Short Story: Bunny Love Has No Limits, by Daniel Eliot Boise

Cover Art: Titan And Ship, by Felipe Brando

Reviews: Review: House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds, reviewed by Todd Drashner

Distant Echoes: In The Hall Of The Flesh Sculptors, by David Jackson

Announcements: New Category: Distant Echoes

Distant Echoes: Falling Stars, by Anders Sandberg

Titan Ship, by Felipe Brando

Our first cover art selection comes to us from the gifted mind of Felipe Brando. Felipe was recently selected as the Featured Artist for this quarter by the Board of the OAUP. Here’s Todd Drashner’s announcement, from the OA Nexus list:

On behalf of the managing board of the Orion’s Arm Universe Project, I am pleased to announce the launch of our Featured Artist program. Please join me in congratulating our first Featured Artist – Felipe Brando Cadavid.

List Moderator – Orion’s Arm Universe Project, Inc.

We shall also be asking each quarter’s Featured Artist to allow us to use one of their works as cover art for V/FT.

We look forward to the images we shall be bringing you in the future!

Daniel lives in the Niagara region of southern Ontario, Canada as an urban hermit, a libertarian monarchist, a licensed ham, the official Star Lord, a Potentate of the Rose, and an ordained minister in the First Church of Atheism. He plans to live forever or die trying, and finds the idea of being permanently stuck as a hairless primate an unsatisfying lifestyle choice.

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Loved OA from the first time he saw it as it provide so much variety in great detail, felt compelled to contribute but it took him a few months to gather the courage to do it, after doing it he loved interacting with interested in similar things and continues to enjoy OA.

As my three hundred ninety-second year drew to a close, it became clear to me that I would not see much of my three hundred ninety- third. As dignity required, I embraced my fate. I resolved that, in my remaining days, I would set out to do those things I had always wanted to do, but for which I had never before found time. I drew up a list, in order of importance, and set out to cross off as many items from it as my remaining time would allow.

Foremost on my list — perhaps by coincidence — was to climb the steps of the Mount of Kings, to see the Hall of the Flesh Sculptors. It was a monument very few had seen. Cast from ivory marble, it was said to shine with its own radiance, like a drop of frozen moonlight there on the granite peak. The climb was said to be long and difficult, and the gods seldom encouraged nosy visitors. But I set out anyway with the knowledge that I had very little to lose. This one thing, if nothing else, would make my life complete.

I took the long north trail, doubting my strength to forge its shorter, steeper counterpart to the south. Over the course of days, my old bones creaked and strained, plodding up the switchback path, taking one chiseled step at a time. Naturally, I made the climb in solitude … so I was quite surprised to find someone waiting for me at the top.

A woman, with the look of a youth but the eyes of an ancient, stood on the steps of the great Hall. She stood as straight as the fluted pillars at her back. She waited, dark and serene as the sandy wind bustled around her — never touching her; never disturbing a single hair.

“Come inside,” she said with a smile. “I have something to show you.”

This invitation came as quite a shock to me, for a number of reasons that began to dawn on me as I followed her through the broad oak doors. Foremost, the woman was not, by any stretch of thought, a woman in the conventional sense. I had my doubts that she even really existed at the moment my foot crossed the threshold. And yet that smile — graceful, alluring, accented ever so subtly by the flash of pearlescent teeth arranged in the most artistic of rows — belied something that at least remembered having once been human, long ago.

It masqueraded as a “she” right now for its own inscrutable reasons, but I have my suspicions that those may have been to advertise its real talents. For this creature — call it a woman — was nothing short of perfection cast in human form. Living art. Silky skin of the most exquisite mocha-bronze, hair like ebony, eyes of emerald — sapphire flecked — and a body like a marble statue, as though every curve and line had been carved meticulously from that vulgar meat in which the raw character of humanity finds its residence. Every movement she engaged in became a symphony of grace. I had only to look at her to know, without a doubt, that I would not leave this place the same man I had come. I might not leave at all. But as the doors closed at my back, it dawned on me that it was far too late to harbor any doubts. I could not turn back. This thing of mortal perfection had extended to me an invitation so rare and cherished that I would have been the worst of fools to turn it down.

I followed her through the gilded cavern of the foyer, through a maze of corridors and into the deepest heart of the Hall. Our path was marked by a burgundy carpet, inlaid in gold — exuding opulence beyond any I had witnessed before. In the walls, arrayed behind panes of heavy, frosted glass, stood inert testaments to the Flesh Sculptor’s artistry, preserved in exquisitely lifelike quality — so much so that I had to shake myself out of the feral apprehension that some of them were, in fact, still alive. Their eyes seemed to follow me as I walked. Every one of them held that same, surreal quality of simultaneous life and death.

All of them appeared at once both human and inhuman, even the most monstrous of forms. A serpentine beast, as long as a sea freighter and as thick as a man is tall, coiled and curved within the confines of the passageway’s northern wall. Facing it from the other were numerous specimens of similarly unholy creation: a thing like a giant squid, a yeti, something with the face of a man, but with a body wholly indescribable by any human tongue.

Standing free about the place, cast in glass cubes, stood smaller creatures. Some as large as a dog, some as small as a mouse. Each exhibited a chilling, beautiful strangeness. Each marked a place on that narrow boundary between the living and the bizarre. Only a scarce few embodied anything like the quality of beauty we humans might look for in a thing … but all were beautiful in some sense. Even if only made beautiful by the purity of the horror their deathless stares engendered.

As had been told in stories handed down through generations, it was the wont of the Flesh Sculptors to pursue expression of their artistry in a variety of emotional mediums — from admiration through apprehension, hatred to pity, simmering lust to stark terror, and the strange sense of preternatural unease that gripped me now. The things I saw on that short walk evoked all these emotions in me, along with others I could never hope to attach names to if I lived a thousand years longer. It struck me then how deeply vetted we meatlings are in the instincts of our progeny. For all our self-styled sophistication, we are animals still — slaves to the prejudices of the flesh.

The Thing that led me through this gallery of my own basal misgivings shared nothing of that with me. She toyed with it, amused by its quaintness. And when she turned around at last to stop me at the doors of our destination, I was shocked to see that she had at some point become a he.

“You must promise, before we go any further, that everything you see from this point on stays with you — a secret. For your own protection, as well as mine. I hardly fear the ill will of your brethren — many of whom I suspect are not as accepting as you — but there are higher things with ears to your affairs that I suspect may not be so accepting, either. Do you promise me you won’t go talking this around?”

My throat had suddenly become stiff and dry as I tried to form a response. I choked out what I had hoped to be an affirmative, and nodded to reiterate the point. I knew it was unnecessary. She — he? — knew full well what I would do, and was only playing at drama for my benefit. As I watched him turn to cast open the doors, I marveled at how deceived I had been at his first appearance — or perhaps he’d changed? It was the same face, the same eyes, that same ebony hair swept back into a delicate sash of braids — the same body even — but everything curiously re-sexed beneath my notice as we’d walked. And I had touched her hand when we’d first met outside the hall — felt its warmth, its living pulse, the delicate structure of its bones, overlaid by flesh. I knew it to be real. This was not the evanescent avatar of Angel’s Fog the Gods so often wore when they walked among their pets. This was a living creature like myself — only somehow capable of this ghastly transformation.

We stepped through the door, out of the hallway’s platinum fog of refracted sunlight and into a room that was saturated with a heavy crimson glow. The air here seemed to be its own source of light. It spread soft and diffuse through every corner, blotting the edges of shadows and hazing the finer details of my surroundings. The character of my guide shifted radically now as he stepped through the door ahead of me. Suddenly he became a Hellenistic blonde. She turned to me only a few steps out of the entryway, beaming that disarming, unsettling smile. The same that had greeted me at my arrival.

“Watch,” she said, as if the things I’d seen already amounted to nothing but trifles.

And then she revealed to me a hint of the magic I had come to see.

We stood on the bottom face of a voluminous octahedron — the door that had been behind us moments ago had vanished, swallowed by the wall. Buoyed on the moist currents of air circulating in the center of the room hung veils of a white, diaphanous material. They congealed out of thin air and swirled together, out of the corners and into the center of the room. For minutes, they entertained us with a dizzy introductory dance. And then, one by one, they began to come apart, dissolving and diffusing together, forming a knot at the chamber’s heart.

Droplets of moisture condensed out of the hazy atmosphere and fell impossibly toward that central confluence. Within minutes, a quivering sphere a fluid had formed there. The twists of white material had dissolved within it. Only a few shreds remained, sheeting across its surface. At first perfectly transparent, it began to grow cloudy. I squinted to see through it — through the rheumy fog of my own ancient vision.

My eyes played tricks on me. The hovering globule began to pulsate slowly. The red of the room bled into its bulk. Within seconds, the light around me went from crimson to hazy white, and the floating globule of fluid turned blood red. As I watched, an explosion of dark little tendrils branched out from the center of the mass, veining it with a throbbing, anfractuous structure.

I saw something I could only describe as a heart congeal at its center. It grew from a speck in moments, pumping in time with the shuddering vibration of the intricate web-work in which it nestled. I scarcely noticed that my guide had begun laughing, gleefully, manically, clapping her hands as the dance of perverse magic went on in the air above us. I had become so engrossed that I had lost all track of her shifting features. She — he? — it? — was trying on new faces as quickly as the hovering globule was trying out different strategies of organizing its components, all the while growing and developing at blinding speed. It was like watching a three dimensional puzzle assemble itself — a puzzle whose pieces were the very fundaments of life itself.

My guide began gesticulating wildly with its hands — ‘it’ was at this point the only pronoun I could think to apply to it. It had taken on, in the past few seconds alone, traits both distinctly male and female … and neither. It twisted and shuddered, laughing and crying out in what looked to be an almost orgasmic kind of bliss. I knew without a doubt then, as I watched it, that it was indeed much more than it appeared. My skin crawled with the sensation that it’s being extended far beyond the amorphous body I saw before me — that it’s apparent identity crisis was just a reflection of a much larger, much more complete kind of being. It was not its failing that it could not make up its mind as to the appearance it wished to wear. Rather, it was my failing that I could not accept the constancy of identity behind its masks.

The thing growing in the air above us was as much a part of it as its avatar-body — as much as the Hall. As much as, I began to suspect, the whole world. I felt suddenly outside myself — that I was not my own person. A deep, unraveling terror began to build inside me. The thing over our heads had begun to take shape. It was a thing not unlike those I had seen on my way in — those once-living statues encased in glass. Only this thing was still alive … or rapidly on its way to becoming alive. In the moments of my floundering apprehension, it had grown nerves, skeleton and now the rudiments of a musculature around the framework its circulatory system had laid down.

It was a demonstration of the Flesh Sculptors’ highest art, being carried out before my very eyes. Just like a puzzle, they assembled bodies one molecule — one cell — at a time, constructing complete creatures from scratch. And, amazingly, those creatures lived. Not at the end — not with some flash of lightning or zap of unnatural magic to impart that vital spark — but from the beginning, from the moment the first cells were assembled and guided nimbly by those phantom fingers into place.

The Sculptors must work fast, for at first their products are unstable. They bring each new cell into being and guide it into contact with its siblings. They lace the structure of the thing together until it takes hold of its own form-to-be. Every branching vein, every twisting sinew or quivering nerve they place with clockwork precision. Like building ships in bottles from scraps of balsa wood, they assemble beings in vats from stray molecules and proteins in solution. The awesome delicacy of the procedure took my breath away … along with the horrifying rapidity at which they went from an empty room of air-suspended protein fragments to a fully functioning product.

In this case, a fully functioning human being.

It floated there in its amniotic bubble, fully formed, fully human. All this only a scant five or six minutes after we had entered the room. It was as perfect as my guide — as artfully crafted, as much a testament to the skill and mastery of its creator as the body that creator wore itself. My guide had suddenly stopped laughing. Now he was watching me keenly, following my twitching, apoplectic movements and my gaping, bewildered stares with eyes that shone dark like polished onyx, pattered with flecks of jade.

“I want to offer you a gift for coming here,” he said. “A thank you … for being an audience to my work. It’s been some time since I’ve been able to work for anyone. I would be honored if you would give me the satisfaction … of accepting my work as your gift?”

If it was a genuine question, I had no doubt he already knew my answer. I stood in the presence of a creature so far above me as to be a god of gods … a creature so beyond my comprehension as to regard me with little more consideration than I might a bacterium. And yet it wanted to offer me a gift? To what end, I wondered, even as I nodded my ascent, throat too clenched to give words to my robotic acceptance.

It — she, as she has shifted once again into the female form I’d known initially and seemed, for once, to settle into a temporary kind of permanence with that shape — smiled at me again. It was the same smile she had worn on our way here. “You understand,” she said, “that what we still find some challenge in is the sculpting of a mind. I would very much like to try … if you would be willing … to sculpt your thoughts in this flesh?”

A million reasons for refusal escaped my thinking that day. Whatever happened next, I cannot recall with any certainty. All I know is that I left that hall a different man than I had entered. A better man, I think. A man with greater understanding of his world.

Certainly, if nothing more, a younger man with uncounted centuries of life still left to live.

As I have studied over the years — as I have come to understand the Sculptors’ talents and their methods; to comprehend the finer delicacies of their craft — I have begun to see the appeal of the Sculptor’s art. To create life, to create being … is as intoxicating a venture as ever I could pursue. And so I have been considering, in the centuries since my rebirth, that I might like to one day try my hand at that curious art.

Perhaps then I will return to the Flesh Sculptors’ Hall. Not this time to visit, but to stay.

More about the author, David Jackson, here.

Before Voices started, selected stories and artworks were posted to the main Orion’s Arm website. Now, with Voices’ continued success, the Orion’s Arm Board has consented to allow us to bring you those stories. Voices from our early days. distant echoes, coming back to us over time…

This is among the first of several changes coming to V/FT this year. But we can talk of that later.

For now, please enjoy our first two Distant Echoes: Anders’ Sandberg’s Falling Stars, and In The Halls Of The Flesh Sculptors, by David Jackson.

As I met ambassador Keilen she was wearing a formal spacesuit, covering with glittering black diamonds and the dull Negentropy pentagon. On her waist she had a metal grey sash embroidered with the line codes of her offices. I could not help shivering when I noticed the 7-7 knot – the symbol for ordered suicide.

‘Greetings, your Excellency. May your trip here have been reversible and swift.’ She greeted formally, but with her usual half hidden smile.

‘Likewise, your Excellency. I hope our confluence will hasten the eternal state.’

‘No need to be that formal, Ologa-Zan. Besides, isn’t referring to the eternal state here of all places a bit of bad form?’ I blushed and she laughed and hugged me. ‘It is good to see you again, even if this has to be brief. I have a pressing engagement.’

‘I came as soon as I heard about the directive.’

‘Yes. The arch-conservatives back home finally decided to send me the silken thread. I can’t say that it was unexpected. I took a chance with the Pyxis settlement, but you cannot win them all…’

I followed her as she strode along the gallery towards the farewell chamber. I desperately wanted to tell her how much I admired her, how wrong this was, that I would gladly do anything to change her mind or save her. But a look at her sparkling eyes told me that she already knew it. She gently shook her head and smiled at me.

‘No, I cannot back down. They have my family, and they will suffer if I don’t act properly. Trust me, I know what I am doing.’

‘I never doubted that, but there must be possibilities?’

‘Actually, I think they suspect my loyalty and purity more than any purely legal shortcomings. And that is much more serious for my gene-line than if I had eloped with a few kilograms of amat or accidentally spilt trake on the God-Emperor. I better show them just how loyal I am.’ Again that smile.

‘But Keilen… what about the Velaria cease-fire?’ Damn! It sounded so self-serving, so coolly pragmatic. But at the same time I had to ask on behalf of my government, my people. The cease-fire in all its bizarre splendour hinged on one thing: it would only last as long as Keilen lived. She had impressed the I4 and their tweak enemies to the extent they actually based the whole deal on her. And we were dependent on the cease-fire lasting at least a few years more, if we were to survive.

‘Actually, that is why I am here. To save it.’

Keilen stepped into the farewell chamber and looked around. The floor and one of the walls were solid diamond, giving an unobstructed view of Threshold. Ahead the sprawling meshwork of hospices, temples, cathedrals, prayer polyhedra and hotel facilities spread towards the infinite horizon line, surrounded by the steady cold light of the stars on all sides. Straight ahead a causeway with ornate railings stretched straight out, ending in nothing 30 meters away. Beneath… it was hard to see, but the faint Einstein rings gave it away. Straight down, the black hole yawned.

Keilen walked on the transparent floor with no hesitation, while my brainstem sternly told me not to. Instincts older than thought told me that walking on a near invisible floor above a literally bottomless hole was not survival enhancing. Again I envied Keilen her iron nerves and rationality. Or did I? The same practical logic that had saved us so many times now made her prepare for a very long fall indeed.

‘I don’t get it. Please explain to a mere Mensan. If you are going to jump into oblivion I better want to know why, except for a misplaced sense of duty. If you had just wanted to end your life you could probably have done it instantly, couldn’t you?’

‘You are getting warmer.’ She smiled at me and fastened the helmet onto the spacesuit. Then she hugged me again and gave me a storage device. ‘Give this mindstate to my family. They will understand. And… I’m happy you are here with me. Just don’t worry.’

As I stood there dumbfounded she elegantly walked into the airlock which shut with a discreet susurration. She waved and stepped outside. I could do nothing but watch as she walked along the causeway outside. A small part of me wondered why they had bothered to put up handrails on both sides. After all, somebody walking along it probably had no desire to avoid falling off. Although to some, I guessed, dying in a less than perfect way would be worse than anything. I began to understand.

‘Keilen, aren’t the Velarian Confed strict physiclassicists?’ I asked over the radio in the room.

She turned around at the edge, now smiling openly at me. ‘I knew you would work it out. Can you see how the pieces interlock? It is so simple.’

She jumped, leaving an empty causeway. Beneath me I saw a moving star among the others, falling towards the unseen distortion in the centre.

‘The conservatives will be happy, since I will be quite dead. One loose cannon less. I have proven my loyalty to my planet, and no shadow can fall on my family. The Velarians on the other hand… to them I will never die. I will just approach the horizon forever, becoming eternal. The cease-fire will remain forever.’

It was indeed simple and beautiful. A solution perfectly expressing the Precepts of Negentropy – and hence the most devious and inescapable revenge on the arch-conservatives back at Cirici that anybody could come up with.

‘It is… wonderful.’

‘Yes. Now you know why I was so glad you could come. After all, the Velarians would want a witness.’

‘I will do that. But Keilen, what about yourself?’

‘Myself?’ the radio voice asked.

‘You have worked for as long as I know you for others. You have saved billions with your negotiations. You saved my skin at the Antares conference. You just saved your family, your honour and the cease-fire. But what’s in it for you?’

The room was silent. I tried to discern the falling star against the background below, but could not make put anything in the diffused light around the hole.

After an interminable silence the radio spoke again: ‘It has been fun watching.’

‘What?’

‘The best way of getting a front seat at some historical event is to arrange it yourself. This way I got all the opportunities, all the fun. You think I have been as unselfish and self-eradicating as the NoCoZo makes us out to be, but you’re wrong – I did it all for my own pleasure. I’m the most curious and selfish woman in the world. And now… let’s see what happens!’

The signal broke up. A moment later the unseen point beneath me flared up in a blaze of gamma.

More about the author, Anders Sandberg, here.

In my last editorial, I was introducing the new Orion’s Arm website, and talking about Against a Diamond Sky, which was soon to be released. You will have noticed, by now, that those aren’t the only changes.

This issue of V/FT introduces several new features. We’re going to add “cover art” to every edition, as more OA contributors turn their hands to brush and filter, adding vivid imagery to the written works set in the OA universe. We’re adding a new category, to start showcasing the early fiction of the Orion’s Arm project. And we’ve redesigned the site, in order to make key pieces of information, like the submissions guidelines, easier to find.

Orion’s Arm continues to grow and improve. We hope that Voices/Future Tense will continue to reflect that.

It’s all my ex-girlfriend’s fault.

It’s all my ex-boyfriend’s fault. It’s all my employer’s fault. It’s all Bunny’s fault. It’s all my parents’ fault. It’s all society’s fault.

It’s all my fault.

I think that last one is the closest to the truth.

I don’t know if anyone else is ever going to get a chance to read this – I’m saving it internally, on my implant’s storage space – so I’m writing it to my future self, while I’m still close to the start of everything that just happened, so that, maybe, I’ll be able to better remember how I feel.

I’ve never been good at feelings. Or other people, really. When it comes to analytical thought, I’m a super-bright… but other humans seem almost as alien to me as the Muuh. I’ve never understood all the status-seeking games that seem to take up the time of my fellow hu, so I’ve done my best to avoid them altogether. That’s why I had Bunny made in the first place. She’s generally humanoid, but with an attractive pelt, bunny-face, cottonpuff tail, sweet-smelling and with a pleasant purr in her voice… and her mind was set up to be just on the low side of being a ‘person’. She finds simple maid-work to be challenging, and finds pleasure in doing whatever I ask of her. Yes, what I mainly built her for is as much bestiality as it would be with a non-provolved chimp… but, fortunately for me, my home society doesn’t consider bestiality illegal, just something ‘dirty’ to crack jokes about in impolite society and avoid discussing in polite circles, like masturbation. To the most complete extent possible for her mental architecture, she loves me, and has always loved me, and I don’t have to try to figure out what a potential sex-partner wants from me, or pay for it, or let some transapient slap together some avatar-body out of pity for the lonely ape. By some standards, that makes me a selfish, misogynistic bastard, and I’ve pretty much given up trying to justify my actions to anyone other than myself.

Not long after I had Bunny made, I found out about an upcoming hermeneutic conference in a nearby star system. I don’t have anywhere near the whuffie to convince our local AIs to send me out-system, but after some careful searching, I found another way to attend. A transapient ship would be heading in the right direction, and though e didn’t /need/ baselines, it preferred having some human companionship for the trip. After a good deal of careful back-and-forth to figure out if we met each others’ needs, e agreed to bring me along – Bunny, too. I was under no illusions – I would be little more than an amusing little pet for em, much like Bunny was for me, but it was a role I was willing to accept – and in the end, not all that different from the roles I had to take when interacting with other humans.

So off we all went, on our merry way, along with the other human-pets who’d come along for the ride. I was always polite to them, and as pleasant as I could manage, but after a few weeks, the involuntary signals of my tension when they tried making friends with me reduced such attempted closeness to more tolerable levels. They formed their pairs, and groups, and clusters, and as long as they didn’t /require/ my companionship, I was able to join in at least some of the social activities.

Halfway between my home system, and the one with the conference, was a starless planetoid, a beamrider station. We were decelerating to rendezvous with it, where some of our passengers would jump off, and we’d likely pick up a few more. I went to sleep the night before our expected arrival spooned up with Bunny in our sleep-pouch…

… and when I woke up, alone, my implant helpfully told me four days had passed, and we were under acceleration again. The ship-AI didn’t respond to me anymore.

I haven’t been able to find out what happened during those four days – the ship’s records are blocked to me, the other humans say they were asleep, too, and Bunny’s never really had much of a vocabulary. We all seemed to be prisoners of the now-incommunicative AI, and, somewhat to my consternation and confusion, Bunny – who was as genetically incompatible with me as a real lapine – was massively pregnant.

Three days later, Bunny gave birth to another Bunny.

Once they’d both gotten cleaned up, I wasn’t able to find any differences between them, and neither of them seemed to understand that there /was/ any difference between them.

The next day, both of them had visible baby-bumps growing in their bellies.

Everyone was trying to figure out what had happened during the stopover, why our AI host had stopped talking, whether we’d been drugged or had our memories wiped… and what was going on with Bunny.

A week later, when I was trying to manage four obviously-pregnant Bunnies, each of which loved me and wanted to do everything she could for me, the next real incident happened. I can’t verify any of the details, but what I /think/ happened is that one of the other humans tried to attack me while I was asleep. All I can say for certain, is that when I woke up, one of my fellow passengers was missing his arms. No visible scar, no indication that he’d ever had the limbs in the first place, and a tale to tell about going into my quarters “for a personal conversation”, not that anybody believed that excuse, when one of the Bunnies hugged him, and he fell unconscious, waking up in his own rooms without arms.

Needless to say, everyone did their best to avoid me as much as they could from that point.

A few days later, three of the Bunnies gave birth to other Bunnies just like the original, and one gave birth to a Bunny who was different – her fur a light blue instead of my Bunny’s Martian pink – and who proclaimed her love for the armless man, and started tending to his every need rather than mine.

The blue Bunny didn’t swell up with pregnancies like mine were inexplicably prone to, but two weeks later, every human had gotten their own Bunny, male Bunnies for the women, though I was the only one with multiple Bunnies. At that point, just as mysteriously as they’d started, the Bunnys’ pregnancies stopped. Things settled down for the next few weeks; we had no way of knowing the answers of the mysteries surrounding us, so life went back to keeping on keeping on. And even if their source was a mystery, everyone seemed to get used to having a Bunny.

Or, at least, that was the impression the other humans gave to me… but two days ago, I found out they’d just been excluding me from their plans. I can’t blame them – after all, I brought Bunny aboard.

Once again, whatever it was that happened, I was asleep for it – or had my memory of it erased afterwards. But when I woke up, two women were armless, the armless man had lost his legs… and, most ominously, two Bunnies were massively pregnant, and ‘their’ humans were nowhere to be found. Nowhere else, anyway – in short order, their fur turned to the pink of ‘my’ Bunnies, though their bellies neither grew nor shrank, nor have they given birth.

I’ve stayed in my room since then, hiding from the other humans. If I were them, I’d be scared shitless of me, and the Bunnies, and would probably lash out in any way I could think of, at me or the Bunnies or both… and from what I’ve seen, all that sort of activity would result in is either a case of acute limblessness, or disappearance into a Bunny. Looking at it from a certain viewpoint, I suppose both… responses are more humane than simple execution, but from a rather a-human point of view.

This morning, when I asked one of my Bunnies about what she would do if I died, she used a word I know for a fact her original design was incapable of understanding. Whatever was done to my first Bunny, it seems to be having an effect on her mind, too. I’m guessing that there’s some sort of hivemind effect going on – that the more Bunnies there are, the smarter they get. But they all still seem completely devoted to my personal welfare and happiness… as they interpret that. And I don’t know whether to feel relieved or outright terrified at the implications.

If anyone else ever reads this: I’m sorry. I didn’t /mean/ for Bunny to be anything other than a sex-pet. By the time I figured out that there was anything /to/ stop, that our stopover had been met with some sort of perversity, that, when it encountered Bunny, took her mental programming to its logical conclusion, it was too late to do anything about it. The ship-AI was, or is, S2, and I don’t know if anything short of intervention by an S3 can keep Bunny from spreading… and according to my implant’s databases, there /aren’t/ any S3s anywhere near our current course.

I’ve had an idea for how to deal with this situation. I don’t /think/ the Bunnies, or whatever the ship-AI has become, can read my implant, but just in case either can, I’m not writing it down. Suffice it to say that if it works, my current problems will be solved… and if it doesn’t, they’re likely to be “solved”, though in an entirely different way. Here’s hoping it’s the former.

More about the author, Daniel Eliot Boese, here.