The Pride of Parahumans
Read The Pride of Parahumans Online
Authors: Joel Kreissman
Tags: #sci fi, #biotech, #hard science fiction metaphysical cyberpunk
Copyright 2015 Joel Kreissman
Published by Joel Kreissman at Smashwords
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Chapter 1
I was woken from my comfortable sleeping
position by a siren blaring less than a meter away from my fairly
large vulpine ears. Startled I leaped out, or at least as much as
one can do so in a zero-g sleeping bag clipped onto the wall at six
different points. "Hey Silver!" Came the voice of the most annoying
corvid in the solar system out of that same intercom as the horrid
wake-up call. "Get your Barbie-doll ass out of bed. We're coming up
on that rock soon."
"I have more holes than you do Cole." If the
uplifted raven heard me he gave no sign. Slightly more annoyed than
usual I started wriggling out of my insulated cocoon to the door of
my cramped cabin. Pausing before the mirrored surface of the
metallic door I noticed what Cole had so lovingly referred to as my
"Barbie-doll ass", grabbing onto one of the handhold bars
distributed all throughout the ship I rotated in mid-air and spread
my legs apart so I could see the reflection of what lay between
them. That is, a bunch of black fur with white guardhairs like the
rest of my body, hence the nickname "silver", but if you looked
close enough you might spot my anus and if you looked really close
you could see the opening of my urethra. "Barbie-doll ass", please
I look more like a plushie, or one of those non-humanoid animals in
Japanese anime. Yes, you read that right, I have no genitals, the
twisted corporate bioengineers who spliced human and fox DNA
together and extruded the resulting transgenic slush over a
calcium-titanium alloy skeleton did not see fit to print me a set
of reproductive organs. The vast majority of parahumans had
genitalia of some sort even though the geneticists had made sure
that they were sterile, but I was part of an experiment of some
sorts to see if workers who couldn't waste valuable company time
screwing one another functioned more effectively than those who
did. It turned out that we did not, without the extra testosterone
or estrogen from a set of gonads it seemed that we were less,
motivated than those who had semi-functional ovaries or testes.
Okay, we were downright lazy. They could have
asked anyone who owned a neutered dog or cat and saved themselves a
few million bucks.
Anyways, introspection over I flung myself
out the door and into the corridor. Not going to bother with
clothes until I know whether they want me to go outside. Isn't like
I've got much to hide anyways.
As I was floating up the corridor to the
bridge I felt a paw slap me on the rear and propel me into a
bulkhead. Looking back I saw a meter-and-a half tall red panda
wearing a set of workman's coveralls trying to catch himself on a
handrail with his ringed tail. Denal, our mechanic. "The hell were
you thinking?" I snarled at him getting increasingly annoyed by the
second. "Doing that in the middle of a wide open hallway? In zero
gravity?"
"Hey, Argentum, you dress like that and you
have to expect some workplace harassment." He was joking of course,
when you can't make babies and have practically no diseases the
corp crèche supervisors don't bother to instill taboos about sex.
It was practically expected for co-workers to hold orgies in the
break rooms, now that we actually had breaks. I couldn't see the
appeal of it, me and Denal had had sex once or twice but all I felt
was a pain in the butt that made it impossible to sit for half a
week. Thank the corps for using us in microgravity. I shrugged it
off and darted for the hatch to the bridge.
I should probably explain the name I gave
myself, Argentum, or "Argen" for short, is ancient Greek or Latin
or something for, well, silver. I know, original, but I'm a chemist
by training and during my accelerated education I found myself
wondering why so many elements had symbols entirely unrelated to
their names. There is neither an "a" nor a "u" in gold, or for that
matter silver doesn't have an "a" or a "g". So I did a bit of
research in the crèche library and found that scientists liked to
name things in long dead languages that nobody spoke anymore and
after discovering the full names of certain metals in those
languages I thought they sounded cool. What? I was barely three
years old.
Cole and Aniya were already there. Cole was a
raven the size of a large turkey, albeit with a much bigger head.
His wings were also modified with small claws at the ends,
apparently a small atavism the bioengineers found that dated back
to the earliest birds from the time of the dinosaurs, that allowed
him to hang onto an overhead handlebar while his feet manipulated
the flight controls. Apparently there was a prevailing theory among
some of the corps that created us that creatures that evolved in a
three dimensional environment would be better suited to navigating
the depths of space than us terrestrials. So rather than adding
some animal genes to a human baseline genome like most did for
their deep space workforce, they took the genomes of dolphins,
parrots, octopi, corvids, seals, basically any aquatic or flying
animal that showed a decent level of intelligence, and boosted
their brainpower until they could operate a spaceship. I don't know
how well it worked but I do know that for all his annoying quirks,
Cole is a great pilot.
Aniya couldn't be more different, she was a
rescue taur. A four-legged, two armed centauroid of mixed human,
wolf, and possum heritage designed for both heavy lifting in the
low-gravity mines out here in the Belt, and bailing out fellow
workers whose suits sprung leaks. Above her waist she looked like a
lot of parahumans, anthropomorphic torso covered in black fur with
a lupine head, but below she looked like one of her natural kin,
except considerably larger, like the size of a fully grown horse.
And a peek under her pressure suit would reveal a bit of her possum
genome, a prehensile (but mercifully still furred) tail, and a
pouch big enough to accommodate an adult human or most parahumans.
Yes, a nice soft pouch modified to seal airtight around a small
hose that would supply a distressed miner with oxygen as he calmed
down all safe and warm in a secure pocket of flesh. Oh dear I was
rambling wasn't I?
Right, so there I was on the bridge with the
rest of the crew of the nameless prospecting ship we'd managed to
get a hold of sometime after the combination of violent raids on
corp bases and legislative action on the behalf of sympathetic
lobbyists that won us our freedom. The monitors were displaying
several different views of an asteroid a couple kilometers in
diameter that our scanners seemed to indicate held a promising
concentration of mass. The plan was simple, latch onto the rock,
toss out Aniya and whoever happened to draw the short straw with a
load of mining equipment, prop up a burrowing mass driver over the
masscon, and drill until it got within a few centimeters. Then
they'd chip off some samples, I'd analyze them in my lab, and if
the mass was something valuable dig it out and take it back to
Ceres for sale to one of the local fabricators or the freighters
supplying earth with needed minerals.
"We should arrive in a little more than half
an hour." Cole announced to the rest of the crew. "Better get
ready." Knowing his tricks it was more likely we'd be there in
fifteen to twenty minutes, whichever unlucky bastard had to go with
Aniya wouldn't have much time to suit up.
Aniya glanced at me and Denal and shrugged.
"Might as well get it over with." She pulled three straws out of
her suit pocket with her right hand while she held onto a rail with
her left. She grabbed one straw in each of her free semi-prehensile
forepaws so that they all appeared roughly the same length. Cole
flapped over and took the one in her hand before flying back to his
console, leaving me and Denal to take the ones in her paws. I
looked at the one in my hand, it was barely five centimeters long,
I compared it to Denal's, his was a full cm longer. Dismayed I
floated over to Cole, sadistic corporations, his straw was seven
cm.
"Guess I better get dressed." I said
dejectedly as I let the losing straw fly off. Aniya plucked it out
of the air and put it back in her pocket. Then she held out a
foreleg and drew me close to her. She bent over and looked down at
me with an amused expression on her wolfish face.
"Come on, I'll let you sleep in my pouch
tonight if you don't complain too much." So maybe going out on that
exposed hunk of rock wasn't so bad after all.
***
For once, that avian bastard gave us the
correct time to arrival, I spent fifteen extra minutes standing in
the airlock wearing the light pressure suit that was sufficient for
parahumans of my model to survive in the vacuum of space. One of
the perks of being built rather than grown being that we have a
much greater tolerance of low pressure than humans do. If necessary
I could remain conscious in hard vacuum for up to ten minutes, more
than enough time for a nice rescue taur crewmate to drop her pants
and shove me in her pouch, but I wasn't going to take any chances.
Space is a harsh, unforgiving environment, under the supervision of
the corporations we lost ten percent of our number every year. I
don't know the mortality rate now that we're free but I would bet
pretty good odds that it's still rather high, definitely above
birth rates now that the corps aren't popping a thousand of us out
of the tanks every quarter. We used to have two full time miners
but then Billy ignored the warnings of an incoming radiation storm
and got his brains fried, his share of that haul bought us a 'bot
with enough sense to scurry for shelter at the first sign of cosmic
rays.
There was a series of jarring lurches forward
as the harpoons pulled us down to the surface of the asteroid and
anchored us there. The airlock opened and the ramp lowered as we
made our way down to the regolith. Aniya gleefully bounded across
the landscape carrying some 500 kilos of equipment while I drove a
rover with the really heavy stuff. Conceivably the two of us could
carry the mass driver between us, but neither of us was experienced
enough with maneuvering in microgravity to risk doing so while
bouncing around. After half an hour of that we arrived at what our
radar indicated was the shallowest point above the mass
concentration we were interested in. As we unpacked I prepared a
portable spectrophotometer, unlike the clunky devices of the 20th
century this device was little bigger than a suitcase, including a
specialized computer for interpreting the data. I scooped up a
sample of regolith and poured it into a sample cuvette that I
inserted into the machine, within a few minutes the device had
exposed the asteroid dust to every wavelength of light known to
mankind and its creations, and contrasted the reflections with
those given off by baseline samples stored internally. Once I'd
analyzed the readouts I addressed Aniya subvocally using the
implants in our throats, no point wasting breath when some subtle
movements of the larynx would do.
Looks like basic nickel-iron,
maybe a little heavy on the iron but not exceptional.
In my experience certain metals tend to
aggregate around iron.
Came the wolf-possum's sub-vocal
response.
Some of those are worth quite a few qcoins if I am
correct
.
I'm not saying that it isn't valuable, if
nothing else we could try to sell the coordinates to one of the big
haulers.
Ooh, almost lost your bedmate you asexual
dog.
Did you intend to subvocalize that Denal?