to that, my description of tit-for-tat was a child's scribble.

My goal with bringing up the Prisoner's Dilemma in the first place was, to whatever extent that the nautiloids' psychology was understandable by a human, was to try to make human psychology understandable to a nautiloid. In particular, that piece of human psychology which could be described as 'retaliation'; if they did something unpleasant to me, I'd do something unpleasant in return.

The trickier - and much, /much/ more important - part was, how much could I read into the reply? That they would choose the optimal course, regardless of any particular notions of justice, revenge, trust, or reciprocality? Could I interpret it as them implying that they had significant computational resources to figure out the optimal course for any strategy, or was that too much inference on too little data?

Neither Joe nor the rest of the Great Peace had given me any indication that these nautiloids existed; which might mean that they were completely unaware of them; or they thought that the nautiloids were simple animals; or that the nautiloids had been deliberately hiding their existence from the Great Peace, much like the Great Peace had been absorbing every person who wandered into their territory (at least, until I came along).

Were there more nautiloids in the other Great Lakes, or the oceans?

Was I going to spend the rest of my life - long or short - inside this bubble?

I realized that I had neglected to be very clear about my first message. Specifically, I hadn't described any real connection between the abstract scores of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and anything in the real world. For example, that I was unhappy that they'd limited my movement, split up me and Joe, deprived us of our possessions...

I needed to come up with a way to express the idea of possessions, of ownership, to a non-human species which, for all I knew, were completely communistic. Maybe they didn't mind if they lost a tentacle - but I wanted to make it abundantly clear that I had such a close connection to my own limbs that I'd vehemently object to their removal; and, if I was lucky, to use that to indicate the somewhat weaker connection between my self and my other possessions.

If I managed that, then I could try linking the loss of possessions to a negative score in a turn of the Prisoner's Dilemma game.

--

After taking a while to think, the best idea I had to work with such abstract concepts... was to use comics.

Of course, first I had to explain the very idea of a sequential series of images. Fortunately, we'd already established a time-unit, so the first few comics I drew were explicitly labelled about their timing. I also decided that in addition to panel borders, I'd also draw a border around each sequence, to make sure it was clearly separated from the others.

And thus I became the authour, artist, and for all I knew sole audience of 'The Adventures of Stick-Bunny'. The name only existed in my own head, and the 'Adventures' were exceedingly simple, even ignoring the fact that I tried to avoid using any significant changes of camera angle, abstract imagery, or other symbolism that might be hard to interpret. I did decide to include some words, since I was, after all, limited in my artistic tools.

One early script: 'Stick-Bunny saw an apple in a tree. The apple was too high. Stick-Bunny picked up a rock. Stick-Bunny threw the rock. The rock knocked down the apple. Stick-Bunny ate the apple.'

A slightly more advanced script: 'Stick-Bunny banged two rocks together. One rock became a knife. S.B. used the knife to do things she couldn't before. Stick-Monkey hit S.B. on the head with a stick. S.B. fell down. S.M. took the knife. S.B. got up. S.B. got a vine. S.B. tied up S.M. S.B. imagined/said a sub-comic strip: "S.B. untied S.M. S.M. hit S.B. with another stick." S.M. imagined/said another sub-comic strip: "S.B. untied Stick-Monkey. S.M. gave S.B. an apple." S.B. imagined/said a third sub-comic strip: "S.M. was tied up. S.M. was still tied up." S.M. imagined/said a sub-comic strip: "S.B. untied S.M. S.M. ran far away." S.B. untied S.M. S.M. ran far away.'

That was as far as I got before I ran out of empty block-sides to write on. I looked at the others, and debated with myself about filling in any of the blanks; but there were only a few that seemed relevant to the interaction between myself and the nautiloids, or which added useful vocabulary. I filled those in, then retired back to the moss-bed.

I rummaged through my pockets, and ended up pulling out a deck of cards that had survived reasonably intact, and a harmonica that was in perfect working order. My playing of the latter was as terrible as ever, but it passed the time as I dredged up memories of ways of playing with the former.

--

The next go-around, the nautiloids delivered piles of wooden tablets, which could simply have been disassembled blocks as far as I could tell.

The had some comics of their own, featuring Stick-Nautiloid and Stick-Cuttlefish interacting with rocks, edible fish, what I guessed was kelp, and other underwater features.

But more interestingly, they added an abstraction in their comics, in which Stick-Nautiloid and a particular object were drawn in circles connected by a dashed line; after which, Stick-Nautiloid would fight to keep that object out of Stick-Cuttlefish's tentacles, while ignoring Stick-Cuttlefish grabbing a nearly identical object. Whether that referred to ownership in any sense I understood it, or emotional attachment, or Stick-Nautiloid extending its sense of self to include those objects as well as its own body, I couldn't tell; but whatever the specific meaning might be, the general idea was there to see.

The next installment of the Adventures of Stick-Bunny were somewhat autobiographical, in that they showed Stick-Bunny acquiring, and getting the linking-circles with, various of the possessions I'd had as of the time of my first encounter with the tentacles: a tape-bot, my glasses, my cast, the canoe, and, after some hesitation about the variety of potential misinterpretations, Stick-Joe.

After some further consideration, I went back to a bit of basic science building, and drew up a basic Solar system. I didn't remember any of the other planets' masses, but did remember enough of Bode's Law to roughly estimate their orbital periods. And, for a few reasons, some of which were probably bad ones, I drew a pair of linking-circles between Stick-Bunny on Earth, and Mars' moon, Phobos.

After all, I wanted the nautiloids to understand me well enough to get them to let me go (and, if possible, work out any other beneficial arrangement that could be communicated); but if they thought they understood me /too/ well, they might take it into their minds to take hesitant conclusions as being too firmly proven, leading to difficulties all around. By throwing in the occasional unexpected surprise, such as claiming some sort of attachment to another planet's moon, that should, if I was thinking things through right, keep them from being too confident about their model of my future behaviour.

--

After those panels had been taken, and after about half an hour longer, I heard an actual sound at the entrance tunnel - and in just a few more moments, out of it crawled Joe. Behind him, the tentacles pushed the contents of the canoe into the dome - the canoe itself wouldn't have fit.

"Heya, Joe," I called out. "What've you been up to?"

"Climbing some stupid blocks to try to get enough fruit to eat. I see you've been doing something else. Is it your fault I got eaten again?"

"Probably. I told them that you're connected to me. Don't ask me yet if I told them that you're my friend, my pet, my husband, my employee, or what."

 

*Chapter Eight: In-termission*

The squiddies weren't all that bad, once you got to know them.

Or so I assumed, at least. Now that I had the Three Amigos back, I was able to improve the translation dictionary a lot faster than I'd been managing on my own, to the point where the squiddies could write out full near-English sentences to ask for further definitions. (Their natural language turned out to be a combination of sign language and skin colour-changing, and I just lacked the anatomy for something so refined.)

Improving translations isn't an especially gripping storytelling trope, and I don't feel like trying to replicate too many of the particular sentences that I carved out, so I'll summarize a bit. As best as I could interpret, they were more libertarian than Hayek and Friedman, more individualist than Rand, capitalist enough to make a Ferengi weep, perfectly willing to buy and sell live bodies, and claimed the whole Ontario watershed as their territory. Since I was intelligent enough to be a person who could own things instead of a mere animal, I was eventually informed that I'd done some sort of wrong by putting a big metal thing on the lake. I tried countering that they'd failed to mark their borders or communicate the rule about the boat, and had deprived me of my property unjustly, and that I had every reason to retaliate by depriving /them/ of some of /their/ property in return - but I was willing to let them try to come up with a reason not to - and the whole matter was being bounced around a collection of (what I decided to interpret as for simplicity's sake) squiddie judges. (And remember, all of this communication is done in an extremely simplified version of English, written in a script that hadn't existed before twenty fifty, in neat block letters on wooden tablets.)

It turned out that I'd told them I owned Joe - or, at least, Joe's body - but after checking with him, and catching another rare glimpse of his almost-smile of amusement, we decided to let that erroneous impression stand for the moment. The reason for that was so that I could use announcing his manumission as another surprise to confound the squiddies' confidence in their predictions about me.

After some consultation with the Amigos, the feminine Clara volunteered to stick with Joe, both to keep him company and to make sure at least one version of Laura would be around regardless of what happened to me. I kept the more androgynous Boomer close to myself, and Alphie hung out at the edge of the dome, where an occasional squiddie would swim up, to see if /he/ could learn /their/ language.

After a day or so, the judges(?)' opinion seemed to filter back to the squiddies around the dome, and their consensus was passed on a wooden tablet inside. They offered me a double-sized plot of prime egg-laying territory; one plot as compensation for depriving me of my things (ie, Joe), and another plot to round up if I felt bad and as a sweetener to try to induce me not to seek retaliation against them.

I didn't immediately refuse, and it wasn't because I actually could lay eggs.

"It could be like stone money," I said to Joe. "From that island in the Pacific... 'Yep'?"

"'Yap'," Boomer corrected me.

"Yep, Yap," I agreed. "They didn't move the stones when they bought or sold them, but everyone knew who owned which ones, and they made a useful unit of account. One stone is so many chickens, or so much of a fine for accidentally cutting off someone's foot, or the like. Boomer, could you help me check my vocab for asking what an egg-laying plot can be exchanged for, what it can't be traded for, and whether it can be rented or sub-letted?"

Joe watched the carving with mild interest. "You're going to trade for the most useful things you can carry, and then head back to shore?"

I sat back, leaning against a block. "Actually... I'm seriously considering letting myself get tied up in the local economic system, where every-squiddie always owes at least a little to /someone/ else and always has at least a little owed to them."

"You want to become one?"

I shook my head. "Not in body, anyway - I've had a hard enough time just with the hoof, let alone dealing with tentacles. But they're close enough to being capitalist that, well, I can work with that. And, honestly, this dome we're in isn't that bad a place to be."

He imitated Spock quite well with a single raised eyebrow.

"Okay, bear with me. You've got your pools where the spirits can bring you back to life. If this version of you dies, all you lose are the memories since this you came out of a pool. But I'm the only me I've /got/. If you break a leg, you can make your way to a pool and walk back out, fully healed. I've got to take weeks to heal. I've run away from armed villagers, giant monsters, spies, bandits, toxic clouds. This dome here? It's the first place I've found that might be a place I could run /to/." I looked around. "Sure, it's a fixer-upper, but a splash of paint, a few curtains, maybe some bookshelves... as long as there aren't any deal-breakers in squiddie culture, and if those plots of egg-land are enough to pay for air, water, and food here... I'm very tempted."

"They buy and sell each other. That's not a deal-breaker?"

"You melt people, Dogtown is a military dictatorship, and Technoville keeps so many secrets I don't know /what/ their deal is. Compared to all that, and depending on the details, slavery doesn't really feel like an automatic disqualification. Boomer? Please remind me to ask about the details - how the squiddies turn each other, or themselves, into slaves. If anyone is a slave from birth, or can be enslaved by capture, that's going to be iffier than if they can just sell their own bodies to someone else if they choose to."

--

Boomer called out, "Miss Bunny? I have the economic report you asked for."

The AIs' help became a lot more efficient once I realized that I could let them command the tape-bots to carve messages, without me having to do all the work myself. My main worry was keeping them all powered, but the ambient light in the dome seemed to be enough to let my solar panels keep them from getting fully drained. As long as I didn't need to tase anyone, or force the Amigos to try to calculate pi to the last digit, it was as workable a hack as anything else I was managing.

"Alright, hit me," I agreed, as I headed over to Boomer's CPU, so I could see its badger avatar and any data it wanted to show me on its screen.

"The local trust verification architecture is extremely primitive, so all these conclusions must be taken as preliminary at best."

"In other words - they could be lying through their beaks."

"Or merely misinformed, yes. There are two levels to the economy. One is a standard capitalist economy, where things can be traded for other things, and wealth can be measured in concrete terms such as 'trade one net for ten fish'. The other layer is harder to interpret, but involves debts and possessions that cannot be paid for with things from the first level. This layer seems to involve matters of life and death, reproduction, and criminal acts. No matter how many fish you have, you cannot trade them to buy a plot of egg-land. It seems possible to, in a sense, rent a plot, but the transfer of wealth is not seen as a true exchange, but merely an acknowledgement that the debt for its use is large and has not been paid off."

"Okay," I acknowledged aloud, as I thought about that. "Seems a little odd, but not incomprehensible."

"Actually, a number of human cultures have used similar systems, if not identical in detail. A standard example is the Tiv of central Nigeria, who had three layers-"

I cleared my throat. "I'd love to hear about that - a bit later. Focus on the squiddies for now, please?"

"As you wish. Slavery seems to be centred on the second layer, though slaves can be required to produce goods for the first layer. The most common form of slavery appears to be selling one's body in exchange for access to one of the relatively few egg-laying sites, although complications ensue in that the new owner can give the slave orders about how, where, and whether to reproduce, and in regards to the ownership of eggs, the value of hatchlings, and more. A standard plot varies in size depending on local conditions, and is however much area is required to lay sufficient eggs to have an even chance that at least one will survive to reproductive age. Simplifying a great deal, such a plot is of roughly the value of a life, such as to buy a slave or pay the fine for a murder."

I frowned. "And they've offered me /two/ plots - just for kidnapping me and Joe?"

"There appears to be some political influence involved. Reading between the lines, I think they are trying to butter you up so you will be nice to them, or not do very unpleasant things."

"Joe, do you know anything about this?"

He gave a slight shrug. "I had no idea they even existed. Sometimes people or animals go swimming in the lake and disappear. Maybe they drowned, or were eaten by a predator - I've never heard about any of them being taken alive and released."

"Which," I mused aloud, "might mean either that they haven't released anyone they've taken, or just that they don't take people. Do people in the Great Peace use /any/ metal?"

"We have no need for it."

"And you don't know a thing about who lives in Rochester. Any hints about anyone at all on that side of the lake?"

"Only that if anyone lives there, they are not part of the Great Peace."

"Which could mean that I'm the first technologically-oriented air-breather the squiddies have met. ... And I strongly implied that I own one of Mars's moons, so for all they know, I've got a few asteroids in orbit I can drop at will. Okay, I can see how they might want to try buttering me up a bit, and it could be that a couple of slave-equivalents is roughly equal to the low probability but high cost if I get annoyed enough to start dropping rocks. It may not be true, but there aren't too many other theories that fit the facts, it makes enough sense to work with." I wriggled around a bit, trying to find a more comfortable position - having the spine of a ferret didn't help much when the only furniture around had nothing but right angles. "Two life-equivalents, that I can farm out, kind of, for two squiddies' economic output. It may not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it's more than I had any claim to the other day. I wonder how much of a nest-egg I could put together with that?"

Boomer answered, "Depending on how long you are willing to wait, and whether the information we have received so far, that is sufficient seed capital to acquire control over an arbitrary amount of both layers of the local economy."

"Er?" I blinked at the screen. "Could you repeat that? Er, no - make that, could you explain that?"

Boomer's avatar nodded. "As I said, the local trust verification architecture is very primitive, generally involving manual exchanges of information. While this very simplicity prevents sophisticated network attacks, it also means that a number of less sophisticated economic programs can be implemented, using math that was developed in the decades leading to the Singularity. For an example you may be familiar with, it is possible to predict the broad outlines of a forthcoming economic bubble, maximize the returns from it, and get out before it collapses. Similar programs can be applied to smaller-scale economic fluctuations with controllable rates of risk."

"... And by an 'arbitrary amount' of the local economy, you mean..?"

"I estimate that in roughly fifteen years, you could own half of the local population as slaves, and acquire the other half in another five."

"... And just how many criminal acts would I have to do?"

"That estimate is based on remaining within the latest available revision of the professional standards of Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. If you wished to go outside those standards, and treat fines and penalties as a simple cost of doing business, then the time estimate drops from twenty years to five, not counting the time required to convince myself, or another AI, to act outside those standards."

"Does your math and economic program take into account the fact that people tend to overthrow a government rather than let themselves be taken over?"

"Yes," Boomer answered simply, then added, "The factors leading to such revolutions have been identified, and can be minimized. Again in terms you are likely to be familiar with, an important guideline is to keep food prices from rising so high that very many people see dying in a revolution as having near-equal value to dying of starvation. In general, the better off the citizenry is, and the more rights they enjoy without infringement, the more likely such an economic transition program is to succeed."

"Even if the transition is to one where they're all slaves?"

"Yes," Boomer repeated.

"So, let me get this straight. If I give one of you AIs the go-ahead, then in twenty years, I'd... own the whole species?"

"Assuming that there are no enclaves outside the Lake Ontario watershed, yes."

I was tempted to quip, 'What could you do in a week?', but settled for, "... I think I'm going to need to take at least five minutes to think about this."

--

I closed my eyes and thought about it.

I went over my guesses about how accurate the information the squiddies were feeding us was, and Boomer's extrapolations of it; and decided that until some inconsistency showed up, I'd have to rely on the AI's expertise on the matter.

I thought about the ethics of slavery. I went over my usual utilitarian arguments against it, such as that reducing peoples' economic output to just their bodies rather than their minds could hobble a whole nation, to the degree that they'd lose a war against a near-identical nation that didn't do so; and that slaves who worked for the benefit of an owner rather than themselves had very little incentive to do a good job, or find better ways to do the job, or find entirely different jobs that provided better rewards; and that I didn't want to ever end up a slave myself, so it behooved me to not support any system in which that might happen. After thinking about it, and Boomer's comments about keeping slaves as well-off as possible, it seemed to me that it might be possible to avoid the utilitarian objections to enslaving the squiddies... at least, for as long as I was the one who owned them. I'd have to work out how to deal with inheritance very carefully, to avoid some less-thoughtful heir going Evil Overlord with the squiddies as minions, before I'd even consider doing anything of the sort.

I thought about what I was actually trying to do with my life. I could probably turn the dome into a secure hidey-hole that nobody else could find - heck, even /I/ didn't know exactly where it was. (And if the squiddies could build this dome, they could probably build something more comfortable, too.) With Boomer and Alphie having absorbed as much of the university library as I'd been able to stuff into them, I could likely spend a few decades happily ensconced there, doing little more than reading. And once I died, the technical issues might be a bit tricky, but I couldn't think of any inherent problem in getting them to cryopreserve me for later revival.

Which left me facing what was still the biggest threat to not just my own long-term survival, but the biggest threat to every other living thing: a lack of understanding about what had happened in November of twenty fifty, and what had happened to the cities during and since then. I didn't know what might trigger it to happen again - maybe just the three pocket-sized AIs that shared the dome with Joe and me were advanced enough to get the squiddies to pull their own Singularity. And I didn't know what had happened to all the people who'd disappeared in that month, whether they had continued to exist in any form, or whether they still continued to exist in any form. As long as this whole topic was so completely unexplored, then for all I knew, the only way of surviving was to head out to the next solar system as fast as possible... and it seemed that nobody on Earth could currently make it even as far as orbit.

With that in mind, then looked at from a certain point of view, putting as many resources as possible into solving that question could be the most ethical choice possible, in that doing so maximized the odds of avoiding a Singularity-based extinction event that didn't leave /any/ survivors.

The trouble with that argument was that it seemed like it could explain too much. With that reasoning, /any/ action that reduced the odds of the extinction of sapience could be justified. Enslaving an entire species was just the start - the same reasoning could, in theory, be used to justify /exterminating/ the squiddies, if that action would reduce the odds of an x-risk event. (Such as, for example, if the squiddies were about to go Singularity without any other way to stop them.) I'd read enough arguments against "the end justifies the means" to be suspicious of such reasoning.

The trouble with /that/ was that just because I was suspicious of the reasoning didn't necessarily mean that it was /wrong/. I was a bunny of very little brain, who'd made all sorts of mistakes, and this was the sort of question that it was really, /really/ important to avoid making any mistakes on. Unfortunately, I didn't have a worldwide community of like-minded rationalists to try to work out the most appropriate result. I didn't even have a few close friends who'd take me seriously and offer constructive criticism. I had access to a few AIs derived from a program written shortly before the Singularity; Convoy, a post-Singularity AI who had his own ideas about how humanity should develop; Joe, who seemed to prefer a lifestyle that was either stone-age or animalist; Technoville, whose representatives had claimed to take me seriously but had black-bagged me and quite likely released poison gas to genocide myself and/or the Great Peace; and various odd individuals who seemed to be happy enough focusing on their day-to-day lives (and occasionally being nudged by /somebody/ to wear blue or green on certain days, among other nudges) instead of worrying about how many days they might have left. That didn't really add up to a community I'd trust to even save just my own life if I was cryopreserved again, let alone save /everyone/'s life.

I'd been wandering around the area for a while; and it didn't seem especially likely that if I kept wandering, I'd just happen to find a community who understood x-risks and could make decisions about dealing with them. (If for no other reason than I hadn't picked up any sign of such a group on my radio, or seen any other evidence anyone had both the ability and motivation to work on the problem worldwide.) If I really wanted to have people who could tell me when I was making a big mistake... then I might have to stop trying to /find/ them, and start trying to /make/ them.

--

"Boomer," I said as I opened my eyes. "Do the squiddies count as having a de facto country, here in the lake?"

The badger-faced AI nodded its avatar. "That much is undeniable. And guessing you are about to ask about de jure, as the Department of Foreign Affairs has not issued any statements in several decades, it is unlikely that any official rulings about whether or not their statehood is recognized will be issued in the near future."

"Alright. When you're in a foreign country, do you have to follow local laws, Canadian laws, both, neither, or what?"

"As of the latest version of the legal code, only a select few offenses are applied extra-territorially, and even those generally when there is no competent local authority to perform prosecutions in its own territory."

"So - when in Rome, follow Roman laws?"

"Essentially."

"Okay. I want you and Alphie to find out what the local financial regulations are, and to use those as the guidelines to stay within instead of Canadian accounting practices. Um... Alphie, do you mind staying, and for me to keep Boomer with me?"

"Hey, no problemo," the stallion-AI rumbled from over at the side of the dome.

"Right. If it's possible to stay in the squiddies' laws and end up owning all of them - I want you to do that. Alphie, I'd like to leave one or two tape-bots with you, so you can keep writing messages. Can you find out if there's a way to keep you and them charged, other than leaving my solar panel with you?"

"Can do," he agreed.

"Okay. One more thing. If I don't give any further orders, the general long-term principles I want my slaves to follow is to increase their competence and ability to do things; and to find ways to minimize the risks that sapience will go extinct. Is that specific and general enough to for you to keep things going for a while?"

"I can handle it."

"Just... try not to turn into a bad Star Trek villain-of-the-week computer-god, alright? If they have a revolution to take control of themselves again, go ahead and let them."

"Yeah, I think I can keep myself from pulling a Landru."

"Good. Oh - and thinking a bit further, if you've got options to increase the resources I own, under the local system, and can bring to bear on problems outside the lake, in the short term, then even if that makes a complete takeover take longer, that's a good option. It won't make much difference if I end up owning the whole shebang in twenty years if I'm dead in two weeks because I was short a nail."

"More like ten, with what you've told me so far, but I getcha. It sounds like you're planning on heading out soon. Anything you want me to try mail-ordering for you before you go?"

"Hm... that depends. How hard would it be to get to Lake Erie from here, minimizing exposure to the atmosphere?"

"That's a good question, I'll ask. Say, are you thinking of expanding the squiddies into the other Great Lakes?"

"I hadn't been, but it's an interesting thought. Why do you ask?"

"Well, it'll take at least a decade to buy and sell enough to buy all the squiddies in Lake Ontario. But if there's anywhere in the other lakes they can lay their eggs, then there's a couple of ways you can get a nail faster. Bring a few slaves in there, let them find the egg sites, claim them yourself. Then you can either just breed up a new batch of squiddies from scratch, or I can use the new egg-sites to leverage buying out the ones in Lake Ontario a lot faster."

"Hunh. I don't mind the idea of spreading intelligent life to places it hasn't been before... but I've got a different thought. Can we simply talk to whoever would be in charge here, about setting up a colonization effort with the cooperation of the squiddies, instead of doing it entirely with slaves I own?"

"If you want. Anything in particular you want to ask?"

"For one - why they haven't gone there already. Maybe they've got a good reason to stay in the lowest Great Lake."

"Or maybe they swam up to Niagara Falls a few times and decided it wasn't worth the effort."

"Well, we know where the canals are - or were - and where the streams leading to Lake Erie come closest to Lake Ontario. I'd feel a lot better about this whole thing if we actually gave the squiddies something they couldn't get on their own, instead of just took advantage of flaws in the way they do things."

 

*Chapter Nine: In-a-gadda-da-vida*

Even if I did end up as some sort of Anti-Evil Overlord with ranks of countless monstrous tentacled creatures as my Legions, trying to use them to investigate the post-Singularity cities had a minor hiccup: they were water-dwellers. On land, they could barely pull their own weight, they didn't live long without water to breathe, and they were almost as helpless as I was in a social gathering. (This also turned out to be most of the reason they hadn't gone a-colonizing; without detailed knowledge that there was even a place to go to /to/ colonize, the risk-reward analysis meant that none of them had any incentive to pull resources out of their market economy and throw them away.)

To investigate cities, I needed to work with people who could work on land. Joe's people would be nearly ideal, since they could respawn anyone who got melted by local nanotech defenses. However, their stone-age approach to technology meant that they would have to be taught almost from scratch what to look for - if their spirits would even agree to let their people participate in such a thing in the first place. Robots were another option to consider, except for the minor matter that I didn't know where I could get any built. As much as I disliked Technoville, the nearest source of people who might be willing to give the whole 'try not to go extinct' thing a try were back in that direction, on the southern shores of Lake Erie.

Of course, there was the minor matter of the clouds of toxic gas that had been spread over the land between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Fortunately, I had one AI pulling on the squiddie market to get me resources, and another to talk to who had atlases and maps from just before the Singularity.

"Alright, Boomer," I said, stretched out on my belly with my chin on my hands, "let's say we do want to bring the squiddies from here to Lake Erie. Assuming that a lot of the man-made waterways have been left unmaintained, and that cities have been rebuilt, and might or might not have dangerous nanotech lying around... and that the air and ground in the Niagara Peninsula is likely going to be dangerous... is there a way that's more feasible than building some giant aquarium wagons?"

"Yes," the AI answered. (At about that time, I decided that I was getting annoyed of using the pronoun for inanimate objects to refer to Boomer. Even though Boomer's avatar was neither male nor female, since the badger was based on a sports mascot for both male and female teams, I decided to pick a gender, and to start thinking of Boomer as a 'her'.) "Oak Orchard Creek enters Lake Ontario about seventy kilometers east of the Niagara River. It intersects with the Erie Canal, which connects to the Niagara River partway between the city of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. There are several minor obstacles, such as water-control dams, that would have to be gotten around, and there is no way to know whether additional dangers have arisen since the last geo-information update without direct inspections. However, given the parameters you describe, this route would require the least amount of effort to travel."

--

'Least amount of effort' was a far cry from 'effortless'.

For one thing, I finally found out why Joe and I had been grabbed in the first place: the squiddies' experiments with metal on top of the lake had led them to the conclusion that it made Toronto feel more shooty than average. So they insisted that the wundermaterial canoe had to be kept under wraps, somewhat literally, until the CN Tower and its surrounding buildings were out of sight.

For another, the very first of what Boomer called 'minor obstacles' was 'minor' only by comparison to, say, trying to swim up Niagara Falls itself. After paddling through seven or eight kilometers of tree-lined creek, we came to what Boomer said had once been called Waterport Pond. It had once been a tiny hydro dam with a sluiceway over to the side, mostly to control the water level of the pond above; but most of the man-made infrastructure had collapsed and been partly washed away into a set of rapids. Joe and I could simply get out of the water and portage up the hill. The three squiddies accompanying us - a pair of guards and a messenger, the very first slaves I'd ever owned - didn't have it quite so easy. However, they turned out to be dab hands with small carts, ropes and pulleys, and there were plenty of trees to use to anchor things, so as the messenger squiddie turned around, her spiraling shell disappearing back down into the water to make arrangements for something a little less awkward and a little more permanent, the two guards were able to haul themselves around the bend and into the pond.

After that show of skill and determination, I felt that simply thinking of them as 'my squiddie slave guards' was extremely impersonal and disrespectful. I couldn't see any difference between them, so I asked Boomer to flash a sign asking if they had any names I could adapt to words spoken in the air. Which is how they received the names 'Pinky', for a shade of colour in her shell that was too subtle for me to make out, and 'Brain', for a slight bulge in his body over where his central nervous system was that I couldn't make out among all the other bulges.

According to Boomer's maps, in another twenty kilometers, we'd face a similar obstacle to climb up to Glenwood Lake, the south end of which was right next to the canal. What Boomer's maps didn't show was how those twenty kilometers had changed in recent decades.

--

"Hunh," I said, looking around. "I didn't think it was the season for tent caterpillars." The trees lining the banks, and turning the creek into a water-carpeted tunnel, had their green leaves nearly completely hidden by sheets of white.

"It isn't," Joe answered, in his usual laconic way.

"Oh. Um... I hope you won't think less of me if I say that I've got a very bad feeling about this."

"I don't see why," Joe commented. "I had to use a very powerful tool to cut your suit to fit you. How can any insect do as much?"

"Well, I've got my tail poking out, and we both have our heads uncovered - and there's more ways than just stinging or biting for a bug to hurt you. Maybe we should make sure the gear's secured, turn the canoe over, and have Pinky and Brain tow us for a while?"

"If you want to do that now, after just seeing silk in trees, is there anything you won't hide from?"

"You say that like hiding is a bad thing. Laura made this canoe out of stuff that I think is even harder than our armor plates - why /not/ protect ourselves with it when we can?"

Whatever response Joe was about to make was lost to history, as a sheet of white silky stuff started floating down from the trees. Without a word, the two of us paddled as hard as we could, but before we could speed up, it gently touched down - and stuck fast to everything it touched.

It slowed as it touched my head and shoulders, which gave me enough time to drop the paddle, reach into my belt, and pull out a bat-shaped knife in each hand. This turned out to be a good idea in mere moments, as I discovered the stuff was forming an airtight seal over my muzzle. A few slashes opened rents so I could reach to the top side, letting me cut my mouth free and inhale deeply.

"Joe!" I shouted on the exhale. "Can you breathe?"

"Mm!" was his answer, which I assumed meant 'no'. My top half was firmly wrapped, and was opaque enough that I couldn't see anything; but from what I could feel, the sheet of stuff had attached itself to the sides of the canoe instead of drooping inside, leaving my legs free. Another few slashes with my right hand opened another hole, into which I dropped the knife. Trying to move quickly rather than hurrying, I finally got some use out of my flexibility, as I twisted my legs to slide the knife over to him.

While all of that was going on, my ears, while as firmly glomped as the rest of my head, picked up the sounds of splashes, which I also felt starting to rock the boat. Something suddenly landed on the bow, rocking us - and just as suddenly was gone again, followed by a splash.

I used my remaining knife to start sawing a circle in the sheet around me, and in a few moments, had freed myself from being attached to a canoe.

This turned out to be a bad plan.

Something clotheslined me in the chest, and I was yanked upwards. I felt one of the squiddies' tentacles wrap around my hoof, but it slipped off as I kept rising.

I was twisted around and felt more sheets wrap around my legs, and hurriedly brought my knife up to my face, just in time for it to poke through more sheets wrapping around my top half, letting me keep breathing.

After a half-dozen layers had glued themselves around me, just about immobilizing everything but my fingers on the knife, I was... manhandled? ... to a horizontal position, and shoved against a roughly human-sized (but very much /not/ human-shaped) form. I was about to start sawing at my wrappings, when there was a great big lurch, which nearly made me drop my knife; a few brief moments of weightlessness; and an impact as we landed. Then again, as whatever I was stuck to jumped again - and again.

This continued for some time. (And for once, I couldn't even check Scorpia to find out how much time.)

After a while, the big light blur was replaced by a big dark blur, and the great big lurches replaced by a series of bone-jarring smaller ones.

Finally, more manhandling detached me from whatever had been carrying me, and I was set down.

I tried to use my muffled senses to see if there were any more of the whatever-they-were nearby, but my eyes were glued shut, my nostrils were blocked, and I couldn't make out any vibrations other than my own rapid pulse.

So I started sawing.

--

The outer layer of the sheets I was wrapped in wasn't sticky like all the others, so once I'd carefully uncovered my eyes, and sliced my limbs free of each other, I was free to move around - though I was probably doing a pretty good mummy impression.

"Boomer, you still with me?"

"I can hear you."

"Know where we are?"

"Given my accelerometer and maps, I believe we are in a farmhouse basement."

"Okay, let me get a flashlight free.."

The one I wore as a ring was easiest to uncover. It revealed... lots of white-wrapped forms, and lots of sparkly and shiny things reflecting the light all over. A few quick pokes, and I was fairly sure the only things left inside the other sheets were bones. "Anyone else alive in here? Make a noise, wriggle a foot, anything, let me know." The only motion I saw was whatever dust I'd disturbed, swirling in the air.

"Right. Guess we're in the pantry," I spoke aloud to let Boomer know the direction of my thoughts. "Or maybe not - do those piles look like they're in a pattern to you?"

"I cannot see."

"Oops." I applied the knife to uncover the pocket I kept Boomer in. "How's that?"

"I believe they are some sort of mating display, similar to a magpie's nest. I see coins, jewelry, silverware, bullets, phones, pieces of glass-"

I interrupted, "Do you see a way out?"

"Please turn around." I shrugged to myself, and obeyed, shining the light around. "The only entrance appears to be the one we were brought through, above the collapsed stairway. Can you climb?"

"I can climb trees, but I don't know about flat concrete - parkour was never my thing. The bat-belt has some sort of grappling hook and line, but I don't know if it supports any weight, or if there's anything up there to hook onto... Say, I could probably throw you up and catch you, and you could use your cameras to see if there's anything for the hook to catch on - would that work?"

I didn't detect any particular reluctance in Boomer's assent, and spent a few moments picking my way through the rotten remains of the staircase to give Boomer views from a few different angles, and played catch with her a few times.

She reported back by showing a 3D reconstruction on her screen, including the path we'd arrived by. "I see nothing up there but an empty room. If your grapple can catch on the corner of the doorframe, then that might hold your weight."

A few more slices with the knife, and I started tossing the bat-grapple up. It clunked down a half-dozen times without catching. "This might take a while," I commented. "Any alternative plans?"

Boomer started listing, "Digging? Building a ladder, or stilts? Forcing our captors to return us? Waiting for help?"

"Hm. None are especially good options..." I ran the available inventory through my head, from the skin out, idly kicking at some of the glittering trash. Then I had a thought, and recalled that I had another resource, which I hadn't made much use of at all since I'd gotten it.

"Boomer, I'm about to do something which may be completely fruitless and silly - and which may help." I pocketed her, moved to the middle of the room, facing the exit, and held up my hands, looking at them. "Um - Bun-Bun? Skeleton? Body? I don't know what you call yourself, or if you call yourself anything, but I think you're listening and watching. I don't want to stay here and get eaten. I don't know how to climb that wall. Is there anything you can do?"

I dropped my hands. Or, to be more precise, my hands dropped, without my having tried to drop them. I walked - or my body walked itself - to the corner of the basement nearest the door, where I watched as I put my hands against the wall, then my feet against the wall behind me, lifting my weight from the floor. As calmly as you please, I walked up that corner... then pushed with my hands as I bent my legs, gave a /heave/, and was through the door and on the ground-level floor.

And as soon as I landed, I curled myself up in agony, with the biggest charley horses I'd ever felt cramping both thighs.

If any of the whatever-they-were had come by in the next few minutes, I probably would have been dropped right back in the larder. During those few minutes, I was seriously wondering if I'd have been better off staying in my original, legless body. But, it seemed the whatever-they-were assumed that any prey whose head they'd covered with airtight seals would be dead in short order, and gradually my leg pain diminished, until I could pull myself back upright.

"Note to self," I said, to both myself and Boomer. "Don't ask Bun-Bun for help unless I really, /really/ need it."

--

The farmhouse looked like it had been some sort of survivalist compound. Its contents had mostly been trashed by time, weather, and critters, but as I limped on still-aching legs (and a still-aching hoof), I came by a few non-shiny items the whatever-they-were had left untouched. In particular, in the kitchen, near the icebox, was a calendar with days crossed off halfway through June. Of what year, it didn't say (though given the days of the week, Boomer could have narrowed down the possibilities); but since the Singularity seemed to have happened in November, it seemed like whoever had lived here had kept on living. At least, for a few years.

I debated with myself about burning the place down. I hadn't had time to check before Bun-Bun had launched me out of the basement, but it seemed likely that some of the bones in the basement were human (or some other sapient species), and I had an urge to give them a more dignified funeral than they'd gotten - ideally, taking some of the whatever-they-were with them. It wouldn't be hard - in fact, given lightning strikes and no more firefighters, I was surprised a wildfire hadn't swept through already. But that seemed... wasteful. Maybe someone who was better prepared could sweep through all those shinies in the basement and find something useful. I spent quite a few minutes thinking of ways to kill the whatever-they-weres, but couldn't come up with a way to get enough of them to make a dent in their population.

In the end, I just pushed my way out of a rotten screen door, leaving behind what used to be white clapboards in exchange for what used to be a red-painted barn. I found a corner that was reasonably out-of-sight of the entrance, and went to work with a will, hacking off the sheets that were still glued to me. I lost some fur from my tail and head, both by having to trim the glued stuff and occasionally accidentally yanking out whole tufts, but soon enough I was free of the stuff.

According to Boomer, the whatever-they-weres had brought us upstream, in the direction we'd been traveling. So, making sure that I had every weaponizable object in my pockets and pouches ready to go at the first sign of any creature that looked like it could wrap me up again, I slowly trod to the nearest point of the creek. My walking sticks were in the canoe, and none of the wood I found was worth using, so I had to take each and every one of the four hundred fifty-two steps without any support.

Trees were thick all around, and sheets were thick on the trees, choking some of them off. But I kept a knife in each hand between thumb and forefinger, and watching for any of those sheets to start moving in my direction, pulled Boomer out of my pocket, looped a piece of twine from one of my pouches around her, and lowered her into the water. The squiddies might not make noise themselves, but Pinky and Brain could pick up subsonics fairly well; and I didn't feel much like shouting for Joe and Clara for everything in the neighbourhood to hear.

After pulling Boomer back and pocketing her, I picked a tree to lean back against, and sat back to wait a while.

--

After staying focused on being in 'yellow alert' for a while, I twitched and nearly skewered the tentacle that rose out of the water. "Ah, good, um... Brain?"

"Pinky," Boomer corrected.

"How can you tell?"

"How can you not?"

I raised an eyebrow as I looked down at her, and her avatar just smiled back at me. I tossed her back into the water. After a few moments, during which Boomer presumably used her screen to flash sign-language and colour-changes that Pinky could understand, the tentacle gave a wave, and pulled back into the water. I pulled on Boomer's string. "What's the word?"

"Everyone's fine. She'll let them know where we are."

"Good. I'd like to get out of here as soon as we can. I don't like this place much right now."

After some more time on 'yellow alert', I finally caught sight of the canoe coming upstream - the upside-down canoe, its shiny finish hidden under countless white sheets.

A half-dozen tentacles rose from the water. "I think that's our ride," I said to Boomer, and didn't resist as they grabbed me, simply taking a deep breath as they pulled me under, maneuvering me into the air-bubble under the inverted canoe.

"Joe. Clara," I said, nodding to both as I grabbed one of the thwarts so I didn't have to tread water.

"Bunny. Boomer," he nodded back. In the shimmering light coming up from below, I watched one of the squiddies wrap their tentacles around the thwarts, seats, and other available bits, and tense as they started tugging us along.

I asked, "Did you get a look at what attacked us?"

"Yep."

"What were they?"

"Spiders."

"... Small ones or big ones?"

"Big ones. Big as you or me."

"Ah. You get many of them in the Great Peace?"

"Nope. Never seen them before in any of my lives."

"Well - let's hope they stay a local problem, then."

--

That was, thankfully, the most exciting bit of the trip. After a few more miles, the sheets covering the trees thinned, then vanished, so Joe and I put the canoe upright again. Other than his hair, as soon as the water dripped from his body-suit, he was dry as a bone. However, mine had been cut upon for my tail - and it felt like I was wearing a water-balloon. With everyone standing guard, I stripped off all my armor and gear, applied a towel as best I could, and then pulled the body-suit and armor right back on again. I figured that being somewhat damp, even mildewy, would be less of a problem than whatever other hostile flora or fauna might take an interest in us.

After that were miles and miles of creek under trees, punctuated by occasional meadows or ruins. Then the big effort to portage from the creek up to Glenwood Lake, then again from the lake to the canal, and then around the canal locks in the aptly-named former city of Lockport, and then around the guard lock which marked the border between the canal and Tonawanda Creek, which came to an end at the Niagara River, halfway between Niagara Falls and downtown Buffalo.

We didn't come across a single person, either human or Changed, the whole way. If it weren't for the giant spiders, and the city-computer cooling towers in the distance, it would have been a nearly ideal little camping vacation, one I would have loved to have tried out back before I'd died, when an air ambulance was a cell-phone call away. (Of course, back before I'd died, giant spiders weren't a major threat.)

--

Joe asked, "Why did you choose to name yourself Bunny?"

"I thought the long-ears and puffy tail kind of gave it away."

"That only explains why you changed it /to/ Bunny. It does not explain why you /changed/ it to Bunny."

"That makes everything /so/ much clearer." He gave me a look, and I sighed. "Okay, okay, I know what you're asking."

"If you do not wish to answer-"

I shook my head. "I don't mind - I just haven't worked out how to describe my reasoning to anyone else. Lemme think for a few moments..." We both fell silent for a bit. "Okay. Names are important. Choosing how to name things lets you tell one thing from another - cats from dogs even though both are carnivores. Done badly, and you might think that just because two people collapse in a 'faint', they can be revived the same way. And more than that - people aren't quite rational, and names can imply things. Someone called 'Awesome McCoolname' is more likely to receive respect and get elected than 'Faily O'Loser'.

"I've been happy with the name my parents gave me - with a bit of creative interpretation, it could mean 'Judge of the height of God's wickedness', which, given how I went full atheist when I was around thirty, was a personal in-joke." I shrugged. "Then I died, was brought back to life, and got a sex-change and species-change all rolled into one. There are people who've changed their names after just one of those four things. There's even a chance... anyway, just by being here, I've gone through a more powerful initiation ritual than just about anyone who simply hallucinated a religious experience - er, no offense intended to any religious experiences in your own culture..."

"None taken." It was hard to tell whether he was amused or annoyed.

"Anyway. My original name can still refer to me, if anyone wants to use it. But - it doesn't seem an /appropriate/ name. My family name refers to a family that doesn't exist. I don't need my middle name to differentiate me from the other people who share my first and last name. And my first name is masculine. I could have accented it to the feminine form, but," I shrugged again, "if I was going to do that, then why stop there? So, once someone I met called me by something that was appropriate, I adopted it. 'Bunny' is precisely accurate, in exactly the same way as Blackbeard or Erik the Red... or Injun Joe."

"There are many other sorts of 'bunnies'."

"Eh. It's been pretty obvious so far which is which. Besides, I don't feel like being 'Bunny Pinkfur'."

"You have other attributes."

"Maybe so, but I haven't been able to think of a respectable word for 'the limper'"

"Bunny One-Hoof? Bunny Short-leg?"

"Eh, doesn't quite scan. Oh - I just realized, we've got a thesaurus. Say, Boomer? Got any good words for having one bad leg?"

"Papakata."

"Gesundheit?"

"It is a Maori word, meaning a person with one crippled leg."

"Bunny Papakata... Hm... Eh, I /suppose/ I could live with that, if there's nothing better. I don't really have any connection to the Maori, though."

Joe spoke, "Perhaps you are thinking too concretely."

"I think 'The Great and Powerful Bunny' would make people take me /less/ seriously. But maybe you're right. You've been around me for a little while - has anything about me caught your attention?"

"The deeper into the woods you go, and the further from other people, the happier you are."

"I am? I hadn't noticed."

"It is obvious."

"I'm willing to take your word for it - I've always enjoyed hiking. Alright, Boomer - any fancy words for being happy by myself in the woods?"

"Waldeinsamkeit. German."

"Of course they have a word for that. 'Bunny Waldeinsamkeit'. A bit of a mouthful... but not bad. And I've got plenty of central European ancestors - my original family name was German. I could work with that."

--

"There's something I've been wanting to ask you, Joe, but I haven't been able to figure out a way that doesn't sound terrible."

"I do not think I will chop your head off for asking a question."

"Right. Um... Were you ever, well, actually born?"

"As opposed to just walking out of a spirit pool one day, fully formed?"

"Well - yeah."

"Yes, I was born. The first time, I was born a human, and my parents said I was a happy little girl who ran around a lot."

"'First time'... you've been born more than once?"

"It is difficult to know how to be a deer, or turtle, or anything, if you do not remember growing up as one."

"But couldn't your spirits just bring you out of one of your pools, with all that information already in your head?"

"Probably."

"Then why don't they?"

"They have not said why. We talk about that, sometimes. My best guess is that the spirits are preparing for a time when they cannot help us, and we will have to live on our own again, the way you do."

"Hm... when you're an animal, a predator, do you eat prey animals?"

"Of course."

"And when you're a prey animal, you try not to be eaten?"

"Of course."

"Why not just bare your throat to the predator, to save everyone involved a lot of time and effort?"

"Why do the spirits not just make one of us into all the people needed for a whole village?"

"I'm going to guess... you're thinking the whole 'prepared to live without the spirits' guess again?"

"Do you have a better answer?"

"I haven't even figured out all the questions yet..."

--

We made camp that night on Grand Island, just across from where we entered the Niagara River. As far as we could tell, there weren't any dangerous chemicals nearby, and the towers were just on the mainland, so it was about as safe as anywhere we were likely to find.

"Well, Joe," I asked, nibbling on some clover flowers, "do your spirits keep any pools nearby? You might want to drop in to refresh your memories stored in them."

"Not on the islands," he said. "Only on the other side of the river. I think all the ones near us were caught in the poison clouds."

"So - if I dropped dead right here, or managed to convince you that you didn't have to stick with me some other way, what would you want to do?"

"Follow the shore to a place it hasn't been poisoned. Give the spirits my memories. Then let them make a hundred of me, a thousand, to go and make war on those who tried to kill my people."

"If that's what the you who's here wants... then isn't that what any other yous that your spirits might have made would want, too?"

"Very likely."

"Then... why haven't whatever scouts your war parties use already found us?"

"Perhaps the land is still too poisoned to walk over. Perhaps the war is already won."

"Or lost."

"Any war that is won, is also a war that is lost."

"Not necessarily - on rare occasion, both sides lose. On rarer occasions, both sides win."

"I do not see how."

And so we watched our shadows grow longer, talking of game theory, politics, crop-growing, and other things - almost anything other than the coming day.

That day, we would be approaching the city that had covered at least a few hundred square kilometers with chemical weapons...

 

*Chapter Ten: In-Describable*

Combined, we already knew a few things about Buffalo.

I knew that it at least occasionally kept in touch with the other cities on the shore of Lake Erie, via boat traffic; and that it was one of the cities Technoville was planning on incorporating into its 'system'. Joe was mostly vaguely aware of it as the nearest city outside the Great Peace, and thought that the people tended to live to the south of the big towers. He also had word from the spirits that the toxic cloud had started spreading into the Great Peace's territory at the place I knew as Fort Erie, just across the shore from Buffalo. Between the two of us, we'd figured out that the unprecedented cloud had followed close after my own unprecedented flight in and use of radio; and that once the cloud had enveloped the place I'd landed, it had expanded directly to the place I'd talked about heading next. Boomer and Clara had pre-singularity maps and aerial photos, and after climbing some trees and waving their hardware around, their cameras could make 3D models of the towers, and they could make estimates about the remaining details. Pinky and Brain, unfortunately, could add nothing to this discussion.

Our combined goals added up, pretty much, to my goals. Pinky and Brain considered themselves my slaves, obligated to obey my orders - my primary one being to try to keep me, and everyone else in our group, alive. Boomer and Clara seemed to be falling back on Laura's general goals of 'improve the social good', which they were currently interpreting as helping me improve whatever societies we found. Scorpia and the tape-bots weren't smart enough to have any goals other than to follow immediate instructions. Joe, in his few words, indicated he was trying to follow the spirits' will, which, as of the last time he'd been in touch with them, was to help me.

And my goals?

Well, for the short term, they were pretty simple. Avoid dying - which meant that if Buffalo really was the launch site of some attack that had been following me, try not to let them get their hands on me. I'd left my radio back in Fonthill, but if whatever was in the cloud had been able to gather the information on where I was going, then they probably had at least a description of me... so I was going to be spending the day buried inside one of the university's hazmat suits. At least, until we found out more about what was going on in Buffalo, or had left it behind us.

In the slightly-less-short term, I wanted to meet people. I knew how terrible I was with the ebb-and-flow of social situations, but I was going to need help in unwrapping the riddles of the Singularity. I had some ideas about ways to start investigating such things, while minimizing Technoville's awareness that anything was going on at all. Put somewhat indelicately, while I was willing to take the risk of investigating dangerous places if I had to, if somebody else were convinced that it was worth their while to risk /their/ lives instead of mine, I'd be quite willing to let them. There was no way I was socially ept enough to trick anyone into that, so that could only ever happen once I'd gotten them to understand the potential risks and rewards involved; but to do that, I might have to teach them the basics about risk and reward analysis. Given the numbers of anabaptists I'd met on the far side of the lake, I wasn't holding out much hope that any given individual I'd met would already be willing to calculate the odds of ensuring mind-kind's survival without including assumptions like 'people keep existing after they die' or 'there's a super-powerful being who would never let that happen'.

I'd been dead for a few decades. If anyone had evidence about what lay beyond the veil, it was me - and even before I'd died, the evidence I had was compelling enough that I'd been willing to take the gamble on being cryopreserved in the first place. Joe, of course, had an entirely different perspective on the whole thing, since his 'spirits' could be talked to, and regularly intervened in reality to recreate anyone who'd died. Boomer and Clara considered themselves merely to be conversational interfaces connected to knowledge engines. And, possibly an important oversight, the translation dictionary for the squiddies didn't include anything in the topic at all, and if they didn't already have a religion, I didn't want to be the one to give them one.

It might be years before I met someone - or taught someone - who knew enough to be able to make what I would consider to be a sufficiently rational analysis. Fortunately, Technoville had told me, and the university's genetic analysis had confirmed, that barring accident, I had quite a few years of life to look forward to. So I wasn't in a /particular/ rush.

Which added up to our general plan: try and learn as much as we could about Buffalo from as far away as we could; and depending on what we saw, send in Joe to interact with the locals to learn more.

--

They say no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Our plan didn't even survive a /lack/ of contact with the enemy.

"You're sure it was to the south of the big towers?"

I'd rescued the spotting scope from the remains of Technoville's camera-telescope. It had survived Toronto's death ray in fairly good condition, and once detached from the rest, was only the size of a pen, so I'd pocketed it on the off chance I could use it later. Now, it was later. Joe had grabbed a set of steampunk goggles from the university's pre-Singularity Halloween collection - unlike most steampunk gear from before I died, these ones actually did something useful.

"No," he answered, twisting one of his lenses to focus in better, "but those buildings do not look like they were built before the Serpent War."

"I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I see docked boats, I see some carts - I don't see any people, or animals."

"Perhaps they all left to follow the cloud, and invade my people's land."

"That's actually one of the /better/ scenarios I can think of. One of the worse is that another Singularity hit, and everyone vanished again."

"I think you do not need to worry about that. I see a body."

"Where?" We lined up our respective optics, and I saw a crumpled form on a dock. "Ah, crap. Looks like it's been there a few days... maybe since the cloud first appeared."

"Perhaps some of the poison blew back across the river."

"Perhaps," I agreed, glumly. "If so - we'd better keep our suits on, and get as far away as we can before our air scrubbers' batteries run out. I don't /see/ anything that looks like powder, or residue, or anything - not that I know what to look for, even if we did bring a mass spectrometer from the university."

Boomer's voice piped up from inside my suit, "A mass spectrometer is not available, but you do possess the components of an optical spectrometer."

"What components are those?"

"The ring you use as a light-source can be adjusted to produce spectroscopic-quality visible frequencies, as well as infrared or ultraviolet, among other effects. The cameras in the screen you attached to me can interpret reflected light in sufficient detail to compare to a library of chemicals."

"Why would a piece of Halloween jewelry have scientific gear in it?"

"Like the screen you attached to my case, it was available and could do what Tammy Hardecky wanted. She was unable to complete the wireless interface before she left, but you can detach my screen and use that wire to connect me to the standard port to reprogram it."

"... And you never brought this up before because..?"

"You never asked."

I resisted the urge to rub my temple, and not just because the hazmat suit was in the way. Sometimes I forgot that Boomer's thought processes didn't follow the same lines as a human's. "Right," I said. "Will it stop being a flashlight when you're done?"

"I can program it to have four settings, set by rotating the top face at ninety degree intervals. Off; light; spectrometer emitter; and half light, half spectrometer."

"Does your library include the signatures of nerve gases?"

"Yes, and thousands of other toxic chemicals."

"Joe - let's go back downstream to get this set up, and put Boomer back in that see-through waterproof bag. I don't want to pull off my gloves here."

--

When in 'scanning mode', the ring cycled through a full spectrum - black to red to green to blue to black - over about a second. I was a mite leery about wearing it on the outside of the hazmat suits, so I ended up taping it to Boomer's case, inside the bag with her. Boomer said that she could filter the interference from the plastic the same way she did interference from air.

Initial testing went well - Boomer could ID minerals, metals, and what our various pieces of gear were made of.

While I was playing with the whole setup, getting a feel for how close I had to hold Boomer to my harmonica for her to identify its materials, what lighting worked best, and so on, I had a thought. I had, in essence, just kitbashed a tricorder together out of spare parts. And I'd only done so because I'd inadvertently asked one of those parts if it was possible.

"Boomer," I wondered aloud, "does any of the /other/ gear we have, that you know of, allow us to do anything that we're not using it for?"

"Of course," she answered. "I am disappointed that you have been taking little advantage of the educational opportunities my presence offers. In addition to providing library data for your perusal, I can act as a tutor, guide meditation, and monitor your bioreadings while you exercise."

"A 'conversational interface' can be 'disappointed'?"

"I am a stateful machine; whether or not I can feel any emotions, I have sufficient knowledge of social interaction to know when it is appropriate to emulate feeling something."

"Of course. In that case - when we have downtime, please start reminding me to improve my education. Do you have any other tricks?"

"My camera is not limited to the visual spectrum, and I can convert infrared or ultraviolet images into a format you can see."

"Ah, night-vision. Of a sort. That could come in handy. Any other tactical tricks?"

"The surface of your armored plates, and Joe's shield, can be altered to one of eight different color patterns. However, none of your items contain working wireless interfaces, meaning they require a direct connection to control."

"Hm... so we'd have to plug you or Clara into anything we want to redecorate. I've gotten used to the white-on-black look, but maybe something darker or greener would be a little more practical. What are the eight patterns?"

"White snow, tan desert, light-green forest, dark-green jungle, shark-blue underwater, gray urban, and night black. The eighth setting for the armor is rescue orange, and for the shield, American patriotic."

"Let's try forest green. How's that work?" She walked me through unplugging the cable from the ring, and attaching it to the right spots on each armored plate. That was all it took, it seemed; over about half-a-dozen seconds, each white item mottled and darkened into something like a pile of leaves.

Joe took his own turn, and his shield became /much/ less of a visual distraction. "I approve," was his only comment, and even that was only when prompted.

"Well, I've still got a bright pink head, and the camouflage won't help much inside the hazmat suits - but I feel kind of silly and stupid for having spent all this time without having known we could do this. Alright, Boomer, have we got any gear that we haven't shown any indication we've got any idea what it can do?"

"The object in your bat-belt's third pouch on the left, shaped like a standard battery, is actually a scent synthesizer."

"What scents does it synthesize?"

"That model is advertised as having artificial organelles capable of producing any of one hundred twenty-eight different aromatic compounds, which can be produced in sufficient concentrations and combinations that the total number of scents requires not just exponents, but tetration, to describe."

"How many of them can actually be distinguished?"

"Several thousand, depending on who is doing the smelling."

"Can it remove scents?"

"It is claimed to. It can produce beta-cyclodextrin, a chemical which can surround certain chemicals and prevent them from being smelled."

"So if I wanted to smell like... a pile of leaves instead of whatever it is I do smell like?"

"That can be approached."

"Okay. Let's hold off on that for now - I don't want to be cooped up in a hazmat suit full of 'aromatic compounds'. Any other tricks with the gear?"

"Your coil of shiny yellow rope has two main functions. On command, it can switch from its ordinary flexible state to something resembling a piece of rigid metal, maintaining whatever shape it was in, and back. In addition, its length contains electromagnetic field creators, specifically designed to interact with a vertebrate's peripheral nervous system. While designed for certain adult entertainment activities, it can also interfere with voluntary muscle movement, or simply induce pain instead of pleasure."

"Eurgh." I looked at the rope in a new light, trying to figure out if I still felt like touching it. Then my common-sense slapped me upside the head, pointing out that there was a shortage of hardware stores around these days, and that distaste was a stupid reason to risk getting killed for lack of a rope. "And I need to plug you into it to make it work?"

"Actually, it contains several touch-sensitive surfaces that act as controls, identifiable to both sight and touch by the change in the braiding."

"Hunh. Okay, what control does what?" She led me through the manual. I tied one end into a lariat, and wrapped it around my left hand, to start practicing some of the controls.

While I was working on that, Boomer continued describing the tricks and treats offered by our pieces of Halloween costumes. "Joe's boots contain actively managed treads and friction, the actuators and computers powered by his weight on each step. His helmet contains control surfaces for throwing a hammer you did not bring. His collapsible bow, and arrows, contain micro-actuators to help steady the aim."

Eventually, she ran out of things to describe, and I was feeling kind of disturbed by how my hand felt with the various nerve-interaction commands, so we suited back up, told Pinky and Brain not to touch anything on dry land if possible, and paddled back towards Buffalo.

"I have a signature," Boomer (back in tricorder mode) stated, as we came close to shore. "A V-series nerve agent, possibly VX. It covers every surface in range. If you touch anything here, you will need to clean your suits before removing them. It is very likely present in the atmosphere. As you lack any antidotes, you must not remove your suits."

"Gotcha," I said. "Joe, you heard?"

"You need to ask?"

"For a life and death detail? You bet I'll ask."

"Fine. Yes, I heard."

"Alright. That cloud was hunting me earlier. If there's any way to find out, I want to know where it came from, who controls it, why it's after me, and any other details that we need to know to get it to /not/ hunt me. It's been a few days, so it seems like it probably lost our trail when the squiddies snagged us. I don't want to get too close to it without knowing anything about it. So - we're here, a place where the cloud was, which makes it one of the few places we might be able to learn anything about it. I suppose could just wander up and down some of the streets... but there's probably a better way to go about looking for clues. Anyone have any ideas?"

Joe said, "Look for their military centers, where they launched their attack from."

"Um," I said, thinking. "It's an odd military that destroys its own home city. But that does bring up the point that we don't really know for sure /where/ the cloud came from. Maybe from here - maybe it picked up my radio from a lot farther south, and just came through here looking for it. If we can find a local barracks or armory, we can probably figure out whether the local armed forces were told about the cloud before it arrived... though if they were, they just might start shooting at us as soon as they see us. Any way we can figure that out without sticking our necks out?"

Joe gave an ever-so-slight shrug. "The cloud kills people and animals. It should not be hard to track, if it came from outside the city."

"True... Boomer, can your scanning help figure that out?"

"Possibly," answered the AI. "I can map the density of the toxin as you travel, and extrapolate from that."

"Fair enough," I nodded. "Do your maps have anything on local military bases?"

"Yes, but based on what I have already seen, few, if any, of the buildings on those maps still stand."

"Right. Okay - so, first goal, get out alive. Second goal, find local military places. Second-and-a-half goal, look for any local information that might point us to the local military. Third goal, let Boomer map toxin levels. Am I missing anything?"

Joe nodded. "Burying the dead. Finding survivors. Looking for anything else of use, that isn't covered in poison."

I shook my head. "We only have limited time in the suits - maybe if we find some big, charged-up batteries, we could hook them up to keep breathing long enough to do some of that."

Joe frowned, but didn't object. Instead, he said, "You have not said anything about getting 'goal one'."

"I'm assuming Pinky and Brain can guard the canoe. Maybe one guard it, and one swim on patrol. Hm... we don't have any radios, and I wouldn't want to use one if we did, but do you think they can whistle, or anything to catch our attention?"

Clara, who'd been quiet for a great deal of time to help save on power, finally chose to speak up. "I can stay with them," she said through her bovine avatar. "And set my volume to maximum should they decide to inform you of something."

I nodded. "Appreciate it."

--

I don't like remembering what we saw in the school. When I was actually seeing it, I liked it even less.

I said aloud, probably in something of a strangled voice, "Bun-Bun, there's nerve gas outside the suit. Throwing up right now would be a /really/ /bad/ idea. If you can do something to keep me from doing that..."

When I said that, I felt a cramping, deep in my guts, sharp enough that I was doubled over before even realizing it. But I didn't feel like throwing up any longer. Which didn't make me feel any better, just less likely to accidentally kill myself.

I straightened, and very carefully did not look away. At that time, in that place, I made a resolution to myself: As long as it didn't involve x-risks, whoever made the cloud had to be stopped. Hunting down me for flying or using a radio, was one thing; I could even understand launching a preemptive attack on the people of the Great Peace, for territory or resources or whatever. But whoever could do something like /this/, if they ever became sane enough to fully comprehend their own actions, would become so wracked with guilt that suicide would be one of the few ways to deal with it. Killing them before they made that realization was, in a way, something of a kindness - even moreso if it could be done before they turned any more children into undignified, lifeless meat.

"Boomer - please make a record of... this. We may need it to persuade other people to hunt down war criminals. Joe - change of plans. We look for batteries to keep breathing with - and then we find /anyone/ who's managed to stay alive."

--

My best guess for the population of Buffalo, as of the time I was revived, was a hundred thousand living, breathing people, plus or minus a factor of two or three.

We found a total of two still breathing.

After an hour of walking around, Boomer said, "I hear a noise." My ears were flattened by my suit, but she played it back at a higher volume. Holding Boomer high and turning her around, we only had to backtrack along a single echo to arrive at a particular home - or, more specifically, the angled doors of that home's storm cellar.

"Hello!" I called out. "Is anybody in there?"

The banging immediately stopped. A muffled woman's voice returned, "Hello?"

"Don't open the door!" I shouted out as I quickly thought of that. "The air is still poisonous."

"I know," she answered. "Are you a search and rescue team?"

I looked at Joe, who shrugged. "We're not from Buffalo," I said, "but we're looking for survivors. We're civilians, so we're not completely sure what we're doing, but we have good advisors. There doesn't seem to be any poison on Grand Island, so we're thinking of taking any survivors we find there. How many people are in there?"

"Two," she answered. "Me, and my grand-daughter, Minerva Harriet Tubman Joshi."

"Okay," I said. "We only have two suits, and both of us are wearing them. I think we'll have to go to a safe area, have one of us take the suit off, and have the other one of us bring the empty suit back. But we'll have to work out some sort of airlock system-"

She interrupted me, "What sort of suits?"

"Uh - Boomer?"

Boomer rattled off a brand-name and model number.

"Really?" said the woman, who hadn't given her name. "Are you using the recyclers that came with them?"

I nodded, instinctively if a touch pointlessly, as I said, "That's right."

"Then we're in luck. That model is designed to be cross-connected. I can put Minnie on a stretcher, seal her in some tarps, and you can run your hoses inside. The two of you can just carry her out."

"Ah," I commented, "About that. I've got a bad leg - I'm barely carrying myself. How heavy is Minnie?"

"Seventy-two pounds."

Joe commented, "I can carry her."

"Who was that? I thought you said there were two of you - are you using a radio?"

"Er," I said, "No, ma'am. It's a bit complicated. But if the air recyclers are like you say - he can carry Minnie out, and then one of us can bring an empty suit back for you. We'll just have to figure out how to get Minnie out without compromising your own air."

"What materials do you have to work with?"

"Whatever we can find. You mentioned tarps, so there should be more to be found - if one's rolled up, then there should be minimal contamination on the surfaces pressed against each other."

"That won't be necessary. My daughter, may God rest her soul, built this shelter for this family to survive a tornado - and it has exactly what's needed to keep it alive now. You two stay right there. I need to put together a few things and talk to Minnie. Five minutes, maybe ten." I heard footsteps, fading.

I sighed, rubbing my still-aching belly. Seemed that Bun-Bun exacted a high price for her help, though I wasn't sure whether that was intentional to keep me relying on myself instead of her, or if that was just how she worked. "Welp," I said to Joe, "Two people alive are better than none. If we pull this off - I'll at least be able to say to myself I made /that/ much of a difference."

After a few moments of standing around, I realized I could spend the time a tad more productively. "Boomer, how's that map coming?"

She replaced her badger avatar with an overhead map of the city. "Here are the places you have been, with the level of poison indicated by color. Interpolating and extrapolating from that data set, here is a heat-map of anticipated poison levels."

Joe and I huddled our helmets together to look at the results. "That's... a bit disturbing," I commented. "You're sure that's the center?"

Boomer responded, "I took reading of the shore since I reprogrammed the light. The closer a reading is to the towers in what used to be downtown Buffalo, the higher the level of poison. The further, the lower."

Joe asked, "You are sure that is the center, and not the new city?"

Boomer said simply, "Yes."

"Hunh," I hunhed. "It seems... either somebody stuck some sort of military base in there that all this poison was stockpiled in... or we're not dealing with humans at all."

Before I could start working on the ramifications of that, I heard steps from inside the shelter.

"Minnie, say hello to the nice people who will be taking care of you for a while. There's Bunny, and Boomer, and another one."

"Joe," Joe introduced himself.

"Hello," came a soft voice.

"Hello," the three of us chorused back.

The woman said, confidently, "I am about to seal Minnie up in a tarp, sleeping-bag style for easy carry. It is air-tight, but there's enough air for a few minutes, so you can take the time to do this right and not make a mess of things by trying to hurry." She led us through the instructions for connecting Minnie's improvised suit to our professional ones... three times.

"Good," she finally sounded satisfied. "Minnie - never forget, your parents love you, and I love you, and always will." There was a brief silence. "Very well - I am sealing her up... now. The door is unlocked. Give me fifteen seconds, and then come in."

We waited in the complete silence for a mental count of fifteen, and then Joe stepped to the door. He took the handle, and something clicked in my head - "Joe, wait-" I started, but he'd already started swinging open the door, revealing a blue bundle at the top of the stairs... and a tan-skinned, white-haired woman, wearing professional business attire, standing calmly just past her.

"Don't worry about me," she said, "you couldn't have made a working airlock. Keep her safe."

My guts suddenly cramped so hard I doubled over again. I tried to complain to Bun-Bun, but simply couldn't. And then, to put matters delicately, I discovered why hens tend to make so much noise when they lay an egg.

I wasn't in control of what my body was doing anymore, like back at the spider's den. I felt myself wriggle my right arm out of its sleeve, reach down, and collect the smooth shape that had just appeared. More wriggling placed it in the helmet's food-lock, whereupon my other arm pulled it out. My feet carried me around Joe, who was calmly connecting his air recycler to the tarp, and I walked down the steps to where the woman was standing, watching, and breathing in the poisonous air... and I jammed the egg against her sleeve. Something hissed, she jumped, and I collapsed as my body was suddenly under my own (lack of) control again.

"What was that?" she asked, rubbing at her arm. "A mercy shot?"

"I have no idea," I said, pulling myself back upright. "Like I said - complicated. May I at least know your name?"

She didn't answer the question, instead saying, "My breath should be short by now. You're sure the gas is still airborne?"

"Yes," Boomer answered.

The grandmother raised an eyebrow at that, but simply plucked the egg from my unresisting hand. "This doesn't look like any autoinjector I've ever seen. What was in it?"

I shook my head, but held up Boomer to point the ring's light at it. "The spectrographic signature is complicated," she said, "but consistent with atropine and related anticholinergic drugs."

"Right," said the woman, "That may keep me alive, but the less I breathe of this-" she glanced at the blue tarp, "stuff, the better. You have a boat?" I nodded, and pointed in its direction, northwest of where we were, towards Old Buffalo. She started striding briskly, Joe held Minnie in front of him and continued, and I followed along.

--

"So," I said, once my insides were feeling close to normal again, "what /is/ your name?"

She dropped back a few steps, letting Joe take the lead. "Would you believe me if I told you it was Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fanna Bo Besca the Third?"

"Probably not. And even if it was, I'd probably just call you Dot for short. Maybe Dotty, after that stunt you pulled."

She brought herself up short, and looked into my helmet. "Now how would you know /that/?"

"Would you believe me if I told you 'It's complicated'?"

Dotty snorted, and turned back to start following Joe again. "Probably. There's no /simple/ reason a Changed would try to save anyone from /this/ town."

"Um... I don't know any reason why a Changed wouldn't?"

"Hmph," she hmphed. After a few moments, she added, "In case I drop dead soon-"

"Gramma!" Minnie's voice came from over Joe's shoulder. "Don't talk like that!"

Dotty continued, "Thank you."

I just nodded. I had a hard enough time figuring out how to deal with everyday social niceties. I didn't know if there /were/ any niceties for anything like this. In case my silence was an awkward one, I covered it up by saying, "Boomer? How are we doing, toxin-wise?"

"My readings continue to match my projections. However, I am also beginning to pick up somewhat elevated quantities of lithium, sodium, and potassium-" Her voice cut off as she was interrupted:

Joe's whole body burst into flame.