soon as my cybernetic teeth could chisel their way through the wires of limited primate thought processes.
But as far as I’m concerned there is always the ineffable.
The unplanned for.
The viscous.
And the rat.
With a flick of my tail and a stream of coding I hack the button on the escape hatch, the portal swivels open, and I board the shuttle. All I need now, is a Citizen to override the emergency departure protocol. Dayan.
Dayan will come.
I hope.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR NAME MEANS?” Eva brushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Dayan’s mother was standing at the edge of his bed, staring out the porthole. A swirl of stars outside his bedroom window, smears of light steaking like shooting stars.
An antique book made of real paper rested on Dayan’s chest, Nanaboozhoo Stories. The rotation of the space station Marius simulated gravity in the low g’s of their orbit. The smears of light repeatedly interrupted by the looming presence of Io’s volcanic surface. The hulking mass of Jupiter. Jupiter’s smaller moons, Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, flitting across the moulded curve of the wall like sprites. Satellite of a satellite of a satellite. The space station Marius wasn’t actually on Io’s surface—too much volcanic activity, the surface compressing and decompressing like a squash ball in the tide of forces. Not to mention the radiation.
“Dayan is an Ojibwe word, you know? Short for ndayan, it means ‘my home.’ We named you this because it wasn’t until you were born that Io began to feel like home. A home away from home.”
For Dayan, Io had always been “home.” But maybe home lost all meaning when Earth was supposed to be home, though he’d never stepped foot on that world. His parents both worked in the organic-tech industry, a “lucky spoiled space-brat,” his cousin Aesa teased from Earth when they ve-ared across the distance. Distances meant very little in virtual space. Dayan wasn’t so sure about his fortune though. He thought they were the lucky ones.
“The Earth is our mother,” Eva whispered. She folded the hair across his temple, kissed his forehead, then turned to the door. She touched palm to sensor to dim the lights, then stepped out of his room leaving only the blue glow from the track lighting around his window.
He had a habit of staring out at space from every nearest view-port, searching for a glimpse of Earth. No brighter than a star. A distant blue orb. The stuff of imagination and holo-series. Though his Earth-bound relations dreamed of the adventure of space-living, Dayan dreamed of being an earthling one day. He imagined the vastness of the ocean. A real blue sky overhead. Wind. Rain. Snow. So many things he’d never experienced.
“If the earth is our mother, and the moon is our grandmother—what does that make Io? What does that make Jupiter?”
Eva paused in the doorway. “Relatives too. Aunties. Uncles. Cousins. They’ve always watched over us, just like Dibik Giizis. Just like Nokomis.”
Dayan supposed this was true, the sun and moon had always hovered in the sky exerting their subtle influences of gravity and astrology. He’d tried to figure out his astrological sign once, based on the month and year of his birth, but wasn’t sure if those old superstitions applied. Aquarius. Year of the Dog. He would need a whole new Jovian–Ionian astrological system to chart the subtle dance of the galaxy.
Not that he believed in any of that shkiigum. Slime.
Like one of Jupiter’s moons, his grandmother had always been hovering around the peripherals of the projection fields, a constant though distant presence in their lives, offering recipes, crabby words of advice, laughter, and medicine. A floating, semi-translucent, three-dimensional hologram sewing a new pair of makizinan in her easy chair, narrow spectacles perched on the tip of her nose. “Like astral projection,” she would giggle. “E.T. phone home. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” Sometimes she was so weird! Though the source of her presence was technological rather than spiritual.
A chime pinged on the edges of his awareness. Abacus.
Dayan arranged himself comfortable and let his eyes flicker in command as he dropped into the ve-ar overlay. Abacus’s avatar was a boy Dayan’s age, maybe a bit older, prominent brow ridge, small round ears (not rat-like at all), medium brown hair, though with the same opaque black eyes, the blown-out pupils with a wet sheen, and his skin a splotchy patchwork of light and dark, in the same pattern as his rat-self.
He’s asked about it once.
“It’s important for my sense of identity.” Abacus gestured with an open hand to the darker pigmentation around his neck and jawline. “It is as much a part of me as my servo-matrixes.” Vitiligo, Abacus called it amongst humans. This oil-and-vinegar separateness of pigmentation.
Today Abacus wore blue jeans and a tight nineteenth-century Star Trek T-shirt featuring the face of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Dayan groaned melodramatically, though a flower of pleasure bloomed in his chest. Sometimes the rat was too much.
He might be a spoiled space-brat, but Dayan bet his cousins didn’t count rat-avatars amongst their best friends. They had actual human children to hang out with. Aside from ve-ar, there were slim pickings on Io.
“Hey, Abacus.” Dayan had been avoiding the AI for the past few days, ignoring pings and messages after the, the confusion, inspired by their last meeting. But he knew the boy wouldn’t stay away forever. They’d become good friends over the past three months. Ever since Dayan had picked up the AI from one of the mazes. To pet him.
Abacus bit his finger, a bright spot of blood erupting where the skin had been torn, dripping to the floor of the maze in a patter. Vile! The rat sent a holo-emoticon in his general direction where it appeared to shatter against the inside of his lens implants, the debris raining around him in shades of green and violet.
“Ow! Effing thing bit me!” Dayan dropped the ridiculously expensive organic computer, outside of its enclosure, and it ran off. Uh-oh. He was in deep miizii now! He wasn’t supposed to play with the product. They were destined for richer kids on richer stations and richer worlds. Not the far-flung stations where they were fabricated.
Dayan spent the next five days hunting the creature, crawling through viaducts, and service tunnels, grubby and dark, carrying a flashlight. A hunk of cheese and bread to entice the creature. A small butterfly net for capture.
Unable to find the AI in ar-el, real life, Dayan spent a day banging around ve-ar searching for the creature and tracing the subtle trail of its existence. In the ve-ar overlay, a very close virtual approximation of the physical world, Dayan found the rat, in the avatar of a boy, roaming the halls of the station Marius. He guessed they were the same age in the conversion of rat-to-human years. And in fact, the creature had holed himself up inside Dayan’s bedroom.
Dayan followed the boy-rat, stalking it from a safe distance. He knew this station inside and out. Every passageway. Every servicetunnel. Every viaduct. And deducing the AI’s route, he circumnavigated quickly through a secondary network of ducts to cut him off. Leaping from an adjoining corridor, Dayan pounced.
He grabbed the boy in a chokehold, leaping on the virtual AI’s back, tackling it to the ground. They tousled. A tangle of limbs and arms. Too close to throw any punches. The rat resorted to biting and kicking. Pulling hair. Fighting dirty. Dayan wasn’t about to let the creature
