It wasn’t as if she had a schedule to keep. She could take as long as she wanted on the repair validations, as long as she got them done before the next automated maintenance cycle. She could even cancel the request entirely. Lunar Central would simply republish the request and somebody else with the necessary qualifications would take the assignment. She wasn’t even really in any danger of needing to work any time soon. She gave enough of her time to maintaining Theta Dome’s ventilation system that she could afford to spend the next hundred rotations doing nothing but reviewing automat cuisine and importing designer pharma from Ganymede.

Rather, the chance to work on the external airlocks—and most importantly, outside them—gave Gemini a chance to practice one of her more… difficult… vices. She inhaled sharply, rolling the scent of her own breath and the citrus tang of her air supply around in her nostrils. Pressure-suit training was mandatory for residence in any of Luna’s domes, and Central was quick to fine anyone whose certification lapsed. That was one tax the neofeline airtech had never had to pay, and probably never would. To the extent she could, she lived in her suit, filtering her reality through twin transparent displays and a thin layer of full-body latex.

Unfortunately, to really get the full experience, she needed at least one partner, somebody brave enough to risk a seal breach and interesting enough to be worth the risk. On Mars or Titania, that wouldn’t have been a problem; most of the inhabitants knew their way around a suit and the local cultures encouraged the sort of no-risk-no-reward attitude the technician could get behind. Lunar tastes, however, ranged to the safer, saner, and more consensual. That meant that, in Theta Dome at least, Gemini’s choices were somewhat limited. She’d sent out a message to her top five candidates a full five kiloseconds before starting the job, hoping for an interested response, but she’d only gotten static for her troubles.

With a count of FF, Gemini stood and stretched, the suit squeaking around her. She sighed into her rebreather and slid forward towards the edge of the alcove. Just to the left of the airlock was a small terminal, and she slid the snug metamagnetic bracelet around her wrist into the small opening below. The port chimed softly in recognition, and then air rushed into the space between the seals. With pressure near to normal, the sign above the door lit and a second beep sounded as the inner iris opened, revealing a narrow space lit with simple white panels. Two emergency pressure-suits and helmet hung on one side of the gap, while hazard icons blanketed the other. The airtech stepped between them and pressed her bracelet to the inner scanner, and the iris sealed behind her.

“Hello, Gemini.” The words echoed across her cochlear transducer. The feline’s eyes widened behind her lenses as she spun around. Leaning against the inner iris, a raccoon half-grinned at her from within a smoke-tinted bubble-helmet. Silvery biomechanical tendrils crept up from beneath the neckline of zir own suit. “Fancy meeting me here.”

“Kassita.” The airtech hissed the name into her rebreather as she backed up against the outer ring. “I don’t recall asking for your help.”

The raccoon chittered in response, zir feedback-laugh grating directly into Gemini’s skull. “Not directly, perhaps, but I received word from… a mutual acquaintence, shall we say.” Spidery threads of unfocused nanopaste clung to the inside of zir visor. “I thought I might offer.”

Gemini backed up against the outer iris, but her denial was lost to the rush of fans as they evacuated the airlock. The feline swayed slightly as the pressure outside dropped, sending a rush of blood to her head. The warning sign light flashed twice, and her wrist bracelet began to vibrate as the second ring opened. She took a step backwards, crossing the threshold. Outside, Terra hung high in the sky, the cyan glow of the Wall surrounding and isolating the planet shining like a second sun. Sol floated lower and to the left, casting long shadows across the ground.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Kassita mused as zie glided towards the feline. Zir paws were at the feline’s shoulders before the she could say no, gecko-like patches on the raccoon’s fingertips affixing themselves to the airtech’s suit. “O, goblet full to brim with bloom and faun, what grants her holder never but a sip. Padilla’s Shattered Albedo always seems appropriate when Earthgazing, don’t you think?”

The airtech squirmed around, trying to pull free of Kassita’s van der Waals grip. “I’m not out here to Earthwatch,” she protested. “I’m just here to spot-check the automated repair system.”

“Correction, Gemini. You’re here to engage in asphyxiation and exposure-play.” One of Kassita’s gloves slid with uncomfortable fluidity down Gemini’s front, leaving a faint silvery trail as zie caressed the airtech’s suit. When zir paw reached Gemini’s hip, zie turned her roughly to face the Wall. “If you happen to certify that repair work while you’re enjoying yourself, so much the better.”

Gemini grit her teeth, trying to ignore the warmth she was feeling inside her suit. She jerked her shoulder forward out from under Kassita’s grip, but the raccoon’s glove held as if bonded in place. “Technicalities. What do you want?”

Kassita chittered again, this time backed by a dissonant trill, like a pair of sine waves fighting for dominance. “The same thing you want, of course. You haven’t actually told me to stop, you realize. You could at any point, but you haven’t, have you?” Zie snapped one arm forward, grabbed Gemini by the back of the throat and jerked backwards. “I’m starting to suspect you don’t really want me to stop, do you?”

Gemini’s eyes went wide as a binaural beat began to drum its way into her head, disrupting her focus. “I—” Between the sudden motion and the carrier signal, Gemini’s thoughts struggled to cohere. “I want you….” She shook her head, her tail lashing behind her, swatting at Kassita’s thighs. “… to stop.”

Kassita put one paw on the release valve of Gemini’s airtank and gave it a quarter-turn. “Do you really?”

Gemini groaned as the air hissed behind her. Unbidden, one of her paws went between her thighs, as if she could physically restrain the physiological response through her latex suit. “Don’t,” she whimpered. “Stop.”

“Don’t stop?” Kassita chittered. “If you insist.” Zie gave another half-twist, and the pressurized air in Gemini’s tanks began to boil away, tiny flurries condensing across the raccoon’s helmet. “Breathe slow, Gemini. Every lungful will cost you.” Zir other paw went to Gemini’s tail, pulling it to the side as zie pressed against the rear of the airtech’s suit. “Here, let me give you something that will help.” Zie casually linked the front of zir suit to the back of Gemini’s and extruded a nanotendril between them.

“Wh—” Gemini interrupted herself midword, holding her breath as she listened to the gas venting behind her. She keened softly into her rebreather and pressed more firmly against her cleft. Her whole body shook as as she struggled against the urge to grind her hips against her paw. As she rocked on her hinds, she felt one of her waste-seals crack, and then something body-warm and slick pressing directly against her fur. Her teeth chattered as the filaments of nanopaste began to light up her neurons, compounding her desire. “—at!” she finished sharply, caught between the need to pull away and the fear of breaking the seal.

Kassita’s laugh echoed in Gemini’s cochlear transducer again, rolling along the dueling sine waves. “It’s just a small gift, Gemini. Something I’ve wanted to share with you for a very long time.” Zie pushed the silvery probe further into Gemini’s suit, slipping between her legs, splitting and gliding through her fur towards her openings. “You’ll love it once you try it, I promise.”

Caught between rising arousal and terror, Gemini’s heart began to pound. The dissonant hum and the dwindling oxygen killed any hope of protest. Everywhere the nanotendrils touched her, cool electricity poured into her skin, lighting her nerves and augmenting her arousal. She began to rock impatiently against her fist, fingers rolling against her crotch as she mewled into her rebreather. Stars danced at the edge of her vision, while the Wall glowed directly before her. “No.” The word was automatic, a whisper among howls. “Please.”

“No and please?” The raccoon’s voice flowed along those sensuous sine waves, cold enough to burn. “You should make up your mind, Gemini. You don’t have much air left. Which is it?”

“Please!” came Gemini’s gasping reply, her lungs starting to sting. The stars grew brighter even as her vision began to fade. She jammed her paw tightly to her crotch, pressing inward against the thickening quicksilver tentacle crawling inside her sex. “Please! Please! Please! Please!” The word became a mantra, every thrust of her hips forward and back matched with a fresh exclamation as she rode the dizzying wave of disorientation towards climax.

Kassita’s smile turned cold, her eyes narrowing to slits. “Then… no.” Zie hissed, and suddenly the tendrils withdrew, sucking backwards into the raccoon’s suit, replacing the seal in their wake. Zie pushed the airtech away and stepped back towards the airlock. “If you want it, then it isn’t any fun.”

Gemini cried out in frustration, rocking frantically against her fingers. The loss of the nanoprobes inside her left her cold, but the oxygen-loss was enough to push herself over the edge, and she dropped to her knees, yowling into her rebreather as she climaxed. She fell forward onto all fours, wincing as the metamagnetic bracelet banged into the back of her paw. “Bitch,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

“You wouldn’t appreciate it otherwise,” Kassita smirked as she withdrew. “Come find me in Red Sector, four-eight-two-five, if you change your mind later. You may want to refill your tanks before you try to work. Oh, and one more thing. Jakob Voynovich sends his regards.” Then the raccoon stepped back inside the airlock, disappearing from view.

Into that space, though, something had just entered that clearly didn’t belong. It was… I couldn’t tell what it was. One corner was squared, sharply, like a building block. The opposite faces were irregular, rippling and jerking like some kind of living thing. Its surface shifted colors rapidly, along with its shape, though the three edges of it remained consistent. Fragments grew and shrank in the air, fingerlike projections or completely separate objects that vibrated slowly before fading out or merging with the underlying structure. It didn’t even announce itself; one moment it wasn’t, and the next it was, letting out chirps and warbles seemingly at random.

“So what is it?” Imogen asked, her paws on her hips. “More to the point, where’d it come from? I thought you said this place was closed.”

“It is,” I insisted. I hesitated a moment, then added, “It was, anyway.” I opened my hardline and scanned through menus, looking for intrusions or malware, but each check came back clean. “I’m not seeing anything. Giri, any ideas?”

The fox shook his head, his tail lashing behind him. “I have checked it twice; even with your added permissions, it has no properties, no structure. It does not actually exist.” He scowled. “It reminds me uncomfortably of the FutureShock.”

I nodded at that. “Yeah, but Jules isn’t here, and he did the real hackery on that place.” I looked back at Imogen. “Let people know we’re poking at it, but truth is I don’t know.” I glanced at Giri, but the fox shook his head. I sighed; I wanted to tell her more, but Giri was right to advise against it.

The mouse nodded, then walked back towards the group she’d been addressing before. “C’mon, folks. Let’s go somewhere else and let these guys work. C’mon, everybody, make some room. Soon as these guys have things figured out, they’ll let us know.” She motioned, and despite the collective groans of about a hundred weary people, they rose and began to shuffle away, towards another part of the space. Before they’d even gotten a few steps, though, Imogen was back into her story, and it sounded like the others sank quickly back into the rapture of her narratives.

As soon as Imogen’s voice was down to a murmur, I looked back at Giri, voice low. “Any clue? I’m at a loss.”

Giri shook his head again. “The server is failing; that much is certain. Could this be a side effect?”

I stared at the shifting block and shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea. I can hack a bit on back-end stuff, but my job was always front-end components. Aesthetic, not functional. I’d need somebody like Jules or Briar for details, and even they might not know.” I sighed. “I’m afraid this is out of my league.”

The fox stared intently at the shifting image, a frown spreading on his muzzle. “It is growing.” He motioned with one paw to the object. “It has a second corner now.”

I looked where he indicated, tailtip hooking in frustration. “You’re right, it does. That still doesn’t tell us what it is, though.”

“You know as much as I at this point,” Giri said. “I would have to do a deep dive to determine more, but I am not sure I would know what I am seeing. It does not appear to have definition, yet it is there. It is not anything, yet it exists. And it is still growing.”

I watched with fascination as a square, about a foot per side, slowly filled the space. The chattering and clicking that it emitted changed in timbre, and the shapes that it filled rapidly took on the edges and corners. It looked almost as though someone were pouring luminescent, light-and-sound-reactive goop into an invisible mold that hung perfectly still in the air. It ratcheted up to the top of the space, and then, as if meeting an invisible lid, it leveled itself and then formed a perfectly shaped rectangle, about four inches tall.

As if cued by its completion, a shout rang out across the space. Heads turned, and Giri and I broke into a sprint towards the voice. Imogen beat us to the site and was already asking questions of a visibly-upset black cat as we approached. “What is it? What happened?” She spread her drawl thick, resting a paw on the other girl’s shoulder. “It’s okay now. Everything’s gonna be—” She stopped, then followed the cat’s pointing finger to a space in front of her in which letters and numbers hung in midair. “Ah, hell.”

“It just showed up out of… hey, is that my—” She stopped, as the block started to echo her speech, but a scant moment before she spoke, as if it knew what she was about to say. The same words scrolled in space, in a vivid violet, starting cleanly at one point then disappearing off raggedly off of another. Perpendicular to that, code fragments flickered. The area between them filled in rapidly as the cat spoke. “What’s it… it’s writing down what I say!” She looked at Imogen, then me. “Why’s it—it’s hard to… to talk with… with that. How is it… doing that?”

“I have no idea,” Giri said, spacing his words evenly. His words showed up a deep blue calligraphic script. “I find this even more disturbing, though.”

I nodded. “Me, too. It’s like it’s—” My own speech came out in angular gold text, blocky and monospaced. “It’s… reading out of the—” I stopped, head snapping to Giri.

The security expert’s head canted to the side. “What? What is it?”

Imogen leaned forward and adjusted her pince-nez. “Yeah, you look like—” I made a quick cut-it gesture, dragging my paw across my throat, and she snapped her jaws shut, her teeth clacking audibly; the sound showed up as a splat of red in the air.

I put a finger over my muzzle, then motioned for Giri and Imogen to follow me. They exchanged glances but did so, stepping away from the fresh distortion. I looked back at the block of text, then squinted and whispered, “Test, test.” It flickered as I spoke, and I sighed, returning to full volume. “Damn, never mind.”

“What?” The word was simultaneous from three muzzles. A cacophony followed as they sorted out who spoke next, but Imogen easily overpowered both of the others. “Don’t leave us hanging, John. What is it?”

I pointed to the space as it swelled. “It’s a chunk of the speech engine. It’s… it’s how the graphics engine is rendering the speech engine.”

Imogen and the cat just blinked in confusion, but Giri’s eyes shot open in shock. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “Pretty sure. I can’t think of any other way it would be getting that information.”

Imogen held up a paw. “You two lost me at ‘chunk,’” the mouse said. “Try again, in English.”

Giri jammed his paws into the pokets of his coat. “If John is correct—and I hope he is not—it is… a piece of the underlying software that another piece, the display system, is attempting to render.”

“Okay, I get that,” the mouse said slowly. “But why? And what’s so bad about that?”

I looked at Giri, then back at Imogen. “It’s… listen, this plan… the server can’t hold everybody on here right now. I deleted everything I could, but I’ve still got more people on here than my development box can sustain at the same time. Everything we do, it all takes memory. Computer memory. Every thought, every action, it’s all computer code. It takes memory to execute, to tell who’s doing what. We’re running out of it. It’s—” I barked a laugh. “It’s the only limited resource we have… and we’re running out.”

Imogen blinked and canted her head to the side. “How do you run out? Nobody new is showing up. Nobody’s running anything, right?”

Giri shook his head. “It is not so simple. There must be a time delay between when a bit of memory is allocated to record that someone has done something, and when the bit that marked the past state is freed, to ensure that all systems have the new state. The more people, the more things are present, the more complex the interactions, the longer delay that must be to ensure safety.”

I nodded at the fox. “Jules explained it to me once, but he’s the genius on this stuff. The short form is that the system’s out of memory, and it’s out of backup memory, and there’s nothing left for it to use to store people’s actions… so it’s using whatever memory it can.”

The cat blinked. “You mean it’s…” She looked back at the block of code, then burst out, “It’s bigger! Oh my god, it’s… there’s another one!” Her finger shot out suddenly, and I followed it to another patch of flickering graphics hanging in mid-air, some distance away.

I groaned. “It’s run out of everything else, so it’s using this space. And because it is, everything that happens on the back-end that shows up is rendering, and we’re all seeing it, so it’s changing the environment that much faster!” I looked at Giri. “This… this beats the Beni hack, by a long shot.”

Giri smirked. “I believe this is where Mitsuko would say, ‘oh, hai.’”

Imogen put a paw on each of our shoulders. “Okay, bad. What do we do? How do we stop it?”

I blinked. “Stop it? We can’t stop it. Anything we do makes it grow faster!”

The mouse’s eyes hardened, “John, that’s—damnit!” The cat took off at a run, over to a group of people, pointing and jabbering agitatedly at the distortions. They turned, then approached, and the volume spread as their words were echoed, then spread as they went to show others. “I swear, nobody learns around here,” she grumbled, putting her muzzle in her paw. “You and Giri work on this; I’m gonna go stop the deluge.” Then she clapped us on the back and followed the others. “Hey! Hey!”

I tuned her out, then looked back to Giri. “This is going to go to hell fast if we don’t do something. Ideas?”

Giri shrugged. “I do not know. I wanted to understand the way that my world worked, but… now I am not so sure.”

I shook my head, then popped open my hardline. “There’s got to be something.” I started scanning menus. “Change the garbage collection speed.”

The fox shook his head. “Desynchronized actions and corrupted accounts.”

I scowled. “Cache dump.”

He shook his head again. “That would make the problem worse; we want fewer misses, not more.”

“Damnit, Giri, I want help, not—” I caught myself mid-outburst. “Sorry, sorry, this is… stressful. Suspend the whole system, wait for Jules.”

Giri nodded. “I… am unused to being afraid, myself. If we trust that, we should have trusted the rollback. Plus, we have no way to know if he will be able to restore us, regardless of whether he wants to do so.”

“Right. Damnit. I’m running out of options here.” My eyes flicked over hovering menu choices. “What about—” A scream cut me off, followed by another. I turned, then gaped. The cat that had run from the conversation had one paw on her other elbow, shaking and crying as she tried to pull her fist out of a silvery box shot through with multicolored lightning streaks. One person had her by the shoulders and was trying to extract her; another was backing away quickly, then suddenly turned and bolted.

“Help me!” the cat shrieked, blubbering. “Help me, please!”

That was the only spark the room needed. What had been a crowd instantly became a mob, people running in terror from the alien blocks and from each other. Some tried to help; others tried to escape. Of course, with all that commotion, the system needed that much more memory to render it all, and the only place it had left to find it was in here. Alien spires and fractal fragments began to materialize across the universe as the graphics engine seized more memory to try to display what was happening.

I looked back at Giri, eyes hard. “Space partition; cut the ceiling in half, buy us some more time.” The fox didn’t respond. “Giri, I need your opinion here. What about—Giri? Giri, what’re you doing? I told you, no loading!”

The fox had a sword in his paws; I hadn’t seen him with it when he’d arrived. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember him having one, but he held it balanced across his pads, his head bowed. “I… am sorry, John. It is the right thing to do. Please… give my apologies to Briar.”

I blinked. “Giri? Giri, what the hell are you—no! No, no, no!” I ran over to grab the fox by his lapels. “Don’t you dare quit on me!”

He smiled. “This is not abandoning the fight; this is giving you a little more time. It is… fitting. This is the role Tadashiissei wanted me to play, so I will play it. Good-bye, John-kun.” He drew the blade in a graceful arc from its sheath, then turned it in his wrist and, with a solid thrust, rammed its tip into his gut. There was no blood; he must’ve been too conscious of how much rendering power that would take. Instead he just… froze in place. He didn’t even crumple or fall. His body just stopped moving. His eyes were squinted tightly closed against the shock and pain, but on his muzzle was an almost beatific smile, his head upturned and his tail held high.

“Damnit!” I swung at the statue of Giri in front of me, but as my fist came in contact with it, a black square shot with angry red lines materialized around his head, wiping the smile off of his muzzle and catching my fingers in mid-air. “Shit!” I felt my heart leap into my throat as panic tried to set in. Screams and cries filled the spaces around me, interspersed with static and pure-tone beeping. Music rippled across the panel in front of me, notes making the lines wink on and off. A wolf grabbed my arm. Her eyes were gone; in each socket, a pair of luminescent letters glowed. She opened her muzzle to say something, but only the smell of violets and shift right two && call_function(vox, TRUE, #0xA1830128725E); came out.

Make or break(); time. There had to be something I could do. I wasn’t going to let this be LOOKUP_FAIL(memory()); NO_SWAP(memory());. I froze. What wasn’t I going to let this be? I tried to remember what I was going to compare it to, but my mind felt empty. Why couldn’t I think of anything? “Imogen!”

“Little busy, John!” the mouse shouted in response. “Trying to keep the panic down! What is it?”

“Giri’s gone,” I replied .”I can’t think. I need your help.”

The writer snorted; the sound echoed and twisted around itself in grey-brown whorls. “This is your field, not mine.”

I shook my head. “My memory’s corrupting. I need help to call_function(vox, FALSE, NULL);.” Golden letters scrolled across my field of vision. There has to be something we can do. The rollback has to be almost done. We just have to hold out a little longer. The system should resync itself and the database will offload its—”

Imogen threw up her paws. “Don’t have time for this! Just do something!”

Time. Timing. open_menus(admin(TRUE)); Scan down to the system statistics. Find the Irokai services. It is a shame he could not come back, Mitsuko said. Lower priority. Lowest priority. Garbage collection. The scent of rotten eggs, the feel of something unpleasantly moist, and a charnal taste, overwhelming. Highest priority. Less action per time unit. More time for sync. Time.

I had to it would be enough.

The Voice of Irokai was a core function that could tap into any audio stream in order to deliver important system updates; it had permission to access anyone’s audio system at any time. However, for deaf tourists and noisy environments, Tadashiissei provided an alternative: a scrolling text field, which again couldn’t be disabled but could be resized or relocated for customer comfort. That hook was always present, even if the recipient of the message could hear! The hack bypassed the audio system, went straight for the visual interface, repositioned and altered the text to be as annoying as possible, and then began dumping chunks of Project Gutenberg passed through a fishbowler. The end result looked like a badly-written description of a drug trip.

“Debugger, abort run.” The words vanished from my vision. “Open e-mail, title, quote, bug one-four-six-two-two, end-quote.” I dumped a fast summary detailing my findings, suggesting that the visual hook be disabled as long as the audio one worked and access for the text interface be explicitly limited to the individual. It wasn’t a cure, but the real fix would take locking down the Voice of Irokai, which was way outside of my scope. Ideally, I’d have never gotten this deeply into the core systems in the first place, but with the ongoing crisis, Tadashiissei needed all the help it could get.

I pulled my test results together, then attached them to the outgoing message. “Send to developers-internal. Close. Suspend.” With that, the remaining windows faded around me, leaving me sitting in the back of Tadashiissei’s Beni office, rubbing at my muzzle with one paw. “One down…” I glanced up at the wall, to a list of open issues, then shook my head. “Too many to go.” I rose out of the chair and stretched. “I can’t believe I’m up this early.”

Mitsuko put a paw on my shoulder, smiling gently, her own deep green eyes tired. “You were not sleeping, John, nor was I. At least this way we are helping, ne? The outstanding crises are being addressed. Progress is being made.”

I groaned, paws on the small of my back. “Yeah, but the overall list is still growing.” I rolled my shoulders in a shrug and twisted, trying to pop my back. Explain to me again the sense of giving people the ability to fly and then letting them have sore backs. I wondered if it might be some function of the map from neurons to code that made me still think my muscles felt tight, when in fact I had no muscles to tighten. That got me thinking about the models they were using and how they got the tail to function so naturally, but before I got too far into that path, I felt something in in my lower back give way and the tension melted. “Still, I wish the reason I couldn’t sleep was ‘busy’ and not ‘worrying about not waking up.’”

“Do not worry, John,” Mitsuko’s other paw was at my side, and then her body was warm against my back. “I will not let that happen.”

I reached back and hugged her against me, then turned and kissed her forehead. “I appreciate the thought, Mits, really.” I stretched again, loosening up my shoulders. “I’m going to take a break and see if anyone is open for breakfast. I’d rather not just instantiate something.”

“Oh, hai,” Mits said, making a face. “One can only see the same plate of eggs so many times before doubting its sincerity. I will meet you in a bit; this meeting cannot last much longer.” She slid back, out of my arms, then tapped her ear, holding one paw in front of her, waving me away with the other.

The skies over Beni were overcast, but the rain had yet to return. At least someone got rid of the music, I thought, paws stuffed into the pockets of my slacks. The streets were eerily empty, as were the store fronts. Pseudo-organic tendrils jutted and swayed haphazardly from buildings and road, spreading in a fibrous network across rooftops and across streets. Signs hung on the walls at regular intervals suggesting that tourists visit Murasaki Prefecture or the Bazaar at Hana while Beni Prefecture was undergoing emergency maintenance; it looked like most everyone had taken the suggestion.

One front door to a tenement building hung open, unlike all the others in the block, but even more oddly, it opened not to one of the stock building interiors but to an unlit staircase, leading down. I recognized the floor of the FutureShock as soon as my hinds touched it, that weirdly cool, slick feel of trying to process the sense of touching nothing. This, however, wasn’t the Shock’s entrance; there was no warning message and no sign. From a quick scan of the environment, it looked like somebody had hacked the door in place.

A quick review of timestamps showed that the edits had been put into place late last night, after the extended shift had gone to bed. The link out from the club had Briar’s information stamped all over it, which didn’t surprise me; she was the sort to make that kind of quick hack, but she had to have authority to link to a public area. The inbound link had a name I didn’t recognize on it, but where the author’s employee number would have been was only the single line: terminated, Rei Sasaki.

That made me pause. Something very clearly had happened, but based on what little I had, I had no way to tell what, and the last thing I needed was more mysteries while I was already tired and hungry. I copied chunks of the relevant logs and databases to personal storage, then stepped inside the door. I wasn’t interested in what the Shock had to offer at the moment, but it was the first sign of anything other than abandoned buildings and other people’s tampering.

“Briar?” I called out as I entered the main room of the club, but the interior was as empty as the rest of the prefecture. Semi-fungal fronds covered large chunks of the walls, swaying and occasionally sending out a fresh shoot to cling to one surface or another. The sunsphere looked clean, as did the mirrors, but most of the rest of the hexagons had been obliterated by it. The Tree sported eerily organic curves in addition to its angular branches, and underneath it, most of the benches looked like they’d been completely overwritten. I squatted over my heels, pulling up logs and object models. From a first glance, it looked like it did some kind of space analysis, then did a massive property overwrite to spawn copies of itself, but where was it getting its environment? It wasn’t calling any kind of environment model, could it really be doing a fast location test? That seemed really inefficient, especially in open spaces—

Something electric slammed into me from the side, sending a spasm through my body and knocking me onto my side, landing on my elbow with a curse. A second later, some kind of thick vine shot through the space my back had just vacated, hitting the side of the Tree with a wet splurch. Where it hit, a fresh discolored disk began to spread, new nodules rising out of its surface. “You want to watch those force fields,” a familiar voice called. “You’ll have plenty of chances to get hurt, don’t worry about that.”

I scrambled to a sitting position, looking towards the voice in shock. Standing in front of one of the mirrors was a starkly white-furred wolf. His arms were folded across his bare chest, subtle shifts of his posture emphasizing the gold bars in his nipples and the matching chain that hung from his neck. He wore his pants baggy, covered in gold-toothed zippers, the wide hems sweeping the floor. His tail wagged behind him, matching his grin.

He walked over and held out a paw, which I took hesitantly, looking him in the eyes as he helped me back to my hinds. “Jules… what’re you doing here?”

Jules ignored the question, motioning with his free paw to the tendril that had almost hit me in the back. “That thing’s nasty; cleaning it out of the zone’s going to take work. I’ve spent the better part of a day deconstructing it, and you’re not going to like it. It eats properties, fills space, clones itself, and that’s about it. Oh, and it’s unpredictable; it’s doing some hash-randomizer that tells it where to spread and how that I can’t reverse-engineer. I’ve seen that spine-tendril trick before; I threw a chair and it got snagged in mid-air. It’d be a really cool screensaver if it weren’t wiping out the place.”

“Jules,” I repeated, squeezing his paw more firmly to get his attention. “You got banned. What’re you doing here?”

At that, he turned and looked at me. “I’m trying to clean up my club, but it looks like a lost cause. The back rooms are clean, though; it can’t get through the mirrors. It can eat them, but it can’t read the portal code.” He smirked at that, tapping the edge of one and sending ripples across its surface. “These are still some of my best work.”

I scowled, my tail lashing behind me. “Jules, quit dodging the question. Tell me what’s going on.”

The wolf rolled his eyes, letting out an exasperated sigh. “All right, fine. Follow me; I’m not standing around in here.” He tapped on the surface twice, then stepped into the quicksilver surface, pulling me behind him. I closed my eyes as it slid coolly over me, then opened them again as my hind again touched solid ground on the far side. The walls of this room were red, a deep crimson velvet interspersed with hardwood beams and brass. Gold dragon statues breathed a steady stream of smoke into the air, filling the space with a sweet herbal haze. The floor away from the edges of the room was recessed, with steps leading down to a thick carpet that matched the walls. Overstuffed sofas and bean bags lay strewn about the floor, next to tables on which a number of hookah sat. The whole place had the feel of a futuristic opium den.

Jules let go of my paw and spun as he popped out of the mirror. Walking backwards with practiced ease, he dropped into one of the bean bags built for two, snagging a hose on the way down. “Like what I’ve done with the place?” He grinned, slipping the filigreed nozzle into his muzzle.

“The dragons are new,” I quipped, folding my arms across my chest. “Listen, Jules, I don’t know if you noticed, there’s a disaster happening, and last I heard, you were still banned. How’d you get back in?”

The wolf breathed out a cloud of faintly shimmering smoke, then stretched, crossing his arms behind his head. “I know people, okay? I caught wind that something bad was going to happen to Irokai, so I got with some friends and came to find out if I could help.”

“Nice try,” I replied. The grin vanished from Jules’ expression, his eyes shifting away from mine as I continued. “Outside of Adam and I, you don’t know anybody well enough to help you try to crack the security on Tadashiissei’s servers, I wouldn’t do it even if I could, but I’m not half the developer you are, and Adam wouldn’t even know where to begin. Plus, I know you. You want to be here legitimately so badly that you wouldn’t dare violate your ban, even if you could get an unregistered rig onto the network. Drop the patter, Jules. Just tell me the truth: why are you here?”

Jules started trying to look relaxed and confident, but the more I spoke, the more he looked like he wanted to crawl inside the bean bag on which he’d flopped. When I finally repeated the question I’d tried to get him to answer twice before, he sighed, ears flattening against his head. “Okay, fine, John, you caught me. Are you happy? Yes, I’m on an unregistered rig. I got the keys from a contact. I got tired of pretending this wasn’t important to me. Ever since you moved, Adam’s the only one left I see regularly, and he hasn’t been the same since. And he still refuses to call me Jules.” The wolf sagged into the oversized cushion. “You know the ban’s nothing but politics, John.”

I sighed and shook my head. “I know, Jules. I said that from the beginning, but it was because you wouldn’t let go of your crusade.”

At that, his arms shot out wide. “Crusade? They’re charging you by the second for the privilege of being alive! They’re bleeding you dry, making you pay for stuff that should’ve been free, just for the sake of squeezing a little bit more money out of everybody’s dreams!”

“My point, Jules,” I said, putting a paw to the bridge of my muzzle. “Look, you’re right, I agree with you. I always did, you know that. That doesn’t justify you breaking and entering. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The wolf’s eyes dropped, his body tensing. “How about three?” he breathed.

I cocked my head to the side at that. “Three? What—” His outburst and the quiet admission combined in my head with some of the things I’d seen over the last day, and my eyes narrowed to slits. “You bastard.”

Jules cringed. “John, I—”

“Stop.” I cut off his protest with a sweep of my paw, and my eyes lit a deep and righteous gold. “Jules, you had better tell me the truth, and you had better do it right now. Did you have anything to do with what’s been happening to my home?”

The only response I got was a nod, but it was enough. A chill ran down my back, the bottom falling out of my stomach. “Why?” It was all I could do to force the word out around a clenched jaw.

The wolf pushed himself out of his seat and jammed his paws into his pockets. His shoulders were stooped, his tail trying to curl between his legs. “Okay, yes, I was stupid. I was angry. After I got banned, somebody contacted me about an underground movement to protest Tadashiissei’s policies towards Irokai. I joined. At first it was harmless pranks, leaving messages for people to find to make them ask questions, but Tadashiissei just kept it all under wraps. So… we escalated, and they just kept burying it. So, finally, after months and months of protests and trying to make ourselves heard legitimately, the group finally just blew up, hoping to make a scene that the company couldn’t just hide. It worked.”

I bit back the first reply, then gave up and let it out anyway. “Idiot. Do you really think they’ve heard a single thing you’ve said? All you’re doing is proving that if you can’t play your way, you’re willing to ruin the fun for everyone else. Damnit, Jules, you’re not this dumb! Since when did this kind of strategy ever work?”

He hunched further in on himself. “John, please stop yelling.” His voice had gone very soft, taking that near-monotone I knew meant he was close to his breaking point. “I said I was wrong. I said I was stupid. I don’t need you making it worse. I was angry. I was desperate. You’re right; I want this. I want this desperately. I never expected Tadashiissei to ban me for trying to challenge their policies. I figured the worst that would happen is they would win and I would keep paying forever, hating it but doing it anyway because I need this. I need to be this. When they told me not to come back, I went a little crazy. I did some really dumb things. Now all I can do is try to fix them and hope for forgiveness.”

I took a deep breath and let it out in a rush, feeling the anger sap out of me. I took a step closer to the wolf and put a paw on his shoulder. “You’re forgiven, Jules. I couldn’t stay mad at you. I just wish you’d thought this through before you did it. All of you. Two residents so far are confirmed deleted and the backup system is offline to prevent accidental corruption, so there’s no pulling them back until everything’s fixed.”

Jules winced. “Oh, hell.” He turned, his yellow eyes looking into mine. “Please, let me help.”

I nodded. “I’ll talk with Rei and some of the others I know in Security; they may be willing to listen to reason, and this will be a good way for you to prove that you’re trustworthy, but you’re going to have to come clean and turn over everything you’ve got. I mean it. And that means the rig, too, if he asks for it.” His eyes went wide, but I pressed onwards. “I’m serious, Jules. I’ll help you get back in, but you’ve got to go legit.”

He sagged against me, but he nodded anyway, his arms wrapping around my shoulders in a hug. I returned the embrace, and suddenly he was clutching me to his chest, shaking, tears quietly rolling down his cheeks and onto my shirt. I ran a paw down his back, doing what I could to comfort him. “I’ve missed you,” I said quietly. “I never quit loving you, you know.”

That caught his ears and he withdrew enough to look at me, wiping at his eyes with one paw. “What? But what about—”

“Mits?” I smiled. “We were close, but it wasn’t until after you got banned that we got together. I’d gone out of habit, but I was having a lousy time, and she happened to be off-duty. We spent the day just talking about Irokai, how much I loved it, how much you loved it. She told me she’d heard what happened and was sorry the company had responded as it had. We commisserated. Things went from there.” I shrugged. “I wasn’t the one who broke it off, Jules. I tried to tell you outside, but you were so set on it being a problem that nothing I said was getting through.”

Jules chuckled quietly, his tail giving a half-hearted wave. “I wonder if Mitsuko knows how lucky she is.”

I smiled. “She’s got an idea. I’ve still got all your old avatars, you know. I kept them. We don’t come here much, since you left, but we still reminisce about this place.”

“Yeah?” The wolf’s eyes lit at that. “Do you think… you could? Once, for old times’ sake?”

I huffed, tail lashing. “Jules, remember that whole ‘disaster’ thing happening?” Seeing the look in his eyes, though, I sighed. “Okay, okay.” It took a moment to scan through the interfaces to find where I’d archived everything, a few more to do a quick validation to ensure they were safe, but once I had them active, I backed out of the menu and then looked down at my paws. A quick internal command, and my pads began to glow. “Ready?”

The wolf nodded, his eyes focused on my paws. He licked his lips once, then waved away his pants, leaving himself nude in front of me. A fresh glint of metal caught my eye, making me chuckle; he’d put a barbell through his sheath, even knowing no-one would probably see it. “You really do need this,” I said quietly, stepping closer to him. I knew the answer, but seeing him nod, watching the shivers of anticipation pass through him still made my cock twitch in its sheath. “Easy or hard, Jules. Pick fast.”

Jules snapped his eyes shut, but not before I saw the hunger in them. “Don’t be gentle,” he whispered. His tail curled tightly against his back, his sheath stirring. He balled his paws at his sides. “Please.”

I snapped open my hardline and enabled the pain transmitters, glimmers of pure white mixing into the golden glow. “Brace yourself,” I replied, then grabbed his paws in mine, sending pulses of light up his arms.

Instantly, he clenched his jaw. “Hurts,” he whimpered. “Don’t stop.” His tail lashed behind him as the light spread further up his arms and over his shoulders. I grinned, tightening my grip against his wrists, letting the light slide further over him, outlining his body in a radiant halo. His muzzle hung open, tongue lolling. He gulped air, letting out a gasp as the light enveloped him. As he dropped to his knees, he let out a high-pitched whine, flattening his ears against his head. “Please….”

I nodded, then pushed the light, baring down on the wolf’s paws. Under my pads, the fur flattened, joints stiffening as his skin began to crystallize. His elbows locked as the change spread further up over his arms. “Please what?” I smirked. “Please stop? Please no? I could leave you like this, I guess—”

“No!” The cry was reflexive, thrusting itself out of Jules’ throat with the force of a junkie begging for a hit. “Don’t… don’t stop.” He opened his eyes, haunted and needy, looking down at himself as his shoulders froze. His expression locked into one of panic and bliss as his chest solidifed, his ability to breathe gone but not the instinct to do so. Then the changes came faster, down over his stomach, his crotch, his stiffening shaft turning smooth as it turned to carved diamond. Light permeated the wolf’s entire figure as the shift accelerated. He tilted back his head, muzzle frozen half-open. “Ye—” The word died mid-syllable as his muzzle became translucent, clear, his entire figure transformed into a crystal sculpture with a final flash of light.

I took a moment to validate that the editor had finished, then put my paws together, the light shifting from a deep gold to a bright blue. I put my fingers on his chest, and the glow suffused Jules’ form, casting curious rainbows across the crimson carpeting. Deep inside, where the wolf’s heart was, something sparked, then caught, an orb of cerulean lightning crackling to life. It flickered, then flashed, sending tendrils of current out through his frozen limbs. As it crossed joints, the crystal fractured, then broke. Metal plates grew to seal the shattered ends, with powdered gemstones providing lubrication. Metal shafts grew inward through the hearts of the crystals, forming rods to carry current from the central core out to the smallest segments. Fractal filaments pulsed with power as the ball in his chest throbbed. The last spark sent a wave up his head, restoring his neck and filling his eyes with St. Elmo’s fire.

“—es….” Jules moaned as he collapsed, his fall muffled by the thick plush pile. “Oh, gods… oh, John.” The crystalline wolf shook, fingers clutching at the carpet. “Thank you… I’d… I’d almost forgotten how good that feels.”

“Oh, hai, John is quite skilled at that.” I spun around, ears flat against my head. Mitsuko stood next to the magic mirror, her arms folded in front of her chest, her tail waving lazily behind her in amusement.

“Mits!” I ducked my head, a chill running down my back. With a guilty glance, I dismissed the glow around my paws. “How… how long were you watching?”

My girlfriend giggled. “Long enough to watch you give Jules-kun what he wanted?” She walked towards us. “I did tell you the meeting would be over soon, John.”

Jules pushed himself back to his hinds, though he was still shaking from the rush of the change. “I’m sorry, Mits; it was my fault. I was the one that asked him to—”

Mitsuko put a finger over Jules’ crystalline muzzle, silencing him. “I have no reason to be jealous, Jules,” she said quietly. “I know John loves me. I know John loves you too. And I am glad to see you again, even under such circumtsances.” She withdrew her finger, then leaned forward and pressed her muzzle to the wolf’s, eliciting a quiet whimper from him as they kissed. She withdrew, then licked his muzzle teasingly. “Perhaps when this is all over, we shall finally get to know one another, ne?”

Jules’ tail wagged, though the wolf’s cheeks still glowed with embarrassment. “I think I’d like that, yeah.”

“Oh, hai, I do as well,” Mitsuko murmured. “In the meantime, though, I suggest that we both show John how much we know about him, ne?” She grinning, and then as she arched her back, her clothing dissolved, falling around her in a flutter of leaves and flower petals.

“I think I’d like that, yeah,” Jules replied, turning his attention to me, his expression taking on an almost feral grin. Lightning flickered throughout his entire form as he took a step in my direction.

I looked from wolf to raccoon and back, reflexively taking a step backwards. “Hey, what about… we just stepped out for food, Mits… we don’t have…”

Mitsuko advanced, grinning. “We should make the time. If Irokai is to disappear, then our final moments should be good ones; if Irokai is not to disappear, then we may continue our work afterwards. There will always be more reasons not to do the things we wish, ne?” With that, she smiled, kissed her paw, and blew it at me, enveloping my muzzle in a cloud of sweet-smelling pollen.

Reflexively, I tried to draw in a breath before the dust hit me, but by the time I knew she was doing it, it was too late to avoid pulling the pollen deep inside. Almost instantly, a warm tingle ran along my spine, tail shivering and muscles relaxing. My knees went weak, but thankfully I had a beanbag nearby to break my fall. I landed smoothly, feeling almost liquid as I draped across the overstuffed leather.

Jules grinned down at the other raccoon, dropping to his knees. “Nice one, Mitsuko.” His eyes turned to mine, flickering with concern. “How you feeling, John? You can still say no.”

I looked at the wolf, a warm grin spreading across my muzzle. My head felt clear, my body relaxed. The pain in my back was gone, as was the tension in my shoulders I hadn’t even realized I had. I was still in control, still very aware of my surroundings, but all of the stress of everything that had happened over the last forty-eight hours just melted and poured out of me. “Good,” I murmured. Watching Jules move so freely and so confidently, I couldn’t help but remember how it used to be between us. I missed it. I missed him. I’d told him the truth, earlier, one I hadn’t even really said to myself; I did still love him. “Very good. Please.” I groaned and, with a bit of maneuvering, shifted the bag so I was mostly level, my rump over the edge, my knees spread.

The wolf let out an electric growl, positioning himself between my legs. His crystal shaft rose from its shealth, glittering and smooth. “It’s been a while,” he admitted. “Too long. I may need a little help.”

At that, Mitsuko was beside him, smiling. “How may I help you this morning?” Before he could answer, though, she knelt, one paw ducking between her own legs. Her breathing visibly quickened as fingers shifted against her sex, and then she gently wrapped her paw around his shaft, spreading her nectar along his length. At her touch, his back arched, letting out a modulated groan. “Oh, hai,” she breathed huskily. “I can assist you with that.” Once his shaft glistened from her juices, she withdrew her touch, leaving him to crawl closer, his cock bobbing up as he moved between my legs.

The wolf’s pads were as cool as I remembered as he spread my cheeks, nestling himself between them. The tip of his cock tingled with current as he cautiously positioned it against my pucker, then wrapped his arms around my thighs. “Ready?” When I nodded, he leaned forward, pressing himself inside of me in a slow, smooth motion. Almost instantly, the pressure and power and pleasure pulsing under my tail made me groan, bliss spreading over me in shockwaves up from my crotch. Jules slide his smooth crystalline cock as deeply as he could into me, then held himself against my legs, panting. “Forgot… how good it feels….”

I closed my eyes and nodded in response, trying to breathe deeply, senses overloading. “Keep going.” I put one paw on my sheath. He groaned as he withdrew, then thrust forward again, achingly slow, visibly relishing every twitch and spasm of my pucker against his cock. I did my best to match my strokes to his, and soon we had established a rhythm between us, his crystal-and-lightning form moving against mine, arousal surging every time his hips came to rest against my rump.

Mitsuko giggled above me, and I opened my eyes again to see her standing over me. “Excuse me, but is this seat taken?” Without waiting for a response, she knelt over my muzzle, legs parted. At the cleft of her crotch, rather than the delicate folds I knew, a vivid blue-white magnolia blossomed, its petals unfurled. As she neared, her scent, rich and heavy mixed with floral fragrances that overwhelmed my nose. It filled me with the urge, like an insect, to explore her depths. As soon as I could reach her, I parted my jaws and flicked my tongue out to savor the taste of her nectar as she rocked against my muzzle. With each breath, that teasing, aching desire burned more fiercely, and I tried to slide my tongue further into her.

“Wow.” Jules’ voice was distant and panting. “You got him.” I felt Mits arch her back above me, glanced down to see the wolf’s paws at her breasts, then focused my attention back to her floral depths. We all of us moved together, my girlfriend above me, my ex-boyfriend below, each of us shifting and moaning and panting in time to the others’ movements, driving each other to higher and higher depths of joy.

The wolf was the first to break the pure sounds of lovemaking, whimpering against clenched teeth. “Not… gonna last.” I nodded and started squeezing him as he thrust himself into me, tightening as much as I could given how out of practice I was and how devoted I was to licking each and every petal from base to tip and back, tongue circling Mits’ stubby stamen at the base of her cup. She keened quietly, driven closer to release by my actions as well as Jules’ eager caress at her chest, but it was the one between my legs whose rhythm was breaking. His whole body shook, paws moving back to my hips to pull himself deeper into me, struggling to hold out one more, thrust, another, and then with a warbling howl he drove himself into the top of his knot, sending not spunk but a wave of pure electricity deep into my guts. The surge of power sent its own spasms running along my spine, down to my tail and up to the top of my head, and my paw tightened around my shaft in time for me to come, sending spatters of my own juices across my chest.

As the last aftershocks of his release passed, Jules pulled out of me carefully, a last zot of his charge leaking against my pucker and making me jump. He grinned, then sprawled back on his back. “I needed that,” he groaned. “I can’t tell you how much. He doing okay for you, Mitsuko?”

The moment my orgasm had left me, I had turned my attention back to Mits’ petals. At the wolf’s comments, though, she rose and then bent down to kiss my muzzle, flicking her tongue across her juices soaking into my fur. “Always, Jules, but I am afraid that something urgent has arisen.”

She held out a paw to me, which I took, rising and shaking my head to clear it. “What’s up? Sorry you didn’t finish, Mits.”

The raccoon smiled at me, but her eyes were hollow. “It is okay, John. For now, we must go.” She tapped her ear. “While we were engaged, I received word from the head of Hospitality. The decision has been made at the highest levels to increase our efficiency in handling the ongoing issues. With most critical system disruptions resolved, senior management has opted to declare the crisis averted and handle the remainder as maintenance issues.”

Jules’ eyes flashed, baring pointed teeth in a growl. “Hello? Metafungus? I don’t think this counts as resolved.”

Mitsuko turned to the wolf, arms folded across her chest. “Oh, hai, you are correct, but nor is it an emergency if the zone is empty. All available personnel have been asked to locate and escort anyone remaining within the area to the transit station for Murasaki. In one hour, Beni Prefecture is being taken offline until further notice.”

When I opened them again, the sun was no closer to setting then before, but a fresh crop of user reports had blossomed across the map of the prefecture. Fingers tapping rapidly over the glass surface, I pulled some of them towards me, opened them all and scanned through their descriptions. Some included snapshots: a rain of winged toasters, a person’s face reduced to an iconic yellow disk, a flame hanging in midair; those fell quickly into clusters of similar conditions. The ones reporting only in text took longer, scanning for keywords to add them to the growing collections. A few drifted back to the map, but the rest eventually sorted into five larger collections, each of which I tagged for the development team.

The crisis of the moment resolved, I opened my personal archive of all the security reports I had filed relating to Irokai no Minshukakumei. None of the present attacks shared any immediate similarities with past intrusions; in the past, they—whoever they were—had been more than willing to claim credit for their work, attaching their name and slogans to all of their assaults. None of the latest attacks, though, showed any sign of ownership. And yet, I kept seeing signs of common identity among them. The floating flames, for instance, reminded me of a past display of fiery kanji in a bonfire on Kigiku Island. Staring at the two images in their respective reports, it almost seemed that I could spot the places where the two used the same randomizing functions.

I copied the filed reports to my archive, then waved away the windows with a sweep of claws and shut my eyes. Feel, and accept the feelings, but do not succumb to them, I reminded myself. I felt anger, and fear. For months, if not years, I had reported threats to Irokai’s security; Tadashiissei had done nothing. I had pointed out correlations between past assaults, suggesting a large and organized effort; Tadashiissei had done nothing. I had all but begged my superiors to open further investigations, to find the people who were breaking my world and to stop them; Tadashiissei had done nothing.

Now, I was reduced to sifting for patterns in apparent chaos, making connections where none existed, and hoping that Tadashiissei would do something. I was angry, and I was scared.

A touch on my shoulder brought me out of my reflections. “Giri?”

I opened my eyes, looking over my shoulder to Koneko’s face; her wide blue eyes were squinted in concern, her ears and whiskers held back; in her other paw, she held a mug of hot tea, steam rising from its mouth. “You’ve been here over fourteen hours. You need a break.”

I put a paw over hers and shook my head, looking back to the map. “I am taking breaks as time permits. I took a walk—”

“Five hours ago,” she interrupted, thrusting the mug at me. “Orders from management. You’re off-duty for six hours, minimum. Get a meal and a nap.”

I held my gaze level as I took the tea from her, then rose from my chair. “Very well,” I said after several seconds. I took an obligatory sip from the mug, then passed it back to Koneko with a minimal bow. “I will return in four hours, then. Thank you for the tea.” Koneko returned the bow, her expression carefully neutral, then motioned me away from the table, sliding into the seat I had just vacated. As soon as she was comfortable, a fresh array of lights blossomed over the map, and her fingers began tapping across its surface, sorting through customer complaints.

I watched her work for a few seconds more, then turned and walked out of the front of the building. The skies were still a rich afternoon blue, streaked with pink and gold. Someone had put a human infant’s face on the sun, constantly changing expressions. I watched it laugh silently for several seconds, then suddenly begin crying for no reason. The rapid change of expression sent the fur of my tail into a bristle, and I turned my gaze away, focusing on the sidewalk in front of me as I walked the short distance back to my apartment. The building, a glass-and-steel high-rise, looked thankfully free of infection, though I didn’t take the time to validate the entire system. I did, however, test that the front door would let me back onto the street and that the elevators had the same number of buttons as when I left.

I didn’t want to admit it, but I was even more tired than Koneko had suggested. Leaving the recovery efforts up to my superiors, though, seemed unthinkable. After all the times I had warned about this very danger and had my reports quietly ignored, the exhaustion was just one more thing to tolerate in the line of duty. Still, I was relieved for the order, despite the irritation at being interrupted. It meant that, at least for a few hours, the failure to protect Irokai no longer weighed on my shoulders. You have done what you can, and you continue to do so, I reminded myself. If Irokai falls, it will be because they failed to listen, not because you failed to warn them. It was a small comfort; the thought of my home disappearing was no more pleasant now than it was when it had occurred to me before.

I dropped heavily into the futon in my living room, covering my eyes with my paws. Such thoughts would get me nowhere. I felt mounting annoyance and aggravation, but I had no means to deal with either. For now, all I could do was as had been suggested: eat, sleep, and hopefully awaken to a steadily shrinking queue of complaints and questions. I summoned up my administrative window, and a few quick glances later, I had a hot meal on the way. While the menu was open, I glanced at my standing account, the numbers hovering in the bottom-right corner of my interface, and smiled wryly at the note hovering in its place: All residence fees have been temporarily suspended while we resolve these ongoing technical difficulties.

That resolved, there seemed to be little to do but wait. I had no interest on watching more reports of the disasters, and I was too tired to focus on other entertainment. Dinner arrived soon enough, and I quickly tucked into fried vegetables and shrimp over noodles with thick broth; the food was a welcome distraction from the rapidly compounding absurdities, and once I was done, the exhaustion I had been staving off hit me at full force. I stretched out on the futon, not even bothering to return to my bedroom. “Lights, off; windows, close.” I told the room, shrouding the apartment in darkness.

Giri, it’s Briar. The words came through in spurts, chunks of text followed by stretches of silence. We need your help. Bad.

I counted off three seconds, letting the last of the ringing fade. I have another two hours of on mandatory downtime, Briar-san; I am afraid there is little I can do at the moment.

FutureShock hit, Giri, came the hasty response. Some kind of lockout, can’t leave. Got two uploads and a dozen analogs, some kind of deep object hack. Need your help.

Usagi-san, I appreciate your situation, but there is little I can do at present. I responded. I can provide you a list of contacts who have agreed to help me.

Her next message was almost instant. Please, Giri. Most here don’t trust Tadashiissei. Some think this is a company plot as it is. I don’t know who else I can call. A moment later, she sent a second reply: Please don’t make me beg.

I sighed, rubbing at my eyes. I wanted to insist she find a replacement, but really, could I in clear conscience ask that of her? I didn’t trust most of my superiors to have the best interests of Irokai and its inhabitants in mind; what assurance could I offer someone who knew less about the situation than I did? I rose from the couch and stretched, trying to awaken the rest of the way before I left the apartment. I will be there as soon as I can be. Please do what you can to prevent panic. With that, I took a moment to adjust my coat and left for the tram station.

Finding the afflicted area Briar had described was easy enough; a few minutes’ walk from the terminal, I caught wind of something that smelled distinctly of dust and mold. Following the scent another block, I found a patch of some kind of abnormal discoloration on the wall of a café, spreading slowly over the surface. As I watched, the rust-colored brickwork turned a mottled yellow with streaks of darker green. The while area then began to distend irregularly, taking on a slick, swollen sheen. Once it had bulged out like a pustule, a small cluster of filaments shot up from the building, arcing in semi-random curves back towards the surface. Where they fell more than a few feet, they withered and vanished; where they came into contact with regular brick, they spread their symptoms, fresh buboes bulging upwards from the surface.

I opened my hardline and scanned the spreading infection; it looked like someone had gone past virus and directly on to digital fungus; the whole city block appeared to be infected. There was no lockout; the door to the club that Briar had mentioned simply didn’t exist any more, nor did most of the buildings. The tendrils moved slowly, likely to ensure that no people were accidentally hit, but anything infected became defined as a host, losing all properties outside of spreading the disease, and the more hosts, the faster the infection could spread.

Studying the vector, I had to admit it was an elegant disruption: simple, thorough, and fast. Unfortunately, it had also spread further than I could repair on my own. This is Giri of Tadashiissei Security, I broadcast to the prefecture. Is there anyone within Development or Hospitality currently available that can assist with resolution of an attack? I have two residents and several tourists trapped within a building; their only exit has vanished and tensions are rising. I waited several seconds for a reply, then repeated myself, but still no response came. I closed the menu, then took a deep breath and let it pass slowly, trying to release the sudden burst of anger I felt.

Four or five seconds later, I opened my menu again, reaching out to Briar. Usagi-san, I cannot get to the door; one of the attacks has blocked access. This will take me a few minutes to resolve; are you and the others safe?

For now, came the quick reply. The entry’s covered in some kind of web and spreading into the interior. Slow, but we don’t have a lot of space left. It got Wyth’s cloak and Babel’s suit when they tried to analyze it, but nobody’s hurt.

I wanted to ask who Wyth and Babel were, and why they would stand so close to an obvious source of danger, but those questions could wait until afterwards. Stay away from it for now. Do you or anyone there have local administration access over your present area?

Briar hesitated several seconds before responding. I do, yes. What do you need?

I considered, then shook my head. Everything. Please grant me read access so that I can try to get you out as quickly as possible.

Giri, there’s a lot here. This place is pretty custom.

Please, Briar-san. You asked for my help; I am attempting to comply. I am in Security, not Development; I can only access what I can see. You must trust me on this.

It took almost a minute, but the next message I received from Briar contained the header record for something defined as FutureShock, and I quickly opened and began parsing the code. My eyes widened at some of the contents; they had to have deliberately broken the rendering engine in dozens of places: wall objects with references to non-existent textures, symbol primitives invoked directly, disjoint spaces connected solely by teleportation, rooms in which every wall had been defined as “ground” to disable gravity. The entire area appeared to be either the worst programming attempt I had ever seen, or one thoroughly premeditated violation of Irokai’s building code. I fought down the urge to simply let the virus wipe out the club and have them rebuild it according to the guidelines; the time for recriminations would be after the patrons inside were safe.

Something flickered out of the corner of my eye, and I turned, then dropped just in time for one of the viral tendrils to launch itself overhead. The reek of mold filled my nostrils in its wake, and I skittered on all fours out from under the tentacle as it arced to the ground. Suddenly this had become much more difficult; standing in one place while I focused would be impossible with that thing looking for new targets. I couldn’t teleport them out directly, nor could I edit any of the privately-owned areas around, but I could define a new door in an uninfected area that led to the interior of the club, then allow Briar to connect back to it from the inside. It was an unpleasant hack, but it would resolve the problem in the immediate, assuming I could concentrate long enough to make the changes. Give me a few minutes, usagi-san, I sent to Briar as I stood and started walking. You should receive a link request presently. Please accept and build a reverse link.

Got it, thanks, will be waiting, she replied. As soon as I received her message, I closed down the communications window and willed the katana into place at my hip. Finding an unowned area of Beni proved difficult; the zone was a popular destination and many people had staked out claims to buildings, even if they had done nothing more than add construction signs and donation request links to the doors. However, surprisingly close to the prefecture’s Transit Center, I managed to find a tenement whose owner had improperly secured it; its front door was closed, but it had not been made private. Closing my eyes, I paced in a circle in front of the facility and ran through forms in my mind, then nodded to myself and stopped.

With a forward step, I drew the sword, opening the development menu. As the tip of my blade swung in a wide arc, I hashed and scanned the building’s construction list. With a decisive thrust to my rear, I deallocated the previous owner, then claimed it for myself as I brought the katana back to my chest. Another loud pop behind me made me turn, and I had to remind myself to step aside to dodge the oncoming tendril. I made a quick downward slice and cut the old link between portal and building, then stabbed outward in front of me as I sent a fresh request to Briar. I held the point of my katana perfectly still as I waited for Briar’s reply, then returned to a ready pose as I acknowledged it. Lastly, as I slid the sword back into its saya, I closed the access menu and stepped up to the tenement.

As soon I approved the link, the door jerked open from within and a dozen… forms… spilled through it onto the street. Some I could charitably describe as heavily modified; others seemed to be complete rewrites, so thoroughly altered that I could make no guess even as to original species. The first to leave the door seemed like an ordinary raccoon, but rendered in high-gloss plastic and enamel. The second appeared to be little more than a wireframe model of a wolf, lacking any internal structure at all. The parade of bizarre figures continued, each more vivid than the last. The last to leave was the most shocking; it might have once been a rabbit, or perhaps might one day become one, but at the moment it looked mostly like a collection of brass gears and rods with colored tubes interwoven, inscribed all over with glowing runes and covered in places with black rubber sheeting and small patches of fake fur. After that one left, I shoved the door closed again, then looked over the group, breathing slowly to keep my emotions in check. I hastily scanned them each for any sign of the infection I had seen on the buildings elsewhere, but each of them came up clean.

The clockwork contraption turned—to look at me, I presumed, though I could only guess based on the position of its ear-supports—and then stepped closer. “Thanks,” it said in what might have been Briar’s voice from within a metal box. “We had some time to spare, but not much, and we were all getting escape pod fever down there.” It stood for several seconds, silent, then tilted its head to the side. “Giri?”

I shook my head, breaking my stare. “Yes, good,” I said hastily to fill the silence, then addressed the group at large, raising my voice. “You all appear uninfected. Please, for your own safety, I would consider exiting Beni Prefecture as quickly as possible; the infection—” Another wet rupture interrupted my speech, followed by somebody’s shriek. The summons was instinctive, as was the turn and throw, and then my katana hung in midair, halfway between a pink rubber mouse and the incoming tendril. As soon as they connected, the blade began to convert.

“As I was saying,” I continued as I began escorting the group towards the transit center, “the infection here is spreading too quickly for me to resolve. If you can leave Irokai for the time being, I suggest you do so. If you cannot, Tadashiissei has established a shelter in Murasaki Prefecture to provide temporary—” I caught myself suddenly, then opened my hardline and began poring over each of the figures in turn. All of them showed extensive edits, most of which had no attribution at all. Few of the modules carried approval from the company, though none of them seemed at first glance to violate the rules any worse than the club itself. For all that they were aesthetically disturbing, they were well within the terms of service.

I spun to face the mechanical rabbit. “Who among you made all of these changes?”

The clockwork creature’s brass antennae suddenly flattened against its head. “That’s…” It stopped, then looked to the rest of the group. “I did,” it said with a sigh.

I narrowed my eyes, then looked to the others. “Did any of you help?” They exchanged glances amongst themselves, then looked back to me, their eyes hard. I sighed, then held up my paws, pads out. “I understand.” I took a deep breath, then let it out suddenly. “Irokai is under attack,” I said bluntly, cutting through the delicate statements that Hospitality had been pedaling. “I believe that Tadashiissei is more intent on preserving its image than on protecting its creation. I am looking for volunteers willing to assist with reversion of past damage.” Most of the motley mob visibly changed from reserved to surprised and, at the last, perhaps even a little eager. “Are any of you interested?”

One paw, grey-furred and decorated with glowing tattoos, rose hesitantly, and I nodded to its owner. “What do you call yourself, koyōte-san?”

He looked first at me, then to Briar, then to one of the others. He stepped forward, his tail bristled behind him, and folded his arms across his chest. His eyes narrowed, and the light from the designs in his fur shifted to a warning amber and began to pulse. “It’s Sparks,” he proclaimed, and an electrical arc leapt down one arm as a demonstration.

I nodded, then opened my hardline. Without the sword, it took me more time to remember the locations of all of the menus, but eventually I found the one I needed and set his administration flag. I had to limit his scope to Beni Prefecture and scale down his access in other ways, but once I was done, I nodded to him. “You should now be able to make at least some local edits. “See if it worked, Sparks-san.”

Sparks’ ears flattened against his head briefly, but then after a few moments, he knelt and touched the ground, and a webwork of blue circuit traces branched out from the point of contact. His eyes went wide and the changes reverted instantly. His brow furrowed and he did it again, and the ground began to glow in a circle around his feet. He stood upright, grinning. “Wow. it… it worked. I don’t know what to say.”

At that, my tail flicked, the closest I would permit myself to a smile. “Please say that you will assist, Sparks-san. We cannot be everywhere; we need people we can trust.”

Sparks nodded at that, and I turned to the mechanical rabbit, doing the same for her. “Please validate?”

The rabbit knelt and traced some sort of symbol in the ground. In the wake of her motions, glittering silver lines poured into place, forming runes that began to radiate warmth. “Looks like it’s working. And of course I’ll help.”

I smiled. “Are there any others, Briar-san?”

Briar shook her head. “The last one was Jules, but he got banned.” She held up one brass arm, her paw outstretched to block any criticism. “Not for hacking. He… got in a fight with Legal over access charges. You can look that up.”

I shrugged. “If he is banned, he cannot be of help to us; that is beyond my ability to correct.” I turned back to the rest of the group. “There is much work to be done, but it has been a difficult day for us all. I would ask that you all meet me here tomorrow at—” Before I could finish my sentence, a thunderclap sounded behind me that sent the crowd scattering. I spun to face the target, one paw moving to the hilt of the sword that was not there, but rather than a fresh assault, I found myself staring into the eyes of my manager. The tiger scowled down the length of his blunt muzzle at me, his arms folded across his broad chest. His tail lashed behind him in visible displeasure.

“Where do I begin, Giri?” Rei Sasaki’s voice rolled its vowels like storms on the horizon. “I’ve been watching for several minutes, hoping that I was misinterpreting your actions, but it would seem I wasn’t.”

The few from the club who stayed began to grumble, but my attention was on my supervisor. My own eyes narrowed in response. “Perhaps if Tadashiissei were dedicating sufficient resources to resolve these incidents before they put our customers at risk, Sasaki-san—”

Sasaki cut me off with a wave of his paw. “Tadashiissei is doing what it can with the resources it has. The company does not have to justify its actions to you, only to its customers, and they, by and large, seem happy with how this unfortunate incident is being handled. You, however, have seen fit to violate a direct order to remain off-duty to rest, to alter private code without permission, to perform drastic edits to an environment without justification, and to grant tourists prefecture-wide administrative access without authorization.” He paused after each infraction in the litany of my misdeeds just long enough to let its gravity take hold. “What possible explanation could you have for acting in so reckless a fashion?”

I closed my eyes. Feel, and accept the feeling. I struggled to keep my tone as level as possible. “Perhaps, Sasaki-sensei, if Tadashiissei had taken a single one of my warnings about Minshukakumei no Irokai months ago when these sorts of attacks started, we might not have found ourselves in this position now.”

Sasaki’s eyes narrowed at that, and I couldn’t help but smile faintly in response. “Perhaps, Giri-san, if you had followed instructions I would not now be forced to take such drastic action.” His tailtip flicked, then held eerily still. “If I cannot trust you to fulfill the orders that you have been given, then I cannot trust you to be responsible with the authority you have enjoyed. Effective immediately, your position with Tadashiissei is hereby terminated, your security access revoked.” I felt a wave of nausea pass over me, followed by a chill that settled into my spine and refused to leave. “Any personal effects that have been left at one of our offices will be relocated to your apartment within twenty-four hours. Good evening.” Then, with a second flash of light, the tiger was gone.

“What a dick,” Briar said anticlimactically into the uncomfortable silence that followed. Then, more quietly, she added, “I’m sorry.” Mistaking my silence for refusal to answer, the clockwork rabbit stumbled onwards. “I shouldn’t have asked you to—″ My paw snapping up, pads towards her, stunned her into silence for a moment, but then she backed away. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, lowering her head.

I took another deep breath, holding it deep in my lungs, silently counting off seconds. Do not succumb to it. When the moment of anger subsided, I let go and lowered my paw. “What is done, is done. I acted as I believed right; I would do so again. That this is the result only proves my point.”

Briar was silent for several seconds, then muttered, “He’s still a dick.”

I opened my eyes and studied the mechanical rabbit for several seconds, tail flicking, but before I could respond, the sky above began to finally darken. I glanced towards the sun, watching it sink below the horizon, then turned my face to the heavens, watching for the eye of the Dragon to shine in the sky. Even as blue faded to indigo, though, Seiryū was nowhere to be seen, though there wasn’t a cloud in sight. I turned to the far horizon, hoping to catch sight of the Tiger, but Byakko, too, stayed invisible.

Then the sky faded past twilight to darkness, exposing the empty, starless heavens.

Something within me broke in that moment, something indistinct and tenuous that simply let go at the sight of the void overhead. Suddenly, it no longer mattered whether Tadashiissei survived, whether Irokai endured… or whether I did. All of my pain, all of my struggle, and yet even this one thing was beyond my power to protect. “The stars….” I had nothing left to say. There were no words for what I felt, staring at the expanse of pure black overhead. The lights had been taken from inside of me as surely as they had been taken from the sky.

“Giri?” Briar’s voice, subtly changed, rescued me from falling into space. I lowered my gaze from the empty sky and turned to face her, but everything I had meant to insist died on my lips. In the time I had stood stunned, the rest of the inhabitants of the FutureShock had dispersed, leaving Briar alone. However, instead of the half-finished automaton, she was again the rabbit I had first seen standing in the middle of the Sunny You. Her eartips were black, as was a small patch at the end of her muzzle, but aside from that, her fur was so white that it gleamed. On her shirt, a stylized metallic gold atom whirled slowly, while the patterns of her skirt rippled through muted matching greens. A pair of bracelets clattered quietly against each other on her wrists.

All around her, swirling in lazy orbits, a small cluster of stars twinkled. They winked and fluttered, dancing casually around her figure. She smiled, then caught one in her paw and held it out to me. “I can’t give you back what you’ve lost, but I can give you this. You did a good thing back there; you deserve recognition for that.”

I took the star from her, glancing at it briefly. “You did copy it, usagi-san.”

Briar shrugged, still smiling. “You going to turn me in?”

“No,” I admitted, closing my paw around the light, then held out the other to her. “I would rather ask you to join me.”

The rabbit entwined her fingers with mine, some of her starlets hovering around my arm in response. “I’d be glad to.”

Most of the trip to my apartment passed in relative silence. I was unsure of what to ask and half-afraid of the answers I might receive. I knew she had had a security record at one time. Someone she knew had been banned. The clockwork form, and in fact most of the other figures leaving the club, disturbed me. I wanted to know how, and what happened, and why. What would you do with the information, though? I asked myself as we exited the tram in Murasaki and I directed her towards my apartment building. What could you do? Would you call Security?

At that, I stopped myself at the door to the lobby, turning to face the rabbit. “My apologies, Briar-san; this has been a very—”

Her finger was across my muzzle in an instant. “You don’t need the honorifics, Giri.” She smiled, a tiny star floating in front of her eyes as she looked at me. “Just ‘Briar’ is fine. Or just usagi, I guess. We’re equals now, aren’t we?” Then, to emphasize the point, she withdrew her paw, opened the front door, and waved me inside.

“You are right… Briar,” I agreed, heading to the elevator. “This has not been an easy day for me.”

The rabbit giggled in response. “We were bodily assaulted by a macrovirus. I think everyone’s stressed.” She turned. “Listen, Giri, if you don’t want this—”

It was my turn to silence her again. “I want this, Briar.” I moved the paw in front of her to her cheek. “You have shown me multiple kindnesses, and for now, I would rather not be alone.”

She smiled. “I never sleep alone if I can help it.”

As soon as we entered the apartment, her fingers were at my shoulders, tugging the coat down my arms and tossing it over the back of my couch. The sweater followed quickly, and then her fingers were at the waist of my slacks, making short work of the zipper. “I want to see you,” I said softly as she knelt, sliding her arms around to unfasten the button holding the flap over my tail.

“You will,” Briar said, grinning up at me, still fully clothed. She tugged down my pants and underwear, letting out a giggle as she leaned forward to place her muzzle close to my groin and inhale deeply. “Nice,” she breathed, making me stir. Then, before I could respond, she rose from her crouch and stepped back, lifting her muzzle to the ceiling and closing her eyes. The lights dancing about her dimmed slightly, drawing in closer. The rabbit drew in a deep breath, and as she exhaled, her top and skirt dissolved into a myriad of whirling, multicolored wisps floating around her. She smiled, then stood next to me, her stars enveloping us both.

My paws found her hips as hers rested upon my shoulders, and then she was in my arms, her muzzle pressed to mine, her legs around my waist. She was surprisingly light as I pulled her to me, walking slowly to the bedroom. Her white fur was thick and so, so soft, and her scent rich and full in my nostrils. I set her down carefully on the edge of the bed, leaning forward to kiss her; her muzzle tasted faintly sweet, and she trilled quietly in the back of her throat as I lay down beside her. Her paws roamed over my chest as I slid an arm under her head, then drifted down to my sheath, tenderly stroking the short fur with her fingertips. It wasn’t long before she had me fully exposed and breathing hard, gazing deeply into her eyes. Even now, they glinted like copper.

Briar smiled in response and wrapped one leg around my waist, guiding me to the entrance to her tunnel, then pressed herself to me. I held one paw one her back to steady her, and placed the other on her hip for balanced. She hissed, arching her back as her heat engulfed me, sending a shiver down my spine as she embraced me fully. A slow moan escaped her muzzle as she sank herself to the root of my shaft. “Nice,” she breathed again, eyelids fluttering as she held herself around me. “Please.”

I nodded in response, then slowly pulled away, drawing in a shuddering breath as she clutched at me, then gently pushed myself back into her depths. She began to keen softly, moaning slightly with each stroke, while I held her to my chest, her breasts pressed against me. The stars that surrounded her pulsed in time with her breath, her heartbeat, flickering in response to her arousal. Her short tail flagged with each thrust, back arching as she met my motions with her own, rocking her hips, pulling herself against me.

I held the rabbit tightly, trying to take my time, to coax her slowly to release, but she was as skilled as she had suggested, and soon I was as eager as she, hips grinding rhythmically against her. With every thrust, I felt myself drawing closer, tensing, shaking. Her quiet moans were an aphrodisiac, the scent of her fur an inspiration. Stars swam in my vision, encircling us both. “Briar,” I whispered through clenched teeth, “I cannot… hold out….”

The rabbit’s only reply was a high-pitched whimper and a nod as she met each of my thrusts with one of her own. She relaxed herself as I drove myself into her, then tightened as I pulled away, milking me with expert control, and despite all my meditations and training, there was little I could do but give into her ecstasy. The longer I resisted, the more I shook with need, tension and need rising within. My sheath tightened against me, but I closed my eyes, determined to delay as long as I could. One more stroke, and another, and another, and—

With a grunt, I drove myself as deeply into her as I could, arms locked around Briar, her muzzle pressed into my shoulder as I came, pulsing within her warm, tight tunnel. My breath hung in my throat, body spasming, her sex fluttering against my cock, squeezing as much out of me as she could. For seconds, I lay rigid, buried hilt-deep within the rabbit, every muscle locked and twitching. Then, slowly, I sagged against the mattress, spent, and let out a groan of relief and release. “Oh, Briar… Briar….” My fingers slid gently over her back as I nuzzled into her neck. “Arigatō.”

The rabbit moaned softly into my shoulder, muzzle pressed softly into my fur. “De nada,” she replied, her voice satirically formal. I blinked and pulled away, looking curiously at her, but her brass eyes glinted at me in humor as she snuggled against me. “Sorry, I had to. You don’t have to thank me, Giri. I wanted that.”

“As did I, ” I sighed. “But still… I wish to. Thank you, Briar.” With a groan, I withdrew, rolling onto my back, feeling the tension of the last day, the last week, the last few months, starting to drain out of me.

Briar rolled up onto her side next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. “So, I have to ask… why the sword?” She grinned. “It’s so stereotypical.”

I turned to look at her, giving a faint shake of my head. “It is, yes, but… since you ask, I will tell you.” I leveled my gaze once more at the ceiling, letting out a long sigh. “Irokai has always fascinated me. I always wanted to know how it worked, why it worked. I knew, even from my kaishi—my… birthday, essentially—that this was a created place, a playground for others, but I saw no reason why that should stop me from wanting to understand it. ” I paused, then sighed. “They wanted me to be part of their security staff, but that was not my desire. So, I studied, earned a degree in software engineering, and applied repeatedly for a transfer to Development. Each time, it was politely suggested that my skills were of more use to them where I was. Never mind that I wished to do something different; they simply preferred letting those who could leave the world design it. When I learned—” I stopped that thought; it was unnecessary to delve into personal politics.

“Eventually, I decided that if what they wanted was a toy soldier, that would be what they would receive.” My muzzle twisted into a faint smirk as I continued. “I changed my name, took up battōjutsu, and practiced using it as a focus to improve my access times.” I rolled up onto my side, looking into Briar’s eyes. “We may be wholly digital, but I have no more awareness of my code than you do, and our models were based on human neural networks. My muscle memory is stronger than my base recall, but my recall tied to muscle memory is better than both. Simply put, I work better with it than without.” That made me frown. “This is no longer an issue.”

“Wow,” Briar whispered, her eyes wide in awe. She spread one paw over my chest, entwining her fingers into my fur. “What was your name before you changed it?”

I hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “Chō.” I considered. “I think… I may change it back.” Then I smiled, covering her paw with one of my own. “As for stereotypical, would you not say that oversexualized rabbits are just as bad? I recall an old saying involving breeding.”

At that, the rabbit laughed and pressed herself against me, sliding her fingers lower down over my stomach. “Yeah, well, where I’m from, foxes have the same reputation.”

As her fingerpads brushed over my waist, I lifted my voice slightly. “Lights, off. Clock… off.” Once the room had gone to darkness, I pulled Briar to my chest once more. “I cannot guarantee your safety if you stay, or mine. If I am gone by morning, though, I will have left happy.”

It had taken me the better part of three hours to get the drivers for the induction rig installed and tested. I’d checked and double-checked the potential throughput of my system’s network. I’d validated the integrity of the skullcap itself, reading and inducing a current through every magnet. I’d secured the power lines to ensure the total power drain wasn’t going to brown out the building when I ran everything at once. I even ran a successful mock-connection to Tadashiissei’s network, aborting the connection right before logging into Irokai. Piecewise and collectively, I’d done everything but actually turn out the lights, put on the helmet, and activate the connection protocols.

During the fourth dry run, I consciously realized that I was stalling. I could only validate things in a vacuum so many times before I started second-guessing myself, but something kept me from actually sitting down in the chair and launching. I’d checked and double-checked everything system-related, so it couldn’t be the software. The hardware itself was a black box to me, but all the tests I had done against it suggested that it was what Fuki had promised it to be: a hardware component for reading neural impulses and inducing state changes in the brain through electromagnetic resonance. I was as ready for this as I was ever going to get. Why was I still hesitating?

I bowed my head, letting out the breath I caught myself holding, forcing air in and out of my lungs. I didn’t trust Fuki. That was at least part of it. She’d contacted me out of nowhere, citing some vague mutual acquaintances and suggesting that we had a lot in common, but really, I didn’t know anything about her. I shook my head. Scratch that, I thought. I knew she either worked for Tadashiissei or knew someone who did; that was the only explanation for the amount of detailed information she’d been able to provide. No casual hacker, no matter how good, could have reverse-engineered so much about the company’s codebase in such a short time. Even a team as good as the one she claimed to have couldn’t have done this much research this quickly without internal access. That meant she had an angle, a reason for taking down the company from within… or a reason to go looking for people who did and get them to reveal themselves.

In light of that, I couldn’t trust the rig either. Sure, it had the Tadashiissei logo on it, and it did look remarkably like what I saw on every visit to the transit facility, back when I could get through the front doors. That didn’t mean that it actually was what I requested, or even that it did anything at all. It passed the initial checks, but any clever programmer could set up a dummy device to respond however he or she wanted, to look like a perfectly valid piece of hardware and then do absolutely nothing. Worse, what if she was a company agent, and this was a trap? If the thing could do proper induction, I had no way to control in advance what it would put into my brain, short of tearing the thing open and studying its guts.

Having admitted that, I had to know. With a groan, I crawled under my desk and jerked the cables out of the back of the box. With much grunting and thrashing, I dragged it back into the light of day, then rummaged in my desk for a multitool and set about to stripping screws and splitting security seals. When all the screws I could see were sitting in their rough locations two feet to the left, I grabbed my headset in one hand and spoke into the mic, not bothering to put it on. “Open search. Search for, quote, induction rig schematic, unquote. Go.” That done, I braced myself for explosions or worse, and I carefully pulled off the ugly beige case.

Inside the box was exactly what I feared: a mass of colored wires, circuit boards, and the occasional corporate logo. I hauled myself up into my chair, scrolled through search results, and then started trying to compare notes. Nothing said “burnout circuit” or “possession virus”, or even had a label written in English. I could see the firmware that handled the induction, the small solid-state drive for buffering. None of the diagrams I found matched perfectly, but all of them were at least six months old. Far from proving my theories, peering the inside the induction rig just made me more unsettled.

I ground my teeth in frustration. “You’re still stalling,” I said aloud, as though the words, given form, would somehow jar me into action. All it did was up my heart rate, as I realized I was running out of excuses. Either I trusted it, or I didn’t. If I trusted it, it either worked or it didn’t. If it worked, I wound up in Irokai. If it didn’t… my mind conjured a myriad of scenarios, from brainwashing to a silent alarm going off in Tadashiissei’s offices to impossibly lethal feedback.

I shook my head again as I stood and walked out of the room, grabbing my cigarettes from the kitchen counter. The equation was even simpler than that, really. Either I trusted Fuki, or I didn’t. If I trusted her, and that trust wasn’t misplaced, then I got to go back to Irokai with administrative access. If I didn’t trust her, or my trust was misguided, then I stayed outside, in the “real” world. Everything followed from that assumption, and that was the one line of the proof giving me the most trouble. Could I trust someone I only knew by pseudonym with something this risky?

The first draw of smoke hit my lungs in a burst of heat and nicotine, soothing my rattled nerves. I leaned against the balcony, cigarette tucked between two fingers as I stared at the sky, the sodium glare from the streetlights washing out the night sky. Nothing Fuki had said to me yet had turned out to be wrong, but that could all be an act, an attempt to lure me into her web. I had no reason to doubt her, beyond the fact that I couldn’t make sense of her actions. Why would someone inside the company work to destroy its greatest asset, unless she were trying to get people to incriminate themselves? She had to have a motive, a reason for her betrayal, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I just had no idea.

I took a second drag, holding it inside until my chest burned, then let it out in a rush of grey smoke. Did John understand why I left him? I wondered, watching the wisps dissipate in the ever-present breeze. For that matter, does Adam understand why John’s leaving us both? I shook my head, flicking the half-finished cigarette into the empty space. Some things, I realized, couldn’t make sense from the outside. Even if I knew Fuki’s reasons for what she was doing—assuming she was really a “she” and not a “they” or something else entirely—I couldn’t guarantee that they’d make any kind of sense. Knowing something and understanding it were two very different things, and all this twisting around trying to decipher someone else’s inscrutable motives was getting me nowhere.

The leather of the captain’s chair was cool against my butt as I dropped, naked, into the seat. I took a few minutes to put the case back on the rig and shove it half-heartedly under the desk again. Whipping together a timer, a little watcher-script to cut my outside connection in an hour in case anything went wrong with the system, took a few more. The skullcap was tighter than I remembered, putting a faint pressure all around my head as I tugged it into place and tied the chin-fastener. “Lights, off,” I said, my voice muffled by the earplugs. The light seeping around the edges of the blindfold disappeared, leaving only the faint glow of the monitor. “Timer, execute.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and leaned backwards, lifting my feet off the ground as the chair tilted me to near-horizontal.

“Inductor, execute.”

An infrasonic thrum began pulsing through my head, and despite the absence of any light, my vision slowly filled with a field of grey. Faint rainbows rippled in the void, and then suddenly I was falling, but up and down refused to identify themselves. Bars of music resolved out of the background hum, chords coming together into a chorus of electronic pure tones, then diminishing into a digital hiss.

Swirls of color took shape and form, resolving like stereoscopic images into regular, asymmetric patterns. Gravity abruptly asserted itself, and I landed with a heavy thud onto my hinds, then staggered into the dart-tiled door . It gave way as my weight impacted it, and I tumbled out of the arrivals booth onto a concrete walkway. A collection of people stared as I struggled to my feet, and somebody in the crowd said, “Hey, buddy, you okay?”

Someone put a black-furred paw on my shoulder. I followed it back up the brown arm’s length to the face of a raccoon, his brows furrowed in concern, an awkward mixture of sympathy and smugness at play in the set of his muzzle. Behind him, a group of his friends stood around twittering and watching their companion with admiration and annoyance. He extended his other paw to me and helped me awkwardly to my feet, offering a fraternal pat on the back. “First time through the transit system? That looked pretty rough.”

I blinked, snapping my head from the raccoon’s face back the wall behind me; it was concrete, like the rest of the tram station, but set with a series of multicolored tiles like the floor of Tadashiissei’s transit transit station. The patterns extended briefly up onto the walls, and overhead a sign in Japanese and English said Beni Prefecture Transit Point. Welcome Visitors to Irokai!

I grinned so wide my cheeks hurt, tail wagging madly behind me; even if I could have stopped it, I wouldn’t have. I wiped at my face with one paw, relishing the feel of fur under my pads. “Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat with a cough. “That last step’s a long one.”

The raccoon grinned, obviously glad of his chance to show off his superior gravity-management experience. “You gonna be okay? You need some help?”

I waved away the offer, shaking my head. “I’ll manage; I’m meeting some friends at a club not far from here.”

“Yeah?” The raccoon’s eyes lit up and a knowing smirk crossed his face. “Which one?”

I looked back at my erstwhile-assistant and made a point of visually giving him the once-over. Out of curiosity, I went for a hardline and tried not to look too shocked when I got one, complete with administrator options I wasn’t expecting. A quick scan using my newfound powers showed a bog-standard model, even down to the coloration. He didn’t have a single mod or upgrade that I could spot. His clothes were custom-tailored, but a fast follow-up on the labels showed that they came from a corporate partner, probably part of a package deal. Even his tail moved in recognizable idle-loops; the overall effect was random, but the individual segments of movement were pure Tadashiissei-baseline.

I smirked, giving my own tail an expressive wag. “I don’t think you’ll like it.”

The raccoon frowned at that and pulled his paw away. “Suit yourself,” he quipped with a shrug, then motioned back to the gaggle behind him. “We’re gonna go have some fun now.” Then he was gone, rejoining his group of little friends, which slipped back into the moving throng.

“Yeah, fun,” I said to no-one. Then I was off at a dead run, sprinting past bodies as I exited the station.

The front of the FutureShock looked like almost every other building in the district: low to the ground, with concrete walls and a corrugated roof, faintly tinted red with rust. Flyers advertising various bands, upgrade shops, and brothels blanketed the steel double-doors marking the entrance. The only sign for the club itself hung in the single window: a constantly-evolving logo filling the glass, beneath which were the words, “Anything is possible.”

No bouncer stood at the doorway; instead, as I approached, the quick double-beep of an incoming message sounded in my ear. I opened the hardline and checked my queue; in it was a request for response from “The Association:”

Dear Prospective Member,

Please be aware that FutureShock and its participants do their utmost to live up to the organization’s motto. Inside these sacred walls, anything is indeed possible. This venue is not for the faint of heart or the closed of mind. Anyone wishing to experience everything that Irokai not only can but should offer may enter the club after responding in the affirmative to this message, at which point The Association holds itself blameless for any loss of sanity, dignity, or innocence experienced within. In other words, don’t say yes if you don’t mean it, and don’t try to hold us accountable later if you didn’t really mean it.

If you understand everything you’ve read above and you’re still interested, respond in the affirmative and someone inside will acknowledge your acknowledgment as soon as possible. Thanks.

The Association

I’d forgotten about the application, and more importantly I’d forgotten that I wasn’t using my old account. I considered searching through the administration console to find my old records, but good sense stopped me for a change. The last thing I wanted right now was to advertise to anyone else in charge that I might still be around, and checking for my old access information would probably trip somebody’s flag somewhere. Still, it couldn’t hurt to see if my old hangout had changed much in the time since I’d been gone, and this was part of why I wanted to be back in the first place.

It took a few minutes for someone to process my acceptance, while the light rain slowly soaked into my white fur, turning it a slick silvery grey. Then the double doors creaked open, inviting me inside. Synthesizer tones spilled into the streets, while softly strobing lights beckoned from the bottom of an unlit stairwell. I crossed the threshold into the concrete antechamber, and the steel doors closed behind me, shrouding me in shadows. Moments later, a red light came on behind me, illuminating the stairwell, throbbing gently like a mother’s heartbeat, coaxing me further inside.

The stairs had no handrail, but each step was more than wide enough to find, even in the reduced light. Gradually, the glow filtering up from the basement replaced the red behind me, as the concrete steps gave way to solid black strips, limned in yellow light. The edges of the stairs themselves lit the way further into the depths, their glow augmented gradually by a pattern of hexagonal panels on the wall that matched them, giving the appearance of a neon beehive. I paused and touched the wall, running my pads over the smooth surface; it wasn’t glass, or plastic, or for that matter any material at all. It was an artifact of Irokai’s nature, a wall defined solely as “wall,” absent any property indicating substance. Light bordered each hexagonal segment, suffusing the hallway with golden radiance.

At the base, the staircase gave way to a broad tiled floor, each step sending up a soft reverberation that no analog material could naturally make. The middle of the room was sunken, dominated in the center by someone’s artistic reinterpretation of a tree, circular clear trunk rising from arcs of roots embedded directly in the floor, while angular branches spread out overhead, decorated in fractal holofoil leaves. Translucent “fruit” in an array of Pythagorean solids and the occasional exotic surface hung at intervals, inviting those standing beneath to reach up and pluck them. Benches surrounded the “tree,” free of any visible support yet easily carrying those who sat or sprawled across them. Instead of doors leading to other parts of the club, tinted pools of liquid mercury rippled at intervals around the edges of the room, and a long bar dominated one part of the wall. Inverted cones—primitive solids defined purely as functions in space, lacking texture or material—balanced impossibly on their points to serve as stools. Overhead, the walls rose in finer and finer tessellations, converging at the domed ceiling in a semi-spherical sundisk of luminous, impossibly pure yellow that filled the room with its light.

If the room itself defied conventional physics, then its inhabitants defied classification. On one of the benches beneath the tree, a glass statue of a domestic canine leaned against a liquid-metal rabbit, one transparent paw stroking along her silver thigh. At the bar, a holographic mouse drew lines of light through a cluster of violet rosettes floating in snow-leopard-shaped formation. Against one wall, a feline-shaped hazmat suit dripping with machine oil exchanged connector hoses with a blue-furred cat in a silver umbilisuit. As I watched, one of the portals began to ripple, then disgorged a butterfly-woman, her stained-glass wings coruscating rainbows behind her as they vibrated. Behind the counter, a topiary rabbit blooming with berries chatted amiably with a plush coyote, glowing wires stitched into its fur.

I smiled. It felt good to come home.

As soon as I stepped out of the tunnel leading down from the entrance, the rabbit-bush turned and waved. “Welcome to FutureShock!” she called, inviting some of the other inhabitants to turn in my direction.

My swagger died in midstep. They don’t—oh, yeah. I waved sheepishly with one paw, ears flat against my head and tail trying to curl between my legs. Of course they won’t recognize me, even if they do, I remembered. New account, new identity. In a place in which anyone could be anything, nobody took appearance for granted. I strode over to the bar, making a show of nonchalance. “Hey, Briar,” I called out to the topiary, taking a seat on one of the conical stools. “What’s blooming?”

The rabbit-bush’s ears flicked upwards in surprise. “Sorry, have we met?” Suspicion tinged her voice.

“It’s been a while,” I admitted, scratching at the back of my head with one paw. “It’s Jules.”

The plush coyote huffed, its glass-bead eyes half-closed in a suspicious squint. “Nice try, officer.”

I smiled wanly, ears back against my head. “You never change, Sparks.” I motioned them forward and leaned over the bar, whispering, “I hacked my way back in.” I put a finger across my muzzle and grinned.

That got their attention. Both coyote and rabbit leaned in close, ears arching forward to catch every sound. “If you are who you say you are,” the rabbit challenged, her voice reedy and tight, “then prove it.” Then she dumped a mass of encrypted text into my communication queue.

I dragged up my hardline and rummaged through my settings, then pulled up my bank of private keys and started decoding. As the algorithms cranked, I recited. “Why, the fact is, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to—”

The topiary rabbit held up a paw, ears arching forward and needles bristling in a smile. “Enough, Jules. Welcome back.” Then she gestured towards the staircase. “So how’d you get here?” She waved the fingers of her other paw, and a cluster of bright red berries rose out of her palm, which she proffered. “Last I heard, you’d gotten banished.”

“I was,” I agreed as I took the bunch. They were sweet, mostly raspberry-flavored with a faint metallic aftertaste. “What is this?” I asked after I’d eaten about half of what Briar had given me.

“Something new,” she replied with a shrug. “So how’d you get back in? And what’s with the admin flag?”

Sparks nudged the rabbit with one paw and said to her, “I don’t like this.”

I finished the cluster of berries and handed back the stems, which vanished into Briar’s thickets. “It’s a long story, and I don’t have a lot of time to explain it, but… yeah, I’m on a hacked account.”

Briar grinned, her brambles rustling amusedly. “Tadashiissei’s gonna be choleric if they catch you.”

I smirked at that, but then the bottom fell out of my stomach, forestalling my clever retort. I put a paw over my gut and kneaded at it. The muscles beneath my fingers moved in very un-muscular ways, wiggling loosely, as though not quite attached. “What was in those, anyway?”

“Something new,” Briar repeated with a giggle. “You’ll see in a minute.”

It didn’t take that long. Despite the slow wave that my vision seemed to be doing despite remaining still against the bar, I could definitely tell that my fur was changing color, shading from white to a deep red. I brought a paw up in front of my face and squinted, watching with detached interest as the hexagonal wall-pattern began to shine through not just my fingers, but my pads as well. I looked down at myself, observing the changes as they spread, my fur losing definition, then vanishing entirely into my new rubbery skin. I couldn’t see any bones or organs when I looked at myself, just an expanse of translucent red all the way through. I looked back at my tail and tried to wag it; it felt like I was dragging it through molasses.

Sparks snickered, then leaned forward and gave my arm a lick with a velvet tongue. “Raspberry,” it pronounced with a smirk.

Carefully, I lowered one foot, then the other, letting them flop against the ground. Everything felt so heavy all of a sudden. I slid forward, but somehow my legs wouldn’t support me, and I slipped bonelessly to the floor, ending up in a heap of tangled limbs. “Hey!” Even my voice was heavy, coming out slowly and ponderously, played back at half-speed. “Warn a guy next time.” I stared up at the sundisk and brought my paws in front of my face, watching the way the colors before my eyes moved as I waggled my fingers.

Briar laughed. “That’d suck all the fun out of it.” She came out from around the bar and sat down beside me, dragging one leafy paw over my chest and neck, making me squirm in slow motion. “Now, tell me, how’d you get back in here?”

“Induction rig,” I responded immediately, though still on a heavy delay. “Hacked connection.”

“Mm-hm,” Briar agreed, ‘petting’ me with her leaves. “So what’s with the admin account?”

“Ask Fuki,” I replied, slowly waving my paws in front of my face, then in front of her. The topiary rabbit swam in sticky red when I waved at her.

The rabbit-bush’s ears flicked back against her head. “Who’s Fuki?”

“Don’t know,” I admitted with a slow shrug. Choleric. The thought of the word made me laugh.

Briar’s ears twitched, and I saw her look up at Sparks, who shrugged in response. “You sure?”

“Yeah, sure.” I nodded, then tried to get a paw under me. I had legs, last I checked. Two of them, in fact, but they didn’t really want to talk to each other. I contented myself with playing with the sun while they decided to be nice.

Again they looked at each other in silence, until Sparks said, “Is it really you, Jules?”

I nodded again. “Yeah.” Yellow and red made orange. Orange. “Yeah, that’s right.”

The topiary frowned, and then berries were before my lips. “Here.” They were blue, and I snapped at them eagerly with gelatin-teeth. They popped in my mouth, and strands of purple suffused me as the juice spread. “This’ll help.”

The weight slowly dissipated as the second batch of berries worked their magic, and I forced myself into sitting upright. “Whoa,” I looked down at myself; the change was still fully in effect, even if the mind-bender wasn’t. “Real nice, Briar, Sparks.” I frowned at the two. “Nice way to say hello.”

Sparks threw up its cloth paws in frustration. “How were we to know? Somebody comes in here with an admin flag claiming to be you, and we’d heard you’d gotten zeroed.”

I held out a paw. “Okay, yeah, I understand. Do you believe me now, at least?”

Briar nodded. “Yeah, sorry.” She stood, then helped me back onto my hinds and onto the stool. “So, how are you back? And why?”

I rolled my shoulders and grinned. “A guy gets lonely?”

Sparks chuckled, but Briar scowled in response. “I’m not taking it. There’s something going on here.”

I sighed and nodded. “Yeah, there is.”

“So spill.” The topiary folded her arms across her chest.

I looked at her, then at Sparks. “I can’t say much. Mostly, I came to warn you. Some really heavy-duty disaster is on its way. Be ready to duck and cover.”

Sparks’ ears flattened. “Are they shutting this place down?” It huffed again, paws balled into fists. “We didn’t do anything wrong! Well, I mean—”

I held out a paw to forestall the protests. “Not you, not here. Irokai. Does Minshukakumei ring a bell? Democracy Revolution?”

Briar and Sparks exchanged a glance, then looked back at me. “Rumors, mostly,” Sparks admitted. “I’ve seen a few images of edits, but I thought they were faked.”

I shook my head. “They’re not. Not all of them, anyway.”

The topiary rabbit frowned and leaned forward. “Jules, what’s going on?”

I turned to the rabbit and smiled wanly again, showing translucent teeth. I leaned forward to rest my elbows on the bar—

—and pitched out of the captain’s chair as the software timer expired, cutting my network connection. My knees hit the floor with a bang, my elbows following a moment later and only barely keeping my face from being next.

Unwelcome darkness and silence assaulted me, and for a moment I flailed in the void. Then sense reasserted itself and I clawed at the straps of the skullcap. I pried out the earplugs and then tore the whole thing off of my head. It fell in a heap of nylon and cables beside me as my eyes snapped around the room, the sudden change of sensory inputs making my head reel.

I put a hand to my stomach, trying to still a sudden burst of nausea and to get my breathing back under control. So that explains the transit stations, I thought, in between bouts of disorientation. The world slowly came together, and I poked at my skin, scowling at the pink flesh that had so recently been raspberry gelatin. It felt real enough, even if it wasn’t mine.

Seconds ticked past as I stared at the discarded skullcap, paws—hands—clenched tightly on the arm of the chair. The urge to run back to FutureShock, to drop everything else for just a few more minutes of self, welled up, then broke out of me in a sob. Get a hold of yourself, damnit! I swore inside my head. Every second you spend in there on that account is one more you risk getting caught!

I choked back a second sob, wiping at my face with my hand, the sensation of fur against muzzle already gone from my mind. You’ve already said too much. They’re not stupid; they’ll figure out what the need to know and what they need to do about it. There’s nothing more you can do!

Gingerly, I got my legs back under me, checked that the bones were intact within, and then pushed myself upright. “Successful test,” I said to no-one in particular as I dropped back into the captain’s chair and pulled it in front of the computer desk, shoving the skullcap out of the way with one foot. “Lights, on.” I grabbed the normal headset next to my keyboard. “Timer, close. Inductor, close. Editor, open. Debugger, open, load file ‘voice-over.’ Synthesizer, open.”

I had a lot of work to do to cover my advance payment.