Chapter 1: The Joy in My Heart

  I'm lying in bed. The neon lights on the walls strobe every few seconds, reminding us both that our time here is brief. My arms are wrapped around a man about six inches taller than me—from the tip of my tail to the top of my cat-like ears. Despite the seediness of the room—the concrete floors and blacklight posters of tigers and dragons on the walls—it reflects a mood that just isn’t here. I pull myself closer to him, my chest nestled against his back, and with a sigh, I begin to speak.

  “Hey, why don’t you tell me about your childhood, nya~?”

  They pay us extra for the “Cat” service.

  The man sighs in turn, rustling his tight jeans and shifting his t-shirt, which bears the logo of a 200-year-old rock band. “Come on. You know you always feel better when we talk about these things. Just a little bit. I promise I won’t laugh too hard this time.”

  He sighs again. Last time had been rough—he told me about the childhood bully who beat him senseless for liking virtual games just a little too much, and I’d found the whole thing hysterical. What kind of Luddite didn’t play virtual games in this era? But tonight he seemed more direct.

  “You know,” he said, “I’d like to talk about my mom this time.”

  Not a shocker. His whole life from age five to twenty-five seemed like a rotten mess, but I’d never say that out loud. We here at The Cuddle Cat Club aren’t paid to mock or react—we’re one part therapy and one part skinship for people who can’t find it elsewhere. The lonely, the strange, the outcasts. They all come here to lie in one of our rooms and talk for hours about whatever ails them. No touching beyond hugs. No dirty talk. No extras. We make our coin simply by being there to listen.

  “We can do that!” I said, hugging him a little tighter. “You start~.”

  He shifted again, resisting my vice grip around his impressive waistline, trying to get comfortable. “My dad was never really there—ever—so I was raised exclusively by my mom. But she was... overbearing, let’s put it that way. So I was pretty isolated. Never really played outside—not that anyone did after the Fallout of ‘67. Played virtual games more than I should’ve, ate lunch alone every day. That was my life for a decade.”

  “That sadge little guy. But your mom’s gone, and you’re here nyaow~!” +10 Credits. “Everything’s gonna be okay. Just try your best—for me, okay?”

  I couldn’t see his face, but I felt the tears running down his cheeks, dripping onto his chest where my paws sat firmly locked in place. From the motion of his head, I could tell he was nodding. “That wasn’t so hard! You’ll be better in no time, I promise.”

  From the corner of the room, the ticking of the atomic clock echoed faintly—a reminder that our session would soon end. In five seconds, we’d both return to the real world: me to my job, him to... whatever life he had out there. I didn’t care. I only ever wanted to know enough about a client to talk them through their problems. Anything more was a burden on my cat-eared head.

  “It looks like we’re almost done. I’m gonna get moving before night hits; this neighborhood gets dangerous after dark.”

  I released him and nodded. “You don’t have to tell me twice. So—next week? Same day, same time?”

  He grabbed his coat from the chair. “Same as always, just like you said. But next time, skip the cat service. I’m running low on funds—my employer replaced half the crew with AI drones. I’m basically a babysitter for robots now.”

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  “You got it! See ya next time, dude!”

  As he opened the door to leave our little sanctuary, I waved goodbye with my right paw and, in a moment, was finally alone for the night.

  Breathe, Stella. One more on the books. Another 10,000 credits in my account for basically doing nothing. Things were looking up—at least, until I noticed the streaming television in the corner of the room. It's usually tuned to something important to the client: childhood cartoons, looping music videos, that kind of thing. But someone had turned the channel to the news.

  An old man with gray hair and an even grayer suit was speaking:

  “Authorities have raided another supplier of the street drug known as Joy—the fifth such raid in the past three months. Mega Zone 3 Police Chief Robert Owen told Station 5 News that the supply of the popular party drug has dropped by 95% in the same period, calling it one of their most powerful moves yet against, as he put it, ‘the filth that pollutes our city to its very core.’ And now, the weather...”

  Another sigh.

  “Shit,” I said aloud.

  Since the AmeriJapanese Wars of the 2060s, the country has been divided in two. Japan got the West Coast, and what remains of America fled East, still centered on Washington, DC. Here in the West, the fallout was far worse. Whole swaths of the country are uninhabitable, populated exclusively by monstrous war machines—remnants of the conflict—still roaming freely until their nuclear cores die. A virtual no man’s land that’ll likely stay that way until the end of the world, which experts regularly forecast could come any day now.

  The Cuddle Cat Club was, as the name implies, a skinship club founded sometime after the war. The Boss won’t say exactly when—probably because it would give away her real age. It’s not exactly a den of sin; people barely go outside anymore except to work or eat. Physical contact between people is rare. For those who can’t stomach haptic VR or synthetic intimacy, we fill the gap. You pay a fee, and we talk. I hug them. They cry. They vent. It’s unlicensed therapy—with all the flair of a seedy motel. Which, funnily enough, is what the building used to be before the Boss bought it.

  As for the name? We have a gimmick. We’re all cat mutates. Tails, ears, paws—the whole package. We’re products of the genetic engineering boom brought on by the war—a failed attempt to create super soldiers who couldn’t feel pain or exhaustion. Instead, they found a way to turn genes on and off using a method called Gene Switching. That led to decades of human experimentation, war crimes, and abominations against man and god. It’s illegal now in most of what’s left of the civilized world. But that doesn’t stop people in the shadows from playing with it.

  Everyone at the Club’s been hacked to hell and back. The result? The feline forms me, the Boss, and a few others wear. Painful? Incredibly. Marketable? Absolutely. We look damn good on a billboard.

  While I dwelled on all that, I sat in the break room—one of four in our little hovel—teetering back and forth on my chair, rolling an empty pill bottle in my right paw. My ears twitched toward the news still playing in the cuddle room.

  “They sure picked a fine time to cut off the supply,” I muttered.

  I can’t sit here for eight hours a day listening to other people’s trauma and be expected not to drown myself in drugs once in a while. That’s just un-American. The country might be gone, but the freedom to self-destruct? Still alive and well.

  But I wasn’t completely screwed yet.

  I got up and rummaged through an old cabinet filled with cosplay costumes (don’t ask), several toy robots (also don’t ask), and finally—near the very back—found a few little white pills.

  “Bingo!”

  I pulled them out and looked them over. Dusty. Likely an old stash I’d left here for exactly this kind of emergency.

  “I might feel a little weird after this. Looks pretty old. But who cares? Bottoms up.”

  I took both pills and washed them down with half a cup of soda straight from the Pepsi Cartel. Good stuff.

  Within moments, I was gone—blissed out of my mind like a feline on catnip.

  Joy wasn’t a drug that got you high, or low, or in-between. It was more like… nothingness. But not empty. You just existed in a null state beyond what normal humans could feel. It wasn’t that nothing mattered. It was that the things that mattered were nothing.

  The Boss. My clients’ issues. All of it? Tossed into a black hole for three glorious minutes.

  A three-minute eternity as I gazed into the void.

  Was I an addict? Probably. But there’s no cuddle club for the people running the cuddle club. So Joy would have to be my therapist of choice—for now.

  Soon, I’d have to face reality again—especially if the raids kept up.

  But in this moment?

  Nothing mattered.

  And I felt great.