Part 2 | Chapter 15 - Operation: Oceanic Memory (4)

Part 2 - Orientation Day

Chapter 15 - Operation: Oceanic Memory (4)

Pooka’s form swells, the familiar shape of the black Equus from my manifestation congealing out of his ethereal edges. The mane and tail billow in wind that does not blow, his proud stallion neck arching and broad black hooves pawing restlessly at the red dirt. We shift muscles that roll with power, feel an earth that calls to us beneath our feet. So much closer than at Murasaki. Here she is stacked, ordered, crushed, and taken to be purified from her natural chaos. But she calls us. Ghosts wander in my mind, memories of being vast. I blink, and blink again, and feel our joint bodies.

“We’ll run,” I instruct, pushing Everett now towards the ramp up to the door of the loading bay.

“Run?” he leans back against me as I push, resisting me. “With our legs? It was a forty minute bus ride-”. Then Pooka nudges into his back with his muzzle and he stumbles forward, his face returning to the stiff, cautious mask I remember when Pooka knocked him over on the train. His symbiont holds on around his neck, legs braced against his shoulder.

I hop up the ramp and use it to mount Pooka, then pat Pooka’s broad carbon-black back in front of me, showing Everett the shape of his form with my hands. “Get on!” I urge. Pooka’s elation is rushing through me, and a giddy grin begins to creep onto my face.

It seems to only make Everett more cautious. “Shouldn’t I be in the back?”

“Who cares? Get on!”

Tentatively, he reaches a hand and flinches when he touches Pooka’s shoulder. Then he carefully traces his hands over Pooka’s withers, feeling the curve of his back. I can feel the brush of his fingers on Pooka’s hide as if it were my own flesh he was tracing those fingertips along, sending a shiver down my spine. Cautiously, he mounts in front of me, and I wrap my knees on either side of his hips, hugging his back. He's as firmly built as Pooka’s muscular form beneath me, Harris was a stick compared to this guy. The feelings of loss that thought surfaces, feelings I’ve been struggling so hard to avoid, are quickly lost to Pooka’s radiating joy.

We dance away from the ramp, cantering a broad circle out and away from the buildings to put some space between us and the drifting black smoke rising into the sky, remnants of burning acid and plastic. We trot between the buildings, avoiding the mass of humans assembled and waiting to return to their shifts. As we clear the back of the work camp, I bend, pushing Everett forward to steady him and center our collective mass, and the edges between our bodies and minds completely dissolve.

Equus thunder with the force of trains, for no other symbiont has the stamina and speed to pull them - accelerating to hundreds of kilometers an hour using not a single scrap of energy. We do not run so fast, to keep Everett and the human part of our body from falling, but it has been a long time since we felt such freedom. We are gale force winds, we are rushing water, we dance and dive and boil and roll. Red dust greets us, scattering beneath our hooves and trailing in swirling eddies, and the earth skims along beneath. I don’t care that the dust cakes as mud on my wet skin and clothing, all I can feel is our power. We open our mouths and laugh. I spread my arms into the wind and let my hair fly behind me, just like our carbon-black mane and tail. Black and silver.

We barrel between the rock piles, larger than buildings and stacked in flat topped pyramids, the humans and symbionts alike ignoring us as they labor. On others, conveyors carry the ore towards the far away port and that smell of brine that hangs in the yellow, stale air. The occasional symbiont moves between the rock piles, hunching, shuffling, casting shadows with blurred edges

This is only a taste, tempts Pooka. I’ll show you the sea one day, promises Pooka. I’ll show you the trees, I’ll show you the mountains and valleys. Places where they remain, where they haven’t run out. We’ll run away, we’ll be free, but for now we dream of falling leaves and rolling white clouds on blue skies. They’ll never catch us.

We run.

When I grip Everett around the waist, I can feel his torso shaking with tiny convulsions. Concerned, I press the ear without my Vespa to his back.

He’s laughing.

The sound of his voice is carried away with the wind as we gallop.

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“Thanks for the support, bill Aquila for any incidentals. Do you need me to approve anything?”

I wrap my wet hair into a bun and secure it with a clip as I approach the seating area from the lockers and changing rooms at the Obsidian Security Depot we stopped by at the tiny town and train station at Catakalan. It seems to act as some sort of hub between the transportation in and out of the city-dome and the laydown and port operations beyond. Buildings only a few stories tall are so strange to me I can’t help but stare at them out the window, the sunlight is so bright when so much of it reaches the ground here. Pooka trails at my feet in his favored hyaenid form.

A young lady in a suit with a Sanguinus on her shoulder is holding out a tablet for Everett to work his way through reviewing. He’s showered and changed, like I am, back into his white collared shirt and black suit pants, his symbiont hanging from the back of his head now he’s tied his long curls into a single braid again. I don’t have anything near as neat to wear, still in my lab scrubs that was the uniform making up most of my daily wear at Murasaki, stinking of sweat.

“No approvals needed, pleasure doing business with you Exec Hawthorne. We’ll send over your receipt shortly,” finishes the young lady, giving him a quick deferential bob of her head and departing.

I slump into the chair next to him, pulling my still unopened luggage from my Dad protectively beneath my feet. “Exec eh? How long till our train?”

“Less than 20 minutes, we can walk over when you are ready?” he says without turning his gaze towards me, eyes glancing around the room and between doorways.

I sigh, “Nah, I need to just sit for a minute.”

“We’re about to do a bunch of sitting on the train, again.”

“Not the same, somehow.” I lean forward onto my knees, looking at the network of cuts on my hands and picking some of the dead white skin from them nervously.

I start when his voice speaks through the Vespa in my ear. “Pell.”

“Huh?” I reply aloud.

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Lips not moving he continues, his eyes looking at his hands as he scratches at one fingernail, “Pell. It’s the name of my symbiont. Her name.”

I stiffen and fight my reflex to look at Pell on the back of his head, the fine hairs on her legs almost glowing as they catch the light from the window. I sink into my couch a little, cautiously sniffing.

“How much does Adrian hear?” I ask.

“Everything,” says Everett.

“Everything,” says Adrian in my ear.

“Does-”

Everett cuts me off, “Not here. Someplace dark.”

“Dark?”

“No surveillance.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m usually not really listening unless you say my name,” adds Adrian in a tired voice.

It’s not worth very much to me. I bite my lip and look at my luggage. Everett has his own bag and Regina’s by the side of his chair, and a growing ball of Vespa that have been flying their way towards us for the past few minutes, gathering on the bag. It seems they can also act independently then. Exactly how many bodies does Adrian's symbiont have?

“Conrad.”

Everett lifts his head, his fingers pausing.

“Conrada Dorrien. Sometimes people call me Conrad,” I say, shrinking from his gaze.

“Isn’t that a boy's name?”

“Oh fuck off.”

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We get off the train at Apex City and I can’t help but crane my neck to look up at the buildings around us. Colorful banners hang, advertising restaurants and bars, glass fronted shops line the promenade past the complicated, multi level network of trains coming and going from the city - the sound of Equus hooves thundering in my ears as they bring their magnetized, metal carriages in behind them.

It took another 36 hours of travel to reach here. Everett seemed content to glare out the window and read on his tablet for most of it, sleeping when darkness fell on the fold out bed built into the side of our cabin. A meal cart came around at regular intervals, and while he offered to buy me food I turned him down again and again, letting my stomach growl. He never pressed much after the first ask.

When I slept, I did so curled on the ground with my belongings, exhaustion overwhelming any discomfort. Pooka stood over me, never sleeping when I did. When I awoke, his memories slowly diffused to me. He spent a lot of time watching out the window into the passing white fog, and between it occasionally shapes passed - tall, dark figures; rounded, organic bodies; twisting puzzles of wire and metal.

Everett walks ahead, slinging his own bag over his shoulder and wheeling Regina’s behind him with its buzzing ball of Vespa. He doesn’t walk towards the turnstiles and security with Glaucidians waiting to inspect us, and instead knocks against a locked door in the building behind it.

“Pick up already here?” he says aloud as we wait. Whatever Adrian says in response he doesn’t say to me. I’m fairly certain now he can perfectly control who hears what.

The door clicks and shifts, opening to someone in a black security uniform who leans out to beckon us in. “Exec Hawthorne, welcome back.”

“Aquila should have called in?” he asks, not bothering with any greeting.

“Of course sir, we were expecting you. Please come this way.”

Not even a glance is spared for me as I trail behind. We pass straight through security without any inspection.

At the front of the train station, a broad paved area swarms with people and smaller symbionts, and vehicles pulled by all manner of vertebrate symbionts, and a few with none running on precious batteries instead. The pedestrians all gather in a crowd as the vehicles stream by, then the lights change, and they cross from the station into the city beyond. Murasaki district, while vertically huge, took up very little land and I, like everyone else, mostly relied on the skyways to walk anywhere I needed to go, only ever leaving to the central districts by train when necessary - like my manifestation. Apex seems both tall and wide, I can no longer see the sky again between the buildings.

I lean over one of the railings to look down, curious to see if like Murasaki district we’re high in the air and the ground is somewhere below us beneath the dark underbellies of the buildings. To my shock, when I look down still, dark liquid laps between the buildings. Organic grime crusts the base of buildings, bobbing with the current.

I look across the street at the colorful shops, there is clothing and furniture and all sorts of belongings I never even dreamed of privately owning.

“Do they sell things to employees?” I ask Everett curiously.

“What?” He unfolds his impatient arms, waiting to the side of the road in an area that appears to be a loading zone for passengers coming and going from the station.

“The shops? How does credit work?”

“Oh,” he mutters, then scratches the back of his neck, “Right, Murasaki is one of those internal credit only companies. Uh, Apex uses Velo Tokens, it’s a broadly used currency within their own network and most of the smaller companies in Western Asitika have adopted it unless they are doing their own thing, makes trade easier across the region. Aquila mostly works in Velo and I-Euros, but we hold a collection of other currencies as well. You’ll be paid in Velo, given we’re based here.”

“What does that mean? Like actually paid, as in have my own money?” I ask.

“A bit, maybe? Look, someone’ll give you a contract once we get back.”

“Do you know if I could buy paper?”

The edge of his jaw shifts, curiosity suddenly piqued, “What do you want paper for?”

Pooka sneezes at my side, distracting me from answering as a shiny black car slides in front of us, a horned Capra steaming purple haze as they pant from the exertion of pulling the vehicle behind them. Their host and the vehicle's driver exits the front door and comes around to open the back doors for us. I snatch back my own luggage from him as he bows to take Everett’s and loads it in the back, opting to climb in with my own on the seat next to me. Pooka launches himself onto the roof, shaking the whole vehicle and he hunkers down, purple tongue hanging from his mouth.

“That one of yours?” asks the driver.

“Yes, h-” I stutter to a stop, “Yes. It's mine.”

He doesn’t ask any other questions, Everett lowers himself into the seat next to me and roughly pushes my bag on my lap to make more room for himself.

“Put it in the back with the rest,” he hisses.

“No.”

The car rocks from side to side as Pooka lowers his head out the window to look at Everett, lips curling into a snarl that lacks most of its menace upside down. I’ll put you in the back with the rest.

The Capra pulls us forward into the organized rush of vehicles, and whisks us into the city. I keep on spotting dark water between the buildings, lights from above reflecting abstractly against the gently lapping waves. Pooka turns into the wind, tongue flapping from his mouth.