FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The doors of the tram car snapped shut with a metallic whine, threatening to bite Luke's tail clear off. Their clanging sound echoed as the fox stumbled, clasping the limb out of the way of the temperamental doors, the clumsiness of his sudden movement bumping him against the hefty flank of a surly-looking businessman.

Muttering a nervous apology, Luke turned his gaze downwards. The businessman gave a brisk shrug, a heavy pair of cybernetic eyes peering out at the fox from behind the man's sunglasses. The tram car stank, filled with the tightly-packed bodies of the morning commuters, forming a mixture of acrid sweat and bitterness that seemed to ferment as the tram rumbled its way downtown.

The rain had not eased when Luke departed the train, along with many of the carriage's inhabitants. Under the blanket of ashen grey clouds, the sky was the colour of a rotting orange, as though the rays of the morning's sunrise had fought a valiant drive to penetrate the cloud-cover in the hopes of reaching the impoverished shadows of the city's lower depths, before finally giving up against the blanket of smog. Luke pulled his hood up over his ears, making his way through the walkway with splashing steps.

Fumbling his fingers slightly, the fox slid his fingers into his pocket to press against the screen of his music player. Soft tunes hummed through his earphones, the lilting rhythm of new wave jazz fusion drowning out the side of vast holographic vid-screens that buzzed and flickered on the sides of towering grime-etched buildings. Barely audible over the music's soothing embrace, Luke heard a droning news report as spoken by a computer-generated image of a wiry male ferret. Another report of violent outbreaks in war-torn far off nation-states. Another report on an unsuccessful break-in and attempted hacking of a corporate warehouse in NewTown. Another report of anti-robotics protests getting out of hands. Luke slid the volume of his music higher.

He stopped, mid-step, as one flickering image caught his eye. In OldTown, people learned to filter out the ever-present advertisements that surrounded them on a daily basis. And, normally, Luke had no hesitation to do just that. However as he caught a glimpse of this new holo-image, flickering just a few inches above his head, he couldn't help but pause. "CyberaTech presents the next generation of synthetic life" the advert boasted. Luke peered at the image, a curious smile crossing his lips, before he pressed onwards.

As he stepped into the work yard, Luke paused to check the read-out on his holo-watch. Pulling up the wrist of his rainproof hooded jumper, he pressed the side of the device and watched as thin, semi-translucent numbers shimmered into existence in the air just above his arm. He grumbled, and hurried the last few steps through the doorway that lead into the office.

"Three minutes late, Rickard" rumbled the voice of the foreman.

Plucking his hood down, Luke nodded. "I'm sorry" he began, "the tram was late."

The foreman, a heavy-set rhinoceros, adjusted a pair of thin-rimmed glasses that sat atop his bulbous nose. He drummed the fingers of his thick cybernetic hand against his thick upper arm, his metallic digits making a soft clanking noise as the old machinery tapped together. "It's been late three days in a row" he said officiously. "Hit the showers and get ready, stick."

Luke hurried along. At only twenty-two years of age, he was half as old as the rhinoceros, and still considered a junior by most of the workers at the yard. He was already short for his age, and his thin arms and lack of the defined musculature that marked many of the older workers had earned him the nickname that the foreman had addressed him by. Most of the workers called him 'stick' - or at least, the ones that noticed that he was there in the first place did. Apart from Dwayne, that is.

As the fox stepped into the locker room, he found his eyes once more drawn to Dwayne's locker. The thought of his former partner brought a sense of sadness to Luke. The leopard had been old, almost seventy, with a face full of wrinkles and smiles. The old guy hadn't deserved the death that he had received, especially not when he had taken the time to show Luke so much kindness. The boy tried to turn away, finding his own locker. Sliding it open, he recovered his radiation-proof overalls.

A soft hiss filled the air. Glancing towards the end of the room, Luke noticed one of the shower decontamination booths slide open. A thin plume of steam coiled through the air, anointed by the rumbling crackle of running water. A soft pad of damp footfalls drew the young fox from his thoughts.

Timidly, Luke looked up. The figure that emerged from the cubicle scooped a towel from the bench, smoothly wrapping it around his waist. The movement caught Luke as unusual - smooth, but also considered, delicate even. For a moment, the fox found himself looking up at the figure, realising that he had never before met this man.

The figure was a wolf, his fur a middling shade of grey. A shock of bright fur sat in a casual swash across the wolf's sharp facial features. His tail hung loosely, thin and unassuming. A quick glance across the wolf's chest allowed Luke to see a strong, tight network of muscles. At this distance, the fox figured the wolf to be almost two heads taller than him and broader too. But it was none of that which drew the fox's attention. Instead, it was the occasional glimpses of metal that sat around the wolf's body. An entire eye shone with the sharpness of a cybernetic enhancement, as did the joints of an arm.

Noticing the fox's stare, the wolf turned his head and offered a broad smile. "Hi there" he said.

Luke tried to form a smile back. His mind, however, resisted. A hundred questions rushed his mind as he looked at the wolf's cybernetic augments. "Hi" he began, a little unsure of himself.

"Come on, come on!" rang the voice of the foreman, snapping the young fox from his contemplations. "Quit daydreaming. We have a city block full of kibble to clear!"

The wolf nodded, pulling open a locker. To Luke's surprise, it was the one that was directly next to Dwayne's old locker. The fox nodded, quickly unfastening his shirt. "Won't be long, sir" he replied.

"Take your sweet time, Rickard" replied the rhino sarcastically as he leaned against the door frame of the locker room. The old building's frame seemed to groan under the foreman's bulk. "It's not like we're on a quota here or anything."

"Yes sir" replied the fox, hurrying along to shed his shirt and stow the clothes safely in his locker. When he had first began to work at the municipal health depot, he had sat through an intensive three-hour training course on the importance of proper decontamination protocol which, having grown up within the urban sprawl in the two decades following the dying days of the last great war, had been little more than second nature to him before he had even set foot into the room.

"And stow the yapping until you both get to your van" snorted the rhino, wiping his thin-rimmed glasses on his tie.

The fox's hands paused at the waist of his pants, a moment's hesitation flickering in Luke's mind. "Sir?" he asked. "Our van?"

The foreman gave a somewhat irate sigh. "Yes Rickard, your van. You and the new boy. Congratulations on your new partnership. Teach him well." With that, the rhino hefted his way back down the hallway, leaving the fox in a state of silent confusion.

Luke paused, staring at the wolf. His new partner? The fox found the announcement confusing. After all, surely he was still a junior. Did the foreman really think that he had enough experience to head out into the kibble again with a new recruit?

Once more, the fox found his gaze drawn to the wolf's physique. There was no way about it; the boy found himself feeling a little intimidated. The wolf was larger and obviously built strong. The broadness of the man's hips, the firmness of his chest, they were all reasons that the fox found for his gaze to linger on the wolf for just a moment longer.

"You're my senior?" asked the wolf.

The sound brought Luke back from his contemplation. "I guess so" he said, uncertainly.

The wolf stepped forward. For a moment, the fox found himself feeling a little flustered. There was no other way to look at it, the wolf was certainly handsome. "Then I will endeavour to adapt my skills to your teaching" said the wolf.

Luke nodded, a little taken aback. The wolf's voice seemed to lack any discernible accent, which struck the boy as unusual. In the sprawl, the cultural mishmash of various peoples and cultures had given form to strong regional dialects. But the wolf's voice was not only crisp, but soft, without any immediate sense of harshness. "Uhh" stumbled Luke on his words, "I'll certainly try."

Gradually, his gaze seemed to slip downwards, away from the wolf's kind jawline. Luke found that he didn't want to stare at the wolf's eye, not at the mechanical sharpness that seemed so much at odds with the stranger's soft words and gentle smile. Instead, he found himself looking downwards, towards the top of the towel that encircled the wolf's hips. It was a pleasing region for him to look upon - strong, and yet also very tempting.

Trying to think of something to say, Luke quickly stammered, "Have you, uhm, I mean, have you worked in waste processing before?"

The wolf shook his head. "No" he answered. "But I understand the concept."

The fox pulled his eyes from the wolf's form. As he shuffled off his boots, though, Luke found his curiosity continually spiking. He glanced upwards, just as the wolf unfastened the towel and let it slide down onto the bench beside him. The fox tried not to let his mind linger. But still, he found that one question came to him as the wolf changed into the uniform anti-radiation jumpsuit - just how much of the stranger's body was mechanical?

By the time that Luke was suited up and his air filtration vent was firmly fastened around his muzzle, the only city blocks on the day's rota to be cleared were in the dank. Of all of the areas that comprised the Kibble - the sections of the sprawl that had been damaged by the radioactive fallout of the war two decades past- even the dank was considered to be unappealing. The boy had barely spoken to his new partner since the shower room, and the silence was broken only by the footfalls of their booted paws as Luke guided the new recruit through the network of building-sized garbage trucks.

"This will be ours" he said, coming to rest beside one such vehicle.

The wolf glanced up at the truck. Unlike Luke, the wolf had not yet donned the head of his rad-suit, instead holding it in his hand and letting it swing lightly as he walked. As he surveyed the size of the vehicle, a shimmer of the canine's cybernetic eye seemed to throb. "Do you wish for me to drive?" he asked, his voice infected with a buzz as it passed through his filter.

The boy scrambled quickly up a small ladder leading to the van's cockpit, moving quickly and lithely. He pressed a small pad on the door's side, allowing the entrance to slide open. "If you're happy to" he said, trying to keep his mind on the job at hand.

Luke tried not to glance around the cockpit too much as he slipped in and slumped down onto the tempur-foam seat. It had not been cleaned since Dwayne's passing. To one side, a few small notebooks and bottles of half-finished water lay as discarded mementos to his lost former partner.

Hurrying into the cockpit beside him, the wolf took a place at the driver's seat. Once he had adjusted himself into a comfortable position, he slid free a small hatch on the arm of the chair, pulling free a data cable.

Luke blinked in surprise. Like all vehicles, a data uplink cable could allow a driver who possessed a suitable datajack to link in with the vehicle's on-board navigation system. But in the sprawl, the cost of a datajack of that nature would surely be astronomical - far more than Luke would be able to afford. But still, to the fox's amazement, the wolf threaded the data cable smoothly from its storage compartment. Then, with a single movement, the wolf pulled free the back of the neck of his rad-suit and slid the end of the cable into place between the tufts of his fur. The cable clicked into place as it connected to the afore-unseen socket.

For a moment, the wolf said nothing. Then, he announced "I have our destination. Are you ready?"

Numbly, Luke nodded.

The vehicle began to thrum, rolling out of the depot with a churning grind to its wheels. It joined the roadway and before long was heading onwards through the rubble-strewn wastes of the kibble. All the while, Luke found that he was unable to peel his eyes from his new partner.

"You keep watching me" said the wolf, finally.

Luke felt startled. He wasn't certain how to respond. "Yeah" he said, quietly. "It's just, I've never seen anybody with as many augments as you."

"I see" replied the wolf. It was a simple, matter-of-fact statement. "Is that a problem?"

"No!" replied Luke. "No, not at all." He flushed a little. "If anything, it's just, well, I don't have any."

The drive seemed to slow a little as the wolf navigated the vast truck around a half-shattered skyscraper that lay crumbled across the ruined landscape like a discarded domino.

"You are fully organic?" asked the wolf. "Your entire body?"

The fox's blush seemed to grow. "I know it's unusual" he answered. "And don't worry, I'm not some kind of bio-purist or anything. It's just, well, my family were pretty poor. As a kid we never really had the money to afford it."

Luke tried not to think about the social stigma to that, too. In the last decade and a half, the presence and ease of access to cybernetic augmented body parts had become less of a badge of prestige and of social class, and more of a mainstream part of culture. Almost everybody, from the elderly and sick to the very young, were able to afford some small modification, be it clearer eyes, additional fingers for typing, or a subdermal data port that allowed for digital information transfer. Stating that he had no augmented body parts seemed almost impossible, almost as though he was stating that he had no use for food, air or mobile phones.

"I see" answered the wolf, gradually rounding a corner in the road. "Your former partner, was he biological too?"

A lump formed in the fox's throat. "Yeah" he answered.

"What happened to him?" asked the wolf. "If I may ask?"

"An accident" replied Luke. "In the field. A piece of rubble, it fell, and..." he paused. "I don't know. Maybe if he had been mechanical, it wouldn't have killed him. Maybe..." Luke continued, but the words died on his tongue. He shook his head, dismissing the thought half-formed.

Almost instinctively, Luke checked once more over his radiation suit. The accident that had claimed Dwayne's life had done so not because of the impact of the rubble that had struck him during the clearing; it was the toxic nature of the radioactive atmosphere in the kibble that had seeped through the rip in the suit and, in doing so, claimed the old dog's life. It had been only a handful of days since, but in each day Luke had found himself thinking about the threat that the war-damaged atmosphere caused. "Maybe" he said aloud, "if I had anti-rad skin, or my body was a little bit better..."

Instead, the wolf perked up. "Do not feel unhappy. I think your body is quite nice."

The flush that had crossed the fox's face earlier returned, growing heavier and warmer. "You do?" he asked, suddenly aware that he was fiddling with his fingers.

The wolf nodded. "I could not help but notice it earlier. You suit it."

At that, the fox found that he was unsure how to reply. "Oh" he said. "Thank you?" he asked, as if hoping that it was the correct response. "I, uh, I'm not sure how much of it I would keep if I had the chance to change it. I mean," He said, "you clearly have a lot of augments. It must have taken you a long time. I mean, to upgrade it all. That is..." he inhaled, "how much of yours is tech?"

"I am fully mechanical" replied the wolf.

The words that stammered and sat jumbled on the fox's lips fell away in a flurry, replaced with a sharp silence. "All of it?" he asked.

The wolf nodded.

"Your whole body?" asked the fox, his eyes widening. "Everything?"

"I can show you if you would like" said the wolf.

The idea seemed like a jolt of nervous energy to the fox. His fingers stopped fidgeting, and clasped bolt upright against his palms. "Really?" he asked, unable to withhold the excitement in his voice. "I mean, well, I don't even know your name yet."

The dull rumbling of the van echoed once more, before fading into a dull whine. Then it was gone, and the sense of movement that had filled the mammoth vehicle ended. Smoothly, the wolf reached up and slid the cable from his datajack. "I would be happy to" he said. "I don't have a name, but you can call me Cybe."