During the civil war over Saturn, the Marine suffered heavy casualties and half of its fleet has been incapacitated. Flowing from Kuiper, pirate squadrons filled the void the Martian left and ardently ventured on the last stretch of the space highway. Dodging ambushes and skirmishes, the Kitty managed to reach the Jovian orange exosphere six exhausting months later and was throttling to an invisible moon. The non-registered satellite appeared to be slightly larger than our last stopover, Thyone, but seemed inhabited.
“You shure itch ‘ere?” my copilot asked, loudly chewing her Wagon Wheels.
I chuckled. “Ali, my dear… between electromagnetic domes and bismuth palaces colonized by blinking polyhedrons, we’re never sure of anything in this system!”
Once again, my cynicism remained unchallenged. With no surprise, the curious celestial object and its Stygian surface concealed, within a natural crater, a secret entrance wide enough to gently fly through a starfighter.
“Rad! It feels like a James Bond movie!” my associate exclaimed, spitting sugary meteors throughout the cockpit.
“Moore or Dalton?”
“Connery, you fraud.” The esophageal grotto looked like a perfect hiding place. At least until my partner pointed out the shell impacts doting the decompression chamber that slowly welcomed the Swallow. “No response on the radio,” Ali completed. “Keep both eyes open.”
Inside, the base didn’t provide any artificial gravity but possessed a sterile atmosphere. We could glide in without a suit and access the large rotative doors at the other end of the landing platform. Halfway, the smell of black powder started to tickle my nose.
“No welcoming committee despite the wide camera collection,” Ali noticed as the green steel shutters slipped up before the remains of a man whirled over our heads. “Ew! Spoke too fast…”
“As always…”
My partner grabbed the man by the ankle and brought him up. His naked body was covered with suppurated implants and cables scratched through and through. His face, an oozing marmalade, had probably been devoured. The tattoo on his shoulder betrayed the data-cartel of Thanatos.
The culprit of such a massacre appeared to be the lion which floated dead against the control console at the center of the vestibule below. This Panthera Leo was, however, quite peculiar with its strange white and blue wavering fur. As if we had before us a photo’s negative.
“Selena had another visit she didn’t expect,” Ali went on.
I flew over the panel, stained by a brownish fluid. “This happened a while ago. The blood has already dried up,” I explained. “The survivors must have left as we’re the only ship here. Which means the worst-case scenario for our contact.”
“I don’t see any weapons,” my partner continued by picking up the electronic equipment stuck in the room’s corner. “How did the big cat die?”
Circling my royal cousin, I noticed a curious detail. The domesticated beast had been killed with electric shocks. Yet, it wasn’t the smell of burnt skin floating in the confined air but charred electronic circuits.
“Robot?” Ali asked, gently lifting the poor animal’s head.
“No,” I replied, clinging to her shoulders. “He’s a vat lion—of printed flesh and synthetic blood.”
Ali grimaced. “A Niku-kitty?” Under my supervision, she searched the jungle king’s mane. There, between the burnt white hairs, we saw a discreet electronic implant and the remains of a melted hard drive. “And cyborg too? Poor dude.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“I don’t like this place. Let’s get this over with.”
“Roger that.”
I leaped back on the control panel; my human ready to fire as I ordered the opening of the doors. However, this time, there wasn’t any sapiens nibbled like a stick of licorice, nor even a beast. Instead, we suddenly found ourselves blinded by bright lights and a hot breeze.
“Fuck! It’s like putting lemon juice in my eyeballs!” My partner moaned, protecting her sight with her arm.
“I just lost my immediate memory,” I whined as my cat’s eyes began to get used to the supernova.
“What do you see?”
Hard to describe. We were facing a 360° jungle of neon colors so flashy my retinas shrunk like raisins. Pink kapoks bloomed between the tangles of shining lianas. A warm wind artificially shook the palms and ferns whose hues covered the rest of the known spectrum. My paws crossed the luminous ghosts of the fallen leaves that blanketed the circular ground and, when I eventually approached an upside-down Kitty-sized baobab, I could pierce the illusion. The trees, also holograms, concealed shelves hosting stacks of servers in their racks as the anarchic lianas appeared to be the data farm’s power cables. “Clever…”
“Dope place. With animals and stuff.” Ali had joined the fever dream wearing the pair of sunglasses found on Ijiraq.
“Animals?” Obsessed by the vegetation, I hadn’t noticed the strange and noisy fauna occupying the central heights like the bushes of white Gomphrena blooming on the circular wall.
Negatives of tapirs, anteaters and parrots gently approached Ali, already offering them candy and chips she was always hiding in her unfathomable pockets. “They don’t seem mean,” she said, opening a snack for the insistent levitating orangutan who was pulling the black Lycra off her left thigh.
It was before a shrilling voice made us both turn around: “Don’t you hurt Nixon!” It came from a shadow barely visible beyond the inverted foliage above.
A woman was staring at us. She looked like Ali with her slender body hidden under a tight Harlequin suit; except that she had bright red feline eyes, a fluffy tail and fangs—in the end, a much better version of Ali, if you asked for my opinion. When she jumped in the weightlessness to float in front of us, she was immediately followed by a group of gray pussycats hissing in my presence. Undoubtedly, we had found Carole Selena.
“Your girls are rude,” I groaned, pushing back the one that came sniffing too close to my tail.
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black!” Selena meowed, claws out. “You’re the one entering my realm without permission, nasty puffy-tailed duster!”
“Puffy-tailed duster?” I roared, ears in airplane mode.
Ali shut me up by grabbing me by the scruff. “Mancéphalius sent us,” my partner explained after scratching the chin of her ice-haired cousin with her other hand. Pleased, the ape air-waddled towards Selena. “You may hold information that could help us.”
The data broker immediately clenched her fists. “Oh? It’s you… You took your time…” she groaned. “Alas, I’m not on very bright terms with Mancy. For this reason, I haven’t made up my mind about his request yet.” But Selena’s growing anger faded quickly as she welcomed her orangutan. “However, Nixon’s usually excessively shy when it comes to strangers. Only one sapiens used to approach him with such ease.”
“Who?” Ali asked.
“Zéphyr, the Data Maiden,” concluded the cat-Freak.
I saw my partner freeze. Our former cyborg companion met on the liner Danaë had an important place in her heart. And her reaction didn’t escape the keen-sighted data broker.
“Come…” she said before guiding us down the balmy jungle.
Selena’s hidden hut made of magenta bamboo was perched against the bottom of the two miles pit sheltering the neon forest. Inside, between the cat trees and the stacks of kibbles, emerged a four-poster bed as well as quirky and goofy furniture nailed to the walls. Nixon, a soda brick in hand, fit into a plastic beanbag, close to a white chimpanzee with a red knot on her head. Both started watching a Batman animated series.
Selena activated a wall fan. Then, after giving a Funyuns bag to the chimp, she searched the hair on the animal’s back. From one of the small slits embedded vertically between the ape’s shoulder blades, she ejected a tiny transparent plastic floppy disk. “Margaret kept it warm for you. Whether you deserve it or not.”
“It’s important,” I insisted.
“Truly. Maybe. I don’t care.” But while Selena made the device dance between her long fingers, a discreet telltale blinked on the laptop floating near the bed. She noticed it and let her anger explode. “You gotta be kidding me!” cried our host, rushing to her laptop as thin as an encyclopedia. “Not again!”