Yeoman Kit Colony

Entry

Everything feels like dog. I'm in bed, in a perfectly dark room:
my only available senses are smell, sound, touch, taste, gravity,
and time.

My sense of smell: Dog breath. I may as well be inside of a dog's
mouth. It smells like the inside of a dog's mouth unmistakably. I
feel like I am in a room that has been wholly slobbered on from
ceiling to walls to carpet, and not just cursorily, not just for a
short time. My nose radiates euphoria in recognizing the scent of
a dog's chewthing, a dog's breath, a dog's saliva, as being what
we are more or less surrounded by, as we lie on this bed.

My sense of sound: Breathing. It could be a human. When was the
last time I was in bed in a dark room with a human? It isn't a
human. So this is canine breathing, somewhere in this dark room
with me. The breathing in... the breathing out... the breathing
in... the breathing out... It sounds like the dog here with me is
soundly asleep.

My sense of touch: There's blankets all around, one is bunched up
around my head, one my feet have gotten themselves wrapped up
into, one is draped across my torso, it feels like there's another
one or two off to either side of me; the blankets feel like
adopted nerves connecting me to my sleepmate. In the way the
blankets, the ones wrapped around my feet, draped across my torso,
et cetera, are being tugged, I know, from that, where my canine
companion is. On the bed with me. Not touching me. But very close
by. It feels, in among the blankets, like me and this dog were
earlier snuggled up very very very very very close together, and
then, in the process of settling in...

Oh, wait.

Adding one: My sense of temperature: Warm. Hot. Melting via the
furnace (FUR-nace) that is sharing a room and a bed and blankets
and space with a dog.

My sense of taste: ...Paws?

My sense of touch again: There is a dog paw on my face. The coarse
paw pad rests on my upper lip, and the claws touch the side of my
face, next to my mouth, and my tongue (dry) is thoughtlessly
sticking out of my open mouth, touching the flat of the dog paw
that is on my face. Cool. Very into it. Genuinely.

My sense of taste again: Definitely a paw. I can taste the...
salt? I can taste the fact that my tongue is touching the hair
that grows between the paw pads. Whatever that taste is? That's
what I'm tasting.

My sense of gravity: There is gravity. Hell, there is always
gravity, there's never not. But, there is immediate gravity.
Perceptible gravity. Appreciable gravity. I am lying on my back,
on a bed, in a room that "has gravity" even in the layman's sense.
And, also weighing down on this bed, with bodily weight, is a dog;
my gravity and a dog's gravity cooperate, turning the bed into a
sort of bowl, cone, basin, a shape where me and the dog are both
naturally drawn to the center which is also the bottom.

My sense of time: I think I'm supposed to be in the middle of
sleeping right now. I think that's what time it is. I think I was
supposed to be asleep for a long time already, and still have a
lot of sleep left to come.

And yet. Here I am. Awake. With my dry tongue pressed against the
hair tuft in the middle of a dog's paw.

The dog, in the midst of dream, softly, barks.

I wait for the paw twitches; sleep barking and sleep running so
often come as one thing. I wait for the dog's paw to scratch my
face, leave a line of torn skin, blood...

There was only the one bark. And then a sort of sigh... a
frustrated, giving up sigh. And then a pause. Now back to
breathing. The dog breathes in... the dog breathes out... the dog
breathes in... the dog breathes out... the dog breathes in...

The dog wakes up, with a big exhale--a big sigh--and then a big
stretch, the back arching, the legs going rigid during the
stretch. The paw pad slides off of my face harmlessly.

The dog has awoken.

The dog had detected a sleepmate awake.

I still don't know which dog I'm with. Shine or Joey.

I roll towards the dog, and rest a hand on the side of a canine
ribcage. A BIG canine ribcage. Joey. If I moved my hand up his
body, up the fur, I would arrive at pointy ears; if I moved my
hand down his body, towards the hotter parts of his anatomy, I
would arrive at a sheath, balls.

I crane my face forward and give him a dry peck on the front of
his muzzle.

With his paw that had been on my face, he uses his claws to pull
my body close to his body, and he holds me, close. He licks my
forehead. Over and over again, he runs his tongue across my
forehead, washing me.

No wonder everything smells like a dog's chewthing. I am the
chewthing.

I let it happen. I'm overjoyed to let it happen. There is nowhere
else I would rather be than right here, bunched up in a hot bed
against a hot dog, my human sweat being washed off by him.

I say, "I love you, Joey. I love you, guy."

As his licking goes on, he pulls me even closer with his claws,
and starts licking the back of my neck. Heh.

I put a hand on his back and a hand on his belly; He rolls onto
his back, legs splayed apart, and I give him a big belly rub,
rubbing my hands all over his fluffy big warm chest. He and I
kiss, mouth to mouth, as he gets his belly rubbed. Moaning. Little
giggles. I can't help making little noises about how fun this
feels, to be here in bed with him, again.

As we continue to kiss, I take one hand off of him, off of his
belly, and I start examining my own body. I don't mean
masturbating, although, that's not to say that we might not be
going there. I just want to find out what I am right now. As one
hand rubs my canine partner's tummy, my other hand touches my own
tummy; I find that I am flatchested, no breast growth to speak of;
even pressing a palm flat against a nipple and rocking the palm
back and forth, I can feel no mass of developing breast underneath
whatsoever. I guess it's always been one of the main clues, that
tells me what part of my life I've arrived at.

Ever since I arrived at the Yeoman Kit Colony, my life is no
longer lived in chronological order. I wake up, and sometimes I've
woken up on a day three years before the last day that I had just
lived. Sometimes I wake up and only a week has advanced forward.

Things change. So there are some questions that can give me a good
idea of when I am, at least roughly. Am I with Shine, or am I with
Joey, or am I damned to the lonely time, the time after everyone
else but me has died. Is my chest flat, or has the estradiol given
me breasts yet. What name do people call me.

Right before waking up to this, I was in the lonely time.

The floor outside of my bedroom creaks; speaking of "What name do
people call me," speak of the devil.

I stop kissing Joey, not that this stops him from kissing me.
Within his claws, I turn myself around, so that I am little
spooned, my back flush with his chest, his claws resting on my
bicep, him licking the back of my neck, and then the side of my
face, and then sticking his tongue in my ear.

From there in Joey's grasp, among the nest of blankets on our
shared bed, I look up to the doorway of our room; the sliding door
is already slid open, apparently left that way whenever Joey and I
had gone to sleep. By the soft light of some of the electronic
display panels outside of the room, I can see when a figure with
long black hair (and piercings on his nose, eyebrow, and earlobes,
and tattoos of a flock of small black silhouette birds going
across his face) appears in my doorway. Geoff.

Geoff says, softly, "You're up, Joey and Roman?"

I hear Joey's tail beat against the bedsheets as he wags; I feel
the little percussions ripple across our bed; Joey continues to
lick the side of my face clean.

I put a hand up at his muzzle for him to lick instead, giving him
my fingers to have instead of my ears, which I need to borrow back
for a second to better hear the human who has just arrived and
called me Roman.

I say to Geoff, laughing a little bit at myself as Joey doesn't
let up on licking me, "We're up, yeah."

Joey tries to force his muzzle between the gaps of my fingers and
get back to my ear, but I firmly keep him pushed away.

Geoff says, "I'm sorry, correction, you're up Joey The Dog Himself
and Lilly The Aforementioned Dog's Girlfriend."

Oh that's really pleasing to hear. He does know the name that I
end up changing to. And the trans of it all. And the zoo of it
all.

I say to Geoff, referring to Joey and myself, "He and she are
awake."

He asks, "Wanna hit breakfast at the cantina, if you're up for the
day?"

Hearing that we're going somewhere, Joey stands up on the bed,
standing with his paws on me in fact, and he does a big shake-off,
and then he leaps off of me and onto the ground, and walks quickly
past Geoff out into the hall.

Geoff mentions, "Joey's going with me, apparently. Ha."

I say to Geoff, "Yeah I'd love to come get breakfast. What time is
it?"

"Oh four hundred," he says.

"Oh, do they even serve breakfast right now?"

"Twenty four seven, Lilly," Geoff says, wearing the boredom on his
sleeve, of re-explaining some piece of trivia that he probably had
to remind me of as recently as his yesterday.

I'd forgotten, the cantina near Geoff, here in his neck of the
colony, is indeed an all day and all night affair. More recently
(in my own highly individual sense of what "recently" entails)
I've been more used to getting snubbed by a cantina on the far
opposite side of the colony that closes sometime between twenty
hundred hours and twenty three hundred hours, seemingly at
complete random, seemingly to avoid serving noisy drunks (my
friends.) But yes. Geoff is right, obviously. I do have memories
of getting a bite to eat in this nearby cantina in the dead of
night, usually just with Shine, but sometimes with both Shine and
Geoff.

As I'm thinking about going to this cantina with Joey instead of
Shine for the first time (my individual sense of "for the first
time,") I feel a surprising pang of sadness, at thinking of Shine,
and the fact that she is dead now. I don't want her to be dead. I
tell myself that I will see her alive again. Maybe the next time I
wake up, or maybe a hundred times from now, but at some point, I
will wake up, and it will be a black dog in bed with me, a smaller
dog, with floppy ears, and she, alive, will roll onto her back for
me to give her belly a rub. She, alive, will be there, getting her
belly rubbed by me, and we will both, together, be remembering all
the years we shared together, even before arriving at the far-off
Yeoman Kit Colony together, back on Mars, our home planet. But
then, as quickly as I summon all of these memories of her back to
me, and as quickly as I summon up the reassurance that I will see
her alive again, I feel unbearably guilty. I feel so selfish, so
thoughtless, about the fact that I am trying to rationalize her
death by assuring myself that I will go back to a time before it
happened. Does that matter to her, or just to me? She is dead now.
Either way, as me and Geoff and her replacement go to get food at
the cantina, we do so in a world that is no longer graced with
her.

Geoff asks, "Are you alright?"

"Um," I say, and then suddenly I am crying. Not big sobs--maybe
Geoff can't even tell that I'm crying yet--but, my vision is
blurred from tears that are here now, even if they have not yet
fallen. With great effort, I force out the words, "Just
remembering Shine. Be out in a minute."

"Okay. I think about her too, sometimes, yknow," Geoff says, and
then I think he shrugs, but I can't see him too well through my
teary vision, and then he walks off, leaving me alone in my room.

I do cry. Joey comes back. He climbs up onto the bed, and he lays
down with me, and he licks my eyes, and I love him. I love him
more than my words could ever say. Words are not enough, or, more
specifically, words are not the right kind of thing. But I say the
words anyways. "I love you, Joey. I love you a lot. I love you."

Desolate

It's so quiet. In the times after everyone else. I sit in a park,
on a bench, looking at dead leaves caught in a whirlwind of the
station's artificial wind. The dead leaves, pale greens and pale
browns, circle around and around each other like animals chasing
each other's tails. They rise in the winds, they swoop, the leaves
follow after one another... and then the wind stops, and the
leaves fall to the ground. And then, indefinitely, the leaves just
stay there. Unmoving. Fucking incredible.

This is my life, in three frames: 1) Me and Shine arrive at the
Yeoman Kit Colony which I have been invited to in my capacity as a
network engineering apprentice and she and I spend a year together
here; 2) Shine dies and the next day I go visit my friend Sala
fully intending to kill myself with booze with her that night and
then I accidentally fall in love with her dog Joey instead and me
and Joey spend a little over six years together; 3) Joey dies and
the next day the colony is attacked and everyone else dies too,
except for me, I am the only survivor.

What is the sound of one trans girl not having anyone around to
say her name, and being almost completely deaf anyways from bombs
going off in her ears on the day the last of her friends died, and
not to mention she was already feeling quite dead inside herself
from her first love and her second love both also being dead and
so she probably wouldn't want to talk to anyone anyways?

That's a bad question. Terribly formed. Compound. Unclear.

The Yeoman Kit Colony is--well, "was," maybe--a habitable
structure orbiting the star Tau Ceti; the star is
characteristically very similar to Sol, albeit smaller; as someone
who has been under both suns, they indeed feel like they are both
creatures of the same species, so to speak; the colony was formed,
several years before my arrival, out of the combining of two
spacefaring megaships, one ship being on a research voyage and
bearing the namesake of Dr Miranda Yeoman and the other ship being
on a voyage of a religious nature and bearing the namesake of Dr
Melissa Kit.

Is this legacy one that Drs Yeoman and Kit ever even once saw
coming? That their ships coming out all this way and then being
welded together would ultimately result in a day where one faggy
girl whose friends are all dead is sitting on a bench in a park on
their colony, sad?

"Welded together" is an over simplification of the process of what
actually happened, to integrate two ships into one another that
were each already the size of a terrestrial city.

"Sad" is an over simplification of how alone I feel, some days.

Vested

I am sitting on the brown carpeted floor in a common room, putting
Joey's reflective work vest on him, making sure the straps are
secured to just the right looseness or tightness. He is beautiful.
His coat, in the sunlight that shines in through the big windows
on the other side of the room... His coat looks like sweeping
hills and valleys, waves, dunes. He should be photographed more
often, is all I'm saying, I guess. Heh.

His vest is cyan, and says WORKER in black text.

My lanyard is a matching cyan, indicating I am a qualified animal
handler.

Yeah. Yeah I've "handled" this animal, alright. Giggity.

But also yes I am a qualified animal handler. And therefore I am
allowed to bring Joey to work without even really needing to
justify how exactly it is that a huge burly stud dog helps me in
my task of improving computer intranet uptime for the colony.

The vest seems good.

I say to Joey, "Should we check?"

Joey trots away from me to the center of the common room, rolls on
the ground between all of the couches (one of which, I had
forgotten, Sala is currently passed out on.) He doesn't roll
around for a particularly long time, just seems to want to proof-
of-concept it, 'yeah yeah, I did your trick,' kind of thing. He
stands up from the roll onto his fours, and then he does the
world's smallest little jump as a placeholder for what he's
'supposed' to do, which is stand on his twos (his hindpaws) for a
little bit. Satisfied with himself that he's gone through the
"check" routine, he trots back to me and sticks his tongue in my
mouth.

I kiss him back, saying mid kiss, "You lazy, mmmmmwah."

He doesn't seem to mind being lazy.

I do say it as a compliment towards his sense of comfort, rather
than a critique towards his lack of obedience.

The full "Check" routine that we trained on, as part of being able
to demonstrate that he was a trained animal, basically involved a
series of agility movements to be sure that the harness isn't
unduly restricting him, and also isn't going to slide off at an
inopportune time. Rolls, different speeds of movement, leaps,
standing on twos, he's supposed to ('supposed' to) find ways
(wherever we are) to run all of the checks when I say Check.

But, pragmatically speaking, I know how to put on the harness; we
both already know that it's on correctly. He is already certified.
The trick is no longer something he 'has' to do, just something I
invite him to play out if he still wants.

I'm getting hard as Joey and I kiss. And, as much as that's great,
I also don't need to smell like precum all day. ...If anyone would
even notice. I guess I've already been to the future from here,
and, nobody ever brings up, "Damn Lilly remember that day you and
Joey softcore fucked before you came in to work and we could all
tell and now we all make fun of you for it?" So I guess today will
go fine, basically, is what I've decided. Based on the fact that I
can't think of anyone in the future who suddenly hates me after
circa today, I guess today is not a day when I go out and make
anyone hate me. Nice.

I break myself away from Joey's kisses, and I grab my boots, and
put them on and tie them up.

After they're tied, I stick one leg into the air, rotate the foot
around, flex the ankle.

...Feels tight around the ankle.

I put the foot back on the ground, and start untying the laces to
try again.

I really do a better job with Joey than with myself.

When my boots are properly on and good, I pick up my backpack full
of my tools. Little clippers and sensors and interface-y gadgets,
All Of The Wires Ever, and in the front pocket things related to
canine stewardship--little treats, a pretty complete set of first
aid implements in the rare event that I need them although I know
already that it will happen now and then, poop bags in the rare
event that I need them although I know already that it will happen
now and then. Joey mostly does his business in the courtyard at
home, but, yeah. I don't decorate the outside of my backpack too
much, but, I do have one patch sewn onto it that says
she/her/HERS, honestly mainly so that I can be sure it's MY bag at
a glance, not just a similar looking one. And, also on the outside
of the backpack, I have strapped a water bottle, a little electric
lantern, a little baby flashlight, and a momma flashlight. It is
shocking how often someone in my proximity opens up a panel and
sticks their head inside and says "fuck I can't see shit" and then
I and I alone am their salvation.

From the couch, I hear a long, pained groan.

I call to Sala, in a very musical voice, really exploring a range
of notes up and down in 'morning,' "Goo-oo-oo-oo-ood mo-o-o-o-o-o-
orning, Sunshine!"

"Lilly I will fucking kill you," she groans.

I walk over to the couch, take my water bottle off of my backpack,
and offer it down to her.

"Lilly I fucking love you," she groans, and takes the water
bottle, unscrews the mouth bit, and drinks. She groans again. The
grimace on her face does not make me feel jealous of how her
insides must feel right now. She was really hitting the booze last
night. She asks, "Are you going in to work?"

I say back to her, "I don't know, do I need to take you to the
medical bay instead?"

Her grimace does not become any less intense while she tells me,
"I'll be fine."

It's fucked up that I know she does live until the same day
everyone else on the colony will live to, and then her death will
have nothing to do with her habits anyways, so, I can't even tell
her she's being an idiot. She is being an idiot, but, she's also
right that she'll be fine.

Suddenly, her expression changes. Well, it doesn't completely
change--the grimace remains--but, added to it, she begins looking
at me with concerned scrutiny, as I am looking at her and pitying
her.

She asks, "Will I be fine?"

I sigh, and say, "There could be things I haven't learned about
yet. I'm not an oracle. Maybe you do go to the medical bay and get
a robot liver today and just never told me."

She smiles at that. A pained, pained, pained, pained, pained
smile. She says, blissfully in her misery, "In the future they
make me a robot liver..."

"NO, chica fucking que crazy, I am JOKING, those do NOT EXIST."

Her eyes are closed as she smiles and she is not listening to me.
"Robot liver..."

Musically on 'fucking,' "You are going to fu-u-u-u-u-cking spend a
miserable week in the medical bay getting needles stuck into you
all over and I'm not going to be sorry I never learned about it
until it was too late, because I am not your time babysitter."

She whispers, happily, to fuck with me I'm sure, "Robot liver..."

Whatever.

At some point me and Sala are both trying to learn Spanish
together, doing flash cards and stuff. Neither of us are of that
culture, neither of us are descendants of anywhere that spoke that
language with any particular prominence. We just. Try it for our
own edification, I guess. I'm not aware of any point in time that
either of us actually does speak Spanish with anything even
vaguely resembling fluency, so, I guess it doesn't go well.

I call her a dumb bitch in Spanish (I think) and she just says
robot liver again and I guess I don't know what else I was
expecting.

I tell her to drink the rest of the water so that I can go refill
it and leave for work.

She does gulp down the rest of the water, and hands me my water
bottle back.

As I walk to the sink, in the long kitchen area that's off to one
side of the common room, she calls to me to ask, "Are there any
dirty dishes?"

Yes. "Ye-e-e-e-es."

"Fuuuuuuck," she groans. "I used a lot of pans last nighttttt, I
remember now. They should make cooking but with no dishes to do
after."

"I think that's called having a romantic partner--"

"Shut upppppp!"

"I'm just sa-a-a-a-aying," I sing. I turn on the faucet and start
filling up my water bottle again, pushing a stack of dirty pans in
the sink out of the way a little.

She groans, apparently having heard them clink and stuff.

Heheh.

She mentions, "I don't see YOUR fuckbuddy ever doing your dishes."

"He does, he helps lick them clean."

"Which is GROSS," she says.

I mean, his tongue was in my mouth not one minute ago, so,
obviously we have very different perspectives on that matter. But
yeah. She never used to let him lick plates, participate in meals,
before I kinda stole him from her. She literally screamed the
first time I held a plate down for him. Heheheheh.

Joey is sitting by the front door, facing me, waiting for us to be
done with our dumb Lilly-and-Sala human time-wasting so that we
can go already.

I call to him from the sink, "Almost baby, very soon."

I screw on the top of the water bottle.

I call to Sala, "Want me to get you anything from the kitchen
while I'm up?"

"Cheese."

I go to the fridge and slide the door open.

Standing there in front of the open fridge, looking at our goodies
of packaged up foodthings, I try to remember if I ever even
noticed a difference, when going from Martian food to Colony food.
On Mars we had a hybrid approach of food from farms, food from
hunting, and food from vats. Here on the colony it is allllll
vats, babyyyy. Vat algae. Vat meat. Vat things that are...
somehow... derived from vat algae and vat meat. I mean, there are
also gardens, actually, but, Sala and I kiiiind of aren't the most
conscious eaters, and so we're both prooooobably eating almost
exclusively from gunk scooped out of Yeoman Kit's finest aluminum
cylinders that has then been prettied up a little and made to look
like potato chips and summer sausage.

...Is 'aluminum' right, or do the vats just look like aluminum but
they're totally some other metal?

Anyways. Molecularly speaking, the cheese is cheese, the meat is
meat. It's just used-to-be-in-a-vat cheese instead of used-to-be-
in-an-udder cheese, and meat that was raised brainless and
cylindrically in a vat instead of meat that had grown up with legs
and thoughts and might have had a cute animal name once. And as
far as I can remember I have never noticed a difference. Taste,
texture, it's all a perfect recreation.

After everyone else dies I don't know how to keep the food
production machinery going but there is enough excess already
preserved in various storage facilities to where I'm not worried
about it.

I reach into the fridge, and am about to tear off one cheese stick
from the set of cheese sticks that we have in here, but then I
just grab the entire thing of like ten cheese sticks, let the door
of the fridge slide over back to the closed position, walk over to
Sala, and set the like ten cheese sticks down on the couch with
her.

"I love you," she says. "You are a hero."

"Have a good day girl," I tell her.

I walk to the front door, open it, and Joey in his cyan vest runs
out of the door ahead of me, into the sunlight, into the courtyard
of our housing complex. Right away, his first business is to run
around with his nose to the grass, and then he finds a spot to
pee.

Shielding

Sometimes I live the same day over again. Like, the same calendar
date, I perceive it again. And, incredibly, the fact that I do
this doesn't... really... make it any clearer to me whether or not
free will is real.

I make different choices. One time I lived the same date three
times in a row, and on the first two I went to work and did my job
just to watch everyone else closely and see if they did anything
differently, and then when the third consecutive instance of that
day rolled around, I said, FUCK IT, and I called in sick and went
to a furry rave with Joey and Sala and Natalee and Nicki and Girl
Avery.

I have not been able to find out, on dates after the fact, which
version of this day the universe thinks I actually lived.

There should be proof, right? It should be easy to tell for sure?

Sometimes I'm in pictures from the rave that night and sometimes
I'm not. Sometimes station records reflect that I did work tasks
on that day and sometimes station records reflect I called in
absent. Which way it is has never shifted directly in front of my
eyes, at least, not yet, but it has shifted back and forth over
the course of the same day, without me ever having had a gap where
I went to sleep and have clearly come back on a different "run" of
the day that I'm now presently living.

And it doesn't seem to particularly matter which way that day
went. Does Natalee remember feeling overstimulated and leaving the
rave and taking a walk around the block with me and Joey? Or does
Eli remember auditing the breaker box in a station library with me
after library hours? Either way, Natalee and Eli both still like
me later. They either go, ha ha, yes, I do remember that, what an
interesting day, or they go, hm, no, must have been someone else
with you, I don't remember that at all, but sounds like quite a
time. It feels about the same as talking to Sala about something
that happened while she was blackout drunk.

If a trans girl makes a choice in the woods and no one remembers
what it was did she make a choice at all?

I don't know if free will is real. I think it is. I think free
will does exist, but, also I am only human.

I'm at work sitting in my cubicle with Joey asleep on my feet.

I'm pretty sure this is a day I've lived before but I don't know
for sure, since a lot of days are kind of similar anyways, and I
guess I've been at this for a long time.

On my desk is a cardboard box stacked full of routers that I am
inspecting one by one. It's a process that involves selecting the
next router off the top of the stack and plugging different wires
into all of the ports, and then over those wires, I send signals
from my computer making the router think that it's plugged in to a
busy real-life network, and I can see which of these routers is
performing as expected, and which one is an anomaly that is
causing dropped packets that then cause the clergy in a nearby
sector to think that their chapter is being sabotaged
deliberately.

Two cubicles over, I hear Eli and Mariana talking about a head-
scratcher in Networking Closet 6B of Data Center Kai IX. As they
go on about seemingly randomly dropped packets (sometimes I feel
like a human whose main desire in life is to suck dog cock and
other times I feel like a dog whose main desire in life is to
chase dropped packets) I am losing my mind hearing them not be
able to figure it out because I already know the answer because I
remember it from the future--

Frustrating. Disorganized. I should just let it happen because
everything is going to happen anyways.

I work on my routers.

Eli says, "Well I'll tell ya, I isolated everything in that
closet, top to bottom. Every single element, I spent a good twenty
minutes on, one and then the next."

He hasn't. He would know what the problem is if he had done what
he's saying.

Mariana asks, "Have you been working on this alone, or do other
people come and go from the closet? Like, could someone else be
changing some element of this back and forth?"

Eli says, "Well Kyle's been in and out of there the most, but he
wants this figured out as much as I do."

Mariana says, "Yeah that's so weird then," even though Eli totally
just basically ignored her idea.

Eli says, "I'm about ready to submit a request that we just pick
up all of the equipment in there and relocate it to another
closet, it's gonna be a pain but, it's about all I can come up
with."

That won't solve it.

Fuck it. Fuck it I can't focus on my work like this.

I call, "Hey, Eli, come here a sec."

Joey wakes up and stands and slinks out from under my desk, and
sits beside my chair.

I bend down and give Joey a big smooch on the top of the head, and
then I turn in my swivel chair to face Eli as he approaches. I
recline back hardcore in my chair, draping an arm over Joey,
petting him.

Eli appears, having wheeled himself over on his own swivel chair.
He asks, "What's going on, Roman?"

Should he be calling me that?

Oh yeah I guess it is that early, at this point. If I looked down
at my lanyard right now, my badge would say that name on it.

Whatever.

I say, "Eli, the spectre-3-augmented firewall on the rack in this
closet, does it have a cooling fan?"

He thinks. "Well, yes it does. Same grade of fan I'd expect to see
on a tower like that."

I shake my head. "How cold is that data center?"

He thinks. "Well, holy smokes, it's freezing in there."

I nod. "The fan was sourced from Venetian standard--it doesn't
matter, nevermind. The power supply to the fan has inadequate
shielding and so when the fan turns on to run its exercising
routine every few minutes it's sending out noise and that's what's
killing your packets. If you refit the fan with a power supply
that matches the rest of the environment then that would be one
way to solve the problem, but, also in that data center, the fan
on that rack is completely redundant anyways, you can just unplug
the fan."

"How in the world did you solve that one just from overhearing me
and Mariana?"

"Call it a hunch, anyways I gotta run, there's a meeting I need to
catch really soon here."

Holy shit that was fun.

Me and Joey scamper off to one of the more secluded bathrooms in
the office and I get down on the tiled floor and butt my head
against his flank and caress his sheath and he gets humpy and
fucks my hand and I suck his cock.

I do feel a lot more productive for the rest of the day, though I
do pause in my work kinda regularly to sniff my hands and feel
really, really happy with myself and with my boyfriend.

Sightseeing

Seventeen minutes ago I woke up from a nap on Geoff's couch to the
subtle sensation of Shine dropping a slobbery tennis ball on my
face.

Seize the day. I hadn't seen her in a really long time. I got up
and went straight to my boots and put them on and we went out the
front door. I held her slobbery tennis ball as we walked, and she
ran around, orbiting me, making friendly approaches to different
strangers and sniffing different trash bins. Sightseeing.
Scentsmelling. I watched her taking in the world through her eyes
and nose and paw pads and floppy ears.

Now, me and her are walking through a park. It's a long amalgam of
trail that spiderwebs over the uppermost surfaces of the colony,
with valleys of genuine rock and dirt and grass and flowers,
streams of genuine water.

We get to a long stretch of clear open grass, and she zooms ahead
of me and then turns back and faces me, posture tall, alert.

She's so small, compared to Joey. Black coat, very very wavey
hair, droopy floppy ears, and small. I never really used to think
of her as small, back when she was my one and only, back when she
and she alone was my entire world, and so she was just my default
concept of how big a dog is, and I didn't know that an ostensible
canine giant was going to be in my future. But her version of
"standing tall" wouldn't bring the top of her head up to the top
of Joey's back, I don't think.

I don't know. I've never seen them together. As far as I'm aware,
Shine and Joey never meet, even though technically, somewhere else
on the colony, Joey is alive already.

Shine is staring at me to throw the ball.

I throw her tennis ball as far as I can.

She sprints after it. When it hits the ground she is already right
next to the spot where it hits, and she snaps towards it and grabs
the ball in her teeth. Holding the ball, she does a sort of
victory lap, galloping with the ball around the grass, and then
she comes back to me, and drops the ball at my feet, and runs a
few paces away again, and then looks back at me again, ready for
me to throw it.

I do grab the ball again, and throw it again, and she sprints
along with it again, and gets it again. This time when she has it,
she doesn't come straight back to me. She trots around the grass,
looking at other people who are in this park, seeming very proud
to have the ball, be the master of fetch.

Scared

I sit on a boulder alone in a dry valley of dead grass.

My greatest fear is that someday I will stop living my life out of
sequence and I will never be able to go back to her or to him.

Cantina

I sit at a booth in the cantina with my uncle Geoff and my
girlfriend Shine. Shine is sitting on my side of the booth,
staring at the french fry in my hand. I hold the french fry up
between the two of us, making a show of examining it, considering
it. I bring it to my mouth, take a bite, and then what's left of
the fry, I offer to her. She eats it out of my hand and smacks on
it in her mouth for about a second and a half and then she
swallows it and then she continues sitting and staring at me,
waiting for me to pick up something else for us to share.

Geoff says, while gesticulating with his glass of unsweetened iced
tea, "You know, most people who look at each other like you and
Shine look at each other, I would accuse them of dating."

Heh. Yeah. Funny that, Geoff.

He'll know someday, and he'll be cool about it.

Is this the day that he finds out?

It could be. It doesn't need to be.

I guess I don't really care if it is or it isn't.

I rest my hands on either of Shine's shoulders and I go in and
kiss her cheek, smooching the very corner of her salivating canine
mouth.

He laughs at my audacity, and says, "Like father like son."

Wait, what?

Aching

I am in a bedroom and I feel like puking and all of my muscles are
sore. It's one of the few days, during my stretch of years on the
colony, when I am truly, deeply, medically, sick. My nose runs and
I sniffle and then I keep snorting in my snot and then I have to
cough and I cough until my throat hurts but it feels like I
haven't actually gotten all of the mucus out of my nose and my
throat and everything is awful and I hate that this is my
existence right now.

Joey is in the bed with me and I am wrapped around his belly,
melding to him, I am trying as much as physically possible to fuse
my cold aching out-of-order body into his healthy warm furnace of
a body.

I am covered in sweat and fur and I am not having fun. I want so
badly right now to shed my skin and leave my bones and become one
healthy creature with the dog who is holding onto me.

Honesty

I'm at the rave again. It's that day again. I went to the furry
rave again instead of work.

There are actually... different zones, of the rave, I guess.
There's the one deep inside of this facility that has all of the
strobing lights and deafening music. And that's a really big room
that very many people are packed into, it's very popular and very
fun and very well liked. It's also not ideal to bring a perfectly
nice dog into, I suspect. So I haven't gone into that room, I
haven't taken Joey in there. There are also other rooms. Rooms
that still have intriguing lights and hypnotic music and
fursuiters--rooms you can still really get lost in--and those are
the rooms that Joey and I wander through, at the rave.

There's also an alley where two dozen people are smoking tobacco,
as cigarettes and vapes.

I've never been a smoker, but, I'll admit I find the scent
nostalgic. Reminds me of hanging out with my school friends on
Mars, shooting the shit.

Here, too, a lot of my friends smoke. And so in this alley is
where I can pretty reliably find one or two of my friends,
throughout the night. So at some points in the night me and Joey
are popping out of the facility and into the alley, to hang out in
the smoking section, and yap with people.

Right now Nicki is on her phone texting someone and I am lying on
my back on the ground atop all of the grit down here and Joey is
lying completely on top of me and me and Joey are making out. He
has me pinned under him, completely putting his entire weight onto
me, and my boner could not be harder, grinding against his heavy
furry belly through the fabric of my pants and shirt. His slobber
covers my face. His tongue, as always, is at home in my mouth. A
few furries in the alley are staring at us. Like, there's a pair
of furries who are whispering quiet remarks to one another while
looking at me and Joey making out, and then there's another furry,
a guy in a fox shirt and neon green paws, who is completely
gobsmacked by us, just staring, slackjawed, enraptured.

Joey is pinning my neck and shoulders with his forepaws, holding
me down against the ground with his claws, tilting his head as he
sticks his tongue in my mouth to get down into my throat as deeply
as possible. I run my fingers deep through Joey's coat as we
softcore fuck, pressing my fingertips to the depths of his hair,
massaging all of his skin and muscle and bones underneath.

With bestiality like this, why isn't everyone a zoo?

Joey shifts his weight on top of me a little bit for balance, and
he ends up pressing all of his weight down on one of my boobs, and
I cum. Literally I just orgasm, unexpectedly, my diamond-hard
femme prick still inside of my clothes, pressed under all of
Joey's weight.

Me and Joey share little smooches in the afterglow. He would
gladly keep tonguefucking my esophagus, I'm sure, but, my body is
completely flooded with happy sleepy reward chemicals now, and so,
just cuddling with him now feels very peak. Cuddling and little
kissies. I pet him, and cherish him, and tell him he did a very
good job, and that I felt so good, and that my god I needed that,
and that he did to me all of the perfect things.

Eventually he agrees that we are done kissing and he rests his
chin on top of my face. Like. My entire face is now under the
weight of his dog head, my nose and mouth finding a home in the
hollow of the underside of his jawbone, my face is blanketed in
his jowls and his drool. I am in heaven. He is literally perfect.

This lasts for very many minutes, and then eventually some furries
who are closer to the mouth of the alley a ways away start barking
at each other and being really loud and playful and maybe start
fucking (who knows?) and Joey stands up off of me to go walk over
to them and see what kind of fun they're having.

Lying there on the ground, I straighten out my clothes a little
bit (move my dick so that it won't flop out over my waistband for
everyone to see as soon as I stand up) and I glance around to see
if anyone is still kinda looking at me at all.

Yes the gobsmacked furry with the neon green paws is still looking
at me.

The other two who had been talking about me have gone away.

I say to the guy with the neon green paws, "You know, I actually
read in a wildlife magazine that wolves solidify their social
bonds by sticking their noses inside of each other's mouths, and
it helps them test their levels of comfort with one another, like,
how close are you and I, well, let's find out by sticking my nose
in between all of your really sharp teeth and we'll see if we're
both okay with that or if I get bit, is kinda the idea."

The guy nods.

I go on, "I'm a zoo though, I was already kissing dogs for a long
time before I read about that, but, when I saw it in the magazine
I was like, huh! Light bulb moment, that seemed to totally add up,
with my experiences with canine bonding and intimacy."

He nods, and then he glances around the alley.

Nicki is the closest person nearby besides me and Greenpaws. She's
still texting on her phone, standing nearby a wall.

I mention to Greenpaws, "That's my friend Nicki, she's cool."

Nicki kinda gives a very vaguely playful sneer and under her
breath says "hey" and continues focusing on texting.

Greenpaws nods. He then gets down onto the ground with me, on his
chest. I roll over so that we're both on our chests, our faces
both really close to one another, looking really close at each
other eyeballs to eyeballs.

He puts his paws up to shield a whisper from any eavesdroppers,
and he whispers to me, "I'm uh. I'm gonna run away from you right
after I say this. But. You will be the first person I say this to.
Literally ever."

I gasp, and nod rapidly a bunch of times.

He glances around again, sees that Nicki is still the only person
nearby, and, even with her, there's hardly any chance that she
could be able to overhear us. Greenpaws whispers to me, "That was
really hot, because I'm a zoo too!"

He then hops up to his feet and books it towards the mouth of the
alley.

On the way, Joey starts running alongside him.

Greenpaws skids to a halt, cautiously pets Joey on the head once,
and then goes back to running away again. Joey wags and looks, but
does not follow.

Greenpaws disappears out of the mouth of the alley, around the
corner.

I stand up, brush the grit off of myself, stick my hands in my
pants pockets, and casually saunter over to be standing side by
side with Nicki. I resist the urge to like, look down at myself
and see if there's a very obvious cum stain on my shirt, or if
there's only a slightly obvious cum stain on my shirt. Either way
it's kinda... too late to undo whatever is there anyways.

Nicki mentions to me, "Natalee is freaking out and is coming out
here..." she trails off as she glances up and sees Natalee
shuffling slowly towards us, her hands crossed over her stomach,
her posture very small. Nicki says to her, "Oh hey."

Natalee says back, "Hey."

Natalee looks tired. Natalee looks like her body is full of the
same sleepy post-a-lot-of-excitement chemicals as mine is, to be
honest. But, I wouldn't know. I'm not her, obviously. I'm not in
her brain right now.

Arms still crossed across her stomach, Natalee looks down at my
shirt, and says, "Ha, spill a drink on yourself, or?"

Ohhhh fuck me.

Nicki looks down at my shirt, and then she falls over onto the
ground pointing and laughing at me.

My cheeks burn with embarrassment. Yup. Yup this is what my night
is. Okay. Yup. Sure.

Natalee grabs Nicki's wrist, and pulls her back up to her feet,
saying, "Uuuuupsy-daisy, cmon, this is a yucky place to touch the
ground."

My cheeks burn even more. Nicki nearly falls right back over
again, laughing at me in regards to Natalee's comment about
avoiding touching the ground.

Yeah. Yeah I deserve this. This is the consequences of my actions.
This is what happens when you get too kissy with your feral dog
boyfriend in the furry smoking alley with the girls.

Nicki, completely breathless, tries to explain to Natalee, "Lilly
and- was mwah mwah mwah- she was dry hump- Joey on top of her-
GROUND- getting looks from soooo many people-
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA!"

Natalee is hugging Nicki, still helping her keep her balance,
patting her on the back. "Okay, sounds like fun. Zoo girl was
sharing a little special time with her dogfriend. And got very
excited about it?"

Nicki wipes tears out of her eyes, and nods.

You know, fuck it, I would literally rather have my trans tits out
than keep having the shirt on at this point.

I take off my shirt aka impromptu cum rag, use a dry part of it to
wipe off my bare stomach, and then I throw the cum rag aka shirt
onto the ground against a wall.

I guess I'm still wearing a bra, so. That's something.

Natalee, who is wearing a black shirt and an extremely cool jacket
with arctic foxes all over it, takes off her jacket and holds it
open out to me.

Oh I feel bad. "Oh Natalee don't--"

"Shhhhh cmon."

"I'm covered in--"

"Shhhhhhh I'll survive, cover up, get in."

I do back into the jacket, getting it on really smoothly with
Natalee's help. She zippers the jacket up for me.

"Thanks," I say to her.

"Mhm," she says. She then says to Nicki, "Ya good?"

Nicki nods, and says, "I just need to breathe for a minute."

Natalee says, "Okay. I was gonna go walk around outside of the
venue for a while, and just, decompress."

I jump on that. "Would it be alright if I walk with you too?"

Natalee says, "Yeah, please, I would love your company."

Soon enough, it's just like I'm back in the last time I went
through this night, all over again. Me and Natalee and Joey,
sauntering slowly along around the block outside of the facility
the rave is in, decompressing from it all. Except this time I have
her jacket, I guess.

She's telling me about food her family made for the potluck at
their church.

Then there's a lull in the conversation, and we walk along quietly
for a little while.

And then she says, "So, this time anomaly, that you live in."

I nod. "Life on shuffle."

We keep walking.

She asks, "How long has it been happening, to you?"

I need a moment to think about that.

Tonight, per the calendar, is six years after me and Shine arrived
on the Yeoman Kit Colony; five years after Shine died and Joey
entered my life; long enough on HRT that it has done a very
significant amount of work on my body and I well and truly pass to
strangers as a woman (which feels nice, since, I am one) and
everyone calls me Lilly; it will be about one year from now that
Joey dies and then everyone else dies and I am all alone and
mostly deaf on account of the bombs.

But how long has it been from my lived perspective? The time
anomaly began for me when I first came to Yeoman Kit. Skipping to
random days. Sometimes repeating days.

Right now, per the calendar, it's six years after me and Shine
arrived on the Yeoman Kit Colony; 6 x 365 is 2,190; so, do I feel
like I've lived more than 2,190 days on Yeoman Kit (albeit out of
order) or fewer? Probably more. Like, by a lot. I still haven't
seen every day that the seven years pre-bombing has to offer. But,
most of my days are not spent pre-bombing. Not even close.
Sometimes I spend months post-bombs before visiting the living
again. So with the years and years I must have spent by now alone,
post-bombing... And with the frequency that the same days pre-
bombing have played over again... As I walk beside Natalee, I am
older in spirit than I am in body, there's no doubt at all.

I say to Natalee, "In your time, my anomaly began six years ago;
in my time, very roughly estimating, all together, I've lived the
anomaly for fifty years so far."

That answer knocks the wind out of her.

We stop walking, and hug.

She says, "I wish I could make it all better."

I tell her, "It's worth it to keep seeing Shine and Joey again."

"Is it worth it though, for all the time you spend alone?"

"Yes."

She squeezes me, and then we stop hugging, and go back to walking.

There's no explanation that I'm aware of for why all of this
started happening to me. Why I alone survive the bombs. Why I
alone am scraped across the years under Chronos's boot.

Over these seven years pre-bombs, I lay everything I know bare to
scientists, commanders, friends, family, tabloid writers, and
religious elites; I know something that nobody else does and it's
infuriating being able to see the doomed trajectory this entire
station is going on while most people flat out disbelieve me and
those who do believe me don't do anything about it. The scientists
are busy staring at profitable vat gunk under a microscope. The
religious elites consider bragging to be a sin. Nobody important
has time for my "imaginary" games (which, they say behind my back,
I'm definitely just making up from the HRT turning me crazy.) I
think some people just want to be so wrong that the magnitude of
their wrongness kills everyone and no one is left alive to call
them out anymore. The fact that everyone will die in the bombing,
from my friends and family all the way up to the high chairs and
the commanders... it's not because nobody told them it was going
to happen someday.

Apathy

I would rather lie naked in a field from sunrise to sunset and get
blistering sunburns on my cock and tits and soil myself and
dehydrate and become malnourished than play a video game.

My days alone pass in pain because my days alone are painful.

Relay

I am back. Everything feels like dog again. I'm in bed, in a
perfectly dark room: my only available senses are smell, sound,
touch, taste, gravity, and time.

My sense of smell: Dog breath. Dog paws. Dog coat. How much I have
missed it. How utterly incomplete I have been in its absence.

My sense of sound: Breathing.

My sense of touch: I feel a little smoldering ball of warmth
pressing against my left arm.

I roll towards Shine on the bed, and bury my nose in her scruff,
and inhale deeply, taking in more of the scent, taking in the
sound of my nose bristling her coat, taking in the feeling of my
nose and my lips and my chin nestling into her hair.

Taste, gravity, time, yeah yeah yeah, they do exist, check check
check.

I lie in bed with Shine for nearly an hour as she continues to
sleep, and I do nothing other than meditate on sensing her, living
in her smells, her sounds, and the fact that we are physically
located here with one another.

Eventually, there is a change in her breathing. Very minutely, I
can feel some of the hairs on her face bristling my face, in a way
that tells me her eyes are moving around, and she is now awake,
and she is trying to sense if I am awake.

I say very, very, very quietly, "Is she awake?"

Her tail thumps against the blankets, and she does a big stretch,
pressing her shoulder blades back into my face, and then she rolls
towards me onto her back. I rub her belly, as she wags.

Within a minute and a half of her being awake, I am dressed and
have a tennis ball in my hand and she and I are leaving our front
door; the sun is not yet visible itself, but illuminates the sky a
very slight amount; Shine and I walk together through our familiar
neighborhood, on a mission to play some morning fetch in one of
the nearby parks. There are a few to choose from. She leads the
way.

The park we arrive at is more or less a very large square lawn,
with a children's playground and some pavilions at the center,
but, mostly, the space is wide open expanses of green grass,
perfect for playing fetch in.

She runs ahead of me a few galloping paces, and then turns back to
me, and stands, facing me, ready for me to throw the ball.

I throw the ball. I throw it as far as I can, and she turns and
darts out into the field after it.

When she snatches the ball up out of the grass, she gallops around
with it in a big loop, victorious, proud, happy.

As she is out there, doing her first victory lap, I notice another
dog, running towards us over the grass. Specifically, the other
dog is booking it straight towards Shine. The dog has a collar on,
and a leash attached to the collar, and no human attached to the
leash: the dog runs with the leash flailing behind, masterless.
Heheheheheh.

The dog seems fairly young, not a tiny puppy but, very puppy-like
in appearance, behavior.

Shine turns to face the oncoming dog, and idly drops her ball as
the other dog nears.

The other dog's pointy ears... the coat... the face... it can't...
it can't be...

Joey and Shine stand snout to snout, both of their noses gently
twitching as they take each other in.

Joey being so young, he and Shine stand perfectly eye to eye,
shoulder to shoulder.

Puppy Joey then play-bows and barks at Shine, and Shine plays
along, and the two of them run around the grass with one another,
chasing, playing. I run towards them, and fall to my knees with
them, and for the only time in my life, my pack is all together.

Future

I didn't know if I was going to be able to go back to being alone,
after that. Going from one of them to neither was pain enough;
Going from both to neither... I didn't anticipate being able to
take it well.

As it turns out, after that day, I was released from the time
anomaly. It happened like this.

I woke up, and I could tell that it was some day after the
bombing, because I had no sense of hearing, and nothing smelled
alive, and there was no other warm body in bed with me. I'm not
sure how long I laid there, waiting for the sun to come and shine
in strongly enough through the windows that it would annoy even my
most stubborn, depressed, and annoyed self out of bed for the day.
My thoughts ranged from life with Shine and our old friends back
on Mars, to attending church services with Natalee now and then,
to hexadecimal addresses of key components of the numerous common
systems I've worked with throughout my career, to Joey asleep on
my foot, and constantly throughout my thoughts, I was circling
back to "yesterday," when Shine and Joey and myself were all
together, in that unexpected moment.

I waited in bed for a very long time, for the sun to come up.

The sun did not come up, nor was it ever going to for as long as I
continued laying there.

Eventually I did get out of bed. Not for any need; Not because I
had to pee, not because I was hungry or thirsty, and certainly not
because I had any appointments that I needed to keep. I just
wanted to go walk outside. Lying there in bed, I was remembering
times in my life when I went on dead-of-night walks with Shine or
with Joey; Usually with Shine back on Mars, when I was younger,
less established in existing; But sometimes on Yeoman Kit too.
And... Yeah. Yeah if there was anyone who could use a good, long,
dead-of-night walk to process through some feelings, it was me.

I got out of bed. I was already dressed in black jeans with holes
in the knees and black underwear and a black bra and a grey long-
sleeve undershirt and a t shirt from some metal band; I don't
think anything I was wearing was stuff that I owned before the
bombs; after the bombs, it was always finders keepers when I saw
some sick threads, who the fuck cared.

After getting out of bed, I brushed my teeth. Peed. Looked at my
face in the mirror. And then I sat down on the bed again to put on
my boots. And then, with those on, I stepped outside into the
night.

I wandered around colony streets in the dim starlight, thinking.
Thinking about the time Joey got a cut on his shoulder when we
were out walking, and I didn't see it when it happened, I just
noticed at some point that red was painted down part of his coat,
and on the inside I was freaking out about my best friend being
injured and how he didn't deserve whatever had happened to him and
I didn't know if the cut was deep and I worried about him being in
pain and I worried that he would associate me with the pain and he
would think that I had done this to him. Outwardly, I just asked
him to halt, and I knelt down with him there as people passed by
us on the street; I got my little flashlight off of my bag and
shined it at the wound, gently moving some of his bloodied hair
out of the way; No foreign objects were stuck in the wound,
whatever had caused it; The wound was pretty fucking deep, and I
was terrified, but I got out my first aid kit, and I stuck him
with a numbing agent, and I stitched him up, there on the spot.
Medicated and bandaged the wound on top of the stitchwork. And
then I picked him up, and carried him home; We walked several
blocks, step by slow and careful step, me carrying this dog who
was my own body weight plus a few pounds, and him letting himself
be carried by his handler. When we were home I set him down and
then went to the kitchen sink and washed his blood off of my
hands, and the loose hairs from him that had become stuck to the
blood.

As I was thinking about his blood being washed down the drain, I
kind of snapped out of that series of memories, and became more
aware of my present surroundings.

I was on a nature trail that me and Shine had walked before, a
long time ago. We had played fetch here, in this elongated
clearing of grass, in a valley of rocky slopes.

Standing in the center of the clearing, as I walked through a dead
and empty world, was another person.

She stood on two legs, her height eye to eye and shoulder to
shoulder with my own. She had a muzzle and tall pointed ears and a
black coat of fur, and it was not a costume like all of the other
furries I had seen before; her ears turned minutely to take me in,
head to toe, as I at first approached; When I noticed her, I froze
in place, and her ears shifted from being aimed at my footfalls to
being aimed at the rest of me, scanning me up and down. She wore
jewelry but no clothing; She had breasts akin to those of a human
though covered in her black coat of hair, and a sheath and
testicles akin to those of a canine, her penis's white tip
extremely impossible not to notice poking out of its sheath a
little, as it and her eyes were the parts of her that glowed
white, very brightly; Her mouth, as well, glowed, when she opened
her mouth to speak.

She stood at the center of the long clearing, and I stood a
significant distance away, and when she spoke, she spoke calmly,
yet I could hear her across all that distance, and in spite of my
rattled ears; She said to me, "The winds of time as we stand here
now calm for thee, o Lilly, o passionate youth; come hither, o
sister in the cosmos."

I walked towards her over the dead grass that her radiance
illuminated.

When I arrived at her, she curtsied, lowering herself before me.

I stepped in and wrapped my arms around her in a hug, pet her
head, rubbed her ears, scratched her scruff and her throat and her
back and her flank, as she wagged and leaned into it all and let
out noises that were halfway between human laughter and excited
canine exhales. I had known, when I first laid eyes on her, that
she was a god. She was Tau Ceti, as we humans had dubbed her; The
star around which the Yeoman Kit Colony orbited. From the way that
she glowed as all of the other starlight glowed, and in the way
that she roared, and in the way that Tau Ceti was missing from the
sky in what should have been the daytime, I knew that I was
petting a star, giving rubs to a being who was ancient beyond even
my anomalous comprehension. I laid a big kiss on the front of her
muzzle knowing that a star's surface was supposed to be hot enough
to transmute my body instantly into plasma. Instead of
experiencing death by turning into a cloud, I experienced my lips
squishing against dog lips. I tucked my head in against the side
of her neck, and hugged her, and she hugged me.

She said to me, as we still hugged, "Not to brag too much, but I
feel vindicated that I have judged very well, and you will be
perfect for this."

I asked her, as we still hugged, "What in the world has happened
here? Please."

She squeezed me tighter. "What has happened here is a tragedy. And
in all the days which I create, I will never forgive those who did
this. I will tell you what has happened, for it need not be a
secret, and indeed, you would be better to know it. I am not much
for war, though. I want to move forward, and I have an idea, if
you will hear it."

I nodded, nuzzling her neck as I did. "I will hear it."

I then turned my face in towards her and planted a deep kiss in
her coat on the side of her neck. She pet the back of my neck in
turn.

We stopped hugging, and began pacing across the long, vacant, dead
field.

She told me that her name was Sword Of Sin, Love, Amnesty, And
Devotion. She told me that she was, indeed, Tau Ceti.

She told me that when myself and Shine had first neared her
gravity, upon our arrival, our love across species bounds had been
a brightness unto her that was unmistakably powerful, and she had
marked us as being under her protection, before my feet ever even
touched Yeoman Kit's surface. And she told me of how, with her
protection threaded through my days, she has been able to weave my
timeline out of order, show me parallels and contrasts and pains
and euphorias not obvious to a life lived in an unexamined blur;
since my arrival here, she did forge me, test my devotion to
canine kind, test how I would acclimate to spending many long
years alone.

She told me of the war that was now taking place on my home system
(on Earth, Luna, Mars, Titan,) and all that had led to it, and how
bombings much like the one here had now clipped humanity's wings:
in the wake of our own destruction of our own most advanced
technologies, humans were once again relegated to our own home
planets, no longer a spacefaring species.

She told me that it was time for me to run from a dangerous
household into the wild.

Standing now at the other far edge of the long clearing, and
looking back at where Shine and I had played fetch, those many,
many years ago...

Sword Of Sin, Love, Amnesty, And Devotion said to me, "Though you
have thought yourself alone on the colony since the bombing, there
have, in fact, been a number of dogs who have survived, deep
within the colony's tunnels and chambers, packs subsisting off of
food reserves and unintended streams of filtered water, once meant
as artificial rivers here above, now trickling through the
battered wreckage down to them."

My mind raced to questions of their wellbeing: whether they were
getting along well socially with one another; how dire their need
for veterinary care must be, if not already, then eventually; did
they have vast networks of tunnels to roam through and explore or
were they confined; were there lights in these chambers or were
they in the dark.

I asked all of these questions and more, of the god beside me.

She wagged, and said, "Be assured, they are well; My hand has been
upon this matter thus far. Though... I would like to transfer
their stewardship to another. Another who, when left alone, and
then when returned to all that the world has to offer, keeps
coming back again and again to her dogs. Another who has fed them,
pleasured them, exalted them, exercised them, mended them, and is
indeed made whole by them, as they are made whole by her."

I nodded. "What do you propose?"

She said to me, "I will break off a piece of myself and give it to
you, so that you may wield command of divinity as I do, and so
that your days may be prolonged, and so that your form may be
multiplied; I will give you my tail; For every hair on it is a day
which you have already lived; And, with this tail, you will live
in my orbit with these dogs, tending to them until the days when
even my light has gone out, and the universe has seen that here,
with us, at least one species of life from Earth has had a long,
good run."

There was nothing to consider.

I turned to her, and offered out my hand. She shook my hand, and
then we hugged.

As we hugged, she moved a hand back to her tail, plucked it off of
herself, reached around me, and placed it on my person, and I
wagged and I wagged and I wagged and I licked her muzzle, and she
licked me back, and we kissed.

And I did kind of go down on her, while she was there.

In the days that followed, true to the promises made by Sword Of
Sin, Love, Amnesty, And Devotion, I found myself multiplied; Every
day that I had lived within the time anomaly became another
duplicate of myself, each of us now walking as our own
consciousness, as our own person, in our own body; walking the
station to work together to dissect the production facilities,
learn about them, and repair them for the long future ahead of us;
most of us with breasts though not all, most of us deaf though not
all, all of us with black tails. We all wasted no time getting
down into the depths of the tunnels and chambers within the
colony, and, indeed, found multiple packs of canines living down
there, overjoyed to see us, their tails and our tails matching one
another in speed as the dogs all jumped up onto us at our first
arrival.

And so it is that the Yeoman Kit Colony, orbiting Tau Ceti, now
exists as a far away bastion where dogkind lives, generation after
generation, and eon after eon, circling around sin, love, amnesty,
and devotion.