Ourobouros

It came out of nowhere, while "It" was looking for a way out of that pit that, really, was the "Anipos Hyperspace Jump".

"It" found it in the same stash of discarded - because impractical... for humans - alternate spaces theories from the past of the Anipos civilization.

It was one from the long dead Anipos physicist Jojo Asdolfis - indeed one clever, clever woman.

Expanding its operation to Anipos fourth was a risk, but obtaining her genome would be such a great addendum to "It"'s galactic colonization plans.. maybe later.

After all, the woman had died two hundred  years before... reconstructing her DNA was not really going to be any more difficult, if it waited some twenty or thirty years more.

"It" got an awful lot of time ahead, after all - even if the thing seemed to move like a snail ,usually.

It understood soon why the Anipos civilization leave it behind - the capability to send signals back in time seemed great, until you delved a little more into its consequences.

If the nature of space-time was an ever-forking-merging "soup" of alternate universes, then every possible future  would send back into its past contradictory informations, and the receiver would be swarmed by white noise.

It if was a singular timeline, then knowing the future effectively meant losing the possibility to make any choice about it.

"It" knew that this loss of freedom would be only apparent, yet it would feel absolutely real, and the result would have been planet-wide despair and frustration because, once available, of course evervody would have used and abused it.

After a while - a whole quarter of an hour, at its top thinking speed...  about 28 and a half years of subjective time - it came down with what felt like a damn headache.

Something it was glad enough to have never felt, ever, since it stopped being human, though it never really was... human; it only remembered that it was.

"It" realized that this was the time and space to go and ask for its better parts' counsel.

It composed a brief paper to explain the situation to them, and then distributed this - in physical form... on paper! it really was off its game - to its "ladies", while it temporarily scaled back its incursions in their minds.

It needed counsel, for real, about what to do, not some half-assed cyclical thought in which the half side of its mind told the other half something that both already knew.

In a more moment of decided indecisiveness, it opted for a risky option, and to have all its "ladies" meet in the same physical place - of course, it couldn't be anywhere else than Pyramiden's Tulpan Hotel, for sentimental reasons - so that they could actually discuss and give some thoughtful suggestion.

Errors in communication, once evaluated and rectified if needed, were the source of most new ideas - this was true for the rudimentary quantum circuits that firt hold its mind, as well as the sophisticated humans that he used, nowadays, to hold his better instincts.

It was risky because, if someone would be so smart as to bomb the hotel - with something powerful enough to destroy all its "messengers" at once, not really easy, but not impossible either - "it" would revert to its most basic nature.

Of course, aid nature was an amoral sadist with a penchant for massive bloodshed, which would have been then aimed to get vengeance on the perpetrators no matter what, without empathy - Ice contribution to its personality  to keep It in check.  .

No sane intelligence in-system would be so stupid to exchange one bad neighbour for an unleashed demon, so it was unlikely to happen - but not all players were in-system or, even, actually intelligent.

The old Soviet settlement was thriving, in those days - plenty of tourists liked to see the northernmost city on the planet and the last remnant of the Soviet civilization; it seemed a good enough explanation - so squeezing some few dozens of very gorgeous women in the Hotel was going to be unnoticed.

No, probably not, but it didn't matter - after all, It had the com network of the small city under control since the '50s.

Little organization problems started to crop up early - the Mollys refused to move unless they could carry the kids and their alien wife - alien wife? When that had happened? and how came that "It" allowed it?

Alone, they were twenty of them - 8 Mollys, one (damn) Xanthippe Xeyos, and their elven (or is it twelve, no? Twelve)  daughters . so, no, 21.


Ditto Ice - she didn't want to move without her... cat?  And The Mollys wanted their cat, too?

Well, if "it" really wanted some fresh viewpoints, "It" decided, it could as well add the girls from his (not so very) secret harem, to the fray, and let everyone carry their significant others and have a good time.

It is entirely possible that, with Keisha [9] imprisoned by the USA government, and Keisha[8] refusing to come out of her exile, "It" was just feeling lonely and craving meaningful human contact - which exposed how much of a contradiction its existence was.

An emulation of a human mind, purposely biased so that it could exact its creator's vengeance against the human kind,  that had simply grown beyond it by the first time it snooped outside its intranet.

Even in its worst moment, It knew that using all its might against simple humans was wrong - also, 36 second was still enough for the Anipos 'Bots to led It know that a destroyed city was not what they expected to see from one of their allies... it had its weight in "It" 's decision to "overshoot" the sub-relativistic weapon that it had launched against the USA capital.

Maybe a holiday would be good for everybody.

So, Saturday 14 April 2108, Valentin Morozov was waiting at the helipad near the Tulpan hotel for the firsts of the 120 visitors of the conference "New Perspectives on Spiritism".

He stood there, waiting to see arrive the usual helicopter - one of those LFH thingies, he could never remembered the number of the model, 622? - when he finally heard an odd, low humming sound that did not remind him of any helicopter he knew.

Valentin Morozov was too old to be drafted into "The Gloriously Unlucky Army", but his assistant, ex lieutenant of of the Ukraine contingent in the U.N. Army Ludmilla Myroslavivna Kouiek, remembered the noise all too well - before Valentin could said her anything, she was already running for cover.

It was, she knew, the noise that the BattleBot's anti-gravity systems made.

She was sure that nobody on Earth had cracked that peculiar piece of tech yet, so, this could only be one of those monsters, whose entrance she mow waited from under the maintenance team's snowcat.

The transport appeared,  much  to the surprise of Ludmilla, to be  human made - it even had the marque of the producer, painted on the side - Wolffe Aerospace.

If Ludmilla had been a lover of old aircrafts, she could have seen the similarities between this and what was, once, the hugest helicopter in the world, the powerful - for the 1970s - Mil Mi-12.

Like the old soviet glory, this machine was carried around by two anti-gravity assemblies at the end of short wings, that probably contributed some lift at speed.

However, this had also two conventional jets , on the interior side of every assembly, and the wings where the kind of lightweight, sleek mesh of surfaces that had become "de rigueur" in aerospace industry after the development of the very large size, Carbon-fibre-reinforced-plastic laying 3d printer.

Also, these wings eschewed any external reinforcement apart a profiled tensor from the AG nacelles to the bulges of the wide track, tactical transport-style landing gear.

The transporter was bigger, much bigger than the helicopter they had expected, and likely carried much more than the 24 people they were ready for.

In fact, it could hold 100 persons - Valentin looked back at Ludmilla, that was now returning from her hiding place, covered by threads of grass - he was going to scold her, then he saw her face and realized what had happened.

Ludmilla was a strong, young woman who could handle anything, in life.

Any thing but for facing - again - a Battle Robot from the Alien Invasion Army.

When, three years earlier, some tourists said that they had seen one of the "Not-Killing" machines at the edges of the town, she had closed in her room and refused to come out of it for two days.

Valentin remembered having ceded to curiosity and looking up her service status on the 'Net.

The 'bots were very thorough... and they knew, collectively, who they had already met.

So, every subsequent time a soldier confronted them, they wounded her more gravely.

Ludmilla was wounded three times - the first, it was a simple, clean hole on her high torso, without damaging her lungs,

The second, she found herself with both arms broken in two and three points.

The third, she lost three cm of both femurs, "cut" by a "razor shot", and needed five operations and  two years of physiotherapy to be able to walk again.

'Milla, call Illiana, we will handle this, if you manage booking our guests".

Illiana was the senior member of the staff - she, too, was too old to having served in the war, and was likely going to consider the huge machine just a curiosity, and not the concealed spawn of Satan that, evidently, was for 'Milla.

Because Valentin could clearly see that Ludmilla needed all her strength, to come near the source of the sound, and he was a boss good enough to know that he had just a limited number of times he could force things, with 'Milla, before passive aggressivity started raising its ugly head.

The machine opened its landing gear - another difference with the usual helicopters and their sturdy, fixed skis - and almost landed... from the way the wheels did not deform or crashed into the ground, Valentin could have deduced that the pilot had lowered the lifters output, but not  really switched them off.

He was leaving just enough weight on the gear, so that the cross wind couldn't stray the vehicle away.p, but not enough to damage the small helipoad, ebidently designed for smaller choppers.

The door opened, and Valentin prepared himself to be swarmed by tourists.

The first to come out were a bunch of kids, all girls,frenetic like only pre-teens that have been an hour or so enclosed in a a confined space, full of boring adults, can be.

Two of the girls, evidently twins, were carrying one enormous cat, each. By the size of the animals, they could as well be small European Lynxes, but probably were just oversized Maine Coon.

They were all wonderful, kids and cats, like the models in the bikini catalogues Morozov used to collect.

Then it came their mother.

And their mother.

And their mother.

And their mother...

8 women - all with slightly different in height and weight, thin or chubby, different hair, and different ages;

Almost identical, slightly Asian-looking faces.

Even in the modern age, in which the associated tech has become quite inexpensive, clones are very rare, as they are frowned upon by most people.

Having a clone for offspring is, really, proclaiming to the world an unsavoury level of narcissism.

Having 8 such daughters, probably using some poor surrogate mothers... Valentin proved that peculiar hitch that afflicts people with an authoritarian mind-set, since the dawn of time, when confronted with something that embarrass them.

The thought - "if it isn't already illegal, they should make a law to prohibit it" - flashed prominently inside his mind.

Two of the girls stopped their ruckus, and looked him like he was an insect -  which made the man feel a bit on edge - the they shrugged, and went back to their far more important affairs, chasing each other on the open field.

He expected more than its share of oddballs from a conference on esoteric mumbo jumbo, but these were the "wrong" kind of oddballs.

Other people had come out of the  brand new "Wolffe", even stranger than the kids and their mothers.

One was the taller woman he ever saw, a willowy blonde with ivory pale skin, and grey eyes so clear that they could as well be white, every bit looking like a 16 years old vampire fan.

She was talking to a shorter woman, a black with the shoulders of a wrestler.

When they came nearer, he realized that the short one was still well above six feet, and the tall was, simply, impossible - seven feet, maybe?

Them a woman with the two babies, one a very little child in a marsupial bag, the other a toddler that climbed on her shoulder. Hers was a vaguely familiar face, though Valentin could not really place her.

She was wearing a plain dress with a fancy skirt, which was the reason why he couldn't focus on her -  the "red Leather" jacket she was  famous for, and made her far more remarkable, was not there.
Xanthippe Xeyos was simply out to enjoy herself and some quality time with her large  family. 

Other people continued to disembark but, apart the ruckus initially made by the kids, this group looked considerably disciplined - the usual septuagenarians were often harder to handle, with their tendency to wander off and consider anyone below 65 an idiot..

He introduced himself and Illiana, and guided everybody to the Hotel and its 160 places of "Soviet Delice".

In reality, the real Soviet Hotel - with its 48 beds and obsolete furniture - had been extended and overhauled some twenty years before, and the current Hotel had little if anything made by the Soviet in it.

However, the SSSR nostalgia was stronger than ever, in an era when the world discovered that planned  economy was very common in the galaxy.

Morozov doubted that all humanities were really the same (the Betans were hardly humans, the Transsians slightly more, as for what the Anipos really were, it was anybody's guess) and, thus, that anything that solved problems in system A could be really used to fix things in system B.

Stealing ideas from the aliens could be a good way to get techs ahead, but in sociology? That was poppycock. 
.
Morozov, ancient major in Sociology from the Moscow university, stopped his melancholic derive through the alleys of the career that he never pursued, and forced himself to guide the last guests to the hotel, while the transporter went away, with a slightly stronger hum as it gained height.

He had to investigate on those, he reflected - if they were to become the norm of transport, their usual guest acceptance ceremony needed to be reworked.

In the hotel, everything went smooth, till Milla found herself in front of the marsupiated alien woman.
She looked at the rather beautiful woman - a bit plain looking, in this group - gasped and ran away again, forcing Morozov to take over.

- "I am sorry" - he apologized - "She is still struck from the, ah, notable mean of locomotion you arrived in. That is the first anti-gravity machine that I see from near, but she was in the war, with all those ugly robots."

- "I understand"  -  The woman looked, and sounded like she was sincerely touched by Milla's misfortune.

- "Your name?" 

- "Xanthippe Xeyos, and this on my back is Micaela Xeyos, while this one is Teodolinda Xeyos" 

- "Your daughters?" 

- "They are all mines, really"  And she indicated all the kids.

Valentin Morozov thought, again, "Someone should forbid this".

The woman looked at him, puzzled, then asked "Why?"

- "Eh?"

- "Mr Morozov, you should control your volume, when you sub-vocalize your thoughts - they are not as silent as you think. People with very good hearing may inadvertently catch them."

Morozov went red, then purple, then managed to contain his sudden burst of anger - she was listening on his thoughts! but, inadvertently? - and continued his job.

- "Chamber 512" - a small vengeance, for the embarrassment. 

The bulky black was a Keisha something, out from some corner of the USA - Morozov was almost certain from the south, as she had a bit of a drawl.
 
He kept his thoughts to a tight leash, with her - she really looked like someone that a sage man would not want to irritate, ever, and if he was really speaking his thoughts that loud - something that, he knew, happened when he was really tired and stressed - who knows what he could blurt.

The pale giantess was very sweet, instead - she gave off the impression that she was some kind of dreamy Princess out of a fairy tale, all gentleness and flowers not plucked out of respect for life. 

The clones... all of them registered themselves as Molly Something Xeyos-McDonald, while the kids registered as Something Xeyos.

By the end of the registration of the first group, Morozov was already planning an humorous piece on the unforeseeable directions the family institution was taking,  at the turn of 21st century into 22nd.

The transporter pilot called, and Morozov trotted out with Martina (Illiana was busy getting their guests to their chambers, and Milla was still MIA).

Again, they heard the humming sound, but a big different.

Morozov soon saw why the sound was different, the transport was not alone - behind the Wolffe, something else was coming. 
 
Valentin had not been in the War, and did not knew the sound that they made first-hand, but he had seen the newspaper photos and the video clips... the new arrived really was an alien battle robot, a two hundred tons - thus medium sized - autonomous hover-tank.

The 'bot didn't look so impressive, being an almost perfect disc of some five meters of diameter, two meters and a  half tall - having no void spaces to reserve for the crew or troops, they tended to be very compact, a lot more than the human tanks.

However, Morozov knew that it could level the whole city before any Norwegian force could arrive, and probably it could, then, level also said forces. 

He felt fear... and understood a bit better his poor colleague, and her bitterness the rare times she talked about her time in the army.

They sent her against these? In a tactical suit, with an assault rifle? Good things the 'bots did not kill.

The firsts to come out of the transporter, this time, were three men... if possible, these werre scarier than the robot. 

The first was a shortish brute, with shoulders disproportionately wide, in a costly black overcoat.

His two companions were the kind of mercenary thugs that Morozov remembered from his Moscow childhood, before the Tsar Alexej managed to dismantle the threat of the various Organizatsja.

Then, again, women poured out of the transporter door. 

If the ones in the fist transporter were between nice, cute and gorgeous, these were positively outlandish. 

Green eyes, skins from ivory to tanned to black, tall, walking like they owned the place though the sheer power of their sex-appeal, some of them looking like - clones of? - the most sexy actresses of the movies Valentin consumed in his youth. 

If the first group had not been hint enough, this second one made it certain. 

Whatever was going on here, today, it was not a congress of old ladies convinced to be able to talk with the dead.

He imagined  that, soon, the transport would disgorge a new, unaccounted, group of persons - politicians, entrepreneurs, powerful males that would feast on these women, in a place virtually beyond the reach of any law. And the other ones. And the kids... 

Valentin felt a throb in his guts, an almost imperious desire to throw up, at the thought of what could soon happen to those wonderful little girls. And what would then happen to the witnesses of such excesses...

- "Mr. Morozov?"

The short man was in front of him, his face imperturbable. But his voice sounded a bit concerned,,,

- "Yes?"

- "Would you mind escort us to the hotel?"

He didn't mind - after all, he was already a dead man, he could as well take his time and go on with the work. At the hotel, Milla was probably looking at the scene with a binocular... if she had managed to get back on her feet.

So, he didn't really count on her being at the desk, as she was.  

She registered all the new guests, and behaved like the professional that she was. Not that it matter.. soon the transport would be back, to disgorge a horde of powerful pervert, a weekend of orgy would follow, and he, her and the other four that worked in the hotel would die.

Only, the third wave of guests never materialized.

The second group took the 3rd floor, right in the middle of the building, and asked to jack the temperature up to 25 degrees... which was unusual, but Valentin didn't enjoy the idea  of saying no to the little man.
At dinner, the women of the second wave kept a bit distant from the others, but, then they met the kids... and they swooned over the little girls, like a bunch of spinster aunts whose maternal instincts had been awaken and sent into full overdrive. 

At first, this seemed to trouble the clone mothers, then they relaxed a bit,when they saw that the other women were really delighted to meet the kids.

By the end of the evening, the atmosphere remembered Valentin, a lot, of a family reunion - a marriage, or something like this. 

A family composed almost exclusively by women... Morozov thought again to his sociology paper idea...The day after, the city Auditorium ( a true Soviet antiquity , whose use was seldom if ever authorized) was half full with most, but not all of the hotel guests.

The kids were playing outside, with their mothers and some of their new "aunts". 

Morozov had to escort the crowd inside, check that they did not damage or stole anything. Again, these women seemed very disciplined - he could not say the same of Martina and Illiana, who hadn't stopped chat a moment ever since Martina had come back from the third floor, where she had spent far too much time, this morning, just to inform the occupants that the breakfast was ready. 

The hotel little robots would still be cleaning the rooms.

The podium - a precious relic... Valentin's heart had thumped hard when they moved it -  was in a lateral position, and the short brute had taken place there. At the centre of the stage, a briefcase had opened up itself into one of those fancy robotised multi-projectors that enterprise executives love so much, nowadays.  

On the big screen, it appeared what looked like a page out of a text of physics, while the man started to talk - "I suppose that most of you has read the preliminary note that I sent you, though many of you probably has ignored all the math. We have already built a small, scale test bed, and do some tests. It works, and we can also already confirm the validity of Novikov's self-consistency principle, which opens up an important question: do we use this? Is there a reason to devolve some important resources and build a full scale system, with retrograde legs of six days or more?"

Valentin drowned off the rest of the discourse   it looked like this was not spiritism, but, rather, some kind of philosophic discussion over arcane theoretical physics, though he would have never pictured all these women as being into physics at all.

Behind him, Martina and Illiana were still talking and giggling... this people was not going to do anything nasty to one hundred years of Soviet history, and Valentin's curiosity was past its limits.

- "Why are you so damn happy, women?" - he hadn't voiced to anybody his concern that this was going to be a week-end long orgy, with death of all witnesses at the end ... in retrospect, it was a paranoid fantasy, a lot more embarrassing than Milla's PTSD crisis.

Martina's cheeks lightened up bright red, as she was suddenly flushed

- "I discovered why they wanted the floor so warm - they go around all naked, all the time!"

- "Really?" 

- "Not really naked, though" - Illiana said in a malicious way, and Martina went even more red and flustered

- "Yes, they wear any kind of... " - she glanced at the auditorium, here the women of the "second wave" were recognizable, for wearing the same  robe, a kind of silk overcoat over some brown skirt, thick adherent trousers and comfortable leather boots... the auditorium was too big to be really heated up to a comfortable level in just the two days since they received the communication that it was going to be used 

- "I do not know, chastity belts?"

- "What?"

- "Yes, in steel, with a lock here" -  she indicated her belly button - " and that's not the most notable thing, really"

- "No? There is more"  

- "I do not think that they are really chastity things" - Illiana took an astute expression - "I think that they are the contrary, that are devices to keep things inside."

- "You have seen them, too?"

- "Of course, when I saw it, I called her up to 'Help with the robots'."

- "Yes, and I  am sure - those are inverted strap-on!"

Martina looked at her colleague puzzled, while Valentin took note that the middle aged Siberian woman was probably into pretty interesting things herself.

- "And they use them full-service" -  Martina's stare went blank, in the most classic "what the hell are you saying?" way, so Illiana draw her breath in and started explaining - "they use them front, and back.... two dildos."

- "All of them?"- Valentin suprise was absolute - "and here goes my 'family reunion' hypothesis, again" - he thought.

- "They all wear the belts, I  am sure"  -  Martina was categorical.

- "And of those I could observe well, none had an empty belt" -  added Illiana with a smirk 

- "Incredible" - and he meant it. 

- "That's not the most incredible, either"

- "There is more?"

- "Yes, they all have rings," - Martina made an effect pause, for Valentin's sake; he felt himself drooling for the anticipation  - "here" - and she indicated one of her nipples,

- "And down there, too, I am sure" - Added Illiana, pointing her index in the direction of her crotch, once again showing that she was probably into S&M.

- "You could call me, I'd be very glad to help programming the cleaning robots, too"

- "The two guys were at the elevator and stair entrances, to keep out undesired guests"

- "And they saw all that, and still kept guarding?"

- "I don't think they are into women, chief"

- " I didn't think to be into women either" - this was Martina - "I HAD to call for help... I got so nervous, I messed up the robot's program, and couldn't manage to fix it"

- "Well, it is understandable" - Illiana was commenting, in a dreamy haze - "those were the most beautiful bodies that I have ever seen, even the scarred ones."

- "Scars?"

- "Whip scars, I am certain." - Illiana confirmed her SM inclination.

- "And they asked me if I wanted to try..."

- "Try what?"

Martina made a strange gesture, rolling her eyes while she tilted ad turn her head away, that could be interpreted as "Come on, you know" , "I have no idea, but reasonable suspicions"or "Do I really  have to tell you?"

- "What is really going on, chief?"

The image of their bodies, spread on the last snow in a mist of blood, glimpsed in Valentin's mind.

- "I do not think that I want to know, really."


He returned his attention to the great hall, where one of the "belt wearers" - an impressive beauty with waved, mahogany red hair - had taken the word

- "It is true, using it for operative information is a mistake, however... what about scientific information, and parallelizing development? There is a wealth of advantages to be exploited, there"

- "Would you explain?" 

- "Imagine that you have a new theory, but verifying it requires ten years  of research. You can spend ten years doing so, while potential developments of the theory will be frozen, or back-send it to a spawned unit, let it go its way , and having it turn out its results ten minutes AFTER the signal ha been sent. No casual loops, no information really created from nothing, simply a radical reduction of R&D 'linear time¡. Not any different than what is usually done, splitting the workload among different work-groups, only faster... and potentially hyper-parallelizable."

- "That could be dangerous"

- "Yes, the risk is ending up with a series of paperclip optimizers, but, we are here for that, no?"

The thirty women or so of the "second wave" in the room giggled all together, while "the brute" head lowered and, with a humble voice that didn't match at all with the character that Valentin had cut around his appearance, he said "It is a very good idea. I fell a little dumb."

- "Oh, but we love you all the same, boss" - it was another of the "second wave", and her colleagues, against, burst in a soft giggle, while the ones on the fist transport cringed. 

They did not really love the man on the podium.

He stopped, spent some thirty second silent - and the whole hall was holding it breath - then he finally spoke again

- "It is a good idea. I have what I was looking for - enjoy the rest of the week, you all have earned it. This reunion is adjourned - a better God blesses you all."

At this, the whole hall draw an almost silent "oh".

The short man disappeared, immediately after the auditorium was emptied.

At 100 km by feet from the nearest city, it did not seem to concern any of the other guests, not even the two men that had arrived with him. In fact, they impeded Valentin to call the authorities.

Soon, even other women from the first transporter started to disappear - it was creepy as hell. All this people had come here to exchange pleasantries on some idiotic theory, and then march to death in the night.

This was worse than his orgy-with-death fantasy.

Soon, in the hotel remained only the odd family, the women in the second wave, and their two bodyguards, in what seemed - to Valentin - a surreal atmosphere.

Some of the kids should realize that heir friends were walking out to their deaths...

But, then again, they were in a poly-amourous, female-only family made by eight clones and - probably - the pervert that had them made to be her paramours. They had no idea what was normal or not.

Ludmilla had calmed down - or had she resigned to an imminent death? - while Martina had left the job, and taken on one of the silk gowns of the "Second Wavers" -  he had decided to call them like that.
She smiled a lot more, and seemed more beautiful, yet  Valentin could not help but imagine what she was really wearing below that gown.

Or what the "Second Wavers" were really teaching to those kids.

- "How could you let your kids with those women?" - he finally spurted to the "Husband", the unflappable Xanthippe.  

- "I had my doubts, what with the guy they work for, but they really are good persons."

- "But, they are a bunch of perverts - don't you worry about what they are teaching to your daughters?"

- "Not really" - and she added mentally "if you knew better, man, you would worry a lot more about what they can learn from their mothers: infiltration, espionage, torture, murder, swordsmanship and recognizing wines".

- "Not really? Not really?"

- "No - I have seen them. They love the girls, they will not do anything that could result armful to them, like trying to impose their ideas on sexuality. Also..." - the woman smiled crookedly - "they do not need kids to increment their ranks, do they?"

Valentin walked away, embarrassed.

And then, he understood why the mothers didn't really worry too much. 

The day before the transporter came to carry back the surviving, the kids and the "Second wavers"  organized a movie marathon in the hotel hall, with the multi-projector - some of them fell asleep on the sofas. 

The morning after, Valentin found them, two "Second-Wavers" and six kids. And one of the kids was sleeping, about a meter over the sofa, floating, with their enormous cat on her chest. 

The large feline awoke, looked intently at Valentin and then, slowly, placed the tip of its tail over its mouth, in what reminded Morozov of the classic human gesture that means "keep silent".

Morozov repeated the gesture, the cat nodded his large head up and down and then, when he was sure that the human had understood the message, went back to sleep over his flying owner's chest.  

And this, more than seeing a colleague - a  girl he once had a crush on - joining a sept of modern-day Bacchae, losing two thirds of his guests, or the moment where it was decided that half the stars in the galaxy would be populated by descendants of the "second-wavers", became his core memory of the period.

That he met a talking cat sleeping on top a flying child. 

In the afternoon, when the transporter came to take home Martina and all the others, Valentin really felt that he was the one left behind.  


It was not for the first, nor would be the last time in his life.