Memory Transcription Subject: Chief Executive Officer Sifal, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 27, 2137

  Vivy’s brow furrowed. “What’s with that reaction?” she said, perplexed. “My clients usually only react like that if they sober up and suddenly realize they’ve just cheated on their mate.”

  “I have a boyfriend!” I screeched, still as quietly as an Arxur could muster. Where the fuck even was I? This wasn’t my room!

  “Oh dear,” said Vivy, leaning back on the pillows. “You probably shouldn’t have slept with me, then.”

  I screamed again, a primal wail of frustration and panic, kept as quiet as I could. What was this place? How thin were the walls?

  Thinnish. My head swiveled at the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. The door slammed open. Jodi, my prey bodyguard, scanned the room in a heightened state of alertness, searching for hidden attackers. She found none. “You good in here?” she asked, tentatively taking her paw off the hilt of her sword.

  “No, I’m not good!” I shouted, quietly. “What the fuck happened?”

  “I dunno, lady,” said Jodi, squinting. “Sure looks a lot like you drunkenly hooked up with Vivy. Is this a trick question?”

  “Why’d you let me do that?!” I said.

  Jodi scoffed. “How the fuck was I supposed to stop you? You’re like twice my size! I have a sword. What, you want me to chop your fuckin’ legs off next time?” She shook her head. “No, you want me to take down an Arxur harmlessly, I’m gonna need some kinda… magic space gun with a stun setting.”

  “There are no such weapons!” I shouted. “I had a whole thing during the initial raid about how we’ve got jack shit for nonlethal munitions!” What, was I supposed to give her a cattle prod!?

  “No, no, we’ve definitely got stun guns in the Federation,” said Vivy, taking a sip of water from a large flask, and then holding it out to me. I drank from it greedily as she continued. “You can probably bum one off of Security.”

  “Neat! I didn’t know that,” said Jodi with false cheer. “So is there anything you actually need, or can I go back to sleep now?”

  I coughed and wiped water from my lips. “Where the fuck am I?” I muttered. “Where did you come from?”

  Jodi blinked. “You’re still at the Vice Queen’s Court,” she said, a bit incredulous that I wasn’t getting the picture. “It’s a tavern or something. Taverns have rooms and beds. Doubly so when they’re also brothels, or whatever the fuck the local term for that is. I have the room next door.”

  I nodded, blearily, a brief wave of fatigue washing over me as my body processed whatever I’d done to poison myself. “Okay,” I said, shaking a little. It felt like shivering, but I was also sweating. “Did you at least find someone you liked, too, or was it just me?” I mean, I definitely did like Vivy, but betraying Vriss like this was…

  Jodi snorted. “No. No no no. I’ve only been out of prison for like a day and a half. Got a lot of shit to unpack before I start getting the urge to start fooling around.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding numbly. Memories fluttered back in through the fog, but only older memories. Last night was just gone. “You mentioned a son, so I guess that implies a husband?”

  “Oh,” said Jodi, her face going stony. “No. He’s dead to me.”

  “Hm.” Vivy nodded, introspectively. “I’m sorry to hear that. Not a lot of people make it out of PD treatment. He probably assumed you’d be in there forever, so he moved on.”

  Jodi snorted again. “Oh, no, it happened before all that. Came home from a campaign to find him in bed with another woman. Again, he’s dead to me.” She grinned with a wild lack of sincerity. “Anyway, I hope your boyfriend’s more forgiving than I was!” She patted the hilt of her sword fondly, like it was an old friend, or perhaps a co-conspirator in a crime. “Good night.”

  Jodi closed the door behind her as she left. The panic started rising in my gullet again as I grappled with the gravity of what I’d done. I gripped the back of my head in my hands and rocked back and forth. “Oh gods, oh fuck. I’m done for.”

  “Sorry,” said Vivy, “I want to be empathetic here, but I don’t know much about your culture. Are Arxur monogamous, or…?”

  “He’s my commanding fucking officer!” I blurted out. “My entire authority derives from him wanting me to be here!” I took a few panting deep breaths. “And before you get any stupid and clever ideas about blackmailing me or replacing me, no! There is no one else willing or able to run this colony! He’ll probably just fucking glass the whole planet if he thinks I’ve betrayed his trust.”

  Vivy coughed. “I wasn’t thinking that,” she lied.

  I grasped at desperate straws. “I… I was drunk,” I said. “You took advantage of me!”

  Vivy snorted. “You're the one who asked me if I wanted to come upstairs with you! And you’re three times my size. You could swallow me whole if you got the urge. In what world was I in any position to say no to you?”

  “I don’t know!” I said, panicked. “You could have let me down easy!”

  “No, sadly, you were quite insistent on me, specifically,” said Vivy rubbing her face with a paw. “Frankly, I think you hurt Kara’s feelings.”

  Oh grand, I had multiple messes to clean up. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, reluctantly.

  Vivy shook her head. “You are very fortunate that I was amenable to all this. I was interested! But it’s not like you offered me a lot of wiggle room to say no if I hadn't been. Setting aside the size difference, you have to understand, you’re… basically my boss.”

  My eyes widened. “You’re… a contractor,” I said, grasping at straws.

  “And you have largely unchecked authority to arbitrarily cancel my contract,” said Vivy, leaning in, her gaze deathly serious. “I mean, what recourse would I have? Take it up with the local government, which is also you? Call up the Federation, let them know that my Arxur boss is overstepping her authority?”

  That was a bittersweet joke right there. The Federation would probably burn her alive for having ever even spoken to an Arxur, let alone slept with one. They spoke of predation like it was a disease you could catch. There was probably a weird metaphor in there somewhere. Fuck, you couldn’t get STI’s from other species, right?

  No, not the time for that. I breathed, and I tried to ground myself a bit. I took in my surroundings. It was an odd room I found myself in, but now that I knew I was still at the Vice Queen’s Court, I saw the commonalities in the decor. A willful and deliberate momentum from factory-line to eclectic. Soft bits of cloth covered the windows. Dark purple, like the last moments of a sunset, captured in fabric to be enjoyed at all hours. Beautiful curtains. Fuck, I’d spent spent so many years on a spaceship, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen curtains. Why the fuck was I thinking about fucking CURTAINS!?

  Vivy gently put a paw on me, and I flinched away in a panic. She shook her head. “Look, what’s done is done. Let’s calm you down, see if the two of us can figure out a way out of this mess we’ve made together.” I sighed. She gently rested a paw on me again, and I let her. “Breathe. Just breathe. Here, let’s talk about something else for a moment. What are the scars for? Marks of rank, or…?”

  My eyes widened, and I looked at my forearms. “No,” I said simply. “Just marks of shit I’ve lived through, I guess.”

  “Tell me about them,” said Vivy.

  It was infectious. Empathy. I’d felt it on Earth, and in the handful of times somebody on Seaglass thought to get close to me, I felt it here, too. It was another alien concept, being around people who wanted to be around you.

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  “The scars on my right forearm were from a fight I was in a couple months ago,” I said. “My commanding officer wanted to stay with the Dominion, instead of joining the Rebellion and maybe making a real future for the Arxur. So I killed him.”

  Vivy’s eyes squinted in confusion. “But you’re dating…”

  “The former first officer,” I said. “We killed the captain together. Bit of a couple’s bonding experience.”

  “Aw,” said Vivy, smiling softly. “Honestly sounds rather sweet, in a fucked-up and violent way.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shrugging. I held up the other arm. “The older scars on my left forearm were from the aunt who raised me. She was strict, and I was a difficult child.”

  Vivy snorted. “Aren’t we all?” she said, smiling.

  “No.” I wiped sweat from my brow with a hand. My species didn’t sweat much. I was poisoned, sick, or stressed, or maybe all of the above. “She clawed my arm open to teach me a lesson. It was a stupid lesson. I’ve forgotten it, probably on purpose. But the scars are still there.”

  Vivy nodded solemnly, taking this in. “They seem a bit newer than childhood, though.”

  “I’ve been overwriting them,” I said. “I’m an adult now. I make my own choices. I make my own destiny.” I pointed at the two fresh scars overlaid on the three old. “The first was Garruga. Yulpas and their religious obsession with hunting, albeit only predators. I told her she was like me, and I fed her my blood to prove a point. It’s a reminder that hunting is something any sapient can do. The second was Jodi. An herbivore untouched by the weakness of the Federation. She bested me in single combat with a sword. It’s a reminder that strength is a quality any sapient can have.”

  “No third, yet?” said Vivy, tilting her head.

  I shook my head. “No. Not yet. I’m very curious who it’s going to be.”

  Vivy nodded, and patted me on the shoulder, comfortingly. “Interesting. Very interesting. Feeling better, though?”

  I breathed. “Yeah,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest and rocking back and forth a bit. “Okay. Just… just tell me what actually happened. Like, from the top.”

  Vivy blinked her big eyes. Pretty and piercing. “Well, we were all drinking a lot and dancing. You started flirting with me, which I found surprising but not unwelcome, so I flirted back. Kara started flirting with you as well. Not to be left out, Maddilly started flirting with Jodi. Jodi told Maddilly she was, quote, ‘going to bend you over my knee and spank you like a naughty girl’, which was, through some incredible miracle of translation software and cultural differences, not flirting in the slightest.” Vivy shrugged. “Just a threat.”

  Hold on, violent domination counts as flirting in some cultures? I thought, reeling in surprise. Wait, does it count as flirting in my culture? Oh gods, it probably does, doesn't it. Why am I always the last person to figure these things out!?

  Vivy shifted her sitting position, a bit less lounging on the pillows, and a bit more upright. “We went back to having fun for a little while longer. At some point, I think Jodi figured out that this place doubles as a bordello. Then she explained the concept of a bordello to you. Then your eyes absolutely lit up, and you started looking at me with a type of hunger I'm a lot more comfortable and experienced with.” She held her paw out expectantly, and I handed her the water bottle back. It was empty. She snorted, and tossed it in the corner before grabbing a fresh one from the side table. “Now, unfortunately, this puts me in an uncomfortable position. My establishment, there are certain expectations when you walk through the door. You're looking to drink, you're looking to dance, and you have a very clear idea if you're looking for love or not. You start willingly heading upstairs with somebody, that was part of your plans for the evening, drinks in the interim or not. But you? You not only weren't aware of that, you didn't even seem to know what a bordello or a hookup bar even was.”

  “Explain it to me again now?” I said, rubbing my head.

  Vivy sighed. “People come here to fuck, Sifal. Sometimes you meet someone, have a good time together, and it just happens. Sometimes money changes hands, like you’re just purchasing a service. Sometimes it’s in between, like when one of my girls wants to have a fun night with you and runs up your bar tab a bit on the way there.”

  I nodded slowly. I think the concept made sense? Favor-trading for food wasn’t unthinkable in the Dominion. Rations were like money. “What part of that leads to an uncomfortable position?” I shifted position a bit, and the damp sheets stuck to me. My tail felt sore, like I’d slept on it awkwardly.

  Vivy rubbed her eyes. “I had no idea if you’d been interested in fucking me before you’d started drinking.”

  “I was,” I said, ducking my head a bit as I said it. “I’m not upset about hooking up with you. I’m upset I betrayed my boyfriend’s trust.”

  “Well, this all certainly could have gone a great deal smoother, but I’m not upset, either.” Vivy sighed. “Nevertheless, in the moment, I had no idea how to tell how much you were into me. Or how to tell how drunk an Arxur was.”

  “You could have asked?” I tried, unsure.

  “I did,” said Vivy. “You explained to me at length that, as an apex predator and as an engineer, you were in complete control of your faculties at all times and could not be emotionally swayed like lesser professions, not even under the influence of intoxicants.”

  My jaw dropped. “I said what?!” Did my brain shut down, and my fucking ego alone take over?!

  “Without even slurring your speech, frankly,” said Vivy. “Then Azira--”

  “Who the fuck is Azira?” I asked. Gods, there was another person involved in all of this?

  Vivy sighed. “Azira’s a Gojid engineer over at the mines, so, you know, closest thing to a predator/engineer we’ve got domestically. She overhears you and says that’s not how engineering or being a predator works, so you explained to her, at length, with citations, that she didn’t know what she was talking about, and that her brain was rotted from malnutrition after a lifetime of not eating enough protein.”

  My jaw couldn’t drop any further. “How were there citations?!”

  “You tried to hack into the projector I use for movie nights to pull up relevant scientific papers from the Dominion,” said Vivy, pausing briefly to light a cigarette. “You only stopped when Jodi reminded you that no one else in the room could read your language, which you took as proof of your own intellectual superiority. Jodi told you to quit being a bellend, and then you told her to fuck a cabbage.” Vivy took a long drag of her cigarette, and exhaled. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what either of those words mean.”

  She held out the cigarette to me to share, and I shook my head vigorously. “No more intoxicants tonight,” I said, grimacing in horror. “Please, continue.”

  Vivy shrugged. “More for me. Anyway, Jodi stomped off back to the bar to cool off and get herself another round, and while she wasn’t looking, you scooped me up and suggested we sneak upstairs before ‘Matron Killjoy’ noticed. Kara asked if she could come with. You looked her over, head to toe, and then made a weirded-out face.”

  Oh gods, that’s so mean! “She’s… she’s got an alluring physique, but her personality is something I’m still getting used to,” I said, ducking my head in shame. “She’s too… un-Arxurlike.”

  Vivy smirked. “Oh? And I’m not? Interesting. Very interesting.” She took another drag. “Anyway, after Kara sulks off, that’s when I had to make a snap decision.”

  “Which was?” I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know, but I probably needed to know.

  Vivy stared, and pointed at me with her cigarette. “Do I tell the eight foot tall cannibal who runs the planet that this might not be a good idea?”

  My face fell, mortified. “I told you, I don’t eat people anymore!”

  “And sober, I think I believe you,” said Vivy, shaking her head. “Drunk, how should I know how far your convictions will hold?”

  I squinted. “So wait, was I drunk, or was I sober?”

  “I mean, in retrospect, the fact that you don’t remember any of this means you were probably drunk but very good at hiding it. I was a little suspicious, but what do I know about Arxur? It really just seemed like you were letting loose and having a good time. It all had an air of mischievous fun, like we were sneaking out of class together to go hook up in the janitor’s closet before the teacher could catch us.” Vivy sighed. “But the way I reasoned it, we had a logical fork with linked outcomes. If you were too drunk, I wasn’t sure if talking you down was a good or safe idea. If you were reasonably sober, I didn’t need to. Either way, here we are upstairs.”

  I leaned back against the pillows and headboard, processing this. There was one unanswered question left, I think. “If I was being an arrogant bastard all night long…” I began, with trepidation. “Why did you still even want to come up here with me?”

  Vivy chuckled. “Oh, I mean, I thought it was fucking hilarious.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and shrugged. “Must be my Arxurlike personality.” She exhaled a plume of smoke. “Wanna go again?”

  “No!” I whisper-shouted. “I mean… yes, but… no. Once, while drunk, that’s a mistake. I can… I can try to apologize for a mistake. Couple more times while my head’s clear? That’s a willful betrayal of trust.”

  Vivy shrugged. “Suit yourself. Offer’s open. It was honestly pretty fun once we set some boundaries. Took a bit of convincing, getting you to keep your claws and teeth away from my lady bits.”

  I squinted in confusion. “Wait, then how did we…?”

  Vivy smirked. “We found a way.”

  She patted my tail, and I winced. It was still sore, like somebody had bent it the wrong way, or sat on it, or… “Oh! Okay,” I said, blushing.

  “Mmhmm,” Vivy said, chuckling. “I can’t claim to know what Arxur hygiene practices are like, but you should probably wash your tail thoroughly the next time you bathe. Especially the tip,” she said, smiling coyly.

  I snorted. “Will do.” Lacking any further questions, I sighed and tried to reset. “I’m glad we’re both good, and this was all just a series of compounding mistakes, but… I don't know. I still have to figure out how to explain this to Vriss well enough to salvage things. Maybe the fact that you’re prey? Like it won’t bother him as much as if I’d slept with another Arxur?”

  Vivy’s eye twitched, briefly, but she smiled warmly and patted my arm. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Maybe you’re right, and we’ll all be rather lucky that your Vriss still thinks rather little of us, even if you’ve learned better.” She ran a delicate claw across the scars on my left forearm. “One for the hunt, one for strength…” Quicker than I could react, Vivy dug a single claw in, carving a shallow groove in my flesh. I flinched, eyes wide in shock, as I watched red blood seep to the surface. It’d likely form a third scar by morning. “And one for ambition,” said Vivy. “It is as you said: we all make our own choices. We all make our own destiny.” She stared at me, eyes forward, and lapped the warm blood off her claws.

  I blushed furiously. It was starting to take some real effort, resisting the urge to take Vivy up on her offer to go again…