Station News

COMMON ANCESTRY?
by Jay Marks, the Cybele Sounder

If you were trying to have a nice breakfast on a Promenade C café patio this past Wednesday morning, it’s possible that your food was given a faint chemical tang by the mist from the cleaning guns across the courtyard. It’s also possible that, as if the above were not enough, you then looked up to see the graffti they were washing away, and had your stomach turned beyond repair.

"FEATHER-BRAIN.

BIRD-LOVERS.

CLOACA."

You might also have been sadly less shocked and more appalled, as I was. It isn’t necessarily uncommon to see such hate-filled language painted on the station walls, especially this close to an Avian festival and usually perpetrated by ignorant teenagers acting on their parents’ private prejudices, but it is still disheartening. After I’d eaten, I strolled over for a closer look, expecting to find that the vandalized facade belonged to a traditional Avian restaurant, or a bird-owned boutique… but I was stunned to find that it was a Reptilian-run free clinic.

From the cleaners, I learned that this clinic was operated by one Dr Wesley Wyvern Scales, MD, PHD, whose controversial research (and more importantly, controversial conclusions) have stimulated so much, shall we say, debate on the public stage of late. According to Dr Scales’s latest article… [continued on page 12]

ALLEGED VICE-QUEEN SLAIN IN BOTCHED PRISON TRANSFER
Simon Beak, Cybele Sounder

…A Ms. Lyria Corvid-Eyrie, known to friends and colleagues as the "Lady Lyria," was gunned down Tuesday afternoon by an unknown assailant in the shadow of the colonial basilica on Deck 6. Corvid-Eyrie, a socialite and charity organizer, had been arrested late last week on a laundry-list of likely trumped-up charges including the illegal trafficking of sex and drugs, intimidation and blackmail, "corrupting the innocent," racketeering, and tax-fraud. The accused— and the legal representatives of the Noble House of Corvid —have vehemently denied all claims of misconduct. Corvid-Eyrie was held in custody over the weekend while the investigation continued, despite attempts by the family to post bail. Then, in a baffling move yet to be explained by colonial authorities…

***

MINOR NOBLE CAUGHT IN GANGLAND CROSSFIRE
Jeremanthius de la Pez, New Imperial Times

…the so-called "Viscountess of Vice" was driven by prison transport to St. Bubbles Basilica for additional processing, in accordance with recent changes to correctional policy. It was at this time, while the prisoner was being escorted from one vehicle to another, that a cloaked individual was able to penetrate the security barrier and to discharge a weapon of indeterminate make and origin. Said discharge struck the prisoner in the abdomen, and colonial doctors pronounced her dead some few hours later…

***

LYRIA KILLING DOMINATES NEWS WHILE 1000+ MISSING KEBO YOUTH FORGOTTEN OR IGNORED
Bola Bana, The Dragon’s Tongue

…and to be very frank, "Lady Lyria" and her ilk represent, and have always represented, a not-insignificant threat to the security and sustainability of a thriving Kebo community on the station’s central ring. For one thing, the drugs and illegal spirits put into circulation by Lyria —and by extension, the entire Corvidae Crime Syndicate— have given colonial officers ample reason and excuse to over-police the decks and to act out previously-held biases, placing undue hardship and unearned scrutiny on the heads of Kebo peoples across the station. Now, because of the public attitudes that this has engendered, a rash of utterly preventable disappearances has been allowed to go wholly unchecked. Yes, the Lyria killing was an obvious set-up followed by an even more obvious cover-up… but young Kebo men, women, and teens especially have been disappearing from station streets in alarming numbers, with little attention paid and zero action taken by colonial authorities. From the peak of Cybele’s Crown to the bottom of her needled spire, apes and birds alike are debating to what extent Lyria Corvid-Eyrie deserved or did not deserve to be murdered. We at The Dragon’s Tongue prefer to ask the following: why is her’s the only murder that seems to matter? And how many innocent Kebo does it take to equal a single avian pimp & pusher? Apparently, 1000+ and counting.

COMMON ANCESTRY?(continued)
According to Dr. Scales latest article, everything we once thought we knew about ourselves —avian and reptilian— our histories, our biologies, our collective cultural heritage, could be based upon a lie, or at best a well-intentioned misconception. It is Scales’ assertion that we birds, in addition to being forever linked to reptiles sociopolitically, are reptiles ourselves. Furthermore, he claims that both species represent different lineages of a common ancestral race, which he has named "saurian," and that it is this ancient ancestor, and not the modern reptilian peoples as we understand them, who built and lost the great empire which has for so long been attributed to our historical oppressors.

Naturally, this has resulted in some rather strong opinions and heated dialogue from both sides of the Great Belt. Although specific reactions have varied, I find that they tend to fall into one of a few categories: A) outrage on behalf of avians, who have spent the better part of a millennia defining themselves as destinctly non-reptilian in all possible ways, B) outrage on behalf of reptilians, who sneer at the very notion that our two peoples could share any kind of genetic heritage, to say nothing of losing an empire in the bargain, figuratively speaking, and C) mild-to-severe tonedeaf enthusiasm on the part of officials within the colonial government and their integrationist supporters. Making all of this worse is the tragic, unexpected, and uncomfortable fact that Dr. Scales’ conclusions, at least as far as the genetics go, appear to be well supported.

Scales’ ventures into amateur xeno-archeology are less convincing, especially considering the doctor’s well-known dedication to the polarizing notion that only a united Sodyban front can hope to treat with the Hominids as an equal force, as opposed to the fractious and easily-controlled lot we apparently are now. I fear these fictions about a legendary super-race, as delightful as they may be, are not what the tense reality of our present situation demands. Still, Scales should be permitted to indulge his fantasies in peace, at least as long as the very real and very important work of his free clinic continues. According to numbers released by the Governor’s health council, the Scales clinic was responsible for a 11% increase in vaccinations and an 4% decrease in medically-preventable deaths across Ring 2 in the last year alone. Few special-interest groups among either birds or lizards can boast comparable numbers.

The Thousand Eyes of Kebos
Dr Wesley Wyvern Scales, Sodyban Journal of Science and Medicine

In my academic career, I have occasionally been accused of publishing findings which are deliberately incomplete or even outright fabricated, purely to pump sales down the line with corrected editions of my books. I could argue, were I a petty lizard, that my byline is prolific enough within these very pages that even discounting my entire catalogue of books, I would still be the most-published working scientist in the system, but instead I will save us all the pretense and simply publish my latest corrections here. I would like to assure my detractors that, while the Journal may charge its readers for the issue, I am paid for my submissions not as a celebrity scientist, but merely as an academic, which is to say, not at all. You’re welcome.

In my book, The Psychic Sound-Barrier, I posit that the root cause of the hitherto universally recognized incompatibility of avian and reptilian telepathy could be traced to a particular mitochondrial gene-sequence which I dubbed the "dragon’s signature." This line of genetic code exists in both avians and reptilians, but each is expressed phenotypically in ways which differ at the molecular level. At the time, I took this to be yet another consequence of the Panspermia Doctrine, which hypothesizes an ancient race of super advanced aliens which "seeded" all life-bearing worlds with the same basic cocktail of amino acids, which resulted in at least hundreds of different sentient species on at least as many different worlds, which resemble one another in certain ways but differ vastly in others as a result of divergent evolutionary paths. However, in light of the results of recent experiments at my laboratory on Asteroid Z12, I must withdraw from this position. You see, reptilian and avian telepathy are not so incompatible after all.

In a double-blind study involving 12 avians and 12 reptilians, diverse along lines of age, sex, and ancestry, and all possessed of some expression of meta-humanoid ability, my team has demonstrated two things beyond the shadow of a doubt: that unaided communication between telepaths of different species is both possible and teachable, and that even more unique powers such as invisibility, telemetry, and pheromone-control —previously thought to be strictly species-specific— are capable of being learned and taught by any other humanoid. I have previously argued that all such "powers" are essentially psychic in nature, and this I do not retract. To attempt to distinguish between a power which is psychic, biological, or divine is, I believe, generally a matter of ideological hair-splitting. The realm of the psychic represents the overlap of spirit and flesh. All mental and spiritual powers possesses, therefore, a physical component, and if these powers are not utterly unique between species, it must follow that neither is their flesh.

It was in the light of these findings that I then turned to a separate (or not so separate) scientific mystery: the ancient ruins of the rogue planetoid Meggidoh IV. These ruins represent the oldest evidence of civilization in the Sodyban Belt, and the faint traces of biological material that were found there remain infamously inconclusive as to origin. It is now my position that these ruins represent the labor of a third species, older even than reptilians, and that we reptilians are the genetic descendants of that protean race, just as the avians are genetic descendants of us.