FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

A Renegade Reborn

Pt 1 - The Escapist

By H. A. Kirsch

--

It all started with a phone call.

Let's focus. Spam VR call, surveying territory. My old club, "The Pit", in old downtown Lainsville, New York. The gay district, appropriately shoved between the old industrial district and the fancy-ass parts of town. Lainsville was a 'renaissance town', a little old first-rise banking city near the state capital of Albany that'd declined when the big disease hit and then got government money poured all over it as a safe haven for hybrids in the early second-rise days.

"The Pit" was the pinnacle of gay male fetish debauchery. A bar, a nightclub - to me, a nightclub is a bar with dancing, a brothel, a dungeon. You could go in, get a drink, meet someone in the back room, go downstairs and frot your leather-clad parts together, buy some supplies at the little leather shop extension that ran in the sub-basement dungeon, then get a dungeon room and shove your fist up someone's ass until they coughed on your knuckles. Then, because you're a switch who can't find a nice top, you go upstairs to the brothel and pay to get your asshole turned into a sour cream donut by a horse wearing a cop outfit.

I miss sour cream donuts.

Anyway, throw in some "fuck bed" rooms for hire and then my fancy-ass penthouse business-office-slash-urban-wolf-den, and you've got one entire bedrock to bird shit quarter-block kink-sex kingdom. I was its lord wolf.

I was that kind of person. I still am, but I used to be, too. I stole that punchline, but it doesn't matter, because that punchline doesn't exist. You'll see. I told you, if I tell you the big secret you'll just lie there feeling sweaty and alone with a wet sock on your dick.

I talk about the club in the past tense not just because of what happened after that phone call up to now, but because at the time of some apparent prankster invading my field of vision, my club had been shut down for years. No one wanted to buy it from me; I had to close it because of lack of patronage. People didn't go out a lot any more. People didn't do stuff in person a lot any more. No one even wanted to build it for a co-working space or some bullshit like that. Honestly, everything was falling apart everywhere.

I was in the sub-basement dungeon part, looking out over the 'machine room'. The building used to be the city water department, which featured all the pumping equipment in the sub-basement. Long before I got the place, it had all been heavy-painted and kept around as kind of a museum, and then I just used it as a backdrop for public bondage setups. Now it was all kind of dusty and cobwebbed, because spiders like basements. That actually made it look cooler, like something out of an old goth-industrial music video. Probably less compatible with horny idiots fisting each other like a gay puppet show.

I used the space to meditate in a way. I liked machinery, industrial stuff. I didn't feel that bad that my little kingdom had ended. I told myself that, over and over, to stop the actual bad feelings from taking over my smelly wolf brain.

While standing there, still dressed in the black leather suit that had come to be my 'daily uniform', I got a call notification in my AR visor and before I could answer it, my visor accepted it and materialized a red lizard creature on a nearby right-angle pipe bend. Human-sized, hybrid, and wearing matching red motorcycle sport leathers.

"I have a proposition for you," the lizard thing said, in a voice clearly processed far beyond the usual voice chat compression. It looked casually male and sounded that way as well. "I don't think you'll be able to say no."

"Fuck off," I said, and terminated the call. This was not particularly unusual; no one was ever putting the spam genie back in its bottle. I was honestly surprised the thing spoke English; usually it was a computer voice trying to sell a time share or warranty or suggesting the government wanted to arrest me, and half the time in Chinese. I didn't always do nice things but not usually the kind of not-nice stuff the government would want to arrest someone over.

I turned to walk out of the space, meditation ruined, when the visor accepted another call and the lizard punk reappeared, leaning against the 'play bathroom' hallway. "I told you, you won't be able to say no."

"I don't like threats. They don't get very far most of the time. You want money? You hacked into my fucking headset, why not just take what you want?" If the world around me was going to be fatalistic, so would I. What really would I do with my wealth when I have to wear a respirator to go outside. I hung up again.

The lizard reappeared and I opened my mouth first. "Look, lizard breath, I don't know what you want so I can't tell you no in good faith, but no. Just take it in bad faith."

"I am not a lizard. I am a dragon," he said, and his entirely virtual face scowled and smoke puffed out of his nostrils. The voice was entirely unfamiliar, processed to hell and back like I'd said, but something really struck me with bad deja-vu when he recanted my observation. "Also, if you let me finish, maybe I would be able to give you my offer.

I swung my gloved hands outwards, exasperated. "Fine. Offer me the fucking world."

"I have a way out."

I snorted. "A way out? What the fuck's that mean, is that some kinda death threat? If I'm gonna kill myself, I'm gonna do it myself."

The lizard guy looked disgusted. "What? No. I mean a way out of here."

In hindsight, I was a dumbass. I looked around the room and then gestured with two black fingers to the glowing EXIT sign.

"I mean off the planet."

I was still a dumbass, but now it wasn't my fault. "What, you got me a spot in the Mars colony? That's slave labor, basically. And there's a fuck-ton of dust."

The lizard wiped a virtually gloved finger on the wall. "There's a fuck-ton of dust right under your nose. No, I don't mean Mars. How about this: you come meet me in person, and I'll actually give you the entire spiel. I promise not to kill you or steal your money."

"In person! Next you're gonna want to go to a second location."

"I definitely will not. Meet me in an hour at the visitor center at Hopswith Nature Area. Come alone. Not like you'll bring anyone anyway," he said, and then disappeared.

A reasonable person would not listen to some rando who had just hacked into their augmented reality rig and offered a way to get 'off the planet'. I wouldn't exactly describe myself as very reasonable, then or now, so of course I decided to see what the fuck he was on about. Or she. Or them. Or it.

--

The first thing I ever did for a job was work on motorcycles. Big, loud, stupid American ones like you see fat guys riding around. I'm fully aware of the stereotyping; you know what I mean when I say it. After my several decade adventure with being a lucky real estate millionaire and lascivious owner of a sex club, I still had a thing for motorcycles.

No more loud cruiser bike to wear classic Leather Daddy gear on. Instead, an electric sport bike that was computer-controlled to let you accelerate at the absolutely maximum rate while never taking the front wheel off the ground. It felt like what a bullet probably feels like being shot out of a gun. Plus, I got to wear a head to toe leather riding suit and a respirator helmet, complete with airbag collar in case I decided to transform into a squid. It even had muzzle airbags, because having a fucking wolf head made a mess of everything's ergonomics. I could only imagine how much easier it was to design headgear back when you just had different sizes of human heads, instead of different shapes and antlers and horns. Don't get me started on how much of a pain in the ass a tail is.

The outside world was pretty spoiled at that point. Climate change made for pretty gross humid weather, and the last few years saw the completely alarming lack of winter in the northeast. Temperature inversions were pretty common in the warmer months, and that meant smog. Not to mention that hanging around in crowds meant you were likely to contract one of the viruses going around. Tail pox sounds funny until your tail lymph nodes swell up like grapefruit and it feels like someone stuck a fireplace poker into your ass.

It didn't matter that we had the technology to turn someone from a human into what's officially and never colloquially called a ZH - zoomorphic hybrid. It didn't matter that we could turn one of those into a different one, which seemed pretty ghastly to me the few times I ran into it and the one time I did it to someone. It didn't matter that we could regrow someone's brain in their head after half of it died from an injury. It didn't matter that we could take their brain out of their head and put it in an entire robotic body. You could still get the flu or a coronavirus or the fucking bubonic plague because you fucked an armadillo who fucked a fucking feral armadillo, and croak.

Despite the bad conditions and the continual warning billboards and AR heads-up notices, there was enough traffic that I had to weave around people. I had enough money to stay inside. A lot of people didn't. We still needed food, dry goods, repair work, people still built housing, people still built cars, the world still ran. It ran harder than ever. I ran harder than ever - I'd never been much of a crazy driver, but whenever I got on my EV cycle I tore the road up.

Hopswith Nature Area was something I'd spent much of my life around. I was born in Brooklyn, down in New York City, and my family moved upstate when I was about nine or ten because my mom got a job with the forest service at the state land next to Hopswith. When my parents split up, dad going off to Los Angeles to write TV shows and fuck every chick that'd bend over for him, mom going off to Alaska to be a bona-fide wilderness ranger, I stuck around. When I blundered into some money, I ended up just building a fancy house right on the edge of the parkland. When I got the club, I kept the house. I eventually sold it because I went a bit more urbane staying at the club penthouse, and wished I still had it so I could have set up a meeting at some location I had control over.

Instead, I wound my way through the smog mists, along the disused roadway - the nature area had closed down officially the year prior - and up to the ridge where the visitor center stood. Despite the closed park, the late dusk had triggered an ugly copper utility light that made the dirt parking lot look like river scum. There was one other vehicle there, a red and very not-electric sport adventure bike. The rider stood leaning against a fence, looking out over the valley below, and the impending thunderstorm that I had completely ignored on my map display.

At first, the red bike and matching suit made me think it was a friend I hadn't seen for a while, a weird fox who had such an anachronistic rig. However, the rider was far too tall. That was the second deja-vu. Upon seeing me, he snapped his gloved fingers, and my AR display overwrote him with the dragon.

"I'm surprised you came alone. I would have called the cops on me if I'd just set myself up like this," he said, in the same overly processed and disguised voice as before. The respirator gear in the helmet made for a particularly cool sound in person, and resulted in weird splats of white noise over the audio channel. As soon as it had appeared, the red lizard image disappeared. "I think it's going to rain. We ought to go inside over there, plus we can take our stupid helmets off."

"You wanna burn your lungs on a smog cloud? They're not fuckin' stupid, but yeah, we can go over to that completely locked up and closed down building that surely doesn't still have security cameras or some shit."

The red rider walked over to the building. "Power, yes. Anything fancy? Absolutely not. I hacked into your AR rig, don't you think I know what I'm doing?" He leaned in close to the door, then pulled something out of a storage slot in his back armor. It looked vaguely like a pistol, except the barrel was thinner than an ink pen. He stuck it into the door lock and pulled the trigger with a simple mechanical snap snap snap. With the fourth snap, the gun twisted in the lock and he went inside, waving me on with an armor-gloved hand.

"If I wasn't so fatalistic, you wouldn't be even asking me that question because I wouldn't be here. I'd be back home, jacking off to VR porn again."

"I know," he said, and closed the door behind me. He was right that there was nothing particularly technological in the visitor's center. There were even candy bars still in the gimme racks, probably several years stale at that point. There weren't more than motion-sensing emergency lights - my AR display pointed them out even as they turned on - so no cameras, no taser drones, nothing.

I was about three quarters turned around in place as I looked the shop over, when I realized what he'd just said. "What do you mean, you know?"

The red rider took his helmet off, complete with a bit of a hair flourish as he had quite the long mane ruff. He was in no way a dragon or a lizard, but a maned wolf. Dusky crimson fur that blended to black along the mane ruff and up his ears and down his muzzle, a long canid face, and up close the height difference was screaming. I was six foot seven inches tall, which made me The Tall Guy unless there was a horse or siberian tiger in the room. Now he was the tall guy. "Oh fuck. Alzarre."

"Were you hoping I was dead?" He cradled his helmet under his arm. Outside, a bolt of lightning criss-crossed the sky, followed several seconds later by a tremendous pounding thunderclap. "Oooh! Drama! I suppose I should have checked the weather before suggesting we come here. My bad." No more processed voice, just the smarmy melange of someone ostensibly from Argentina trying to talk like someone from a BBC newscast.

I felt like someone who had just been pranked on a viral video. "You fucking asshole. What are you doing hacking into my fucking eyeballs? Every time I see you, something fucked up ends up happening. I almost died because of you! I killed someone because of you! Sorta. I mean I sorta killed them. They really died, I just was only sorta responsible." That is true and as much as I like to think I'm a badass, every time I tell someone I get nervous that one day someone'll actually care and do something about it.

"I did not hack your eyeballs. Can you imagine if it was in your eyes though? And do you really think I'm a hacker? I'm not good with computers. I'm good with getting people to do things for me. Like this." He reached back into the storage slot to put the bump gun away and pulled out a glossy pamphlet. "And also like selling me the hacking software I used. What did you think of my alter ego? I think I could handle being a dragon. I wonder if they breathe fire when they cum?" He jabbed the pamphlet at me and I snatched it.

"Dragons aren't real. What the fuck is this?" There was a picture of a large, elaborate space ship on the cover, half-cut with several other pictures of interior scenes of people in some sort of lounge, and then inside there were even stranger pictures: rows and rows of some sort of pod. I flipped back to the cover. "Dominion Prime."

"I don't like the name either, but it is what it is. And that, is a genesis ship, I think they call it. More of an Ark if you ask me. There's three of them, and all of them are pay to play and invite-only."

Genesis ship. Ark. "You weren't fucking kidding when you said 'get off the planet'. So if not Mars, where?"

"Somewhere very far away. Those little pod things are cryogenic suspension units."

"They freeze you? Do we know how to un-freeze people yet?"

"It's not actually freezing, I don't think. It's some sort of new technology. Anyway, this whole thing goes up in six months. There's some crackpot theory that shortly after, the sun is going to do some sort of decompensation that will completely fuck all of us, and so this is-"

"A bunch of rich people buying a ticket to the future? Give me a fucking break." I stared down at the pamphlet. Surely there was some augmented reality experience to show you what it'll be like to quaff a few bottles of champagne before being frozen in a bathtub so aliens can defrost you and take your kidneys. Yet, they printed out a glossy brochure. "The fucking sun, huh? This has gotta cost a lot. You said it's invite only, right? I don't think they're gonna invite some sleazy First wolf-ass whose local claim to fame was having sex stage performances with wolves molesting humans." I could tell you stories until you're a dessicated corpse.

"It costs 'neither of us are eligible'. Or rather, that's what's supposed to happen, an invite-based random lottery and a significant wealth pay-in. What really has happened, is I found someone who could hack the lottery system used for the passenger selection process. And it's still very expensive, and you're going to have to pay me because I'm not made out of money. My generosity is providing this opportunity," he said, gesturing like a sleazebag. "Effectively, we will pre-empt someone's selection as soon as it's made. The system will have no idea anything strange happened, and we'll already be cleared with profiles and everything. Fake audit history. It all seems pretty air-tight. I suspect that rich people don't like actually playing the lottery and it's just some mechanism for paying your way on. Plus, you get to stick it to some small billionaire. No one needs that much money."

I nodded. "So I pay you a bunch of money, and then you get me on some sort of spaceship, the plan for which is to go Somewhere Else, because something Terminally Bad is about to fuck the Earth. And this is all backed up by science and not just tech-bro human supremacists."

Alzarre looked gleefully malevolent for only a few seconds, before his seriousness drained back into his face. It was an expression I had only seen him make once or twice before, and I'd known him for a long time and spent a long time in pretty close contact with him. If he looked like that, he meant it. "Yes."

I shrugged. "I'll think about it."

"Oh, I was hoping you could think quite quickly, I mean, this entire... that entire thing is possibly being bumped up in schedule." He gestured to the brochure.

"That makes it sound more like some kind of cult thing. You know, the aliens are coming so better all put on your jumpsuits and get into your bunks before we open the natural gas valve and knock you all dead and blow it up."

The maned wolf winced. "Did you notice something about me? How I can walk in a straight line without prancing? How I rode here on a motorcycle and didn't die in the process? I've cleaned myself up a bit. This isn't a joke."

I started feeling worse and worse about the idea. "I said, I'll think about it." I put my helmet back on my head and secured it in place. "Don't hack my shit again. I'll call you."

Outside, I was thankful for my riding suit and helmet. The thunderstorm, while not violent, was a terrible deluge. I intentionally blew off Alzarre, and as I wound back down off the park ridge, he wasn't following immediately. My bike did its best to keep me from high-siding off after sliding around corner after corner in the mud and rushing water. As soon as I was back on pavement, I got a regular call. From Alzarre. That was useful; I needed his contact.

"Listen, Mister Wolf. I need you to consider this offer."

"Mister Wolf! You're really buttering me up." I don't care if it sounds stupid; I get off on being called 'Mister Wolf'. Sue me.

"I've known you for a very long time. I've known you since before you took this tack in your life to be a fetish force of nature."

"Technically, that was for about five minutes and one good pee."

"I was going to say I might be responsible for it, but I think your resulting bruised ego might find me and bite me in the ass for that. I don't want to see you sit under a rock while the world burns around you. I don't want to see you stand on top of the rock like a wolf in a nature photo, either. That would have made it all for nothing, wouldn't it?" He actually sounded concerned. In the background, I heard a loud rowl from a sport bike exhaust, surely as he revved after starting up.

"I said, I'll call you if I decide you're not full of shit. Now leave me alone, it's fucking shit out and I don't wanna wipe out." I hung up.

He didn't call back.

--

I didn't intend to honor Alzarre's offer. A cursory look around on the internet pointed out that 'the sun is going to go wrong' theory was little more than some crackpot conspiracy theory, possibly even based on an episode of an old sci-fi television show. I didn't even bother to look up this 'Dominion' project, because 'Dominion' in my own recollection tended to be used by religious fundamentalists and they could miss me all the fucking time with that kind of intolerant shit. Again, I'd owned a gay sex club. Anything less than that, I wasn't going to have any of it.

I was going to have some virtual fun. "Samantha, load up the foxes simulation."

[I'm sorry, I don't know which one you mean.]

Fucking assistant software! "How can you get these things wrong all the time, when I can have weirdo old friends masquerading as lizard people hack into my fucking AR display, you can't understand a simple request!" No answer, because I didn't use the magic word. "Samantha, load up the Two Foxes, One Wolf simulation."

[Loading 'Two Foxes, One Wolf' into your augmented reality system. This simulation features haptic integration. For proper functioning, please connect with your VirtuSpace integration suit and display.]

Pretty much everyone had taken to wearing augmented reality visors or headsets or glasses, and to be honest it beat walking into a phone pole while looking at bullshit on social media. Now the bullshit floated around like it was real people. They were a far cry from the kind of fidelity you could get from a more intensive virtual reality headset, and when you mix that with a neoprene body suit with little haptic vibrator things and strain sensors?

Body suit, on. Leather bar chaps, riding boots, a nice classic biker jacket, and officer's gauntlet gloves? Also on. Penthouse air conditioning? Sixty five freedom degrees. For a moment, I thought about whether I should go the extra mile and break out the CyberJack milking machine I had, since I was wearing chaps and I could make it work with the air hose draped over my shoulder or down my leg. I could even go the extra light year and get out the... I did not name it, the DoppelGangbanger, which was basically a set of servo-actuated fuckable holes and 'grip tubes' that would get painted over virtually by whatever I had programmed into the virtual simulation. It was a pain to get set up and my particular choice of entertainment didn't support it, and I decided that even the milker was too much of a fuss.

Going out and running into Alzarre left me unsettled and tired and I just wanted to get away from everything that encounter meant. Visor on, then, and go.

--

I woke up the next morning in a complete panic. I'd had a nightmare, a very simple and straightforward one: as the sun went down, instead of the usual dusk, a line washed across the Earth racing towards me like rain on a lake. I looked over and saw Alzarre standing there, his riding suit from the previous night replaced by red lizard scales, his head his normal glam-rock-pirate maned wolf coiffure. "I guess it really was all for nothing," he shrugged, and then walked away. I turned back to see the line rush past me. It was black and frost at the same time, like the world was being frozen by a squall line.

I immediately called Alzarre. "Okay, you stupid shit, I'm in."

Despite the sheer amount of stuff that's happened in my life, it's hard to describe what happened in the ensuing two months before The Day. A lot of paperwork, doctor's visits, and even more paperwork. Alzarre's deal was that I paid him money, and he got me on what we called The Mission when talking about it. That wasn't exactly the guarantee we both thought it was, hence the doctor's appointments. I guess they - They - whoever was really behind this Dominion Project stuff - didn't want to go seed humanity on a planet with rich and sick people, just rich and healthy people. I turned out to be healthy enough for a middle-aged wolf, so go me.

On The Day, I got out of bed and put on my leather business suit finest. I even put on a white dress shirt instead of going shirtless, just in case someone wanted to complain. I watched out the window as scant few people walked by on the sidewalk, a far cry from when Lainsville had been a bustling mini-metropolis. A black sedan pulled up in front of The Pit, and a mink in a full-on driver's uniform complete with hat stepped out. I was out the door of my 'penthouse apartment' before I even got the text message.

The mink was a young guy and had all the actual professionalism of a car dealer porter. "Good Morning, Mister Kirsch," he said, and held out a tablet for me with a QR code.

I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it, which dumped me into the Dominion app and gave me a big green checkmark. "That's Mister Wolf to you."

The mink chuckled and opened the back passenger door for me. "Alright. Is that everything you have?"

I had nothing with me. "I'm a light traveler. I can just pick up what I need when I get there," I said. Wherever fucking 'there' really was.

He climbed in and we took off with a subtle electric whirr. "Hah, that's a good one," he said. "Don't forget to read all of the documentation you'll have in your app there."

I scrolled through it. "This is like fifty pages of legal crap, isn't it?"

"It's fifty pages of extremely important information that I'm paid to tell you that you really need to read," he shrugged. "You're not just taking a taxi down to JFK. You're going to space, man. Up to Perrin Station, and then onto Dominion Prime for a little bit of bio-stasis."

Bio-stasis. We have bio-stasis. I looked out the window as the city slid by. I'd been through a recession, where seemingly half the stores were closed. Everything looked different from that. So little traffic, and everyone on foot looked like they were going somewhere very specific.

The city gave way to countryside as we got on the highway and headed south towards New York City. After about half an hour, the mink spoke again. "It's a shame about the club."

"Huh?" I was still staring out the window. I was trying to fight off the urge to open the window and stick my head out. It was a nice day, actually sunny, and the smog level was down to where sticking my head out the window would have just made me sniffly.

"You're the guy who used to run that club where I picked you up. Hawk, right? And it was The Pit? I went there a few times, I guess a year or two before it closed. It was the first thing I did once I was old enough. I mostly wore spandex and stuff."

Maybe he wasn't as young as I thought. Weasels had cute ears. "Yeah. The pandemics kind of put a nail in that coffin lid. It's a shame, the smog makes people wear respirators, and the gas mask drone crowd probably would have loved that."

I could see his face in the rear view mirror. He looked excited and yet uncomfortable. "Ahh well. Sorry, I'm not really supposed to make a lot of personal contact. I'm hired as a black car driver and we're supposed to be quiet."

"That's fine. I don't know how much I wanna talk anyway." I was leaving Lainsville for the last time. I knew it. I was okay with it. It still made me feel hollow inside. I really felt it; normally, you can't shut me up.

I hadn't been to JFK for years, and the airport was alarmingly different. Half of it had been repurposed for space plane launches, and they had done a pretty rush job. All of the security equipment and setup for them was just out in the open, cluttering up what were the common areas before old-style shoes-off security lines.

Taking your shoes off was nothing compared to the security process for the launch. Multiple body scans of different types, chemical paper swabbing, security dogs, and an extremely adversarial fifty-five-question interrogation with someone who looked like they were paid to say No. They didn't say No to me, nor anyone else I was traveling with. Surprisingly, most of the fellow travelers looked like ordinary people. There were plenty of business suits, and plenty of much more casual clothing. I was the odd one out. That was fine.

After all the security fuss, we were herded into what looked like a small presentation theater. After sitting for a few moments, a cougar in an outfit that was half flight suit and half janitorial uniform rushed up onto the stage and snatched an old-fashioned wireless handheld microphone.

"Hi everyone! Sorry to pack you into a room like this, but we move everyone through in batches. There's two for this plane and you're the second, so you won't have much of a wait at all. You'll be going out of here single file into a few different changing lines. You'll need to take your clothes off and put them in the provided bins. All of them, although you can keep your phones for emergency and communication purposes. You'll be given a flight uniform like the one I'm wearing, it'll have your name on it and your itinerary ID, in case of the unlikely event that you are separated from the group. I understand that you would probably like to keep your clothing on, but from this point on, you're going to be traveling on spacecraft and we follow some semi-military rules for making sure things run smoothly. Thank you." The cougar's amplified voice rang in the room, and then the opposite exit opened up.

Leaving the club and my apartment for the last time was one thing. Now I had to strip down in public and surrender my clothes. The leather suit, especially the cowboy-style riding boots, were the first leather gear I had ever bought that I still had around. It was me. It was what I looked like. I took everything off - riding boots, leather pants, blazer, dress shirt, dress gloves, my leather jockstrap, my regular-ass socks - and put it in the provided bin. It went off into a security scanner, while I put on the aforementioned flight suit. I kept going; my clothes were gone.

I expected another waiting area, and instead they herded us right onto a jetway. I could see the plane we were getting onto - it looked more like the old supersonic Concorde than any typical jetliner, all fuselage and a sharp delta-wing. I could make out some jet exhausts at the back of the wings, and then the entire tail of the aircraft looked like a big fighter jet afterburner cone.

Inside the space plane, it looked generally like a jetliner, except the seating was extreme. Two by two, where there was surely room for three by three. Each seat looked like something out of a race car but much more heavily padded, with reinforcement bars that went floor to ceiling.

I settled into it and buckled into the harness, then looked around at the rest of the plane. There were a few families, seemingly a few couples. On the aisle and up a couple of rows was a head above the rest, black ears and a new-wave pop band head and mane ruff. "Hey, you," I called out. Several people looked, including the maned wolf.

"Ahhh! Mister Wolf! I was beginning to worry. You must just have been in the group behind. And there was that commotion..." he gestured up at the front. "Do you think they get it? This is really it."

"Oh my god," his seatmate - a female coyote - groaned. She turned to look at me with pleading eyes. "Do you know this guy? He's been going on and on and on the whole time I've been in line with him."

"He likes to talk," I said, and flashed my teeth. That was true, although it's not like I was a quiet one. "It's alright to be scared, Al. No one's ever done this before. Also, us being here was your fuckin' idea." There were kids ahead of me and their mother was in the row ahead of them, and she scowled at me for swearing. I just flashed more of a snarl her way and shrugged.

Alzarre frowned, crossed his arms, and sank back into his seat. I wanted to keep belittling him for fun, but the same cougar steward from before stood up at the front of the cabin and got on a microphone.

"Alright, hi again. I'm one of the flight attendants," the same cougar from before said. "Think of this as a roller-coaster ride. We're going to go up to thirty thousand feet and about six hundred miles an hour, which is pretty typical altitude for a commercial airliner. Then, there'll be this warning light show in here for about thirty seconds. That's prep for the rocket burn to go up into orbit. We're gonna accelerate up to over seventeen thousand miles an hour, so it's going to get heavy. You've all been cleared for health problems, so just sit back, keep your head forward, and we'll be up in orbit in no time. This space plane doesn't have artificial gravity until it's docked at Perrin Station, so you will have to remain seated and belted in. Thank you again for your cooperation and we'll talk in orbit!" His cheerful enthusiasm came with a profound tail curling as he got off of the PA microphone and moved to sit down.

The plane took off like any other plane, with a whining jet roar and a bit of a shove as it accelerated down the runway. The world outside tilted past my window and it was up and away. I tried to distract myself with facts. A space plane wasn't any better about getting into space, so I'd read, because the hard part isn't getting off the ground. It's getting to orbital velocity, which like the big kitty said, was a lot faster than even the fastest plane. It was a lot better at taking off and landing at regular facilities with passengers, though.

Just as described, a series of warning lights came on, followed by an automatic announcement. [Prepare for rocket burn. Please remain seated. Your seats will receive additional restraints from above. Rocket burn is an intense procedure that will press you into your seats at over your body weight. Please keep your head forward. You may wish to rest it against the side padding.]

The 'additional restraints' were a lot like a roller coaster, a mechanical harness that came down in addition to the five-point one we all were wearing. We might as well have been clamped into our seats.

[Rocket burn engaging in 3, 2, 1. Rocket burn engaged.]

If taking off in a plane felt like a good shove from behind, this felt like being in a rear-end car crash. I had the misfortune of leaning my head slightly forward and the impulse smacked it back hard enough that it hurt. I felt like my face was being peeled back, and unlike a car crash, the jolt was just continuous for a long eight minutes. I think it was about three G, so suddenly I was a real big wolf in a small seat.

Out the window, the usual view of the ground and clouds turned into a curved blue haze. The acceleration stopped abruptly and I felt like I was being thrown forward into my harness. My stomach lurched upwards and stayed that way. Within seconds, I started feeling a bit puffy.

I reached up to make sure I _could_ press the button. My arm wanted to stay up there. Weightless. The cabin filled with conversation, mostly from people gawking out their windows or complaining about nausea.

We docked at an orbital station to refuel, which took a couple of hours. I managed to keep my pee to myself, though several people had to get up to go to the bathroom, and then had very loud and amused things to say about what that was like in the lack of gravity.

Then, another round of rocket burn to leave orbit, and that's when I started to actually panic inside. I could see the Earth getting smaller, and I realized fully that this was not a normal situation. This was beyond me. This was no joke. Every little kid probably thinks about being an astronaut now and then, myself included, and not just because I'd get to wear some sort of spacesuit. I never in a million years figured I'd end up in space for any reason - I just wasn't the Air Force Test Pilot type of person.

A final round of deceleration, and we docked at Perrin Station. It was at a Lagrange point, which meant that it wasn't moving towards or away from the Earth or Moon and instead basically anchored in space. I say basically because orbital mechanics was not my speciality. It was also large, larger than any sort of orbital station like the old ISS or Sky Dragon or even the refueling one. There were three large ships attached to it, which looked vaguely like old-school science fiction cover art. They were the Dominion ships, recognized from all the documentation I'd pored over.

As soon as we docked, the computer alarmed us that the artificial gravity would turn on. I fell about an inch and a half into my seat, as did everyone else, a chorus of yelps and ear flicks swirling around the cabin. Instead of just being pulled down towards the cabin floor, it felt like something was pulling on every part of my body. Every molecule. I turned my head, and it felt like I was turning my head against something, except 'against' was touching every atom.

"Alright everyone! As you exit to the rear - we turned around to decelerate and docked backwards - you'll see the three Dominion ships out the port windows. That's the right side of the space plane. Follow the signs and employee direction - you'll have some time to stretch, use the bathroom, and have snacks. For any medical issues, see one of the employees immediately." The cougar got off the mic and came down the aisle, and row by row we were let out of our harnesses and ushered off the plane. It was actually a lot better than the usual bullshit commotion leaving a jetliner.

Perrin station was a lot more industrial than I was expecting. It wasn't the same as the orbital stations, where every surface was covered in equipment and wiring. For one, it had artificial gravity, so the floor and ceiling of all the hallways and gathering spaces looked like buildings on Earth. It also had a clear design to it, although that design looked a lot like a subway car designer built a cruise ship. From what I'd read, the station's primary purpose was to build the Mars colony service ships and now had been repurposed for the Dominion Project. There was also a space hotel, although I was surprised to find we weren't going to be spending any time there. Everyone on the trip was supposed to be rich; now they were all wearing flight suits and getting herded around like feral cats and dogs.

After everyone took a drink and a shit, we were corralled and moved along to a hallway with lots of pressure bulkhead warning signs and large DOMINION PRIME messaging. The further we walked, the more I felt strange and disconnected, and right before entering the bulkhead at the actual ship, I had to stop walking and lean against the wall. I felt lightheaded, anxious, and most prominently like my body was being sandpapered from the inside out.

"Are you alright?" A regular human man in a more intricate flight suit stopped to check on me.

"I don't think I like this artificial gravity. It feels like it's messing with me. I'm not... I'm not gonna barf or somethin', it's just, every time I move it feels a little like all of my body parts aren't moving with me the right way."

"Yeah, that's pretty typical and it's nothing to worry about. You get used to it. Did you get separated from a family group?"

I shook my head. "Nah, I'm-" I looked down at a tag on my suit, "Section C, 2 dash 4."

He patted my shoulder. "Perfect. Let's get moving, you're being boarded right now so you won't have to worry about the gravity for very long."

"I'm sure I'll be fine."

"I'm sure you will too, however, I do need to accompany you."

I quirked a brow spot but went along with him. I didn't feel much better about the gravity grind, though having a person nearby made me feel less panicky. If he was fine about it, I could be fine about it. We entered the actual ship, and much more than the station, it was not luxury comfort. The hallways were big enough to move people and equipment around in, with periodic computer display panels. We left the hallway and entered a large space, where the walls extending forward were full of small cubbyholes. It looked a lot like a cross between a laundromat and one of those Japanese capsule hotels. A group of people were being cordoned back while several people up by a barrier were working with a few passengers. Thanks to the temporary barriers, we couldn't see what was happening where the actual pods were.

"Why can't we watch? What's going on in there? How do we know you're not doing something funny? I already don't know what happened to my family in the mixup," Someone said, very agitated, ahead of me. He was a coyote. He looked vaguely familiar; I think I'd seen his face back on the space plane when my seatmate mentioned the 'incident' - maybe he had been part of it.

The same attendant who was with Hawk stepped forward to address him. "You have to strip down naked before going into your pod. Do you want everyone here to see you naked? We do respect your privacy as much as possible."

The coyote stayed verbally reluctant while he was led around the barrier, and there didn't seem to be any more complaints from him. If it was good enough for his cranky ass, it was good enough for my kinky ass.

Then it was my turn. They took me on the other side of the barrier, and I got to see the coyote's pod being inserted back into the wall by a placement crane. I could vaguely see that he was inside of it, and that it was filling with some sort of fluid. None of this was really a surprise, as the entire process had been documented for us in detail, though this actual place, the actual equipment, wasn't the pleasant white hospital setting of the instruction videos.

"Alright, Mr. Kirsch, take off your flight suit and step over here, and we'll give you a sedative and then help you into the pod." The human gestured towards a table and a nurse who had an autoinjector.

I stripped down and stepped over; the nurse prodded me and a little snap and pinch later, I felt... mostly the same. My arm started to get warm.

No, not mostly the same. Lightheaded and frothy. Like the last time I'd had any kind of medical operation, a wisdom molar removal. Everything sounded weird - there was a low rushing sound, and I couldn't hear any noise from the line of people behind me, despite them all talking right before going around the barrier. When the attendant and nurse spoke, the sound was quieter than normal. It sounded like a pair of noise canceling headphones. Or it sounded like I was being sedated. No, it really was weird. They were hiding whatever noises people made.

"Now, step into the pod here, that's good," the attendant said, and guided me into a large clear and metal chamber that looked like a very evil version of a bathtub. Inside of it was a big mechanism at the head end on one side, and then two arm and leg restraint cuffs. "Lie down, and I apologize for this, but the induction is going to be pretty unpleasant. You're going to get poked in the neck, and you're going to get very cold, very fast. However, you'll also be anesthetized into a medical coma, which should take only seconds.

I stepped in, paused, then looked around. For a moment, I pondered resisting entirely. A bunch of thoughts welled up in my head. 'This is a farce. They're just killing rich people.' 'They're not sending us to space, they're going to do something weird, like hold ransom.' 'None of this is going to work. It's just a fucking ruse.' Then, I realized that I was out in space, and why would I be out in space if they were going to just kill me. I shrugged and crouched down, then laid out. The ankle cuffs snagged around my ankles, the wrist cuffs around my wrists, and then the crane picked up the pod.

Just before it slid into the wall, the pod bumped against something, and it started to fill up with fluid. It was already cold and I jerked against the restraints. Then a computerized voice sounded in my ear.

[Bio-stasis induction will begin. You will be perfused with protective solution. This requires central access through your neck. Administering anesthetic.]

One of the wrist cuffs poked me again, and the swirly warmth of the sedative turned into a pounding rush. Something pressed against my neck, and then into it. It hurt, a lot. Too much. Way too much. It went inside - I could feel something pushing into me, like a cold metal snake. It made me instantly panic and hen the panic instantly subsided. I couldn't really see any more, and barely could hear my breathing. I couldn't even tell I was in the pod. The thing in my neck got longer and longer, grinding against something important, going down towards my chest. Then I started to get cold. A second after realizing I was getting cold, I lost consciousness.