The Green Lady 🗽 NYC

Rablanar & the OC

Occasional Cortez was now the CHR (Chief Human Representative) of NYC 2.7, which stretched from Hartford to Baltimore. Occasional C (OC to her colleagues) was chosen by the Baulians because she had some good ideas and because they were afraid of her teeth.

Even on the top floors of the Great Temple, Fractal Masters were fascinated, perhaps even in love, but mostly unnerved by Occasional Cortez. Smooth, infiltrating, sharp as a knife, she was Montezuma and El Requerimiento all rolled into one mouthful. Memories of the Pink Well welled up inside them and they imagined a sharp-toothed life-form struggling with them in the primal waters. Her torso slid over theirs and her hair swept across their faces, underwater, as if in their dreams. This time they wouldn’t electrocute the strange fish and suck out its fluids. They would let it live, to see what it might add to the universe. With teeth like that, she could go anywhere.

And she did. Occasional C rode the orange beams all over the continent previously known as North America. With her retinue of fawning nerds, she made sure that the new systems of governance worked smoothly from Vancouver to Oaxaca, and that all the crucial data funnelled to the nerve centre of NYC 2.7. She also oranged to Paris and Rome, Mumbai and Tokyo, to attend meetings at which the regional CHRs synchronized the complete restructuring of the planet. “At last,” Occasional would say to her European counterparts, “Americans have universal health care!”

Everyone seemed happy about this … except Rablanar the Mystic. In his experiments he encountered certain biological variables that varied so much from the norm that he feared they weren’t variables at all. On the outside, Occasional C appeared human. While at times she displayed organizational characteristics of a Baulian priestess, her blood was red and her hair was black. Her body clearly fit the human mold, albeit it in a way that left humans scratching their heads and staring into space. The problem for Rablanar was that he detected some type of sub-spectral frequency, which seemed to affect the usual frequencies, which were off, just slightly. Or, they were blurred by some infinitesimal vibration that crept in at the edges. She was 99.99999999999 percent human. Maybe even 100 percent, Rablanar couldn’t be sure.

Officially, Rablanar feared the OC was from a species the Baulians didn’t know about. In his as-of-yet unpublished report, he expressed concern that this species might be operating at an unthinkably deep level, one that the Fractal Masters insisted was outside the realm of possibility. And yet, every time he sat across from her at the conference table, something in his pink blood tingled.

Officially, the prospect of a rival species was terrifying. Unofficially, Rablanar hoped it was true. He too was under the spell of OC’s teeth.

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Next: 💍 La Vie en Orange

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