All Cats Are Beautiful

Chapter 3

Chapter 3“I have to talk to you.”

Luna turned, her coat still hanging from her shoulders, the steam still rising from the coffee cup recently placed down on her desk, the familiar green goddess design on white, the popularised image of Diana or Tiamat.

In the doorway of her office, her father stood, his expression harried, looking as if he had not slept in a very long time.

“Do you mind if I take my coat off, first?” she asked.

He frowned, shook his head, utterly failed to register the levity in her tone.

“This is big,” he said, entering the room, clutching a handful of printouts, kicking the door closed behind him so as to isolate the rest of the office from his discovery. He held the papers up, waving them before her, and, as if to emphasise their significance, added, “This is important.”

Slowly, deliberately, she removed her raincoat and crossed the office, hanging it on a peg, pausing once her hands were free to slip a hairband from her wrist and tie back her long, blonde hair in the rough approximation of a ponytail.

Dressed in a smart white trouser suit and black silk blouse, Luna found it easy to appear professional, especially when contrasted with her father, the Foundation’s de facto owner, who, despite his genius, was not a man to whom the media warmed easily. This was not to say that their relationship has always ran so smoothly; she would not have admitted it, but the resentment she had felt since childhood towards him lingered, informed her interactions with him, and no matter how much both of them pretended that the past was the past, no matter how many reconciliatory gestures they made, there remained that distance between them.

In that moment, she thought of Poppy and the idea that she might ever feel that way about her and it broke her heart.

“This,” her father said again, shaking his handful of papers, “this is what we’ve been waiting for.”

He pulled out the chair on the other side of his daughter’s desk, and slumped down into it, still clutching the papers as if they were the most important thing in the world, intent on relaying their contents, rather than simply showing them to her and allowing her to read them herself.

“You remember that ship we left in orbit around Jupiter 2? The one with all the meows in stasis awaiting human pilots? Something came across the bridge, Luna! It come through into our dimension and merged with one of the meows, tore the rest of them apart.”

Doc Labyrinth’s daughter grimaced, and she was uncertain if it was due to what she was being told about the violent fate of the slumbering meows or the fact that she intensely disliked the term Jupiter 2.

The true shape of the solar system had slowly been revealed beginning in 1999, with the discovery of Lucifer beyond the bounds of Pluto and Neptune. Following that, a further three planets, including Jupiter 2, had been sighted, as well as a vast second star in orbit 0.5 lightyears from Sol.

Despite evidence, despite the facts and despite her role within the Firmament Foundation, Luna found she often resisted the notion of such a vast expansion of what was meant when they spoke of the solar system. She disliked it not because she had a personal stake in what it meant, but because it ran contrary to what she had been taught in school, and thus threatened her sense of nostalgia when looking back at her childhood.

“W-What do you plan to do about it?” she asked, her lips unusually dry.

Her father looked at her with incredulity.

“Send out another ship, of course!” he proclaimed.

She sighed, pushing her hair back behind her ears, and taking a seat on the other side of her desk.

“Dad,” she said softly, gently, hoping to ease what surely he must have known was coming next, “do you have any idea how much that will cost?”

On the other side of the desk, her father glowered back at her with contempt.

“The cost be damned!” he proclaimed, raising his voice in the way he often did when worried that he was going to lose an argument. “This is the very reason I created the Foundation! If we don’t act on this information then we are as good as obscuring it from history, brushing it under the carpet, pretending that we are alone in the cosmos, acknowledging that our understanding of the universe has limits! Leave the cost to the bean counters, what the world needs now is to know that there is more out there, more than we could ever possibly have imagined!”

“Dad,” Luna answered with frustration, “I am the bean counter. That’s why you hired me. If you do this, you’re going to be going against the wishes of the board.”

Again, he gestured with the papers he still clutched in his hand.

“Fire the board!”

“You can’t do that, Dad.”

He frowned, falling back in the chair and crossing his arms. There was a moment of silence, and then he said:

“Convince them then.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“You want me to convince the board to let you launch another spaceship?”

He shook his head, refusing to meet her eyes.

“We don’t need to do that. There’s another one in orbit around Neptune. Let me divert it to Jupiter 2.”

She sighed.

“Dad, that vessel is out there as a part of a survey of Neptune and its moons, you know full well that it’s not one of our vessels, that it was constructed for JAXA.”

“But we built it for the Japanese!” he protested. “Without us their space agency wouldn’t have anything to send into space.”

“They paid us to build that ship for them, Dad.”

“But we still have the control codes, don’t we?”

She sighed.

“Of course.”

Doc Labyrinth shrugged.

“Activate them, then.”

“You’re risking an international incident.”

Again, he shrugged.

“They’ll thank us when we give them part credit for the first meaningful contact with alien life.”

He rose from the chair, deciding the conversation was over, and finally dropped the papers down on her desk.

“Familiarise yourself with the information, Luna. We’re on the threshold of a brand-new era in human history.”

Tentatively, she reached out and took the papers, looking down at the reams of calculations and blurry screenshots from strained stereovision feeds. The door of her office clicked shut. Her father was gone, vanishing back out into the office, members of her staff eagerly stepping out of his way.

* * * *

Eirian had planned meticulously for their relocation to Sarah Ann Island, and yet, despite such forethought, had not truly been able to predict the sheer humidity of the climate. Having lived all their life up in the dour valleys of Wales, it was hard for them to comprehend such a summer as those endured on the tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, and, as such, they were not faring well.

Sitting in a diner in the centre of town, the air conditioning billowing down above their head, and the magcat sitting on a stool next to them at the counter, they began to feel that perhaps such a move had been ill-considered.

A heavy sigh escaped their lips, the milkshake on the counter before them all but drained of its contents, the sole remainder being the pale sludge at the bottom of the glass and the thick lines of viscous residue that streaked its sides.

It was stupid, they thought, coming all the way out here on a whim, thinking that just being on the same island where their father had spent the latter years of his life might help them make more sense of the way he had lived. Likewise, the magcat that had apparently been with him up until the end was no help, a creature of surprisingly poor temperament and slovenly behaviour.

On one level, Eirian knew that the creature was a sort of computer, a biological machine originally intended for a human mind and running at the behest of a machine operating system, but they could not fathom who exactly would allow an AI to grow into behaviour like the magcat exhibited without hard rebooting it and starting again.

Despite this, they had a sort of fondness for the creature, and even if it was possible to reset the operating systems of homunculi, which they supposed it must be—at least someone at the Foundation must have made provisions for it, they guessed—Eirian thought that they would not have considered it, no matter how poor the creature’s manners.

Behind them, they became faintly aware of the bell above the door ringing, but it did not really seem to matter. Instead, they remained there, seated before the almost empty glass, considering their magcat and their late father.

“Tea, please, milk,” said a voice at their side, surprising them slightly as they registered someone else was at the counter.

The magcat opened one eye suspiciously.

A girl, Eirian registered with surprise.

From the pocket of a well-worn pink hoody, she drew a thin phone roughly the size of a playing card and placed it down on the surface of the counter, watching as the space around it lit up to confirm payment. One of the new tarot phones, Eirian realised at once, the kind you could use to summon homunculi without having a decorative card with the creature’s sigil.

They glanced the girl over, trying to understand the confusion of her wardrobe, the mismatched baseball boots, one apple red, the other bright pink, neither of them especially well tied. On the white cap of the pink shoe she had drawn a chequered chessboard pattern with a black felt tip pen, whilst the red shoe boasted a more elaborate and colourful representation of stars and rainbows.

Her disastrous dress decisions didn’t end there either, for in the fringe of her freshly-dyed powder pink hair were roughly ten or fifteen hairclips and slides, some shaped as stars, others decorated in polka dot or zebra striped fashion, a confusion of shapes and sizes that Eirian desperately wanted to believe held a pattern, but instinctively knew did not.

Sensing she was being examined, the girl turned to look at them, her expression a faint frown, one born more from confusion than displeasure.

Whatever the case, Eirian blushed, being famously bad at communicating with girls.

“M-My name’s Eirian,” they blurted out, “pleased to meet you.”

She smiled faintly, a non-committal gesture.

“I’m Poppy.”

“P-Pleased to meet you,” Eirian repeated, then realised they had repeated themself, and, panicked, searched for a new topic of conversation to draw attention away from their stupidity. “I-Is that a new tarot phone?”

Poppy lifted the phone up and turned it over in her hand, looking down at it as if seeing it for the first time.

“I suppose so,” she murmured.

Eirian nodded with enthusiasm.

“Wow, those things are really expensive, aren’t they?”

She shrugged, and slid the thin device up the sleeve of her hoody.

“I wouldn’t know.”

A teacup in a saucer was placed before her, warm steam rising from the water and milk within.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, smiling weakly, and lifted her cup and saucer up and turned away.

Think, Eirian, a voice cried at the back of their mind. Say something cool, something that will make her remember you!

“Ah, would you like to meet my magcat?”

The animal lifted his head and glanced sourly at Eirian as if he somehow knew that he was being used as a bartering tool.

Poppy turned slightly, looked at them over her shoulder, still holding the cup and saucer, and regarded the magcat sadly.

“No thanks,” she said quietly, “I don’t much like homunculi.”

In their chest, Eirian felt their heart sink.

* * * *

The Ayanami, eleventh of a grand number of twenty-four commissioned Fubuki-class vessels, received its orders around 01:42 JST. It took automated monitoring systems in Tanegashima a full six minutes to recognise that the vessel had begun to drift off course around Neptune and was on a new trajectory that would take it far into the outer solar system, by which time the craft had already been designated anew as FF-00 by the Firmament Foundation, or Rei, as the newspapers later that day would identify it, being the Japanese character for zero.

By the time an emergency meeting of the Japanese cabinet had gathered at 03:15 JST, the matter was already being fast tracked for escalation to the UN and accusations of the Firmament Foundation’s bad faith made very public by frustrated officials.

None of this mattered, all that was significant in the departure of the newly-christened FF-00 from Neptune’s orbit was that it was moving deliberately and at speed through what was still termed international waters in acknowledgement of the legal precedent of maritime laws, and was clear on its way to Jupiter 2 before anything could be done to prevent it.

On board the huge craft, one by one, automated systems began to activate a skeleton crew of necessary meows, each one specialising in the maintenance and revitalisation of the functions required to prepare the ship for arrival at its new destination.

Two weeks, Firmament Foundation President Luna Labyrinth had said to gathered UN officials and representatives of the Japanese government via a FaceCam conference call: Two weeks to allow the Foundation to confirm vital new data of high significance to the human race and then FF-00 would be returned to the Japanese people and significant reparations would be made by the company.

The response had been one of disgruntled resentment, but, with a thin smile, she had already known how it would end. No government could withstand the Foundation, not with so much of its money invested in propping up said institutions. It was never said openly, but it was information that was out there, information that was hard to misinterpret; to fall out of favour with a corporation the size of the Firmament Foundation was to run the risk of considerable economic loss and budgetary concerns, and certainly no country dependent on the Western stock market really wanted to chance such a possibility.

Thus, it was agreed, and without further discussion, FF-00, commonly known as Rei, formerly the Ayanami, continued on its two week journey out into the furthest reaches of the solar system.