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A Renegade Reborn

Pt5 - Eyes to See

By H. A. Kirsch

--

_ _

A fox stood in my living room. He wore high-heel black patent leather boots, black panties, a corset, opera gloves, and he held a syringe. "It's really simple. If you get people hooked on something, no one will miss them when they're gone." He squirted the syringe like in a medical movie.

_ _

I looked away. When I looked back, it was Marece, the fucking bunny rabbit. "I'm a hare," he complained, and approached me with the syringe.

_ _

I was tied to a chair, except I could stand up and smash the chair. I flailed in my apartment, and stumbled out onto the over-street balcony. It looked down over a forest. I could hear a waterfall. Either the hare/fox got me, or I jumped.

_ _

The pool of water at the bottom was space. Empty, cold, black, vacuum space. I could see stars.

_ _

"You ruined my life, and for what? So you can dress up like a gay Batman and fuck people in space?" The voice was the coyote from my recovery room on the numbers station. I turned my head to look, and saw Kale, naked, his groin blurred out like he was censored for daytime TV. He punched in something out of sight, and I got sucked off the cliff and out into space-

--

I woke up tangled up in my blankets, on the floor. The apartment computer was silent, at least in terms of judging me. It was playing some sort of gentle stream and waterfall noise which I'd used to go to sleep. I swore that sometimes, I could hear the artificial gravity, and it made it hard to fall asleep.

"Good morning. You have a medical appointment today."

Oh shit. It started off scheduled as a simple checkup. I guess the medical system wanted to make sure that my DNA wasn't denaturing itself or whatever causes DNA to get fucked up. When I'd mentioned it at my robo-mechanic job, all three of my typical coworkers had the same reaction:

Christyk: "You should sign up to get ocular implants. They work great-"

Cara: "Way better than that ancient wristcomp you have. Sure, it's bulletproof, but think of the augmented reality ads you can see!"

Jade: "Maybe everyone stares at you because of old tech."

Cara: "Jade, they stare at him because he's a dark and stormy black wolf who stares sex beams into their souls."

I looked into it, and while I really was completely able to use my wristcomp, generally everything assumed that I had ocular implants, and everyone else seemed to have them. Only a small percentage of Selnari avoided them for cultural reasons, and an even smaller percentage had medical issues that precluded using them.

Fine, I'll get fucking microchips implanted into my eyeballs.

Despite the appointment being scheduled only a week out, adding on the implant surgery wasn't a problem. It had a three-day recovery period that was automatically scheduled with my job, and I received an enormous amount of documentation that was frankly a pain to read, so I didn't really. I'm not gonna lie; when I had to do a lot of business stuff back on Earth, I let business people do it for me.

The appointment started off pretty typically. A bunch of biometric testing for my height, weight, body proportions, fat percentage, bone density scan, full-body magnetic hyper-resonance scan, galvanic skin reactivity test, multi-modal physical reflex testing, audiology exam, dilated pupil eye exam and ocular mapping, dental X-ray and oral sonogram, and a blood draw using a device that looked like a transdermal injection gun that worked backwards and felt just about as pleasant. Okay, that's a lot of stuff, I guess.

Before I quite realized what was going on, I was wearing a hospital gown and sitting on a bed, while an overly cheerful female malinois dog gave me a whirlwind explanation of what would happen. First, I'd get tetanized and then inducted into a bio-electronic fugue state; then they'd do something to my eyes; and then they'd implant some 'minor support electronics'. I'd wake up, they'd help me acclimate in recovery, and then I could go home and rest.

"This is really uhh, you know, casual," I said, continuously looking around the room. There was some medical equipment, though most of it looked like computers instead of tubes and hoses and gear that either sucked or blew things into you.

"We do this operation on basically everyone, and the success rate is 99.999%."

"Five nines. Nice. Well I'm from fucking Earth, so hopefully I'm not that point-zero-zero-one, eh?"

"Please lie back and relax," the doctor's 'nurse' said. They were one of those canine things that I'd seen on the numbers station. With my entire wits about me and actually panicking a bit about what was going to happen, they were very obviously not a person and definitely some sort of robot.

"Wait, you're just gonna-"

The canine medbot pushed a device towards my neck, gently cradled my head, and everything dissolved to static.

No, it actually dissolved to blackness. The static sensation lasted forever, and just a few seconds, at the same time. I was very definitely awake, and at the same time, I couldn't see anything. Not just like my eyes were closed - I couldn't see anything at all. Not the random colors and hallucinated fireworks of eyes-closed, not anything I could remember, nothing. I also couldn't hear anything, not even the slight tinnitus I had from too much time walking around the dance floors at my old club, The Pit. I missed that place. I needed to figure out how to make The Pit v2.0.

But first, I needed to see. And hear. And talk, and move, none of which I could do. Oh shit what if I'm dead, what if I'm the one in a million or whatever that has a problem, this is all that fucking maned wolf's fault, why would I ever pay him money-

"OKAY CAN YOU HEAR ME? HAWK?" The voice was the doctor's, both chirpy and gruff at the same time, and so loud it sounded distorted. It hurt, like having an ear infection and a hangover at the same time.

"Oww oww not so loud!"

The sound crackled, garbled, moved around my head. "--better? Can you respond? Can you hear me now?"

"It's weird, I can't, I guess I can hear - why can't I see anything? I can't see anything. Or move. Or anything."

"You were having a panic attack and we had to re-tetanize you. It's nothing to be concerned about, some people come out of the bio-electronic anesthesia with their brain waking up out of order."

"I can't see anything," I said again. This time, I could hear myself talk, which made me feel extremely fucked up because I couldn't hear myself talk before and had no idea what it didn't sound like until I could compare.

Then, the visual version of what happened with my ears. Light that was so bright it was blinding me and felt like being stabbed through my eyes, to the back of my skull. I could see the room, the doctor, the medbot, flickers of some other things, and then mostly normal sight. "Holy shit, now I can see stuff. What the hell did you just do?"

Huge letters appeared hovering in the room. [OCULAR IMPLANT ACCLIMATION TRAINING - PROCEED?]

I lifted my hand up - now I could move - and waved it in front of the words. The doctor then walked across the room, looking at a tablet. She walked behind the words.

"Holy shit again, there's, do you see that? There's a sentence just hanging there." I waved my hand in front of it, the doctor moved behind it.

"Perfect. The augmented reality processor's working. Okay, I'm going to leave you here for about an hour, and your implant systems are going to run a self-test and then the acclimation. It'll walk you through everything."

"What do I do, is there a keyboard or a mouse or something?"

"You'll... you'll understand." Then, the dog strode right out of the room.

"Hey, what the... great, I guess the future doesn't give you any more time with a fucking doctor, huh?" I turned to address the medbot. As I focused on it, a small indicator appeared over its head, and then expanded into a notification display that showed a bunch of information, such as what the robot was assigned to do, and just "Medical Cyber Assistant" for the name.

"Do you require the doctor's assistance?" the robot asked, making eye contact.

"No, no, I just..." I looked between the canine thing and the words hanging in space. "Okay, okay, let's proceed with the acclimation."

[YES] rolled up into view at the end of it, and then the most insane thing I ever saw started to happen. I could see the room perfectly normally. I could see myself if I looked down, at least as much as I ever could; I could see the medbot; I could see all the equipment and storage racks; and then I could see a nearly infinite amount of other stuff presented to me. Look here, look there, follow these objects, identify these from a list, think of them, think of them with words, say the words out loud - after the first few minutes, I lost track of just what I was doing and just followed instructions as they were given.

It's hard to explain seeing something like words hanging in space. It wasn't like even the really good VR and AR stuff I had back home. It wasn't like the fox play simulation I used to tinker with. That obviously wasn't real, even if it was easy to pretend. This stuff was real. It was there, until I tried to touch it.

--

I completely understood why people had made fun of me for using the wrist computer. The ocular implants were terrifyingly good. Also, I had a lot more stuff implanted into my body than I realized, and as soon as I got home, the very biological nerve blocks wore off and it felt like someone had stabbed me through in about ten places and then hung me from a wall for a week.

I had a medical delivery waiting for me in my secure box, and it contained some pain medication. My implants explained it as "non-habit-forming pain receptor blocking agent", or rather, that's the actual description. It had some brand name I can't remember. When I took it via a nasal spray, I felt like I'd taken a few vicodin, like I was swimming in a gold and grey haze. When it wore off, the only reason I wanted to take it again was because I went back to hurting.

After about a day and a half of rolling around in bed, fitfully sleeping, and staring listlessly out into the greenery behind the apartment... the daze wore off and I didn't feel quite so bad. I went out to get something to eat in the food court, and immediately ran into Marece. He looked surprised; too bad I wasn't Selnari so I couldn't tell if he was lying. At least, if surprise is an emotion.

"Oh, you're walking around normally after all that."

"After all what?" I squinted at him. My newly-omnipresent augmented reality told me that he was not just 'Marece' but 'Anokh Marece Darencalleh', and just as I suspected and he kind of had told me, he worked for the Daleon Station Social Services.

He put his ears back, looked up with his eyes, and then chuffed loudly. "Do not call me anything other than Marece, please."

"Yeah, alright, as long as you never call me Harry," I shrugged. "So after all what?"

"You got ocular implants and you were just looking at my biometric card. Are you surprised I know? I can see your biometric card now, at least the full one, and you're also not wearing your wristcomp. And you're wearing that outfit so you're obviously feeling better."

Instead of someone calling me up for my food, I saw a notification floating over by the cart vendor and I got up to retrieve my plate. When I returned, I circled behind the hare. "This is my everyday outfit. What, you think I'm gonna walk around in shorts and sandals or somethin'?" For the record, Marece was wearing black utility shorts and sandals, and a brown leather harness. He rolled his eyes.

"The recovery can be a little intense. Robosurgery is an everyday thing, however, having things jabbed into various parts of your body is still having things jabbed into various parts of your body."

"I know all about jabbing things in various fuckin' parts, that's for sure," I growled, and started eating. For the sake of comparison, let's say I was eating carne asada and a pineapple coconut tamale. That would be some kind of seasoned meat, and one of those Hooly things.

"Mmm," Marece looked over my food. "You've really settled in. No longer breaking cultural rules, you're letting robots insert things into your eyeballs, and then I presume you'll be letting someone insert something into your ass later tonight." He pointed a recyclable fork at my Hoolyrito.

"Is that why these things are so popular? I mean, sure, they clean you out. Maybe you Selnari just a very fuckin' regular species." When I said that, he looked flatly back. "Regular. You know, regularly... shitting..." I shrugged and ate my food like it was nothing.

"Really, I am impressed you got the surgery so quickly. Did they have anything interesting to say afterwards?"

I shrugged. "No, they just kind of shipped me back home here. Although I was in kind of a daze."

Marece looked surprised, and not like when he saw me walking about. He had his crazy hare eyes on, and I was pretty sure he'd said something he didn't mean to. "Oh. I just imagine... there has to be something interesting about your bloodwork or something, after all, you're from Earth and supposedly from quite a while back."

"I mean, it's not supposedly, unless everyone's lying to me."

"There's actually some contention as to what happened. The reason being, as you've discovered, there are people who came here on your ship and there are people who did not come here on any ship. Let me rephrase that - left Earth, obviously you have to come to this station on a ship unless you're born here."

"What do you believe?" I leaned back in my food court chair, my hunger having turned to a slight sour stomach. It felt like just some recovery pains, as opposed to conversation, although the topic did make me feel squeamish and restless right into my bones.

He leaned onto the table. "It's not so much the five hundred year part. It's more whether you were some offshoot of humans left meandering through space - or on some other sort of multi-generation pilgrimage, in the case of some others - or whether, as us Hener believe, that you truly are from an alternate dimension caused by a particular event in early Selnari history. It's quite an explanation. Are you sure you want to hear it while you're eating?"

I tried to have a few more bites, and that was it. "I hate to waste food, but I think that painkiller stuff I'm on isn't so good for my stomach." Also, you can't tell me I'm something I know I'm not.

"Ahh, you'd think that they could engineer that out over time, but I suppose painkillers are painkillers. At least you can't get hooked on it." As he spoke, and continued eating, he kept looking me up and down.

"Hey, if you're Hener, aren't you supposed to wear that harness thing by itself?" I spoke up.

"There are levels of adherence. It's more like I can wear it, and I cannot wear the harness on top of other clothing. You cannot wear it at all. And, despite being furry, I tend to get cold."

Back at my apartment, I felt tired for around an hour after eating, and then experienced the glorious production courtesy of one fragrant and delicious Hooly burrito thingy. In other words, I pooped my entire colon out. Shortly afterwards, I got hungry enough to eat an energy bar, and also started feeling much better still. Maybe my recovery's really going well. I wonder what the fucking bunny rabbit meant about something interesting from the doctor. Well, Mister Wolf, it seems you have an unusually large penis. Really? It's always been like that.

Just thinking of the comedic interchange, I started to get horny. Well, shit. I wonder if I can go out and fuck, or if something got implanted where it'll get fucked with by all the... fucking. I put my leather outfit back on, added the cowl mask, and looked in the mirror. I definitely need to go out fucking. I consulted the medical interface in my implants, which showed my body and slowly filled in various areas with green - I got stuff inserted in all those places??- and then gave a message of, [ACCEPTABLE RECOVERY PROGRESS. YOU ARE NOW CLEARED FOR STRENUOUS ACTIVITY.]

I immediately thought of foxes, and how I was going to strenuously something them.

--

I could have tried one of the other 'Mezzanine' SEPs but maybe it was the familiarity of Mezz-5 that drew me back. Or maybe it was that thing that makes you, when you have to piss in the outdoors, pick the same tree over and over even if you're fucking living in a forest. Rrrh, wolf territorial bullshit, growl growl.

I went back to that same club I'd visited before, and this time had a very different experience getting into it. What had looked like a rather boring little staircase hidden by some kind of mirage hologram, became a fantastical entryway once it was undisguised. Also, I was behind someone else, and they disappeared when they went inside - they seemed to walk right into the boring facade without the illusion, and were completely invisible. That seemed a bit concerning; my implants were responsible, and if I didn't know any better, I'd have thought something impossible had happened. If they could make someone entirely disappear, they could make someone entirely appear. We had worries about that back on Earth, and meanwhile, the environment was making everyone actually disappear so I guess we just had a lot of problems.

I hadn't paid attention to what time of day it was now - just at dinner time - and found that the club was only modestly busy. The bartender on duty was not the gruff cannon-dicked leather-rhino, but a buck whitetail deer who was in some ways very pretty and in others kind of frightening. He out-glared me, except it was a down the muzzle kind of glare like I wasn't as important as he was, and he was also taller than me thanks to a pair of leather hoof boots. Now there was something I had kind of forgotten about - I'd lost track of that particular fun fetish once everyone went indoors and virtual, and my own sex costuming had receded.

I also wasn't coming up on Prak, so I could just take in the sleek and sex-mood colorful decor without being instantly sucked into the slimy-cocked Hener wolf beckoning me. No slimy-cocked wolf here; that seat was empty.

"I'd ahh, order something fancy off the bartender special menu," I said, attracting the deer's attention from what he was looking after (the entire rest of the club). "But. I kinda can't read that." I gestured to the fancy menu display on the bar.

He turned and squinted at me. "Cade told me about you-"

"Who the fuck is Cade?"

He cleared his throat after being interrupted. "Earth-Wolf," he said. "Can't you translate the menu? You have augments."

"I can do a lot of fuckin' things, but it's more fun to have someone else do them for me." Growl growl, I couldn't figure out how to turn on the translator overlay fast enough. I did, and the interestingly glyphic writing was translated romanji-style... into equally unreadable English words. "I think the problem, is that I'm not from around these parts, and so I can't read TIL even when it's written in Earth-Wolf." Also I couldn't get the translator to then also convert to actual common English fast enough. "So, I'll just have that purple one."

"Of course," he said, and started to prepare a few bottles. Instead of pouring the drink, he stood there. "You need to pay." He motioned at the object I would have bumped my wristcomp against. Then, grinning, he lifted a hand, and demonstrated.

I felt incredibly stupid, because somehow I had paid for food earlier, or maybe someone just felt bad for the confused Earth Wolf and let me skip the boop-boop transaction bullshit. I moved my hand over the sensor pad and was shocked to see a dramatic color overlay shoot from my arm down my index and middle finger, and then the payment info popped up. Forty-two credits. Yikes, I think?

"Do you know what the name of this club means? It is also in TIL," he said, and I then recognized that he wasn't just curt, but had a Hener accent. He then motioned with his hand, and the club's name appeared in space in the same TIL glyphs as outside on the building. He said something that sounded like 'Farn-eyl', except there were some consonants and glottal stops and a melodic tone in there which weren't used in anything I knew how to speak. "It means, Front-Tail."

I squinted behind the eyes of my mask. "Front-Tail, huh." Now that I'd paid, he let the letters hang in space, while he produced my drink. I looked around; already, two more people had come in behind me. Nothing was particularly special about them, if you remove the fact that they were wearing flashy and dramatic outfits worthy of a medieval political drama that was also a bondage porno flick. Well, they were male, as I was, and the buck... "Oh. Is that like a Tark word for 'penis' or somethin'?"

He grinned down his muzzle again and presented the drink forward. "It is a pun for that, yes."

Once more, I felt a shock of being culturally stupid. I sniffed at the drink, and instantly forgot about feeling stupid. It smelled like a liqueur, a mix of caramel and fruit, and it wasn't just purple but pearlescently purple. Imagine pearly handsoap and pearl sake and blueberry puree. I really like whiskey - I'm a cigar and whiskey kind of wolf - but I won't say no to a tail-curler cocktail. The sting of whatever made it alcoholic was just another flavor note or whatever they're called.

I gave him a bob of the drink, which he responded to the way I hoped with a bob of his muzzle and antlers in turn, and went to wander around the club. I would later learn that I in fact was ordering that bar's version of one of the most popular 'cocktails' around, basically the Selnari version of a martini or a cosmo or long island ice tea or something, so at least I wasn't making a tacky mistake.

There was no 'action' yet, with the scant number of patrons either sitting about and watching me - staring at me - go by, or paired up or in groups chatting in a mix of understandable english, slang, or TIL. I leaned against a wall and looked out over a room that was explicitly laid out with loungeable booth areas, where I could stand and see people and yet they probably wouldn't feel on display. I thought about the language issues. My brain had automatically filtered people out if they weren't speaking English. I vaguely knew pieces of various languages but had never bothered to learn an entire second fucking language. You know, I was American, right? Here was different; TIL was unfamiliar as well as unintelligible, and some of the sounds seemed difficult to even make, like tuvan throat-singing and harmonic whistles and purrs. I had the same problem with slang though, and some Selnari seemed to speak in almost a pidgin English that was just understandable enough to lure me in, and then incomprehensible to put me back off-

Someone was staring at me, and not the 'you're horny and it's shining on me like a spot light' thing that Cara the slutty hyena had told me about. They were staring at me in the way that says, very loudly without words, YOU. It was the rhino bartender, only he was in the furthest 'booth' in the room and clearly not tending bar.

I walked his way, finishing my drink in the process, and set it down on the table in front of him with a rude clunk. "Antlers up at the bar said Cade told him about Earth-Wolf. You started this Earth-Wolf bullshit last time, so that means you're Cade." I also later found out that no, he didn't start anything, it had been used by someone on a news program.

He snorted. He was wearing a bit more of a dramatic outfit than before; what I would term an 'executioner's hood' of black leather that exposed his eyes, muzzle, and horn; a sleeveless leather vest with shoulder pieces almost like pauldrons; leather gauntlet gloves that looked made for law enforcement beatdowns; leather chaps; engineer-style riding boots; and nothing to rein in his big, fat cock. "Earth-Wolf."

"My name's Hawk," I said, and he squinted at me as if he didn't believe it. "Don't I look the part? Look at this shit," I gestured to myself, and glared at him, with a turn-up of the left side of my muzzle. "Aren't you a bartender?"

"I'm not at work."

"So what, you shit where you eat?" I gestured to the seat generally next to him in the booth.

Instead of offering it or moving over, he stood up, and moved to stomp right past me. He bumped me hard to the right side of my chest, but didn't keep walking, and put his hand up on my coat. "Come with me."

"What if I don't wanna?"

He shrugged. "Then don't come with me."

I couldn't fault that logic. I followed him, just like the previous time. Instead of leading me out into an alleyway, he led me into a part of the club that looked more purposeful. There was a hallway of rooms, some of the open while a person cleaned and prepared them. Fuck rooms. He didn't lead me into one of them. He led me into the staff door at the end of the hallway, which also had an emergency exit sign in English and TIL. He walked into a utility storage and wash room, and stepped to the side. "Get the door, and lock it."

I kicked it back shut with my boot, then turned to figure out how to lock it. There wasn't an obvious way save for a pad near the frame; when I put my hand near it, I got more phantom glowy lines onto my fingers, and then, "Protect?" and a TIL character. I picked "Yes", with my mind. Don't try and think how I actually picked things in the AR interface - it won't make sense unless you're doing it, trust me.

"You gonna tell me about some other underground, nearly-illegal den of sin?" I said.

"No, I'm going to fuck you."

I looked around the room again, surprised, and down at myself. "I'm not really dressed for getting fucked, more like doing the fucking-"

"If you don't want to, just say so and leave."

I looked at the door. "Well, I uhh, I mean I literally... didn't dress thinking someone was gonna fuck me, and I usually keep my clothes on when I fuck... I mean you're the one with the chaps-"

"I am going to fuck you," he snorted, and jabbed me in the pec with two fingers. "Did you have Prak? Do you want to fuck other people later? I won't give you any now. If I do, then you will wear out and won't have fun and ruin the rest of your night."

This Cade guy seemed to be really gruff and curt and, abruptly, a little bit considerate. "Alright. Also, I might need... a little help, you know, a little warm-up. That thing's pretty thick," I gestured to his cock, which was slowly and steadily throbbing with his heartbeat up to thick and upcurved. If it wasn't as thick as my wrist, it at least looked that way.

"Alright," he said, and rummaged through some things in a few boxes. "Do you do other drugs?"

I laughed, a nervous kind of sputter. "I mean, I get stoned and drink a bit... stoned, uh, smoking or otherwise consuming uh, cannabis... do you know cannabis is? Weed? Pot? Is that a thing in space? Poppers, for sex, sometimes..."

He squinted, then held something up. It looked a bit like one of those fabric white dust masks you wear when mowing the lawn or sanding something, though it was in a plastic baggie and just slightly more fashionable. "Ease."

"Ease?"

"Ease. To ease, to make easy. That's what it's called."

I put my eyebrow spots up as far as I could. I could feel them running into the inside of my cowl mask. "Oh. Like poppers. Yeah that's, that's fine."

"Pull down your pants, and bend over right there," he then pointed to a handwashing sink in the corner of the room. It wasn't very large - I couldn't have bent over it fully to put my junk in it or anything, just use it as a handle.

"You're really pushy, aren't you, no fucking nonsense," I said, undid the drop front of my leather pants, then was just about to undo the buttons that held it closed at my waist when he walked up and grabbed at the back. "Huh?"

"You have a zip," he said, and I felt him unzip it, then a draft rush in against my fur from under my tail to the top of my balls. Oh shit oh shit I've had a fucking ass-zip in my pants this entire time how did I not notice that I guess I can't see my fucking ass very well most of the time but I have to put the damn things on, why didn't I notice, fuck that drink was kinda strong. "My kind of asshole Earth-Wolf."

"Hey, you know, is this like, did I fuck something up when I went to that other place, with the cyborg dog guy and stuff, like I kinda went almost too far with this fox there but he liked it, though I almost got in trouble, I mean am I really in trouble?"

"I want to fuck you. I saw you look at me when I pissed for the little cleaning robot. You wanted my dick."

"I've been, ahh, informed that I somehow project extreme horniness out at everyone all the time and I can't control it and I'm not aware of it-"

"Do you not want to do this?"

"No, no, I mean... I mean yes, I just... the situation, you know? It wasn't what I came out here for."

"I am filthy," he said, and unpacked the little mask from its baggie. He stepped behind me, then reached around with one hand and held me by the upper chest, while he pressed it up to my muzzle. "Breathe a couple of times."

I inhaled. While it did not smell like poppers, it did have a noxious vaporous quality, and actually smelled extremely strongly of cologne musk. I got two inhales before he took it away and tossed it aside.

Then, he pulled his right glove off, and grabbed from another box. He withdrew a green rubber sanitary glove and pulled it on that hand, then reached up and stuck his index and middle finger into not just his mouth, but his throat. He gagged slightly, swallowed, then took them back out, slimy with spit and throat mucus. Then, he reached under my tail and started to stroke my ring.

"You're really something, you know that? You're like me, if I was a rhino, and didn't talk so much, and fuck, holy fucking shit." The stuff he had me sniff was definitely the same idea as poppers, in that it gave me a massive delirious rush and also made heat flow compulsively to my cock, balls, and asshole. I could feel myself throb and loosen as he fingered, and those two thick fingers went right in. I could feel his hand twitch as much as I flinched; I don't think either of us expected it.

Unlike poppers, it didn't make me feel like I was instantly getting a migraine. So that was a plus.

He slowly worked his fingers in and out, and on one withdrawal, twisted them and curled them downwards. I staggered against the sink, bumped my head forward into the room corner above it, and wrinkled my lips up underneath the top jaw part of the mask. It was a prostate massage the way that those intense masseurs will fold you in half and suplex you into the floor like a massage is a wrestling match. I thought I was going to instantly ejaculate, then piss, and then just convulsed inside with the fastest prostate orgasm I'd ever experienced. He pulled his fingers out, then rummaged around and came back with a single-use packet of lube. It was white and creamy and he squeezed it out onto his cock, then massaged it around, leaving his green-rubbered fingers streaky with white.

I looked at all of this happening with my masked face over my jacketed shoulder, completely aghast. This Cade guy had a mask but I could still see his expression, and it was as dull serious as his cock was veined and straining. He made eye contact with me, and his cock throbbed. "Do you have something to say?"

"Put it in before I fucking realize how big that thing is and change my mind."

He stepped forward and nudged the head against my pucker. His glans was mushroomed enough that his foreskin stayed back if he didn't yank it forward; I felt it pushing back against me, denting in instead of spreading. I pushed my rump further back, pressed outwards, and HAH! It cramped me up and I grimaced, snarled, and pulled forward.

"Is something-" he started to say.

"Shut up and let me batter my fucking asshole with it so it'll go in," I growled, and pushed back over it again. Big, Again, though less of a cramp. And again, and again, until I had enough lube inside me that each movement made a wet, fleshy unplugging sound when I pulled off. If he was seven inches, it would be with him squashing his pubic area back with a hand. It felt like he was three wide, though. "Okay. Okay. Now you can... now you can do whatever you want."

He tugged back out himself, and then pumped forward. I just about jumped off my boot toes and only didn't lurch into the wall because my thigh banged the sink just above my knee. That "Ease" stuff really worked, however, getting fucked is still getting fucked. I like to be kind of erratic when I start working someone over; this rhino guy did not. He thrusted steadily, the only change being to go deeper as I loosened up and pressed back. He wasn't that long, so I didn't have to jog sideways to make him go past that whatever inside always feels like it gets in the way; and it wasn't even a minute before his leatherclad hips and bare groin flesh were smacking against my fur.

"Why... why are we in a fucking utility room..." I groaned, and pressed my hooded head against the wall, splinted ears bent down by the hard surface.

Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack. "I'm filthy. You're filthy. You want a bed, you find one later for your fun time."

He curved up and so I didn't get the kind of prostate massage he'd given me with his fingers, or I'd have gotten if I was on my back or in a sling or riding him. Which was fine, because judging how he treated it with two fingers and how he was hammering me like a fucking machine, I'd have howled and thrown up and then pissed it off of me. Even so, if I clenched and pressed at the right moment, rocked back and forth just right, I felt the quaking convulsions of a prostate orgasm well up and subside.

Smack smack smack smack smack, now without any periods between them. He grabbed me by the hips, by the bunched-down leather pants, and even grabbed me by one shoulder using his clean, leather-armored hand. He didn't reach around to touch my cock - if I moved with him, I could feel it swing forward, sometimes hard enough to hit my stomach if I clenched.

"Do you want to watch?" he asked, while not stopping.

"W-watch? There's no fuckin' mirror in here," I mumbled, drooling literally strands of slobber out of my mouth while talking. There indeed wasn't a mirror - the room wasn't a bathroom, and had a sink just to clean one's hands or other items.

He pulled something out of a vest pocket - again, while not even slowing down - and I thought he was holding a smartphone.What the hell does he have a phone for, we have fucking eyeball implants, is that a camera, do people use cameras in space. _ He pressed something and there was a chiming sound, and then he flung his hand upwards like he was holding a small box of _thingies and wanted to hurl them around the room like a jerk. Five small objects flung out of the box and instantly started to buzz and whirr softly, like large polite bumblebees.

"What the hell is that?" I tried to shrink away, and he just pulled me back, for an all-caps hip-SMACK.

Four of the objects spread out on either side of me, while the fifth went up above. They all hovered in the air, and slowly moved about in cycles.

"So you can watch, have a recording, pictures to show your friends, Cade fucked you until you howled like a wild Earth-Wolf," he said.

"Are those fucking cameras? Did you have fucking drones in your pocket?"

He grabbed onto my tail and kept it from moving around as he kept pounding me like he was beating down bread dough or tenderizing a big steak or driving a building piling into the bedrock with one of those smoke-spewing banger things. If you're only from space, just imagine something you hear about in history about how they build stuff on backwards planets like Earth. One of the little drones buzzed down to where my tail would have swatted it if it weren't clutched in his lube-slimed green-gloved hand.

"Do you want to see right now?"

I must have mumbled yes, because I got a prompt in my AR display. Thankfully, I'd put it in do not disturb mode so I couldn't get any other notifications - this one seemed to be allowed through, and asked, [ACCEPT LIVE MEDIA STREAM?] Sure, why the hell not. I remembered a long time prior - five hundred years and about twenty more on top of that - a situation where I was tied up and fucked by an entire room full of 'tiger drones', big tiger hybrid guys in full-enclosure rubber suits, while they had me wearing video goggles showing me the feed from a camera. The situation had been extremely unsettling; if you ignore the fucking and the drones and the bondage part, seeing yourself externally like that instead of whatever is in front of your eyes instantly gives you an out of body experience. On the other hand, I often just randomly thought about it, and always got hard and antsy when I did, so it was extremely exciting.

This was not that; I got to see a virtual display showing me the different camera angles. I didn't have any control of them; I opted to just let them cycle through. A closeup looking down of his hips slamming into me, his hand holding my tail, his black shaft disappearing and reappearing; my face, masked and grimacing, strands of drool hanging off my jaws, a twitch and a little wider each time he hit the spot; a wider shot from the other side, my whole body lurching and swaying as his stout hips slammed into me; a shot from 'behind and to the side', which showed that there was some unrepentant leatherclad black fantasy wolf bent over a sink and being pounded by a wrecking ball pro-wrestler of a rhino dressed like he was in a heavy metal music video, without any crucial detail; and then a shot from underneath - it was the top view drone having moved - showing a much better view of his cock pummeling into my hole, stretching the ring back when he pulled his glans free, huge leathery balls smacking up and providing a good bit of the sound, and my own black shaft swaying and dripping precum. As I watched, a big slobber of semen gushed out, without any following it. As I watched, I felt that one wave of orgasm hit and then... my muscles just kept getting interrupted and I couldn't keep it going.

"Ahh, ahhh I can't cum like this! Fuck!" I yelled.

"Do you-"

"Don't fucking stop, just, just I can't cum like this, you're too fucking hard at it!"

"Earth-Wolf likes it. I like Earth-Wolf," he said. His ability to speak common English seemed to degrade as he got closer - he snorted and huffed and didn't exactly fuck any faster or harder, just with a more urgent jerking movement.

I really couldn't cum like that. Some guys don't cum or even get hard while being fucked, which made me feel weird the first few times until I realized that I'd just take their guttural moaning as proof that they liked being railed with ten inches of the best fucking wolf dick they'll ever see. Is it really? Well, I always said it was, and they'd agree or I'd smack them until they did. I, on the other hand, 100% would cum while being fucked - from being fucked - would be fucked specifically in order to blow off hands-free. Except right now, where his cock kept triggering some anti-reflex that spoiled each attempt to orgasm. Honestly, that was just fine, because how I actually felt was amazing. My entire experience of the world was ninety percent the sensation of a thick, thick cock sliding back and forth, dragging back and forth, punching in and out of my asshole; and ten percent seeing it happening from any of five different perspectives chosen just by basically thinking of which one I wanted to see.

Since I very loudly proclaimed that I wasn't going climax while being treated like that, "Cade" kept doing what he wanted to do until he pushed in all the way and stayed there, flexing his muscles under his leather with a few telltale squeaks as he ground that last inch or so back and forth. He made a very loud sound that was equal parts human moan, something like a cow's moo, and then a hollering, "FUCK!" It's nice to know that English profanity has staying power. I want to say I could feel him shoot, however, I really wasn't in the headspace to detect the subtle hot squirts of someone orgasming inside me.

I did, however, see a fantastic mess when he yanked out. I think he intended to shoot a final squirt against my ring, however the creamy glop missed me by an whole couple of inches; the little under-viewing drone dodged out of the way just enough that it didn't get fouled and I could still clearly see my literal black hole gaping as his spunk slid right back out and hung from the rim like a very disgusting drool.

That made me cum; I pounded a gloved fist on the wall several times, clenched my jaw, and made a pitiful wolf noise as my cock jerked and pumped seed all over everything under and in front of me.

Right afterwards, he helped me stand up; I guess I was sliding down from buckling knees, although I think he also wanted me to see the mess. It looked like someone had taken a restaurant squeeze bottle of mayonnaise and flicked lines of it all over the sink and some on the wall, like some fancy food presentation of a boring-ass chicken breast.

I twisted out of his grip and immediately backed against the wall, stuck a boot forward on the floor, and braced there. "I'm okay, I'm okay," I groaned, and looked around. The video feed flicked away, and his little camera drones formed up into a small rectangle that he 'caught' with their holster, before he tossed it back into a vest pocket. "Fuck. Are people gonna come in here 'cuz I banged on the fuckin' wall?"

He shrugged. "No. You have the recording for another day if you want to save it."

I looked down at myself. Amazingly enough, I hadn't made a mess of any of my outfit. I grabbed a towel from the sink and wiped at my ass, then grunted as I reached back to zip myself up. It felt like if I wiped too hard, I'd shove the towel inside. "So what'd you think, huh? You like fucking Earth-Wolves? I'm the only one you'll ever meet."

He shook his head. "I've met another one. I don't remember his name. It was years ago. He'd come the long way. That's why I wanted to fuck you. You liked it. You were surprised. So was he."

Huh. I adjusted my gloves, checked my coat, and then paced around the cramped room. "Nice trick with the little things. I guess that's how you film porn around here, huh? Anyway... what was that you said about Prak?"

"If you want to go have your own fun, now do it. You'll feel like you haven't even climaxed. You can have all the fun you want at that nameless place down the back alley."

"Who said I'm going there?"

--

I walked out into the back alley, thanks to Cade letting me out the staff door without setting off an emergency exit alarm. I definitely, one hundred percent, wanted to go to that apparently nameless 'dark interests' club again. Now that I'd been screwed like a two by four, my head was clear enough to fill back up with more of my fantasies. Those fantasies involved foxes. Specifically, the other two foxes that I hadn't gotten to play with before.

Despite it being early, there were actually more people in the not-very-underground underground club. I had to wait about twenty minutes to go from the front foyer into the actual space. There were no crazy augmented reality tricks, either. It looked just as shitty and repurposed as it had the first time, and smelled just as enticingly cock-rank.

The bar room was also packed. I wouldn't have had a place to sit down if I wanted one. Not only were there obvious patrons, but there were obvious... companions sounds like a nice word. Nah, obvious sex slaves. I could tell because those were all naked, and had some sort of collar on, although they were leather, chain, or rubber and not the kind of shock collar I'd worn.

I went up to the bar during a lull; robo-hound was there. "Hey, remember me?"

He muzzle-bobbed.

"I gotta question. How come none of your... your guys here, have any of those indent shock collars?"

He didn't miss a beat. "Those are illegal in-network. Also, we trade guys around between clubs so much it'd be a pain in the ass. You a cop?"

"Do I look like a cop? I'm a fucking Earth-Wolf. God dammnit."

"Been talking to Cade, that rhino at the cock bar down the way, huh. He wouldn't shut up about you. You want a drink or another round with someone? There might be a wait on the someone."

I wasn't sure about a regular drink. "You got that Prak stuff people drink? I don't know what it's called. Not the leafy shit out of the dispenser in the room. The green glop."

He nodded and poured me a thin glass of nuclear green liquid. "Coming up." I went to pay with just my hand, and he raised an eyebrow. He would have raised both; the more I saw him, the more I realized the cyborg-implanted side of his face was mostly slack. He managed to talk well enough. "You know who you want? You read the menu out in the foyer?"

"What fuckin' menu? You have a menu? Shit, I used to go to a place like this back home. Things don't change much sometimes, huh." I leaned on the bar and looked over towards the door 'into the back'. "You remember those foxes I went after last time? They still here?"

He nodded.

"How much for all three of 'em?"

Robo-doberman was wiping the bar after having spilled just a little Prak Juice and stopped mid-wipe. "You can't have more than one companion to one customer."

"What kinda rule is that? I have one dick, two balls, one asshole, one muzzle, two boots, two hands, and a fuckin' tail. I could handle ten fuckin' foxes." I looked at the drink, and wondered if I should drink it right now and get horny in cyber-pooch's face, or wait until I convince him to go my way.

"It's... it's not my rule," he said, and wrinkled half of his muzzle.

"Okay, so, how about we go back and I can take a look at 'em to see which one I wanna pick."

He squinted at me. "We're busy and I don't wanna leave the bar. But, fine. Hey Shan, hold it down out here," he yelled over at someone who looked more like a barback than a bartender. They were a lion and, like the doberman, were a cyborg. Half of the fur was missing from his head on one side due to some kind of scarring, and he'd shaved the other off, giving him a ruddy mohawk.

We went back, and had to muscle past a few people to get to the door. Once we were in the bullpen or whatever they called it, I could already see the three foxes in their three 'cages'. Just like before, two of them looked bored and one of them looked dejected and unkempt. Now that I knew what I was in for, I could tell that he was very intentionally unkempt.

I stood in front of them and looked them over, one hand on my hip, the other dangling the Fuck Froth or whatever it was called. The dobie stood next to me, a bit too close for comfort. I caught him smelling me. I gave him a scowl, with extra lip in case he couldn't see it through my hood.

"You said that runt there, the other two were pickin' on him and you had to separate them, right?" I asked. The dobie nodded. I leaned close to his ear. "That's bullshit, it's just for fun, right?" I whispered. He nodded again. "It's like three hundred for half an hour, right. So that means all three are nine hundred."

"I can't do-"

I didn't have any cash, because there wasn't any cash. I did, however, have the ability to allocate money to my hand. I allocated twelve hundred. Then, for lack of knowing what to do, I tapped him with it and waved my hand in front of his face. "Remember, I'm a fucking Earth-Wolf."

"You can't bribe me," he said, crossed his arms, and despite what he had just said, I could see that he accepted the money.

"You got a room with toys in it? Equipment? Or just a dirty mattress and a condom dispenser?"

"Hang on," he said, and looked distant. "Alright," he turned and stuck his muzzle in my ear. He spoke inhumanly quietly, the sound piped into my ear like I'd stuck an earbud into it. "You're gonna take the dirty one, and I'll have the other two brought by in a few minutes."

"Hey, I got a question. Is he Hener?" The dobie shook no to my question. "What about those two? Either of them?" He nodded. I put my muzzle up to his ear again. "I want you to bring me one of their special fucking harness outfits. Not on them. Just bring it to me with them."

"You sure about that?"

"I'm real fuckin' sure about everything I say," I said. The dog opened the dirty fox's cage, unhooked his hobbling chain, and handed it over to me. I took it and followed the dobie back to the 'fuck rooms' with fox in head-hung tow, where we were led into a slightly larger room. It wasn't any cleaner, but there was a sling and what I always call a fuck bench, like a padded bench with picnic-table seats either side of it, as well as a noticeably stained leather couch.

"Alright, go sit there," I said to the fox, and directed him to the couch. He sat on it, one leg crossed, the other on the floor, and he continued looking dejected. The dog left the room. "Guess you don't get to play with the rich guys just yet. Don't worry. I've got a fun idea to keep you occupied. Your little friends from out there are gonna learn how not to mess with a poor little foxy friend."

I could see him trying to keep character, though he quirked an eyebrow spot up and flicked an otherwise saggy black ear. I shrugged, made a 'cheers' gesture, and drank the Prak stuff down. It tasted about like it looked; absurdly green.

Someone knocked at the door, and the dobie and another staff member - not the lion - herded the two other foxes in. The dobie also had some leather gear, which he tossed onto the room couch next to Dirty Fox. One of the two that had just come in gave the pile a look, then looked at me, then put his ears back. The dog and his friend - some other kind of dog, perhaps a black german shepherd? - then left and locked the door.

"This is perfect," I said. "I heard you two aren't very nice to this poor little foxy," I said, and pulled on Dirty Fox's shoulder. "I'm the big wolf in the room now, and you're all gonna do exactly what I say. And you two are also gonna do whatever he makes you do."

They looked at each other. My cock throbbed in my pants, and I unbuttoned and removed the front flap; now it could throb out in the open. This is the kind of shit I always fucking fantasized about. God damn. "Alright, Dirty Fox. You're gonna put that leather stuff on." He made a face at me that said, 'whoa, really?' and one of the other foxes made a face that I could easily place on Marece back when I first saw him. "Yeah, I'm not stupid. I know what that is. I know what you are, and I know what he is. Just because I'm some sort of bastard asshole wolf from some furry-animal version of Earth that doesn't exist or whatever, doesn't mean I'm ignorant. Selnari like sex and Hener like sex a lot, and they like their little pretty-boy pulling harness shit just as much. So he gets to wear it, and you get to kink your tail over the fucking moral violation."

I helped Dirty Fox out of his hobbling chains, and then sat back to watch him slowly put the leather harness, gloves, jockstrap, and tall boots on. One of the other two moved to cross in front of me towards Dirty Fox, and I picked my leg up and thumped a boot on the edge of the coffee table. Here it comes. I'm seeing triple. One fox, two fox, three foxes at my fucking beck and call. I clenched a gloved fist up to creak the leather and crack my knuckles. "No you don't. He's gonna play reverent sex fox. First things first. You two know how to shine a pair of boots? I know he does, he's one of those things." I pointed at the blocked fox, then looked over at the newly leathered fox. I made eye contact with him, we exchanged subtle muzzle bobs. Yeah, you're on my side, aren't you. "You, on that boot. You," I pointed to the other of the two 'mean foxes', "The other one. And you, Filthy Fox, you're gonna cuff them behind their backs."

The two Mean Foxes looked at each other.

"You're gonna lick my boots and then polish them with your face fur. And your little bullying victim there is gonna wipe your spit off your own fur if you get too messy, so you can keep doing it. You better be glad I didn't wear taller boots today." I put both legs up propped on the coffee table.

Dirty Fox went and cuffed each of the others. I'm pretty sure they were playing along, since multiple times one of them went to open his mouth to speak, then reconsidered and shut it. Neither looked 'happy' about the situation. One of them, the one who was likely Hener, was the more recalcitrant. "I said, you both lick my boots to a spit shine. Go on, Filthy Fox, convince him."

Dirty Fox gingerly scruffed the nude Hener fox and pushed his face down against my boot. That got a high growl out of the vulpine, who begrudgingly started to lick the black leather over my boot toe. Dirty Fox then rubbed his face against the leather, which did a reasonable job of making it shine a little more. It did a very good job of making me feel very, very full of myself. The other fox quickly leaned over and nearly fell against my leg, and started slurp-rubbing eagerly on his own.

"You, you come over here. Sit. No, kneel next to me," I gestured to Dirty Fox. He slinked onto the couch and adopted the posture. I leaned over and sniffed at his face, his neck, his chest, and then grabbed him by the harness and straightened him up so I could sniff further down as well. Even with his cock in the well-kept leather, I could smell it. He, to my delirious pleasure, _stank_of sex. "I bet these mean other foxes here will just love to hear how I strangled you until you came while I was fucking you."

That made the Hener one stop what he was doing. Dirty Fox lifted a black-gloved hand and the other fox made an oh shit face and quickly returned to work.

I pulled Dirty Fox close to me, nuzzled at his face, and then kissed him. He whimpered and tried to look down, but I managed to fight his muzzle back up. "What's the matter? You're the good fox."

Part of me really wanted to make the other two actually lick every inch of my boots. The other part, that was currently boiling over with sexual energy thanks to Prak, had already seen enough of that particular humiliation. I continued talking. "I know. I bet you're feeling left out," I said, and gave Dirty Fox a nudge. I put one of my boots onto the floor, which caused that fox - Hener Fox - to topple over and land on his side with a groan. "Go on, put your boot up here," I tapped at the 'coffee table'. I don't think anyone had ever put coffee on it. Cum, piss, and I'm pretty sure some kind of drug residue, yes.

Dirty Fox stepped his boot up and adopted the cutest, most unsure 'pirate stepping on a barrel of rum' posture I'd ever seen.

"Good. Now, you lick his boot. In fact, both of you, lick." I need a whip. The room had all sorts of toys, none of which were in reach. I got up and stalked over to some racks and cabinets, and loudly banged through them. Is this a muzzle? Is that a jaw spreader? Does this ass plug SCREW IN? That hood doesn't have any holes! To my slight disappointment and also genuine relief, the canine-shaped hood without holes actually had micro-perforations. Whew. If this place really condoned real edge play, I'd nut before I turned around. I picked up the muzzle, jaw spreader, and then grabbed a simple strap flogger that could have been a thick belt strap riveted to a metal handle. I mean, it was one, it just didn't look mass produced but made bespoke out of the two items.

I want to explain something. I'm a sadist. I mean I've said it before, and I guess_demonstrated it_ a little. Obviously, something really bad happened to me in my life to make me take my own personal torment and black hole self esteem out on innocent whimpering fox sex slaves. My parents divorced when I was ten years old because my dad couldn't stop fucking around. In fact, he fucked around on my mom while she was pregnant with me, which is why I have a half-brother. Well, had, in the same way that I had two parents and a few friends and a former bar I lived on the top floor of, in the same way that I had a home planet. That tragedy obviously turned me into a person who likes to hurt others for sexual pleasure. Actually, I have no fucking idea why I like that. I definitely_do_ like that, and the worst part is, strip away all the Makes Me Feel Big bullshit, literally making someone feel pain, humiliation, degradation, even making them cry real tears, directly makes me aroused. Maybe it's just how my brain is wired.

I returned to the nascent scene to see the Hener Fox still on the floor and barely trying to get up - he'd rolled over to try and pull up to his knees - while the other one was in the process of moving to put his face to Dirty Fox's boot, and Dirty Fox looked like his erection was going to poke out of his Religiously Mandated Cock Pouch. I still couldn't really grok that there was a religious order that said sex was the most important thing in the world. What kind of 1970's softcore Italian porn movie plot is that?

"Get up," I snarled, and whacked Hener Fox on the rump. He instantly squealed, one of those natural fox noises that is unsettling to hear in the night and annoying to hear anywhere elese. "On your knees, you gotta kiss his boot leather, not the fucking cum stains on the floor." There were, in fact, cum stains on the floor. Was there an instruction sheet that said I got a discount if I shot my load on stuff? I didn't see it. Maybe it was an augment and I was too dumb at that stuff yet to figure it out. Speaking of augments, even though I was in Do Not Disturb mode, my ocular implants demurely told me someone was trying to contact me and it wasn't an emergency. Not who it was, just a little count that was slowly and steadily increasing. I bet it's that fucking rabbit.

Hener Fox required some physical assistance, and I let Dirty Fox do it. I stayed leaning back, unsure if I wanted to slowly jerk off while watching, or just threateningly curl and uncurl my gloved fist while watching the leather glisten in the room light. "I got an idea. Why don't you push them together? They can lick the same spot. Maybe'll it go faster." Dirty Fox responded by nudging Hener Fox to do just that. "Yeah. Make them kiss eachother while they wipe their fucking face-fur on my boot."

This Prak stuff is uncontrollable. I bet I can just sit here and clench inside until I cum, watching these fox sluts. Also, they don't fucking talk, do they.

I then tossed the strap to Dirty Fox. "Here, that one's a problem, if he keeps being disobedient, make him squeal again." When I said this, Hener Fox decided he didn't like being licked all over the face by the other fox, and kneeled more upright. I grabbed the leather muzzle, and brandished it. "Correction. He is being more disobedient, so make him squeal again. And then make sure he kisses the other fox. I want to see tongues tying into a fucking knot. And then put this on him." I handed the muzzle over to Dirty Fox.

I want to make real fucking clear that all three of these alien Selnari foxes were doing this because, in a general sense, they wanted to. They were okay with it. They had intentionally entered into short-term indentured service contracts where they would receive food, board, and the satisfaction of some or all of their sexual fantasies on a routine basis, in exchange for other people paying their contract holder for the chance to step into those sexual fantasies. I had been, in my lifetime so far, on all three sides of this kind ever-fluid sexual math equation.

All of that said, it sure didn't look like Hener Fox really wanted to make out with anyone. I saw actual disgust wrinkle into his muzzle as Dirty Fox approached him, face twisting up into aggressive bracing as Dirty Fox whacked him on the ass with the strap with a very un-practiced crack!, and when he didn't squeal, as Dirty Fox did it again. This time, Hener Fox moved although not out of the way, and the strap wrapped around his hip and the tip of it flicked at the side of his balls. He cried out - not a fox squeal but a very human yelp of pain - and he crumpled forward and hunkered into a ball as much as he could with his black-furred wrists handcuffed behind his lower back.

The other fox moved forward, leaned down, hunkered forward and nosed at Hener Fox's muzzle, then gave him a soft lick. Another lick. I thought I was going to lose it, and it only loosely included my ability to hold back a fucking orgasm.

I didn't have to tell Dirty Fox to pull the muzzle onto him; that one did it of his own accord, which required struggling on both sides as Dirty Fox tried to get both of Hener Fox's jaws into the leather sleeve. It was soft yet sturdy leather, and I could see the ridge of his lips and gums and even faint indentations of his teeth as he strained and huffed into it, the air and drool holes at the end whuffing and spritzing said substances while the leather puffed and sucked inwards.

I groaned and flexed one of my gloved hands, splayed my fingers, clenched it up into a squeaking fist, and without even touching my cock, started to clench and pump and fling wolf cum all over the few feet of space between where the three foxes were collected and my own sort-of-spitshined boots. I gritted my teeth, growled, snarled, glared at all of them, and then it felt like the room collapsed in on me.

I quickly stood up, clasped my codpiece pouch in one hand, and stomped towards and then through the door. I shut it behind me with a slam that startled someone else who was down the hall - a black panther and a tiger nearly twice his size who were about to enter a room. I turned the other way, and kept up the stomp. You disgusting piece of lupine shit, I thought to myself, it's not enough to make your home assistant AI system simulate slave foxes back on Earth, you have to find some real ones and use them like real-life cum-dump court jesters.

I paused before exiting the hallway to button my pouch back on, then stomped out the way I came. That wasn't the proper way to exit the building; I got some concerned looks by one of the staff members as I made my way around the slave cages, and then the lion out in the bar area actually moved to intercept me before I went back out into the foyer. The attendant there watched smugly as I pushed past an actual lineup of people and went out 'the front door' into the alleyway.

Thankfully, the lineup didn't continue out there, and no one else was in the maintenance corridor aside from one of the dome-shaped cleaning robots. Nonetheless, I still felt claustrophobic, and headed not for the back-door to Front-Tail, but hopefully to where the alleyway met up with some other normally-populated part of the Selnari Entertainment Plaza's Horny Hener Shadows labyrinth.

Apparently sensing that I was no longer doing something that involved other people, my ocular implant interface once again told me [You have received forty-seven contact notifications while in Do Not Disturb mode]

"Fine, fine, let whoever it is fucking talk to me!" I said, out loud, to no one in particular as I paused before bursting out from behind some hedgerow.

I turned around to face the length of the alley and, to my horror, foxes started to pour out of every available nook and cranny. Not anthro-hybrid walking and talking ones like I'd just been abusing; small feral ones that had to be computer simulations as they were too uniformly cute and also kind of cel-shaded. They coalesced into a mass that reshaped itself into a person-sized roiling mass of vulpine maws-and-paws, which then impossibly poof!'d into a recognizable person colored almost exactly backwards from the foxes.

"What the hell was that!?" I said, and suddenly wondered if anyone else would be able to hear me. I didn't hear my voice echo down the corridor. "And who the fuck are you?"

The person looked immensely surprised. "Oh! Oops I left the auto-dialer on! Well it's not dialing anything, I mean, there's no dial, did we even have dials on phones back home or was that before my time, I kind of don't remember, anyway! Hi! Hawk! You remember me, it's Mike!" The figure was vulpine, hybrid, and black-furred with red ears, hands, feet, and wore black spandex shorts. It was in fact Mike Jasek.

"How did you fucking get my.. My... rrrgh, my brain phone number or whatever?"

"You got eye implants! That's awesome! They're pretty cool, huh? I just kind of harvested it when we were standing around. I secretly connected to your wristcomp while you were ogling the glass of Prak juice I gave you. Just kidding, it's a normal contact interchange thing that people do."

"I don't remember fuckin' doing anything," I mumbled. My mouth felt dry and I felt about a mile away from being as horny as I had been after my most recent Prak-ing almost an hour earlier.

"Yeah, I guess I kind of surreptitiously did it," he rubbed at the back of his head.

"Can people hear us talking? Am I just yelling to myself in some fucking cum-stained sex-palace alleyway?" I looked around, feeling creeping paranoia again.

He shook his head. "No, their own implants will suppress it, and they'll see you kind of blurred out. I'm sure you've seen people looking like that. It's subtle. It's mostly their faces."

"What... what do you want? I was busy," I backed up and bumped against the wall. I had thought it was a privacy hedge, and no, it was a full-on fuckin' wall.

"Sorry! I uh, I can call back later, it's not really important-"

"I said I was_busy, I'm not busy _anymore," I growled. "Actually, I'm kinda... anti-busy. I, uh," and then I didn't know what to say.

"I got a notification that you now had AR implants so I thought hey, maybe I should see what that wolf's up to! I bet he's doing something interesting. Maybe he wants to catch up! Not like we were really amazing friends, just, you know, I mean, we're both from Earth and stuff." As energetic as he usually sounded, he also sounded just a bit pained.

My first reaction was to say no, I didn't want to do anything with anyone at all, go away, I want to be alone. However, I just thought that. Then I panicked. "You didn't just hear something, did you?"

"Huh?"

"I... didn't say anything?"

"You just asked if I heard anything."

"No, I mean before... so it's not when I think stuff? 'Cuz I use this shit by kind of thinking..."

His avatar shook its head. "Oh, no, you can't think things and have them go to other people. That'd be awful. That'd be the end of everything. The galactic government could read your thoughts. I doubt they even really want to read your email. I mean really, most people don't have anything useful to say about anything but their own problems. I used to have to read email logs back on Earth at one of my jobs. Actually, scratch what I said, because you can sort of talk silently, however you basically have to actually talk and just not make any sound. You _can_think a text message, but you see it before you send it."

I sighed and about five hundred pounds of tension left me. "So what, you want to go hang out or something?"

"Oh! Well, sure, you could come here. I have kind of a neat place. And I could show you some neat stuff! It's a bit weird to get into. It's kind of hidden. Fox dens and everything. I'll send directions."

A map of the station appeared in front of us, and some indicator progressively demonstrated where I was, to some tram lines, to the 'ass end of the station' (the sector where I lived), to the very asshole of that ass-end (which seemed to be where a lot of commerce trade ran through the ship docks), to a maintenance alleyway not unlike the one I was in, to a confusing [SYSTEM ERROR] display in the alley.

"Don't worry! That's not an error. I'm just fucking with the system with my privacy mirage. That's also the thing that did the Fox Explosion when I called you." He lifted a hand, made a gesture, and foxes started swirling around his arm. He made another one, and they subsided. "Anyway! You're welcome to come by!"

My abrupt rotten mood and paranoia had vanished, and it left me with a weary feeling that made me want to say, "Yeah, fine. It can't be any weirder than whatever else I've been up to lately."

I hung up, and headed out of the alleyway. The strange wall was not strange; it was just a wall with a door in it, that led out to the 'maze'. Time for a tram ride.

-

Mike apparently lived inside the Shipping District. There weren't a lot of apartments there, at least from what I could see in the AR map, though there was more temporary hotel space. My destination wasn't near either. It was a service alleyway in between a defunct backup utility docking section, and a small shipping company frontage.

Several people had described Daleon as being an asshole, an armpit, garbage, trash, and maybe at absolute best, working class. So far, where I lived was 'working class' and it was alright. The fancier parts near that Conformance Park where Cara had corralled me into hammering her pussy, they were outright nice. I'd say 'expensive downtown city condo on The Earth That Was nice'. So where was the trash?

The Shipping District. This was where I entered the station - I walked past Main Dock 4 and recognized it immediately. The Main Dock areas were spacious; everything else was not. While not Earth That Was claustrophobic science station stuff, everything was a maze of corridors and alleyways and double-stacked businesses. It felt dim, it smelled like unkempt people and machinery, and shockingly, for once I didn't get many of the danger, wolf! stares. Instead, I got the hey, don't get any closer, unless you want to find out why I smell stares. There were more than a handful of people generally dressed like me, although minus the flashy leather cowl hood, and a couple of them had outright helmet headgear on. They didn't look horny as much as on a mission. Other people seemed to regard them with contempt, slight shakes of the head, flicks of the tail, roll of the eyes.

I finally approached my destination, which gave me an even worse feeling. I wasn't just in the equivalent of The Docks in any big city; I was in the The Dock That No One Uses Except Criminals. The shipping company had an address, though the entrance had a 'closed' sign as well as the futuristic bar-and-computer-lock equivalent of chains and a padlock across it. The utility docking area had an even bigger version that indicated it was out of service. That left the alleyway.

I walked down it as indicated, and as soon as I got about ten feet in, a virtual fox materialized in front of me, chased its tail in a circle, and then bounded forward. This service corridor wasn't even an alley, but just an access pathway that led into some 'You Shouldn't Be Here' area like where Front-Tail was located. Very tight, pipes-and-hoses-and-wiring, a metal catwalk that made it impossible to be quiet. Then, the catwalk ended, like something had fallen and ripped the end of it clean off. I could look over the edge and see down far enough that if I fell, I wouldn't be climbing back up.

"Alright, little foxy, you gonna tell me what to do? Is this just a trick? Someone's gonna jump out and push me off?"

The fox chased its tail for a moment, then scampered towards the edge and pounced forward into empty space. It landed... on empty space.

I gruffed. "You gotta be kidding," I sighed, and walked forward. It was extremely hard to put my foot onto nothing, especially because when I did, there was no little ripple of the illusion being broken. I was standing in the air above a pit down into the station internals, like a cartoon coyote who'd walked off a cliff and hadn't yet remembered what gravity was. I walked another pace forward and my AR display gave a sudden eruption of flashing lights and a ["SENSOR READOUT ERROR"] message I'd never seen before. It was too late. I walked smack into something that wasn't there.

"Whoops, sorry, it's all on manual," a voice sounded inside my brain. "And I was uh, distracted." [Down The Rabbit Hole...] appeared in front of me, and then a nauseating illusion of falling started as it appeared I was going down some sort of dirt hole. Yes, I yelped and ducked. Then, actual lights flickered around me, a bar that scanned down and a bar that scanned around. "Okay, you don't have any weapons! That wasn't a mirage, I actually have a scanner. Ok, you're good! You didn't fall! You didn't even move."

The 'wall' in front of me was actually a metal and plastic door. It had a small handwritten sign that said, "If you can read this, either you're my friend, or you're about to be food for my pet laser!" along with a cartoon of a doggish robot lasering some hapless X-eyed person.

The door slid open, and I walked into an industrial back room full of some junk and even more racks of green plants and glowing grow lights. A hybrid fox's head slowly peeked ears-first around the corner of the door at the other side of the room. "Hi," he finally said. Mike had dark reddish-golden fox eyes; I could swear they were even more red than he remembered, not like he had much whites to go bloodshot.

I sniffed. It smelled like dirt and plant, and a little floral from some blooming flowers. "I was expecting some fuckin' pot plants."

"Oh god no, those smell so bad," he laughed, and stepped into view. "Although I am very baked, which is why I was distracted. Uh, come on, you can... you know, come see the rest of everything."

Wherever we were, it wasn't supposed to be an apartment. I guessed some series of small lab rooms or maybe workshop areas. There were decorative posters, mismatched shelves, a few more plants, and I did catch a whiff of cannabis. The first one since I'd been defrosted. He caught me sniffing and took out a small pen-sized device.

"You want some?"

I shrugged. "Maybe." I felt a bit claustrophobic - this apartment wasn't really very spacious. It was overall bigger than mine but each area was quite cramped, and the ceiling was low while I was tall. I pulled my hood off, and felt a bit better.

We went into a bigger space, which was set up as a general living and dining space. Several display panels, some speakers, a big sectional couch that was made up of two entirely mismatched sets of very vehicular and also very synthetic-leathered seating, a kitchen nook area. I took a seat on the couch, and Mike excitedly and yet nervously sat down kitty corner to me. "Well, this is my place!"

"It looks like you're squatting in a run-down business." I said it as droll as I could.

He flatted his ears. "Uhh. I'm not squatting. I own it! I mean, as much as anyone owns stuff around here. And it's not run down, it's just, I don't run the shipping business, and my workshop stuff is... okay I'm getting ahead of myself, do you want anything to drink? Snacks? Weed?"

I set my hood on his coffee table. By coffee table, I mean 'some sort of industrial metal work table whose legs were shortened by very obvious torch cutting. "Is that a fucking Volcano?" A metal conical device sat on the surface, and there was an empty plastic bag with a nozzle next to it.

"I made it! I used to have one back home and I loved it. It's like the most weird and fetishy way to do weed without actually doing weird fetishy stuff! Although you don't have herb anymore, it's all these cartridge things." He unscrewed the end of his vape pen and stuck it into the top of the cone, causing the device to light up a control knob. He then took the bag nozzle and put it on top. "Anyway. Sorry if I was bugging you while you were... doing stuff." He gestured at my hood, and also sniffed towards me; meanwhile, the device bleeped and a soft whirr started, and the bag began to fill with fog.

I put my boots up on the coffee table, and now the only thing Mike seemed to look at were them. "Hey, at least I managed to DND myself. This implant shit is wild. Your fucking hidden entryway, walking out onto nothing? Falling down a hole? I fucking swear I had no idea there was a floor."

He leaned forward, and looked intently excitable. His tail curled around his lap and he held it against his thigh to keep it from lashing. "The implants don't make you see light, it's not like the AR visors back o-on Earth," he stuttered slightly and looked like he was going to burp, but just kept talking. "It directly interfaces with your optic nerve, as well as having basically a camera inside your eyeball, and if you want to just look out and see nothing, well, you can see nothing! Or everything! Or anything!"

"Yeah, that's a bit disconcerting," I said, and gestured to the rapidly filling bag. He unscrewed it and the device stopped whirring. He then handed it over. "I feel like I'm back in fucking college or something. I knew some guys who'd fuckin' sit around one of these like it was a campfire. Next you're gonna start playing 'Dark Side of the Moon' on your fuckin' hi-fi." I pushed the end of he bag nozzle against my muzzle and inhale. Yep, weed vapor, guaranteed. I inhaled it, held it for a few seconds, and then coughed noisily. "Fuck. I haven't done that in a while."

"So what the hell happened?" Mike sighed, and seemed to reverse course from being excited, to melting against the couch. Like his avatar, he was wearing what looked like black spandex bike shorts. Unlike his avatar, he also had a pair of futuristic riding boots on. He looked like a half-dressed kinkster. "I mean, to you."

"Didn't you see it on the news? 'Earth-Wolf Defrosted On Fraudulent Space Station'."

"For real, I mean, I... I... it's not like I miss you, I mean that sounds like, I mean, we, you kind of were my boss but not really, and it's not like we ever, you know, fucked around. Which is kind of weird, now that I think about it. I mean, you... and me... are kind of the fuck-around kind of people. Anyway, it's just, you know I don't run into other people from our Earth. I haven't seen any for years. And I start to... wonder if maybe, I'm just kind of nuts, and maybe I've..."

"We are definitely not from a fucking space station all along, foxy. Don't worry about that," I said, set the bag assembly down, and sighed. "You ever met Alzarre? Maned wolf guy, dressed kinda like a pirate, weirdo accent, always looked like he was about to fall over his own intoxicated ass? He called me up and gave me an offer he really didn't want me to refuse: pay some money, and we get onto one of those Dominion genesis ships. Dominion! What a fucking name. Like those religious whackos. So I did it. We did it. Us and some third person I didn't know, maybe he didn't either. One day, I'm in my apartment above The Pit, the next, I'm in a jumpsuit heading up to a space station to get on a ship. Being frozen was, well, that was fucking weird. They sedated me and put me in this bathtub-sized tank and shoved this giant fucking spike with hoses into my neck and then the next thing I know, two harried hybrids with weird accents were pouring me out onto the floor so I could throw up from every hole."

Mike's stoned discomfort became stoned rapture while I talked. "Wow. So someone got cryo-preservation to really work!"

"I guess it freezer-burnt my DNA or something, because I had to undergo some kind of genetic reconstruction. Thankfully, they gave me back my big dick and my rotten sneer." My face started to feel like it was floating away from my head. Ahh, fucking familiar-ass weed. "Then, they sold me into slavery, I got a shock collar put on me, and I was sent to some other station where this bull guy was squatting and running Prak farming operation." I delivered this next bit, and waited for Mike to either respond or just wait in turn. He didn't respond; I was kind of hoping he knew that Cal was another human from "Our Earth". So I was going to have to tell him. "The guy was this bull named Cal Hopswith. Like, Hopswith Nature Preserve. I think he was a cousin." Mike squinted, and then perked his eyebrow spots way up. "He ran a sex dude ranch in Lainsville, then sold it to the guy who sold The Pit to me, and who knows what happened then. I guess he ended up out here the way you did, along with this big, crabby white tiger named Strake who likes guns and threatening people. So there we are, farming this sex weed stuff, and the people who used to own the station show back up, in the form of mercenaries that go to kill everyone. We escape, come to this little station, and Bull Guy immediately is killed in an unfortunate freak accident right in front of us. I'm put into the system as a refugee, they stick me in an apartment, and now I'm a robot mechanic who goes to sex clubs to fuck foxes. It's like I rewound my fuckin' life back to when I was twenty, and now I get to do it all over again, except I remember everything and now I'm in fuckin' space." I licked my chops. "Fuck, this is good weed." I felt my sneer curling up and I chuckled almost too hard.

Mike's eyes were as wide as they could get, round black pupils instead of foxy slits. "I don't know who either of those two guys are," he said, blankly. "But they were from back home? From Lainsville?"

I nodded. "Yeah, 'the long way around'."

He squirmed in place.

"Hey, what the fuck is with you being underdressed? Every time I ever saw you, you were dressed in all kinds of fuckin' bonkers fetish gear stuff. I mean, I guess so was I."

"I was just.. I was just sitting around..." he flipped his ears back.

"Go put something interesting on. I'm not gonna fuck you, I'm done fucking for the day. I just... if I'm gonna be who I used to be, you go be who you used to be."

He looked extremely conflicted, and then extremely excited, and quickly disappeared. That let me have a few moments to think through my own situation. You can't go home again, dumbass. Just because he's a fox doesn't mean you can push him around. He's not that kind of fox. Not to you. I crossed my boots a different way on the coffee table, and tapped the side of the sole against the vaporizer. I like whiskey, but I only like having a drink or two of it. Alcohol is poison. It doesn't matter how important it has been for human society over the millenia; it's literally fucking poison that only hurts your squishy bits. Weed, on the other hand, that's alright, in a now I'm stoned and I wonder if I'm going to do something stupid by accident and fail to escape my unrepentant wolf tendencies and alienate myself from people and end up sitting in my apartment making virtual fox sex dolls kiss while I cum in a condom, again.

Mike came back out, and this time, he was neck to toe in leather. It wasn't a motorcycle riding suit from 'Our Earth', but it was not not a motorcycle riding suit from 'Our Earth'. Most importantly, instead of riding-ish boots like mine, his were somewhat angular everywhere and looked like the leather version of some kind of stormtrooper armor from a movie. He had elbow-length armored gauntlets, too, which he flexed a couple of times when he saw that I was looking. "Is this better?"

He simultaneously looked awesome, and I was weirdly not at all attracted to him. "Yeah."

"I was really just lazy. I... I put the boots on before for you. I figured you like that stuff. Also, you know, things have been, kind of weird for me."

"Yeah, your turn, what's this fucking long way around?" As soon as I broached the topic, he tucked his tail between his legs so much that he had to push it back out. Instead of sitting down, he meandered around the room. "I know it's probably awful shit. I mean, my adventure sounds fun, but I went through it and every morning I wake up from fucking nightmares about stuff."

"Oh, you too?" He eased up. "Well. When it became obvious that Earth was really going down the drain in terms of habitability, there were all these groups trying to figure out what to do. One of them decided that the Southwest Territory Exclusion Zone was actually a conspiracy theory, and that there hadn't been a weapons accident that made it uninhabitable. The idea was that no one ever came back out of it if they went in, which meant they were going somewhere else. I mean I suppose the other option is 'they die', though that's not really how radiation and biological poisoning really works. You can't really make that big of an area in the desert kill 100% of the people who go into it, without having done nasty shit to everyone else downwind."

Mike's ability to talk too much was untempered by his current stoned state, so while he looked dazed and tired, he kept boot-clopping around his living room and I had to constantly keep an eye on him.

"Kind of up into the 'end times', I guess around when they were going to launch those ships you got onto, there was this underground migration that left for the STEZ. I decided to join it, because I didn't want to sit back and slowly... die... I mean that doesn't sound fun, at least I could go actively do it. Maybe the part of me that used to be suicidal got excited, I mean I tried to kill myself twice, I hanged myself when I was a teenager when my mom left and then I tried to uh, well kind of breathplay myself to death when I found out why my mom left, in my thirties, and I kinda got over that stuff but you know, sometimes you wonder hey maybe I didn't screw it up, maybe I'm dead and this is purgatory, or stuff like that. Anyway, I felt fatalistic and joined up with a bunch of people, and we made our way down there. The border of the area was kind of weird, like there were all sorts of military guard people, however they didn't really stop us. You couldn't really see past the border, the weather was gross, it was really misty despite, you know, it being the desert. It was like walking into a haboob or a fog bank or something."

I don't think Mike really understood what 'too much information' was. I just let it all wash over me.

"So, we went through this border, and... we didn't die. We did eventually kind of leave the fog stuff, and we were in another desert. Full of people, we were just outside of a town. They were just like us, animal hybrids, they even spoke English. Except there were also some of these lizard things - Tarak."

"I work for one of those, his name's Jade. He's kinda strange."

"Yeah, they're not human, they're aliens, that's probably why they're strange. Anyway, so, the sort of idea that people would go into this place and never come out because they died was maybe like, almost half true. Half true like... do you know what decimation really means? We usually mean it like, a group is decimated and reduced to tiny numbers. It's not that at all, it means an army unit would be captured and ten percent of them would be killed, to threaten them." Mike swallowed, and his ears went back again. "We were allowed to pass through the area, as long as a percentage of the group were taken to be reprocessed for slave sales. You know how you can turn a hybrid into another hybrid, the way you can turn a naked human into a hybrid in the first place?"

"Yeah. I think I know about that." I hoped saying it would make him remember. I didn't turn Mike into a fox or anything. He was always a fox. We just... I don't know if he knew I knew what... that's a story for some other time. It's from my old life.

"They'd do it to kind of brain-wipe people. Anyway, anyone who had a partner with them, or family members or something, they'd have to pick one or more of those people to go into that process. If they didn't, then, well, they kind of... were all killed. If you were alone, then it was a crapshoot. And the process didn't even work very well, so people died no matter what. I also think they weren't really intending to let us go. Some groups managed to really kind of escape, though, and I was in one of them. I mean we tried to go back the way we came, and that didn't work, you just couldn't. It's hard to explain why. It doesn't make sense, that's why it's hard. You just would go to leave through the fog and you'd come back. You said something about a tiger... was he like a biker gang kind of guy? Really big and didn't talk that much and he had absolutely no problem just getting hands-on with people in a bad way?"

I thought about my experience with Strake. "Sounds like him."

"Oh. Oh that must have been him. Anyway, he was one of the people who helped our group kind of get away from the settlement. It was really hard, we had to go through the desert, and it was... it was desert, but it wasn't our desert. There were plants I'd never seen, those lizard things - dumb wild ones and talking ones like us, those are Tarak - and all sorts of other stuff. The moon didn't look the same. It just... it just wasn't the same moon." A hollow look descended across his face. "Eventually we got to another border, and we went through the fog, and thought we were having the same problem, except we were in a desert that seemed more normal. And there were humans! Naked ones, you know, IPC-H or whatever. Only them. No people like us. And they were kind of hard to understand, they spoke some pidgin English that was just real weird. They didn't want to kill us though, and actually helped us along. Eventually, we got to the border again, after a week or so. And what happened? Well, once again, we thought we just got turned around, only we were back in the weird desert. This time, the people there were like us, furry critters, and they didn't want to kill us, either. And bonus points, they were all wearing... BDSM sex gear!"

"Mike, on the surface, this sounds like some kind of bullshit adventure cooked up by some horny teenager. But, because I was turned into a wolf popsicle and defrosted into sex-drug farm slavery, I'm gonna assume everything is true."

"We were on Selnar! We'd ended up in a Hener settlement. Kind of a bit like a desert monastery. And this is where it gets weirder; this thing happened shortly after we arrived, and the border stuff disappeared. It was this huge deal. A whole bunch of researchers - more Selnari - came in after a short while, and all this fuss happened. Because the problem was, we weren't Selnari, at least not at first glance. We were from Earth. How much do you want your mind blown? Do you think you can really take some brain-fucking? Do you want your neurons to hurt?"

I winced. "My neurons already hurt, although maybe that's cuz I had computer chips fucking injected into my eyeballs the other day. But whatever. This is a fun story."

"Hah, it's fun like an adventure, level 3 travel fun. You've heard that right? Level 1 is just like, you travel and have fun. Level 2 is you have some sort of distress that's kind of a fun adventure when you look back on it. Level 3 is like you get kidnapped by paramilitary slavers and watch as they either kidnap or kill people's spouses and hope you aren't next. Anyway, no, I need to explain what a location point is. Okay, so," and he conjured up a huge thing in the middle of the room. "Imagine this is our universe. We're here, and somewhere else is over there." He poked at it with a finger, leaving a sort of dot with an arrow.

Fuck whatever he was going to say - he made it happen like it was nothing, and I had no idea how it even began to work. "Small universe."

"Well, it's just an illustration. The universe might be infinite, we don't really know. Anyway, so here's where we are and here's somewhere else. So, this is all three dimensional - you have this way, this way, this way, and then time kinda moves in a direction but it isn't a spatial direction. As you move around, you progress forward in time. Now, does time move because you're moving - everything in the universe is moving - or does time move even if you're still? What's still?" He made his example cloud-iverse slowly churn and expand. "I am not a physicist. Anyway, that's how the universe works. However, on some other dimensional level, the universe isn't this sort of cloud that's expanding out from a singular point. It looks like... I can't make an illustration. Areas of the universe are basically next to each other, like imagine two sheets of paper touching. You're on one sheet of paper, and somewhere else is on the other sheet of paper. Or it's one sheet of paper with two sides." He tried to conjure up an appropriate illustration, where the universe seemed to have a membrane and the two 'arrow-dots' were on either side. "Well, if you could go through there, then you could get from one point to the other instantly."

"Uhh, that's like a wormhole, right?"

"Maybe. I think those are like a tunnel. This isn't a tunnel. It's a Location Point. They just seem to exist, and we're not entirely sure why. It's like in some dimension, the universe is a flat piece of paper, and it was crumpled up into a ball, and wherever it touches itself, that's an LP. It's not a flat piece of paper, it's a four-dimensional volume, it's just crumpled up into a whatever-dimensional volume. And it turns out, if you create a singularity at a Location Point, then you translate through it and now you're on quote-unquote the other side."

"Oh, you're talking about the uh, shit that lets ships go faster than light."

"Exactly! You aren't going faster than light. You're just going from one place to another, through another dimension, and most importantly it skips over moving forward in time. It's like you didn't actually go anywhere distance-wise, so time doesn't advance. So, we basically use an enormous amount of electrical energy and some weird materials science sort of crystalline capacitor matrix stuff, and dump a huge amount of power into The Thingy, and boom! It's like an event horizon is created around you. And if you're at a Location Point, now you're at the other side of it!"

"Uh-huh. So what's this got to do with Earth?"

"That thing on the planet, the exclusion zone on Our Earth, was what's known as a Location Point Anomaly. LP's aren't really like, a thing. They're a higher-order concept that isn't representable in our world. They don't really have a size, although for practical purposes it seems we can only activate some of them to translate through them and there's some scalar value there. Occasionally, something happens that kind of gets them stuck open. They're not really like a hole, they're kind of a three-dimensional, maybe four-dimensional hole, and what does that even mean? That's like a black hole, right? It's a point in space where eventually you get so close that you can't stop being attracted to the center. Maybe a small black hole, if it manages to bump into a location point, leaves it 'stuck open'. Humans have never observed this, though the Tark have, and it was about a thousand years ago and the phenomenon lasted only about ten years or so. Well, until this Earth thing. See, somehow, a location point got stuck open and it intersected with Earth. The other side of the location point was Selnar."

I could follow what Mike was saying, although it didn't really make a lot of sense. "So you guys were going through a wormhole whenever you went in and out of that zone?"

"Well, sort of! Maybe. There seems to be an extra factor. You were in space for five hundred years. It's been fifteen years since I got on that migration. We did those two things basically at the same time - if I remember what I looked up, your ship launched about twelve hours after you would have been frozen, and went to make its first location point translation about a week later. That's roughly when we showed up on Regular Selnar, and when the whole border thing went poof. We had watches and stuff, calendars, we kept track of how long the journey was. And that was fifteen years ago. Meanwhile, your ship was actually floating in space for five hundred years. It was recorded in the computer system, and there were even paper logs for a bunch of it before the skeleton crew on the ship died. How's that possible?"

I shrugged. "I dunno. I'm fuckin' high off my ass."

"The sort of official answer is, we just don't know, something something relativity. The Hener, on the other hand, have a belief based on poorly-recorded historical fact, that when the Dream Shifter network got destroyed - do I need to explain this to you? Oh god, I can't do that much explaining. Anyway, when the dream-shifter network was destroyed, it was destroyed by someone diverting the energy powering it into reversing them back through time. When you go back in time, you end up 'forking' time, so the future is changed for people there going forward, but the other future you came from still exists and it's unchanged. So they went back in time, and basically... forked Earth, and also connected it to Selnar, probably by accident, and that forked Selnar."

I winced again. "Fucking sci-fi time bullshit. None of that stuff works."

"I know!" He conjured up another diagram. This time, four planets, which then intersected like a venn diagram around one particular area - the Southwest Territory Exclusion Zone on the two Earths, and some unrecognizable area on the other planets that I'd never seen ever before in my life. "This is what happened. Somehow, when moving through those location point anomalies, we slid forward in time. We went from Our Earth, to Our Selnar, to Current Earth, to Current Selnar. You didn't do any of that. You left Our Earth. However, you did it right when the anomaly collapsed - they're unstable, they don't stay open, especially not with this time fork thing involved. I think your ship did a location point translation right when the anomaly collapsed, and somehow that translated you into the current universe. Maybe it damaged the ship. Or maybe the translation system just didn't work right, and that's why you got stuck floating in space. I mean, it's the first time humans ever really tried to do that stuff; Tark had been doing it for hundreds of years."

"So this collapse thing... what do you mean, collapse?"

"I don't think universes are really meant to be connected to each other. The location point anomaly itself just won't last, it needs energy to hold it in that open state. There's a theory that the singularity gets 'lost' into a sort of higher-order virtual universe, and since it's not big enough to sustain itself, eventually it evaporates. Its event horizon expands diffusely and then splurp." He didn't use a computer-reality diagram; he just finagled his gloved hands about. "In this case, it was doubly unstable, since this forked looped universe was connected to it."

"Yeah, but, but when it collapsed, what happened?" I started getting that feeling from before - FIVE HUNDRED YEARS - except it was worse now.

Mike shrugged. "I don't know. We're both in 'the regular universe', the one that people were in when the Hener say they went back in time. I guess the other one just stopped existing. Or not, however, it's not connected anymore, so I mean, if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it, does it matter? To the forest, yeah. To the people who aren't there to listen to it... no. If it exists, we can't reconnect to it. If it doesn't exist, then, it doesn't exist. You and I exist, because we're... in this universe now." His pause this time was because I was staring at him.

"So... so it's like the place we came from, doesn't exist. It's not there. Mike, it didn't take fifteen years for you to get here. It took five hundred. You just experienced fifteen and I didn't experience anything because I was not not dead in a fuckin' frozen goo bucket! Five hundred years ago, our fucking _planet_disappeared. Our planet and every fucking one else on it!"

I'm not sure if he expected me to do this; I sure didn't. I'm unflappable. You hand me a gun and tell me to shoot mercenaries before they shoot us, and I fucking shoot them. Then I have nightmares about pedophile coyotes telling me I'm going to hell while they freeze in a vacuum, but that's just being human. Suddenly though, I felt alone, and even being next to someone else in the same condition didn't make it feel any better.

"If... if it's any consolation, it's probably just, I mean the anomaly didn't damage Current Earth - we're pretty sure - and it didn't damage Current Selnar. So it probably didn't damage the other two. It just kind of went away, like it wasn't there anymore. And... I'm sure the universe still exists. I mean, it's a fork, it's not like you could erase it with more time travel, you'd just be making another fork."

"It's gone. It's fucking gone." I stared at a spot on the floor.

He moved to sit next to me. "If you believe that, then you'll feel bad. And if you believe it's just off doing its own thing, then maybe you won't feel so bad. And I don't think we can know which one of them it is, so do the one that makes you feel less bad?"

"What if I want to feel bad? What if I'm a bad fucking person and somehow I accidentally ended up in the 'it's good' universe instead of disappearing like I was supposed to? I just spent an hour making three fox sex slaves humiliate each other so I could fucking ejaculate all over the floor in front of them! I don't care if they're willing indentured prostitutes who get off on it and it's just a great way to get a bunch of money after a few months of being used like a condom! It's still fucking gross! It's gross like everything I've ever done! And what happens after all this shit, do I do something different, do I start a kitten petting nonprofit that lets people who are sad pet kittens? No, I pretend to fucking rape people because if I actually do it, I'll get thrown out an airlock!"

"Uhh. Maybe weed wasn't a good idea."

"It's not the fucking weed, it's fucking me," I grabbed Mike by his jacket, which was hard since it didn't have lapels and I kept wanting to grab them, so eventually I unzipped it partway down his chest just so I could yank him.

"I think, I think, I think there's a lot to unpack here, the whole sex thing with the Selnari is really interesting, like there's nothing wrong with indulging yourself as long as it's okay with everyone, even if you pretend it's not, it's a really common thing! You know what sort of stuff I like! I mean I even tried to kill myself doing it and I still like it afterwards! I just have to find people who are into it and know how to be safe and stuff. I like being treated like a science experiment! It's even better now because there isn't that 'well some people still think gay people are going to hell and should be sterilized' crap, literally the only bad stuff is non-consent!"

I realize how bad it sounds to have said what I said a couple minutes ago. I can't stop being a sadist. It's always there in my head, like a little voice saying, what if you make this guy cry right now, wouldn't that be fun. No one ever really directly said what Kale did, though I figured it out; he was a pedophile and he got caught, someone cut his dick and balls off, and he was exiled out of the Hener order. Apparently a lot of exiles sign into indent contracts since they don't feel like they fit in with normal Selnari society. I don't have a smidge of interest in whatever Kale really really did, either finding out, or doing anything like it. That's disgusting. It's disgusting and it hurts people and I don't like it. I'm also one of those assholes who can't stand children. Why the hell would anyone want to have sex with one? I think I might know a little bit about how he feels, though, or at least felt, until he spaced himself. Grabbing some adult and convincing them to let me tie them up and then tying them up a little more and spanking them even after they say stop? I know exactly how that feels. It feels wrong, and the worst part is, I always had the feeling that I picked people who'd 'go along with it'. Except now I was wondering if they were 'going along with it' or 'feeling convinced to go along with it because of voodoo sex powers'.

I was having a panic attack, probably because of the weed. My stomach also growled. "I gotta eat something."

"Oh yeah, the munchies."

"No, I mean, I last ate hours ago. And, yeah, the munchies."

"How about we have some food, and then I can show you something even more cool than this, and it won't be full of scary stories. Probably. Maybe one or two." He patted my shoulder.

"Fine."

--

Mike had a kitchen, but he didn't make me food. Instead, it was Food Court Time. I didn't really want to go in public while high, although it wasn't very busy. My concern was alleviated when we saw the place. It was one of the semi-open food stall type of place, where a central kitchen had seating around it, all under a big awning. There was no reason to have an awning - what, were birds gonna shit on it? We're inside a space station - but the vibe was nice.

It wasn't busy, and there was just one person manning it. Or should I say dragoning it; he was one of those Tark. The slightly more unusual ones I'd seen - he hardly wore clothes on his upper body, and his natural blue-green-gray-black color patterning was interrupted by what I first thought were tattoos. They started around his back near his shoulderblades, and wrapped around to his front, in white and a screaming neon orange. On further examination, they were scars, irregular in back at the root of the design, and then more regular throughout. His forearms and his lower body were clad in what at first I thought were Hener harness bits, though they were insanely complicated in design, tooled and carved leather that was connected in ways that weren't necessary for any kind of structure. It was all design work. He had a headband on, which looked nothing Tark at all - in fact, it was an exact copy of the famous one from Mister Miyagi in the "Karate Kid" movie.

"Ungh. I just want normal food," I groaned, and then groaned harder as I realized my error. "I mean like, I want Earth food. I want junk. I want trashy shit that'll refill my cum reserves," I then laughed. Mike chuckled as well.

"Don't worry. That guy's Tark and yet it's gonna be what you just said you want. This is the Earthiest food I've found anywhere I've been in the network, and I don't seem like the person but I've been a lot of places." Mike waved the cook over from where he was chatting energetically in TIL to a flagrantly Hener-masked deer and a flagrantly punk-leathered opossum.

"The fox brings a friend!" The Tark hooted, and - I shit you not - stepped on a fucking skateboard and slid halfway around to where we stood. "A dangerous friend," he said, kicking the tail down and scraping to a stop. "Space pirate Xyrex!"

I laughed. "What the fuck is with this space pirate stuff? Who's Xyrex?"

"Imposter!" he chortled, and then said something unintelligible. Mike responded in very uncertain tones, which only made both of them laugh after a few seconds. "Is not the infamous, this wolf shows his face. Who is Xyrex? Attractive and mysterious."

"Okay, look, I'm hungry, and I'm obviously out of the fuckin' loop."

"There is no loop," the Tark said, and made a gesture. "I do feed us in a circle, though." He then gestured around to the place.

Mike pushed in between us. "Hawk, this is Grix. Grix, this is my friend Hawk. He's from the other Earth, like me."

"He is the frozen wolf," Grix made a gesture using his slightly demonic striated horns that was half a bow and half a Hindu head-bobble. "Not Xyrex. The same sense of clothing. What does the Earth-Wolf eat?" He then made a gesture and a glorious pictorial menu exploded from a point and hung in mid-air like we were at a point-and-puke family diner.

I literally drooled overflowing my muzzle. "Are you shitting me?" I tried to zoom in on things; Mike helped me with the gesturing. "That's... those are tacos. That's a cheeseburger. That's mac and cheese! Is this weird Tark food that just looks like American shit? Is that General Tso's!?" General Tso's is American food; bite me.

Mike grinned ear to ear. "That is real American food. Remember those food personality video people everyone would watch on streaming stuff? One of them was in the group of 'pilgrims' who came 'the long way around'. He kinda just... kept going with it here, and Grix is one of his proteges. It's surprisingly popular."

"I want Carnitas. Do you have Carnitas? I see Carnitas, I swear, I saw it," I drooled harder. "And hot sauce. Do you have hot sauces?" I needed tex-mex all of a sudden. "That's not American but I saw it, I saw it..."

"I do it for you, hot," Grix said, and yanked the menu away. "You want alcohol?"

On one hand, no. On the other hand, "Do you have beer?"

Grix shook his head. "Not here, over there," he pointed a taloned finger towards another area, where there was a busy-looking bar.

Mike got up from his stool. "I'll go get something. What do you want?"

"I dunno, something juicy and wheaty, if that's a fucking thing. Otherwise just whatever-ass beer you get." I didn't even finish speaking before Mike hurried away, leaving me to sit alone while this Grix guy started to prepare some food. It was, as far as I could tell since he was doing it all out on the open on the central grill, actually pork-ish meat that he was actually going to griddle fry in a puddle of what looked like lard, along with a bunch of fried rice and beans and peppers and onions. Carnitas Fajitas, mexican food for the German-heritage New York space pirate Earth-Wolf. "This is fucking nuts."

"There is no nuts," Grix said, over his shoulder. "You want nuts?"

"No no, I mean, crazy, nuts. Sorry. I'm kinda, not from around here."

He... tweeted? "Grix knows fox for years. He was from hard place, when the crack disappeared on Selnar, with other humans from other Earth. I was in the army group sent to investigate, do re-settlement work. I was the cook. Just an army cook. Now, I am best cook on Daleon," and then he said some more stuff in TIL. "I know you can't hear it. I can't say it in C-E."

"Best cook, down here, huh? It's always the shitty little dives with the best food. I've been to fancy French restaurants. You get like one little duck testicle and a splatter of weird fat and it's two hundred fucking dollars."

"I lie about Carnitas, that is pork, swine, pig, boar, whatever, bald animal, likes mud, makes squealing? This is not pork. This is," and he said something that might have been 'Toon-weuh', but with this weird huff and tonal bounce that I will not be able to replicate. "It is better than your Earth pig. There some animals grown from genes with the early humans who joined with Tark. You should find history lessons, very interesting story. Gets more interesting for you long-way-around Selnari."

One thing I'd noticed so far was that Tark and even Hener Selnari didn't seem to like trying to speak English very much. They did it and looked pained and were curt about it, even Varius, who seemed otherwise eager to interact with me. Grix, on the other hand, was kind of hard to shut up and he talked constantly while he cooked. Both to me, and also repeated hollering in TIL back and forth with the other people he'd been serving. The general cooking layout was like mongolian-style barbeque, where there was a big central flat griddle and a few repeated stations around it. He cooked my food in front of me, and also went to check something else that was in front of the other patrons, and which was decidedly not anything like my food and looked an awful lot like a plate of worms.

I turned to look around and Mike was right there, and I almost fell off my stool. "Fuck, don't sneak up-"

"Hefeweisen!" He put a tall 'glass' down in front of me. It even had... well, it wasn't an orange, but it was a fruit slice. I sniffed at it. Well, if it wasn't an actual white hefeweisen, it was a simulation of one. I slurped at it. He had some sort of more typical lager style of beer, though it stank of grapefruit. "What do you think of Grix?"

"Well, he's standing right there, so I better be nice..." I gestured, as Grix was scooping my food off onto a platter. "He's talkative." Something stuck into my head, something Grix had just said moments before, something that didn't make a lot of sense. The Tark put my food in front of me, and I leaned over to sniff at it. "It smells good." I took a cautious bite of the meat. "Oh, that's pretty good. Even if it's not really pork."

"Is better than pig," Grix said, having overheard me despite now working on someone else's meal a couple seats away.

"Yeah, it's better than pig," I said, and started eating for real. It actually tasted so good, I felt emotional. I hadn't really had anything like anything I'd had back home, yet. I'd never really had culture shock before, and I felt like I was adapting well enough. Now, I wanted to cry into my mexican fried rice.

Mike wasn't eating something that was freshly made, and it wasn't anything familiar at all. Maybe it was some sort of dessert - it was a rectangular piece of something that jiggled just slightly, like maybe it was a flan or creme caramel or something. It looked green and it smelled purple, and he seemed to really like it because he intently ate and wagged his tail enough to hit me with the fluff. He caught me staring after a few moments. "Oh, it's Tark food. Want to try it?"

I cautiously took a forkful. I struggle to explain what it smelled like beyond 'purple', which was at odds with the color. The flavor, as best as I can explain, is 'what if meat was cheesecake'. I almost found it revolting, at the moment, although as I continued eating my entirely delicious space-dragon mexican food, I found myself actually wanting to have some of Mike's thing.

By then, Grix was on the other side of the grill, working for more customers. I turned to Mike, rudely while eating. "So, he kinda said something weird, he said I was Selnari."

"Oh yeah, so there was a fuss when we turned up on Selnar, because they did biological testing on us and said oh, you're not from Earth, you're Selnari, just some sort of really isolated group that must have been isolated in the 'crack' - that's kind of the name for the normal Selnar equivalent of our STEZ back on Earth. And well no, we're from Earth, trust us, we're definitely NOT from here. It actually was a big hassle, and the big pilgrimage migrant group kind of split up depending on whether people wanted to stick around and be prodded about or just go somewhere else and see what happened. I didn't stick around - I actually got hooked up with a pretty crazy opportunity that kinda ended a couple years ago. I was doing basically robot salvage work, salvaging robots, and my partner - this other fox guy named Bly - we were really, we really kind of worked well together for years, and then he had a heart attack and we just weren't anywhere near enough medical equipment and it doesn't matter how fancy stuff is, you know, sometimes it's just not enough-" He was abruptly overcome with emotion and yet, while starting to stutter and sob, just continuing to talk. Meanwhile, my brain was trying to catch up between eating, his rambling train of thought, and the actually important thing he'd said right at the start.

"Wait, wait, I know you just said somethin' sad but, back up a bit. Rewind. They tested you guys and said you're Selnari?"

As fast as his emotion had overcome him, it receded and he wiped at his eyes with his arm, then dabbed the leather with a napkin. "Yeah, they did all sorts of testing on everyone, and we're Selnari. Specifically, really early Selnari from about four hundred and ten years ago. Selnari aren't like an old race or something, they're created by humans, right? Sort of willed into existence through this alien technology that was misused by accident."

"We're not Selnari. We're from fuckin' Earth."

Mike shook his head. "No, we're definitely Selnari. That's how we happened. I don't think anyone really understood how it happened at the time - that whole time loop thing? That's when they went back and turned some humans into Selnari, and it just spread."

I went from 'approaching full' to 'I wish I hadn't eaten', and quickly finished my beer. That helped only in that it made me belch crudely. "We're fucking Selnari? Selnari have that thing... that whatever... the arkanic ability, the empathy thing, and we don't."

Mike shrugged again. "I mean, I guess that's true, I don't know. Maybe it didn't get included."

I thought about what happened earlier in the day, to me. I thought about getting fucked by Cade, the rhino. I thought about going off and turning the tables on those three foxes. And despite my otherwise frazzled and baked state of mind, it wasn't really that hard to get turned on by it. Especially Cade's no-nonsense ass-fucking. That had been mind-altering. Then, I looked at Mike. "Hey, how am I feeling right now?"

He shrugged. "I dunno. You look like you're gonna pop a vein, though."

"You don't feel anything? Any... anything?"

He shook his head. "Nah. I don't feel anything weird from people like that. I have no idea what that empathy stuff feels like. I wonder if it's like smelling someone?"

The Hener deer and oppossum couple were leaving and walked by. I slid off my stool and stood up in front of them. Both of them stopped dead in their tracks. "I'm not gonna do anything bad, I just have a question, it's a social experiment, I'm not from here, I'm that fucking... you know who I am, everyone does. How do you feel right now?"

The deer yammered to the opossum in TIL. They had a conversation.

"Come on, just, what do you feel from me?" I tried to recall the Cade situation again. Instead, I ended up thinking about the moment that Hener fox got muzzled, and how much he looked bent out of shape with the other fox holding onto-

"He says you're making him horny and to stop it," the opossum said, "Weirdo," they frowned, and then said something in TIL before grabbing their friend and hurrying away.

I turned to Mike, who again shrugged. "There's no bottom to the amount of horny depravity I can come up with, and I mean, right now? You look kinda freaked out, and I feel like I ate too much of that stuff, and that beer was kinda strong."

I didn't know what to do with this information. It explained what Cara had said about me, and it also made me unsettled. I couldn't feel anything from anyone else, really, except the most vague 'warmth'.

"Oh! Did you want to see something even more cool? It's like two cool things in one," Mike said. "I can show people cool things until they tell me to leave them alone."

I shrugged. "Is it gonna make me feel weird?"

"Probably not, but who knows?"

--

We went back to the access alleyway and headed for the 'broken walkway' again. This time, Mike was with me and he led forward. It was incredibly fucked up to see him just walk out over a clear 'bottomless pit', turn left, and then disappear into nothingness.

"So uh, there's nothing actually down there, right?"

"Huh? No, there's just the walkway. It's an illusion," he made a tapping sound with his gloved knuckles against empty space. "Come on."

Magically, a doorway appeared, with a cartoon fox-flourish of cute little wild foxes walking around the frame. Mike stood in the middle of it, with the door open. I followed him into a utility foyer. This one had a lot more infrastructure in it, and a lot of warning signage in English and TIL. "So it's just to freak people out? What if they don't have implants?"

"Well, then they can't get in anyway, because the doors are locked. It's just... it's kind of a Selnari thing. It's actually I think from the Hener Shadows stuff, and backported to the rest of society. The idea of privacy and plausible deniability. You can never see someone going into or coming out of a door in the Shadows, and everyone wears masks, even if you know who people are. It's just kind of a thing. The Hener are weird. I mean I thought I was weird and they're way weirder. There isn't any actual privacy, right? Too much tech. So you invent it when it makes you feel better about yourself."

"So where are we going?" I followed along, feeling like I needed to duck even if I didn't really. "Also, is there a bathroom? That was a tall-ass beer, and weed always makes me need to pee a little. And I guess I didn't pee after getting off a few times earlier."

He didn't answer my question and instead: "Oh, what were you doing earlier, anyway?"

"This bartender or owner or whatever of this place I got introduced to, with some silly name like Front-Tail but in TIL, he fucked me really good. You remember sour cream donuts? I bet my ass looked like one of those when he was done. And then, I went to this other place, where they kinda..." Should I tell him? "Have sorta sex slaves, and I was... I was just kind of acting out some fantasies with uhh, willing victims."

"Oh, I know what you're talking about. The place with the half-robot dog guy and the messed up lion? They're cool. It looks like a dump but their balloon payment is, as they used to say on Earth, fat with a p-h. Anyway, here's my workshop!" He led me through a doorway that conspicuously said: [WARNING - AIRLOCK PRESSURE DIFFERENTIAL WHEN WARNING LIGHT IS ACTIVE], and into a big space that was full of equipment.

Some of the equipment looked like it was either being stored or salvaged. Some stuff wasn't even equipment, just storage crates. And tucked into the corner, in a big maintenance frame, was: "Is that a robot?"

It looked, generically, like a hybrid wolf. An American football linebacker hybrid wolf. No fur, only some parts covered in a 'pleasing' aesthetic coating, and a few inches taller than me.

"Yep! I used to collect costumes, and that was fun," Mike said, walked over to the robot, and patted it like it was a friend. Nothing moved and there was just a light leather-on-hard-stuff tapping. "And I used to make them, too. And gear stuff. Remember I made all that rubber gear stuff and sold it through uh, Black and Silver, at your club?"

I nodded.

He looked wistful for exactly seven seconds. "Well, I also made some neat tech stuff to help with that, like a 3D body scanner so I could exactly cut rubber sheeting and armor plastics and stuff. I guess I'm just a nerd. When I got out here, I ended up meeting up with... that guy I mentioned, I think? He did salvage stuff. We came up with a pretty cool plan. What's your experience with robots here so far?"

I squinted. "Fuck, I gotta use my brain? Uhh, well, I think there's been a few medical ones-"

"Yeah, the medical assistants, or as I call them, nurse-bots."

"And I think they stuck the shit into my eye with robots..."

He nodded along. "That's robosurgery. I mean, we had that back on Earth. It's amazing here now. If you had a ruptured appendix they could take it out in 5 minutes while you were standing up and conscious. I mean, they wouldn't, but they could. If you have cardiovascular disease, they can rebuild your arteries inside your body. Well, I mean, if you're on a station where they can do that." Once again, he got that 'about to cry' huffy sound and look.

"And then there's the shit I do at my job, this place called... Syrex On-Demand transportation services or something, lots of these little delivery truck things with robo-arm unloaders. Which, weirdly in contrast to he nurse robots and the brain-adjusting robots and whatever that is," I gestured to the unsettlingly sci-fi-movie-esque thing, "Seem to suck fucking balls and break down constantly."

"Ahh! Tangent! There's a Tark word for this, it's called... oh I'm screwing it up, Seneril," except he tried to say the word as if he was playing it on an instrument. "Seneril means 'acceptable unreliability'. Something like this station's core infrastructure and hull and stuff, or a ship, or medical equipment, has extremely low seneril. They have to work, and they have to last, and if they fail they have to be self-healing or redundant or super easy to repair. I mean, how else do you have a galactic space empire if nothing ever works and all the air leaks out?"

I shrugged. "I dunno, the Russians had a space program where stuff broke all the time, and they just kinda fixed stuff on the fly." Shit I'm in a space station and the air could leak out into space.

"Or they let people die and covered it up because they were an autocratic communist dictatorship. Anyway, seneril isn't used for that stuff - it's used for stuff where it's okay if things don't always work, or need to be maintained. The loading system on those trucks you're talking about, isn't that important. Requiring maintenance and repairs gives an opportunity to ensure that the rest of the vehicle is maintained properly and inspected regularly."

"So it's like breaking windows so glaziers have something to do."

He looked like he was about to sneeze. "Well, maybe, but that analogy's from a system of government that doesn't apply here. Anyway, that's why those things are fussy, because they weren't designed to be mission-critical and bulletproof. I mention it, because even though you think those nurse robots are probably mission critical - they have a very short operational life. They're in service for a few months, retired, and salvaged or reprocessed. And there's tons of robots like that - law enforcement, emergency first response, search and rescue, industrial inspection, hazardous materials management, agricultural processing. Lots of areas where there are these android style robots that work alongside people enabling really specific areas of work, and they get swapped out constantly. So... no one really minds or notices when some of them don't end up where they're supposed to be. And there are a lot of people out on the fringes of the network, the subnet so to speak, who really could make use of some robot assistance for various reasons. I mean like, normal life stuff, like helping on farms and whatnot. That's where I come in."

"So you steal robots out of the garbage and sell them to poor people."

When he chuckled in response, it was hardly a regular laugh, but one of those fucking ridiculous chattering fox noises. "You know, you're really crass. You have an amazing amount of crass-itude. And you're totally right, that's exactly what I do. We aren't in a utopia. Utopias are nightmares. The Galactic Network is really founded on the principle of supporting the people who live in it, because Selnari are really kind of democratic-socialist progressive lefty types, to use Earth terms. It's just not like, all-encompassing and universal. You can't do everything. People with agency are always going to do stuff that steps outside the boundaries. Someone's going to want to go somewhere else and do something else and take some friends or likeminded strangers with them."

"So what the hell's that thing for? It looks like it could rip me in half."

"Oh! It's not actually that big. It's kind of... not entirely compacted into its normal body space, because I'm still doing some last bits of stuff. It's ahh, it's a personal project. See, these robots I mentioned are all really specialized, with very intensively trained virtual intelligences and hardware parameters. And I thought, what if I... kind of went the other way? What if I made a robot that could take your appendix out in 5 minutes, after pulling you out from underneath a collapsed causeway, while fighting off scavengers, and then could uhh... cuddle you to sleep afterwards when you're recovering from all the trauma."

"Cuddle you to sleep," I said. I then repeated myself, making 'air quotes' with my gloved fingers, and pointed to a conspicuous device. "Because that thing has a big fucking penis. I mean I'm assuming that's its penis and it's not installed, and not just a random dildo, but who am I talking to again?"

"Oh no, that's it's, uhh, that's well, I was seeing how different attachments worked."

"Mike, you're building a sex robot."

"No I'm not, they have those. I'm building an everything robot, that can also have sex."

You're building a boyfriend, I thought, and decided not to say it out loud, because even if I'm crass, I know when I'm being the wrong kind of asshole.

I wandered around the space a bit more, and got a funny feeling. An extreme sense of deja-vu. I walked down a central corridor, peeked into several rooms, and then stepped up at the end where a door was partly closed but not entirely. Inside, was a control cockpit, not identical to but very similar to the one on Strake's ship that evacuated us from Cal's Prak operation. "Mike, this is a space ship."

"Oh, oh, wow, really?" He actually sounded seriously surprised. "Haha, I mean, yeah, it's... it's the ship I had with B-Bly. That guy. I mean it's his ship, but he died, and since... since... you know, I mean, I inherited it. I kind of changed a bit about the business. Since I was just going it alone. It's parked in this decommissioned utility dock... it's really kind of like storage, I guess. He took over this little shipping company that used to use the dock for small stuff, and kind of used the whole thing as a front. We lived in the other part, like where we were earlier."

"Huh." This caused a big moment of silence. "Sorry. I mean, this is pretty nuts. I just... I think I'm out of wolf brain for the day."

"Oh, that's fine! It's not like I can even turn this thing on yet. It's probably another few days. I just wanted to show it off."

"Mike, I get the feeling you've been through some shit. And I just wanna say that, it seems like you've got your shit together now. And that's cool."

"Oh. Oh, uh, thanks," he said, taking the compliment terribly.

As I sat on the tram heading back home, leather hood on my lap, seated as far away from anyone else so they would have the least reason to think I was going to accost them or whatever... I thought about Mike. He was such a dork. He colored his fur weirdly, he was always good for fetish outfits, he was so excited and never shut up - and this is coming from someone who never shuts up - and he obviously had seen some stuff.

And damn, he had his own ship that he was using for a robot workshop.

His own ship.