Circa Tempore: The Artificial Organic
Copyright© 2026 by E. B. Redfield
Chapter 17
The sun had begun to dip below the skyline, and the festival was wrapping up. The booths were being torn down, and the bar was among the few still operational, though not for long, apparently. Craig finished his drink and watched the sunset, the weight of his loneliness in almost direct proportion to the growing darkness.
The bartender, a deciduous kaiseichan with orange leaves and flaky white bark approached him and took his empty glass, “Last call?” she asked.
“Yeah, give me another of that,” he replied, but instantly regretted it, hanging his head in defeat. It felt more like an impulse to order another one than anything, and he just knew he was going to see that look from Kayla again when he got back to the ITSTU. Maybe he ought to try to apologize for some of that fight earlier.
“Hey, excuse me,” a raspy voice to his left called, shaking him out of his thoughts. He glanced over and saw a human man with heavily lived-in clothes staring at him. The man was one of the altered people he’d seen occasionally throughout the week, either in propaganda material for frontier hiring or in the alleyways and street corners begging for tender. This man had webbed fingers and (Craig had to fight the urge to shudder at the sight) gills between his ribs, visible through the holes in his shirt. What were these people? Why were they so ... different?
“Hi,” Craig returned the greeting, doing his best to hide his discomfort.
“Please, my family just moved here from Cuan,” the man started, “We have two children, and we’ve been struggling ... I work in the North Atlantic Rig, but we don’t make enough to get by. Anything will help, if you can spare.”
“I got you,” Craig replied, sympathy filling him, “How do I ... uh ... transfer the money?”
The man pulled a scratched-up neural band from his pocket and held it up to his head. Craig willed three hundred tender to the man, who immediately smiled and grabbed Craig’s hand in both of his, shaking it enthusiastically.
“Mother bless you,” he said gratefully, then immediately moved onward to another person to ask for help, who simply walked by without so much as a glance.
“Waste of money, that,” another voice scoffed. He rounded to see a human woman at the end of the bar, a half-finished glass in her hand. She was looking at him with mild distaste.
“Meaning?” he asked.
“All he’s going to do with that money is go out and get his fix,” she explained, “You’re just enabling him.”
Craig glowered at her. He loathed when people talked about the homeless this way. Indifferent, uncaring, and reducing their suffering to the most debasing of assumptions.
“Yeah, whatever,” he muttered, turning away from her.
“That’s quite unsympathetic of you, don’t you think?” the bartender asked the woman while setting Craig’s drink down.
“Oh, pardon me,” she replied, rolling her eyes, “I didn’t realize I had to sympathize with every damn pioneer mutie who rolls by begging for my tender.”
“I ain’t see him ask you for anything,” Craig glowered at the woman, “Probably knew better just looking at your cheap ass,” She turned red and puffed out like a tomato.
“He knew you were a mark, gussied up in all that fancy immediattire!” she scoffed, “How much did that outfit cost you anyway? Flaunt yourself too much and you’ll be swimming in muties like him. It’ll be even worse now that they’ve seen you give a handout once!”
Craig’s blood began to boil, and he went to retort, but paused. How much did the outfit cost? He thought this was just part of the immediattire. He glanced at the selections and for the first time all week he finally noticed the price tags on the items in the catalog. All this time he’d just thought they were just part of a library of available options, but apparently every outfit he’d chosen all week had cost hundreds, if not thousands of credits. He cringed as he thought about the measly three hundred he’d just given to the poor, gilled pioneer. Crap, how could he have been spending so much without even realizing it?
“It’s always disturbed me how humans can be so callous to their own kind,” the bartender said, stepping between them and grabbing Craig’s empty glass, snapping him back to the moment.
“Oh, spare me,” the woman replied, rolling her eyes, “You saw him, right? Did he look like my kind? And don’t even get me started on your kind. Always so uppity and thinking you’re better than the rest of us. Makes me sick.”
“Lady, you ain’t exactly demonstrating the best of humanity right now,” Craig chided her. She huffed and turned away from him in disgust.
“Pay her no mind,” the bartender intoned to Craig, “You are right to have sympathy for him. His plight is likely no fault of his own.”
“I’ve only been here a week,” Craig commented, “And it feels like all I see is people hating on these pioneers. It’s just ... where I come from people be this way for other reasons, and it’s just as ugly. Is it cause of the mutation thing?”
“Yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than that,” the kaiseichan replied as she filled up another glass for a different patron
“How do they get that way in the first place?” he asked.
“Corporate greed disguised as opportunity,” the bartender replied bitterly, “Most businesses are heavy in ambition and light in morals. They pay pioneers to venture out and strip planets dry for resources that the whole galaxy is dependent on,” she paused and turned to the bigoted woman at the end of the bar, who had apparently become deaf as she stared to her left at the empty field where the festival was being torn down.
Craig pondered for a moment, “So these people go out and work ... like what? In mines?”
The bartender nodded and began stowing away the glasses in crates and unplugging the various kegs, “And farms, lumber processing ... all sorts of laborious work. The problem is that many of these worlds are barely habitable to begin with. They have harsh atmospheres, intense gravity ... or as in the case of that person’s home, are completely oceanic. And while explorers can survive these environments with simply exosuits and space vehicles; long-term settlers require something more drastic.”
“Like what?” Craig asked.
“Accelerated Mutagenic Compound. The street name for it is Accelutate,” the bartender replied, “It’s a psychotropic mutagen that convinces the brain matter of most organic species to enter a state of rapid cellular and molecular adaptation. My people created it hundreds of years ago. Pioneers take it when they colonize a new world, and their bodies adapt to the new environment over the course of a few months. It’s an agonizing and painful process in many cases ... and the result drastically alters the person to the point of no return.”
“But they do return!” the woman at the end of the bar jabbed, “They come back here in droves and who ends up paying to resettle them? The tax dollars that go into propping them up and enabling their ... unnaturalness ... is just sickening! And isn’t the whole point that they’re supposed to support themselves in these new places? It’s not our fault if they can’t cut it! What about all the rest of us who work hard, and remained loyal to Earth our whole lives? What do we get?”
Craig had half a mind to throw his drink in her face. The bartender, thankfully, seemed to be ahead of him on how to handle the situation. “Bar’s closed, you’re free to leave anytime,” the woman looked ready to argue, but the bartender approached her ominously and leaned over the bar, her leaves bristling threateningly. The woman pulled her things together and began complaining loudly about kaiseichans and pioneers as she stormed off. Most of the other patrons at the bar seemed relieved to see her leave, though there were a few glaring angrily at both Craig and the bartender. The bartender paid them no mind, handing one of the glaring patrons their drink before returning to Craig.
“So ... if pioneers change to adapt to a new world, why come back?” he asked.
“Any number of reasons,” the bartender explained, loading the kegs into a large crate, “Just because they adapt to the planet doesn’t necessarily mean the planet is adapted for life. Many settlement planets or mining asteroids are dependent on imports of food and clean drinking water. Sometimes they can be terraformed, but for many, it’s not an option.” She began gathering the empty glasses in front of Craig to take to the washing station, “And considering that the whole point of most of these is to mine resources that are sent to the home systems ... well, there’s a reason Roima went from a mining world to a pirate hub.”
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