Wild States

Volume 1: Eyes Open - Issue 2: Kale and the Needle

Wild States is a new speculative fiction serial by the Sparrow System, set 30 years in our future where Species Affirming Therapy has been normalized but comes under threat of a very familiar-sounding reactionary administration. Volume 1 of Wild States will be published sequentially here on Substack every Friday. Don’t miss the next issue: be sure to subscribe for free to receive Wild States directly in your email inbox!

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Wild States
Eyes Open

2
Kale and the Needle

Johnson Space Center, January 2057

“Kale Juarez, the first therian in space.” That’s what he’d go down as. Not just that, the first manned (or lizarded?) mission to Jupiter! It was going to be livestreamed, nationally—the energy hit him like a wave and Kale knew how to surf.

“First therian in space,” he repeated under his breath. He wondered if it was really true, or if he was just the first one lucky enough to have access to SAT. He was definitely the only one lucky enough for SAT-5X. Either way, he’d better put on a damn good show. It was hard to get him to care about other people, but other critters were a different story.

And the clipboards were about to fuck it all up.

The clipboards—his middle-management handlers with an intern cowering somewhere behind them—had met him moments ago, at the door to the space elevator. They had also met him yesterday and last week and last month, all on the same petty but half-hearted mission from the administration.

It was like the admin was having some kind of policy seizure with Kale Juarez: there was probably no greater American hero. And he was a green-scaled, antenna-rocking, fork-tongued, hindclawed, therian-as-fuck lizard, and he rarely shut up about it.

He looked around the clipboards. All middle-management, all human, all white, all muttering and spineless. Some things never changed. But some things did. He was proof of that. Or he was going to be, if this last hurdle of dipshits didn’t have something to say about it.

“You’ve had your anti-rads?” had been Dr. William’s first question. He nodded. Guess they felt they needed to boost his system even more. Shit made him nauseous for a week until it finally started setting in.

“I took all my pills you prescribed me, doc.”

“We just have to do a last check before we clear you for the mission.”

Kale’s eyes widened, his vertical slits displaying. “Motherfucker, we are on the elevator. What did you plan to do if I didn’t pass these checks?”

They didn’t meet his eyes. Finally, Vera spoke up in a small voice. “The administration, uhm…wanted to make sure we—”

“—found an excuse to kick me off the mission?”

The room turned into the scared, hurried nos that usually meant yes.

“We just need to make sure you’re mission ready.”

He slammed his balled claw on the thankfully nigh-indestructible transparent alloy, barely noticing as their cabin climbed the massive, low-orbital structure and began to sail above the horizon. Which he had planned to savor watching. “We. Have. Fought. For. This. You have fought for this. You know damn well whatever paperwork they cooked up was made to stop this mission! Because this administration sure as hell doesn’t like that some therian fucker’s rolling around in their sky, huh?”

Dead silence.

“I say you stamp what you need to stamp, sign what you need to sign, or you can kiss this whole fucking mission goodbye. Or does Donaldson strike you as really scientifically fucking curious? You think he’ll put another one of you in there? You think that’s what you’re getting?”

Again, no one met his eyes. Time was a flat circle around clipboards. Finally the intern of all people spoke up.

“U-uhm, excuse me, Mr. Juarez, sir…” the intern’s voice fell to a whisper and Kale beckoned him closer impatiently. He walked forward in timid little steps.

“Uhm, they had me print out these forms, they—they really are standard procedure. I understand what you’re saying about the administration, but—well, we only picked things we knew you could pass, and this cabin is being recorded.”

Juarez moved one of his eyes up to a black sphere that housed a camera. He poured a cold, patient, reptilian hatred into his monocular gaze.

“S-s-sso if we can just continue. I promise nothing here will stop the mission.” He mouthed the next part away from the camera’s angle. “I made sure.”

He’d have better made sure, thought Kale with a strong but failing poker face. Today was the first manned mission to Jupiter, and there was not a soul alive (and capable) of piloting a damn space vehicle under these parameters except for one dumb motherfucker who didn’t care for people much anyway. They put him in solitary to make sure he could handle the isolation. They opened the door two weeks later to find him meditating.

Kale was built different, even before he built himself different with genetic recombination in detail. The suite of customized organs and specialized cybernetics offered radiation resistance, pressure change resistance, g-force resistance and the ability to hold his breath for thirty minutes—before his astronaut training. Zero-gravity environments barely phased him, and he already worked out all day anyways. The benefits of SAT-5X—hed taken his last dose this mourning, the clouded liquid glowing light blue inside of a comfortable multi-needle that didn’t have to gauge deep enough to hit muscle. It reminded him of the hypo-sprays in Deep Space Nine. It was a bioluminescent effect from the new hardware platform, but Kale liked that it looked like Cherenkov radiation.

All that training, all that ability, all that fucking ten-million-dollar-man bullshit he had to go through for it, and now the entire mission hinged on the word of a fucking intern.

Kale turned and looked at the sky shift from blue to black, the blue that had been all there ever was above, slowly and steadily, into a small band under him. He let himself savor it for just a second before he tried to say anything, took a breath. Halfway through his breath the intern ruined his fucking moment.

“If we don’t get started soon, we risk delaying the mission, and our flight time’s tight if we want to miss the Kessler field.”

Even the space trash was trying to fuck today up. Christ. He wanted to snap at the kid so bad. But he knew they could declare him psychologically unfit, maybe already would unless he started playing nice real fucking quick.

“Fine. Just hurry up.” That and keeping his eyes glued to the scenery was as close to playing nice as he could manage.

“Have you experienced any nausea from your medication?”

“No,” he lied. And lied well, buying his Alka-Seltzer with cash, at night, and a little extra to tell the pharmacy to please not tell anyone a green lizard with antennae came and bought fucking Alka-Seltzer today. Okay, a lot extra. Not like the pay was bad for this line of work.

And he continued to tell either lies or truth, but either way, the right answers. Sure enough, it ended with checkmarks, signatures, and apologies, and finally, the doors opened up to the orbital shipyard.

The clipboards scattered away like someone had shined a flashlight on cockroaches. He was left alone to walk to his entrance. He took one important moment in his now accelerated timeline to see his ship.

There she was.

The Greeley.

The engineers had outdone themselves with the design of it. She reminded him of old Soviet satellite ships. There was so much she could do other ships never could, never having to reach escape velocity. Her only booster got her out of orbit. After that, all the acceleration would be handled by a nice, easy-going ion drive and solar sail. The acceleration would be slow, but she would get there. She had by far the largest cabin of any space-faring vessel, with accoutrements that astronauts in the past would have drooled over.

There was a PC terminal equipped solely for entertainment, and it even came with a quantum-based internet connection, though it was barely above dial-up speeds. It’d be enough to download porn. Slowly, but he’d get there. He couldn’t really give a damn if that was monitored. He wondered if Donaldson porked it to therian porn when he was done spouting hatred about them. Probably, Kale concluded with a smirk. He looked like a cloaca guy.

Time to go in. He had studied the cabin layout, been in the mockups, but nothing prepared him for actually being there. He wanted to drink in the room he was set up in—like something out of Hyatt Regency with the TV, zero-G-friendly minibar, dear god it had everything—but he had run out of time for any hesitation. He sat in the cockpit, its galaxy of buttons, consoles, CRT monitors, and arcane readouts as open as a book to him.

“Mission control, we’re ready for pre-flight check.” He had done it enough times in the simulator; keeping count was a pointless affair. Boosters, check; engines, check; the fucking coffee maker, check; didn’t lose his dick in his slit, check.

“Pre-flight checks cleared, control. Let’s go see our sky!” He’d practiced that line.

The first T-minus began. The doors opened and the void of space called to him. With all the earthshine here, it was pitch black, but he knew the stars were out there, waiting. He could feel them in his blood, like he could feel he belonged there as soon as he could remember looking up at the sky and knowing what they were.

The Greeley disconnected and, with small compressed air boosters, accelerated itself out of the bay.

Then came aiming the damned thing at just the right trajectory. Any mistakes could mean an aborted mission and would mean millions of taxpayer dollars. He double-checked the nerds’ math for them and cleared it. Perfect. Could’ve hit a dime from Mars.

“T-Minus ten, nine…”

Time for the boosters. The numbers melted into a pattern. He knew when the pattern ended and hovered a claw over the button. He felt the ship rumble as the massive booster started up.

“...two, one, ignition,” said an impossibly distant voice before the entire cabin shook with the wrath of a giant angry child that had just dropped his collector’s coin in an iron piggy bank.

The roaring.

Nothing could have prepared him for the roaring, for it all to be real, pushing acceleration well past the human limit. Any normal pilot would have been well on his way to the grave by now, but Kale wasn’t normal. He’d never wanted to be.

No wonder he was irreplaceable. This whole damn ship was built for him.

He cackled in impossible joy, blowing out the microphone in his stream briefly with his screeching cackles unburdened by—by fucking anything, not even gravity—before letting off a loud hiss with his forked tongue as he threw his head up, showing off his creature features for all the gawkers back home. He even winked at the camera with his tongue still sticking out. That one was for the haters.

Finally, the adrenaline rush of his life ended, and the booster disconnected behind him, glimmering into deep space, its own velocity hurtling it in some errant direction from Earth.

The ride came to a smoothness that felt motionless, like a long highway drive on cruise control. Once he had completed his final course heading and programmed it in, he began his work for the day, which mostly meant confirming nothing fell off the damn ship.

After spending six hours painstakingly confirming exactly fucking that, he allowed himself his first proper nap off of planet Earth. But not before one last self-congratulatory hiss, rattling his forked tongue as he put his claws behind his head.

In the morning, he’d have a proper view of the stars. The solar sails would be finished unfurling by then and would block enough sun glare for a solid view. And he couldn’t fucking wait.

He fucking made it, and with one last stretch and a yawn, he yelled into the empty room:

“I finally fuckin’ made it!”

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About the author:

The Sparrow System is four creatures in a human-shaped trenchcoat who think a lot about the contextual, material relationships involved in being animals stuck in human form. The writing is mostly done by Radon, the resident feral coyote, bapping her paws on her keyboard furiously and wondering why this job didn’t land to anyone with fingers.

We hope to bring a grounded, materialist take on therianthropy that treats it as a concrete, objective, and relational form of queerness. We write with the loving and terrible gaze of our beautiful fiancé, who acts as our general editor in both text and life, furiously burning the sins from our text. Another friend, a mighty and valiant warrior queen from Themyscera, acts as our specialized BIPOC sensitivity editor.