Author's note:
I was browsing some adventure-themed fanart that had been featured on ZNN, when I saw something that gave me a ridiculous idea. and I entertained it for a few minutes, mostly for shits and giggles...and then it turned into something much bigger. Now, on to the disclaimers:
There are numerous references to real world buildings and/or events in this story, such as the Seagrams Building, or the Vietnam War.
Please note, however, that Zistopia (and yes, I may be spelling it as Zistopia, as a reference to the fan comic of the same name) does not necessarily follow our history verbatim...so although there are references and similarities to our 20th century, Zistopia's history is not our history. Think of it like an alternate history, where the Beatles still happened, but they broke up some time before '68.
In other words, don't rip me a new one in the reviews over somewhat minor historical inaccuracies. This is a world full of talking, bipedal animals, and you're complaining about me getting my history wrong? Plus, as it is an AU, I could just say "alternate universe, non-canon" and ignore any such complaints on the subject of historical error. In conclusion, any similarities between Zistopia and our world are mostly there to draw disturbing parallels, to expand the in-universe lore, or to serve as the vehicle for obscure, comedic references.
Also, considering the theme, plot, and concepts this story is based around, this might be one of the more blasphemous Zootopia fanfictions ever written.
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."
Nietzsche, on the ubermensch
He couldn't see anything. He was in a void, black, infinite, and completely empty, even of his body.
"Am I dead?"
No answer.
"Well, shit. This isn't how I imagined it at all."
The shimmering scarlet wire-frame form of Nicholas Piberius Wilde appeared in the void, startling him. He could, in fact, see just fine here, except there had been nothing to see here until now.
"MULTIPLE CRITICAL ALTERATIONS TO TERMINAL DETECTED. DO YOU WISH TO UNDO?"
Dozens of injured regions, highlighted in white, appeared on the wire frame. Fingertips, much of the chest cavity, half of the joints in this body, most of the pelvic region, a femur and both ankles, the entire cranium, inside and out, and one distinct line across the face. All pockmarked by the white symbols and shapes. The wireframe collapsed onto an invisible floor, disjointedly ragdolling into impossible poses as it settled.
"Sure...why the hell not?"
"COMMAND RECEIVED, REQUEST ACCEPTED. LOADING LAST QUICKSAVE..."
One by one, the white zones disappeared, the wire frame fading from a nasty red to a pleasant green as it was pieced back together and stood up by floating grey polygons. Their work complete, they vanished, and he was once again alone with this wire-frame fox: upright, upbeat, and appearing far healthier (at least, physically) than he had been in a long time.
"...REPAIRS COMPLETE. PREPARE TO CONTINUE."
he paused in contemplation...he had no idea what was going on, or why, but he decided to keep going with it...see what other oddities this...entity...had in store...whatever the hell it was. Perhaps he could even try to find his body, wherever the hell it was.
"Well, is there anything else to do around here?"
"ACCESS DENIED."
Friday, November 16th, 1973. 5:48 PM.
Nicholas Piberius Wilde came to face-down on the concrete. His head hurt like hell, and the rest of his body, which ached as if it had been dismantled, reassembled, and then rebooted, wasn't much of an improvement. Come to think of it, the outside world wasn't a whole lot better, either: Upon opening his eyes, Nick saw the same grey Zistopian hell he'd seen countless times before, as boring as it was depressing, even in the skyscraper choked sunset.
How the fuck did I get here?
His collar beeped its yellow alert.
Nick took a breath, and instantly noted the unmistakable stench of blood, dripping from his nose to the concrete below.
An inconsiderate asshole might have cleaned it up, but he didn't, knowing that if it wasn't for inconsiderate assholes like him, the hopeless predators with no future in this hellish city (such as himself) wouldn't have their job, cleaning up after inconsiderate assholes like Nick. Sure, it was a shitty, demeaning, exhausting, minimum wage job, but it was still something. Nick, by contrast, had nothing but angst, his brown leather jacket, a handful of cigarettes left in his pocket, and an angry fistful of dollars. In truth, Nick Wilde was a grade-A nobody: depressed, trapped in his collar and slaving away at a dead-end job at the canning plant, and not quite homeless nor broke.
Today he'd go drinking with a few of his friends, tomorrow he'd mope around in his hangover, and the day after that, he'd begin the cycle anew, over and over again, running as fast as he could, yet never getting anywhere, till the day he died.
Or at least, that's what he thought.
Nick, looked around, and found himself on the sidewalk at the base of the Seagrams building, itself a faceless black monolith pockmarked by the headache-inducing fluorescent lighting within those miserable offices. His location near the center of the city, and its distance from the bar he frequented, was now the most recent item on his list of grievances.
Not that anyone would listen to any of them.
Yet today, something was different. On any other day, Nick would've taken the subway. As menacing as it was, it was a hell of a lot faster than walking. Yet today, that was exactly what he was in the mood for: Walking. Nick couldn't really explain it, but his legs felt...springy. Sort of how a man high on LSD really notices their body, only Nick wasn't high.
He would've known it if he was tripping balls.
Nick had once worked a stint with the mob, back when the hippie counterculture was consuming the stuff as fast as it could be smuggled in. Nick had been a semi-successful individual during the 60's, smuggling the stuff past every cop in town. He insisted, to just about anybody he knew, that foxes could in fact, be trusted; That they weren't just sneaky, shifty, slimy scumbags who'd take your money and run...and yet for most of his 20's, Nick had been a sneaky fox who lied to cops for a living, as he shipped his cargo to people even shiftier than himself, before he took their money and ran off somewhere else.
And for a while, he had almost enjoyed his ironic life, but time, the bitch, kept on ticking: The Beatles broke up, the space race faded into history, the god-forsaken war had finally ended, and then, in '68, they desegregated the city, and everything went to hell.
At first, Nick had been rather excited. Perhaps his message had gotten through to somebody up top. Perhaps the people really were beginning to let go of the bigotry that had for so long cleaved the city in two. Only they hadn't. The city demolished the barbed wire eyesore, and promptly rolled out those fucking collars.
Nick's collar went yellow. Fucking thing.
Sure, they claimed there was equality now, but when you got rid of the bullshit, they had essentially pulled the bait-n-switch, in this case, replacing one fence with another.
Only the barbed wire hadn't punished people for having feelings. The collars, unable to differentiate anger from joy, often electrocuted those who were dumb enough to try LSD while wearing one, and in one fell swoop, they had silenced the counterculture for good (what good is a sober hippie?). Nowadays, the only real demand for pot came from angsty teens with nothing better to do and even less disposable income. So Nick had been forced to look for what his preachier relatives, having drunk themselves to death on the protestant work-ethic koolaid, would've called 'a real job,' and was living paycheck to paycheck on a wage his younger self would've laughed at.
Although his legs had a newfound spring to their step, his Neck had gotten worse. The dull ache that had permeated his flesh when he woke on the concrete had subsided, yet now his neck was itching incessantly, spoiling his otherwise picturesque view of the afternoon gridlock, and of the morose commuters who were as hopeless as he. Nick neared the semi-neglected central park, taking in the sights and smells of the skeletal trees, sleeping their way through the winter. The park, and to a lesser extent, the winter as a whole, had so far been the worst of both worlds: all of the cold, none of the snow. The grass had dried up, perished, and turned the color of piss, the frozen blades crunching morbidly as he stepped on them, just as society had stepped all over him.
Great...just great. Now I am empathizing with the fucking grass.
His collar went yellow, again. Nick decided to skip the bar, and instead embarked on a trip to Honey's place.
He had had it to here with that collar, and, even if only for a few hours, he wanted it off.
6:26 PM, "HappyTown"
Ra-ta-ta-tat-ta-ta-t-t-tat.
Nick rattled off the ridiculous code on Honey's door.
The crazy badger who lived here was a paranoid, conspiracy theory spinning nutjob. The Reptillian Illuminatti, the New World Order, The Moon Landing Hoax, Paul is Dead, The Pope is the Antichrist, telepathic humans secretly control the government, etc.
It was all batshit crazy, and she believed every word of it. One time, she had even had the audacity to claim that somehow, asbestos was not only dangerous, but that the companies had known of its danger since the 1930's, and had been lying about it ever since.
Like all her conspiricy talk, Nick thought it crazy, much like Honey herself, but she was one of Nick's closest friends, and she'd always been there for him when times got tough, and whether or not he believed she belonged in the loony bin, he loved her just the same (Platonically, of course.)
She was also the only person Nick knew who was smart enough to reverse-engineer her own working collar key (and so far, nobody else had even tried), and the only predator Nick knew who was clever enough to not get caught with it, despite having owned it for 4 years.
Honey, knowing it was a friend by the code used in the knocks, hurried to the door.
Oh, he hasn't been back here in a while.
Honey, despite knowing who was there, checked the peephole anyway. After assuring herself that it really was Nick, she undid all 7 of the locks on her door, and opened it.
"Nick, it's been a while."
"I'll say! What took you so long to open the door? You still convinced I'm one of those androids?"
This question sent the lonely badger into a fit of laughter as they hugged on the porch.
"Oh no, they won't have small enough transistors for that for another 10 years at least. Just getting those damn collars to measure your heartbeat was a technical marvel."
"It's funny you should say that...that's exactly why I'm here. I've had a really rough day today, and I'd like a break."
"Well why didn't you say so? Come on in."
Nick entered Honey's bipolar house. She'd bought the place with her fiance (and some money loaned from Nick, who had been working with the mob in those days) back in '63. The property value was low then as it was now, but it was a decent place to live, and Honey, who had been a mostly normal person at the time, had been ready to begin the next stage of her life with the man she loved...Until one evening, before they had even repainted the walls of their new life, his had reached a swift and abrupt conclusion at the hands of a trigger happy cop.
He'd been out on an errand, buying groceries.
She was devastated, and in the decade since then, she had never gotten around to repainting the walls. Instead, she had gone of the conspiracy theory deep end, and Nick's detached mobster animosity against the ZPD had become a burning vendetta. He'd been an orphan, and Honey was the closest thing he had to family, and to see those fucking cops do this to her of all people...it angered, and on a deeper level, disturbed him, to his core. His regular duties as a mafia smuggler required him to ignore his principles on a daily basis. Mobsters didn't have time to wonder what Jesus would do when they were transporting bootleg liquor into the bad part of town, and Nick found it hard to keep dragging himself to church every week when the world around him just kept on getting worse. Why the hell should he be the one apologizing? They said that god loved him, but all he had ever received was stone cold hatred.
As cold as the winters he had slept through. Outside.
As cold as the scalpels they had used to fuck up his hands, the steel table they'd strapped him down to, or the electrodes that kept him awake at night.
As cold as his father's lifeless corpse, or the booze that had sent him six feet under.
"God loves you, Nicholas."
Yet unlike Honey, he'd never bothered to show any of it, and as per the old saying, none of Honey's kindness had gone unpunished. In truth, the death of Honey's fiance had been the straw on a back that had already been broken. Why pray for salvation, when you were already damned to hell on Earth?
In the absence of her lover, Honey had filled her apartment will all sorts of wacky things. Broken machines, cannibalized for their parts; Other devices were crammed on her shelves, "equipment" she called them, but for what purpose, she never would say. Not even to Nick.
Her living room was full of filing cabinets, themselves stuffed with dirt on just about every politician elected over the last decade, their yellowing contents filling her house with a notable musty stench. Her basement, however, had no such staleness to it. It smelt of silicon and plastics and solder, of a troubled genius who had tinkered with everything she could get her hands on.
Her basement was where she kept her coolest gizmos. And her key, which she hid inside the light switch.
She retrieved one of the many Flathead screwdrivers in the room, and twisted both screws exactly one half turn to the left. She'd custom-built the whole setup, and having undone both latches, the whole switch assembly slid out of the wall on a set of concealed telescoping rails, and magnetically secured to the other side of the drywall, was the key, safe in its hiding place.
Honey claimed there had been others who once had acquired their own keys. They had all been caught.
"But why don't you make another one? Just in case?"
"Nick, any possible scenario in which I loose this key is one where I won't be able to use the backup, because I'll be in jail."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. I can count on one hand the number of people who actually know where I keep the key, and both of us are standing in this room. If either of us are dumb enough to tell someone else, they'll probably tell someone else, and before long, the cops will be at my door with a search warrant and a set of instructions on where to find the thing. The only other people who could possibly find out and confiscate the key are the very same people who would kill both of us over it, and I won't be needing a collar key if I'm dead."
"Fair point. But what if it breaks?"
"C'mon, Nick, quit stalling. You said you wanted a break, and I can't get your collar off 'till you sit down, and hold still..."
"Ok, ok. But what if it breaks?"
Nick sat himself down on the musty green armchair that he had often described as "crunchy."
"Well Nick, I'll just have to make another one, and that's assuming this one breaks before it is made obsolete by some new version of that collar. And in all honesty, that outcome is far more likely"
The collar released its choke-hold on Nick with a disingenuous clank, and what Honey saw next nearly gave her a heart attack. Nick could tell something was wrong by her face alone.
"Honey, what's wrong?"
"Who the hell are you? What the hell are you? What have you done with Nick?"
"Honey, what are you talking about? I'm right here."
"Like hell you are! Nick hates the collars as much as anybody, but even he has to wear it. You, on the other hand, have a fully grown winter coat below yours! And what's this? ZERO dermal irritation? From the looks of it, today is your first day wearing the thing."
The badger was right. The intact fur below the collar was not only the explanation for Nick's abnormally itchy neck, it was also impossible. A fox's winter coat took over a month to fully grow out, and special barber shops had opened to allow predators to shave their necks, in an effort to mitigate the itching. And even if you didn't (and Nick did, frequently), the constant presence of a collar left numerous minor scorch marks on the fur and skin it sat atop...somehow, this strange fox who claimed to be Nick Wilde lacked both the shaved neck, and the scorched fur.
Stranger still, although 'Nick' was spotless, the collar he was wearing seemed as beaten up and worn out as ever, its casing scratched and faded, its electrodes thoroughly discolored by electric arcing. This guy may not have been Nick, but he had definitely stolen his collar, or someone else's.
The strangest thing of all by far, however, was the motive, or more accurately, the complete and utter lack of one. If this fox really was an android, he could've killed her 20 times by now. And if it was evidence of collar key possession that it/he was looking for, then where were the Razorbacks, lying in wait to swarm the house? And if it was a reptilian shapeshifter, trying to blend in to society (not that they even had to, the reptilians had a special bunker beneath the city hall), why would it pose as such a disadvantaged species? Very few mammals got quite as much crap as the foxes, and surely any reptilian master would masquerade as a pig or a yak or a deer or a wolf or literally anything else that was less likely to be randomly shot in the street by a cop than a fox.
The more Honey pondered this guy, the stranger he became. It was as if she was in an episode of The Twilight Zone, where she was the normal person, and Nick was the premise of the episode, the guy around which weird shit went down.
The closer she looked, the more improbable he seemed, yet he was standing here just the same. Perhaps it was spying on her, trying to obtain her contacts...but if that was the case, then why hadn't it knocked her out when she had briefly hugged him earlier, and why wasn't it currently ransacking her filing cabinets in the living room?
As no rational motive for a shapeshifting creature existed, and as every possible scenario involving an android also entailed her arrest, which somehow had not yet occurred (indeed, no robotic mind could possibly be this irrational, or this sophisticated), she was left with only one conclusion:
Nick Wilde really was telling the truth. He really had been through one hell of a bad day.
"OK...considering that your behavior is completely and totally inconsistent with any possible scenario involving any possible shapeshifter, which would explain the fur, I'm going to go the easy route, and assume that Nick Wilde has had a very strange day, and that you really are Nick Wilde, which would explain the fact that you haven't done anything to me yet. Before we can proceed further...I-"
"Honey, don't tell me that we're-"
"I'm going to need you to strip...I've got to see if they changed anything-"
As Nick put his hands on the armrests of the chair, Honey noticed his claws.
"...else."
Perfectly normal claws, that were exactly where they were supposed to be, doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing...Except they had been amputated in police custody back in '66, when what the mafiosos called a "pinch" from the law had turned into arrests and jail-time. Back then, it was standard procedure, and now, as Honey scanned every inch of Nick's body, she found himself wondering if this man was even real.
Although he seemed at first to be a spitting image of Nick Wilde, on closer inspection, all of the scars were gone. Whoever, or whatever had done this, hadn't stopped at fixing his hands. It seemed as if Nick's entire body had been given an enormous tune-up, like a car. The metaphorical mechanic had gone down the list, buffing out every last scratch, and replacing each and every defective or missing component it could find.
His fillings were gone, the nick in his left ear (from a fight in middle school) had vanished, his ears once again seamless. Once, back when he had worked with the mob, he'd been grazed by a bullet, and the telltale scar from that too was erased. Ultimately, Honey realized there was only one remaining way she could possibly prove that this guy was Nick: the tattoo.
Honey had an inner circle of friends and co-conspirators-in-conspiracy-theory, and whenever one suspected another of being an impostor (a surprisingly frequent occurrence), the tattoo, itself a secret as closely guarded as Honey's collar key, would prove them authentic, or reveal the impostor. Barely a centimeter across, directly above where the tail met the backbone, it easy to find if you knew what to look for, and damn near impossible to notice otherwise.
Even the mechanic, which had thoroughly fixed every square inch of Nick's body, had somehow missed it. She checked, and it sure enough, it was still there.
"Nick, tell me about your day."
"My shift was even worse than usual. I remember getting on the subway after work, and then, after putting down the depressing article I had been reading, it all went dark. I woke up, sprawled on the sidewalk outside the Seagrams Building with a bloody nose. It was about 5:45 or so, and my collar was bugging me, well, bugging me more than usual, so I came here. I didn't notice that I had changed until you pointed it out to me."
"So, you were unconscious?" Honey's logical yet delusional mind was already hard at work forming a new hypothesis to explain these most peculiar of facts.
"Yes. Well no, actually, there were some very strange dreams."
An amateur would've jumped straight to the questions about flying saucers and hairless pale primates from mars, but Honey was neither an amateur, nor convinced that Nick had really been abducted.
On one hand, he had to have been abducted. There was no way stuff like this just happened, and people didn't just accumulate (or in Nick's case, misplace) surgical scars for no reason. Yet he hadn't been gone for nearly enough time. It had only been an hour and a half since his shift had ended, and he'd spent half of that time walking through the city. Even the most skilled surgeons alive couldn't do much more than remove an appendix in 30 minutes, and considering that it could've taken 10 minutes to get on the train, let alone read the newspaper, Honey knew that who or whatever had done this had done so in half an hour or less, and that was assuming they began operating immediately, in the subway car. Even if they (and it would have to be a they, in this scenario) had managed to somehow take over an entire subway car, there was no way they could possibly have kept it that way for long...someone would've noticed. So of course they had to have taken him elsewhere, to their evil lair, and then they took him back to the Seagrams Building after they were done. That too was impossible! They'd have less than 10 minutes remaining to actually do the surgery!
So Nick couldn't have been abducted by people, and any alien abduction would either have failed for similar reasons, or would have been spotted by some bystander (faster than light vessels are very noisy, after all).
Honey decided she needed to get her friends over here and see this. Nick (and once again, his real identity was up for debate), merely by existing, had blown all of their current theories out of the water without even trying...and if the government (and this too was merely a guess) was capable of this, who knew what else they were doing?
And if it wasn't the government (surprisingly, Honey found this hypothesis much more frightening), then who was it, and could Honey get to it before the government caught on to their little secret?
So, that's it for the first chapter! See you next time...which could be a while, as this fic is on the backburner until the other one is done.
EDIT: A word. Honey lives in a house. Not an apartment.