Trying to manipulate late-Anthropocene-era orbital technology with paws.
Did you laugh? I did. Of course I did. My options are to laugh or to wail, and the second one takes up more energy than I have on offer right now.
Lily ad-Alice is the proud owner of the most dangerous space station in Sol system. She may be stuck in the massive debris field filled with ancient weapons that is Earth's orbit, but she is also the guardian of Earth. From her unassailable position, she rains fire down on the planet below, destroying interdimensional horrors and ancient weapons that threaten the survivors scrambling around on the surface.
Unfortunately, she's a cat. That makes operating all the human controls far more difficult than it needs to be.
Lily was once a perfectly ordinary house cat, then an immortal house cat, then an uplifted immortal house cat. She's been on the station for upwards of four hundred years, and in that time she has managed to find workarounds. She has (barely) taught the station to accept commands in her self-created cat language. She has (marginally) rigged up ways to make the firing system work with paws. All she wants is to do science and take naps, but there are always the alarms. Always a new emergency to deal with, whether it be an emergence portal on the planet's surface, a new army trying to conquer their neighbors, or a semi-sentient missile battery deciding that she's a threat, there is always something that demands her attention.
Oh, and the station is haunted. Like, super mega haunted.
This novel provides examples of:
- Complete Immortality: Lily can't die. End of story. Injuries take a while to heal, so she still keeps her medical tech ready to use, and she's not sure what her actual limits are, but she's never reached a point where there was ever a sign she wouldn't heal. She gets cut in half the long way at one point, and the only lasting effect is that it takes a while for her fur to regrow. At the very end, she survives orbital re-entry outside of a space suit, including being reduced to scorched bones and then hitting the planet hard enough to leave a large crater.
- Death World: Several of them, in fact.
- First off, the station itself. It's filled with environmental hazards and drones that Lily has barely managed to get under control, and there are multiple ghosts and ghost-like entities that only fail to do too much damage because they're all working at cross purposes. Lily is, explicitly, only alive because she literally can't die. Oh, and the digital grid is apparently even worse, and is maliciously hostile to any form of digital life.
- Earth's orbit is full of old war machines just waiting to shoot a power signature, not to mention the ongoing Kessler Cascade of trillions of tiny pieces of debris. Lily's station is the most dangerous thing out there, and even she's worried about waking up too many things at once.
- Earth itself is a radioactive hellhole populated by hostile auto-builder factories, nuclear weather patterns, sentient clouds of mind-control gas, savage flesh-merchants and conquering armies, and periodically sees "emergence events," where interdimensional portals open up and monsters pour out to kill everyone in sight.
- Heroic Vow: "The Last Oath" is a cultural touchstone across the Sol system. The Oceanic Anarchy, the people who originally built Lily's station, wrote it on the station's bulkheads, and Lily is repeatedly surprised by how far it has spread. At the very end, she calls the entire system to honor the Last Oath and stand against the giant emergence event. Everyone in the system responds, from drones and missile batteries to ancient isolationist stations to technocratic lunar cities to paperclip maximizers building cities. Everyone honors the Last Oath, because it's buried so deeply in the culture and programming of every living thing in the Sol system.At the end of all things, all of us, together, against the darkness.
- Immortality Inducer: The machine somehow makes people immortal... which is why people kept turning the damn thing on despite the fact that it also causes random interdimensional portals to pop up and spill out monsters. Lily, who was an ordinary cat at the time, was the last person to receive this treatment.
- Kill Sat: Lily's station, unsurprisingly. Funnily enough, its weapons are supposed to be pointed out, towards space, but at some point it was flipped upside down because she needed most of the guns pointed down at the surface. She uses the to bomb portals spitting out monsters, ancient machine foundries who don't know their wars are over, or just blast a few demagogues leading armies of conquest.
- Uplifted Animal: Lily, interestingly, did this to herself. She was an ordinary, though immortal, house cat and the last survivor on the station. She spent decades slooowly learning human language, and eventually reached the point where she could tell a biolab she had found to make her smarter.Lily: The first dose made me very sick, and I decided to never do it again. The second dose made me very sick, and I decided to never do it again. The third dose made me very sick, and one day later, it was like I'd woken up for the very first time.
