Well, okay, she did kind of scurry around a lot, and the way she moved didn’t really look human. Baseline humans kind of plod along at a leisurely speed, content to chase you until you drop from exhaustion. Dika was all fast bursts of manic speed, like a lot of small mammals. She had some cosmetic mods too, like the furry ears poking out of her brown hair or the way her face somehow looked like it ought to have whiskers.
But her tail was furry, not naked. So what if she had a habit of climbing furniture, and walls, and sometimes even people? She was so tiny, she needed the extra height just to talk to you without craning her neck. Besides, I thought the whole effect was adorable. Especially when she was climbing around the tree wearing nothing but a pair of panties and a flimsy nightshirt. She might not have a figure like some of the other offworld girls, but she was lean and fit and incredibly limber.
I jerked my eyes away, feeling my ears heat. This was so embarrassing. I’d only started noticing things like that a few weeks ago, and I had no idea what to do about it. Dika was seventeen, and I was still just a kid.
Her eyes took in my bloody face and the half-eaten zango, and she gasped.
“Alice! Are you nuts? Can you imagine what the matrons would do if they caught you eating live animals?”
“Lecture me about living in harmony with nature?” I suggested. “Like there’s anything natural about a terraformed planet with a completely artificial ecology. Did you know zangos have a little corporate logo on their bellies? I bet their DNA even starts with a copyright notice.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “You can’t argue religion with zealots, Alice. That’ll just make them mad, and then you’ll spend a day in the Hole before they send you for Adjustment.”
I shrugged. “You know Adjustment doesn’t work on me. What are you doing up so early, anyway?”
She plopped down next to me with a little sigh, and turned her gaze out over the forest. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been feeling really restless since yesterday. I think I’ve got a new instinct package coming online.”
I nodded sympathetically. That was one of the reasons the matrons had put me and Dika in the same dorm room. Most of the offworld kids here at the orphanage had pretty simple mod packages. Cosmetic changes, health upgrades, maybe a few practical enhancements like a computer or com implant. Nothing that was hard to figure out, or even remove if the matrons decided it was a problem.
We were different. Dika’s parents must have been rich, because her mods went way beyond normal genetic changes. She had tons of nanotech cybernetics, more sensory enhancements than you can shake a stick at, and an amazing amount of software that didn’t come with much of a help package. No matter how hard she tried to fit in, she tended to flummox the matrons just by existing.
As for me, well, no one was really sure what I was. The matrons always said the Federation Navy found me during a raid on a pirate base, and my parents were dead. But whoever they’d been, they’d gone all out with my enhancements. I was an infant when I was brought here, but I’d sprouted into a credible imitation of a thirteen-year-old girl in only six years. Most of the kids were freaked out by that, and the matrons had no idea what to do with me.
Dika took it all in stride, though. She knew exactly what it was like to have some new enhancement to my body or mind activate itself every few months, and she’d always been here to help me through it. She’d helped me get a grip on my hunting instincts, and we’d learned a lot about dealing with extreme sensory enhancements together. If she was going through another change the least I could do was help her with it.
“Sounds annoying,” I said. “Any clues what it might be about?”
“Something social? I’ve been feeling kind of… well, promise you won’t freak out?”
I gave her a look. “I’m the one who’s sneaking out at night to hunt down wild animals and eat them. I’ve got no room to call anyone weird.”
She chuckled. “I guess not. And for the record, that’s really gross to watch. How can you eat raw meat like that?”
I shrugged. “Cooked would be better, but the security bots would be all over me if I lit a fire. Besides, it doesn’t really bother me. I don’t know why mom thought it was a good idea to give me all these predatory instincts, but they’re good for that. So, you were saying?”
She hesitated, and turned to watch the sunrise. When she spoke again, she’d switched to speaking in the Classic English that we sometimes used as our own private language.
“Do you know about boys?”
I frowned thoughtfully. That was dangerous ground.
There are no men on Felicity. There wasn’t even a word for ‘boy’ in Standard Newspeak, the common language of Felicity. The closest I’d seen was some warnings about the strange and immoral biomods that offworlders used, and of course good community-minded girls weren’t supposed to be interested in that kind of thing.
But this was Dika. She wasn’t going to tattle on me to the matrons if I admitted to not being a good little herd animal.
“Yes,” I admitted.
The database I’d been born with was a pretty minimal thing, probably meant as a starting point for a real education. But it covered a lot of basic stuff that our classes here at the orphanage didn’t, including the fact that people come in more than one gender.
“Have you noticed that even the girls who were older when they came here have no idea?” She pressed. “Sometimes we get girls as old as seven or eight, and there’s no way they’d just forget on their own. There’s only one way that could happen.”
“I know. I guess the matrons erase the memories when they Adjust them. They do that with everything they don’t like. No one here really knows what a war is, either.”
“I could live with being stuck on a world full of pacifists,” Dika replied. “But I want to meet a boy someday. Something about that just feels really right, you know? Just, pick one out of the herd, and lure him into chasing me, and… well, I’m not sure about the rest. But I wish there was someone to practice on.”
Ah, now I was getting the picture. I grinned. That did sound kind of fun, actually.
“And you say you don’t have a hunting instinct. Maybe you’re just built for catching a different kind of prey?”
“Shut up!” She shoved me, trying to look indignant. But she couldn’t hold the expression. A smile broke through, and she shook her head ruefully. “Maybe I am. Is there something wrong with that?”
“Of course not. But you’re not going to find what you’re looking for on Felicity. If they’re pretending boys don’t exist they must think they’re evil or something, so they probably don’t even let them on the planet.”
“I know,” she groaned. “Believe me, I know. Sometimes I wish I could just leave.”
“I’d go with you,” I offered.
She rolled her eyes. “Just like that? What are we supposed to pay for passage with? Where would we even go? I don’t know of a better colony to move to. Do you? Besides, space is dangerous. I’m not going to try it until I can afford a bodyguard, at least.”