“You aren’t down at the lab for the test?”
Sandy grunted and shook his head, focusing intently on one of the two wide monitors perched in front of him.
As usual, Alan failed to take the hint. The cougar leaned over the short outer wall of Sandy’s cubicle. “But it’s your project.”
Sighing, the ocelot rolled his chair back to look up at his office mate. Technically, they were coworkers, but not in the same department—Sandy was in software engineering, Alan in marketing—and barely in the same organization. “No, it’s not my project. The tunneling group just adapted the differential-algebraic equation library I wrote three years ago. Even if I wanted to be down there—which I don’t—I don’t have the clearance.”
“Huh.” Alan scratched the side of his muzzle. It wasn’t clear he’d followed Sandy’s explanation. The ocelot tried not to stereotype marketers as technically illiterate, but Alan wasn’t just a marketing guy, he had a “handsome jock” vibe. So, two stereotypes working against him. Not that Sandy didn’t fit a classic computer nerd stereotype: lanky, glasses-wearing, adamantly clueless about fashion. “Aren’t you at least excited?”
“I’m glad that the new owners let BRC keep working on pure research projects with no obvious commercial application, at least for now. So I guess so. But I don’t come to work to be excited. I come because it’s work.”
Alan’s whiskers twitched, and he smiled the little smile of someone who’d just heard something incomprehensible. “Well, I’m going to go at least check out the on-campus livestream.”
“Have fun.” Sandy stared up at the ceiling as Alan padded off.
His answer should have at least come with an asterisk. Back when the Bridgetown Research Center had been the crazy idea group of a century-old telecommunications company—back when Sandy had joined, eight years ago, as his first job straight out of college—he had been excited about work. He’d been thrilled to get an internship, beyond thrilled to get offered a permanent position.
But three years back, they’d been spun off into a quasi-independent subsidiary, and the tenor of the office shifted, just a little. New projects had a better chance of being approved if there was an argument for a return on investment, and the quicker the ROI the better. A year and a half ago, the group had been sold to Strategic Industries, a defense contractor. When the deal finally closed seven months ago, about five percent of the staff had been laid off, and another ten percent had left since. Some of them didn’t like working for the military; some just didn’t like working for an employer they no longer trusted to have their backs, even to the limited degree you could trust any employer to.
He turned back to his monitor, sighing, and brushed a stray lock of long black hair away from his glasses. He wasn’t assigned to any project now beyond a nebulous “engineering support” role, his current task to refine existing machine learning classification techniques. That was just work, and work he didn’t like. And he didn’t like working for the military, either, even indirectly. Unfortunately, it was work he was good at. Really good. When recruiters tried to woo him for more glamorous-sounding positions elsewhere, they always turned out to involve working on ML classifiers, so why take the risk of switching? He could probably keep this job as long as he could stand it.
Alan likely had a point, anyway. Sandy should be more excited about the tunneling project’s third—maybe fourth?—serious trial, one of the few pure research projects left at BRC: a proof-of-concept device for creating wormholes. To be more technical, a “traversable connector,” a four-dimensional tunnel that connected any two points in three-dimensional space. If the theory held up, the connector could have an arbitrary width. In practice, they hadn’t been able to create ones measured in more than angstroms, and those only in simulation.
In fact, nothing they could run in simulation—even with Sandy’s improved math library—could improve on predictions that had existed in quantum theory for years. The math seemed to guarantee the connector would open to somewhere, but not that it would open somewhere you wanted. It was an unexpected outcome of being able to measure either the location or the velocity of a particle, but not both. The “successful” simulations rested on untestable assumptions that made the models work.
His remaining coffee had cooled from lukewarm to room temperature while he’d been talking to Alan and ceiling-staring. Flicking his tail against his chair grumpily, he got up and plodded toward the break room, then hesitated. The oily blend from the office coffee pot was free, but he could get a decent cup at Building 2’s café, and he could use the exercise. After giving the mug a quick rinse, he headed for the stairs.
He’d made it halfway from his fourth-floor office to the first floor landing when the fire alarm began shrieking. After he took a few more steps, the lights shut off, leaving him in pitch blackness for a second before dim amber emergency lights came on.
Well, that wasn’t good. Maybe the timing with the test was just a coincidence. Probably. Right?
Flattening his ears against the deafening bleats, he hurried the rest of the way down and out onto the sidewalk.
Almost nobody else had made it out of the building yet. Of course, he’d happened to be in the exit staircase when the alarm went off. Just like every other time the alarm had gone off, nothing appeared amiss. A bright, crisp fall day, partly cloudy. Pleasant. A few people followed the walkways between buildings or sat at covered picnic tables, all turning to stare—
bzzzzTTT
He turned to stare, too, over at Building 4, where that loud, crackling electrical noise had just come from. Where another one had just started.
Where the lab running the test was.
People began dashing out of the building as the noise grew in pitch and volume. Windows began shattering, arcs of blue electric current visible dancing through the air. Shafts of light burst out of the roof.
bzzzzzTHOOOM
At that third, deafeningly loud crack, several things happened almost all at once: A globe of lightning rose out of the building, blowing glass and concrete and steel out of its way. A new, deep bass rumble began, crescendoing into the roar of a freight train.
And, as the sound of the train receded, something fell onto the building, materializing in a blur inside the globe. Something big. Monstrously big.
Something…alive?
Sandy gaped, suddenly oblivious to the gathering—and fleeing—crowd. Was he the only seeing this, this thing, as giant feral animal paws twitched?
No, he wasn’t. He was the only one starting to move toward it instead of away, though. Not too close; just enough to get some idea of what the hell he was looking at.
He’d gotten maybe thirty yards away when it reared up.
Yelping, Sandy backpedaled. But no, it wasn’t rearing up. It was sitting up. Pushing itself up on very anthro-looking arms, its back turned to him. But how—the paws—
It turned around, back and forth, staring. Not it, she, clearly. The expression on her massive face grew visibly confused. Again, what the hell was she? Not any race he’d seen before, but…familiar.
Wait. A fox. She was a fox, a vixen, evolved the way cats were. Her fur shone with such a deep orange it edged into red, but touches of silver highlights glittered in the sunlight. As the fur reached her hands, it shaded into a deep ebony, the opposite of the snow-white fur extending up over her chest toward her neck. His ears colored as he stared at that fur; she wasn’t nude, but she was damn close, and she was definitely, ah, full-figured. And athletic. A necklace of turquoise-colored stones hanging down in threads formed a fringe that covered most of that rounded chest, but it bounced and shifted as she moved.
She stood up.
The ocelot went slack-jawed, trying to process what he was seeing, why he couldn’t put together the view of her torso and her paws from ground level at first. She was a centaur, upper half that of an evolved fox, lower half that of an unevolved one. And her shoulders—her lower shoulders—stood nearly forty feet off the ground.
The face he’d been admiring a moment ago, huge hazel eyes and sharp muzzle framed by lush red-brown hair falling down past her shoulders, started to shift expression from confusion to fright and anger. She spoke, tensely and quickly, in a language he’d never heard. The voice wasn’t loud as much as full, resonant, less like hearing one blaring speaker than hearing a hundred speakers playing at moderate volume. She wasn’t watching where she was setting those massive paws, eyes instead on a fire growing in the spot she’d been.
Her expression grew more angry, and a little more panicked. Now her voice was getting loud. He backed away quickly, starting to feel panicked himself.
Then her eyes locked onto Sandy.
He didn’t understand whatever she shouted at him, of course, but it didn’t sound at all friendly. Goddammit, he was the only one still right here, wasn’t he? His mom had always joked he had no sense of self-preservation.
She stepped forward, and he couldn’t help but stare at the visible play of the muscles under her fur, the way the four limbs coordinated with one another, the way the motion simultaneously looked slow and perfectly natural. But it wasn’t slow; with just that one step, the “safe distance” he’d imagined he’d kept between himself and the ruins of Building 4 collapsed in his head.
He froze for a split-second, staring at a huge, falling canine paw. It’s too late to run. At top speed it’ll be two steps for her tops before she crushes you like a bug.
Even as that voice rang in his head, he’d already turned tail and started running for his life.
She shouted something else behind him. He could feel her take a step toward him. A fast step. A heavy step.
“Oh God please don’t kill me!” he shrieked, getting out an extra burst of speed. “I don’t know what you are I don’t know what’s going on I—”
He started floating in the air, legs still pedaling furiously, now against nothing.
Sandy stopped, gaping at the receding ground. There was just enough time to get out a weak “what the—” before he flew backwards, exclamation turning into a shrill scream. It felt like he was at the end of a contracting bungee cord, or being sucked toward a giant vacuum cleaner.
His back hit something—something soft, but the impact still had enough force to knock the breath out of him. The flight turned into a tumble, into darkness, into shifting and sliding motion as whatever was around him moved.
Fist. What was around him was her fist. He was in her fist.
By the time the realization had sunk in, she’d opened her fingers, leaving him lying in her palm, her massive face maybe four yards away. She started speaking, quickly, and at this distance he could feel the sub-bass resonance frequencies in her voice. He’d be terrified by it if he wasn’t far more terrified by the sight of her tongue and teeth. She could easily swallow him whole.
But she’s intelligent, so she wouldn’t, right? He clung to that thought, trying to fend off the rebuttals from other internal voices. Just because she looks intelligent doesn’t mean she’s not feral. And she might not know you’re intelligent. Or she just might not care.
“I don’t know what you’re s-saying!” he squeaked, trying not to let his teeth chatter in fear. “I don’t understand! God, and you don’t understand either.” He held his hands to his head.
She tilted her head warily, then suddenly jerked her gaze to the side. Sandy risked a look over the edge of her hand. Fire trucks approached, sirens blaring. He could see red and blue police lights in the distance, too.
The giantess looked back at Sandy, expression visibly alarmed again. She bit her lip—with fangs not much smaller than his whole body—and her thumb pinned him against her palm.
Sandy’s eyes widened. “Hey!” He squirmed as her other hand rapidly traced an intricate pattern in the air about five feet over him, leaving a thin, glowing blue line in the air.
Then she touched that claw to his chest, blue light still trailing from it. All at once his vision flooded with that light, and every nerve lit up like he’d just stuck his tail in an electric socket. He screamed, trying to curl up.
She spoke again, just as urgently, but the words sounded…different. As the pain started to recede, he tried to concentrate.
“Can you understand me?”
The ocelot whined, suddenly afraid to turn his head. He could feel her breath, a warm wind, and realized she’d brought him right up to that terrifyingly gigantic muzzle. “I-I… Yes. I can.” His throat was so constricted from tension it felt like he had to force the words out past wet sandpaper.
“Why did you bring me here?”