by Bogi Takács
“A month.” Jay made a face, sticking out his tongue so his disgust was clearly visible even with his sunglasses and raised hood. “A whole freaking…great. I love waiting around not knowing if you’re dead or alive. Or anything else. That’s my favorite thing to do.”
“You could come with me.” The simple offer wasn’t a casual one, or empty, or easily withdrawn. Stefanos never made them.
“What, just sneak me out? I’m a little bit high-profile. Kinda a big deal.”
“It’s been done a few times before.”
“Okay, yeah, understatement. Ha, they think this thing’s so impenetrable.” Jay nodded up at the barrier arcing far over their heads. “But every firewall has a back door. Especially if your name’s…me.” Jay was entirely still and quiet for a moment, a rarity that indicated some seriously deep thought. “You really don’t think your friends would mind me hanging around? Could you even do it?”
“Like I said, we’ve done it before. Many times. You’d just be on a more temporary basis than most, that’s all.” His shining eyes swiveled down; Jay found it hard to look away, and for a moment, harder to make up his mind. Neither one was something he experienced often. “And no. They wouldn’t mind you being there. If they did, they wouldn’t be my friends for long.”
Jay didn’t answer right away. But after an even longer few seconds of consideration, he shook his head. His answer sounded casual, but that was all. “Nah. How would Parole survive without me? The man, the legend, the one they call…eh, you know what they call me.”
“You’ve got a point there. Wouldn’t last five minutes. I’d bring you back and the place would be a smoking crater.”
“A bigger one, you mean. It’s already pretty much a smoking crater.”
“Mm. I couldn’t be responsible for that.” It wasn’t always easy to tell when the big man was smiling or not; his heavy, curly facial hair hid some of his more subtle expressions, and his synthetic eyes made a hell of a poker face. But his voice was another story; it softened and warmed, and Jay’s wide grin melted into something softer as well at the sound. “My heart valves haven’t been upgraded enough to handle that kind of guilt.”
Suddenly, something zipped between them and kept going; something small and very low to the ground, with four legs and a tail. It zigzagged across the street, then slipped into a seemingly impossibly tiny hole in the rubble of a fallen building, disappearing from view.
“Was that a cat?” Stefanos’ golden optical lenses whirred as they rotated, focusing on the wreckage where he thought the animal had disappeared.
“What? Where?” Jay whipped off his sunglasses and snapped instantly into the moment, as if the mere presence of a cat was much more exciting than their actual destination.
“I don’t know. Probably nothing.” Stefanos shook his head, abandoning the search and silently hoping Jay would too. He’d only caught a glimpse, but it had really looked more like a cat skeleton—which told him it was either something they didn’t want to mess with, or his optical implants were malfunctioning.
“Nothing? There’s a cat around here somewhere!” Jay, however, seemed much more optimistic about the idea. Stefanos couldn’t have been less surprised if he’d made a direct and concerted effort. “Somehow, one brave little stray managed to survive this hell city! Oh, that’s a good sign, maybe we’re not all doomed! You sure you didn’t see where it went?”
“Sorry. But I’ll keep an eye out.” He couldn’t help it; Jay’s infectious enthusiasm won over common sense any day of the week, and today was no exception. He gave one gyroscope eye a whirl in a mechanical wink. “You know you can always play with the dogs at the library.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” Jay closed his eyes for a moment, as if gravely disappointed. “I mean yeah, yes…Ash does good work, dogs are great, they all need good homes…but I’m a cat person, Stef. I mean, living in Parole for ten years, you get to miss a lot of things, right? Family. Home. Um, obviously. Mostly.” His eyes dropped to the sidewalk. “Anyway, growing up we had a ton of cats. Always like five at once. So…”
“It’s okay.” Stefanos’ deep voice was gentle and his large flesh-and-blood hand on Jay’s back was warm. “You don’t have to explain.”
He did anyway, and Stefanos wasn’t surprised. “Dogs just don’t—you can’t compare them! Apples and oranges, HTML and CSS, Wars and Trek…you have no idea what I’m talking about right now, do you?”
“I did about the family part.”
“Thanks. Figured you would.”
Stefanos opened his mouth but stopped before he got any words out, holding up his synthetic hand and giving Jay’s shoulder a slight squeeze. It was second nature by now, but he didn’t have to: they could both hear the strange and ominous noise coming from behind them. It was regular, fast, like someone running in heavy steel boots—and getting closer. He and Jay both immediately edged away from the middle of the sidewalk and into the shadow of the nearest building, listening closely as the footsteps got closer, but not turning around or otherwise drawing attention to themselves.
They rounded the next corner. Then they held very still, pressed their backs against the wall, and held their breath. Jay shot Stefanos a quick glance and received a nod in return, confirming their next move. As soon as their pursuer passed them, they’d bolt the opposite direction, and if necessary, Stefanos would fire a disabling shot with his arm cannon—which he began to power up with a growing electrical hum. Together they held their breath, counting silently down from three, two, one…
Someone sped past them in a flurry of clanking metal legs, loose natural black curls, flowers, and vines.
“Was that Rose?” Stefanos held Jay gently back as he began to immediately rush off, one large hand across his chest. He looked slightly confused as he peered around the corner—though he was already powering down his arm.
Jay’s sunglasses had come loose in his attempted dash, and now he flicked them back on. “Looks like the party’s starting early.”
They did burst out of hiding together, but it wasn’t to fight back or run away.
“Rose!” Stefanos called, trying to keep his voice level to avoid frightening her, but she’d be too far away in a second. “Hey there, Rose!”
“What?” She whirled around, flowers flying and hands coming up defensively in a stance everyone who lived here picked up quickly—so they both stopped immediately, raising their own hands in a similar but much less aggressive one. As soon as she saw who stood several respectful feet behind her, she let her breath out and gave them a relieved smile, but kept her arms raised, letting them see the small forest of wickedly sharp thorns protruding through her skin. “Oh! Perfect!”
“Sorry about that.” Jay gave her a sheepish grin and a wave as she stepped closer to them, arms still held at shoulder height so they could see the thorns recede. When they were fully withdrawn back into her skin, she gave her hands a shake and let her arms drop, sighing as she relaxed from her dash and startle. “Didn’t mean to scare you. We were just on our way, wh—hey,” he stopped, noticing the way she kept looking around, brow furrowed with worry and confusion. “You okay? Something going down, city in peril?”
“Not so far.” Rose looked back at him and laughed, a little breathless. “Just a minor birthday complication.”
“Oh, no, what happened? Maybe we can help.”
“Missing cat.”
“I told you!” Jay pounded Stefanos’ metal arm with his fist, to which the much bigger man barely reacted at all, except to hide a smile in his beard. “Wait. You have a cat? You never told me!”
“It’s one of Danae’s works in progress,” Rose explained, frustration coming back into her eyes as she recalled that morning’s chaos. “Somebody left her workshop door open—”
“Somebody.” Stefanos snorted.
“Mm-hmm. Anyway, the cat’s not done, still being built and programmed and everything, but it can walk around—and run—and it still doesn’t have fur or
all its working parts, but I guess it looks and smells enough like a cat that when it got out…”
“Dandy.”
“In about three seconds.” Rose shook her head, looking like she was caught between laughing and letting out an annoyed sigh. “We managed to catch him, but that thing was gone. Danae and Jack are home finishing Ev’s cake. I’m hoping there’s a chance I can find this cat at all, you know how things disappear in this place…” She chewed her lower lip for a moment. “This is Danae’s star project right now. And it’s Evelyn’s birthday, I just…it’d just be great if we could get everything back to normal and start over. It was going fine until now.”
“Say no more,” Stefanos said in a soft, low voice. “We’ll help however we can. Right?”
“Absolutely.” Jay nodded. “No job too small for Parole’s elite resistance. Battling the forces of evil by night, rescuing stray cats and delivering perfect birthdays by day, that’s what we’re here for.”
“He sounds sarcastic but that’s just because he doesn’t actually know how to stop,” Stefanos said, giving up his attempt to hide his smile. “Anyway, shouldn’t even be too hard to pick up on personal sensors. Danae’s fancy alloys are even easier to trace than body heat.” His eyes clicked and hummed softly, then began to glow a bright green. The light beamed out in a vertical line, sweeping smoothly over the nearest brick wall. “Which I keep telling her to do something about.”
“She knows,” Rose assured him. “That’s actually what this prototype is for. One of its purposes, testing a new experimental alloy. Much harder to trace. You might actually have trouble finding it, I certainly have been.”
“Well, good, if we can’t, then SkEye won’t be able to either. If one of her little friends ever fell into the wrong hands…” He frowned, beam emanating from his eyes growing both brighter and greener as he intensified the scan. “What was the final mix, if you know that?”
“You’d have to ask her about the exact percentages.” Rose shrugged. She was just glad when nothing exploded, as happy as Danae was when she didn’t wake up to find that their house had become a thick forest overnight. “This morning she was talking about tungsten, but just in a ‘wish we had it’ way.”
“Tungsten? Here? She’s dreaming.”
“That’s what I said! Actually, I said, ‘Okay, put it on the idea list, honey,’ because you know how she gets if you just shoot down one of her plans, no matter how wild, she’ll go on a never-ending quest for every bit of tungsten in Parole just to prove she can…”
Jay didn’t even attempt to appear engaged in the conversation. Instead, he stretched out his arms in front of himself, opening his hands wide and wiggling his fingers like a stage magician about to levitate a string. The other two didn’t even pause or look over when he cracked his knuckles—extremely loudly—or when he clapped his hands a couple times, activating the holographic interface in his gloves.
A couple small blue-white screens hovered above his palms, staying where they were when he turned both hands over, then used one to flick through the various notifications and messages. Nothing pressing, though he did tap one square to remotely activate a hidden shock mine, reveling in the knowledge that five very surprised Eye in the Sky troops were currently—ha, he had to chuckle at that, pun not intended, but enjoyed—smoking in their body armor. They wouldn’t try breaching the library roof for a very long time.
Message break completed, he waved “goodbye” to make the hovering screens wink out, and instead pointed decisively at the ground. A small red dot appeared where he pointed, and he made a few quick practice circles. Like Stefanos’ eyes, his glove was now emitting its own light. The beam was just much smaller, more focused, and not for scanning; a LASER pointer.
Not even a full second later, the tiny red light was attacked by a pair of shiny metal paws.
“Ahem.” he grinned as Stefanos and Rose turned to look, nodding down to the small metal cat-skeleton-with-a-head that rolled around on the ground and wildly batted at the LASER-pointer light. “Would that be the cat in question?”
“Sure is.” The relief in Rose’s sigh surprised even her. All day, she’d been the one reassuring Danae that it would be all right if everything wasn’t absolutely perfect. But clearly her own hopes had been higher than she’d thought. “Thank you so much.”
“It’s nothing! Cats are cats. No matter what they’re made of.” Jay kept smoothly conducting his finger and LASER-dot in a figure-8. The cat-in-progress showed no signs of getting bored, still batting at the light whenever it came within reach, long, whip-thin tail waving behind it like a startled snake. “Next time try a box. Wouldn’t even have to put anything in it, probably, just a box.”
“AF-FIR-MA-TIVE.”
Everyone jumped. The harsh electronic voice that had so vehemently confirmed the statement didn’t belong to Rose or Stefanos—or anyone human. The cat abandoned its pursuit and looked up, green eyes unblinking and fixed on Jay as if suddenly finding him much more interesting than even the most fascinating wiggling light.
“Was that…” Jay stared back, finally falling still. He let his hand drop, a programmed glove motion which extinguished the red light. The cat’s eyes flicked briefly down to follow, then right back up to his face. “Did that cat just say—”
“It’s not done yet,” Rose explained with some secondhand embarrassment. Danae hated it when people saw her projects before they were finished; she said it was like people seeing her half-dressed. Rose thought there was something fascinating about seeing the animals especially without their fur; it was like seeing the levels of scaffolding and detailed blueprints that went into the construction of towering buildings. You could more easily see the intricate moving parts and appreciate the works of beautiful genius, rather than go an entire day forgetting you weren’t petting a real cat. But Danae insisted—no seeing a new model until it was done. Otherwise, people saw and heard things like—
“AF-FIR-MA-TIVE.”
“It won’t do that when it’s done,” Rose said hurriedly. “It’ll meow just like a normal cat. And have fur and everything, you’ll barely be able to tell. Really, it’s—”
“Amazing!” Jay practically squealed, crouching down and reaching one hand out, knuckles toward the cat’s metal nose—which it immediately sniffed, then nudged with its forehead. “It’s already amazing! Why would you change it? I mean, what if someone wants a cat that talks in a cool robot voice?”
“That…hasn’t come up yet,” Rose said. “Though I suppose it’s always possible. We get all kinds of custom orders.”
“I’d be fine with plain old fur and meowing.” Stefanos folded his arms and gave the small animal a baleful stare. “Anything else gets a little weird.”
“Oh, come on, be nice! It’s just a kitty!” Jay and the cat both looked up at him, and somehow Rose was sure its bright green eyes wore a matching look of reproach. “Perfectly good, normal cat, just with metal bones instead of bone-bones, right? We like people with metal bones.”
“Right,” Rose said, nodding, then shaking her head, then nodding again. “Everything she crafts is alive. In a w—I mean, yes, they’re very much alive.” She’d never been exactly clear on how. A different kind of life than her plants, a different kind of life than humans, even, or other animals. Maybe even different from what (little) she knew of artificial intelligence. All Rose knew was what Danae insisted: that her creations, from the objects that only appeared inanimate, to the ones that clearly looked you in the eye and protected and loved you, like the giant wolf who’d caused all this trouble, and the cat currently rubbing against Jay’s shins, were just as alive as the human woman who had created them. “We tell everyone to just think of them as very advanced therapy animals. They can actually recognize when you’re having a panic attack or flashback. Or perform complex tasks and understand what you say a lot better than flesh-and-blood animals.”
“Well, that’d be pretty nice to have around,” Jay mumbled, scratching behind the cat’s
ears and admiring their delicate movements. Rose remembered the hours Danae spent on each individual ear, citing the Sydney Opera House for their multi-layered shutter design. “Instead of a hundred anxiety attacks a day, maybe I’d only have ninety. Cute and useful.”
“AF-FIR-MA-TIVE!”
“So did Danae build her custom for someone, or can you like, adopt them, or—how does this even work?”
“How about we walk and talk?” Stefanos suggested mildly, both metallic eyes swiveling over to Rose, who gave him a grateful nod. “Didn’t we have to be getting somewhere?”
“That’s right, we’d better head home. Evelyn’s coming home right after the show, and Danae might need some help finishing the cake. But no, nobody’s claimed this one yet. She’ll go wherever she’s needed most.”
“Mm-kay.” Jay nodded and stood up—and as he did, the cat immediately jumped up onto his back, curling around his neck to drape around his shoulders like a scarf. Jay gasped and held very still, but looked unable to keep from trembling with wonder and joy. “Guys…look! It’s…I’m…”
“I’m looking,” Stefanos sighed, looking resigned as a soldier on a long and lonely night before a battle he knew would be his last. “Rose?”
“Imprint protocols.” Rose kept the laugh out of her voice, and hid a smile behind the sway of her hair; a thick curtain of vines and blossoms came in handy sometimes. “This is why Danae keeps all her projects inside and away from people until they find their homes. They tend to imprint on the first people they see who aren’t us. It helps them bond with their new family… No promises, but let’s talk to Danae.”
“Imprinting… Do you know what this means?” Jay whispered, overjoyed. “She likes me! I’ve been chosen.”
“AF-FIR-MA-TIVE!”
“No promises, I said,” Rose insisted, though the thought of separating this man and this cat was quickly becoming more and more impossible. Especially considering the fact that after this strong an imprint bond had formed, the only way to reset it was just that—a hard reset, wiping the project’s memory entirely and starting from scratch. And (maybe in some cases unfortunately) such a memory wipe was impossible for humans. Even considering that seemed cruel, unusual, and as far as Rose was concerned, out of the question. But just in case… “Ask Danae. She might have plans for this one that I don’t know about, and I don’t want you to get your hopes up, all right, Jay?”