The Ideal Candidate
Auda has just arrived on Earth, from Luna, for an interview. Across the table sits a man -- a human -- who is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
A story as old as industry: Auda must pretend to not be as smart as she is.
At least if she wants the job. She does. She's eager to get hired. As eager as she's ever been for anything in her entire life. Her Lunar colony is depending on her.
All Auda needs to do is to convince the boss that she's the one. And try not to thump her hindquarters too much
The Ideal Candidate
Sonia Orin Lyris
"The ideal candidate is uncreative and introverted." The human male patted his desk with hands of stubby fingers and thick nails.
Auda nodded enthusiastically, her long, white furry ears brushing her shoulders. "Oh, gosh. I can do that. You bet."
Her nose twitched. The room's olfactory canvas had a base of astringent chemical cleaning products. Next, the pungent scent of orange peel, the obvious source being a curl of rind on the desk. A blue mug to the side wafted cold coffee, milk, and something sweet.
Atop it all, the stink of human.
The man swept the rind into a nearby bucket. Saving it for later, Auda guessed.
He looked at her. His eyes seemed overly large through glasses that barely stayed on the flat bump of his neo-nose. It was creepy, how he could gaze directly at her. Auda suppressed the sharp craving to flee.
READ MOREHe also had a disturbing amount of skin. Even his nose was bare.
At least his nostrils had the familiar and reassuring Y-shape septum leading down to unfortunately over-full lips.
No one was sure what had caused the Lagopocalypse that had swept Earth some eighty years back. An engineered viral germline escaped from a human lab? An accidental genetic modification riding into Earth on a meteor? An alien prank? The second coming?
Whatever the cause, generation by generation, nearly all of Earth mammals had gained increasingly obvious lagomorphic features. Elongating front teeth. Fuzzy ears in one of three lagomorphic shapes: upright, floppy, or pika-round. Tails. Bumps for noses.
"We need you to seem vintage," the man said, brushing back a stray whisker.
Did he know how far away he was from vintage? Auda had seen pictures of vintage humans. They had noses that stuck out of their faces like an extra ear.
"You bet," Auda said, keeping her eyes wide, because humans were said to prefer that. She looked directly at him, even though that meant she couldn't quite see him. "I mean, sure, I do have these." Auda raised her front paws and wriggled her digits, emphasizing her opposing and articulated dewclaw, of which all neo-rabs were rather proud.
"Don't do that," the man said. "Not on the job. Keep 'em together, like your ancestors did."
That was not at all how her ancestors did. Auda decided not to correct him.
"Can do!" she said. "I'm an ideal candidate. You won't find a neo-rab as good as me at being quiet, not anywhere on Earth."
COLLAPSE
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