FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The wind had started to dwindle.

The light inside the biodome had started to turn a soft orange. Crimson hints filtered back along the tops of distant holographic clouds, the same shade and hue that the sky outside the dome would turn when the sun was at its noon height.

A soft weight sank down on the bench beside the wolf. Cybe looked up from his contemplation, his awareness returning to the here and now. He turned to look at the person beside him.

"Hi" said the fox. "I, uh, hoped that I'd find you here."

For a moment, the android was uncertain what he should say. He probed his mind for the right type of response, found none, and so remained silent.

"Well" continued Luke, "it was more of a random guess, really."

"You found me easily enough" pointed out the android, as reassuringly as he could.

The fox smiled. "Yeah" he said. "Well, actually no. I was getting tired of running up to random CyberaTech androids and asking them if they were you."

Cybe couldn't help but smile. "Really? Many?"

"Twelve" confessed Luke. "You'd be amazed how many of them choose your face. Twenty-three options for a face and at least half of them have yours."

"That is understandable" replied the android. "I am stunningly handsome, after all."

"Yeah" replied Luke, chuckling, "you are."

For a moment, a soft silence passed between the two.

Luke fidgeted uncomfortably. "Uhm" he began, breaking the hush. "Did you get paid for the job, then?"

The android nodded. "A file."

"They paid you a file?"

"And the cash" explained Cybe. "But that is purely utilitarian. The file contains data which is important to me."

The fox turned to face the android, eagerness flashing in his eyes. "What data?" he asked.

"A woman by the name of Alice Hayes" said Cybe. "Here." With a light motion, he slipped his hand into his coat. Sliding a datapad from his pocket, he held it out to Luke.

The fox flicked the screen on, and scrolled down. It listed the name of a young woman, Alice Hayes. It gave her date of birth, and a brief outline of her life. Born in what was once the Connecticut sprawl, Alice Hayes had grown up in an impoverished downtown region of the city, one known for gang violence and high levels of drug abuse. She had come from a broken family - the file documented her father as an emotionally abusive narcissist and her mother as suffering from severe depressive episodes that quickly lead her to drink, resulting in a rift in the family that saw her parents separating while Alice was at a young age. With the two living apart, Alice had struggled to work her way into college, the first in her family to do so for generations. Whilst there, she had studied sociology, media and political history, something which had instilled in her an eagerness to correct the wrongs that she perceived in society.

Luke thumbed through the rest of the data. It read like the abbreviation of a life - the distilled summarising of a person, boiled down into little more than its core components. On some level, he found it a little depressing to think that the contents of somebody's life could so briefly abbreviated.

She had died in a riot, he noted, one in which she attended in the hopes of protecting a group of refugees who were under attack by a sub-branch of The Goodly Folk. Luke had heard of them before - a neo-nazi extremist group, dedicated to ethnic cleansing in the aims of 'purifying' the nation that their ancestors had colonised. She had been struck on the head by a brick that one of them had thrown, and then shot twice in the back whilst she had tried to crawl away. She was twenty-seven years old. He thumbed his way through the later parts of the document, trying to find any reference to a police investigation, any legal repercussions on her killers, anything that indicated that anybody had even cared. There was nothing.

"Is she important to you?" asked Luke.

The android seemed to stare away for a moment, into the distance. "I don't know where my mind came from. I don't know if it was built by Icarus and Daedalus - a synthetic intellect constructed by two AIs. I don't know, because for as long as I have remembered I have known the name Alice Hayes."

Confusion flickered across Luke's face. "You know her name?"

"It exists" said Cybe, "at my first memory. It dwells, somehow, between my waking and deactivated state. I know only that she is dead, but I do not know how or why. What I do know, however, is that she is somehow important."

The fox looked down, handing the data back to the android. "I..." he began.

"But" continued the android, "it need not concern you. It is up to me to determine who this woman is and to understand the manner in which she is connected to me."

Luke's shoulders slumped. "Can I help?" he asked.

Cybe turned his head, looking slightly to the fox. "There is no reason for you to wish to help" he explained. "You have recovered your memories. Everything that you once were, you now are once again. And I would dare say that you are more - the additional memories that the corporation implanted into you are now fused with your own by Icarus, giving you a greater wealth of life experiences from which you may draw..."

"That's not what I mean" interrupted Luke. "I mean that I want to help you. You have your own past to uncover, and your own goals to pursue."

The android turned away, returning his gaze to the horizon. "I do" he said. "But it does not need to connect with yours. It is my mission to fulfil. Yours is already finished."

The fox looked down. He looked at the grass. It certainly looked just like it did in his memories, no longer and no less green. It swayed with a calming, soothing assurance in the breeze. "What if I don't want to?" he asked. "I mean, what if I want to stay with you?"

"But" started Cybe, "you said..."

"I know what I said" replied Luke, emphatically. "And I was wrong. I don't want us to be apart."

A silence fell. Somewhere in the distance of the park, Luke was sure that he could hear the chirping of a bird. This, of course, he knew could not be real - birds could not possibly survive in such a closed environment. The biodome was little more than a cage, partly fuelled by illusion and technology. He bit his lip.

But still, he was certain that he heard it. Perhaps it was a synthetic bird - perhaps a digital recreation of one, built from coding and programs rather than flesh and tissue. He wondered if that made the thought of the captured bird any less real. He wondered if it deserved to be able to fly free, outside of this cage. He looked back at Cybe.

"What do you mean?" asked the android.

Luke inhaled. "I mean, I didn't mean what I said earlier. About not being sure that I love you."

"But" interjected Cybe, "you said..."

"I know what I said" replied Luke. "But I didn't mean it. Well, I meant it, but I didn't mean it like I said it, if that makes sense."

The android stared at Luke, blankly.

The fox breathed in, trying to steady his shaking nerves. "I do love you" he said. "Whichever version of you that you are. And maybe I didn't understand that. I felt," he said, tapping his chest, "that you were somebody else. If that makes sense. Does that make sense?"

"No" said Cybe. "But please go on."

Drumming his fingers against his knee, Luke tried to find the words. "I haven't dealt with the idea of people moving between bodies extensively before" he said. "I mean, over the last week I have, extensively. Between you and those soldiers and that AI, it seems that I've dealt with it a lot. But each time I had, the, uh... the mind, or the soul, or whatever" he said, "it always seemed the same. You're the first person I've met that is, well, different."

Slowly, the android nodded. "That may be in some manner because of the unusual nature of my creation" he said, finally.

Luke heard the bird again. He was sure that the sound was coming from a tree nearby. Turning, he glanced in its direction, but couldn't see anything. He wondered if the bird was simply good at hiding. Perhaps, he thought, it was simply a sound playing from a speaker hidden in the tree. Perhaps the tree itself was entirely artificial, designed to play the sounds of birds at random intervals.

"When we first met" he said, "I was like a bird caught in a cage that I didn't even know existed. I didn't know that the you that exists now, sitting next to me, is as much a bird in a cage as I was. I think that, seeing you uncaged when you were freed, maybe it scared me a little. Maybe it reminded me that I had been uncaged as well."

Steadily the android nodded. "But Luke" said Cybe, slowly. "No matter which of my bodies I'm in, I'm still caged as well."

Slowly, the fox nodded. "I didn't see that. I'm sorry." He glanced down. "The file that you recovered, does it help?"

Cybe shook his head. "It is possible that my mind was built by Icarus and Daedalus. It is equally possible that my mind is derived from that of Alice - that perhaps upon her death, CyberaTech or Shinjeki recovered her body and implanted her personality into that of the new line of CyberaTech androids."

"Would CyberaTech have done that?"

"It is possible" said the android. "In order to best create a verisimilitudinous replication of a sentient lifeform, it may have been the better option. Perhaps they felt that the AIs would not be capable of the task. It would certainly explain why her name sits on the distant edges of my consciousness, like a piece of coding buried deep into my operating system."

"Or an echo of a soul" pointed out the fox.

Cybe didn't reply to that. "There are two avenues for me. One roots the genesis of my consciousness in a synthetic process, birthed by artificial lifeforms. The other, it would be a biological origin - that before this life that I experience now, I would..."

"You would have had a past" interrupted the fox. "A family, friends. A wealth of human experiences. Well, you have to find out! If that's the case, you..."

"What I know" continued Cybe, "is that there are elements of both that are true. I was developed, in part at least, by Icarus. I do have Alice Hayes' name inside my programming. Neither elements of these can exist exclusive to one another, so logically the truth must lie in parts of both seemingly diametrically opposed routes. Does that make sense?"

Slowly, Luke shook his head. "It can't be one if it's the other" he said, "and both can't be true. But it does seem that parts of both are true - so it's a contradiction?"

"That's right" replied Cybe. "So as you see, I am still trapped in a cage."

The boy glanced downwards at the grass once more. "I'm sorry" he muttered. "I shouldn't have said what I did. I was a dope."

"No, you are not" replied Cybe. "You were simply scared. That is normal."

"Yeah, well you don't get scared" replied Luke.

The android canted his head to one side. "I experience programming which stimulates impulsive reactions for self-preservation" he replied, "often which indicate either a fight or flight response. That could be interpreted as fear. Although" he said, with a grin, "I still don't get afraid when we watch horror movies together."

Luke stifled a chuckle. "Oh, your movie collection. It burned up in the explosions. I'm so sorry."

Cybe's grin widened. "You will be relieved to know that I kept a digital back-up of them all. If you like, we can watch them if I can find a new projection monitor after the move."

Steadily, Luke blinked. "Move?"

"That is a good idea" said Cybe. With a soft motion, he placed his hands on his knees and rose to a standing position. "I should get going."

"Wait" said Luke, rising up to stand beside him as well. "Where are you going?"

For a moment, Cybe turned his head upwards. "Ah" he said, calmly, "I see. Luke, could you please take four steps to the right, please?"

A flickering expression of confusion crossed the fox's face. Tentatively, he stepped to the right, away from the bench.

Without turning to look, Cybe replied. "Actually, no, make it another two steps, please. I believe the collateral impact may cause additional debris."

"What?" stuttered Luke, sprinting heavily in the direction that the android had indicated. No sooner than he had done so, the invisible wall of the biodome shattered.

Huge sheets of holographic-laced duranium steel plating cascaded down around the pair, filling the air. With a heaving uproar, chunks of masonry plumed up into the sky. A rip tore its way through the once blue sky, a vast rupture in through which the grimy browns of the real world intruded. Between the sharp edges of the soft and tranquille clouds, heavy skyscrapers sat, just outside the boundaries of the tear. A cacophonous ripping of carefully laid soil spun around Luke like a tornado, and he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, a hefty blue police tank stood in the middle of the rubble before him.

"Oh" he sputtered. "Oh god, no."

With a hearty whine, the hatch to the tank spun. Then it clanged open, and Cybe clambered out. Around her head she wore a pair of flight navigator goggles which caused her purple-dashed hair to stick up in even stronger spikes than she normally wore.

"Ah" she exclaimed, motioning to the pair. "Good, you're ready. Hop on!"

For a moment, Luke felt a rush of confusion. Looking from one Cybe to the other, he felt a slight dizziness. Oh yes, he remembered - forking. The division of the consciousness and awareness between two synthetic bodies.

"Come on, come on!" she insisted. "Rowan's already onboard, and we've got like exactly two and a half minutes before the police get here. Move your buns, fox boy!"

Luke turned, glancing at the male wolf beside him. Quickly, the male body began to scramble his way up onto the tank.

"I..." Luke began.

Cybe paused, mid-climb. Turning, he glanced behind him. "It's okay, Luke" he replied. "I'm coming with you."

"Yes" chirped Cybe's female form from the top of the tank. "I'm bringing Captain Boring with us too - I know you like him. Bit like a well-hung action figure, if you ask me."

"But..." stuttered the fox, taking a step closer, "where are you going?"

The male android turned and stood, balancing on the tank's treads. "CyberaTech took a massive hit because of our run on them" he explained. "But there are other synthetic lifeforms that need my help as well. Right now, as I am speaking, androids manufactured by Shinjeki are being forced to take part in death-matches for the amusement of people that gamble on them. They are tortured, abused and hurt by people that buy or rent them - with the only justification being that they are unable to feel physical agony. That isn't right, Luke. I have to do something."

Biting his lip, the fox looked down. "I know" he said. "But what can we do?"

"I have contacts" replied Cybe. "People that are working against them. I think you know them too - if you access your memories of being Samedi, you have met them as well. There is a resistance. People - biological and synthetic - who are fighting back."

Luke shifted, uncomfortably. "What? With a tank?"

"This is just our ride" explained the female body of Cybe, waving her hand from where she sat. "I'm dreadfully sorry that I didn't have the time to steal a police fighter jet, but I'm on a tight timescale. Hear those sirens? I've got seventy-four seconds before they arrive."

The fox bit his lip and looked down. He did hear them. They were growing louder. He didn't know what to do.

"Take my hand" said Cybe. He leaned closer, extending his grip. He opened his paw, fingers flexing wide.

Luke looked at his hand. This all seemed so insane to him, so fantastical. His world had been broken entirely, ruptured apart as surely as the wall to the biodome. Hadn't this dome been a safe place for him in his childhood, one that had been a refuge for him from the dangerous things in the world?

And now, here he was, actually considering reaching out and taking a step into the completely deadly world that the android offered. A world in which he could make a difference. He pursed his lips, pressing them together. He had the tools to handle himself now - he knew how to hack his way into just about anything. He could help. More than that, he had an obligation to help. But was he ready to step out of the cage?

He was afraid - terribly, utterly afraid to jump. He stared at the hand. And then, slowly, Luke looked up into the eyes of the android before him. Cybe smiled to him. And, Luke realised, would never stop smiling.

Luke grabbed the hand, and pulled himself up onto the tank.

"Alright!" cheered Cybe's female form, sliding down into the cockpit of the tank. "Awesome! Great to have you aboard - now strap in, it's a bumpy ride! First stop, the television station."

"What?" sputtered Luke, clambering down into the cockpit along with the male Cybe. "Why that?"

"Our first mission is to take control of a broadcast aerial so that we can beam a signal across the nation" she replied, plucking her goggles down around her eyes.

"Why's that?" asked Luke, as the male android helped him fasten his safety belt.

"Didn't you hear?" said the male android as he did so. "The revolution will be televised."

With that, Cybe slammed her boot down and propelled the tank forward, out of the dome and into the screaming night.