Bubochka

Eden's civil detective bureau has Bubochka on its books as a filing-room courtesy animal, on loan from the station's small-livestock allowance and tolerated by the Detective Superintendent's office on the grounds that nobody objects to a rabbit. The paperwork is accurate as far as it goes. It does not go very far.

She reports, in the sense that matters, to Agent Barsik — assigned to him as a trainee the week she arrived, on the same principle the agency applied to him: a mascot gets left alone with the paperwork, and a trainee mascot gets left alone even more completely, because nobody expects competence from either end of that sentence yet. Officially, she sits somewhere on Superintendent Oyelaran's roster, several rungs below anyone whose signature means anything. Actually, she is being taught to read a filed log the way Barsik reads one: for what a form's absence implies as much as for what it says.

Bubochka's training exercises so far have mostly involved sitting very still in places a working agent has no business being ignored in — a supply mug, a windowsill, the exact centre of someone's afternoon marshmallow break — and cataloguing who walks past without looking twice. For her first months she did not file a report anyone upstream needed to act on. Barsik told her, once, that this was the correct rate of progress.

The Unacceptable Cat

Her second exercise, in the late spring of 2827 UCSD, came with a three-part instruction: find a cat on this habitat that is not on the books; do not catch it; arrange for it to be seen, by someone whose seeing counts. Fourteen small objects had gone missing from the bureau floor, the station mascot's conduct box had been ticked unacceptable, and Barsik could neither report nor be seen working the case. She reasoned out where a cat with something in its mouth would want to go, sat in the evidence tray beside the records cabinet, and watched a young grey-and-white cat carry a stylus past the Senior Sergeant, who told it to put that down by the wrong name. Then she turned her Drithane lesson the other way round: being interesting is a kind of cover, and a rabbit standing bolt upright in a corridor is a thing a detective looks at, and a detective looks at what the rabbit is looking at. Superintendent Oyelaran followed her line of sight to Zhulik on the cabinet top with the Inspector's stamp under one paw. Barsik's log entry: she has understood that being overlooked and being looked at are the same instrument, held two ways. The full account is The Unacceptable Cat.

Character Notes

Her own Smart Pet certification is still provisional — training status, in the same sense a Ranger cadet's rank is provisional — but the welfare regulation attached to it is not; a trainee's subsystem gets reviewed at least as closely as a fully certified agent's, on the theory that a subsystem still being calibrated is exactly the one most likely to need catching early.

She has not been told what the badge under her collar actually authorises, in keeping with agency practice generally and Barsik's own file specifically. She has noticed that nobody at Eden has ever asked her what it is, either — which she has correctly identified as the entire mechanism at work, before anyone explained it to her.

Her instinct for finding the smallest, most photogenic container available and sitting inside it until someone stops paying attention to the room is, per Barsik's private assessment, either an extraordinary natural aptitude for detective-agency tradecraft or an ordinary rabbit's ordinary fondness for tight warm spaces. He has not resolved which, and has stopped trying to, since the operational result is identical either way.

See also: Agent Barsik, Superintendent Rasa Oyelaran, Zhulik, Eden Space Habitat.