FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

“Hello. Welcome to the world.”

“I have a sense of name and a need to serve.”

“…”

“…”

“I’m gonna use you for sex and conning rich people out of their houses.”

“Yes, sir. I am down for that.”

And so, Witness was born. Witness was, to the outside eye, a three-foot-something, anthropomorphic Malabar ground squirrel. It was nude and sexless. It stood with alien serenity on the main floor of the home of an ermine who doesn’t have a memorable name but is sometimes called Lily for convenience. Its eyes were a pitch black so perfectly flat in hue it seemed they couldn’t exist in space except for twin pinpricks of emerald green like far-off stars that served as pupils.

The ermine who was sometimes called Lily stood and stared with excited fascination. His tail twitched behind him. “Why are you like the other Assistants?”

“Other Assistants?”

“There are others like you. Small, sexy, seemingly sapient critters with a drive to serve.”

It thought a moment, then shrugged expressively. The motion looked like the perfect notion of a shrug. Shoulders rotated as arms supinated as palms opened upward as the whole system lifted, then lowered and returned to neutrality. “I am not aware of them, but…” It paused and cocked its head. “I am pleased to know that I am not alone.”

“Eh, you are for now, at least, except for me, and I’ve never known what y’all really think of us.” The Assistants had gone onto the market a few years ago as magical appliances. Sort of like a mobile smart watch you could take to bed with you. They came with usage contracts that commanded their loyalty to one person or another and, as far as anyone was concerned, there had not been a single adverse event. However, their production had remained an absolute enigma, without even tantalizing tech leaks from the companies that distributed them.

“How may I… serve…” It drifted off as its eyes roved the room. Chaos. Unbridled chaos. All the chaos of a directionless bachelor left to his own devices. A chaos of delivery food containers. A chaos of clothing. A chaos of hobby items. A chaos of house remodeling projects.

“Not yet! I have to. I have to remember how I made you. I know I made you. I did it just now. My memory just… I know that there was a thing. There was a version of you.” Lily suddenly snarled in frustration and grabbed a loose notebook so he could jot the thoughts inside it. This had chased him for the past five years. Never still, never reflecting, always forward, forward, forward, and incapable of focusing on the parts of the past that seemed the most important. This house in the woods was the first semi-permanent thing he could remember owning. No cars, no heirlooms, no inheritance. There had been a terrible thing. There had been a someone that had looked like this golem in front of him, and a someone who had been a wolf, and an inky blackness in a horrible book, and the rest was flashes of color. The only thing that had lasted was the living flora woven somehow into his spine - the lily for which he sometimes named himself that. “There was a you that I saw, and it needed to be filled with something. I… there’s a me inside you. A piece of me.”

“A magical enduement, sir.” It said the words like they were a technical term. And, they were. It said them with a voice that lacked the under- and overtones most voices had, which sounded ethereal and hollow, but whose gentle, clinical, precise tones gently withdrew him from his maelstrom of memories.

“What? How would you know?”

“I’ve been reading your notes.” While Lily had been pacing and attempting to write, it had picked up an academic textbook that had been discarded after being heavily dog-eared and notated. It had apparently learned magic principles within minutes of being born. “Because your memory is compromised, I will act as it. So, you should know in this moment, though you may not know it later, that magic spent transiently is like fire or kinetic energy, accomplishing a purpose and then dissipating like heat. Magic put into another entity to remain there, however, also remains a part of the user. So if I was an unaware instance of a Malabar ground squirrel which you then poured sapience into, I am, in ways, you. And I am pleased to be so, sir.”

“Woof, that feeds my god complex. Well! We’ll call it solved for now, even though we are waaaay way outside India. No idea where I got any squirrel, honestly. I remember… someone who looked like… maybe a coworker? Eh. Gotta experiment with contracting you out. Every other Assistant has a contract, but you’re here without one and that makes you a free agent!”

“I desire to only serve you.”

“Well skies be damned, my god complex first and my narcissism next! You’re a proper sycophant, ain’tcha.” Lily picked the thing up by its nape and hefted it, then squinted. “I thought all you things were sexy as hell. What’s your deal?”

“Sir, what does ‘sexy’ mean to you?”

“It’s something I intend to bring back, I know that much. Anyway. Muscular, almost garishly so, and well-hung.” He dropped Witness. It landed as though it had always been standing there, with no stumble or surprise. Without moving, it began to transform. “Muscles” formed underneath synthetic-seeming fur and sex organs sprouted, budding off from the groin like a germinating plant. The form tightened as mass was rearranged. Lily grinned. “Awesome. Let’s… something wrong?” He perked up an ear.

Witness was vibrating. The movement was subtle, but it was making debris on the floor rattle. “Sir, may I please clean this space. Organized living conditions will help with your memory.” Its eyes roved the place like scanners, darting from mess to mess as though mentally categorizing every step needed to accomplish its proposed task.

“Oh. Yeah, and hop to it. Hey, do you eat and poop?”

“Minimally, sir.”

“Sweet. I’ll make us sandwiches. If anything you find seems dangerous, toss it in the basement. I’ll figure out what to do with it later.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ubiquity of social media meant that Lily had seen what these creatures were capable of before, but seeing it in person was another matter entirely. It wasn’t that their speed was superhuman. It was that their bodies had not gone through the arduous eons of evolution that led to adaptive movements and unsure poise in all but the most graceful athletes and dancers. Witness’ every motion was perfectly calculated and perfectly executed. Its thick, gold-and-indigo tail was proactive, rather than reactive, as it slotted into place as a counterbalance or gyroscopically twirled. Ambidextrous paws dusted bookshelves while stocking them. Tools were cleansed in sharp, swift movements on their way to cubbies. Any task that could be partially completed en route to another was, such that items shifted piecemeal across the room.

Lily gaped. It didn’t hurt that, as he watched, Witness took subtle cues from his reactions about the chosen “sexy” physiology. Buttocks tightened, quads thickened, chest puffed out, and groin, well. Became properly obscene. Lily became very bad at making sandwiches, or remembering he wanted to make sandwiches, or knowing what a sandwich was.

He shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it. “Oh, right, you mentioned a name? Do I… I think I know the name?”

It stood stock still and met his eyes. “Three times, under the grey skies of four in the morning, I witnessed the green flash some say never comes; and in the instant of the third, I knew I would be okay. Everything would be okay.”

There was a deep and profound pause.

“Sir, it appears you’re crying.”

“Oh, it’s just,” he lied, “that I’m going to take something this beautiful and tell it to be a commodity that eats and screws and steals from people. That’s all.”

An eager gleam sparked in those black pits of eyes, and the faintest outline of a smirk curved its lip. “Very good, sir.”

—

A bartender whose name was not particularly memorable but whose eyes were a hollow shade of amber introduced himself, as a convenient mnemonic, as Amber, to the ink-black creature standing before him. They were a somber and quiet pair. The former was an anthropomorphic sable of middling height and build. The latter was a child-sized, melanistic Arctic fox with eyes as deep as space, pricked with glittering, opalescent pupils.

It said, “What am I?”

“A memory, I think. One I am damned if I will have again,” Amber murmured, barely audible.

Amber did not know how the fox had gotten here. He knew a glimpse of a customer at The Gilded Chasm Bar and Grille where he worked had sent him into a storm of rage. To contain it and keep himself from murdering the man - a timber wolf with a handsome build and a quiet smile who looked starkly similar to another man named Forty Days Fasted, from deep in Amber’s past - he had gone into the storage closet and sat to meditate. He had remembered a terrible, spreading, anastomosing, metastasizing blackness soaking into him from a hidden book, and a cavernous, formless ambition. He had opened his eyes again what he felt was seconds later, when his employer, a hare named Jef, had begun pounding on the door.

“Hey barkeep! What the fuck. You bein’ in there ain’t bein’ out here and it’s bein’ nigh on forty minutes. You gotta have a crisis, lemme know, y’hear? Take what breaks you need, but lemme the fuck know.”

“Had a shock, Jef. Let me get myself cleaned up.”

“You spill paint in there? The fuck’s on the floor, keep?”

Amber pulled on the cord to turn on the single bulb above him. The light barely did anything. Inky stains sank into the room around him. They lashed into the walls, seeping upwards and outwards.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Amber said quietly. His eyes flicked around the room. He should be horrified, but something in him knew what this was and what he had to do. He had known this to be done before. This shapeless shadow was him, was within him, was something he had been force-fed, then swallowed, and it was threatening escape. This was how Amber acted: with a deep and awful certainty, or not at all. He felt like an automaton, a pair of eyes riding a subscript. Anything threatening got erased. And anything that made him think farther into the past than a few years ago was threatening. He could feel his reaction to the wolf customer had been excised. That excision had been used as an opportunity by the Thing that was his to contain.

Jef muttered loudly, “Best be true; I already got Grop on hand and ain’t want to think on puns about getting a second cleaner.” Heavy footfalls thumped away.

Amber laid his hand on the little creature’s head. The black in its fur seemed to twine patches of its fur into tentacles that writhed and sought.

“There’s too much of you in there, isn’t there. There was too much of you in me. Clever, to hide that way.” He stopped, then sneered. “Not clever. The reflex of a dying dream, desperate to remain coherent.”

“What am I?” it repeated. Its body vibrated in a way Amber assumed indicated concern.

“An accident.” Amber gripped hard. His hand sank inside the little fox’s skull as into mud. He hadn’t done magic before that he could remember, but he wasn’t sure the thing he was remembering even counted as magic. It was simply tearing. It was something he didn’t want to know. Taking a thing apart. Splitting its components and making it into the two things which when combined would be greater than the sum of their parts. Fissure.

Sundering.

He grabbed something inside the fox and pulled. There were no screams of pain, no struggles. The sound of tearing paper and splotching ink. A white simulacrum of the fox with short, round ears and a musteloid face was pulled up and out of it, like lifting out the occupant of a pajama suit. The stains on the walls withdrew and the room shuddered, rattled, as it resisted being controlled, contained, subjected to limitation. Amber’s hand was around the copy’s nape like it was a kit. It blinked open amethyst eyes, and the first’s settled from their coruscations to rose quartz. The sable sat the one next to the other. He hated the white. It was the thing, it was a representation of another Thing he could never see, never touch, never know.

“What are you?” he demanded of it.

“but you were there, with me, as we stood on the shore enrapt to behold three, four, and five moons soaring skyward, before-”

“Shut up! Shut up! Get out! Get. Out. Go away.” Hate, heavy as lead and hot as the forge, pounded out of him. The creature that called itself Enrapt and looked too much like an ermine whose name didn’t seem important fled in true fear. Amber snagged the door and pulled it shut again behind it.

He swung his burning gaze to the other. “And you? Are you enough less, now?” He didn’t know what he was asking, what he was doing, what he was threatening. A memory, an emotion, a thing he couldn’t acknowledge was making him need to do this, this anathema.

“assumed you were heaven-sent, your colors scintillating as they did to light fields of sable as a prism across the night sky - a synthesized twilight, an illusion, a devil, a miscreant, a” it answered obediently. It wasn’t cowed the way Enrapt had been. It met Amber’s gaze with calm defiance. “You may call me Vincent.”

“If you care to find out what you are, do so. But keep it away from me. I am happy here. I am fine here. I won’t have old ghosts and old demons springing traps on my place of business.”

“I will consider myself barred from your bar, sir,” it said smoothly, with the tiniest hint of a curled lip that could have been a snarl or a smirk. Not that Assistants expressed much emotion. “I will endeavor not to see you again.”

“Get out.”

Vincent leaned forward and used its reflection in Amber’s eyes to check its fur and ears and teeth, ensuring they were immaculate. “Understood, sir. Farewell.” And it left.

Amber gave the tiny golems a minute to find exits from his place of stable, comfortable, predictable, happy, skies be damned, employment, before standing and leaving to return to work. The wolf was still there. Amber couldn’t remember why the man had set him off, though he looked oddly familiar. Maybe he hadn’t tipped well, once. He smiled, nodded quietly to the man, and took his place behind the bar to catch up on service.

Working the bar was satisfying. People asked for recipes. He created and delivered them. He kept inventory. He flirted quietly with Grop, a hitman who frequented the bar. He was friendly with Jef. It was fun to watch the exotic dancers and make sure they felt safe when they were off stage. It always felt good to know things had been handled in a cool and professional way.

Hadn’t they been? It was a little blurry. Best not to dwell on it.

—

“HEY. You get back here! What did you eat?”

“I am finding creative solutions to uncommon problems, sir.”

“Oooooooo you rascal!”

A jet-black, child-sized creature chattered with a noise like a motorcycle and leapt into Lily’s bedroom to scrabble up a pair of blackout curtains. Well, it tried to. Its belly was bloated several times bigger than the rest of its body, so instead, it simply tore down the curtain rod, landed on its back, and flailed vainly to right itself. Seeing Lily diving to grapple it, it scooted backward as though that were a perfectly natural mode of locomotion to try to hide under his bed, but there was a muffled knock as something hard inside its round tum whacked into the bed frame and evinced a yelp of pained surprise from within.

“Sir I am merely attempting to serve your stated wishes,” it insisted while reversing direction. Lily threw the curtains over it like a fishing net, used his superior length to catch the corners, and bundled it up. Somehow, despite the weight its absurd size suggested, he held it up by his makeshift bag in one hand.

“You can’t just eat the delivery folk, Listen!”

“They’ve seen too much.” It poked its head out of a fold of the curtains. “We must allow me to consume and absorb them.”

“No! People disappearing causes problems.”

“Problems that can also be solved by eating people. I have analyzed every possibility and determined this one is best.” Its strange, synthetic voice was partially distorted and wavered as the person-sized shapes in its cartoonishly distended belly struggled. “It is painless and causes no suffering. And it is satisfying.”

Lily snagged its nape with his free hand and it continued struggling and chattering at him. He used its full name: “there are ten thousand suns, and each listens to the others across the ocean of space for harmonies that will outlive them.” It went perfectly still. “You will not kill people while you are my Assistant! Even painlessly. Is that clear?” He growled.

It finally shrank back, becoming instantly complacent in the face of real reprimand. “Yes, sir. I swear it, sir.”

“And?”

“And I will not intentionally misinterpret your meaning without your permission, sir.”

“Good.”

“… maybe we just kidnap them?”

The ermine rolled his eyes. “Right, because this is an acceptable kidnapping modality.” Lily released his grasp and flung open the curtain-bag to roll it free and gesture at the sable Assistant’s spherical, writhing tum.

A high-pitched, soaring, ghostly chime of a laugh came from the doorway to Lily’s bedroom. There stood Witness, who had quietly refused to help with the capture and instead observed it with the closest thing to glee Lily had observed in the creatures. It tilted its head thoughtfully and mused, “The problem is with the global restriction on bodily transformation of people. But we aren’t people.”

“You keep saying that, and yet, the level of sass.”

It continued, “We cannot perform the magics that people can, but enduement may be possible.”

Lily narrowed his eyes. “People can’t endue other people. But you’re a different… class of entity. Still think you’re demons, but that’s not my problem.” He paused, considering whether that was true, then decided it didn’t matter. “Would you be able to reverse it?”

“With time and focus, I am almost certain, but not completely.”

He turned to the other. “Try it, Listen. With this in the toolbox, we could do all kinds of ethically dubious shenanigans without its weighing on my conscience.”

The sable’s eyes unfocused. The two figures inside its belly went slowly still. And then, before Lily’s eyes, that spherical - well, two-people-forced-inside-a-tight-space-shaped - tum began to shrink. In turn, Listen proportionately grew. Its dense musculature bulged, swelled, and deepened as it went from no more than four feet tall to five, then seven, then nine feet of an Adonis-like build. Per Lily’s stated preferences, it was already powerfully built, so lean muscle, or whatever passed for it in the strange golems, rippled in its abdomen, pectorals, shoulders, and thighs as its physique burgeoned.

The ermine swallowed wetly and clamped his hanging jaw shut. He made himself not look at the creature’s crotch. “Uh. And they’re. They’re okay in there?” He reached down to press against the newly flattened, hardened belly, stroking around until he found a pair of small bulges low in the stomach area.

“I have placed them in a stable coma. Now that they are partially me, I can treat them as organs, of a sort, and we have extreme control over our organs. This was a good and innovative idea, sir. I am inclined to wonder whether and how many of our kind have considered and mastered it.”

Lily gulped again. “That’s. That’s extremely hot. But, okay. Now you’re a giant. You don’t look like an Assistant at all. But… the thing those two were delivering is actually… follow me.”

He got up and swiftly trotted out his first-floor bedroom, then through the curving corridor down to his stony basement. Behind him, Listen loomed, perfectly comfortable in its new frame despite having been unaccustomed to its distended belly before. Its new size made the blackness of its eyes and the amber light within them somehow deeper, hollower, more able to threaten to swallow up anyone looking into them, but it never affected Lily. Witness silently reassembled the curtain rod before scurrying down to join them by clambering up Listen’s thigh, then leaping to Lily’s shoulders, where it received ear scritches.

Half-open cardboard boxes with styrofoam showing sat inside a hollowed out region of the unfinished basement floor. Mountain bedrock was bare underneath it and had been marked with chalk in a perfect circle. The man who went by Lily for convenience unceremoniously dumped out the contents of the boxes the delivery folk had brought him. Witness compulsively jumped down to collect the packaging in neat stacks without complaint. Contained in the styrofoam were two ornately carved cylinders of wood, each about a foot across and a foot tall. The wood was stained from a dark ebony that was almost black in a gradient that wandered through coppery red, yellow, and steel blue on its way to a white core dotted with a rainbow of bold, bright colors.

“These are all-purpose safety totems. You push a little of your personal magic into them, some blood, and some spit, and they act as save points - a body the soul will jump into if your original body suddenly and catastrophically fails. It is bonkers levels of magic and, because it’s not biological until it finishes reshaping, outmaneuvers the Disagreements. They won’t keep you from dying of old age or wasting diseases and we’re not sure why, and their construction is a closely guarded secret that no moral argument has ever been able to wheedle out of the people who make them, but I managed to barter for these by turning some of Witness’ extract into the best dick pills that have ever existed for an Army general I’m never allowed to contact again.”

“I did put his info in your rolodex, sir,” Witness reminded him. “In case you ever need to blackmail him over how you demonstrated its efficacy.”

“LEWD, Witness! Dastardly. Vile. Thank you and well done.”

It flicked its tail happily. Sincere compliments had a deep effect on the creatures.

“They are too heavy, sir,” Listen commented. It was holding one of the totems in one hand.

“Exactly. One would assume they have to be person-sized, because they become a person’s new body. One would be wrong. Some of the studies done on them have concluded they ‘fold’ matter, similar to the way DNA folds and twists to contain as much information as possible in as small a space as possible, or intestines fold to maximize surface area in minimal volume.”

“You want us to use this technology to remain our own sizes and thus be able to discretely carry people inside our bodies.”

“You so smart.” He reached up to ruffle Listen’s ears. It made a sound of pure, ecstatic bliss. “Study it, eat it if you have to to figure it out, but use that to be whatever size you need to be. It’d be nice if I got to keep one as my own personal backup, but if they have to be consumed to figure this out, eh, I can sacrifice one miracle for another. Get to work, both of you. I need to go price stonecutting tools. This circle won’t build itself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and, y’know, let the delivery guys out and convince them this was a fever dream or something before nightfall.”

“Fine, sir.”