The inspectors shuffled into the service bay fifteen minutes before the end of Preston’s shift, four diminutive Earthlings in yellow protective suits that bore the DragonCorp Executive Division logo on their backs like shields. Conversing in voices muffled by the respirators that obscured their faces, they walked the interior of the bay, ignoring the technicians and pointing self-importantly to the trucks, excavators, and mining equipment that towered above them as they tapped notes into their handhelds. The Earthlings would have been endearing, Preston thought as he oiled a hinge of the excavator undercarriage he was repairing, if they weren’t so damn punchable. These inspectors, who flew in from Headquarters every Earth cycle, knew nothing of ore mining. Of operating heavy machinery. Of what life was truly like at the Stickney Crater Mining Settlement on the Martian moon of Phobos. Their inspection criteria, calibrated to Earth standards, would fixate on the most inconsequential details and gloss over the most pressing areas of concern. And it was only recently that Preston realized that these inspections were not held to improve the working conditions of the settlement, but to protect DragonCorp from the legal ramifications of mining fatalities – of which there were many.
But even with this knowledge, Preston did have a personal incentive for the Stickney Department of Machine Maintenance, station B to pass inspection with flying colors. And that was for the hefty five hundred DragonCredit bonus that each technician would receive. With today’s bonus, he would finally have two thousand DragonCredits saved. And with two thousand DCs, he would finally be able to buy a real-life animal companion pug. It had been twenty cycles since Fiona was stolen from him, five since he felt even remotely ready to welcome a new pet back into his life. Not that another pug could ever truly replace Fiona, of course, with her luminous brown eyes and curlicue tail wiggling above the brown spot on her velvety beige coat. But cycle after cycle of working the same service bay only to return home to the same hollow DragonCorp housing unit was making him feel like he was losing his grasp on existence itself. And he knew that the only way to feel tethered was to once again find a purpose for something outside of himself, in the form of some little creature who would love him and rely on him and become his very own world.
He was still thinking about what kind of pug he wanted when the inspectors rustled toward him. Up close they looked… tiny. At 6’5”, Preston was already considered small among the Phobos population – that was why he was assigned to be a technician rather than miner – but most of these Earthlings were a good foot shorter than even him. Earthlings had no need to be tall when they wielded corporate power by tapping on handhelds, and now the lead inspector, a woman, held up hers. “The inspection’s complete.” Her voice was cottony through the respirator. “Where can we find your supervisor?”
“He’s in his office. It’s—” Preston blinked at the handheld. There was a single red X on one of the many checkboxes on the screen. “What does that mean?” he asked, pointing to it with a grease-stained finger.
“Oh. Your department didn’t pass.”
“Excuse me?”
“A fine particulate filter in the ventilation system was expired,” she replied.
“A filter?” Preston could only repeat. When did air filters come into play during inspection? None of the inspectors in any of the previous cycles mentioned filters – because they didn’t fucking matter. Everyone on Phobos was already used to the silvery moondust that would stubbornly sneak its way past every airlock into every habitat, and the only ones who cared were the fragile Earthling visitors who felt the need to swaddle themselves in protective gear indoors.
“The filter change schedule is listed in the SDMM rulebook under Appendix F,” the inspector intoned. “It’s one of the inspection criteria.”
“I know that. I mean, no, I don’t—” He cleared his throat. He wasn’t used to speaking to Earthlings, and the words were coming out in a jumble. Also, he suddenly realized that he didn’t know, as he had never actually read the rulebook, only ever did what his supervisor ordered him to do. “I’ve worked here for ten cycles and none of us have ever been told to check a filter. Think it’s only fair to pass us with a warning for next time.”
He noticed that the lead inspector was no longer looking at him, she was reading off a handheld that one of the other inspectors was holding out to her.
“We’ve kept everything else up to code for the past six cycles straight,” Preston continued. “We’ve just reinforced the entire roof of the bay. The vehicles are cleaned out and topped off. I triple-checked each engine and backup engine myself—”
“I should be having this conversation with your supervisor,” the woman interrupted.
“He never said anything about a filter either—”
“I’d like to speak to him because it’s just come to my attention that due to a satellite disruption, DragonCorp may have failed to send your department the updated version of the SDMM rulebook.”
Oh.
“So, if you could point us to his office…”
Preston wiped his hands on his uniform and pointed. “It’s back that way. Does this mean I’ll get the five hundred DC bonus?”
“It means that if the oversight was indeed on DragonCorp’s part, you’ll have an additional day to bring the department up to code for a repeat inspection. And yes, if the repeat inspection passes, you’ll get the DC bonus.”
As the four waddled away like sentient traffic cones, Preston couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “One more day. Yeah. Fantastico.”
The lead inspector froze. Turned back to him. Her face was invisible behind her respirator as she tilted her head. “Preston…?” he thought he heard her whisper, but it must have only been the rasps of her filtered breathing. Even so, he wondered why she had suddenly stopped to look at him as though she recognized him…
Abruptly, she turned and marched away with the others. It was only after they were gone that he remembered that his full name was emblazoned on the front of his uniform: PRESTON SDMMB-10385.
The pug-breeder’s kennel was set up inside the central rotunda of the main habitat, twenty cages containing fourteen wide-eyed puppies that jiggled their meaty little bodies in hopeful anticipation at the post-shift passerby. Preston noticed when he approached the cages that the travelling breeder, who had flown in from Deimos a day ago, had sold six puppies already. The cream one with the light brown spots and the snow-white one with the blue eyes were gone, no doubt purchased by technicians from SDMM stations A and C who had just passed their inspections with zero issues whatsoever. Even at an eye-wateringly expensive two thousand DC price tag, real live companion animals were a hot commodity at the worker settlements around the solar system.
The breeder, a skinny Earthling man in an official DragonCorp Kennel Division uniform, ambled over to Preston. “You’re back. Is today the day?”
Preston shook his head and explained the situation with the inspection, the filters, the extension.
The breeder chuckled as if to say, typical DragonCorp bureaucracy. But Preston was in luck because as it just so happened, his kennel-ship was scheduled to leave tomorrow, headed back to the pug farm on Mars. Preston would have plenty of time in between to receive his DC bonus and purchase a pug… that is, if they weren’t completely sold out by then. Which one did he have his eye on?
Preston scanned the array of pugs panting to be chosen. As puppies, they were still the size of dinner rolls and small enough to fit into any of his pockets. Their button-round eyes ranged from black to blue, and their velvety short fur was in shades of black and brown and beige. A few even had patterns in their fur, though Preston knew that the patterned ones were considered exotic and typically sold the fastest. He concluded that they were all equally adorable, and that he would be happy with even the most common-looking specimen. After all, Fiona, with her brown eyes and beige fur, had been wholly unremarkable in her appearance except for the dark spot on her back.
Fiona had been the company-issued companion animal provided to fourth-graders at the Stickney School to teach them about responsibility. When she had arrived, bouncing and eager in her crate, everyone in Preston’s class had been interested in playing with her, but nobody had cared about actually doing the work to care for her. With their goals set on who would become the tallest, biggest, and strongest future miner on Phobos, they had preferred to spend their free time on more competitive activities, such as fighting each other for social superiority or ganging up on Preston. Preston’s diminutive size had made him a target of his peers ever since the nursery, and he had spent most days getting body-checked in the hallways or receiving midnight beat-downs in the dormitory. Naturally, Preston had gravitated toward little neglected Fiona for comfort, leaning up against the bars of her crate so she could nuzzle him and lick the salt from his cheeks. They had both seemed to understand without words that she was a runt and so was he, which meant that they needed to protect each other. He had ended up being her sole caretaker: feeding her, brushing her, cleaning out her waste receptacle, and taking her on daily walks throughout the habitat. And the teachers had been more than happy for him to do it, as they had always felt that their main job was to raise the children to be the most productive mine workers of DragonCorp, not to keep a company-issued animal alive.
When Fiona had been stolen, Preston had wept so hard that he blacked out.
Who had done it, which monster had pried apart the bars of her crate and snatched her away from him while he slept? Had it been a lonely miner helping himself to a free pet? Or someone with darker intentions…? God, he had made himself sick thinking about all the things he could have done to protect her, had driven himself to exhaustion scanning every dust-collected corner of the habitat for a glimpse of her…
Even now, studying the batch of young puppies in front of him, Preston realized that he was still half-expecting to find her. He shook himself from this impossibility and indicated a small beige pug sitting unnoticeably among the rest. “Her,” he said.
The breeder frowned almost imperceptibly at Preston’s pick. Then, remembering his salesmanship, congratulated him on his excellent choice. That particular pug had attracted significant interest today, and for him to hold onto her for an entire extra day, he would need advance payment in the form of, say… one thousand DCs.
Preston knew what the skinny man was doing, but took out his handheld and transferred the DCs anyway. It no longer mattered to him where the money was sitting, inside of his wallet or the breeder’s, as long as he could guarantee that the pug would be his once the DC bonus hit.
Grinning, the breeder told Preston that he looked forward to seeing him soon.
Preston purchased a beef casserole sandwich at the cantina – his usual dinner – and ate it as he walked the half-mile length of corridors out of the central rotunda and into the residential sector. But as he neared the door of his housing unit, he wondered if his preoccupation had taken him down a wrong path into another hall.
Because an Earthling woman was standing there, waiting.
“Excuse me,” he mumbled, turning back—
“Preston,” she said, running up to him and touching a hand to his forearm. He stopped. Looked down at her hand, which was lightly meeting his sleeve, and up to her face. She had dark brown hair and eyes. She was wearing a simple blue shirt and pants. His heart began to pulse incomprehensibly in his chest, and it dawned on him that there was nobody else on Phobos that this could be: her, the lead DragonCorp inspector.
He didn’t speak. And neither did she, as she gazed into his face as if gazing upon something wonderful – but there was no reason for her to be doing that, there was nothing wonderful about him—
“You look… bigger,” she said with a smile.
“What do you want?” he replied.
Her smile widened. She seemed amused by his brusqueness. “Of course you don’t recognize me.”
“No, I do. You were the one who failed us at the service bay,” he said, even as he remembered that when she walked away from him, she had whispered his name as if they had somehow met even earlier…
Her amusement made crescents of her eyes. “Sorry I had to do that. Why don’t we talk inside? There’s a lot I need to tell you.”
“How did you even find me?”
She nodded to the number on his uniform, then to the number over his door. “Look, we should really talk inside.”
He felt awkward as he invited her in, suddenly self-conscious about the state of his housing unit even though it was the same as any other economy model around the off-world settlements. Gray walls. Gray bedding, crisply made. Gray metal table and chairs. But he knew that she lived in a different, much superior type of housing unit on Earth – not that he had ever been to Earth, of course, only learned of their astonishingly plush mansions and condominiums through the streamies he would watch at the end of every shift. If she hadn’t shown up at his door, he would be lying prone in bed right now, eyes glued to his handheld until he was lost to sleep.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing vaguely to a chair.
For some reason, she laughed at that – an easy, tinkling sound – and took a seat. A moment passed in silence as she smiled up at him… and then her eyes found the corner of the room, where Preston had placed an empty bowl and a folded up spare undershirt. “You own a pug?” she said in quiet astonishment.
“No, I’m – I’m going to get one…”
When she looked back to him, her eyes were bright. “I’m glad, Preston. Truly. I’m so glad.”
And he didn’t know how to respond to that, except: “What do you want to tell me?”
“Oh. Yes.” She folded her hands in front of her and let out a soft laugh. “Where to even begin – well, I guess I should start with an apology. About the whole ventilation filter thing. My friends and I came up with that so we could have a legitimate excuse to stay on Phobos for an extra day. Otherwise, Headquarters would have flagged our delay, and there would have been questions—”
“Wait. What?”
“We never needed to check your filters. It was just some low-stakes reason for the system—”
“Are you saying we passed?”
“Sure—”
“We passed and you failed us anyway?”
“Preston, let me explain—”
“I don’t believe this.” Preston began to pace in agitation. “Are you even a real inspector?”
“Well, yes… and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that technically, we did receive our inspector’s licenses,” she replied, proudly, “but it was only so that we could travel off-world—”
Preston slammed his hands onto the table and shoved his face into hers. “Who. Are. You.”
The good humor drained from her, and for a moment, she appeared scared. But then… her smile returned. “They never took the fight from you, Preston. That’s good.”
He backed away from her, suddenly feeling terrible. No longer knowing where to put his hands. “Just – tell me who you are. And why I feel like… why you’re acting like you know me.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I think you should sit down for this one.”
“Okay...” He lowered himself into the other chair. “Tell me your name.”
Silence.
“Fiona.”
They gazed at each other. Her brown eyes were brimming with tears. “Preston,” she breathed, “I’m so happy to see you again.”
“No. That’s… no.”
“I look pretty different, don’t I?”
“I don’t know who you are or what I ever did to you, but this is – this is not funny. This is sick. Who put you up to this? Huh? Was it Marco? Was it because of that excavator? I told you, that thing needed a new track—”
Wordlessly, she stood up, faced away from him, and lifted up the bottom hem of her shirt. There was a round brown birthmark, off-center, on the small of her back. Preston stared at it. His mind was buzzing. He couldn’t breathe.
She lowered the shirt and sat back down. “You believe me now?”
And suddenly the breath that he was holding flew out of him, and he began to hyperventilate, gripping the edge of the table so that he wouldn’t drift away. Something warm closed around his hand and pulled him back into his body. It was her hand… Fiona’s.
He felt like a lost little boy again, being comforted by her in the dark. “But – Fiona – you… you’re supposed to be a pug.”
She chuckled and shook her head at that, as if thoroughly tickled by the whole absurdity of the situation. “I should probably tell you about everything that happened after I was taken.”
He let out a sob. A laugh. He didn’t know what else to say except: “Sure. Okay.”
“Well… the whole thing started off horribly. Three people wearing masks broke into the classroom and cut me out of my cage. I don’t have to remind you that I was still a pug. They shoved me into the back of a cargo ship with five, six other pugs, and we blasted off into space. I remember feeling cold. And exhausted. And scared. For that whole trip, I don’t think I was able to eat even a single bite of kibble. I was more scared than I had ever been in my entire life.”
“Where did they take you…?”
“Earth. To a place called Hawaii.”
“Ha-wai-yee,” he repeated. That was a name he had heard once or twice in the streamies. “It’s an island.”
“Many islands. We touched down on one of the small ones.”
“Ah.”
“They threw us all in a car and drove us over some mountains and into this… facility, I guess you could call it. It was in a giant clearing in the middle of the jungle, with nobody else around for miles. And at that facility, I was handed over to the person who had orchestrated the entire kidnapping. Her name was Veronica Chao.”
“Okay… and who was Veronica Chao?”
Fiona seemed to relax at the memory. “She was a doctor. She had white hair and papery, crinkled skin. She healed me.”
“Healed you.” Preston frowned, trying to remember the last interaction he had had with Fiona twenty cycles ago, how he had ushered her into her crate and how she had nuzzled his hand goodnight. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were – you didn’t look sick to me—”
“No, no, Preston. I wasn’t sick in the way that you’re thinking.”
“Then I don’t understand—”
“What are pugs, Preston?”
“Excuse me?”
“Pugs. What are they?”
His frown deepened at her odd detour. “Pugs are… companion animals. Pets.”
“Right, but what are they?”
“Animals...” He paused. There was another Earthling word for them, a word that he had heard used in the old streamies: “Dogs.”
A silence passed.
“Do pugs look like the dogs in the streamies to you?”
He thought this over. He shook his head.
“Back when DragonCorp began setting up their off-world settlements, they knew that people needed animals in these settlements too. Animals provided food, labor – and yes, companionship. But DragonCorp didn’t want to put themselves through the complicated rigamarole of figuring out how to sustain life for all these different species out in space. That would have required armies of scientists doing cycles upon cycles of R&D. Why waste their precious profits on that when they could be building more private villas for themselves on Bermuda?” An expression settled on her face that was sad, bemused, and angry all at once. “So they chose to engineer human DNA instead.”
Preston swallowed.
“We’re human, Preston.”
He remained silent.
Fiona rose from the chair and turned in a circle, almost proudly. “Yep! We’re the designer product of DragonCorp’s genetic engineering. Different enough on the outside so that we’d pass as animals – and human enough on the inside so that DragonCorp only had one pesky set of biology to contend with. How clever, don’t you think? How fucking clever.”
His head was spinning. “But – but what about cows? Tuna? Chicken?”
“I think you know the answer. If it’s not from Earth, it’s human-birth.” She laughed, but the laugh was dry. “DragonCorp set up their transmutation factory farms on Mars. The cow subdivision. The chicken subdivision. The pug subdivision. It’s funny how specific these subdivisions are when all mutes are just different variations on human. Do you want to know how we’re made?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Human embryos are injected with transmutation serums, then grown inside artificial wombs. Once the mutes are born, they’re raised in their specific subdivisions until it’s time to be shipped out to the settlements on a kennel-ship. Or… or on a cargo-barge.” Her face became somber. She looked down at the ground. “The mutes slaughtered for meat… they don’t know any better. They don’t suffer.”
“Fuck.”
A silence settled. Fiona sat back down. “Dr. Chao was one of the original scientists that worked on mute creation. For her contribution, DragonCorp awarded her an entire villa on a private island in Hawaii, the kind usually reserved for SVPs. But as the cycles went on, she became more and more guilty over the role she played in everything. She hated that humans were being used for food and fuel and fun. She was heartbroken over the conditions at the Martian factory farms. She heard a rumor about what the people way out in the far settlements would do to any live cows they got their hands on—”
“What would they do?”
Fiona met his eyes. “Like I said. They don’t know any better and they don’t suffer.” She hardened her gaze at him as if warning him not to press further – and when he remained silent, she continued her story. “Dr. Chao wanted to repent. She wanted to do something to help the mutes that she had a hand in creating. So she turned her villa into a secret research facility and began to perform new genetic experiments – this time, on how to reverse the transmuted DNA to its original form.”
“To turn mutes human again…”
“Yes, you got it. So we could live the life we were always born to live. But the problem was, there were virtually no mutes on Earth for her to experiment on. Mutes were settlement animals only meant for off-worlders who couldn’t tell a chihuahua from a Great Dane.”
Preston nodded, despite not knowing what either of those things were. But still, he understood: “Dr. Chao had to steal some mutes.”
“Exactly. So she snuck onboard some diplomat ship headed for Europa, and came back with her first batch of pugs. Pugs were the size of bread-loaves, friendly, easiest of all the transmuted humans to smuggle. She successfully stole three on that very first try.
“But her experiments started off… badly. Most of the early pugs didn’t even change, they just grew sick and died. She must have gone through around ten before any real progress was made. That was when some of them finally began to grow, shed their fur, and take on human features. But even then, a lot of them got stuck in half-phases. Most of those died too, or she had to put them out of their misery. They were in too much pain to survive.” Tears sprang to Fiona’s eyes, which she blinked away. “Dr. Chao buried them out in the clearing surrounding her facility and gave them headstones. She never hid them away. She wanted to remember their sacrifice.” Preston scrutinized Fiona, the smooth planes of her face, and realized that he was trying to find in her any hint of the pug that he knew. The only thing that looked the same, he concluded, was her eyes. Big, brown and expressive, they were looking back at him with an openness that twisted his heart. “Tell me what happened to you,” he said quietly.
Fiona brightened. “Well, by the time I was brought to Dr. Chao, she had already made tremendous headway with her reversal serum. Mutes were surviving the change with only minimal issues. Sure, they still couldn’t speak, and some kept a few vestigial physical mutations, but overall, they were healthy. You know the three who broke me out used to be mutes too? The biggest issue they had was that they still kept their tails. But Dr. Chao continued adjusting her serum based on the results, so my cohorts and I had no trouble with shedding our tails at all—”
“But how were you?” Preston interrupted. He was no longer interested in hearing about the science of it, all the various stages and effects of Dr. Chao’s serum. “When she turned you, were you… was it painful?”
“No,” she said. “Only the pinch of the needle. It took me a cycle to fully transform, and that cycle was almost like heaven. I stayed at the facility with the rest of my cohort, where all we did was eat, lie about in the sun, and change. Sure, sometimes I felt uncomfortable – there was this tingling deep in my bones that I could never scratch – but nothing ever truly hurt. Dr. Chao’s facility was so beautiful that it made everything perfect. Oh, I hope you can get to see it one day, Preston, see those palm trees and that endless sky. It’s nothing like a DragonCorp habitat. It’s… peace.”
He tried to imagine what she described, and found that he couldn’t quite grasp it. “Okay,” he said, “so what happened after you finished changing?”
“Well, by that time, I was physically in the form of a human child, but mentally only at the level of a newborn. Dr. Chao and the older former mutes had to teach us how to speak and behave – basically, how to be human. So I learned. And I grew up. And I was happy. I was very happy.”
Preston suddenly wondered why Fiona was here. What took her from her paradise on Ha-wai-yee with the indescribable peace, back to the rocky dark moon of Phobos. And she must have sensed him wondering, because the next thing she said was: “I came because of Dr. Chao.”
“Is she still fine-tuning her serum?”
Fiona nodded. “Still fine-tuning, and she needs more pugs. But she’s old, Preston – she’s been old for ages, and she can no longer do the kidnap missions herself. So me and the other mutes have taken on that mantle for her. We began by trying to raid the farms on Mars, but security’s too tight there, and it became way too dangerous. So I came up with a plan to pose as DragonCorp inspectors so we could pass through the settlements instead.”
Her lip twitched upward. “A kennel-ship arrived here yesterday. When the breeder loads it up tomorrow, we’re hoping to smuggle out as many pugs as we can. That’s why I had to buy myself an extra day with the inspection, so we could schedule our ships to be positioned next to each other at the spaceport. It was a logistical nightmare, I won’t bore you with the details… but now you know why we did what we did. Sorry again for the false alarm with the filter.”
“It’s… okay.”
They stared at each other.
“Well,” Fiona said, rising, “my friends are probably getting worried. I better get going.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a lot to do tomorrow. A lot to plan for.”
He realized that he was still in a daze, as though he had just finished being thrashed about through an atmospheric storm. “I understand,” he found himself saying as he got to his feet.
“I’m so happy to see you, Preston. I didn’t think I’d run into you, I really didn’t. And I’m sorry that all I did was talk about myself! Tell me quickly: are you good, is everything good?”
“Yeah. Everything’s good. Job’s steady. The others, they… they’ve grown up. They don’t push me around like they used to. Now they just leave me alone.”
“Oh, fantastico!” she replied in a strange, choked voice – and she ran up to him and wrapped him in a tight hug. For a moment, she felt like a small, hot sun pressed against him. Preston closed his eyes. All those cycles ago, when he had taught her how to sit, and stay, and roll over, he had declared “fantastico” each time she successfully learned a new command. It was a silly word that he had heard in an old streamie once – how strange it was that this was the word that had brought them back together in the service bay—
The warmth left him, and suddenly he was holding air. He opened his eyes just in time to see her slip out the door.
It was only after he was alone that he realized that he should have ordered her to stay.
The Stickney Spaceport was three or four times the size of the service facility, and split into ten different docking bays with airlock doors that closed and opened like giant mouths to receive the cargo ships, freight barges, and people movers that made their passage to Phobos. Preston felt invisible in the foot traffic as he walked the endless length of the spaceport toward Docking Bay Nine, the one meant for the smallest of ships. He had spent the previous night unable to sleep, and first thing in the morning he had gone to his supervisor to tell him that he was taking the day off. His supervisor had been furious: today of all days, when they needed all hands on deck to install those filters for the inspectors? Did Preston want to forfeit his DC bonus?
But truthfully, Preston no longer cared. There was only one thing on his mind: Fiona.
As he neared Docking Bay Nine, he could see the compact white DragonCorp executive cruiser sitting pristinely atop the launch pad, the next ship scheduled to depart. Behind it, in a cargo loading zone, was the bulkier and significantly more run-down kennel-ship. Both ships were powered off and neither seemed to be occupied.
He leaned against a nearby pillar and waited. He wondered if anyone would find his presence here suspicious, but his concern quickly evaporated when he realized that nobody, not even spaceport security, was giving him a second glance. There was nothing out of the ordinary about a service technician at a mining spaceport that seemed to be perpetually skating on the edge of a failed inspection, and no one cared enough to check his identification to see that he was from the SDMM and not Spaceport Services.
A bay door opened, and four Earthling-sized figures in yellow protective suits emerged, headed briskly for the executive cruiser. There was no mistaking who these inspectors were – Preston stepped away from the pillar and followed them. “Hey.”
All four paused and turned. “Preston,” the smallest one said, her muffled voice surprised behind the respirator. A moment passed, and she waved for the others to enter the cruiser. “Get things started, I’ll be right there.”
The Earthlings – the former mutes – hesitated, but eventually opened the cruiser door with their handhelds and shuffled their way inside it.
“Not here,” Fiona said to Preston under her breath, walking toward an unlit service hallway. He followed her into the shadows, where she turned around to face him, removing her respirator to reveal a concerned and puzzled face. “What’s going on, why weren’t you at the service bay? I thought I was going to have to leave Phobos without seeing you one last time. By the way, your station passed the inspections—”
“Don’t go,” he said. “Stay with me.”
She stopped. She stared. “What?” she said.
“Stay here, with me. You can live at my housing unit. I’ll take care of you.”
“Preston—”
“I’ll have the DCs from the bonus to pay for your essentials. It’ll be you and me, just like before—”
“Preston.”
“What.”
“No.”
He could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his throat, rapid-fire, making a torrent of his words. “Why not? If you didn’t want to come back to me, then why did you talk to me in the first place? You could have walked right past and I would have never recognized you—”
“Are you really asking why I talked to you when I realized who you were?”
“Yes.”
“Because!” Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly, as if there were so many things that she wanted to say that they all got stuck on their way out. “Because!”
“Because you wanted to show me what you’ve turned into, is that it?”
“That’s one reason, yes! Also, to show you that I wasn’t dead, so if you were tormenting yourself over what happened, you’d stop!”
“I’m glad you’re not dead. I’m glad you’ve changed. But you can’t come back after twenty cycles only to leave. It—” It hurts, he wanted to say. If you leave me again, you’ll have stabbed me twice. “Don’t be selfish,” he declared instead.
Something hard gripped Fiona’s face, an expression he had never seen on her before. Anger. “Preston, I am not your pug anymore.”
Instantly, he felt his cheeks igniting at her admonishment. Of course. Of course she wasn’t. She was a human now, and humans were not to be ordered around. His eyes stung from embarrassment, remorse, frustration, all of it. “I wasn’t trying to – I’m sorry. It’s just that… you were the only good thing I remember.”
And just like that, the anger fell away from her as she closed her eyes. “I see,” she whispered. “I see.”
“Did you… like spending time with me?”
She was quiet. “It doesn’t matter what I like,” she said at last.
“Fiona, it does matter—”
“I have a purpose now, Preston. Dr. Chao’s so old already that she has to sprint against the clock to perfect her serum. Once she gets it right, we’ll be able to free mutes across the solar system to be the humans they were always meant to be. With enough serum, we can free thousands, no, millions of mutes. One day, with enough manpower, we may even be able to overthrow DragonCorp and claim Earth – claim it for us so it’s not just the paradise planet for executives anymore. None of us will have to be off-world animals ever again.”
He studied her. “But her serum’s already perfect.”
She exhaled and shook her head. “It still needs work.”
“You lost your tail, didn’t you?”
“Yes… but I still have my memories.” Her chin trembled as tears brimmed her eyes. “And that’s the worst vestigial mutation of them all, isn’t it? The vestigial mutation that couldn’t keep me away from you.”
“So… you did like it. Living with me.”
“God, Preston, I—”
“I don’t understand why you can’t just tell me—”
“I had the best time of my life when I was with you! Okay? Our walks, our talks at the crate – you cared for me! I had nothing to worry about! Everything felt easy and good! Now it feels like I’m responsible for so much that I can’t even sleep. When I said that Dr. Chao’s facility was almost like heaven, it was because – it was because you weren’t there with me! There. Are you happy now? I loved being your pug. Are you happy now?”
Blood rushed to his ears as he gripped her arms. “Then stay. Fuck the missions. Your friends can do them without you—”
“Preston, grow up!” she snapped, shrugging him off. And she clasped her hands to her face. “That was rude of me. I didn’t mean that. It’s not your fault – you can’t help being who you are—”
“Me being what I am, what does that mean?”
“Look, forget it—”
“No. Say it.”
She exhaled. “A mute. You’re also a mute who’s been genetically engineered by DragonCorp.” And when he didn’t speak, she pressed on: “Haven’t you wondered why off-worlders are so much bigger and stronger than the people from Earth? Or why you were raised in a communal nursery by teachers instead of by mothers and fathers, like children are in the streamies? DragonCorp made you for a single purpose: to mine.”
Now that she voiced this, it made complete and utter sense… but any shock Preston expected to feel did not come. He felt pretty much nothing except the gentle sway of his entire existence finally shifting into clarity.
“Preston, you okay?”
He was suddenly tired, so tired, all fight inside of him extinguished. It was hard to want to fight when it was fully dawning on him how right she was about his purpose and hers, and how stupidly childish he was being. “I’m fine,” he said. “I was wrong.”
“Just to say it, you’re much more than just a worker to me—”
“How are you doing it?” he interrupted. “Your mission?”
Her face worked. Stilled. She sighed.
“My friends are working inside our ship right now, jamming the docking bay security camera feed. Once the cameras are offline, we’re going to break into the kennel-ship. And when the breeder comes to load up his pugs, we’re going to knock him out and take as many as we can. By the time he wakes up, we’ll be long gone.”
“That simple.”
“We’ve had practice.”
He gazed into her, trying to memorize every line, every peak, every valley of her human face before their inevitable goodbye.
“It’s not forever, you know. I can try to come back next cycle. Maybe one day you can even visit me in Hawaii—”
He didn’t want to be the object of her placation. He walked away.
He was numb as he drifted down one of the many footpaths of the spaceport, headed in the general direction of the housing sector. He tried to pretend that the last thirty-six hours never existed. Once he reached his housing unit, he would lull himself to sleep with a “beef” casserole sandwich and a marathon of streamies; the next morning, he would obediently return to work repairing the treads on the next malfunctioning excavator, and soon, life would be simple again. He knew now that he had been wrong about wanting a purpose outside of himself. His graspings for it had opened the door to uncertainty, turmoil, and knowledge about the inner workings of the solar system that he was not meant to understand. Maybe his real purpose had always been the one he was literally created to do: mine for DragonCorp.
“Where were you?” A voice cut through his thoughts. Preston blinked to see that rumbling toward him, driving a spaceport cart, was the breeder. He appeared annoyed. His twenty cages were piled high in the back, with eight pugs remaining inside them, including the unremarkable beige one that Preston had set his sights on. “I was waiting for you all day, but you never showed.”
As Preston regarded the sweet little pug, he realized that they were not meant to be together after all – and in any case, she would soon be blasting off to a better life elsewhere. “She’s all yours. Give me back my deposit—”
“Don’t you know what a holding fee means? It means no refunds,” the breeder snapped, stepping on the accelerator – only for the cart to plow into a group of miners walking past. The miners toppled to the ground, clambered to their feet, and stormed back to surround the breeder’s cart. As the accusations flew, the are-you-blinds and watch-where-you’re-goings, five or six spaceport security guards emerged out of nowhere and thundered over to contain the situation.
Preston took advantage of the commotion to slip away. He found that he didn’t particularly care about getting his money back anymore. He didn’t care about much of anything anymore.
He heard the revving of the cart engine and glanced behind him to see that the miners had been shooed off and that the cart was now resuming its slow progress toward Docking Bay Nine, this time with two of the security guards sitting in the back with the restless puppies.
Preston’s stomach dropped.
The scuffle must have annoyed spaceport security enough to want to accompany the breeder all the way to the kennel-ship… where Fiona and her friends were lying in wait.
The guards’ genetically engineered muscles were straining against their DragonCorp uniforms. Their stun-guns sat at their hips.
“Damn it,” Preston whispered. “God damn it.”
He stuck close to the shadows as he followed the breeder’s cargo cart. The guards in the back didn’t see him – or maybe they did, but never bothered to register the runt-sized technician as any sort of threat. When the cart reached the kennel-ship in Docking Bay Nine, all three disembarked. The guards each grabbed several pug crates from the back as the breeder activated the ship with his handheld. The back door yawned open, dropping down a ramp that rattled as they climbed onboard—
Preston closed the distance to the ship and rushed up silently behind them. He could see that the inside of the kennel-ship was dark, industrial, and made dingy by cycle after cycle of transporting pugs throughout the solar system. A faint smell emanated, both human and animal, and one of the guards coughed as they made their way inside…
Four petite figures clad in black masks jumped out from the cockpit. The breeder pedaled back with a yelp as the guards dropped the crates they were carrying and rushed forth – and now Fiona and her accomplices were recoiling in surprise, hastily grabbing whatever they could wield as weapons to fend off the unexpected guard presence—
Preston ran inside. Seizing the first guard by the hair, he smashed his head into an overhead cabinet. The cabinet doors splintered open, and boxes of supplies cascaded out, as the guard fell unconscious to the floor. “Go,” Preston rasped to Fiona as the second guard advanced upon him.
“Get the pugs, get the pugs,” Fiona ordered her accomplices. They began scrambling inside the ship, busting the latches open on the fallen crates to pluck out the panicked puppies.
“Forget the pugs, get—”
The guard cocked back a fist and threw a punch that connected with Preston’s jaw – the taste of iron bloomed inside his mouth as he hit the rusted metal floor. Through his daze, he noticed that inches away from his face was the first guard’s stun gun, sitting inside its holster.
The second guard stood over him to throw another punch—
Preston grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger. The stun beam struck the second guard in the chest, and he crumpled, boneless, to Preston’s feet.
Preston rose just in time to see the breeder dashing out of the kennel-ship while shrieking into his handheld: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”
“You gotta go,” he yelled to the mutes. “More security’s coming.”
They were still scrambling to open the remaining crates. They gathered up the last of the pugs and Preston practically pushed them down the ramp. He wheeled around to see that Fiona was still inside the ship—
“Preston, wait!” she gasped. She was squatting in front of the jumble of bottles and boxes that had spilled out of the cabinet, picking out white pen-sized boxes from the mess.
He could hear the patter of footsteps in the distance. “What are you doing, let’s go—”
“He brought pug transmutation serum with him,” she replied in hushed wonder. “It’s what they use at the farms to turn human embryos into pugs. If Dr. Chao can reverse engineer these, it can speed up her progress by months – no, entire cycles—”
Fiona was easily light enough for him to pick up, Preston calculated. Hoist into his arms, just like he did all those cycles before, and get the hell out of there before it was too late…
He couldn’t do it. He knelt and gathered the rest of the boxes for her.
She was holding an armful of boxes by the time she made for the exit ramp. He followed her out, only to see that advancing toward them from the spaceport were five Phobos enforcement officers with weapons drawn—
“Get to the ship,” he barked at her.
But Fiona wasn’t getting to the ship, she was clumsily sprinting toward a control panel at the spaceport wall.
She was going for the airlock, Preston realized. In order to leave, they first needed to close the inner airlock door to separate the launch pad from the rest of the docking bay. It was only then that the outer airlock would open to allow the cruiser to blast off into the vacuum of space.
The officers were getting closer, yelling for them to stop. He could see that their guns were not stunguns, but real ones that meant finality.
“I’ll press it, Fiona – you go!”
Fiona pivoted for her ship as Preston rushed for the control panel – a white-hot pain suddenly seared his abdomen as he heard her let out a startled cry – he staggered the remaining steps to the panel and slammed the heel of his hand onto the red airlock button.
The gargantuan metal door of the inner airlock began to lower from the ceiling. It was only then that he looked down at the blood blossoming on his uniform that he realized he had been shot.
“Come on!” Fiona yelled, her voice hoarse. She was leaning out of the cruiser door on the other side of the lowering airlock, waving for him to come to her.
Preston looked from her to the Phobos officers who were almost upon him. Truthfully, he hadn’t ever thought to run. There was no use in trying to escape DragonCorp’s omnipresent identification technology that would be able to pinpoint his presence in every last corner of the solar system. But the pain that was radiating from his core was fogging his mind, not allowing him to think straight. “Come on!” he heard her yell again, and suddenly he was running, running toward her voice.
The airlock door thunked closed behind him, blocking the officers from the launch pad, just as he reached the door of the executive cruiser. He felt the pressure of many pairs of small hands pulling at him and dragging him inside. That was when his legs finally gave out from under him, and he collapsed.
He looked up to see three faces staring down at him: Fiona, her cheeks washed with tears, and two of the other mutes. They had taken off their masks, and he could see them clearly for the first time. Their features were human-like but distorted – one with velvety fuzzy jowls, and the other with sparse white whiskers that protruded from her upper lip. They were the ones that came before Fiona, he realized in his haze. The half-phased.
He felt the soft pokes and snuffles of the rescued pugs gathering around him. Were they curious, concerned, frightened? Once they were changed, would they still remember this moment of violence, or would Dr. Chao finally be able to grant them the mercy of starting their human lives anew and free of past memories?
“Why did you do that? You shouldn’t have done that,” Fiona was saying, over and over, touching the wound on his abdomen with trembling fingers that came back red with blood.
He opened his mouth but it was hard for him to speak. Of course he had to come back, he wanted to tell her. Danger was coming for her, so he did what he had failed to do twenty cycles ago: protect her. And this time he had succeeded. He had finally succeeded! They had not only rescued the pugs, they had stumbled upon extra transmutation serums for Dr. Chao—
He felt the rumble of the floor beneath him. The ship was taking off. He saw that one of the mutes was piloting from the cockpit, and that outside the ship window, the outer airlock door was opening to reveal a pinpricked blackness on the other side. How funny, he mused, that the first time he would ever leave Phobos would be when he was actively dying. He would never have to worry about DragonCorp enforcement catching up to him, because he would be dead before they landed.
The ship accelerated forward, and suddenly all that he knew fell away from him, and he was surrounded by the emptiness of space.
“Give me the serum,” Fiona said to one of the others, who handed her a pen-sized box. With blood-red hands, she tore it open and took out a thin syringe filled with golden fluid. “I don’t know if this will work, but you have to let me try, Preston, please,” she whispered, holding the needle to his neck. “The serum – it can change you. It can alter your cells. Maybe that means it can heal you and save your life. But if it works, you’ll become a—”
Pug.
He suddenly found all of this strangely amusing. But somehow, he was okay with it. He smiled up at her and blinked. “Fantastico.”
There was a little sting, a little burn.
Fiona moved his head into her lap and cradled him with both arms. Preston could no longer feel his body, just her arms around his head. He remembered all she had said to him about the island facility in Hawaii, and at last he could grasp what he couldn’t grasp before, that elusive sensation of peace. In his mind, he was already there with her in that sun-kissed clearing, safe, and cared for, and wholly, utterly hers.
He closed his eyes and felt himself changing.