Kanagen

  Everything was different. It was like the sun had risen and a cold night had given way to a warm and sunny day. It was an oasis in a desert, cool water quenching a parched throat that seemed to burn with every breath. It was the sound of a chain breaking.

  Koer was back, and Trish felt hope like she'd never felt it before.

  "I'm certain the two of you have a great deal you would like to discuss," Scoparia was saying as Trish stared up at the reconfigured form of her savior, "but before you do, I have a few questions, to say the very least, about your tenure as-"

  Koer cut her off, saying something in deep, rumbling Affini that seemed to set Trish's teeth on edge. It was short, only a single sentence or two, but Trish could see the way it hit Scoparia. First, she froze; then, for the first time ever, Trish watched Scoparia lose control of herself, her tightly woven vines separating from one another for a split second before she reasserted her shape. And then she turned to look at Trish, her perfectly sculpted human-like face broadcasting only a single emotion, clear as the peal of a bell, cold as a still winter's day.

  Pity.

  "I think it's best Trish and I converse alone," Koer said, resting a hand on Scoparia's shoulder. "You will need time to process this. I can connect you with a therapist experienced in these matters if you need it."

  "I...think I'll be alright," Scoparia said, almost losing cohesion again and leaning into Koer's touch. "But thank you for the offer."

  Koer nodded. One of their vines snaked out and wrapped firmly around Trish's wrist. "Trish, come. We're going to take a little walk."

  "You don't have to pull," Trish grumbled, sliding down off the couch and following Koer as they led Trish into the entryway and out the door. The afternoon light, a warm golden-orange radiating from the sunline, cast everything a shade or two redder than at noon. "Thank the stars you're here, though," Trish added after a moment. "She's trying to railroad me into domestication, just like you said."

  "It would probably be the best thing for you," Koer muttered, coming to a stop not far from Scoparia's hab and turning to face Trish. "You've suffered more than enough, and that is my fault."

  Ice began to creep down the back of Trish's neck. "No," she said, jerking her wrist free of Koer's vine. "No, no, no! Don't you tell me that now you're rebloomed you're suddenly all domestication-happy about me!"

  "It is far, far more complicated than that," Koer said, crouching down and still towering over Trish. They looked Trish over, letting out the sound of a sigh. "You seem well enough, at least. Your stress levels are elevated. Though, if what I'm told is true, all of your conditioning will be gone. That should help."

  "Conditioning? What the hell are you talking about?"

  "The conditioning I inserted- no, no, this is the wrong way to do this," Koer said, shaking their head. "I should begin at the beginning. I should expin why before I expin how."

  The feeling nausea rolled back in like a tsunami. "Koer, you're scaring me."

  "I know," they said. "And I am sorry. I never wanted you to suffer, you must understand that. But- oh, Everbloom, they teach you everything except how to mulching expin this," they growled, their form unsticking itself for a moment.

  "Well, try," Trish said, "because I am starting to get really freaked out here."

  "Before I do, I would ask you a question: were you happy?" They put their hands on Trish's shoulders, a warm and strangely comforting weight. "Before. Living in your mobile hab. Printing books. Were you happy?"

  "Yes? I wasn't the life I thought I'd have had, but it was a good one. It's only in the st few years it's started falling apart. First Rod and Meg, then you leaving, and now this bullshit." She half-gestured at the perfectly manicured path around them, as if it were the very symbol of Affini overreach. "I was happy before your lot started to muck with it even more than you already were!"

  Koer visibly rexed, the vines holding their angur form together slumping and disconnecting ever so slightly. "You have no idea," they said, "how gratifying it is to hear you say that. How much I needed to hear it from you."

  "Koer." Trish reached up and id her hands on their thick wrists, staring right up at her. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "How many wardships have you been through?"

  Trish blinked. "What? Three. I'm in the middle of my fourth now. You know that."

  "Incorrect," Koer said. All eight of their eyes were staring directly at Trish. "You do not remember the fifth, because you were not permitted to know about it. It sted for nearly sixty years, and ended only recently."

  An invisible hand began to bundle up all of Trish's gusts together. "What?" Her voice caught, and the question came out in a strangled whisper.

  "You were my ward for roughly sixty years," Koer said. "You were what we at the Nascent Feralism Polrding Office refer to as a hemerosyncretic ward. Through you, and your tolerated strain of feralism, we have meaningfully shifted the resting nothocultural state of your species."

  "I... I don't understand," Trish said, hugging herself, staring up at Koer. "That's- you can't have- I'd know!"

  "Every two weeks, I checked in with you, entranced you, reinforced your anti-memetics conditioning to ensure that your particur strain of feralism didn't deviate or further radicalize, did memory cleanup, and ensured that you were not being unduly affected by the work you were doing for us. We take that st part very seriously, you know. I took it very seriously. When I was not present for a check-in, I was watching you carefully, maniputing others to approach you to provide you with the socialization and enrichment you required, and generally doing whatever was necessary to limit the degree of suffering you experienced from untreated feralism. I did everything I could I ensure that you were, to the extent possible, happy in that state. For the entire time I was responsible for you, the entire time I acted as your social worker, that was the foremost through in my mind." They let out a sigh, and their body shuddered again. "Do you mind if I change my shape? I did not anticipate a need to look human again, and my body does not fit together like this in a particurly comfortable manner."

  "Go ahead," Trish mumbled, her legs going out from under her. Koer's vines caught her and gently guided her to a sitting position on the ground, even as their body shifted, unfolded, roiled, and seemed to grow as it shaped itself into something six-limbed, with a long tail and an enormous, thorn-toothed maw. Within seconds, rather than a rough mimicry of a human, they were a much better — much rger — facsimile of a vreeüt.

  "That is such a relief," they rumbled, shaking themselves out with the sound of a tree rattling in a storm and settling down onto four of their six limbs, then to a seated position, finally curling into a thick green wall around Trish, nose to tail, the eyes on the inward curve of their body all looking in at her. "Do you feel a bit safer this way?"

  The worst part was, Trish did. Something about being surrounded by Koer gave her an immense feeling of comfort. Her eyes suddenly went wide, and her hand flew to the back of her beck, searching for a telltale scar.

  "No, you don't have a haustoric impnt," Koer said, "or any kind of phytotech impnt. It might be possible to maintain you in an appropriately feral state with one of those long term, but it would require much closer and more regur interaction. It could be a potential giveaway that you were an NFPO instrument, which might put you at risk, however small, of untoward action by more violent feralists, to say nothing of rendering you useless as an asset." Vines crept up around Trish and gently enfolded her. She did not move. "We — that is to say, I — took very great care with you. You were my sole responsibility for sixty years. It is not inaccurate to say that a hemerosyncretic ward is the closest one can come to owning a floret without actually owning a floret, and indeed the vast majority of hemerosyncretic wards do end up the floret of their handler. That was always my pn for you. I'm very sorry it didn't work out."

  Terror gripped Trish, every muscle in her body tightening at once. "You were stringing me along the entire time? Keeping me independent was just a- a fucking-" Fighting against the ice down her back, heat was beginning to build in her cheeks, in her forehead. "Why?!"

  "Because after serving as a hemerosyncretic ward — in your case, after sixty years of falling further and further out of step with the rest of your species, being forced to endure a kind of isotion typically reserved for deep chronodispcement — it is very often the kindest thing we can do. But I will not take you as my floret, Trish. I am very sorry, but I cannot."

  Trish shook her head. "None of this makes any sense."

  "You simply ck the appropriate perspective," Koer said, lifting their head and staring at Trish with their binocur eyes. "Listen to me. We domesticate individuals, and we domesticate cultures. What is the principal difference between the two?" After a heartbeat of hesitation, and no answer from Trish, they added, "We cannot give a culture a haustoric impnt. We can collect, control and redirect information, and we are extremely good at that, but we cannot directly interface with the underlying gestalt of xenosophont thought represented by your culture at rge. At least, not yet. I'm sure someone, somewhere, is working on that. It would simplify things a great deal. But until that fabled day, the Long-Term Nothocultural Regution Division of the Nascent Feralism Polrding Office must continue to do its tragic, terrible work."

  "Okay, Koer," Trish said, her voice breaking again, "I get that you used Freedom's Ember as a honeypot, but the rest of this shit is going way over my head. What the fuck is a nothoculture?"

  Koer's foliage shifted, and their vines coiled a little tighter around Trish. "We influence xenosophont cultures to hybridize them with the Compact's own. The end result is what, in your nguage, we would call a nothoculture. But to get there, we must influence not just individuals but the aggregate, collective intelligence of a species. We must influence on a broader scale. We do this in rge part via media, but as I alluded to before this is sometimes insufficient, especially when dealing with a species whose capitalistic advertising culture had metastasized to such a degree as yours. Humans are notoriously difficult to reach through media messaging because you have necessarily conditioned yourself against it as a survival trait."

  They nuzzled Trish gently with their snout, then rested it on her shoulder, its heavy weight like a lopsided bnket. When they spoke, she felt their voice rippling throughout her body. "This only grows more problematic when there are rge segments of the popution retaining feralist ideas. The cleverer ones may not act on them, but they still propagate them, and these feralists, and the feralists they influence, will be even more difficult to reach via media. Other vectors are needed. You were mine. But to use you in that way required me to maintain you in a feral state that you would not have been able to maintain yourself. Without me doing this to you, Trish, you would have abandoned your feral beliefs decades ago."

  "Bullshit," Trish hissed. "I don't just give up like that."

  "That is one of your particur traits, yes. One that I amplified through training." They lifted their head and nuzzled Trish once more. "And through the appropriate clearances, I ensured that any subliminal or hypnotic messaging systems were deactivated in your presence, just in case your anti-memetic conditioning was insufficient. I interfered with wardship processes when necessary to keep you independent, with the assistance of the NFPO. But I made a very critical mistake. I realized it some time ago, but I did not allow myself to fully internalize it, not until my superiors stepped in and forced me to reckon with it. That mistake was taking this position in the first pce. I was not ready for it."

  "What are you talking about?" Trish brushed away a few of Koer's vines. "You gaslit me for sixty fucking years and I never had a clue! You were clearly ready for this!"

  "I do not mean that I was incapable of doing so, Trish," Koer said, their voice dipping into sad dissonance. "I mean that I was unprepared to carry the burden."

  Trish gred up at them. "What burden?! Fucking speak English! I'm tired of having to transte from Moping Affini Who's Trying To Get Out Of Helping Me!"

  After a moment's silence, during which they remained perfectly still, their eyes slipping into deep violets and indigos, Keor said, "We must keep hemerosyncretic wards secret. Even from other affini. This is why I inserted the failsafe protocol. If another affini,were to entrance you, they would surely discover your conditioning and deduce what you were. I designed your anti-memetics conditioning to be extremely delicate, to completely disintegrate if you were not entranced with a very specific induction. That's why I had to reinforce it every two weeks."

  Their remaining vines tightened around Trish, and their feather-foliage floofed out ever so slightly. "Recall how Scoparia reacted when I told her you are a hemerosyncretic ward. She has known you less than a month, and right now, I assure you, the only thing she is thinking about is how much she wants to stick every hypodermic thorn she has into you and empty the reservoir. To be a handler for a hemerosyncretic ward is to endure that feeling at all times for years on end. One must have perspective. One must understand that one is helping by not helping. Helping by harming."

  "Me being independent is not harming me!" She forcefully shoved more of Koer's vines off, and they rexed around her again. A single, spadelike leaf caught between her fingers and came away.

  "Perhaps a metaphor to make the feeling retable," Koer said, lifting their head and looking off into the distance. "In each of your wardships, you have expined your extrajudicial execution of Kenton Chadwick Paskell using surgery as a metaphor, in that you did harm to prevent a greater harm." They looked back down at Trish, each eye focusing on her, each leaf turning to face her. "This, too, is surgery. You, Trish, are my incision into the human soul."

  Something turned over inside Trish, and she felt as though her skin was tightening around her body to the point where it might snap.

  "Through this incision, I have cured a far greater harm done to the collective soul of humanity. Over the course of your wardship, your service has resulted in the direct domestication of 17,391,541 feralist terrans across the Protectorate, and you have assisted far, far more in shedding their feral beliefs and integrating peacefully into Compact society. The exact number is probably somewhere in the hundreds of millions, depending on how one controls for other NFPO efforts. Your work will continue to do so as the LTNRD continues to use future editions of Freedom's Ember for this purpose, even if you yourself are no longer a hemerosyncretic ward."

  "...seventeen million?" It felt as thought every process, every molecule in her body, ground instantly to a halt, a machine whose gears were irretrievably jammed. Her work — the thing she'd dedicated her life to — had cimed seventeen million lives?

  "I kept very close tabs on that direct domestication number. It was how I convinced myself to keep doing this even though I knew it was killing me to watch you suffer."

  "Being independent isn't suffering," Trish whispered, hugging herself.

  "I was going to do the right thing," Koer continued. "I was going to domesticate you, and I was going to spoil you rotten. I was going to make every other affini look like neglectful owners by comparison. I was roots-deep in my preparations for it, you know, before my supervisors intervened. They could see that, even with the end in sight, my condition was not meaningfully improving. They could see what I could not, that the stress of doing this work had not only caused me to develop phytoneuropathy, but had left deep-seated trauma that I had not even noticed." They hung their head. "Even now that I am no longer responsible for you in any way, when I look at you, all I can see is the hurt I've caused you, and not the happiness we've brought to countless others, or the happiness that I was going to finally, finally give to you. Keeping you as my floret would only keep on killing me, and they wouldn't allow me to do that to myself. And they were right to make me recognize that. I'm sorry."

  She wiped the tears away with her sleeve. "Don't apologize for not scrambling my fucking brain, Koer."

  Immediately, every single leaf on Koer's body stood on end. "I hate that I taught you to hold onto that disgusting belief," they growled, their voice seeming to make the ground itself shake. Their eyes shifted to a swirling carmine as they flowed to their feet. "Don't ever talk about florets that way again!" Heart in her throat, Trish could only shrink into herself as Koer began to circle her, the vines that once enfolded her retreating, trailing along behind them until they nearly trod upon them. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," they hissed. "I can't do this, I can't be the owner you need, I'm sorry."

  "I don't need an owner." Trish tried to shout it, but it came out a whimper.

  "You may not have when we first met," Koer said, not stopping in their circuit around Trish, "and perhaps you could even pull yourself up from this downward spiral even now. You are a marvelously tenacious little creature. If you choose integration, really genuinely choose it and not just as a scheme to get out of being domesticated, perhaps you can manage it. But I have left nothing to chance."

  "What do you mean?" Trish croaked.

  "I chose Scoparia very intentionally. She has many qualities I find exempry in a pet owner despite her young age. Or perhaps because of it." They shivered again. "This is not how I wanted this to end. I wanted us to have a clean break, a bittersweet parting that preserved happy memories. Then I regained full consciousness post-reblooming, checked in on you one st time, and-" They stopped, and turned to face Trish, vines drooping as they settled into a four-legged stance. The violet-indigo color had crept back into their eyes, so dark they were almost bck.

  Trish shivered, not bothering to wipe away the tears that were streaming down her face. Her teeth chattered as she looked up at the now-thoroughly-alien face of the one affini she'd ever considered a friend, the one affini she'd believed could get her out of the predicament she was in. I'm a dead woman, she thought.

  "I'm so sorry. I should have been more attentive. I should have waited until you and Scoparia had picked up where we left off. I could have held on for longer. But I thought it was finally over. I thought we were both in a better pce with me gone."

  "I don't want to be a floret." Trish could barely force the words out, her voice blocked up with fear.

  Koer let out a very humanlike sigh and lowered their head to nuzzle Trish. "Humanity as a whole did not want to be domesticated either," they said quietly. "But as a species, you are happier and healthier than you have ever been in your history, and you grow happier and healthier every day. And you are still humans. Just better. Better to each other. Better to the universe you live in. Better to yourselves."

  "Bullshit," Trish whispered.

  "Are you worse off than you were before?"

  "Rod and Meg are."

  After a heartbeat's silence, Koer spoke. "I did what I could for them, but the degree of hypnotic alteration I would have had to do to keep them stable would have been noticeable, and that might have threatened my mission with you. They were far more feral than you ever were, in the end, and they were hurting from it. But now they are happy, though I know the form that happiness takes bothers you."

  "Fuck you, Koer," Trish whispered, closing her eyes.

  "If it helps," Koer rumbled, "their domestication was my breaking point too. I decided that you had served as a hemerosyncretic ward for long enough, and began my preparations to end your mission and domesticate you. But even as I did so, my superiors began to see the effect that it was having on me. My mission had to come to an end as well — including the mission I had set for myself after yours was complete. You had done your part, more than done your part. All that was left was cleanup and ensuring that you would be taken care of." They nuzzled Trish again, a few vines slipping out to nudge stray hairs out of her face. "I am sorry. You deserved only the best, and in the end I have given you only misery and isotion. But I promise that someone else will give you the happiness you deserve. And I will heal, eventually, so please do not worry for me. In the end, we will both be okay. That is the Compact's promise to both of us."

  "Fuck you," Trish repeated.

  Another silence. When Trish finally opened her eyes, blinking away the ghosts of tears, Koer was still there, head drooped almost to the ground, one medial limb reaching up to grasp their back, their feather-foliage half-hiding her. "I think," they said quietly, "that as far as farewells go, I preferred the sunset."

  After a long pause, and a valiant effort to swallow past the brick lodged in her throat, Trish replied. "I did too."