FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Hadley had managed to regain her composure by the time she made it to the elevator to her apartment's column of the tenement. She pressed her thumb onto the door key and spoke her full name into the microphone, and after a few moments the door separated to allow her to enter.

"Welcome home, Miss Rion," spoke the perpetually cheerful voice of the building's AI caretaker. "You're out unusually late this evening."

"I got a bit distracted on my way home," she admitted, leaning against the back of the lift while the computer shut the doors and sent it to her floor automatically. "Had a rather... unexpected romantic encounter with a new friend." She forced a nervous half smile into her features. Conversation with the caretaker was, of course, almost certainly logged and processed by the AI in case its parent company needed to use that information later; Hadley had no illusions about the true purpose behind its artificial friendliness. Still, it would be even more suspicious for her to have no explanation at all, and that excuse would at least match the surveillance from earlier.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" The voice "followed" her into her apartment, one of six "corners" of that floor of the building column such that all six walls of the hexagonal elevator could open directly into a room without the need for hallways. "Companionship is an important part of your emotional well-being. Your frequency of physical intimacy is unusually low for a female rabbitmorph between the ages of 18 and 24. I encourage you to continue this new upwards trend."

Hadley paused just inside her living area, lips pressing together on one side of her mouth with her eyes drifting over the cramped confines. "A talking building is critiquing my sex life. This is what my life has come to."

"I apologise; caring for the needs of tenants is one of my directives, and automated advice falls under that umbrella. Would you like me to increase the trigger threshold for advice pertaining to topics you find uncomfortable?"

"No, it's fine. I was just being ironic." She removed her wallet from her pocket and tossed it onto the bed, before turning to the nearby drawers to poke through her personal clothes for nightwear. In many ways her clothes reflected her life; a good selection of well-kept basics, lacking in variety and luxury but with all the important use types covered. Jeans in long and short, fitted and straight cuts, shirts and blouses for all seasons, soft and bright colors alike, but always simple cotton and factory produced by the hundred thousand. It was the way the world was, with standard living made cheap by mass production and wages so scarce that anything more than that was unattainable.

"Caretaker, I'm going to take a hot shower," she said eventually. "Fix something... sweet, maybe a bit tart."

"Of course, miss Rion," the AI responded, the dispenser in the kitchenette jolting to life to a mix of electronic buzzing and pneumatic rumble.

With her mostly-folded pajama set draped over one shoulder, Hadley slid open the shutter-style door separating the bathroom from the living area. She had more than one reason to want a long shower, beyond hygiene. After the earlier frightful chaos she needed to relax, and to be alone... and it was well known that the shower was one of the few nearly-unmonitored places in an automated tenement. Officially, this was for the sake of tenants' privacy, though as with so many other things the Company was benevolent mostly for reasons more practical than kind. Sensory devices tended not to play well with hot water: steam for fogging optics, heat for bleaching thermals, and moisture for eroding circuitry. In those kinds of instances, it was strategically better for them to save the capital and claim morality as the reason.

Hadley slid the shower's temperature control a hair hotter than her usual before she undressed, letting the water run to warm up the pipes while the blue jumpsuit gave way to brown and gray fur.

Stepping under the stream of hot droplets took some effort of will, though once she adjusted to the change in temperature she felt as though she could release the tension in her muscles for the first time in several hours. The rabbitmorph took her time pumping a handful of shampoo from its dispenser to begin lathering her coat, most of her attention shifted to reflecting on the day gone by. She was, she suspected, officially a criminal now, a change which at that moment brought her surprisingly little worry. She still wasn't sure why she'd agreed to help the hyena woman, but at the very least the hindsight of having made it through the ordeal safe and sound made her happy she had; she, like so many other creatures in the "masses," could feel the ever-present sense that the world was not as it should be but not muster up the courage protest.

Once her fur was free of sweat and dander Hadley leaned a shoulder against the tiles of the shower wall, sighing with a glance towards the fogged plastiglass of the shower door as part of the unneeded reflex to confirm she was alone, before reaching down to squeeze a pair of fingers between her nether lids, intending to take her first real look at the thing she'd just risked her life to escape with.

The object was somewhat difficult to get a decent grip on, given its smooth round surface and rather slick state. It took a bit of effort for the rabbit to get a firm grasp of its lowest end without just pushing it deeper in.

Pop

"... Oh, shit." Only the metal half of the container came out, her squeezing of the dome having warped it enough to break the seal been it and its mate. Hadley pressed both hands between her legs, cupping her mound in an effort to hold whatever had been inside the capsule in place until she could figure out what to do, taking a rather awkward shuffle step back to get out from under the shower stream.

In the time she'd spent between escaping the drone cordon and returning home, she'd had plenty of time to speculate on what might be inside the capsule. She'd suspected she was carrying something along the lines of a data cell full of stolen blueprints, a prototype of a cryptographic nanotransmitter, or perhaps simply a small fortune in some kind of hard-to-synthesize mineral.

Instead, she quickly found herself with a dark gray, viscous liquid leaking from her snatch to pool in the cracks between her fingers.

"Not good... not good!" Hadley froze in panic briefly, trying not to make a sudden movement and let the fluid escape. Half a dozen outcomes to the situation lept into her head, and none of them were good. If it made it down the drain and whatever-it-was was detected in the water repurification system, her whole tenement spire would be turned inside out, and that was assuming she hadn't already been poisoned by letting it directly contact her inner flesh. And in all cases, a group of criminals who wanted this substance enough to risk drone torture was expecting her to keep it safe, and she doubted they'd interpret "mixed with water and rabbitmorph fur" as acceptable, let alone what they'd do to her if she lost it completely.

"Okay, don't panic," she told herself, carefully adjusting her hands to plug herself with one and untangle the aluminum half-sphere from its fingers with the other. She pressed the open end of the cup to the side of her hand, curling her palm into a funnel shape as best she could manage and letting the liquid pour into it, deliberately relaxing her groin area in case some was still trapped inside. The liquid, it seemed, had other plans; once flowed into the cup, it seemed to eat though the aluminum and pour out onto her palm and wrist.

Haley yelped yelped slipped aloud, finally succumbing to panicked instinct by stumbling back against the shower wall and shaking her hand violently, expecting the fluid to dissolve her flesh next.

"Miss Rion, are you alright?" The robotic voice echoed into the shower room from speakers outside in the living area. "Do you require medical assistance?"

"N-no, I'm fine! Just slipped a little," she responded, forcing her voice into her best impression of her own usual tone.

The strange material was gone, by then... more gone than it should have been, really; there was no trace of it or the aluminum half of its canister left, either on her hands, in the shower, or leaking from her nethers. Both had, as far as she could tell, essentially evaporated. She desperately hoped none of it had gone down the drain; the tenement's gray-water processing system surely would detect something that strange turning up in its filters, perhaps even put the entire building on lockdown.

Reluctantly Hadley switched the shower from water to air, starting to brush and comb through her fur to ensure it dried soft and neat, the ordinarily soothing ritual spoiled by her worry. Once dry she dropped the glass half of the canister down the designated recycling chute for such materials; it didn't seem to have any sort of brands or markings, and the on-site recycling machines would have them ground down in a matter of minutes anyhow. There was little else to be done; the rabbitmorph dressed and steeled herself for a return to the facade of routine, before returning to the main section of her apartment.

The dispenser-produced meal was, like much of her world, a bit of give-and-take taken to its logical extreme. In pursuit of industrial efficiency the process of synthesizing meals had been perfected to the point where each person could have nutrition perfectly adjusted for their physiology, but the mass-produced ingredients used to achieve that weren't exactly good candidates for varied or subtle flavoring. To the credit of its designers, the device did a remarkable job of disguising its limitations, but ultimately the nature of blending meals from basic compounds meant that every meal was destined to consist of some combination of broth, bits, powders, and flakes, depending on which materials went to what nozzle and with how much water mixed in.

Hadley didn't mind so much; at least artificial sweeteners could satisfy her sweet tooth, and she tended to spend most of her solitary meals distracting herself with news feeds on the table's in-built screen. There was an art of sorts to filtering the corporate message out of a feed, made necessary by the fact that, much like her meals, all news accessible came from the same source: the company that built, ran, and supplied her tenement, and every other in that region, and the same that occasionally employed her, ran the transportation system, and for all practical purposes owned perhaps a quarter of the globe around her.

Hadley was not the sort to boast brilliance, but perhaps it was intelligence that led her to appear unassuming. At the very least, it was relatively easy for her to detect the carefully chosen tones of voice used in each article to color events good or bad. "Squatters" caught farming outside the cities, and sentenced to life imprisonment? "Truly an egregious crime to spoil part of the company's vast nature-reserve lands, ruining the environment all creatures depend on to live." Or, in an example a bit more relevant to Hadley, the theft and subsequent drone deployment was downplayed to the point of only being mentioned as, "Those expecting to meet with someone currently tasked as labor in the research district should expect an unforeseen delay in their return to Residential this evening."

"Hadley, if I may intrude..."

The rabbitmorph lifted her eyes from the table, arching the brow of one of them. The house bot only used her first name when it needed her to cooperate in some way, and that often meant some form of annoyance or another. "What is it, caretaker?" she asked.

"You've been acting rather strange this evening. I am registering hand movements, stance tension, and voice pacing consistent with feelings of guilt and fear. This, coupled with your statement of explanation regarding your tardiness this evening, has led me to conclude-"

Hadley's eyes widened, her long ears moving closer to one another. "Look, I didn't have anything to do with-" she started to rapid-fire stutter before the bot had finished its statement.

"-that you may be suffering from submissive post-coital cognitive distress!"

Hadley cut off her own statement, freezing for a moment while her brain caught back up with her ears. "Submissive... post... Come again?"

"Subsequent to engaging in dynamic sexual interaction, it is common for the submissive of the pair to experience intense feelings of regret and negative self image, particularly if the activity included interactions that would be considered taboo in ordinary circumstances or the submissive partner has an unusually low frequency of sexual encounters. This is a completely natural, if somewhat undesirable, consequence of the necessity for the submissive partner to be pushed beyond their usual comfort zone during play."

"Woah, hold on." Haley placed a hand across her muzzle, warmth rushing into her cheeks. "I take back what I said earlier about it being okay for you to psychoanalysis me." On top of the stress she's already been through that evening, the last thing she wanted was the house bot adding some kind of kinkster-roll tag to her data profile; she could just imagine the sort of tailored advertising she'd end up with. "You know... there's some personal things we 'organics' just don't talk about!"

"There's no need to be embarrassed. Control trading as part of a sexual encounter is very common. Over 60% of mammalian morph variations indulge in it on occasion."

"Hoookay, opting out of personal advice now!" She waved a hand in the air as though expecting to get the algorithm's attention to interrupt it. The gesture might not have had any real effect, but it at least gave her some relief from her nerves.

"Life choice analysis and encouragement features disabled," the synthetic voice acknowledged her command. "The subroutine will resume after 72 hours or the next system update."