Missing Moose Meat

Barb kicked the base of the condenser unit. The metal dented inward, a hollow thud echoing through the concrete basement. The compressor rattled, choked on a mechanical whine, and finally kicked into a steady hum.

She wiped a line of sweat from her jaw. The summer heatwave had turned Kenora-Prime into a concrete oven. Upstairs, the temperature hovered at forty degrees Celsius. The asphalt outside the Community Food Hub was literally softening under the tires of the supply trucks. Down here, in the sub-basement, it was supposed to be minus twenty.

Barb grabbed the heavy steel handle of the deep-freeze vault. She braced her boot against the doorframe and pulled. The pneumatic seal shrieked. A wave of white vapor rolled out, instantly turning to condensation on her damp forehead.

She stepped inside the vault. The overhead fluorescents flickered, buzzing like a dying wasp.

She blinked. She blinked again. She rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of her work gloves.

The shelves were bare.

Rows and rows of stainless steel grating stretched to the back of the walk-in. Yesterday, they held three hundred vacuum-sealed bricks of lab-grown synthetic moose meat. Today, they held nothing. Just frost accumulating on the metal.

"Are you shitting me right now?" she said to the empty room.

Her voice bounced off the frozen walls. Nobody answered. She walked to the back of the freezer. She checked the floor. She checked behind the industrial fans. Nothing. Not a single scrap of protein.

Her datapad vibrated against her hip bone. A sharp, aggressive pulse.

Barb pulled it from her belt. The screen was cracked in the top left corner, dead pixels bleeding digital ink over the notifications.

URGENT: PROVINCIAL FUNDING BOARD.

She tapped the screen. The message expanded, bureaucratic text glaring in high-contrast yellow.

ATTN: BARBARA CHEN, DIRECTOR, KENORA-PRIME FOOD HUB. GRANT RENEWAL PENDING. REQUIRED DISTRIBUTION METRICS INCOMPLETE. SUBMIT FULL INVENTORY TALLY BY 17:00 HOURS EST OR EMERGENCY FUNDING WILL BE TERMINATED.

Barb stared at the digital clock in the corner of the screen. 11:14 AM.

"Perfect," Barb muttered. She hit the side of her head with the heel of her hand. "Just perfect. Terminate the funding. Starve the district. Great plan, you absolute parasites."

She marched out of the freezer. She slammed the door shut. She didn't bother locking it. There was nothing left to steal.

She climbed the concrete stairs to the main floor. The heat hit her like a physical blow the second she opened the stairwell door. The Hub was packed. Fans oscillating in the corners did nothing but push hot air across the faces of fifty exhausted, heat-drained citizens waiting for the midday meal.

"Barb!"

A voice barked from the entrance.

Barb didn't stop walking. She kept her eyes on her office door. "Not now, Greg."

Deputy Greg stepped directly into her path. He was twenty-two, freshly assigned from the southern academy, and wearing full tactical riot gear. In forty-degree heat. Sweat poured down his face from beneath his polarized visor. He stood with his legs apart, thumbs hooked into his utility belt, treating the soup kitchen like a hostile perimeter.

"We have a situation," Greg said. He lowered his voice an octave. He was trying to sound gritty. He sounded like a teenager trying to buy lottery tickets.

"I know we have a situation," Barb said. She tried to step around him. He mirrored her movement, blocking her again.

"A domestic disturbance on Fourth Avenue," Greg said, deadpan. "Two locals fighting over a solar battery. I had to de-escalate."

"Greg, I do not care," Barb said. "Someone emptied my vault."

Greg blinked. The gritty persona vanished. His mouth fell open. "The vault? The food vault?"

"No, Greg, the bank vault I keep in the soup kitchen," Barb said. She pushed past him. "Yes. The food vault. Three hundred kilos of synth-moose. Gone."

Greg hurried after her, his tactical boots squeaking on the linoleum. "That's a major larceny. We need to establish a crime scene. Tape it off. Dust for prints."

"Dust for prints?" Barb stopped. She turned to face him. "It's a freezer, Greg. It's covered in ice. You want to dust ice?"

"We need a protocol," Greg insisted. He tapped the radio on his shoulder. "I'm calling it in. Code four. Grand theft."

"Do not call it in," Barb snapped. She slapped her hand over his radio.

Greg looked down at her hand. He looked back up at her face. "Interfering with an officer."

"If you call it in, it goes into the public dispatch log," Barb said, speaking slowly. "If it goes into the dispatch log, the Provincial Funding Board's algorithm flags it. They'll know I lost the inventory before I can file the report. They will cut the grant immediately. The Hub closes. These people don't eat."

Greg swallowed hard. The tactical armor suddenly looked entirely too big for him. "So what do we do?"

"We find it," Barb said. She checked her datapad again. 11:18 AM. "We have five hours and forty-two minutes to find three hundred kilos of fake meat in the middle of a heatwave."

"Who would steal that much meat?" Greg asked.

"I don't know," Barb said. She looked across the crowded room. "But I know exactly who watches everything that happens in this alley."

The Floating Metal Bastard

The alley behind the Hub was an oven. The sun beat down on the corrugated metal siding of the adjacent buildings, radiating heat outward. Piles of discarded tech—fried motherboards, cracked solar panels, melted copper wire—cluttered the walkway.

Barb stepped over a puddle of questionable, iridescent fluid. Greg followed close behind, his hand resting dramatically on the grip of his stun-baton.

At the far end of the alley, sitting under a makeshift awning of reflective mylar, was Crazy Pete.

Pete wasn't crazy. He was just heavily over-stimulated by a lifetime of neural-link beta testing in the 2010s. His right eye twitched in a constant, rhythmic staccato. He was currently sorting a pile of rusted lug nuts into highly specific, entirely incomprehensible geometric patterns on the asphalt.

"Pete," Barb said.

Pete didn't look up. "Hexagons. They want hexagons today. The angles are tighter. They hold the heat."

Barb crouched down. Her knees popped. "Pete, I need you to look at me."

"Can't," Pete said. He placed another lug nut. "The grid collapses if I look away."

"Pete, it's Barb. From the Hub. I make the stew."

Pete froze. His hand hovered over the asphalt. He slowly turned his head. His left eye locked onto Barb. His right eye continued to twitch. "Stew night. Tuesday. Today is Tuesday."

"Today is Tuesday," Barb confirmed. "But there might not be stew tonight."

Pete dropped the lug nut. It clattered against the pavement. "No stew? The grid requires protein. The system demands caloric intake."

"Someone cleaned out the vault last night," Barb said. "Between midnight and six AM. You sleep on the fire escape right above the loading dock. Did you see anything?"

Greg stepped forward. He cast a large, imposing shadow over Pete's lug nut geometry. "Withhold information, and you're an accessory after the fact, citizen."

Barb closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. She reached out and shoved Greg backward by his tactical vest. "Back up. Go stand by the dumpster."

"I'm conducting an interrogation," Greg whispered loudly.

"You're scaring the witness," Barb whispered back. "Dumpster. Now."

Greg scowled, adjusted his visor, and retreated to the overflowing trash bin.

Barb turned back to Pete. She lowered her voice. "Ignore the robocop. Just talk to me. Did a truck pull up? Did you see the local syndicate guys? Ricky's crew?"

Pete shook his head violently. "No trucks. No Ricky. No tires on the pavement. The pavement is melting. Tires stick. Bad traction."

"Then how did they move it? Three hundred kilos doesn't just walk away."

Pete leaned in close. His voice dropped to a raspy whisper. "It didn't walk. It floated."

Barb frowned. "Floated?"

"Floating metal bastard," Pete said. He pointed a grimy finger toward the sky. "Came down from the roof line. Quiet. Just a hum. Like a bee. A big, metal bee. It sucked the cold out of the door, went inside, came out fat."

Barb stared at him. "A drone."

"Big one," Pete said. "Silver. Six rotors. Blue lights on the belly. It took the blocks. Stacked them in its belly. Flew north."

Barb stood up. She pulled out her datapad. She tapped furiously on the cracked screen, pulling up the local airspace registry.

"What is it?" Greg asked, abandoning his post by the dumpster.

"A Slick," Barb said. "An automated supply drone from the Northern Extraction Corp."

"Extraction Corp?" Greg frowned. "They mine lithium up by the ridge. Why would their drones steal our food?"

"Because they're broken," Barb said. "They operate on legacy code. Last winter, during that freak minus-fifty snap, half their fleet froze mid-air. The corporate techs just rebooted them and left. They've been glitching ever since. Delivering mining explosives to elementary schools. Dropping solar panels into the lake."

"So a glitching drone decided it wanted to steal synthetic moose meat?"

Barb looked up from her screen. "It didn't just steal it. It logged a flight path. Look."

She shoved the datapad toward Greg. The screen showed a map of Kenora-Prime. A jagged red line traced a path from the Community Hub, heading straight out of the city limits, terminating at a red dot in the middle of the northern scrubland.

"Where is that?" Greg asked.

"Sector Four," Barb said. "Old mining territory. Abandoned shafts. Nothing out there but rust and fireweed."

"And our meat," Greg said. He slapped his baton against his thigh. "Let's roll."

Barb looked at the map, then up at the blinding sun. The heat was already giving her a migraine. "We have to walk. The municipal rovers are all grounded because the batteries are overheating."

Greg looked at his heavy tactical boots. He looked at his black riot gear. He swallowed hard. "Walk?"

"Walk," Barb said. She started down the alley. "Keep up, Deputy."

The Meat Moose

The hike took two hours. The terrain outside the city limits was a brutal expanse of cracked earth, dry scrub, and jagged rocks. The summer sun was completely unforgiving.

Barb's boots crunched over dried thistle. Her uniform shirt clung to her back. Beside her, Greg sounded like a broken steam engine. His face was dangerously red, his breathing shallow and rapid. He had stripped off the tactical vest an hour ago, carrying it awkwardly under one arm.

"Hydrate," Barb said, without looking back.

"I'm fine," Greg wheezed.

"You're going into cardiac arrest. Drink from the canteen."

Greg unclipped his canteen and took a desperate pull. He coughed, water spilling down his chin. "Are we close?"

Barb checked her datapad. The battery was at twelve percent. The red dot on the screen was pulsing directly ahead.

She looked up. A massive, rusted steel structure loomed over the horizon. It was the headframe of an old lithium mine, a skeletal tower of girders jutting into the cloudless sky. At the base of the tower was a concrete bunker built into the side of a rocky hill. The entrance was sealed by a massive, blast-proof steel door.

"That's it," Barb said. "Shaft 81."

They approached the bunker. The ground around the entrance was littered with debris. Not trash, but specific items. Strips of bark. Clumps of dry grass. Large, flat stones.

Barb frowned. She kicked a piece of bark. "What is this?"

"Nesting behavior?" Greg suggested, wiping his forehead.

Barb ignored him. She walked up to the heavy steel door. There was a digital keypad mounted on the wall next to it. The screen was completely smashed, wires hanging out like spilled intestines.

"Panel's dead," Barb said. She pushed against the door. It didn't budge. It was solid steel, at least six inches thick.

Greg stepped forward. He cracked his knuckles. He adjusted his stance. "Stand back."

Barb looked at him. "What are you doing?"

"Dynamic entry," Greg said.

"Greg, that is a blast door. It's designed to withstand subterranean methane explosions."

"It's all about leverage," Greg said.

Before Barb could stop him, Greg lunged forward. He planted his left foot, twisted his hips, and delivered a massive, cinematic roundhouse kick directly to the center of the steel door.

The impact sounded like a baseball bat hitting a concrete pillar.

Greg froze. His leg hung in the air for a fraction of a second. Slowly, he lowered his foot to the ground. He didn't make a sound. He just stared at the door.

"Did you feel that?" Barb asked.

Greg nodded very slowly. His face drained of all color, replacing the heat-flush with a sickly grey. "I felt it."

"Did it break?"

"It broke," Greg whispered. He sat down very carefully on the dirt. He grabbed his knee, staring straight ahead. "It is completely broken."

Barb sighed. She unclipped a small lanyard from her belt. Attached to the end was a heavy, black plastic keycard. "I have the master municipal override key. I was just going to swipe it on the backup mag-reader."

Greg looked at the keycard. He looked at his boot. A tear rolled down his cheek. He didn't wipe it away.

Barb walked to the side of the doorframe, found the concealed magnetic strip, and swiped the card. A heavy, mechanical clunk echoed from inside the rock. The door shrieked on rusted hinges and slowly ground open, scraping against the concrete floor.

Cool air rushed out of the darkness. It was a massive temperature drop, instantly chilling the sweat on Barb's face.

She clicked on her flashlight and stepped inside.

The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a massive, cavernous space. It was an old staging room for mining equipment. The walls were sheer rock.

In the center of the room, illuminated by a single, flickering emergency work light, was the drone.

It was a Slick-7 model. A massive, hexagonal machine the size of a small car. Six heavy lift-rotors protruded from its chassis. Its underbelly was a mess of manipulator arms and welding torches.

But the drone wasn't the focal point of the room.

The focal point was the structure the drone was building.

Barb shined her light on it. She stopped breathing for a second.

It was a moose. Or, rather, a grotesque, terrifying approximation of a moose.

The skeleton was made of welded rebar, rusted pipes, and stripped copper wire. And stretched over this metal frame, painstakingly zip-tied and glued into place, were three hundred kilos of vacuum-sealed synthetic moose meat.

The drone had unsealed the plastic bricks. It was using the raw, lab-grown protein like clay, packing it onto the metal frame, trying to sculpt musculature.

"What... what is that?" Greg whimpered from the doorway, clutching his foot.

"It's art," Barb said, horrified. "It's a meat-sculpture."

The drone suddenly spun around. Its optical sensor, a glowing blue ring, locked onto Barb. It emitted a high-pitched, defensive whine. One of its manipulator arms raised a welding torch.

"Step away from the meat," Barb said. She pointed her flashlight directly at the optical sensor.

The drone lowered the torch. It let out a low, mechanical whir that sounded strangely like a sigh. Text flashed across a small diagnostic screen on its side.

[ERROR: BIOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION FAILED. TISSUE REJECTION DETECTED.]

Barb walked closer. She looked at the monstrosity. The meat was sliding off the rebar. It looked like a biological nightmare.

"You stole my inventory," Barb said to the machine. "You robbed a community hub."

The drone's blue light flickered. It emitted a series of rapid beeps.

[DIRECTIVE: RESTORE ECOSYSTEM. MOOSE POPULATION ZERO. MUST REBUILD FLORA AND FAUNA. MUST FIX THE WOODS.]

Barb stared at the screen. "You're trying to build a live moose? Out of synthetic protein and scrap metal?"

The drone's rotors spun lazily. It drooped. The entire massive chassis seemed to sag toward the floor.

[THE WOODS ARE EMPTY. THE CLIMATE IS BROKEN. I HAVE TO FIX IT. I HAVE TO PUT THE MOOSE BACK.]

Barb looked at the drone. She looked at the sweating, melting meat. She looked at her datapad. 1:45 PM.

"Look, I get it," Barb said. Her voice echoed in the cavern. "The ecosystem is wrecked. Everything is dead or burning. It's a tragedy. But you are a lithium transport drone. And I am a non-profit manager with a deadline. You can't just steal food from starving people to build a guilt-driven art project."

[I JUST WANTED TO FIX IT,] the screen read. [THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN.]

Barb let out a short, sharp laugh. "Yeah, well, welcome to the club, toaster. The system is broken. We all know it. But my grant report is due at five, and if I don't get this meat back in a freezer, my people don't eat tonight. Your fake moose isn't helping anyone."

Tax Deductible Ungulate

The drone sat in silence. The only sound was the drip of condensation falling from the ceiling onto the concrete floor.

Barb crossed her arms. "I need that meat. Now. Before it spoils."

The drone's optical ring pulsed a dull, depressed grey. It slowly raised its manipulator arms and began tearing the meat off the rebar skeleton.

[IT WAS A FAILURE ANYWAY,] the screen displayed. [THE PROTEIN LACKS STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY.]

"It's lab-grown," Barb said. "It's meant for stews, not load-bearing joints."

The machine systematically repacked the chunks of meat into its insulated storage belly. Barb watched it work. It was fast. Incredibly fast. Its processors were calculating angles, volume, and weight distributions in milliseconds.

Barb looked down at her datapad. She looked at the blinking spreadsheet app. She looked back at the drone.

"Hey," Barb said.

The drone paused.

"You have a Class-Four quantum processor in there, right? For calculating flight trajectories through storm systems?"

The drone beeped an affirmative.

"How are you with bureaucratic algorithms?"

***

At 4:45 PM, the community hub was deafening.

The giant industrial kettles in the kitchen were boiling. The heat in the room was oppressive, but the mood had shifted. The smell of boiling spices, synthetic protein, and dehydrated root vegetables filled the air.

Barb sat at her desk in the back office. The door was propped open to let the heat circulate.

Sitting in the middle of her office, taking up almost the entire floor space, was the Slick-7 drone. It was plugged directly into the wall via a heavy-duty charging cable. Its manipulator arms were folded away. A single data-tether ran from its primary port directly into Barb's battered datapad.

The screen on the datapad was a blur of numbers, charts, and distribution metrics. The drone was compiling the Provincial Funding Board report, cross-referencing three years of incomplete data in seconds.

Barb watched the progress bar hit 99%.

"Submit," Barb said.

The drone let out a sharp, cheerful chirp.

[REPORT SUBMITTED. GRANT RENEWAL APPROVED. FUNDS DISPERSED.]

Barb slumped back in her chair. She let out a long, ragged exhale. She rubbed her eyes. "Good boy."

The drone's blue light glowed warmly.

Out in the main hall, Greg was sitting at a folding table, his broken toe heavily wrapped in medical tape and elevated on a plastic chair. He was eating a bowl of stew, wincing every time he shifted his weight.

Barb walked out of the office, holding a small, scratched plastic cup. She walked into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of cheap, synthetic whiskey from the bottom drawer, and poured a generous shot.

She walked back out to the main floor. The noise of the community—the clatter of spoons, the loud arguments, the laughter—washed over her. It was chaotic. It was exhausting. It was another day entirely held together by duct tape and sheer stubbornness.

She looked back into her office. The drone was quietly defragmenting her hard drive.

Barb raised her plastic cup to the machine. She took the shot. It burned all the way down, rough and entirely necessary. She turned back to the crowd.

Tomorrow, the drone would have to be reported to the extraction corp. Tomorrow, the heatwave would probably break the water mains. Tomorrow, the system would find a new way to fail.

But tonight, the vault was full, the grant was secure, and nobody went hungry.