The Hornet Doctor's Hucow

CHAPTER 1

NOVA

The pain never goes away.

It retreats at moments, just outside of attention, but it’s always there.

It started the day Earth died.

They told us not to watch as the planet splintered into innumerable pieces, each turning to flame and dissolving into the merciless void of space.

But I had to watch. I had to see for myself.

I had to kill the lingering hope that somewhere, our little blue planet was still out there, waiting for us.

I lay wedged against the viewport of the ark ship for hours.

One Hell of an eighteenth birthday.

First, my hips ached. Then my neck, my shoulders. Then my wrists and calves.

They never stopped aching.

Two decades have since passed, counted by the atomic chip in my arm that spits out time in familiar Earth units even though the planet no longer exists.

I was in denial for the first five years. Brave for a decade after that. I might even have seemed happy in my job as a Solver. Using my whole brain let me leave my body.

The ICSS—Intergalactic Coalition of Sentient Species—saved us, but they weren’t our saviors.

They kept as many humans alive as they could; that was true.

While other species were rescued only as DNA or a select few individuals, the ICSS worked tirelessly to keep over ninety percent of humans alive after the cataclysm.

They said it was because our self-awareness exceeded a certain consciousness threshold, so it was the right thing to do.

Maybe some of them believed that. But there was another truth: humans are useful.

Compared to other sapient species, we’re small, nimble, adaptable. We don’t require much food. We’re easy to keep alive. And we lack the higher senses—consciousness energy, time strings, gravity threads—that make the ICSS go ‘round.

So, we’re easy to keep in the dark.

We’re not slaves—we’re too well cared for and offered too much autonomy for that to be true. But even this kindness is a calculation. Happy humans do better work. The ICSS is smart enough, knows us well enough, to indulge our curiosity and craving for choice.

It’s like being a prize sled dog. A life of hard work, but nobody could accuse a pampered, eager dog jumping at the harness, raring to go, of being unhappy.

We’ve been given the opportunity to do satisfying work, mostly in service of maintaining and expanding the city ships that are now humanity’s refuge.

We’re scattered across the galaxy in whatever orbits can support our needs, chunked out in populations of a few hundred million here, half a billion there.

The city ships combine tight, efficient personal quarters with sprawling atriums and bio-domes providing near 360-degree views of the host planet and the depths of space beyond.

Special coatings on the glass dynamically control radiation, ensuring that the light is pleasantly bright, but never dangerous.

I used to live on a city ship nicknamed Neo Terra, which orbits a gorgeous gas giant, Vaetar III, streaked with storms of brilliant violet and blazing orange.

Since the planet isn’t traversable, the city ship has especially large and diverse atriums. Some are dedicated entirely to agriculture, large enough to support populations of the genetically modified chickens, goats, and bees that the ICSS provisioned us with.

Neo Terra is one of the largest of the human city ships, but even it’s dwarfed by the host planet’s moons. There’s a sister ship in an opposite orbit, almost as large, called Neo Gaia.

The ICSS tech is incredibly efficient, recycling almost everything and relying primarily on solar energy.

Our city ships remind me of the ecosystem-in-a-jar I made for science class when I was ten.

In theory, it would still be going strong now, nearly thirty years later—if it hadn’t turned to ash along with the rest of Earth.

I might be more grateful, even happy, with my life now if I were a little dumber. If I didn’t see the gossamer threads that bind us, almost invisible.

If I didn’t have dreams of Earth crumbling into fiery ruin, reminding me every night of what I’ve lost, restarting that horrible ache deep in my bones.

Being a Solver was satisfying. I spent my days completing math problems and riddles with other clever, curious humans. Sometimes, the purpose was clear: we’d calculate the bearing coefficients for a new structure in the city ship, or improve a chemical process for air recycling.

Other times, the puzzles were totally abstract. A murder mystery. A set of stones to stack according to precise rules.

Maybe those were equal to some other problem through arcane algebra beyond our human brains.

Or maybe those were to gift us some fun. An enrichment exercise.

The ICSS operators who worked with us were mostly Avioids, sapients like anthropomorphic birds capable of mimicking human speech without much accent.

They learned English and all our languages so they could converse with us directly, developing bonds deeper than those enabled by our neural translator implants.

With their colorful feathers and short stature, it was hard to find them threatening.

But I noticed something. They didn’t know why the computers served us each puzzle either. Every city ship had a primary computer that optimized every aspect of living. When a problem could be more efficiently or creatively solved by humans than by its own inner cores, it served that problem to us.

If anyone in the ICSS knew how that computer worked, they didn’t live on the city ship with us. At times, our Avioid operators knew as little as we did about the machine’s incomprehensible inner workings.

After more than fifteen years working as a node in that computer, I noticed patterns. And one particular problem set caught my eye.

It was a decay problem where a complex set of variables caused an output line to rapidly drop.

Our job was to keep that line as high as possible.

Each variable was just a letter with an equation of its own, totally abstracted.

We developed optimal solves for dozens of little branches of that problem, and the best we could do on that main line was hold it at ninety-seven point seven three percent.

The week after, we didn’t work, forced to stay in our cots on lockdown—a new virus had mutated and spread, and it was particularly vicious.

Deaths were rare on the city ship, but that virus was deadly. Horrifyingly deadly.

Almost three percent of the ship’s population died.

To be exact…

Two point two seven percent.

The exact amount we couldn’t save in our optimization problem.

I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep.

Had this been inevitable, and we were heroes, saving lives every time we drove the output number higher?

Or were we complicit in some sick experiment, some brutal culling of the weak?

I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d noticed. The Avioids we worked with were genuinely anxious, equally grieved. They had no idea.

I was quarantined for fear that my symptoms were from the virus, despite the negative test results. The symptoms were from the virus—I just didn’t contract it directly.

The only reason I had the exact casualty percentage is that I’d calculated it myself. It had never been included in the official reports.

If the outbreak had been planned, and I saw too much, perhaps the computer would think me better off dead.

Or, if it really had all been benevolent, how could I subject my friends to this same bone-chilling doubt?

My cubicle partner had lost his elderly mother.

The revelation that we were somehow involved would break him.

Which variable, if nudged this way or that, would have spared his mother?

How many others would it have killed to do so?

I held all those questions within myself, like a cyst hardening around a different kind of deadly pathogen.

The pain was the worst it had ever been. I could hardly walk, let alone work.

The ICSS doctors ran every test, tried every drug. I did hypnosis and psychotherapy. But I never spilled that dark secret of my heart. I couldn’t.

The pain got worse and worse.

I mustered the strength to go back to work, but it was mostly to say goodbye.

They could tell, could see the exhaustion in my eyes. They told me retirement would be nice.

We all knew I’d be bored out of my mind.

I didn’t plan on retiring, anyway.

The ICSS had tried every legal drug.

I’d solved enough equations that had the patterns of illegal drug smuggling to know that it happened, and at what scale.

So, I assigned myself a problem. I worked it on pen and paper, hidden in cyphers in the pages of my private journal, one of the few places the city’s computer couldn’t read or track.

Grief journaling, I explained when they asked me why I spent such long hours bent over those pages.

I was running variables.

And then I had my answer. The perfect time, the perfect place, to make my escape.

I hurt as much as I ever did, but I had a plan, a purpose. I walked smoothly and confidently down the halls of the city ship one last time.

Then, I slipped onto a star barge holding unrecyclable waste and low-value exports, making myself busy with a tablet so nobody would question my presence.

Certain vulnerabilities in the system were permitted because closing them would cost too much in terms of rigidity and mistrust. When humans feel mistrusted, they tend to earn that mistrust. Vice versa, trust inspires trust.

So, there are always little gaps like this to slip through.

In the quiet moment when the transport ship closed its doors and disengaged from Neo Terra with me still aboard, I became free.

And a fugitive.

For the first couple years, I was alive again. I could always find a distraction from the constant ache. A new person to meet, a new drug to try.

We partied and skulked around the borders of ICSS space, in corners of starports and back rooms of taverns.

I drank and gambled with all kinds of sapients, each strange and wonderful to my human mind: six-limbed salamander-like Urodeloids; humorless sphere-shaped Euclideans which roll about and vibrate their whole bodies to speak; quadrupedal Spirewolves and their delicate prehensile whiskers, more dextrous and sensitive than even human fingers.

Whenever I was sober enough to think clearly, I used my mind to find a job and make some cash. I used that cash to buy enough drugs to forget about my pain—and my job. Then the cycle continued.

Every time I numbed out, the pain returned with a vengeance. So I took more and more of whatever drug was within reach.

I had a close call with a synthetic opioid. Too close.

I sobered up. Swore off hard drugs.

This past year has broken me.

Two decades of constant pain.

I sit out behind an industrial loading dock on a dusty planet, smoking a joint with my coworker, a crow Avioid I call Percy.

It’s not really cannabis, but it’s the next best thing. It’s one of the few drugs I permit myself now, and only on the worst days.

I run the books for this little smuggling operation. Lately, even basic addition makes my head swim.

“You should go to Zairion Prime,” Percy says. “Become one of those… what are they called? Hucows? Wish I could do that…” They tap the ash off the end of the joint and hand it to me.

“Can’t get assigned to a clinic unless you’re in the system,” I say. I’d looked into it. I’d looked into anything that claimed to alter sensation.

“Oh, the clinic sounds horrible. I mean as a pet.”

“A pet?” Now, this is new.

“You sound skeptical, but hear me out. Taken care of, pampered… not a care in the world…”

“Nice on paper, I guess. But lactating constantly doesn’t sound that comfortable.

” The sapients of Zairion Prime are mostly Arthropoids, centaur-like creatures with humanoid torsos and bodies that resemble various bugs.

Apparently, they need a lot of calcium to maintain their exoskeletons, which makes them crave mammalian milk.

The ICSS fancies it up with their clinics, but basically, they tend humans like livestock. I assume this pet thing is even more so. Like owning your own cow or coop of chickens.

“I wish I could lactate,” Percy sighs.

I raise a brow at them.

They flick a feathery arm at me. “Don’t judge.”

I take another deep pull from the joint. “Actually, that might be better than this. No offense.”

“None taken. Your moping is depressing.”

I scoff, shooting them an incredulous glare. “I do not mope!”

Percy’s voice quiets. “I know. That makes it sadder.”

I take a deep breath and sigh. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“I heard they’re doing this new thing. One of my cousins worked with Sylvus—”

“The Sylvus?”

“Yeah.” Percy’s dark feathers puff up with pride. “Like I was saying, he runs the black market for pet hucows.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” I mutter. “He runs the black market for everything.”

The Arachnoid is known for his ironclad contracts—and the gruesome fates that befall those who break them. Arachnoids generally are a key part of trade and commerce across the ICSS—the contracts are effectively magical, able to detect intent and capable of enforcing their terms supernaturally.

The whole thing creeps me out.

“He used to be extremely selective about candidates,” Percy explains. “Only naturally submissive humans were accepted, and it was all figured out on the blacknet ahead of time. But I heard they just opened things up. You could go talk to them.”

“I could go… talk to them? About becoming a mindless milk-producing machine?”

“Milk-producing pet.” Percy sighs wistfully.

Silence stretches between us. “Percy, why are you being so nice to me?”

Their dark feathers splay, then settle. They sigh. “There’s a big neon target on your back. You keep the books a little too well. People can’t get away with shit. I’ve already gotten three offers to take you out of the picture. Shitty offers, but still. The price keeps going up.”

“Ah.” I pull out my little notebook full of cyphers and flip to a page. Red pen circles today’s date. “Right on schedule.”

Percy tilts their head at me. “You knew this was going to happen?”

“It was statistically likely. Thanks for not killing me yet.” I stretch my leg, grunting at the sharp pain in my knee. “I guess.”

Percy chuckles, and the sound tips toward a caw. “We had a good run. That’s worth something. What is it you humans say? You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

I laugh and take one last pull from the joint. “Yeah. So this is my goodbye present?”

Percy takes the filter from me and finishes it off, grinding the butt into the dirt with their scaly foot. “Half of it. The other half is that I can get you on a shuttle. Anywhere you want to go. Personally, I recommend Zairion Prime.”

Ah. So Percy did some research for me out of guilt.

I find a wry grin and shake my head, laughing. “You know what? Sure. Why the fuck not? I’ve tried every other drug in this god-forsaken universe. Zairion Prime it is.”