Bennu Station, 417:6
Fana likes to go ride the faoli, and it worries me out of my mind. They are only permitted in zoos back in the core, and for good reason.
When I was in school, one of the trips was to a local zoo, and they had just received a shipment of faoli—they claimed to be wild, but it was more likely they were from an illegal farm. Basically all the zoos get one of their most popular exhibits from illegal farms. There is talk that the zoos pay the farmers and when the animals reach maturity, call in the tip to the authorities after setting up an enclosure that just so happens is ready to accept the exact number of animals confiscated from the farm.
It must be a lucrative deal—I wouldn't want to do the time on an edge station, breathing in toxic dust from some asteroid mining operation no matter how much they paid me.
Faoli are beautiful animals, so it is easy to see the appeal, but less so the danger. On my school trip, we got to watch the zoo unload the animals and fill the enclosure—sphere after perfect sphere floated from the ship bay, the millions of individual red hairs making them look like the children's stuffed animal representation that most people know them by. We were mesmerized, animals floating—not flying with wings, just gliding like some pollen on an unseen wind, the occasional flickering of their coat to communicate with the other members of their group.
And then one of the keepers tried to alter the course of the lead faoli; he just reached out his arm to provide gentle guidance. I never saw the beak, just the flash of movement and the arm falling to the bottom of the enclosure, the opposite of the floating tranquility it fell through—like gravity itself was the abomination.
The glass of the enclosure got switched opaque of course, but I still see the pulsating stump of an arm in my bad dreams.
Fana has harnessed them hundreds of times, and she looks beautiful getting pulled through the air in graceful loops, the long reins trailing the animals, and she at the end like some tail or parasitic organism.
Fana basically reserves her genuine smile for talking about faoli, or the actual rides she takes them on. She always invites us to participate, but I can hardly stand to watch, sure my anxious energy will be felt by the animals and instigate disaster. I just keep envisioning Fana's arm as one of the huge chunks of meat that she throws them at the end of a successful session.
I thought people took jobs in compliance because they were boring people, but it's seemingly to tame the wildness that would otherwise consume them. I'm still trying to uncover what I risk being swallowed by.