bloodyrosemccoy | The Geography of Main Street: New (Metaphorical) Horizons

Prologue and Index here!

Previous Chapter!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

Note that the formatting is a little weird; you might have to sidescroll through certain parts to read all of it.

Do I have feelings about group projects? You bet I do!

Also, the pressure to change the world as a kid is strong when you take things literally. It's really difficult.

But hey, social media opens up new horizons even if your home doesn't have a horizon!

---

I wound up doing most of the project by myself, of course. I don't know what Mr. Sordell expected; the others didn't take it seriously. The work they did was halfhearted and slovenly, so I had to redo a lot of it anyway.

Dad had suggested that we start with observations, so while the others went to practice and games, I found two colonies of feral sixcats to observe: one that gathered near the library's garden, and one that roamed the maintenance alleys behind Plim's and the surrounding businesses. (I suspected the latter was Toast's original colony. I wondered if I should put her back with them, but Dad said she seemed happy where she was.)

Dad's tablet was immensely useful. I found an old charger in a junk pile behind Plim's, so I could hang onto it indefinitely. I was learning where and how to look for information on ecomanagement and feral sixcat colonies. And Dad's various experimental notes were excellent models for my own studies. But the amount of helpful information in the Greater Galactic Database meant I could find help with that, too.

Also, the sixcat videos were adorable.

I watched a lot of them, because obviously it was good to get a sense of their behavior.

It wasn't that I really minded doing most of the project myself. I'd been planning to do the whole thing solo anyway. It was just harder when I had to work around my teammates. Plus, they were having a fine time with the Ball finals. I wasn't entirely clear on how the teams worked, but the junior division was heading toward the championship, and Thoren's team—the 120 Bolts—was doing unusually well. I didn't go to all the games—watching sports was even more boring than playing them—but Dad and I went to the big ones, and I figured doing most of Thoren's project was a way to support him by freeing him up to focus on Ball.

It was better support than what I'd offered when I'd been on the team. I was a terrible Ball player.

Still, the project I—we—turned in at the end of the school cycle felt woefully underdone. It was a preliminary report, as Dad said; an assessment of the colonies' overall health, behaviors, and impact on the ecosystem. I'd meticulously listed observations on behavior and physical condition on all of the sixcats I had ID'd. Thoren's reports on his colony was fairly haphazard. Neither Jod's nor Nielli's data on their respective colonies was anything like usable; if I was going to carry on the project later, I'd definitely have to redo it. But I left their reports as part of the project, because it was supposed to be a group effort.

We got top marks.

Nobody congratulated me the way they did Thoren after he scored the point that won the 120 Bolts the cycle championship. That feat earned a pizza party at Linjen's Diner, with Grandma presiding over the rowdy team and their families. I sat in a corner booth, out of the way of the noise (Grandma would chide me for "sulking" if she noticed, but she seemed busy) and told myself the pizza was also a reward for my hard work, because it had allowed the team to concentrate on training.

And I still felt as though the project was unfinished. I hadn't really changed the station. I had to do more. This was just the preliminary.

Jod's colony was behind Linjen's. They were probably getting active now, foraging the maintenance alleys.

I glanced at the party, where the team was now raiding the soda fountain, mixing the flavors together to make some kind of abomination in a pitcher. Foam and syrup were getting everywhere.

I had finished my slice. Quietly I slipped out the public entrance and went around to the back.

I was in luck: a calico sixcat had found itself a discarded box; it was having a tug-of-war with something else—presumably another sixcat—obscured by the pods.

A moment later, however, I realized my presumption was faulty when a decidedly sapient-sounding voice started trash-talking the sixcat.

"You think you can take me?" it said. "Go ahead on, you mangy fuzzball! By krag, that pizza is mine, and you will rue the day—"

"Hello?" I called.

The sixcat started back with a yelp, letting go of the box; whoever was pulling at it must have gone backward into the junk along the walls, because there was a crash and clatter. Spinning, the sixcat flattened its ears and hissed at me. I looked away so as not to annoy it. After a moment, it bolted.

The voice had fallen silent when I'd called out. I peeked around the pods, wondering who would fight a sixcat for a pizza.

Nobody, it turned out. There was nothing in that corner except a pizza box with a footprint and bizarre clawmarks all over it, and a pile of red and silver junk.

Now that was odd; there was no way out of the alley for a person except past me, unless that person had the speed and agility of a sixcat. But I had definitely heard a voice.

Was it a hallucination? I didn't think so, but that was how hallucinations worked, wasn't it?

I shook myself. Maybe a trick echo, or a hidden door? Really, it didn't matter. I was here for the cats. Now, where had—

"Dreedo!"

I jumped again, feeling guilty, and Grandma marched over to me.

"Sulking, I see," she observed caustically. "You could be part of the fun, you know, if you joined the team again."

"I wasn't—" There were so many wrong assumptions in that comment that I wasn't sure where to start.

"Come along back inside," she sighed. "Can't stay in one place, no respect, stubborn … just like your father."

I followed her, reassured for some reason. Dad was stubborn like me. Maybe I could put that stubbornness to work for the good of the station.

#

Hello! I hope you don't mind me sending you a message. I'm Dreedo, from the neuro-med forum where you were asking about weird symbionts. I saw you had experience working with ferals and I wanted to ask you a question.

cool, go ahead

So when you've got a feral colony, what do you feed them? How do you stop them from overpopulating?

haha, wait no i live with feral ARHODS, sounds like u got feral ANIMALS

Oh, sorry! I didn't realize there were feral people!

no its funny!

Your bio said you were a paquo, though, not an arhod.

ya i am but i live on a feral arhod ship they saved me when my parents died in a hyper accident

u dont know ferals?

they're usually wanderers. thye're not into like civilizzation and bureucrasy. sometimes theire pirates but sometimes just mercenaries or traders ectcetra

>link:infowiki:article:feral_culture_in_arhods

Oh, that's interesting! Yeah, I'm talking about feral sixcats.

I'm trying to figure out what to do about the ones in my neighborhood.

ok so i looked up sixcat and i guess its a feavah term for a kalkurru tusit. r u from feavah?

Close! I'm from Bright Beacon Station.

krag, SREIOSULY???

[query:infowiki:definition:krag

krag

Rredrra

1. mud; clay

2. (vulgar, slang) (interjection) expression of annoyance or surprise]

wait how does that even work u guys dont use supercom right? i call drombash

[query:infowiki:drombash

drombash

Rredra

1. Any type of edible leaves, esp. salad greens

2. (vulgar, slang) False or exaggerated statements; hyperbolic or outlandish statements not meant to be taken at face value; nonsense

No, it's not!

My dad's a doctor, so he gets a dispensation. I kind of stole his computer.

haha awesome

do u have pics of ur feral sixcats?

No, but I could take one of my pet sixcat.

If I can figure out the camera.

Hang on.

>image:IMAGE_0231

stoppppp, so cute

Why stop?

no i mean,, zeyre so cute im gonna DIE

I guess that's good?

wats zeir name

Toast.

HELLOOOOOO TOAST I LOVE U

maybe send me a pic of u too so I know ur not drombash. ill send u one of me. tell me to do something goofy so u kno i just took it. no perv stuff obvs

Okay.

Pull your left ear flat and cross your eyes

>image:zarlasaysBLEHHHHH

im Zarla btw

Hi, Zarla!

ok, now you put your pinky finger in your nose!

Can I do next to my nose instead?

UGHHHHH FINE

^'v'~

>image:IMAGE_0232

wow ur eyes are SUPER blue

[query:infowiki:paquo_color_vision

Paquo Color Vision

paquos are deuteranopic, able to see blue, yellow, and brown]

Yeah, I got them from my dad. My brother's are brown like our mom's.

What's perv stuff?

serouisly?

u kno when pervs ask u to do sexy things so they can get off and u have to block them

They do? Why?

ok maybe u ARE new to the database

ur lucky u found me first and not some creepo

ill teach u the rules

>link:video:The Smart Kid's Guide To Database Safety

but i guess u already picked up on it bc u said u didn't wnat to do ur finger in ur nose, u didnt just do it bc i asked u to, so thats good

Sorry. It just felt gross.

no thats good! means u can set bonduaries

its ok not to do things u don't want to do!

u still there

Yeah. I was just thinking about what you said.

ok?

I'm VERY okay. Thanks for your help.

just make sure u dont wind up liek THIS guy

>image:GoF_too_many_tusits

Haha! What is that from?

idk some old show

wanna watch the vid together?

the safety one?

its corny but its the basics

its also REAL funny bc it was made by total dorks

we can make fun of it

if u want

I'd love to!

#

I didn't go to station status meetings as often as Civic Hygiene recommended. Yes, of course I wanted to Take An Interest In My Community, but these meetings seemed to be about as productive as group projects. Nobody listened to anybody, least of all to a kid like me. But today I had Dad and Thoren with me, and Grandma in the Focal section of the audience, and I had a mission.

(Sometimes I wondered why the Focal Citizens were all koranos, with no paquos at all. Had only koranos qualified? That seemed statistically improbable. But flukes happen.)

The attendees who hadn't paid attention to the docket murmured when "Thoren and Dreedo Grewell" were called forward to make a petition. Thoren had promised to do the talking, but—rather to my surprise—he seemed to freeze when looking at the sea of responsible citizens before us. They had all seen him win the Big Game, but this was apparently different. He clutched his notes so tightly he was in danger of tearing them.

I hadn't prepared any notes, myself; I didn't feel I needed a Plan once I got on the stage. (All the stuff before and after this moment—the signing up for a petition, getting dressed, getting to 180 Hall, sitting on folding chairs while others droned and bickered, etc.—all of that had to go into my Plan. But I had never found notes anything but a distraction when I was speaking.) I stepped toward the mic.

"Hi," I said. "Well, you probably read the summary of my proposal. I'm going to start a program to improve the feral sixcat population's quality of life, and I just wanted to … let you all know about it."

Thoren seemed to recover. "We've been doing research on the colonies around the station."

(That we was doing some work; he hadn't done anything since the project had been turned in, but he had done the best job on the project, and he'd offered to do the talking here, because the buildup to this moment had caused my mind to start eating itself.)

"I'm going to start putting out vitamins that should appeal to them, but not to the Feavah-native life," I said. "I can special order it. And I'm going to start a trap-neuter-release program. I've studied"—I hoped nobody would think to check whether the information was available in the library—"and experts say this is a good way to control the population. Dr. Kellek has agreed to do the surgeries. But I need …"

"We're having a fundraiser," Thoren said when I faltered.

Oh, and there was that, too. He and Grandma had worked out a way to get a bit of money through a bake sale.

So we went on outlining the plan, and the citizens listened politely. My biggest hope was that they wouldn't get in my way. It was a big project, and I didn't want anybody to interfere.

At last I was finished, and I opened to questions. Most of them I could answer easily, until one person asked, "Did you talk to any of the ecoengineers about this?"

The sheer obviousness crashed into me. I hadn't. Why hadn't I? How had that not occurred to me? They'd brought the sixcats here in the first place; they should have come up with something to help the sixcats. I had thought they didn't have any plans, but maybe they did have one and I was stepping on it. Why hadn't I thought of—

"Yeah," Thoren said into the mic. "No problems there."

I couldn't even react. That was a baldfaced lie. He couldn't misrepresent things like that—

But we had already moved on. After a few more questions, the Station Director said, "Thank you, boys. We'll look forward to the bake sale and keep an eye on your traps." He spoke too loudly to us, like Mx. Plim. "Thank you for your dedication to the betterment of Bright Beacon."

Next on the docket was Dad. His proposal was slightly scandalous: after another death on the ore asteroid, he had decided to request a stationwide dispensation to fit the farm and mining equipment with safety sensors.

"Much of our machinery has the software and the hardware already," he pointed out. "It was deactivated after the war—and understandably so, of course, as we reassessed its impact on society. But I believe it is imperative to reactivate this specific tech, as the lives of our citizens are our responsibility."

The crowd had started muttering as he spoke. Josden Coralym—Jod's dad—stood before he'd even finished.

"When you say 'our citizens,'" he said, "are you not referring to vocationals? Radial and Tangential Citizens?"

Dad looked at him steadily. "It is true, such changes would primarily benefit those levels of citizenry. But I had expected 'citizens' to be the operative word. Again, I want to save the lives of Bright Beacon citizens, regardless of level."

Mr. Coralym fluffed. "No one is suggesting their lives aren't worth as much as other citizens'," he said, which was a relief because that was exactly what it had sounded like he was suggesting. "But it's worth pointing out that they are the citizens most in want of opportunities for self-improvement."

That muscle in Dad's cheek twitched. "You are suggesting accidents are the results of character flaws?"

Mr. Coralym fluffed more. "Not all of them," he hedged, with a glance at Grandma. I suspected he was only just now remembering about Dad's sister Mezzorie.

I never thought of her as "Aunt Mezzorie," though I guess she technically was. But I only knew her through stories Dad told. Even behavioral intervention had not saved her from getting herself in trouble. She had run off one day when she and Dad were teenagers and wound up on the wrong side of an airlock.

It had been tragic, like the Palbert boy's death. Our grandfather had never gotten over it. He'd died barely a year later of a broken heart.

"What I'm saying," Mr. Coralym went on, "is that these accidents are an opportunity to learn and build character."

"I see," Dad said. "Then I would suggest we consider whose character they shall build, and what we should learn from them."

That debate went on for a while, until they decided not to add it to the official docket for the next Admin Session. Dad could re-petition at the next meeting if he got enough people to back it.

"Though I warn you," the Director said, "not all of the equipment still has that hardware installed. Which brings us to the next item of concern: the rise in delinquency and the need for a stronger policing force."

And they were off to that item in the agenda. The meeting went on interminably. I'd tried to prepare myself, but as they bickered endlessly and uninformedly, I felt a scream building somewhere under my ribcage. I excused myself before it could escape and hid in the bathroom for the rest of the meeting.

I hadn't brought a book. But I had brought Dad's tablet. I'd learned enough from Nielli to mute the sound so I wouldn't get caught. And I wanted to talk with Zarla again, because I realized I had forgotten so say something important the first time I had talked to her.

I stayed in the bathroom for the rest of the meeting, until Grandma sent Thoren to get me so we could go home.

#

Hey, I wanted to apologize.

wat for

I realized I didn't say this before, but I'm sorry about your parents.

thanks

I don't know much about hyper accidents, but it sounds harrowing.

it rlly was

You were there?

it was a hyperstorm

pretty nasty

i almost died too

Scary!

Were you hurt?

Besides being sad about your parents, obviously.

i guess not

idk maybe

wierd stuff happens in the Hole

[query:infowiki:definition:Hole

Hole

slang term for hyperspace

Like what?

theres all sorts of STUFF out there

i even got decompressed

Wow, that's crazy.

yah

I've never had any sort of ordeals like that. I guess I'm lucky.

i think im pretty lucky too but yah i wish my parents were alive

Well, my mother died, but that was when I was a baby.

I barely remember her, so I guess that doesn't count.

oh thats to bad!!!

Come to think of it, I don't remember her at ALL.

I remember a few things about life on Feavah, but not her.

oh u lived planetside?

Just until Dad finished medical school. We moved back up here when my brother and I were tiny

I think my grandma took it as a personal affront that our mom died before moving back.

ur grandma sounds nice -ovo^

She's

Sorry, she's just a little snippy sometimes

srry. im sure shes great but thats messed up

but i guess sometimes i get mad at my parents for dying. its not their falut but our captain says feelings arent smart sometimes and its ok to feel them as long as u anlyze them & deal with them healthily

Haha, yeah, feelings can be a mess!

That's good advice, though!

EXP: PQ8?96
DATE 13.23.89

Overall questionnaires report positive outcomes: focus, better school performance, and decrease in hyperactivity symptoms (see chart).

Negative symptom reports are rare; only E6 is reporting listlessness alternating with hypomania and myoclonic jerks. However, at follow-up, E3, E4, E6, and E10 present with flat affect.

PLAN: Continue to monitor.

Next Chapter!

The Geography of Main Street: New (Metaphorical) Horizons

no subject