The Alecto Initiative by Owen R. O'Neill & Jordan Leah Hunter

Author:Owen R. O'Neill & Jordan Leah Hunter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Pleiades Web Press
Published: 2013-05-05T17:00:00+00:00

The apartment was unbelievably huge; bigger than the dwellings on Parson’s Acre, bigger than almost any of the downside places they’d made brief stays at. It had two actual sleeping rooms, a large living area, a kitchen full of food that could automatically be prepared to order with an alcove to eat it in that was itself the size a small cabin, and another room that was just left over.

There were two heads—bathrooms, they called them here. Incredibly both had showers and one had an actual tub in it. She looked for the water ration and couldn’t find any. Everywhere she’d been had a water ration. Parson’s Acre had had a generous allowance and this being a Homeworld where they had actual tubs it had to be even better, but she still wondered how much it was. She assumed someone would tell her before she used it up, even though she thought that was pretty unlikely to happen.

There were beds and sofas and chairs and tables and knickknacks and decorations on the walls and a huge console. One of the sleeping rooms—bedrooms—had a few changes of clothes in an autovalet fancier than any she’d ever seen. And they had given her a xel and showed her how to call on the bots if she needed anything.

Kris wandered around feeling lost for half an hour. There was nothing to do. The console offered a truly bewildering array of options but she was just too tired to deal with it and recalling the news feeds, she shut it off. A little while later she was trying to figure out the environmental controls and the walls of the living space turned a pale peach. It actually made her jump.

“What the hell?” she muttered, recovering. She’d never seen that, not even in vids. She poked again and watched the walls fade to a pale sea green while the kitchen turned a nice sunny yellow. “Jeezus Christ.” A few pokes more and she realized what she was poking a palette control that would change the walls, ceiling, trim, and borders—even the carpet. After she turned the carpet a perfectly hideous pattern of garish bleeding rainbow colors, she decided enough was enough.

“Fuck’n weird!” Shaking her head, she reset everything to neutral. Then she walked over to the long couch and regarded it with the utmost suspicion. What did it do? Walk? Speak? Morph? Could she be confident it would remain a couch if she sat on it?

Unwilling to risk it, she sat on the floor and took out the calling card Mariwen had given her. Huron had showed her how they worked when he made her one of her own in the car. He had her press her thumb to the surface for about ten seconds and then it lit up with a soft glow. It didn’t need to be activated—it just didn’t work off-planet, he told her. “Not these anyway,” he added, implying that some did. Kris had put it in her pocket and noticed it felt slightly warm.

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