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Description
Adobe's screen lit up on the dashboard of her M1170 -- SECTOR14.QUAD3.STATUS.GREEN. So. They'd cleared out Pine Bluff Court. She pulled over to the side of what had once been a winding suburban street outside of Boulder. There had been some sparse fighting in this neighborhood, but she hadn't seen any of it. Just a few pockets of looters. Luckily they were running out of ammo. She was just glad she hadn't been assigned to Colorado Springs. The rioters there had managed to raid Fort Carson. They were pretty bad shots, but they were learning quick how to get range on all the weapon's they'd grabbed. No, she'd take boredom any day.

She left the diesel running, pulled her security key and stepped out in the street. Leaning against the side of the M1170, she took out a crumpled pack she'd gotten off a dead Modified. They were unfiltered cloves. Bad as hell for you, but who expected to live? She lit one up and sucked the smoke deep, blowing it out her nose. It made her cough, and that made her bang the end of her horn on the roof of the eleven-seventy, which almost made her lose the cigarette. Only three left in the pack. Gonna go cold-turkey again real soon.

She looked around at the houses. Most of them were pretty intact. A few had holes blown in them, and some had burned to the ground. The hairs of her narrow mane prickled. This was familiar. That tree, there, with the low branch. And some of the houses. That one. That one, right there. She strode across the lawn with a purpose. The front door was gone, not blown up but splintered by a ram. Somebody must have held out, there. Lots of bullet-holes going in and out. She stepped over the wrecked doorframe, keeping an eye out for nails that could pierce the sole of her hooves. Human medics were pretty useless on body parts they didn't have, and you didn't get a Purple Heart for a fucking nail. You just got a letter of reprimand.

All her hair was standing up, now. The inside of the house looked more like an office, with cubicles and lots of wiring drops. Most of the equipment had been overturned and trashed, but this had been a research facility. The refrigerator in the kitchen lay on its side, door open, guts spilled on the floor. It was mostly syringes and bottles, not food. Somebody had gone through the bottles, but hadn't found anything they could either get high on or sell, so they'd taken the syringes that didn't have doses in them. She knew this fridge. She knew the bottles were vitamins, vaccines, radio-isotope markers, hormones, retroviruses – no street value. All stored together in defiance of regs or common sense. But this was a skunk works, and regs turned a blind eye. She knew the people who had worked here would know exactly what they were using, and that they weren't the type to make mistakes.

She clambered over the refrigerator, through the door. Right turn. Yes, there were the stairs going up. They were missing the middle part. She had to jump. Fortunately, she'd gotten ridiculous agility. Jumping two meters up and three meters forward, across a yawning gulf full of sharp, broken boards, and landing on the one remaining step at the top was hardly even challenging. Second floor was a nursery. Had been a nursery. School, too. Whiteboards on the walls. File cabinets, yanked open, their contents scattered, drawers used to contain cook fires. School desk – only one. She flipped the desk back on its feet. She traced the lines in the top with a finger, feeling – not sure what she was feeling. Like seing someone you knew, but they don't remember you, or running into somebody you hadn't thought of in a long, long time. Or finding their corpse. Under her finger, in a large careful scrawl, printed in capital letters with magic marker: "A.D.O.B.E."

She'd included the periods, to remind herself who she really was. The same letters were spray-stenciled on the drawers of the gutted file cabinets. Their meaning was literally printed into her DNA: "Advanced Desert Operations Biological Engineering." It wasn't really a name, and there were other sections in Project ADOBE, but she had been the first, so the nickname stuck. Her parents had been three aoudads at the Denver Zoo, one nobel laureate, two PhDs, and twelve thousand hours of simulator time at the Sandia Hypercluster.

The whiteboards had once held lessons from history, to economics, to vector calculus, to art appreciation. Now they were covered with the crypitic short-hand notation of Splicer code. One had a bullet-hole and a spray of blood. She wondered who had stood there. If it had been anyone she knew. You can never go home, she thought. That's doubly true when a place wasn't really a home. She had been a project, not a child. She didn't grow up here. Her development was overseen, her education facilitated. She'd had about as much of a childhood as that eleven-seventy idling in the street. It wasn't an unhappy childhood, per se. It's just that everyone around her had believed in the principle of scientific detachment.

She walked into the bathroom. The ceiling was gone. Standing on the edge of the tub, she could almost reach the edge of the hole. She was strong, but short, only reaching one-sixty to the top of her horns. But she could jump. The hole was just big enough. She crouched and sprang, spreading her hands to catch the sides of the hole and pulling herself up. A dry breeze blew through the attic from big holes blown at both ends. The attic was surprisingly clean. Squatters must have picked up all the broken wood for making cooking fires. The holes must have been recent. No bird nests or anything. Then again, with all the shooting in this neighborhood the last couple of weeks, no bird in its right mind would be nesting here, even if it weren't too late in the year.

She walked to the hole and looked out. Great view. Looking over the trees, she could see Denver from here, and the mountains. Several plumes of smoke were rising in Denver. Some action, there. Or squatter fires that got out of hand. There were a few things in the attic that the squatters hadn't burned, lurking in the shadows – A child's chair, some old clothes, a blue wooden box. She bent down under the rafters, dragged the box out into the light.

Well. Who would have thought?

She sank down on the floor, the fatigue of the last three week's campaign catching up with her. She flipped up the catch on the blue box. She remembered when it had been given to her by one of her parents. Not the aoudads certainly. One of the PhDs. A black woman. What was her name? Dr. Kraven? Dr. Kamen? Maybe Dr. Kirian. That sounded right. She said it had been her grandmother's, and she'd repainted it, and put Adobe's name on it. Without the periods, like it was a real name. And it even had a posessive on the end, so that Adobe could know that she could own something, and when she owned it, she'd have a place to put it.

The box held mostly tech toys. Little computer games for improving memory, eye-hand coordination. There were toy guns, knives, military vehicles, all amazingly realistic. She chuckled at that. She hadn't realized how early they'd been indoctrinating her to a military role. She'd known how to field strip an M16D4 before she'd learned to tie shoes. Come to think of it, she never did learn how to tie shoes. Not much point, really. Digging through the toys, hidden at the bottom, she found the secret that had come with the box. Dr. Kirian had made it, and had made her promise not to tell anyone. Adobe pulled it out, and suddenly all the years fell away, and that day flashed into her mind so vividly it was as though she were re-living it.

She'd been five, maturing quickly, as she'd been designed to, but she'd been lonely. She was starting to realize that nobody else looked like her. Nobody else had hooves, or ears they could aim, and her horns were starting to grow in (they'd called those a side-effect, and assigned a team to work on eliminating them in future generations, because they'd interfere with wearing a helmet). Dr. Kirian had been the only one who seemed to notice, and she'd made this little thing. It was a doll, hardly realistic, unlike the toy M5 in the box. It was blue. But it had hooves, and it had ears, and most importantly it had horns, and looked like it wanted to stand on two legs, unlike her parents at the Denver Zoo. It was the only thing in the world that looked like Adobe. She had named it "Amy" and loved it insanely. The memory made her smile. "Amy" was short for amotragus lervia. God, what a child she'd been.

She had kept it a secret, too. Nobody ever knew she had it. And when she was ten, and they moved her to the base for advanced training, she left it behind and never shed a tear. She'd seen a lot of really ugly things, since then, and she could have sworn she was a lot tougher now than she had been then. But her eyes burned, and she felt a lump in the back of her throat. She knew she didn't get that from the aoudads. Poor Dr. Kirian. Poor all of them. Poor world.

A horn sounded outside. She went to one of the holes in the roof. Her field partner's eleven-seventy was pulled up next to hers, and he was looking it over, with his M16 levelled. She barked – not a human sound, but it carried – and he looked up. She signed "all-clear." He nodded and slung his rifle. She walked back to the hole in the floor. She realized she still had the doll in her hand. Leaving it wasn't even a question. She knew she'd probably never see this place again. She tucked Amy in her belt and dropped back through hole in the attic floor.
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Acrylic on Canvas. Had a hard time getting a photo of it, because the grain of the canvas really gets in the way and makes it look a lot worse than it does in person. I think I'll do all my painting on masonite from now on.

Description
Adobe's screen lit up on the dashboard of her M1170 -- SECTOR14.QUAD3.STATUS.GREEN. So. They'd cleared out Pine Bluff Court. She pulled over to the side of what had once been a winding suburban street outside of Boulder. There had been some sparse fighting in this neighborhood, but she hadn't seen any of it. Just a few pockets of looters. Luckily they were running out of ammo. She was just glad she hadn't been assigned to Colorado Springs. The rioters there had managed to raid Fort Carson. They were pretty bad shots, but they were learning quick how to get range on all the weapon's they'd grabbed. No, she'd take boredom any day.

She left the diesel running, pulled her security key and stepped out in the street. Leaning against the side of the M1170, she took out a crumpled pack she'd gotten off a dead Modified. They were unfiltered cloves. Bad as hell for you, but who expected to live? She lit one up and sucked the smoke deep, blowing it out her nose. It made her cough, and that made her bang the end of her horn on the roof of the eleven-seventy, which almost made her lose the cigarette. Only three left in the pack. Gonna go cold-turkey again real soon.

She looked around at the houses. Most of them were pretty intact. A few had holes blown in them, and some had burned to the ground. The hairs of her narrow mane prickled. This was familiar. That tree, there, with the low branch. And some of the houses. That one. That one, right there. She strode across the lawn with a purpose. The front door was gone, not blown up but splintered by a ram. Somebody must have held out, there. Lots of bullet-holes going in and out. She stepped over the wrecked doorframe, keeping an eye out for nails that could pierce the sole of her hooves. Human medics were pretty useless on body parts they didn't have, and you didn't get a Purple Heart for a fucking nail. You just got a letter of reprimand.

All her hair was standing up, now. The inside of the house looked more like an office, with cubicles and lots of wiring drops. Most of the equipment had been overturned and trashed, but this had been a research facility. The refrigerator in the kitchen lay on its side, door open, guts spilled on the floor. It was mostly syringes and bottles, not food. Somebody had gone through the bottles, but hadn't found anything they could either get high on or sell, so they'd taken the syringes that didn't have doses in them. She knew this fridge. She knew the bottles were vitamins, vaccines, radio-isotope markers, hormones, retroviruses – no street value. All stored together in defiance of regs or common sense. But this was a skunk works, and regs turned a blind eye. She knew the people who had worked here would know exactly what they were using, and that they weren't the type to make mistakes.

She clambered over the refrigerator, through the door. Right turn. Yes, there were the stairs going up. They were missing the middle part. She had to jump. Fortunately, she'd gotten ridiculous agility. Jumping two meters up and three meters forward, across a yawning gulf full of sharp, broken boards, and landing on the one remaining step at the top was hardly even challenging. Second floor was a nursery. Had been a nursery. School, too. Whiteboards on the walls. File cabinets, yanked open, their contents scattered, drawers used to contain cook fires. School desk – only one. She flipped the desk back on its feet. She traced the lines in the top with a finger, feeling – not sure what she was feeling. Like seing someone you knew, but they don't remember you, or running into somebody you hadn't thought of in a long, long time. Or finding their corpse. Under her finger, in a large careful scrawl, printed in capital letters with magic marker: "A.D.O.B.E."

She'd included the periods, to remind herself who she really was. The same letters were spray-stenciled on the drawers of the gutted file cabinets. Their meaning was literally printed into her DNA: "Advanced Desert Operations Biological Engineering." It wasn't really a name, and there were other sections in Project ADOBE, but she had been the first, so the nickname stuck. Her parents had been three aoudads at the Denver Zoo, one nobel laureate, two PhDs, and twelve thousand hours of simulator time at the Sandia Hypercluster.

The whiteboards had once held lessons from history, to economics, to vector calculus, to art appreciation. Now they were covered with the crypitic short-hand notation of Splicer code. One had a bullet-hole and a spray of blood. She wondered who had stood there. If it had been anyone she knew. You can never go home, she thought. That's doubly true when a place wasn't really a home. She had been a project, not a child. She didn't grow up here. Her development was overseen, her education facilitated. She'd had about as much of a childhood as that eleven-seventy idling in the street. It wasn't an unhappy childhood, per se. It's just that everyone around her had believed in the principle of scientific detachment.

She walked into the bathroom. The ceiling was gone. Standing on the edge of the tub, she could almost reach the edge of the hole. She was strong, but short, only reaching one-sixty to the top of her horns. But she could jump. The hole was just big enough. She crouched and sprang, spreading her hands to catch the sides of the hole and pulling herself up. A dry breeze blew through the attic from big holes blown at both ends. The attic was surprisingly clean. Squatters must have picked up all the broken wood for making cooking fires. The holes must have been recent. No bird nests or anything. Then again, with all the shooting in this neighborhood the last couple of weeks, no bird in its right mind would be nesting here, even if it weren't too late in the year.

She walked to the hole and looked out. Great view. Looking over the trees, she could see Denver from here, and the mountains. Several plumes of smoke were rising in Denver. Some action, there. Or squatter fires that got out of hand. There were a few things in the attic that the squatters hadn't burned, lurking in the shadows – A child's chair, some old clothes, a blue wooden box. She bent down under the rafters, dragged the box out into the light.

Well. Who would have thought?

She sank down on the floor, the fatigue of the last three week's campaign catching up with her. She flipped up the catch on the blue box. She remembered when it had been given to her by one of her parents. Not the aoudads certainly. One of the PhDs. A black woman. What was her name? Dr. Kraven? Dr. Kamen? Maybe Dr. Kirian. That sounded right. She said it had been her grandmother's, and she'd repainted it, and put Adobe's name on it. Without the periods, like it was a real name. And it even had a posessive on the end, so that Adobe could know that she could own something, and when she owned it, she'd have a place to put it.

The box held mostly tech toys. Little computer games for improving memory, eye-hand coordination. There were toy guns, knives, military vehicles, all amazingly realistic. She chuckled at that. She hadn't realized how early they'd been indoctrinating her to a military role. She'd known how to field strip an M16D4 before she'd learned to tie shoes. Come to think of it, she never did learn how to tie shoes. Not much point, really. Digging through the toys, hidden at the bottom, she found the secret that had come with the box. Dr. Kirian had made it, and had made her promise not to tell anyone. Adobe pulled it out, and suddenly all the years fell away, and that day flashed into her mind so vividly it was as though she were re-living it.

She'd been five, maturing quickly, as she'd been designed to, but she'd been lonely. She was starting to realize that nobody else looked like her. Nobody else had hooves, or ears they could aim, and her horns were starting to grow in (they'd called those a side-effect, and assigned a team to work on eliminating them in future generations, because they'd interfere with wearing a helmet). Dr. Kirian had been the only one who seemed to notice, and she'd made this little thing. It was a doll, hardly realistic, unlike the toy M5 in the box. It was blue. But it had hooves, and it had ears, and most importantly it had horns, and looked like it wanted to stand on two legs, unlike her parents at the Denver Zoo. It was the only thing in the world that looked like Adobe. She had named it "Amy" and loved it insanely. The memory made her smile. "Amy" was short for amotragus lervia. God, what a child she'd been.

She had kept it a secret, too. Nobody ever knew she had it. And when she was ten, and they moved her to the base for advanced training, she left it behind and never shed a tear. She'd seen a lot of really ugly things, since then, and she could have sworn she was a lot tougher now than she had been then. But her eyes burned, and she felt a lump in the back of her throat. She knew she didn't get that from the aoudads. Poor Dr. Kirian. Poor all of them. Poor world.

A horn sounded outside. She went to one of the holes in the roof. Her field partner's eleven-seventy was pulled up next to hers, and he was looking it over, with his M16 levelled. She barked – not a human sound, but it carried – and he looked up. She signed "all-clear." He nodded and slung his rifle. She walked back to the hole in the floor. She realized she still had the doll in her hand. Leaving it wasn't even a question. She knew she'd probably never see this place again. She tucked Amy in her belt and dropped back through hole in the attic floor.
---------------------------
Acrylic on Canvas. Had a hard time getting a photo of it, because the grain of the canvas really gets in the way and makes it look a lot worse than it does in person. I think I'll do all my painting on masonite from now on.