A projection of garch Stirasaq Thot-Legut appeared in the middle of the living room as I was curled up, relaxing on my sofa armrest, watching Ygnoth news. I had a new suit; it was comfy overall but needed some getting used to.

The garch affably straightened his ear membranes and gave me a puzzled look.

“Wwell, you sseemm tto bbe ggoinnng all the wway tto Earth, afftter all.”

As usual, his Metropolitan West pronunciation was exemplary, breathing artistically, all consonants drawn out.

I stretched, spreading thin long fingers with curved claws, tiny but sharp.

“Yes, garch. I hope that the Socium will appreciate my new work.”

Stirasaq winced sympathetically and twitched his shoulder tufts.

“You are ambitious but smart. You'll be fine.”

I yawned, mouth wide open; I always felt sleepy in this suit for some reason.

Stirasaq’s luminous frontal spur extended quite emotionally, and he continued. “I see you like your outfit, but it gives me a strange feeling. Compassion, maybe? Or something. It makes you want to stretch out your tentacles and stroke your ear. Oh, my child, I remember what this feeling is called: tenderness.”

“Why would you feel tenderness?” I asked. “It’s just a banal, four-legged biological creature.”

My tail twitched like a fishing rod when a fish was biting. So embarrassing.

“I always worry about you when you travel to some forsaken hole in the middle of nowhere to practice your extreme art,” Stirasaq evaded answering. “Your size reminded me of those wonderful times when I donated your embryo sac to the incubator.”

“I’m proud it was you.”

“By the way, are you chipped?” Stirasaq somewhat hastily changed the subject.

“There were no chips at that time.”

“Do you need a bell around your neck?”

“It wasn’t very common back then; it could draw extra attention,” I replied.

The garch’s knowledge of anthropology was surprisingly deep.

“You should check the control module, battery charge. Well, you know …”

“All done already. Everything is fine.”

“Okay, then. Be careful out there, you’re so … small,” Stirasaq said and disconnected.

It seemed to me that he was trying to hide some spontaneous blueness between his pectoral suckers, a sign of emotional overload. The old garch was ashamed of his sudden weakness.

The living room was empty again, and I suddenly realized that it was almost time.

* * *

As soon as I materialized in one of the districts of Kushka, a nondescript town at the south of Turkmenistan, my back was immediately crushed by powerful jaws. It was an Alabai, a Central Asian shepherd dog. It was as if he was there just waiting for a cat to materialize right in front of his face, and … crunch!

I didn’t even have time to turn on the anesthetic. It happened so quickly!

A dungeon darkness in my eyes and a deafening rumble in my ears. Unbearable cutting pain all over. An ocean of pain, and nothing but it.

When I finally woke up, I found myself in the bushes on the side of the road. More precisely, I was lying there like a chop, a bag of bones, a corpse with limbs scattered in different directions and unnaturally twisted—a rag puppet thrown into the trash.

It took a tremendous effort and all my remaining willpower to turn on the built-in diagnostic module, generate a posttraumatic mixture, and inject it into my processor.

The module in my head clicked a bit and generated a report: the skull and neck were intact, but the suit was gnawed to bits by the Alabai from the middle of the back and below, barely functioning.

The painkiller worked. I regained relative control over my senses, and with that came some hope that all was not lost. I looked around, struggling to turn my rebellious head. It tended to fall sideways for some reason.

The cicadas hummed unbelievably loudly; the sun blazed like a barbeque grill pulled close. From time to time, antediluvian mastodon-like trucks sped by, shaking the earth all the way to the Cambrian, rattling their iron and dousing me with a sulfurous stench.

Well, what can you do—a stray, ill-bred dog jeopardized the operation. Sadly, this kind of mishap happened quite often in my line of work. Some of my colleagues even managed to materialize inside a wall or in the ground, so I was still lucky, all things considered.

“Garch,” I called in my mind, “are you there?”

“I’m here,” he responded immediately, as if he was waiting for my call. “How are you?”

“Not so good.”

“What happened?”

“I've had worse, but the whole plan is in doubt now.”

I described the situation, trying to avoid overly dramatic details.

“Come back immediately,” he said.

“I must try. I don’t know when the Beaumond will allocate funds for a second attempt. You know, these greedy bastards just love to tighten the screws.”

“No! You must return. I … the Socium needs you here without any avoidable psychological trauma!” The garch did not skimp on the pathos when he was worried.

“Sorry, my battery is low. I can’t hear you,” I said and cut off the conversation.

The saddest thing is that I did not lie about the battery.

* * *

I spent the rest of the day lying in the bushes and trying not to move too much.

As the cicadas’ buzzing gave way to the trilling of crickets and the chorus of frogs, and the giant southern insects began their death dances around the streetlamps, I crawled out of hiding and moved toward an abandoned courtyard embraced by a chipped fence about fifty meters away.

With intact equipment, I would have covered this distance in a few seconds, but in my current state, the journey took a whole hour. I crawled, clinging with my claws to the asphalt steamed by the heat of the day, to the dead roots of the grass massacred by the sun. Dragging my lifeless lower half of the suit forward, losing strength with each foot, but getting closer to my goal.

Kushka at night was a realm of darkness with rare spots of luminescent streetlamps, powerless to change anything; the people were hiding in their houses from mosquitoes and each other. Even the cocky roaming gypsies and the frightened-eyed seconded soldiers, who were here on the occasion of the Afghanistan War, sat in their tents and barracks, drank, played plywood guitars and cards—and did not stick their heads out.

I crawled, cursing the entire canine race and my treacherous luck. I had to inject painkillers and stimulants into my brain from time to time, electrically stimulating the pleasure centers, squeezing the last dopamine from empty glands. When the pain subsided, I rested, breathing heavily through a wide-open mouth with thin teeth red with my own blood. I admired the cyclopean rhinoceros beetles, somewhat resembling horned turtles, that clustered in narrow spots of lamplight, listened to the whining of hungry mosquitoes and squeaking of restless bats, and continued crawling, crawling …

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Eventually I managed to reach my destination and ended up in a dilapidated adobe shed with a cool earthen floor, smelling of old age and decay. The door hung on one hinge, so getting inside was not difficult at all.

The boy I was interested in was supposed to pass by tomorrow afternoon; all I needed to do is survive long enough to exchange a couple of words with him.

* * *

I barely made it to noon. Life support systems were maxed out, the painkillers ran out, and battery level was approaching zero. Everyone knows that you won’t last very long just on electrical brain stimulation.

Finally, footsteps! The boy was approaching. He was nine years old. I knew that he had one ruble with some change in his pocket, he was carrying a bag with a bottle of vodka that his mother sent him to buy for three sixty-two, and a brick of ice cream rapidly melting in the heat.

When the boy came closer, I crawled to the door so that he would notice me. It worked. He stopped dead in his tracks and called out warily, “Chh-chh-chh!”

I crawled back into the barn to lure him inside. The ploy worked; the boy stuck his head in the doorway and stared at me with his large and curious eyes.

I looked like an ordinary cat, well, maybe shabby and dying, but quite ordinary.

The boy bit off a piece of his ice cream, took it out of his mouth and handed it to me:

“Come on, eat. Don’t be afraid. Eat!”

I crawled up, using the last bits of energy I had left, clinging with my front paws to the earthen floor. He put a piece of ice cream on some dirty tin, and I ate it in the hope that this might somehow postpone the final crash of my long-suffering systems.

“Want some more?” the boy asked.

“No, thank you,” I replied in Russian.

My voice sounded high, with a painful hoarseness. I hoped I didn’t speak with a Weston accent. Accents are distasteful.

The boy twitched as if he had been electrocuted.

“I’ve had enough for now,” I added, raising a paw reassuringly with my pinky and ring fingers sticking out. “What is your name? I hope your family and your sheep are well?”

I already knew his name, but I observed the ritual of acquaintance accepted in these places and times.

“Vyacheslav. We don’t have sheep.”

“And my name is Nikitichna,” I introduced myself.

I chose Nikitichna at random from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Humans were unable to pronounce my real name due to the imperfections of their vocal apparatus, nor could they properly hear it.

“Nikitichna is not a name, it’s a patronymic,” the boy remarked, gradually coming to his senses.

And thus, our conversation started.  We talked about this and that for a while: about his father, my suit, and the Socium, I even told him about what humans called “the Fermi paradox” and the great filter.

When the resources of my life support systems were fully exhausted, I declared that I was about to die and told the boy that I had some really important information for him, something like a military secret.

“What kind of secret?” he asked.

“Do you want to know it?”

“I do,” he said, crying, smearing snot and tears down his face.

“Do you promise to remember this important secret for the rest of your life?”

“Yes!”

“Move your ear closer,” I squeaked weakly.

My systems crashed as soon as I uttered the key phrase; the suit died, and I along with it, but I was still able to remember the expression of extreme grief on the boy’s tear-stained face.

* * *

Just before my death, the built-in communicator sent a record of everything that happened to me to the Socium, and I was immediately restored in my good old metastable Ygnot body.

The Beaumond was favorable to me, and so was the Council of the Garchs. I received an additional couple of planets for creativity, got the necessary funds, and spent the next thirty Earth years enjoying some artistic terra- and socioforming. Those were good times, to say the least.

Once I attended a banquet in a newly opened Gallery of Installations. Artists and members of the Beaumond hanging out with garchs and their close circle. Everyone looked so imposing, satisfied with life and a little bored—just what one would expect from such snobs. I had a glass of beautiful purple sparkling wine in my tentacle, sauntering past some of the most gorgeous and inspiring multidimensional imagery ever created. I was in my natural environment.

“Well, my beloved Vyosa Ler-Promang,” Stirasaq said, suddenly appearing out of nowhere and catching me by the sleeve. “You are a most creative Ygnot, and, as such, quite absent-minded. Once upon a time, you asked me to remind you to visit that planet on the outskirts again, Earth, if my memory doesn’t betray me. So, there you go, my dear.”

Of course! The garch was right, it was time to enjoy the final act.

“Well, I forgot indeed.” I innocently parted my mimetic growths to the side.

“Poor Vyosa, promise me that you won’t suffer like last time.”

The garch’s voice was filled with sadness. He turned away, hiding the involuntary bluing between his pectoral suckers.

“Do you promise?”

“Definitely!” I finished my sparkling wine in one gulp and waved my ear membranes in complete agreement. “Don’t worry, my dear Stirasaq, everything will be all right this time.”

* * *

Having learned the lessons from my previous adventure on Earth, the eleven-dimensional Quantum Oracle made me an upgraded suit for this voyage. The scene required it to be in the form of the same fluffy four-legged creature with a tail, but this time around, it did not look as elegant—an overly plump cat with an inquisitive look, an impudent fighting muzzle, bloated like a barrel—with short, thick legs and rounded, artistically torn ears. The equipment included reinforced armor, poisonous teeth, a stun gun, and a backup battery. This was a clear overkill, but I reassured myself that in unlikely event of a recurring dog attack, it would have to gnaw this miracle of technical brilliance for much longer and with no particular guarantee of success.

This donut had to get into a bunker that housed a command center for intercontinental ballistic missiles, and its ventilation pipes were quite narrow.

“Oh, my goodness, here we go,” I said in Russian, putting the cat on.

* * *

I materialized in the sharp, frosty air five meters above the permafrost and immediately flopped heavily into the deep Kandalaksha snow. It was so deep that I had to dig my way to the ventilation grill for about ten minutes, scaring away the delicious-smelling field mice and treacherously breaking their tunnels.

I was digging in the direction of barracks stench and cigarette smoke, and soon my wet, pink nose hit the steel of the pipe and almost got stuck to it in the cold.

It was not easy to remove the grate and climb inside, but I managed. The new suit had an impressive toolset.

A broom brush wouldn’t have picked up as much dust as my fur had managed to soak up while I was wading through the pipes. I tried to be quiet, not to sneeze, but a couple of times I could not resist.

On the way, IIt worked out quickly and easily.

The pipe went down; the way was easy enough, well, not counting one place where I had to turn off a fan motor for a few seconds in order to get through the blades unscathed. Finally, I got to the very depths of the bunker, and my route ended at the last grate that separated the pipe from the main control room.

A dozen military men gathered there. They were talking animatedly and loudly, mostly shouting and using obscene language.

I saw a fat-bellied major with a red face waving his arms with thick sausage-like fingers and screaming in an angry falsetto, “Vyacheslav …! This is … an order from the chief of staff himself! Vyacheslav! Turn that … key!”

The boy named Vyacheslav, now a large man in military uniform, kept his hand motionless on the key, as if waiting for something. The red-faced major jumped on him with an obvious intention to turn the key himself, but Vyacheslav threw the major away with a slight movement of his shoulder.

He was silent, frozen. Sweat streamed down his forehead. He was as white as a Kandalaksha snowman.

“Slava, this is … treason. I … you … court-martialed! I’ll shoot! Launch as ordered!”

Vyacheslav was waiting.

“Arrest him! Stepanov, Troshin! Get that asshole out! Kuznetsov, turn the key!”

A captain and a lieutenant looked at each other and started moving toward Vyacheslav without much enthusiasm. They clumsily tried to put him in a chokehold, grabbed his arms, tore his shirt. Their fingers slipped, tearing out pieces of fabric and buttons. He resisted and stood his ground, as if playing some game known only to him alone.

Vyacheslav held on with all his might, covering the intercontinental missile launch panel from the attackers with his whole body, like a mother protecting her child from predators.

The major unholstered his handgun and fired at the ceiling. The bullet ricocheted and slammed hard into a steel cabinet near the far wall, leaving a dent in it. Everyone squatted at once; someone threw himself prone on the floor.

Vyacheslav ducked but remained in his place. The major pointed his Makarov at him.

Everyone fell silent. And then, suddenly—a piercing ringing of the red telephone.

The attendant nervously picked up the phone.

“What!” shouted the major, struggling to keep the pistol aimed, his hands shaking.

“Stop, comrade major!” shouted the duty officer, his mouth stretched into a happy, idiotic smile.

Vyacheslav slowly pulled out the key with trembling hands and threw it on the table in disgust. He sat down in an armchair, put his head in his unruly hands and said, “fuck!”

Everyone gazed at him in awe, only the captain and the lieutenant looked away with shame.

And at that very moment, I had to sneeze again.

The humans tilted their heads up and stared in bewilderment at a cat behind the ventilation grate on the lowest level of the fifteen-story underground bunker.

I made eye contact with Vyacheslav. He nodded; I winked at him and waved goodbye.

“It is what? Waving its paw!” someone asked.

I did not hear an answer—by that time I was already back at the Socium.

* * *

“How did everyone react to my broadcast?” I asked Stirasaq.

“It was magnificent!” he replied. “The Beaumond is going to nominate you for the Socioformer of the Year Award and petition the Council to upgrade the funding for your performances. By the way, what did you tell your hero thirty years ago? It was quite unintelligible in the recording.”

“What difference does it make, garch?” I answered, mysteriously waving my ear membranes.  “It worked, didn’t it?”