August 2021 – deep future

Toy Delivery (commission)

A commission for @sockfox on twitter!

Sock was bored.

It was a hot, muggy August day – and he’d been cooped up inside for much of the summer instead of going to, well, anything summery. No pool, no cook-outs, nothing!

It was either too hot, too rainy, or too… busy!

So, maybe that’s why he was so surprised when a package was dropped on his front porch one hot afternoon, a simple cardboard box with only his address and the curious company sender title “Summer Fun, Inc” printed on the label. Could you even send mail without a return address?

Sock, hefting the surprisingly light box, glanced around. No mailman in sight, no mysterious gifter walking off down the sidewalk that they’d surely have seen – it was if it had appeared from thin air!

What could be inside?

Carrying the box back in, the fox plopped it down on the table, digging through the nearby kitchen drawers for a box cutter or a knife; eventually one turned up, and Sock gently cut the tape holding the top flaps shut.

Inside was… yellow.

Something folded, yellow, and soft to the touch – vinyl?

Did I order inflatables and forget? Sock wondered to himself, confused. Oh, well. Might as well puff one up to see what it looked like, right?

Tugging a pump out of the closet, the fox gently unfolded the flattened toy, taking notice of the long, brown-tipped ears and little painted-on bucktooth. A bunny!

Stuffing the hose in the toy’s valve, Sock began to pump – watching with delight as the toy began to fill, little ears standing up as it began to round out to a cute, anthro bunny shape. A squeaky mop of blond hair crowned the toy’s head, along with a little star-shaped barcode on their thigh – it was, all in all, pretty cute by inflatable standards. So cute, in fact, that he forgot that he hadn’t actually even ordered it. Lucky mistake, huh?

Finally, after about ten minutes of pumping, the toy was full – and Sock was exhausted, tugging the hose free and capping the bunny’s valve. Whew.

It stood about three and a half feet tall, cute little smile and bright blue eyes seeming to stare right back.

“Well, aren’t you cute!” The fox chuckled, giving the toy’s nose a little boop, sending it rocking. The box included two more, too – what a score!

For now, though, he felt like a couch nap was the best option, yawning as he turned to head for the living room – but pausing at a quiet squeak behind him.

Glancing back, the toy was just as he’d left it – maybe a little more towards the table than he remembered, but he could’ve moved it when he’d touched it.

Shrugging, Sock wandered off to take a nap… and the toybunny set to work filling its friends, dragging them out of the box first, then filling them up with the pump Sock had left behind!

The fox woke up a little while later to… well, to a sight, certainly.

Three bunny faces were peering down at them in various states of curiosity, and as he shouted in alarm and surprise they all bounced back!

“U-Uh,” Sock stammered, coming face to face with moving… inflatables?!

Since when did they move?!

Sock got his answer when the same pump he’d used earlier was plopped down on the couch, one of the toys stuffing the hose in his mouth!

“Mph!”

Another pressed down the handle, a hiss of air rushing down the hose and swelling out his cheeks… but this was different, seeming to quickly go down as the air went somewhere else.

Huh?

The toybunny settled into a rhythm, pumping air into the bewildered fox even as their tummy began to swell, sliding their shirt upwards. Their eyes instantly darted to a bump, pressing out where a belly button was a few moments ago – and, before Sock’s very own eyes, he gained a soft, translucent plastic valve, much like the one the three rabbits sported!

The third bunny giggled, the first sound any of them had made aside from the squeaks of their movement. “Ta-da!”

“Mmph?!”

No reply, that time.

Slowly, methodically, the fur around the valve began to mat down – softening, smoothing into Sock-patterned vinyl in a wave of tingling change; sweeping first over the sides of the bewildered fox’s tummy, but also spreading upwards beneath his shirt, and downwards, out of sight.

The thought occurred to him that he could’ve simply tugged the hose free; in fact, he could do it right now, but… for whatever reason, the motivation wouldn’t come. He was much more satisfied watching the change than actually stopping it.

He felt his lower body begin to lighten, plastic and seams slowly crawling the length of the fox’s tail until even the very tip solidified into a plasticine, vulpine shape; finely (if simply) detailed, flat pattern swaths modeling the fox’s usual fur patterns in expertly-sprayed lines. It squeaked slightly beneath him as he moved it, legs and footpaws following suit as he raised one to see. His toes first melded together as the plastic washed over them, vinyl digits joining into a cute, if not very useful, vinyl paw-mitt.

It was at this point that the hose was tugged out of the fox’s mouth, and gently stuffed into the valve now peeking out from beneath a shirt that didn’t quite fit anymore, inflatable rounded thighs making Sock’s poor shorts strain and groan.

Again, the puffing began – this time, forcing his arms slightly outwards as they inflated from the base outwards, chest hollowing out with a deep, satisfying tingling sensation! Testingly, he squeezed his flank, delight welling up inside as it gave beneath his grip much like one would expect air-filled vinyl to.

A new sensation from his back sent his paws searching there, too; soft, pliable squared-off hoops of plastic had emerged from the middle of his back, recognizable as handles from the feeling alone. Pooltoy handles, for… a pooltoy fox. Made sense, he supposed.

His arms continued to change, fingers starting to melt together much as his toes had. It was fascinating to watch, fur and fluff first seeming to merge together, before gaining the slight translucency and lightness of air-filled plastic. He gave his paws a testing open-and-close, listening to the quiet squirks of vinyl on vinyl.

At this point even the three rabbits were watching the fox’s changes with curiosity, as it began to crawl up his neck and onto his face! Sock felt the urge to giggle, forcing it down for a moment, before he began to smirk.

Then grin.

Then laugh, a long, drawn out giggle escaping his snout…

…and then, nothing, as it solidified into a plastic, painted on smile, nose flattening on as simple detail paint!

His mitts instantly flew to his face, tugging on the smile. But how will I breathe?!

Panic gripped the fox for a moment, before he realized he… wasn’t breathing. He didn’t even feel as if he needed to breathe, as his vision blurred for a moment as his eyes, too, became simple detailing paint on a Sock-shaped inflatable.

The last to change, fittingly, was the fox’s ears. His hearing swam for a moment as fur and skin turned to plastic, before returning somewhat echo-y; whether that was due to his new ears or the fact he was now hollow remained to be seen.

With a quick little tug the hose popped free, Sock’s valve quickly being capped by the three inflatable rabbits – and, as he sat up, dizzy, one saluted.

Another grabbed a piece of paper from the coffee table and a pen, scribbling something.

After a few moments, the toybunny spun around, holding out a hastily (and somewhat poorly) scribbled sign.

“POOL DAY?”

Sock would’ve giggled if he could. Pool day, indeed.

freefall.

//nightsky

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be in here!”

The security guard unholstered his sidearm, leveling the holosights squarely over center-mass of the figure currently hunched over a server, hands buried in the meshspace interface that made up the front panel.

Neither moved for a moment.

“…Control, I’ve got an intruder on level sixty-“

The guard didn’t finish his statement as the crouched figure whirled around, palm outstretched just enough to slap the sidearm out of his grasp. Stunned, the guard made a grab for them as they slipped by to the right, connecting for just a moment with the fabric of their nanoweave jacket before they made it into the hallway, steering a hard right towards the elevators.

“Lock down the damn lifts!” The guard practically screamed into his mic, grabbing his gun from the floor and hurrying after. “Get a team up here, we’ve got a data breach!”

Cai, to their credit, was no stranger to running. They’d spent years as a data courier, time as a merc working out on the backwater worlds of the shallows, seen things fellow spacers would dismiss off-hand.

…but, even they had to admit, this job had them doing things they’d never have dreamed of otherwise.

The rabbit skidded to a stop in front of the elevator just as it dinged – the doors sliding open to reveal a heavily armed GSyn tac-team who filled the spot they’d occupied a few moments before with enough particle beam fire to light up the night sky.

“Guess I’ll take the stairs!” Cai shouted, ducking and weaving as the shouts of the team spilling out of the lift fell behind.

The hallway they were running down skirted the outside of the Ganso Syndicate’s headquarters on Sanibel – a towering obsidian edifice that stood stark against the rest of the glittering skyline. The glow of the vast city beyond the glass cast the bunny in sharp relief as they ducked mid-run, a particle beam searing overhead as the team started to catch up.

Up ahead the hallway took a sharp right turn to run along more offices and board rooms, following the contours of the building. Shouts could be heard around the corner – apparently a second team was trying to box them in.

Cai sighed – and readied their last resort.

Being a posthuman, the rabbit’s frame wasn’t… strictly baseline. They’d had it modified over the years with various enhancements and reinforcements, and as the two teams drew their weapons and shouted for the bunny to freeze, they threw their plan into action. Adrenaline flooded their system as injector implants did their jobs, slowing their surroundings to a crawl. Cai blurred as their own sidearm was pulled from the holster, two shots leaving the barrel in rapid succession.

One hit the window ahead at the bottom, sending cracks spider-webbing across it – and the second shattered it, wind sucking the shattered glass up and away as the sweltering Sanibel night spilled in through the breach.

Crossing the distance in four steps the bunny catapulted through the halo of shattered glass still falling from the wounded frame, a beam catching their jacket alight from a near miss – and plummeted into the dark, leaving the two tacteams staring after as they dropped away into the glittering night sprawl.

Luckily it wasn’t as far a fall as it might have been – they only dropped three stories, smashing through the polarized glass ceiling of a neighboring penthouse and leaving a sizable amount of damage on the various expensive bits of furniture scattered about inside.

They lay there for a moment, vision spinning as their internal diagnostics returned a solid “yellow” and protested against being thrown out of a building, before standing up and picking their pistol back up.

Tugging the little transponder their contact had given them before the op out of their jacket lining, Cai clicked it – and it turned a soft, cool blue.

Their comm clicked.

“…About goddamn time,” They huffed, sliding it into their ear and checking their pistol. Four rounds, two spare mags.

“I trust you retrieved what I needed?” The voice on the other end intoned, curiosity peaking around the edges of their voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Cai shrugged, bringing their pistol up as the penthouse’s occupant – a portly baseline in a red robe, gawking at his ceiling and shattered furniture – threw open the door, quickly getting out of the way as they gestured to the side. Rushing down the hallway they slammed a fist into the elevator button, sighing as the doors finally slid shut and the elevator began to rumble downwards.

“You’re pushing my silicon pretty far, you know. Almost an exabyte of data is a pretty substantial chunk of my frame’s storage.”

“You’ll be well compensated.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Cai sighed, ducking to the side as the doors finally opened.

The lobby was empty – unsurprising, as it was just past four in the morning on Sanibel.

Sirens filled the night air, a pair of security skimmers swooping past as the Syndicate began sweeping the surrounding blocks for them.

“There’s a meshdiver bar three blocks north. Offload the data there into my private nexus. Sending you the access key now.”

A soft ding sounded as the message arrived – and the AR overlay map their hud implant highlighted the bar in question, outside of the Syndicate’s sweeper zones.

“…On my way,” Cai sighed, closing the channel.

The bar was more of a rundown meshspace cafe than a proper dive, with a lowered room with a bar lining the back wall and a pair of hallways stretching out to either side lined with mixed-reality immersion rooms. It gave the place a roughly T-shaped design, and as the bunny took their seat in their rented room and felt their surroundings melt away, they called forth the general directory for Sanibel.

“Gold zero-zero-sigma.” They calmly stated aloud, watching the dawn-hued fog around them ripple with their every word. “Waves upon beaches, tides upon shores.”

The fog parted – gone was the drab peeling walls of Jandy’s, this was a richly furnished office atop a Sanibel high-rise.

A desk sat across the room – with a figure seated behind it, soft cigar smoke drifting into the evening air.

“Ah. You must be the courier.”

“Kellen.” Cai said simply. Taking a seat wasn’t needed – the transfer request had already arrived and been approved, as the exabyte of stolen data was siphoned away into the client’s reception buffer.

“Very well done,” The figure behind the desk stated, amusement tugging at the edges of their tone.

“I aim to please.”

“You came highly recommended on Sanibel, my friend. I see our efforts were not… wasted.”

The figure crossed their arms, revealed to be the gunmetal grey of a synthframe. “Payment has been processed. You may leave.”

It wasn’t a suggestion. The office faded away as the fog rolled in, the familiar brief discomfort of returning to their mesh-bridge causing Cai to shake their head. This was the third contract in a row since their arrival on this world that they’d been in the dark on – and it was starting to worry them.

The payment window for their brief time at Jandy’s resolved from the fog, along with a canned “thank you for your business” video file – both of which were dealt with with a quick swipe of a palm, draining two hundred credits from their luckily just-replenished funds as they made their way back into the busy streets of the city.

Oh, well. Ten hours to kill before their next job.

Where to?

Salvage Frame (commission)

A commission for @vanillayote on twitter!

Rain didn’t really know what to expect when he’d first come out to the Far Belt three years ago, but… success didn’t lie.

The coyote-pattern bioframe was just one of many scavs and scrappers that plied the far reaches of the Mylae system – it being a gateway system for the various skimmers and jumpships passing towards the Old Core meant plenty of debris and ship detritus to pick over, system authorities handing out hefty paydays to those who kept their orbital space clean and easily traversable.

So, today’s run had brought Rain out to the gravity shadow of the system’s farthest planetoid, Scipio – slowly picking over the ancient ruins of some long-forgotten skimmer buoy caught in the steady if weak pull of the planetoid as it wandered along its lonely path.

“Let’s see what we have today…” Rain grinned to himself, shuffling a few rations floating about in the low gravity of the salvage rig’s cockpit aside to press the shutter retraction key on the dingy old orange screen.

It complied with a loud rattle, shooting upwards – and revealing a veritable field of salvage, glittering ice from flash-frozen atmosphere twirling about in the metallic blizzard beyond. Larger pieces flittered here and there, all being marked by the rig’s “dumb” AI as it catalogued and sorted them by metallic purity and content.

Finally, a complete list was ready – along with the bad news, fed to him by the rig itself. Moving closer, with so much debris moving so erratically, was a bad idea through and through. Even if he made it there safely, there was no telling if the rig would survive an impact – or, more likely, if it wouldn’t simply be crushed by the larger pieces as they moved about the moon’s weak lagrange point.

He’d have to go in the old fashioned way – suit and tether, thruster pack included.

Normally bad news, this excited the coyote for one simple reason – they’d recently made a purchase on the back of their latest haul with this exact situation in mind, and now they had a real reason to use it!

“Alright, let’s see…” He hummed to himself as he unclipped the crash seat’s belts, drifting into the recycled air of the bridge. The new system had been installed just sternwards of the bridge in the old maintenance quarters, and with a gently kick-off the coyote drifted out of the bridge and inside.

There, a chair sat – various bioframe interface ports and automated devices lining the arms and legrest standing it far apart from the pilot’s crashseat he’d occupied a moment earlier.

The first step, naturally, was to extend the rig’s command and control network far enough to cover the wreck – something easily accomplished as he slipped into the chair, granting the basic AI control over the ship’s systems while he was “away”, so to speak.

Next, he hit the locking mechanism on the chair – clasps locking the coyote’s arms and legs into place as the chair’s interface ports aligned with his frame, connecting the frame to the shipwide meshnet and starting to feed info to the framelink required for the next step.

FRAMELINK ACTIVE. ENGAGE?

The coyote keyed the proper response – and his world went white, sensory inputs slowing to a trickle – before they were absent, entirely.

The coyote stood in a stark, white place – absent of even a horizon. A link behind him led back to the frame he’d just left, the “Rain” he most identified with and had become analogous to himself – and ahead, another link existed, this to the thing he’d picked up on Mylae during his last brief time ashore.

Gently reaching out, the coyote’s fingers gently brushed against the link – and his mind exploded into color, overwhelmed as if a wave had rolled him against the seabed.

Then, nothing.

It took him a few moments to even realize anything had changed. He was no longer in a chair, that much was certain. While he couldn’t see, native LIDAR the frame possessed for moving in darkness gave him a rudimentary vision, enough to glance around. Rain was tightly gripped in a metal… tube, of some sort, darkened screens surrounding him on all sides. Something was pressed against his back, and after a moment’s struggle he finally managed to activate the frame’s ocular sensors and auditory receptors.

Slowly, gradually, the world faded back in – darkened, various screens displaying readouts and interface information flickering to life as the rig’s AI complied with the orders sent earlier. His first instinct was to take a deep breath – something impossible, as the frame he currently inhabited lacked any sort of biological components whatsoever. He glanced down as his mind finally synced with the synthframe, bending his large, pressurized suit-fingers. Diagnostics told him the suit was fully pressurized and ready for extravehicular activity, and with a quick thought the CORE unit attached a pair of tethers and re-equipped the salvage grips to the frame’s hands.

So this is the frame, he thought to himself, glancing backwards at the large, largely cosmetic tail it sported. He’d always liked skunks.

Not bad.

The tube slid open, and the frame stepped out onto the bare, vacuum exposed hull of the rig – magnetic soles holding him firmly to the metal. His ocular HUD overlaid the scans from earlier across the glittering starscape, firmly planting the most likely location of the old buoy’s fusion cells nearly straight “up” from where he was standing.

Well, he mused, activating the frame’s RCS maneuvering thrusters to lift off into the ever-shifting debris field.

Here goes nothing.