What Happens to Rabbits
People sometimes ask me what an ordinary life would have looked like if I had accepted the conversion.
They usually expect something unpleasant but survivable. Discrimination, perhaps. A worse job. People staring at the ears. Government forms. The sort of injustice comfortable societies enjoy imagining because it leaves enough room to say, Well, at least she could still have lived a normal life.
Maybe.
Some rabbits did.
That was important to remember. Domestic Class did not automatically mean somebody chained you inside a barn on your eighteenth birthday. There were families who protected their Domestic children fiercely. There were rabbit communities that pooled money, bought land and kept predatory companies away. There were employers who ignored classification whenever the law allowed them to. There were states where the word Domestic amounted to an ugly mark on your identification and relatively little else.
Lampasas County was not the worst place to be a rabbit hybrid.
It was merely rural enough that all the worst possibilities were legal.
Rabbit hybrids had an unusual relationship with lifespan. The conversion itself was medically stable, and a well-cared-for rabbit hybrid could live for decades. The human components mattered enormously. We weren't literal rabbits with human faces. Our organs were mostly human-derived, our brains were human, and modern conversion medicine prevented many of the diseases that had shortened the lives of early hybrid lines. A healthy rabbit hybrid under good medical care could reasonably reach their sixties, sometimes seventies.
The phrase doing all the work there was under good medical care.
The average Domestic rabbit rarely got the chance to test the theoretical maximum.
Small variants were fragile. Broken bones were common. Predatory hybrids were common. Rural accidents were common. Cheap facilities saved money on medicine because losing one rabbit was often economically preferable to expensive treatment. Pregnancy complications killed some. Industrial work killed others. Feral attacks took more. Poor nutrition shortened lives. Untreated infections shortened them further. A rabbit who wandered away from registered land could simply disappear, and depending on the county, the investigation might amount to a report being entered into a database and forgotten before lunch.
Then there were the uses.
That was the word in the regulations.
Uses.
A rabbit hybrid could be registered for household assistance, agricultural labor, companionship programs, reproduction, food production or combinations thereof. The language changed from state to state. The fundamental idea did not.
We were useful animals that happened to be people.
Breeding was one of the more profitable industries. Rabbits reproduced easily, hybrid traits transmitted reliably, and dwarf variants were particularly popular because they required less food, less space and tended to have high conversion compatibility. A young Domestic rabbit with clean medical records could be transferred between licensed households or companies for reproductive programs. There were supposed to be consent protections. There were inspections. There were forms declaring that coercion was prohibited.
There were also a thousand ways to manufacture consent when the person signing the form had no money, limited travel rights and nowhere else legally permitted to live.
Food was simpler.
Most people from later generations have difficulty with that part.
By then, the practice had become one of those historical horrors everyone agreed had obviously been monstrous. People looked back and asked how civilized communities could possibly have tolerated it.
Civilization tolerates almost anything if you give it enough paperwork.
Carnivorous hybrids were a huge portion of the population. Wolves, big cats, reptiles, predatory birds, aquatic predators, dozens of engineered lineages and stranger combinations besides. Their biology required enormous amounts of protein. Animal agriculture already existed, of course, but Domestic hybrid law had grown from that same agricultural system. Somewhere along the way, legislators had constructed a distinction between human personhood and Domestic biological status flexible enough that a rabbit hybrid could possess language, education and memories while still being legally processed as meat under certain conditions.
There were health regulations.
That detail always made me laugh later.
Darkly.
Very strict health regulations.
Because apparently the unacceptable part wasn't eating someone who understood what was happening. It was doing so without proper inspection.
Hybrid meat generally carried no special biological danger. Stable conversion prevented cross-species pathogens from behaving much differently than ordinary livestock diseases, and centuries of regulation had standardized everything from processing temperature to predator dietary compatibility. Meat was meat.
People could get used to nearly anything.
Rural counties were particularly dangerous because agricultural tradition and Domestic law overlapped. A rabbit born in a major city might grow up protected by activist organizations, specialized schools and lawyers who knew every loophole available. A rabbit on an isolated farm might grow up knowing that if ownership papers changed hands, their life could change with them.
And intelligence did not necessarily save you.
Sometimes it made you more valuable.
The federal government, defense contractors and major corporations all had programs for unusually capable Domestic hybrids. Officially, these were opportunity initiatives: education, placement, technical training, research apprenticeships, security-cleared employment. A brilliant rabbit who would otherwise spend their life sorting produce could suddenly find themselves inside a government laboratory working beside doctoral researchers.
The salary was usually insulting.
Domestic compensation laws allowed room and board, medical support and classification maintenance to count as substantial portions of payment. A corporation could acquire a mathematician for less than an ordinary technician. A federal project could employ a gifted engineer who technically remained assigned to a Domestic housing program and therefore couldn't simply resign and move across the country.
I had read about cases.
A rabbit prodigy appeared in some technical newsletter. Seventeen years old, exceptional memory, designing power systems for a defense subsidiary. Five years later, nothing. No publication record. No public employment history. Sometimes the company said the individual had been transferred. Sometimes privacy regulations prevented comment.
Sometimes management changed.
The research program was reorganized.
The rabbits were gone.
Maybe they had been reassigned.
Maybe.
I eventually learned enough about the old world to become deeply suspicious whenever a government record ended with the word transferred.
So when people ask what my life might have been if I had stayed Domestic, my answer is that there wasn't one possible future.
There were dozens.
I might have stayed on the farm with Mom forever.
I might have found some legal technical job willing to tolerate my classification.
I might have spent years fighting for reclassification and lost.
I might have been transferred into a breeding program.
I might have been purchased by a company that liked my brain more than it respected the person carrying it.
I might have disappeared into a federal research complex and become a line in an accounting ledger.
I might have been eaten.
And because I was a dwarf rabbit in a rural Texas county, weak enough that a household chair had frightened my nervous system when it moved unexpectedly, almost none of those outcomes required anyone to defeat me.
That was the part I couldn't accept.
Not that terrible people existed.
Terrible people had always existed.
I couldn't accept that I had been rebuilt into someone who needed their permission to survive them.
By the time I finished thinking through all of that, the house had gone quiet.
Not silent. Houses are rarely silent when one of the occupants has several meters of snake tail. I could hear the occasional scrape of scales downstairs, a cabinet opening, running water in the kitchen. My new ears were annoyingly effective at turning family life into surveillance.
I had been working for perhaps another hour.
The backpack sat open on the bed. Beside it were three separate piles: essential, useful and stop lying to yourself, you cannot carry this anymore.
The third pile had become depressingly large.
I picked up my old cordless drill.
Too heavy.
Not impossible to lift, but carrying it for ten kilometers would be stupid.
I put it down.
A compact driver went into the bag instead.
My full soldering station stayed.
The portable iron went in.
Large multimeter stayed.
Pocket meter.
One battery pack.
Two.
I stared at the second.
Leona: "You weigh three kilograms."
The battery remained unapologetic.
Leona: "Asshole."
I put it in the reject pile.
One of the spider drones stood on my desk watching me with a single red optic.
They weren't intelligent. I knew that. Their tracking software simply biased their camera toward movement.
Still.
Leona: "Don't judge me."
The optic continued pointing directly at me.
I sighed.
Leona: "Fine. You carry batteries."
That solved more than it should have.
The six drones could distribute equipment between them using cargo slings. They had been built for inspection work around the farm, including carrying small tools through crawlspaces and over roofs. Individually they weren't strong. Together they could move several kilograms while maintaining stability.
I updated their load routines.
Six small status indicators changed from red to green.
Better.
The map on my laptop occupied half the screen. Lampasas County sat beneath the cursor. Highway 183 ran north and south nearby. Smaller roads disappeared west into ranch country and broken Hill Country terrain.
I had no destination.
That bothered the engineer in me.
Engineers like destinations.
Objectives.
Known inputs.
Defined constraints.
"Run west until something improves" was not an engineering plan.
It was migration.
I opened another window.
Old federal infrastructure map.
Then a leaked GHCA incident archive.
Then an agricultural survey database.
Then a Department of Energy maintenance record I technically had no business possessing.
My access methods were old but functional.
I started searching.
Abandoned substations.
Military parcels.
Closed research clinics.
Cold War bunkers.
Geological stations.
Underground facilities whose land records stopped making sense after acquisition by shell companies.
There were hundreds.
Most were probably nothing.
An abandoned agricultural laboratory might contain mold and forty-year-old refrigerators.
A military bunker might have been emptied properly.
A strange ownership record might simply mean somebody committed tax fraud.
Still.
Somewhere out there was technology capable of changing hybrid biology.
I knew that because modern medicine existed.
Technology did not appear from nowhere.
Somebody built the first version.
Somebody tested it.
Somebody improved it.
And humanity had an established habit of abandoning old laboratories rather than cleaning them properly.
I didn't need the newest facility.
I needed one useful machine.
One archive.
One preserved sample.
One piece of research nobody remembered to destroy.
Maybe it would take months.
Maybe years.
Maybe I would fail completely.
That possibility felt better than staying.
Downstairs, Kira's voice rose enough that even the floor couldn't muffle it.
Kira: "I'm saying you should leave her alone."
I stopped typing.
Mom answered, quieter.
Elara: "I want to apologize."
Kira: "Then apologize tomorrow."
Elara: "She's been alone for a month."
Kira: "She clearly wants to be alone now."
A pause.
Then Mom:
Elara: "You were cruel to her."
There was enough silence afterward that I knew Kira hadn't liked hearing it.
Kira: "I was joking."
Elara: "You knew she was frightened."
Kira: "She's always hated looking weak."
Elara: "And you kept calling her prey."
Another scrape of scales.
Kira moving.
Kira: "Because she is."
I went still.
Mom's answer came sharper.
Elara: "Kira."
Kira: "Biologically. That's all I mean."
That phrase.
That's all I mean.
Humanity has done terrible work with those four words.
Kira: "Look, she'll adjust. I did."
I looked toward the floor.
That surprised me.
Mom must have been surprised too, because she didn't answer immediately.
Kira continued.
Kira: "I woke up with no legs when I was ten. Remember? Everyone stared. Clothes didn't fit. I couldn't use stairs properly for months. I thought my life was over."
Her voice had lost its teasing edge.
Kira: "Then it wasn't."
I sat very still.
Kira: "You get used to the body."
Mom said something too quietly for me to catch.
Kira answered.
Kira: "The classification is shit. Fine. But she's here. She's alive. That's better than the alternative."
I looked at the gray collar lying against my throat.
Kira wasn't entirely wrong.
That was inconvenient.
Maybe she genuinely thought she was helping.
Maybe seeing me alive and complaining had been such a relief that cruelty became the easiest way for her to return us to something familiar.
Maybe underneath every rabbit joke was the memory of waking at ten years old without legs.
That didn't make me want to stay.
It simply meant I could leave without needing to hate her.
I closed the laptop.
The armor had become the next problem.
I couldn't fight.
That conclusion required approximately three seconds.
I had no combat training. My body was barely recovered. My Danger Rank was F for a reason. If a wolf hybrid decided I looked edible, my practical defensive options consisted of running badly and expressing strong disapproval.
So I needed to make grabbing me unpleasant.
The first version was ridiculous.
I took a lightweight protective work vest from Dad's old equipment and started attaching thin metal plates wherever they wouldn't interfere with movement. Aluminum first, then narrow steel reinforcement around the chest and sides. Heavy armor was impossible, but I didn't need bulletproof.
I needed teeth-proof enough to matter.
More importantly, I needed constrictor-proof.
That thought made my hands stop.
Kira.
I imagined her tail wrapping around me.
Not because I truly believed she would kill me.
Because if she found me leaving, she could stop me without hurting me at all.
One coil around my waist and the expedition would be over.
I looked at the scrap bin.
Then smiled.
Spikes.
Not huge ones.
That would add too much weight.
Short reinforced projections along the sides, back and shoulders. Angled outward. Long enough that wrapping a muscular body around me would become immediately painful.
The design was ugly.
Excellent.
I worked. Cut. Filed. Drilled. Bolted.
The familiar sequence calmed me.
My hands knew what to do even if my body didn't.
When the drill became too heavy, I braced it against the bench and used both hands. When tightening bolts exhausted my wrists, I stopped for thirty seconds and continued.
No self-pity. Measurement. Problem. Adjustment.
Continue.
The spiders helped by holding pieces in place. Their little mechanical legs clicked over the desk while I worked, handing me screws from a magnetic tray through a crude command routine.
Three hours earlier I had been sitting at dinner while my family discussed my market classification.
Now six homemade robots were helping me build anti-predator armor.
I preferred this version of the evening.
I added a cape last.
Not a dramatic one.
Despite what later artists decided.
It began as a fire-resistant work tarp cut down into a hooded poncho. The idea was concealment. The armor would attract attention immediately if someone saw me on a road. The poncho covered most of it while remaining loose enough not to catch on the spikes.
It also made me look approximately four feet tall and deeply suspicious.
I examined myself in the mirror.
White rabbit ears protruding awkwardly through the hood.
No.
I modified it.
Deeper hood.
Ears folded beneath.
Uncomfortable but hidden.
Better.
The collar remained visible.
I stared at it.
My fingers found the release.
The hospital clerk had explained that removing it before permanent identification processing constituted a registration violation.
I pressed the mechanism.
Click.
The collar opened.
I held it in both hands.
It weighed almost nothing.
Funny.
For something that had seemed so heavy.
I set it on the desk beside the family photograph.
My reflection looked strange without it.
Still rabbit. Still small. Still weak.
But no label hanging from my throat.
I stood there for a while.
Then Mom knocked on the door.
Softly.
Elara: "Leona?"
I froze.
The armor wasn't finished.
The backpack was open.
The drones were active.
If she came inside, there would be no explaining any of it away.
Elara: "Sweetie, I don't want to bother you."
I said nothing.
Elara: "I just wanted to say I'm sorry."
My hand rested on the workbench.
Elara: "I shouldn't have talked about the law like that. I was trying to make it less frightening."
She paused.
Elara: "I think I made it worse."
Yes. She had.
Elara: "I love you."
That hurt more.
Elara: "You're my daughter. Whatever those papers say."
I closed my eyes.
There it was again.
Love.
Real love.
Insufficient love.
I wanted to open the door.
For several seconds, I came very close.
Then I imagined next week.
The scale. The Authority report. Weight. Health. Yield classification.
I imagined next month.
Next year.
Five years.
I imagined being twenty-six and still needing Mom to certify that her adult daughter was being properly maintained.
I imagined a corporation discovering my academic record.
I imagined transfer paperwork.
I imagined somebody explaining that I was lucky because my intelligence made me valuable.
My eyes opened.
Leona: "I love you too, Mom."
Silence outside.
She hadn't expected an answer.
Elara: "Can I come in?"
I looked at the backpack.
The armor. The spiders.The western maps.
Leona: "No Mom, not tonight."
Another silence.
Then:
Elara: "Okay."
Her scales moved slowly away from the door.
I listened until she reached the stairs. I hated myself slightly. Then I continued packing.
Water became the largest problem after weight. I filled a compact hydration bladder and added purification tablets. Food came next: nutrient bars, dried fruit, crackers, anything dense enough to justify carrying. Basic medical supplies. Bandages. Antibiotic spray. Pain medication. Repair tape, because engineering religion has several denominations but all acknowledge the divinity of repair tape.
My old phone stayed.
Too easy to track.
I removed the battery anyway and left it beside the collar.
The tablet came after I gutted every standard location service I could find.
The laptop was already running my own operating system configuration and enough encryption to irritate anyone trying to inspect it.
Cash. Very little. Identification. Problem. My Civil identification was invalid now. The Domestic registration would expose me.
I took both.
A future problem.
At around two in the morning, I finally looked at everything assembled on the bed.
One backpack. One ugly armored vest. One hooded poncho. Compact tools. Water. Food. Laptop. Tablet. Medical supplies.
Six spider drones.
No destination.
No allies.
No guarantee.
I was perhaps the worst-equipped fugitive in Texas yet i smiled.
Dad used to say that a bad first prototype was better than a perfect design that never left the notebook.
This was definitely a bad first prototype.
I put on the armor and the weight almost made me reconsider.
Almost.
I adjusted the straps until it distributed properly across my shoulders and hips.
Better.
Poncho over it.
Backpack.
Too heavy.
Two spiders took the auxiliary equipment.
Better.
I picked up one of Dad's old metal walking staffs from beside the workbench. He had used it during fence inspections after hurting his knee years earlier. Solid aluminum shaft, steel fittings, ugly rubber grip.
Light enough.
Useful.
I kept it.
The mirror showed something ridiculous.
A tiny hooded rabbit with a backpack, metal staff and six mechanical spiders.
Not exactly the terrifying fugitive one might imagine.
But I wasn't trying to be terrifying.
Not yet.
I walked to the window and opened it carefully.
Cool night air entered the room.
The farm lay dark beyond the porch roof.
West waited somewhere past the fields.
Maybe there was nothing there for me.
Maybe I would make it twenty kilometers and come crawling home.
Maybe some predator would find me before sunrise.
Maybe the Authority would catch me.
Maybe Kira would.
Maybe I'd spend years searching abandoned laboratories until I finally admitted no cure existed.
All possible.
I looked once more at the family photograph beside the discarded collar.
Dad smiling. Mom human. Kira with legs.Me before I knew how quickly a person could become paperwork.
Leona: "I'm not an object."
Nobody answered.
Good.
I didn't need permission.
I sent the command.
Six red optics turned toward the open window.
And one by one, my spiders began to climb out into the night.