Mythlabs

Author : Andy Bolt

Senator Bigfoot sat at the top of the Eiffel Tower daintily sipping espresso from one of Café au Francais’ literally bottomless vortex glasses. His massive, gorilla-derived nostrils inhaled the artificially addictive coffee smell, and he smiled to himself as Jenny stepped out of the spacebender and glided toward his table. He liked Jenny. The multicolored nanolights in her flowing blond hair sparkled with hypnotic blinkery. She hummed low and smooth, her pitch-perfect artificial larynx set to a calypso love song. The lowjack pheromones pumping out of Jenny’s pores didn’t affect bigfeet, but Senator Bigfoot thought Jenny was pretty anyway. Not just because she had been engineered to be pretty either, but because she really was. (Although Senator Bigfoot had an I.Q. of 220, his silverback genes granted him a simplicity of thought that made him more contented than most.)

“Hello, Jenny!” he called to her.

He caught her eye, and a wild swirl of rainbow pigments cascaded through her irises.

“Big!” Jenny’s mech-wings fluttered with delight, and she half-flew the remaining twenty meters to the table. “I’ve missed you!” she sang, kissing his leathered cheek. “Congratulations, Mr. Senator!”

“I’ve missed you, too. Sit, sit.”

Jenny smiled and swished and sat, still humming. “Green tea,” she trilled to the overexcited waiter. “So does this make you the first senator from Mythlabs?” Senator Bigfoot smiled as her loose silky coat almost swallowed her up.

“No,” he responded. “You’re forgetting Senator Gremlin.”

“Oh! Yeah, yeah. He got asked to leave, though, right?”

“Sort of. He was asked to holocommute. He kept making everything malfunction. But how have you been?”

“Alright. Being a siren is fun, most of the time. I get to sing a lot. That part’s nice. But all the boys try to sleep with you, and women hate you. It seems a bit artificial because of all that. Everything happens without me really doing anything.”

The waiter, a jumpy young man in a jumpy smart suit, whizzed up to Jenny with a glass of green tea and a walnut sized diamond.

“Here’s your tea,” he said. “May I have the honor of being your eternal love slave?”

“Not right now,” Jenny laughed, patting his shoulder. “But thank you for the tea.”

Senator Bigfoot shifted uncomfortably. He glanced out the longview window at a flock of three-legged Samjoko swooping and diving over Ulsan. Their bioluminescent flesh-mesh made them glow like bright little suns.

“Jenny-“ he started.

“Yes, Big?”

“Will you marry me?”

Jenny stared at him for a long minute, steam drifting around her cheeks and turning them pink.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I will.”

Senator Bigfoot smiled. In the longview, a Cherokee rain dancer shimmied, the kinetically fueled barometric sliders in his hands and feet producing a light summer mist in southern Oklahoma. Jenny giggled.

“It’s a silly world, Senator Bigfoot.”

“Yeah,” he replied.