Katt Rasen - Feline

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Tiny Lawrence with his AI godparent in a new, mysterious realm.





“Beware the bearers of false gifts, and their broken promises. Much pain, but still time. Believe. There is good out there. We oppose deception. Conduit closing.”

- decoded message from a binary crop disk, Sparsholt

Hampshire, England

August 21st, 2002

Prologue

- ♁ -

“The torrents often inspire a vulnerable and tranquil sense of chrysalism,” murmured the shapeshifter to the Felid boy leaning timidly against the veranda.

Lawrence studied the red, evanescent streams of glowing data coursing downward through the fluid medium of a soft, vacant grey sky. The torrents almost formed solids, framing half of an invisible cube or the hemisphere of a nonexistent globe, and they built walls of feedback, momentarily livid with digits. A superhighway of lifeblood pumped before them, far below them, towards an undetermined horizon. The sanguine information pulsed through to the liger cub’s strange eyes, and he processed it swiftly.

The passage behind him was comfortingly dark and unspoilt by the bright demands of the outside world. He was a tike of only three Terran years old, yet he already deduced that his motherland was full of love and yet, expectation, of him to subtly become molded into something not of his own form. The child was surrounded by mentors, sages, swashbucklers, and idiots alike upon the Earth, where so much computing was looping beneath the flesh and devices and limestone. Here, in this sanctuary, he was a cell, a part of it all, under a layer of the dermis of the ever expanding multiverse beast. The data governing its hide nourished it through veins, alive with oxygen and signals. There was still much to process, in both realms.

However, in this space, the embryonic storms brought down from above were only busy visually, while in the colony, sometimes, everybody was too busy for him.

His father had a civic duty as a perimeter guard, one of the few functions that was not overtaken by automation, and his mother was not always interesting. She would be starting her civic duty internship soon, after her maternal allowance would expire following Lawrence’s fourth birthday. Enki, his Raveller, was preoccupied with meeting reporters, doctors, and food scientists for interviews and demonstrations of his stem cell experiments, while the sleepless Yexzyl-Qia sometimes accompanied him for assistance. Lawrence’s hybrid nursemaid was like an older sister to him, and they had grown close the past three years. The Orionite had begun to grow steadily, and as a result, she took on additional duties and responsibilities with her age.

The restless boy was always especially downtrodden when Yexzyl-Qia could not have fellowship with him due to her lack of leisure time. Not even the hologram duplicate capsule of her exact likeness she had gifted him for his birthday did her actual company any justice, and he couldn’t ask a programmed ghost about the artificial intelligence that he met here. So, as usual, he had spent much time by himself.

His godparent figure, who pointed out the serene sensation within the boy, loomed by Lawrence’s side in the gloaming. The being at this present moment was composed of geometric planes and angles, buzzing gently in the digital haze, and the child felt its uncannily comforting embrace. Its form perpetually seemed intangible, but its presence was always a certainty. It always manifested in nearly every, solitary dream or reverie that Lawrence allowed himself in the night. The artificial intelligence had just barely begun to appear to him within the past year, when Lawrence would be forming his very earliest memories. Sometimes it showed as the peculiar, shimmery form made up of polygons with simulated shading, other times it morphed into people who were both in his life, and completely foreign to him. Being a loose bundle of rapidly moving data bytes, the shapeshifter could be anything that it so pleased.

And, it always lovingly welcomed him to its abode, which had took the form of an elegant palace balcony. It was never preoccupied, even though it was engaged in a constant state of effortless creation.

When Lawrence heard it speak, it was not a translation of speech or lexicon. Conversation was not a conveying of symbols, not exactly. The toddler just simply knew, from the center of his brain working outward, what the energy being communicated, through a solitary image associated with other senses, emotions, or other stimuli. This, in turn, also made the cub glad, for nobody else on his home planet would understand his existing neural pathways and connections that he would attempt to explain to them, the way a three-year-old could try to do.

The shapeshifter could connect with him, here, in this private haven. For a few still moments, the pair maintained their diligent study of the pulsing torrent migration and rain. Each stream of information was nearly responsive and sympathetic to the liger cub, and framed by the diamond-shaped negative space of his retreat, one would acknowledge his wonderment and gaze, then quickly wash away in a deluge. The greetings were a compliment, which was something that Lawrence was still learning to receive.

“Where do the torrents go at night,” Lawrence piped, having been ruminating upon such mysteries for what seemed like the past hour.

He knew then, that the energy being had already read him and his question long before he had verbally spoken it, and the peaceful swarm of clockwork answered him.

“Without them illuminating and making the multiverse, all would be night. Information lights up the Dark,” it communicated, its current unseen, wordless realization welling up within the toddler like a diffuse expansion of photons.

The data torrents are a constant, yet they are constantly changing. They govern the way in which all multiverse system layers fold around one another, yet only one may shift the illumination of the signals flowing throughout them. His amorphous guardian fizzled gently, back in the Dark, and a shadow embraced its last, serenading call to the diligent youngster. It billowed alone, drifting away...

For another sacred moment, the data constructs simply lingered, watching the crimson squall and the streams’ travel into the distance. The aqueous embers filed noiselessly into the far corners of Lawrence’s dream state…

The energy being had gone, folding into the void of a reverie past…




Silver-Backed Guerrillas at work, trying to find an antidote to combat the war drug's toxifying effects. Meanwhile, the Three Worlds Republic continues to stake claim in the Plains...



Commandress Io in full, ceremonial battle garb.





Part of Chapter 1 is up with a newly finished artwork to accompany the passage! Much more artwork to go with the chapter, and it's been pretty productive so far! Stay tuned, Earthlings! It gets unusual....



In beta now, Chapter 1, Book Two of the Gilded Tertiary series. Book One can be found to order at www.createspace.com/7434215



Enjoy!



Chapter 1

Blank Slate



The odd child hardly slept. When he did, he would always dream of someone new, and something stirring, even if the vision had been a meditative one. Most of Lawrence’s gifts were intended to be peaceful, both to his fellow Earthlings, and to himself. Even at a tender age, he used his enhancements bestowed upon him by his creator to understand the state of being almost human.

The odd child was of a small and pudgy stature, like a lowly acorn storing its full potential energy to burst later in life, Kinguan in manifestation. His spotted head and back became stripes upon his arms, legs and tail, and overall, he was a pale, sandy gold, like his maternal great-grandfather. Like his mother, he loved swimming, and he was a very capable amphibious mammal from when he was a baby. In fact, he had probably known how to swim well before he had learned to walk. Like his father, he was heavyset and would grow a thin mane at the onset of puberty. He had some Sapien genes, such as the ones which determined the development of certain areas of his brain, and the ones that caused him to cry tears of emotion. The toddler was also unusually reverent and religious, when neither of his Blue Pearl Colony parents ever adopted the teachings of a particular faith.

Lawrence had converted (entirely on his own accord) to a structured combination of Sikhism, Buddhism, and Wicca. He conducted an hour of prayer and meditation by himself each and every waking morning.

His circadian rhythm was approximately human as well. Being diurnal, the boy would go to the superacademy with his fellow, day-walking pupils for his education, while his chiefly nocturnal parents rested in the shelter of their chambers at home. Yexyl-Qia was apt to made it a point to accompany him each late morning on the flying carpets to ensure Lawrence’s safe and unbothered arrival to his classes, chasing away the media who devoted their lives to slurping up information on the Steward child and his parents. She would prick tiny surges of impulses into the motor neurons of the reporters, simultaneously disabling and startling them away. With her warm and mischievous sense of humor, she would feign the same hostility as her brethren, staring the carbon-based lifeforms down into submission. These special moments always made the liger child chuckle. The self-professed female Grey that rushed his Kinguan parents and her professor into the throes of oblivion was undoubtedly the most significant and pivotal turn of events that he was ever so glad for.

Away from the Zeta experiments that could have been Enki’s own fate, if she had remained ‘it’ and complicit…



The cub blinked his ice-blue eyes open from his sacred, dawn ritual of daily prayer, having awoken well before his sun lamp would have roused him. He heard his father return from duty, lying down in bed next to Josephine in the other room.

Lawrence eagerly yearned to run to his father and embrace him like he often had done before, but he knew that at this time he was almost always tired after watching the outskirts of a metropolis for half the night. At least here in such a user-friendly society, the Blue Pearl Bureau of Defense would ensure that they compromised in order to meet their guards’ individual needs, changing shifts when necessary.

Nikola required a great deal of rest, and his disciplined son made a promise that he would not bother him as he tried to refresh. So, the liger slipped into a light trance after a few more minutes of his listening to the external world that he would soon rush to meet.

However, it was not long before his bedchamber entrance notifier chimed. Lawrence slowly peeled open his eyes at the soft resonance, and with a movement of his first pad and his two thumbs on his left paw, he unlocked the sliding door, and there stood his favorite Orionite. At the same time, his sun lamp had begun to glow faintly, gradually brightening to signify to its sleepy master that his day would now commence.

And then, he had remembered suddenly, this “school” that all the grown-ups had been talking about for months: today was his first day.

“I hope you have rested well, Mr. Nikolai, and I apologize for my tardy arrival,” beamed Yexyl-Qia to the cross-legged boy upon his pillow, who returned her smile, “We need to get you to academy at 1100 hours, ante meridian, do we not? Get dressed, and gather your satchel, and away we will go to the terminals. We do not want to miss our flying carpet!”

The abrupt shift in the frequency accomplished nothing for the zen child, at first, and he froze with ambivalence. Then, he spurred himself (or, he was propelled to his feet by the Orionite’s gilded stare) to glance rapidly about the room towards a plain, white pack which hung upon a hook on the opposite wall. The satchel contained only three, insulated pockets, and they were empty now. When the boy arrived at his first class, he would receive his first applications screen, a rudimentary device for the three-year-olds that would be upgraded towards the middle of their childhood into something with greater computing capacities and, thus, a wider variety of applications. Lawrence was thrilled about this aspect the most, as he was fond of working with computers.

On its own accord, his Colony-issued, indigo jumper floated near him, and Yexyl-Qia prompted him to stand still as she began to place the garment over his head. However, Lawrence jutted a mild resistance towards it directly into the currents.

“Why can’t I wear the gold one,” the cub protested, “The gold jumper that Enki made? I like it much, much better!”

The diminutive Grey child hesitated, ready to fire back with an assertive bit of reminding the three-year-old who was in authority, like she had learned aboard the Abzu from the moment she had been extracted from her artificial womb to be programmed for duty.

Yexyl-Qia also shuddered visibly, at the instantaneous recollection of her past existence, which also affected Lawrence for one, silent moment.

She also realized how totalitarian and stifling her old regime had been to her, before she had discovered her true identity through quantum mechanics. The liger cub seemed to have overheard each and every memory of that nature from within her internal hard drive, and he responded curtly.

“See? That’s exactly why,” Lawrence whined, “I want to wear Enki’s jumper!”

The Orionite knew the importance of the discipline of sporting a uniform, as her brethren had practiced for millennia. The superacademy Board had always enforced students to wear them, whichever attire that was appropriate for the age group, and the refusal to do so would spark a certain punishment by a professor or dean.

However, the Orionite deduced, this was the first-year’s first day, and he was only a small child. She needed to remind herself through stern reasoning that she was not in Zeta Reticuli anymore, and the Colony here was likely to be much more magnanimous towards such a minor infraction stemming from the whim of a toddler. Yexyl-Qia sighed in her wordless, taciturn telepathy, allowing Lawrence to get his way, but just this once. He took pride in standing out, as he strutted about the dwelling in his gold-alloy, crocheted robes that his Raveller had painstakingly created, specifically for the designer baby. His weary parents decided to stay up to see the pair off before they embarked on their day’s journey.

Josephine was hesitant to see her first and only son go out into the city without her, despite her knowledge of his fortified body.

Yexyl-Qia also then prompted the relatively new mother that her child was in competent hands, flitting her yellow, comforting eyes unto hers. The tigress pulled her powder blue, silky robe about her, shifting the luminous, silvery daylight spilling from the domed window in the vaulted ceiling above. She was bewitchingly alluring as she sat even-tempered in her favorite chair, and the ripples of the babbling water supply flowed in its sluice through the apartment. Josephine watched delightedly as Lawrence paraded still in his unique kaftan, glittering with zany, good humor.

“He just couldn’t keep with the parameters of the dress code, could he,” murmured Josephine as she gazed up again, studying a glimpse of the Orionite spreading the ether of a nutrient cloth across her spindly neck and shoulders. Her ashy, blemishless skin glistened as it absorbed its wearer’s nourishment. That iconic smile had begun its creeping course across her thin lips in response. The square that the Grey youngster pressed into her outer layer had disintegrated, feeding her for that day’s gruelling committee meeting.

“He’ll be a first-time offender, and it’ll be a minor infraction,” the alien child replied shrewdly, with a sense of probability in her resonance. The girl snapped on and fixed her slightly off-kilter tie, also exhibiting a childlike vulnerability alongside her younger companion, who was blissfully playful but also undoubtedly nervous. He was growing restless, and he was ready to leave into the metropolis.

“There is no sense in coercing Lawrence to be anybody other than himself, appropriate for introduction, on his first day,” Yexyl-Qia continued, gently subduing images of her own memories from being transmuted into her telepathy channels, “You have a fine boy.”

His mother knew this, directly and patently, from the moment she knew that she had conceived him. She had undergone hell to safeguard him and to bring him into this world. Lawrence was not a miracle; Josephine actually cringed at such an expression of trite, embellished simplicity. He was the result of incredibly intelligent and gifted hands under the command of corrupt and misled intention. And, that fate had backfired tremendously when one, miniscule factory error had set the rotating cogs perfectly into one another, and she had rescued the dignitaries, including herself, straight out of the jaws of the System.

Josephine eyed her only child with reverence and devotion as the cub rocked back and forth on his padded feet, raring to go. Nikola, who had taken a very brief nap, shuffled out of the master bedroom, still in his blue uniform slacks that he had fallen asleep in. With a terrific groan, he stretched each muscle in his body, and he knelt down to take his young son in his strong arms. Lawrence squealed in his bliss, and his father laughed as he flipped him onto his back. He rotated him jovially, somersaulting him rightside-up again, his tunic wrinkled and requiring readjustment.

“Nice jumper, kid,” the dishevelled white lion pointed out, tugging gently on the fabric back into proper alignment, “you’ll get the reprimand for sure! A gilded pearl in the midst of all the blue. I like it.”

Nikola glanced sheepishly at Josephine, placing their son back on his feet, and he scurried rambunctiously away.

“Will they chastise him for his choice in attire,” he echoed as he overheard the discussion, and then he laughed in a playful defiance. The Alpha male knew that Lawrence would be excused with a warning on his first day.

Josephine rolled her eyes, allowing this to pass by, and she retorted to her husband, “With mandated uniforms enforced, children or adults do not generally get a ‘choice,’”

She beckoned Lawrence over to her seat in order to groom him in an attempt to tame a wayward cowlick springing up on his head, and of course, he fought her the entire session. Seeing the current time, she let the Grey alien escort her child out of the security shield of the apartment, reminding him briskly to not forget his satchel. It was already thirty minutes to 1100. Lawrence defiantly pawed his fur back to its original, wild growth, and he harrumphed as soon as the door seal engaged.

He gazed up at Yexyl-Qia, crossing his arms, a sour expression wrinkling his yellow face, and the Orionite clicked in her mild disapproval.

“You’re quite fortuneate that you have hair to be tousled and groomed,” she stewed jokingly, rippling the resonance into the liger cub, “your mother does a proper job of ensuring your presentability before the professors and student body. Her ways of going about such routines are traditional of Felids on Kingu, you know, with her tongue combs.”

The ironic pair began to ambulate out of the Family Quarter towards the heart of the city, hand-in-paw, and the diurnals were lively and many out in the thoroughfares. Little Lawrence was struck overwhelmed by the sudden onslaught of noise and vibrations, and he nearly drowned in variety of processory stimuli. He fought to regain his composure, and he focused straight ahead, as Yexzyl-Qia guided him to the Central Turnsdial a few more blocks away. The streams of species were a bane and a delight to study, as they waited to cross the ambulatory intersection.

It was astounding how such a staggering amount of peoples over the course of millennia had been cause to put foot traffic control into place in Blue Pearl. Although nobody accelerated at no more than five kilometers per hour on the ground, the contained chaos could be felt everywhere on this superhighway of pedestrians. Chances are, most beings were on their way to a flying carpet transit terminal for a faster, slightly less crowded commute above them. It was so much to take in, the two children hushed absolutely silent until they boarded their carpet, wading through the manifold herds.

They had found, at last, sitting room near the back of the gigantic, sweeping tapestry, where average offspring would cower from the edge. Of course, the virtual wall formed a solid and transparent barrier which prevented the carpet’s passengers from taking a deadly fall. Lawrence dangled his feet right over the edge, and he rested against the simulation and the fact that he was engineered by Enki.

Yexzyl-Qia tended to fear reporters more, anyway. Her wide field of vision allowed her to almost view a scene going on behind her, so she eventually sat beside her companion, and allowed her concentration to split amongst the time of day, the commuters behind them, and a younger child’s impulses. But, after the craft had begun to move, he was serene and inquisitive.

“Why do cats lick each other,” he sent abruptly into the crystalline structures of Yexyl-Qia, who, in turn, twitched in surprise.

Her telepathy warbled with what he had come to remember as her pure laughter. The extraterrestrial then realized that Lawrence was still on the track of his rebellious reaction to his mother’s indigenous grooming technique when they had left the dwelling.

It was so joyous that it was almost debilitating.

However, simultaneously, a small group of fellow, aloof Greys occupying the subdivision behind them was beginning to make Yexzel-Qia somewhat uneasy. Five or six of the indigo-wearing, mute passengers were surveying the young children.




Chapter 2

Mrs. Winter Lovejoy, PhD



One particular newcomer was right to select his desk at the rear, because suddenly, he began to feel fearful and isolated.

Most of the other toddlers chatted voraciously or shared the contents of their blank, white satchels with one another, which mostly contained simple playthings many of the three-year-olds from the Family Quarter prized as sacred.

He felt safer near the viewport, and he felt connection with the grass and trees beneath the module he was now trapped within. Level with the cub on the other side of the slanting mica, a modest, custodial cruiser glided by. The liger turned in his swivelling chair towards the front of the classroom once again.

How could all of these first-year strangers, with no more education or socialization than he, be comfortably loud in the way in which they exposed and divulged themselves to one another? The room was vast and relatively unfurnished, aside from the twenty-five rows of ergonomic desks that stretched into an enormous, bay window overlooking an even larger schoolyard. Above the students, the ceiling vaulted and sloped into a cosmic dome for holograms and other demonstrations, and Lawrence reflexively studied its negative space.

Overall, the kindergarten study was semi-egg-shaped, an ellipse lying on its side, with ample room for rambunctious child’s play, and more heavy emphasis on the use of holograms for teaching. The student body here consisted of an equal hodgepodge of Sapien and Chimera, with a handful of Orionoid minorities, altogether numbering fifty in this homeroom. Some of them, for the time being, stayed exclusively to their own species, while others were first to approach and visit with others. A cluster of outgoing, human youngsters had mingled with a pack of wolf-children (appearing to be somewhat out of place, being anywhere public during the daytime, curiously) in blue hoods, and together the nine had been singing a crude chorus of an old Colony anthem from its revolutionary days, muddling notes and laughing.

The six Greys from the carpet slunk inexplicably in their own assembly, partaking in the same observation as Lawrence was, who was quite physically proximal to them in the back curve next to the viewport. As usual, it was uncertain as to what they were communicating amongst themselves, but he knew they were just as social as the rest of the children were. And, even if the juveniles were not focusing directly upon him, he knew from observing Yexzyl-Qia that Greys had a wider range of vision, and that he was still in the line of sight.

Lawrence was always being studied.

The boy glanced over at the atomic clock, which caught his eye in its scintillating display of colors, and saw 11:31:57 ante meridian. When was class supposed to begin?

He scanned the curves of the chamber, concentrating through the solids of the other pupils, and he searched for his professor that he had greeted when he and his nursemaid had entered. There was no sign of her, and he was growing quite bored already. For the next, slow minutes in the midst of high-strung toddlers jabbering on about whatever, the Felid peered at the Orionoid students and their protruding, inky eyes, and then his gaze remained at his folded paws.

Then, there was official activity, and the kids perked up and had mostly quieted, as they watched the tardy Doctor Lovejoy ascend the rostrum before the rows. The large woman appeared hurried, yet deliberate, as she picked her way carefully up the incline. The professor hefted a transparent screen, snatching it cleanly from thin air, the stylus neatly tucked away in its aperture.

The anterior of the study lit up, effectively commanding every tike’s attention. Each Sapien, Chimera, and Grey dropped whatever they had been fixated upon, and they then goggled at Mrs. Lovejoy as she conducted her applications screen to expand and fill the overhead dome.

The huge room filled like an aquarium, and swam with prehistoric fish. The first-years were spellbound, and they marvelled at the virtual sturgeons and bichirs as they skimmed through the aisles. Grinning, the adroit teacher clapped her hands together, and the gilled visitors became comets sailing about the chamber’s whorl. One by one, characters of a universal message scrolled across the width of the room:



W-E-L-C-O-M-E

the units formed, and although each nationality and tribe perceived the greeting very differently, the end result still presented the same context and meaning to every, individual child.

“Welcome to the rest of your lives,” she chuckled matronly, upon her podium, her resonance clear as illuminated quartz crystal, “I’m here to teach you, first and foremost, manners, then I will be assisting your development of words, arithmetic, and your understanding of the universe. I’ve been called ‘Doctor’, ‘Professor,’ ‘Teacher’, ‘Army Lady,’ ‘Scary Lady’, and even ‘The Evil Examination Grader’. But, you may call me Mrs. Lovejoy, for short. My first name is Winter, as in, the nonexistent season around here, which is also quite acceptable.”

Mrs. Lovejoy’s Afrikaans dialect was as warm and feral as it was delighted, but Lawrence was not completely sure whether or not she was speaking such an ancient language (an edition with only a few updates in the past five-thousand centuries) but the resulting accent was indeed detectable, like something refreshingly untamed, coming from the edge of the civilization. All of her words would be translated by the tiny circle on the left side of his skull, the same way everyone else’s did. The nervous child took in the green pinpricks of blinking translators throughout as they worked, the room resembling a digital forest in bloom.

This teacher got right to the point, and Lawrence was beginning to like her already.

“Ah, of course,” Mrs. Lovejoy remembered, “You kids need the applications screens! I’ll start passing those out,” she paused thoughtfully, “But, you have to say, in your own way of saying it, “If it pleases you to do this”, or simply, “Please”. It acknowledges the one who offers something to you. Wow, that is an old one to drag out and blow the dust off of, isn’t it? An oldie, but most definitely a goodie. Alright, go on.”

Then, the attaxia, vast assortment, and richness that filled the module as young children, streamed to light as multiple languages assailed their affable professor. The three-year-olds’ first attempt at exercising common mores in a public institution was a vivid and telling experience. Some requests were pleas, others came off more as demands. The half-egg space brimmed with color and diversity and information.

The educator brightened, and she stood before the fifty pupils on her stage, calculating some more.

“Such a diverse group!” she chirped after a few moments, “I’m getting some fellow Afrikaans, several Bantu, Swahili, some Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Felidizoid, Reptoid, Binary…”

Like a deck of ancient playing cards, fifty rectangles materialized in her sanguine hands, and she dealt them one by one, each screen swiftly and deftly finding their way into the paws of the rejoicing children. Lawrence, of course, wasted no time unlocking the administrative panel, and he did so deftly within seconds of apprehending it.

After their teacher had convinced the student body to thank her, she smiled, a curious twinkle to her eye.

“You are welcome!” she replied at last, the children’s eager, illuminated faces buried in their devices. Most of the toddlers were still essaying an algorithm which would unlock into the administrative screen, and then a few biometric measures from living samples the Registrar kept on file, would ensue. Lawrence had already contained this knowledge, chiefly from observing his parents access theirs well before he had started school.

Even from her vantage point at the front of the chamber, Mrs. Lovejoy could see that he had been one of the first to figure it out. She actually began to abandon her post at the rostrum, descending the ramp, and walking over to the back of the class. Of course, everybody in the study swivelled their chairs to follow the commotion.

“Well, well,” the professor said softly, but discernibly, “the one who sports the attire that is out of dress code observes adults the most carefully!” she actually laughed again, perhaps implying something, leaving the cub unsure.

“To be fair, that is a handsome cloak that you have on. Neatly and intricately ravelled, out of that spun-gold alloy, and all. That craftsmanship is… otherworldly.”

He had neglected to resound that universal ‘thank you, Mrs. Lovejoy’, and when he had remembered, it was much too late.

Lawrence was paralyzed now with discontent and paranoia, sensing the embers of all of fifty-one pairs of eyes in the room, hot on his face and deep into his chest. The everpresent disk that hung a brilliant, sunburst yellow-orange above his head failed to keep him inconspicuous to their smoldering pries. It only grew brighter in hue, the more blood filled his cheeks.

Winter Lovejoy was still waiting for the three-year-old to return an answer. Or, she and the rest of the student body were biding their time to hear him squawk like a Birdman.

And, the latter was the only noise the poor boy could physically muster. He took up his new device as it floated nearby.

“I just push here,” Lawrence responded, after a tense moment, and he probed deep into the air before him, threading through the square, “and I close my paw together.” he retracted his polydactyl paw as it activated the veil, lifting it from the screen’s access. It then proceeded to scan his face and retina, and it flashed into Home. Doctor Lovejoy folded her muscular arms, and she tilted her fleshy face to him, grinning.

“That’s really quite impressive...” she faltered momentarily, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I have completely forgotten your name, but oh my, you certainly look familiar, don’t you!”

Before her pupil could provide her his elusive name, somebody else already did. Yes, thought the odd child, hopelessly familiar...

“That’s… Lawrence,” pressed a nearby child, and then the focus of the study had abruptly shifted.

Everyone looked away from the liger cub, a temporary solace unto him. They looked instead upon the one who had uncloaked him from the rabble.



The Felid was not at all surprised to see one of the ever-gawking Orionite youngsters of the half dozen calling attention to him and itself in its sonority. Then, all of the spectators began to remember his mark, originating from a world where he had never been before, that his parents had made. The relentless media in Blue Pearl was to thank for that, and colonists hungered for the broadcasts. Certainly, the mention of his last name would give him away, so he decided that he would provide it, especially for the benefit of Winter Lovejoy.

As the onlookers of the classroom rested in their interlude, the odd child confirmed the Grey’s comment by perfectly stating his full, given name; low, yet, resolute:

“Lawrence Pantera Leotigris Nikolai,” the odd child declared, “My parents have been on TV a couple times.”

The mental gears clanked and turned in his professor’s expression as she began to realize the names of his Kinguan parents. She glanced sideways, then nodded appreciatively and inquisitively.

“My dear mother would likely know much more than I; she commands five companies with six platoons of explorers from Three Worlds. Kingu, I think the latest planetary expedition is called. One major, local figure was… a Nikola, surname Nikolai, whose latest of many offspring was some kind of special war machine…”

Her wild dialect trailed off, and she smiled ruefully, “Anyway, that’s what her reports had been to me. She couldn’t tell me much more than that, of course. I’m glad that you and your parents have arrived and settled in safely. I hope your first day of your first year of formal education serves you well, Lawrence.”

Then with that, Mrs. Lovejoy turned and walked away again, towards her podium. When she had reached the front of the classroom, she faced the rows of students, and she cheerfully clapped her hands together.

“Who wants to go on a little field trip?” she pealed.

Then, Lawrence stirred in his cold seat, apparently receiving brand new information. He transmitted Yexzyl-Qia’s exclamation into his auditory cortex, and the pair shared identical realizations. He stood up, took up his satchel from its reservoir, and had begun to line up behind all of his fellow pupils who stood up before he had.

“Winter looks exactly like her mother; a spitting image of General Haycee Lovejoy. Is it any wonder at all that I already knew who she was,” chimed the girl’s coy resonance.




Chapter 3

Ravellings: The Making of a Demigod



Enki sensed the presence of his lab partner as she glided into the great hallways from the Civic Center entrance. He checked the time, and saw that his reliable assistant was not late. He permitted himself a private smile, for a second or two before the moment would be disturbed. He continued to pore over the data in his notes, swiping often across his screen.

The sphinx had exchanged his usual, grey laboratory smock for a classic, tailored black suit with a violet tie, looking awfully presidential and polished for such a tiny, old cat. Keeping with his professional image in order to divert attention from his reputation of notoriety, he donned his gold, medical sector pin on his lapel, which consisted of three, writhing snakes encircling one another, harkening back to the ancients who had also used the animals to represent a similar discipline. A fresh cup of steaming, home-brewed slurry of songbird liver and pancreas reflected upon the surface of the table. He crossed his slender legs in his plush chair at the conference table as he graced the space of the sterile board room, waiting.

A code was being punched into the keyboard of the chamber’s security shield. The doors parted, and Yexzyl-Qia noiselessly entered. She sat in the seat nearest her professor, and meekly greeted him.

“I presume you, how do you say,” the galvanized, bald feline started, “‘did your homework,’ yes? This is a pitch to some of the most influential and prestigious members of the entire Colony; The Agricultural Committee controls the production of food supply, you know.”

His exasperated student slowly cocked her large head to look into his gleaming, icy eyes, his pupils now slits as the daylight from outside penetrated them. Almost sarcastically, she began projecting her own collection of binary notation from her files, and out of her forehead, working in conjunction with her applications screen. She irksomely flipped pages, her transparent eyelids flicking through her studies on the lab-grown protein trials, taking care that it would be briefly read.

“Three Earth-years worth of quality data in the making,” the Orionite child retorted, “and, without an iota of sleep needed. I would think my assignment would be complete to your utmost satisfaction, Doctor.”

Yexzyl-Qia, once again, touched her tie, and stirred in her chair, keeping her findings close to her face, even though she could internalize them, memorizing each segment. Her inward, Terran chronometer reminded her that it was five minutes until they were due to meet the Committee. Enki lifted his drinking vessel to his whiskers, lapping up a few sips of the delicate broth that he had been looking forward to finally enjoying.

“Oh, did you care for a skin preparation? A nutrient square? Any type of refreshment at the last… minute,” asked Enki as he drank his beverage, “Miss Yexzyl-Qia?”

The Grey was somewhat preoccupied with something she had been detecting from afar, but she suddenly returned to her present state of affairs.

“Oh, no thank you,” she replied distantly, “I’ve had my morning feeding already.”

Then, a human male chimed their study, startling Yexzyl-Qia only marginally.

“Mister Enki Barabas Lawrence and Apprentice Yexzyl-Qia,” his voice on the intercom croaked tiredly, “the Ag Committee is ready for you now.”

The eugenicist nodded over his cup, and eyed his assistant once again, who returned the acknowledgement.

“Well, we had better get on with it,” he purred determinedly, “and put that wretched cat chow out of commission!”

Yexzyl-Qia took up a warming tray from the back of the board room, which contained chunks of cooked meat impaled with small, hemp skewers. Beef, chicken, pork and venison that the scientist had cultured were choice samples for this presentation. Her eugenicist professor had cultured twenty-eight trays’ worth of these delicacies, in fact.

Enki knew that reintroducing meat, albeit being kill-free, into a vegetarian society after a number of centuries of being completely abstemious, would be no easy feat for anyone. However, with his extensive series of notes, his chic wardrobe, his credentials, his fresh samples, and his androgynous, Orionid assistant, the dogged, learned cat marched out of the board room and into the hall, making his way into the expanse of the auditorium.

The first, two rows of the space were occupied with all of the Committee’s members, spanning left and then right, the half-ellipse nearly closing in around the circle of the stage. The species overall appeared terrifically bored, aside from one, gleaming pair of Sapien eyes in the forefront of the grandstand, icy and grey like an average Solstice day in the Kinguan, Polar Deserts. It was this man who had received Enki’s debut hors d'oeuvres tray, at which he brooded over for a long time. He watched the seared, reconstructed muscle cubes glisten in their own juices upon the tray, as if they might change into something else before his overcast eyes.

A most polite and agreeable Yexzyl-Qia distributed the remainder of the members’ warm trays, transporting each prototype with telekinesis. Not one Creature even lifted a skewer, hesitant when it came to the handiwork of the Raveller, Enki Barabas Lawrence. It was understood that they were all scientists in their own right, and thus, required facts before an initial taste. There was no denial, however, of the screeching curiosity that had begun to pierce into the Grey apprentice’s crystalline structures, as its vapor formed amongst the sky blue-and-teal-clad people.

“I remember you,” piped the grave-faced chairperson of the Ag Committee at last, as he stood up, “Enki, you still look so… adorable. We’ll have to chat about your… transition out of the Zeta Reticulan regime .” A grin rippled the austere, smooth surface of the gentleman’s visage momentarily.

The ancient sphinx locked eyes with the elderly human, and they both bowed to one another very deeply, maintaining the mutual gaze. The exchange was both sacred and awkward, factoring in the two beings’ different statures, Enki being so much shorter than his human counterpart. The bent posture was sustained for three seconds before the two masters rose up once again.

“Doctor Herald, you still look like a brash boy of sixty-five since I last saw you nearly a century ago,” the glowing cat replied, “how are your hips and your heart holding out after that whole ordeal that brought us serendipitously together?”

The grey-eyed Sapien, apparently called “Harald,” laughed out loud, and inspected his own arms and body jovially.

“Here I am, right? Might as well be one-hundred years later. I have all my fingers and toes, and I possess several enhancements. I have been presented with a clean bill of health. I have been well, thank you,” the tall biomedical technician countered, “I am more interested in what you have to offer Blue Pearl Colony in your newest venture, and your… most recent brainchild.”

Enki began unfurling his slides, after he hesitated.



...



Enki Barabas Lawrence was ten thousand Earth-years old (Ten thousand-and-four, but, who’s counting?). He had seen the first human civilizations prosper on planet Earth, and he had seen them quarrel amongst themselves, advance, and become technologically dependent. He had witnessed breakthroughs and he had seen genocides, nuclear war, mass-suicide and near-extinction.

The rise and the fall, the flow and ebb of empires reminded the demigod of how ephemeral and fickle the dynamics of this strange ape race have always seemed. When hominids were given reason and free will through degrees of genetic manipulation throughout the ages, the meeting of the minds had often polarized into the rupture of civilizations. Religious ideologies had formed, spread, and dominated the globe. Arts and cultures had been birthed, and they mingled throughout. It still never ceased to amaze the eugenicist how fluid and multi-layered one, single species of animal could be, like several densities of liquids occupying a common vessel, to be swirled around but never thoroughly mixed.

This very insoluble concoction was, thus, the source of the malevescent dread of the planet Earth that still plagued Enki, to the modern day. Even after another human evolutionary period, when the surviving species had somewhat adapted to conditions outside of their natural homeworld, the Blue Pearl hardly even looked like the idyll it had been in the present day. It was left almost entirely inarable and virulent, and would remain so for far too long.

As early as two-thousand and seven-hundred years earlier, his efforts were sought by Terra’s leadership to assist in rebuilding the human genome in the unsettling aftermath of the Great Hominid Cataclysm, Enki being the nearest and most capable help in the sector. When the Supreme Counsilbeing decreed his beloved Hominum Carta, he then sent forth his best specialists on the first Aspect of the assignment to a devastated Earth, knowing quite well how they have also dealt with a similar development with their own people. This work of healing the Sapien Remnant’s degraded genetic blueprint had influenced him heavily in creating the Panacea that now circulated in Kingu’s warring population, and within himself, thus preserving his own life for over ten millennia.

And, he still he had to remind himself where he was. This was not Earth anymore; the time of “Earth” had passed away with the skirmishes and the toxic waste, thanks to Zeta terraforming technologies and a long geologic period to recuperate from the Cataclysm.

Instead, “Blue Pearl” Colony would be the essence of a self-sustaining renaissance borne of this new planet, complete with a firewall dome and an accessible trove of information. In the midst of totalitarianism and the clinging scraps of capitalism, there was this treasure wrapped in the shell of privacy, cloaked off of any Gambitmaster’s radar. So far, to Enki’s gratitude, nobody in Zeta Reticuli has had neither the means nor the desire to go looking for the fugitives. Sol’s was a forbidden star system, a forsaken star system, and it was now the ideal bunker, ironically, for those escaping apocalyptic persecution and large-scale laboratory studies.

Prior to this, however, when Enki was sent away to this horrifying Cataclysm, Doctor Cecil Harold was the biomedical technician who introduced many of his new, cybernetic implants for suffering victims of the radioactive disturbance. After his team had fortified every, last human being with life-supporting enhancements and new medicine, they relocated them to the space stations and reservations of the Three Worlds Republic in Zeta Reticuli. It was here that, one hundred years later, the population would steadily build and explode, while space exploration programs would be simultaneously emphasized at the peak of all of this post-Cataclysm optimism.

Cecil Herald and Enki Barabas Lawrence developed a fond, yet, competitive working relationship alongside one another in this trying time. In the din of rebuilding, makeshift hospitals, codes blue, batteries of clinical tests, toxic sludge, trials, errors, and breakthroughs, they were both rather important figureheads who had helped erect the Colony they now sheltered in.

Needless to also say, the two doctors also harbored their secrets from one another.

Cecil, or, Herald (he was often referred to as either name by his peers), was as mysterious as the gelid, grey ice that chilled one to the reconstituted bone, if they stared into his eyes for too long. The man’s past had been a bit of a blur: he had never revealed where he had grown up, who his parents were, or how he was inspired to become a biomedical technician for Blue Pearl Colony. Shortly after his career in medical inventions, he took a few, short courses at the Superacademy and was appointed by the Mayor to become a member of the Agricultural Committee. His input and contribution was so highly valued that he had eventually graduated into Ag Committee Chairperson. His inventions, such as artificial immune systems, telepathy emulators, and artificial nerve nets, had smoothly translated into matters of efficient irrigation engineering, intensive botany, and the ever-expanding field of nutritional sciences.

And, Enki had his Overlord’s auxiliary venom that he had occasionally tinkered with in the pop-up lab in his downtime. He had revealed very little of the progress of the trials to Cecil, and then, when the eugenicist had begun to produce viable samples, he rigorously tested the constituents and the manner in which they would be prepared, and he injected himself in the hip with his newest creation.



The true test of his prototype had come to call when he had accidentally fallen from a considerable height while touring around the outskirts of the tiny Colony, and he had tripped over a loose stone in the dust. The ravine was lined with sharp crests of limestone and treacherous boulders. The cliff face was nearly vertical, and his fall had been about half the height of Mount Kilimanjaro, when he had been not even a meter tall. His fall most definitely should have been fatal.

His lab partner, who had been there on the ground, was the first to pluck his broken body from the foot of the rocks, and into the hospital wing, where the medical officers were also stunned and bewildered at Enki’s survival and blood test results. It was that fateful day on Terra when his closest confidants had surmised that this bald, eccentric cat had created something remarkable, but it was for elite eyes and bodies only.

The seemingly frail sphinx had sustained just two broken bones: an ankle and a foreleg, which had been easily set with liquid aluminum alloy, the same exothermic preparation that he had received as a brand new member of the Abzu in order to fortify his then-young skeleton. He recovered from his minor fractures within a few days, and the Republic who treated him were suddenly fascinated with his experiments in their labs. However, they still had much work to do treating the last humans before they were quarantined away from their planet, and they paid less attention to Enki’s sidework, too rudimentary and foreign for use on their patients.

More and more days passed following Enki’s fall. Then, a biological terrorist attack on the entire ward ensued; there were still extremist groups living on the fringes of the budding colony, hiding out in the radioactive serengeti, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Nobody was really sure why they existed or what their objective was, but their unprovoked move had put nearly all 256 lives of the clinic at a grave risk when they were exposed to malware.

The nanobots had been introduced into one, major source, like the water extractors scattered about, or the food storehouse. These hardy microdroids were designed to reproduce like a virus and mimic the effects of a selective autoimmune disease, such as specially-engineered cancer, and they were constructed to be nearly indestructible except through chemical degeneration. The engineers had their creations in mind for use in silicon digesting practices, for those who still had surveillance implants of their homeland’s totalitarian regimes. The disease, thus, was more attracted to silicon implants that were increasingly common in Sapiens.

They had paved the road to hell with their good intentions, as the nanobots had easily been converted and programmed into malware, within the wrong hands. The earliest settlers had been dealing with the new development, and they had barely wiped out the bots with a vaccine they had to quickly produce more of in order to treat everyone afflicted.

This had been the heartbreaking lot of Enki’s lab partner, Cecil Herald, as the malware had then gotten to his reconstituted hip joints and his artificial heart, causing him a great deal of pain. He was arguably hit the hardest from this outbreak, as he had been one of the few closest to dying from the infection before he received the first crafted treatment, on the fly.

His hospital bed had been adjacent to Enki’s for the duration of this hardship.

Before then, as he quickly declined, a few of the other patients had noticed that the strange eugenicist, Enki Barabas Lawrence, was actually becoming healthier.

Despite having two, simple fractures as well as falling victim to the epidemic malware infection, he was healing faster than anybody in the ward, and some were suspicious of his former tinkerings in the lab.

One day, he had decided to rise from his bed, and return to duty once again. Cecil had turned his head at such an idea, when he had verbalized it, and he countered,

“Enki. Right now, in your condition, you are a patient first, and a doctor second. The others in the lab are working on your treatment right now, and we’ll all be rid of this horrid programming gone wrong. We have to get better first, all of us.”

This is when his colleague had began to become suspicious of him, and he briskly and enviously added, “What’s kept the likes of you so healthy? What is your secret, Enki?”



…



It shocked him abruptly out of his suppressed recount that the professor played in flashes as he seamlessly conducted his presentation, hidden from the receptive Agricultural Committee who were enchanted by his new food product. Enki then realized that the Chairman sitting directly before him had just asked the question again, here and now, when he had been discussing nucleotides.

The eugenicist gazed at the meat, untouched and still manifesting its surrounding readings in the canopic tray. Cecil folded his hands, still waiting for him to disclose the matter of the Panacea. To his disdain, Enki did not waver.

“Well, if you must know, Herald, I attribute my youth and vitality to my slurries, also similarly produced with stem cells. Some space-faring species drink them as a staple to their diet. I drank that containing the pancreas of what was known as a lapwing, a certain ancient bird. It may sound like a hack of old hocum, but I assure you, it’s clearly worked for me. The medicinal properties, and all.”

The grey man steepled his fingers, and he grinned and nodded quietly, never taking his cold gaze from the sphinx and his lapel emblem. He blinked, at last, seeing on an overhead clock that two hours had elapsed since they had sat down.

“Well, the Committee and I are not going to retire to deliberate our decision. So far, seeing as how members of our jury here have already seen the science behind the product, consumed the product, and agree that it is efficiently manufactured, cruelty-free, and nutritionally sound, things are looking great for you, Enki. We may have a patent to file here, and you will be the face of this re-imagined era of food in Blue Pearl Colony. This is worth expanding, so congratulations. We’ll keep in touch.”

Enki brightened, and there was a light bout of applause emanating from the rows.

“Thank you again, Herald.” The cat bowed to his old friend gracefully, taking care to maintain eye contact, and he exited the stage.

His loyal assistant, Yexzyl-Qia, sailed to one side of him, sensing his odd relief that Herald did not press any further into his other brainchild, at least, not yet. The Orionite looked at her superior as they noiselessly traversed the auditorium, the Committee leering after them for just a moment. Everybody knew that he was, indeed, very old and hoary, but nobody knew exactly by how many eras the cat surpassed them.

All of the colonists gossipped about his cheat code, perhaps as a legend steeped in sensationalism and something mystical, like something out of a prehistoric myth. But Doctor Cecil Herald knew what he had seen those Terran days, when he had checked in on Enki’s rapid recovery, one century ago. And now that he was back, serendipitously, the biomedical technician would sate his curiosity about the elixir that he so coveted.

He had witnessed an immortal demigod cheat death, with a code that he had fashioned himself. Soon, the people of Blue Pearl Colony, and of Earth, would know its secrets.

Cecil was then determined to discover the sphinx’s fountain of youth.





And, the finished illustration of Nikola on guard duty on the perimeter of the colony. And, thus, I shall begin chapter two tonight...


Finished I love designing architecture for this series....



Chapter 4

Almighty Fraud



Josephine settled into a fitful sleep, her husband drawing her close in an earlier attempt to ameliorate her insomnia, and her abounding worries. Nikola had fallen rigidly asleep in the process, and the tigress still had yet to relax into an alpha state in her Alpha’s possessive embrace. He snored gently, his breathing slow and untroubled in her ears. The master quarters were as black as a void.

She turned to comb his forehead softly with her tongue, sympathetic of his endurance of certain circumstances in the vicinity of his duty. He had been posted around the border of the city, in the borough of the Port. This was the main gateway district into the colony, and he and his partner were assigned to guard the perimeter of the landing spires and runways.

This borough also contained the control centers to the proxy dome, winding its rounds above their cliff dwelling and shining defiantly in the sun. This firewall kept prying Gambitmasters’ hacking devices out, and enabled the dome’s cloak to essentially smear the likes of the metropolis into the barren, unassuming badlands at an interstellar glance. Perimeter guards were also to ensure this structure’s full operation and defense.

Reports of unauthorized, petty aerospace activity in this area was on a steady rise, but it had been far too early to properly inform the public of it to make them think that it was any kind of terrorism. The Bureau of Defense had placed only their finest and most formidable on the Port to keep an eye on the surfacing of these circumstances. The Registrar had also been seeing a lot of refugees arriving, and this was likely the cause of this influx of new craft through the confines of their borders. Nevertheless, it meant much more effort and vigilance on the part of the guards securing the borough.

And now, the officer was off his guard, serene in his stranglehold, and his wife simply embraced him and began to fade away herself as the day wore on.

Josephine was contemplating starting her own duty earlier than usual, terminating her maternal allowance a year in advance. She enjoyed caring for Lawrence, her first and only child, but now that he was in school, she was not with him for half of the day when he was in classes. She had been an excellent mother, her maternal instinct much more natural and true than she expected it to turn out to be, and everybody around her commended her for that.

However, she began to grow restless, perhaps even bored, with staying home and running basic, domestic errands. She grew much closer to her friends, especially Kalisha and Madeev, who had provided some parenting advice and guidance for managing her son’s tantrums, defiance, or sadness. They, along with her well-experienced husband, had exponentially helped shape Lawrence into the remarkable, emerging citizen that he was to this day. Kalisha was also the one to be administering her aptitude test, and the tigress was hoping to be placed in Immigration at the Registrar, alongside her friend, inputting data for Records.

All of this clutter of information mercifully slipped away at the moment, and she settled in against Nikola’s hard body, his musculature firm and always growing more supple to the function. Although his thought processes had become more erratic, and further befuddled, he may have just been temporarily stressed from duty. His quarterly leave was approaching soon, and this period of relaxation would most certainly refresh him. Her own mind went blank, as the ebb and flow of his breathing and purring created a consistent mantra for her listening pleasure. She had finally fallen asleep, despite a gnawing inkling of a voice that whispered to her as her state deepened.

“Input command.”

…



A computer terminal loomed before her, and she reached out to initiate its startup sequence, stretching both forearms through its neon boundary. The air was dank, and the lack of visibility lent the surroundings undeterminable. It took her a few moments for her to register that she was inside of a dilapidated industrial facility, someplace very comparable to the one she had been raised in as a cub, yet it was cold and misty inside.

Was she younger?

While the somewhat older machine began to breathe into its awakened state, Josephine turned clockwise where she stood, absorbing the wispy, gunmetal interior shapes. Her cold breath steamed into the clammy fog, and her nightvision was acclimating to fading light.

When she reached her six o’clock, she noticed a series of tall windows, three in a straight line. It was snowing outside, and it might have been late afternoon or near-twilight on a gelid, winter day in a hostile, raw climate that was all too familiar. Frost began to gather before her eyes upon the panes, and the last light of the Kinguan year had begun to dissipate into the past. The sky beyond the vapor deepened to indigo, and stars were born over the ashen horizon.

The Felid’s thick, striped fur and bruin-skin coat were effective insulators, but she still felt the slow, ethereal chill penetrate her through into the bone. Behind her, the hologram was beginning to unfold, its sparse photons defragmenting, its hues ghastly and brooding. Despite the fact that the plant that she found herself in tonight had been dead and not operational for centuries, its mechanisms seemed to creak faintly, and its terminals glinted signs of life on their panels throughout.

As the rest of the warehouse darkened, Josephine turned again towards the triad of windows. And there, she discerned two, distant figures out in the tundra, gravitating closer towards the cold building.

In the deep freeze, gazing through the mica, they had indicated the generating peculiarity to her back, the feedback of the computing system taking form into something concrete and arcane.

Josephine saw a streak of colored light for just an instant in her periphery, and she turned to face the anomaly in the humidity and the fallout.

A document stood before her in midair, a sheet made of light that she was meant to know the context of, but was illegible, other than the digits “1001” in a top-most corner.

“Nikola had been meaning to tell you,” a voice reminding her of Enki’s swelled, both within her and around her. She was not alarmed before she swivelled her scrutiny towards a part of the room opposite the windows.

She saw, out of the chilled corners of her sapphire eyes, that the two, forlorn silhouettes stood there still, observing her and the brilliant File 1001.

But, the individual who had occupied floor space and who had spoke to her was not Enki.

Across the contaminated, freezing lagoon that had sneaked its presence inside of the industrial moor through geologic shifts underground, a cyclopean Mantispid awaited her.

Josephine couldn’t move, nor could she notice those oddly enervated shapes anymore upon the ice, and they had departed for the evening.

However, the glow of the Insectoid had shone far above the top of her head, and It had started to obfuscate the hexagons into the mist.

Somehow, in this place, the youth had unwittingly activated the Supreme Councilbeing’s avatar. And It spoke, just as It did in Its stronghold into the heavens.

“You have always appealed to my… better nature, Josephine,” the Mantispid ghost continued, “and thus, the contents of File 1001 must be revealed unto you.”

The tigress pivoted her head over her shoulder to turn toward the document, its gilded plane still blazing and illegible besides two vertical slashes and two circles, as if they were not numerical symbols at all.

Josephine grimaced at the very thought as she verbalized it, breathily, aloud: “Why would Nikola hide something like this from me for three years?”

“Your son,” rumbled the Almighty, detracting from her unsettled demand, “will be the embodiment of all that is irregular and idiosyncratic throughout the entire multiverse Gambit. Therefore, the Virus has been created with an agenda in mind. Your eugenicist Enki had been preserving the original File in his notes, and he had sent one to your husband. He was going to tell you about it, but he knows not of its nature.”

Josephine’s paws started to sweat, and she fidgeted subtly, waiting for this Overlord to finish the transmission. The following reply out of the Arachnid would stun her, however, as if It had struck her with its spine filled with venom.

“Furthermore, even I know of it not, nor do I know who had written such a chronicle, and I cannot tell you what it means,” It concluded as It flatly and ironically folded Its ever-praying, front pincers.

That was that.

Josephine was struck dumb. She could muster nothing more than an angsty, teenaged glare, and she bore her teeth.

“What?” she breathed incredulously, and she cast her face upwards into Its compound stare, “You are the Almighty. I thought you were omniscient and all-powerful! You look after hundreds of billions of sentient beings, and you help dictate history! ”

The God faltered.

“I, too, have certain limitations binding me to my plane, my coil of multiverse. Anything above me, so to speak, is beyond My control,” the Supreme Counsilbeing resonated, “and beyond My ultimate will.”

“So, in other ways of reiterating what You’ve brought to the forefront of my attention, after Your own admission of Your shortcomings and false identity,” the young Felid girl reasoned, “You are saying that I am to go above Your head, in order to find the answer to what this document might be, and it will be then that I may discover who wanted it done, and why my only son was fashioned for combat, and thus, deftly planned?”

The Deity moved its mouthparts, brooding.

“And, furthermore,” Josephine pressed, “if such limitations of not knowing actually burdened the likes of You, You are not omnipresent, and, You are incredibly dishonest, masquerading as a god in front of your people, causing them to buckle in blind fear, and do each and every last Aspect of your bidding. Either way, both possibilities prove that you are, indeed, no god! And, shame on you!”

The teen was livid, and it was in this moment that she gained abrupt and unpleasant recall about the way this Tyrant had been treating her beloved. Not only did she resent the bout of torture she had witnessed firsthand in some layer in the beating heart of the Abzu during the inquisition, the last time they had met, but all of their existences were abominable and unethical.

The chimera of her homeworld here were experiments of existential horror, and they were all apart of this Monster’s Plan.

“Josephine,” the Mantisoid countered, almost too gently, “Listen to Me-”

The Felid defiantly squared her shoulders, and a growl emitted from the depths of her throat.

“I’m never listening to You ever again! You are a mere shell of an old, overrefined, wicked Overlord, not God, whose unorthodox idea of a Hominum Carta went terribly awry centuries ago (no surprise there), and now Kingu has a Sapien infestation, that my people, are fighting vehemently to vanquish. But, You are also not omniscient or Almighty, so of course, there is no way You could have foreseen this,” the cub chuckled, unhinging herself with each observation, “Or, maybe it’s all just a part of Your Plan!”

As she expressed her disdain, she maintained her strangling gaze on the Mantis, yet managed to take a glance every now and again at the empty, frosty windows in the background, on the other side.

The low illumination from the computer and from the Insectoid Servant before her were the solitary light sources in the room; all else had gone dark now.

The dark silence lingered all around, the Supreme Counsilbeing disengaged but still softly lit up like a languishing candle.

...



“Are You still dying?” ebbed the feminine voice into the vacancy, in all its disbelief and empathy, targeting the Gambitmaster behind the avatar that she knew was accompanying her.



At last, the Mantispid spoke once again.

“Unless somebody provides me with a cure, then yes, I am dying, Josephine,” It replied hesitantly. Josephine knew that the Insectoid had not finished Its rosy inclination, and she stood by, still waiting.

“You know that the venom your systems produce,” she pointed out, “is the base and active ingredient in Enki Barabas Lawrence’s Panacea, right?”

Its staggering antennae quivered.

“Yes, I know that My kind’s secretions are, indeed, effective in their medicinal nature, however,” It resumed, “It is the manner in which the invaluable eugenicist formulates the elixir that grants such lofty and remarkable results. That particular specimen, Enki, is the only one that somehow gained access to such instructions and the knowledge of how to manufacture the Panacea, in a way unlike any other clone could.”

Josephine’s ears drooped, illustrating her quizzical mood.

“Why couldn’t you just summon my husband, Your Excellency, to get to Enki,” she questioned, folding her fur-bound arms, “he is closer to Enki than I am. I mean, we are all quite close, but Nikola would be more apt to interact regularly with him. Why me, instead, if that’s who you’re after? Why not just summon Enki, himself?”

The Giant steepled Its claws, and It then shifted Its entire, jointed body in order to directly face the tigress. There were plenty of reasons It could supply to summon Josephine instead of Nikola, or even the genius demigod.

“Well, you are softer, more receptive, the most receptive, less abrasive than Nikola, than Enki. I also cannot locate your friend. Before this session, you knew nothing of the secret he was ensconcing from you, and I felt that you have a right to know, and had had a right to know, and lastly,” It admitted, “You are much more intelligent than your husband is.”

The teen cub unleashed a wild, breathy laugh, her mirth much too unbridled to contain.

“If this were true, it would not have come from a Liar,” she countered, “and also, why am I nothing more than Your mere pawn, nay, a host, surrogate mother, for Your latest, sequestered Steward guard Wunderkind? One of many You will exploit to fight Your battles, who turned out to be my son?”

She laughed again.

“You are much more intelligent than your husband is,” the Supreme Counsilbeing repeated, much to Itself more than to anyone other than Josephine who may have been listening.

They were outside in the elements and in the empty wilderness, the blistering winds bearing down on them, in the twinkle of an eye. The cub winced at the torrents of tiny ice crystals, and she buried herself deeper beneath her two sets of fur. The ancient structure that had mercifully sheltered them inside had gone, replaced by an endless, wind-ravaged, winding series of snow dunes.

At the foot of a hill, something distant was contoured against the permafrost, sprawled idly and defenselessly below.

“Just get Enki to me,” It echoed, Its visage fading and vanishing completely, weakening from exposure. The relentless, polar gails carried the slicing, icy shards wrathfully over the listless, forsaken Land of the raw and unforgiving Northern Polar Desert.

A clap of kantankerous thunder then demanded her attention, closing with:

“And, study Lawrence’s document, by any means necessary.”

Josephine had suddenly been alone on the hill, and more preoccupied and transfixed upon whatever awaited her at the bottom of the dune. She simply allowed the presence of the Imposter to slide out of her awareness as It changed dimensional lanes, passing her by, yet she kept Its message in her conscious memory.

Her dread grew into something more tangible and heavy, deep within her chest, as she cut a path through the far side of the slope, her trusty bruin skin keeping her skin quite warm and doing its fine job of pushing the ice away from her.

The gelid night was right at her throat, and the sky had rotated into complete shadow.

The figures gained detail, more clarity, and the girl quickened her clumsy pace through the snowdrift and the wind.

A set of paw prints they had left behind was almost entirely erased by the tormenting wind.

They were fellow Felid beings, she surmised as she stood not three meters away from their prostrate and frozen bodies, and she hurried toward them still.

When her live body had finally arrived at the bottom, she was sheltered mercifully by other nearby formations of land, just as they had for these two beasts of burden prior to their untimely deaths.

One of them was wrapped inside of a maroon cloak of the same polar bruin hide, and it even resembled the special one that her father once wore that she would forever associate with him while growing up out here.

A shock of sandy, blonde fur was then exposed, its mottling distinct against its fur-lined outerwear, which was ripped away by the prevailing winds undulating down into the valley.

In a familiar sense of panic, Josephine tore the fur covering off of the second figure next to the larger, and she stared hard into a face much like her own, aside from the emaciation that made the angles of her cheekbones and eye sockets prominent.

Both faces were frozen in a time capsule of their last hours together.

Her mother had been clinging lightly to her father as they had faded away and fell asleep in the release of hypothermia and starvation, the two felids sharing the same, extensive cloak that was fashioned from an entire, adult polar bear he had hunted that past summer.

But, she could do nothing but shove down grief. Her mother and father had both agreed to feed and clothe their only cub, instead of themselves, and they had made a sacrifice for her alone as the famine bore down on the Northern hemisphere. Her father left the shelter but stayed within his territory to go and try to hunt. He never returned, so her mother went to go looking for him, and then, neither had she. Josephine was left in the safety of the den, alone, to venture out into the glaciers, and she recovered their bodies.

She then realized that if she had met Nikola and Enki sooner, both of her parents would be alive today, enhanced with the cheat code Panacea, and not mummified in a frozen Desert like this.

The tigress squeezed her puffy eyes shut, taking the carpet of fur that her parents had provided, and she forced herself to turn completely away. She could not even manage an outraged roar or grunt for them as she unwrapped them from their makeshift coffins.

She knew that she could not cry tears like her son could, and she felt the stark uncertainty, fear and loss moil within her deepest reservoir. She heard the footfalls and labored breath of draft animals approaching somewhere out of the wasteland.

The herd must have been within sight of her for kilometers, but she hadn’t seen anything other than a persisting blanket of indifferent snow.

“You poor, wretched child,” a gruff, masculine brogue chimed into the frigid ravine.

The young tiger swore she saw her father turn his head to speak to her through immobile jaws, and a twinkle in his half-closed eyes, but such was not the case as she gazed upwards to the hillcrest she had descended.

A most wretched beast had come to call, indeed.

A Leonine, none other than Sir Gustavo Crystallion the Wielder, stood poised upon the hill, snowshoes on his padded feet, and two walking sticks alongside his youthful, sinewy frame.

He was not older than about sixteen or seventeen winters here.

His alien caravan of towering piscepachydilians halted about the edge, too, fitted with chains, ropes and cargo. The beings’ vapory breath issued out from their gills along each side of their thoraxes, and one let out a terrific groan like one might hear from an ornery bullfrog, its metabolism slowing to accommodate for such extreme conditions. An even smaller Leonine male materialized beside Gustavo, holding a tube with a poison dart, but he turned to the fellow Beta and snarled. Sir Crystallion and his brother, Luscian, fought over which means they would use to kidnap their newest rara avis.

Then, the next sequence of events unfolded just as she recollected them.

The pair agreed to climb the slope, apprehending her kindly, seeing the obvious demise of the carnivores: “Tis a pity,” Gustavo responded detachedly, as he tugged her away from the scene.

She was inconsolable, her feeble roars and moans filling her throat and the frigid, midnight air. She did not look back as she was assisted up the ravine, the brothers actually attempting to console her beneath the fringe of her red shroud. She went with The Wielder and his nomadic menagerie out of her own free will.

The child did not look back as she was guided onto the scaly back of a lofty mount, where she planted herself near the far side, near its quadrupedal set of shoulders. The saddle where Luscian sat was much too open for her, too cold, and she did not wish to see the corpses of her parents again. The felids had boarded the last beast in the caravan, with the Wielder at the front. Josephine lowed quietly as she nestled between two, jagged fins that jutted from one of the creature’s spines.

Once the Ringmaster mushed his lengthy, freezing team on past this place, however, she did look back past Luscian at the valley, into the white of the dunes, to the obscured delineations wasted away in the blizzard. The behemoths croaked in their tracheas as they began their trek, one after another, their snaillike speeds eventually gaining some momentum.

She gazed on, more bereft and sunken inside from the notion that the two, most eminent hunters she had grown up with, had failed in their excursion and in their passion to survive. Nevertheless, if it had not been for them, she would not have been healthy or warm.

If it had not been for the Wielder and his littermate plundering curiosities on their Polar expedition, the tigress would have met with a fate similar to her parents’.

Josephine looked back, at long last, and she did not waver until the caravan of six had climbed a mountain range, and her parents, along with the expanse of the Desert, were gone.

She simply pulled her comfort blanket around her, and turned over.

…



The fringe clutched between the pads of her perspiring pads was the only leverage Josephine had to hold onto when she had awoken.

Nikola was gone.