Chapter 2

1 year later…

Olyrean awoke to the sound of her favorite patriotic hymn being piped in through the speakers.

She opened her eyes to a mind-blowing expanse of stars, the utter wholeness of being stretching on through infinity, void black shot through with detritus of creation. It was a sight she never tired of. She rose and walked to the window, drinking in the view, feeling her heart swell with the glory of all that was, would be and would ever be. Then a red spaceship, boxlike and immense, drifted across her vision and blotted out the sky.

She stood in her bedroom on the grand space station of Moody Blue, a breathtakingly vast megastructure of red, white and blue chrome the size of an entire continent that had taken the strip-mining of several planets to construct. It also, if you backed away from it a little bit and squinted, looked a little bit like a suffocating walrus with a terrible stomach wound. Millions upon millions of people lived their entire lives on Moody Blue, completely ignorant to this fact, but it was the cause of quite a lot of backhanded giggling amongs regular space travelers.

The spaceship that was passing by and blocking her favorite view was so close that she could see the person, or rather, the creature, who piloted it. It was a translucent blob of countless jellied tentacles. A great yellow eye burbled up from the murky depths and peered at her. The creature waved. Tentatively, Olyrean waved back. At least she did until she remembered she had just woken up and was still naked.

This shouldn’t have mattered, because the driver of the cargo ship was a Buuglubian, a species that not only did not have any appreciation for naked Sun-Elves but in fact lacked the capacity to wear clothing themselves and, as it happened, had no concept of sexuality, reproducing as they did through spontaneous generation in abandoned jello molds, but some habits died hard. She shouted and yanked the curtains closed. As she did, she caught the words written on the side of the ship in broad, looping Americanese: OMEGA-COLA! THE QUEST FOR COLA-PRIME CONTINUES.

“Damned truckers,” Olyrean grumbled. They really shouldn’t be flying so close to the space station. But then she immediately felt guilty. The Cola corporation had a religious exemption to shipping regulations. She bowed her head and offered a prayer that they might find Cola-Prime soon.

***

The quest for Cola-Prime in many ways mirrors the historical arc of Infinity America, in that the histories of both the Interdimensional Cola Corporation and Infinity America are half-lost and forgotten, and the parts which are remembered don’t actually make much sense.

That hasn’t stopped scholars from doing their best to reconstruct the lost history through the fine academic practice of Nonlinear Chrono-Interpretation (i.e. taking all the scraps you have and making up the rest to fill in the gaps). The leading scholars, upon reading their own work, all agreed that it was very rigorous and that they had done a very fine job and all the grants they’d been given for it were fully justified, and being the experts in the field most people shrugged and took their word for it.

The reconstructed history goes like this:

Once upon a time, very long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, there was a planet called America. The denizens of this planet had developed the most perfect and complete creed that there ever was in the entirety of the universe. The creed was so perfect, in fact, that it was impossible to write down entirely–language could not fully capture it.

But it had something to do with ultimate personal freedom, a rejection of the baggage of history, the severing of all claims your race might hold on you; to pursue your own happiness and reject all those who might trammel it. It was the highest and most ultimate abstract ideal of liberty, where all authority was bound by law, bold eyes looked out towards the universe with the unceasing desire to know it and know it completely, and all had the right to question everything. It also guaranteed the right to own no fewer than seventeen fully automatic rifles per citizen. Many were very, very certain about this specific point.

They were also quite certain that this creed should apply to all manner of sentient life, without exception.

This last belief took on a bit of troubling relevance for the rest of space-time when America also developed some infernally smart artificial intelligences, star drives that approached the speed of light, and the ability to manipulate probability so they could punch sideways into theoretical universes. They sent probes out across the infinite expanse of creation, through space and time and probability, and saw endless worlds, endless realities suffocating beneath tyranny, benighted and crying out for freedom.

They also saw that they had bigger guns than everyone.

So was Infinity America born, and has since been expanding throughout all of reality at speeds first matching, then exceeding that of light, which was particularly impressive considering that they stopped to make sure they built a burger joint everywhere they went. Infinity America held that all directions, all realities, all space, all time should share their creed, and they had done a pretty good job executing on this idea.

So far had they come from their home that nobody was quite sure where the original planet America was anymore, and so many were the species that now followed the creed that, embarrassingly, no one could quite remember which one had originally come up with it. This was confounded by the fact that every species wanted the credit and so reams and reams of imaginary history were published every nanosecond in order to lay claim to the origin. There were ten billion books about how the original planet America had been populated by fungoids, bovines, lizard-men, sentient shades of blue, etc.

It was part of the reason why the history was such a pain to sort through. Some said that the historians and scholars made a hefty sum inventing some of this nonsense history that they could then go on to “clarify” for everyone, but they were generally ignored as being tattletales.

Where does the Interdimensional Cola Corporation come into play with all this? Thanks to some meticulous corporate record-keeping, it was generally agreed that they were one of the few organizations that actually could lay claim to having originated from the original planet America.

A few others holding this weighty honor were the Union of Elevator Repairmen, a holy order dedicated to the mission of stopping elevators from being repaired; a brotherhood of monks which spent their time producing some ancient form of media called ‘The Simp-sons’ in a data format no one knew how to read anymore; and Tony’s Pizzeria, the best place to take your kids for a little cheese and pepperoni pizza after their hockey match (hockey being, from the historians’ best guesses, a form of bloody ritualized combat).

Interdimensional Cola, as far as anyone could tell, was a religion that centered around the imbibing of the Sacred Cola, a holy liquid which, in keeping with the ethos of the Americans, was available to anyone in return for a prayer and a quick swipe of the credit card at the nearest vending machine.

However, it was also determined that the formula of the Sacred Cola had been tampered with dramatically over the course of Infinity America’s history. As the Americans had spread and brought freedom to new worlds, they had encountered a variety of spices and flavors and customers that they had never dreamed of. The Sacred Cola had been modified for consumption by all sorts of sentients with every imaginable biology and taste palate. No fewer than ten billion different varieties of cola existed, among them:

…The ancient and venerable lemon-lime cola,

…The classic Trimixxian blood cola (made from the blood of real, fresh-squeezed Trimixxians!),

…The new and exotic Hypothetical cola, which was not so much a liquid as it was a point in probability space that described the most refreshing drink that you personally could ever experience (if only you could figure out a way to sample it).

Alas, with all these modifications, the recipe for the original cola was lost along with the original history of Infinity America. And so it was a sacred quest for Interdimensional Cola Corporation to find their roots, the Cola Prime, and there were many who hoped that other bits of Infinity America’s history would be found along with the recipe. Due to this historical and religious importance, truckers for Interdimensional Cola enjoyed immunity from all sorts of local laws, including regulations about shipping lane proximity to space stations. And perhaps most importantly, at least from the point of view of Interdimensional Cola’s accountants, they were tax-exempt.

***

“Olly!” a voice called out, interrupting Olyrean’s prayer.

There was a flicker and a hum, and then a very pretty woman wearing a frilly star-spangled dress appeared in the middle of her bedroom. Everything about her was red, white and blue. Even her hair and fingernails, both of which were speckled with tiny winking stars. She was so intensely patriotic, in fact, that she seemed to glow slightly, and the room was a little bit brighter in her presence.

“Hello, Libby,” Olyrean said, squinting a bit.

“You can’t dawdle, not today!” Libby cried out cheerfully. “You’ve got your placement exam, remember? You need to get dressed!” She pouted and fussed with the frills of her dress, which was entirely unnecessary because they weren’t actually real. Libby was an artificial intelligence.

Olyrean had been terrified of them when she first came to the UWA.

She had been swept out of her world of magic and dragons and into one that, well, also had magic and dragons, but in addition it had robots, a startling array of aliens, credit cards, democracy, fashion cycles, ultra-cowboys and a thousand friendly strangers offering her a cheeseburger. It had all been so overwhelming, and for quite some time she had flipped between thinking that she had gone insane, or that she had died and gone to some bizarre version of the afterlife.

The artificial intelligences had not helped with this impression–insubstantial spirits, they appeared to her, who could appear anywhere but had no physicality to them. Libby’s appearance on the battlefield the day she was liberated was tame compared to what the AIs got up to in the civilian world. She remembered the first AI she had ever seen, a statuesque man of handsome grandeur, glisteningly shirtless and with a mane of golden hair that blew magnificently in an unfelt wind. She had regarded him with a combination of sacred awe and want until he knelt down, looked her straight in the eyes, and asked her if she was happy with her car insurance.

It was too much. Olyrean had been deliriously happy that she had been plucked from the jaws of slavery and death, but Infinity America had been all so much, so overwhelming, that at many points she had simply locked herself in her room and bawled. It was not until she had undergone her civics training that it had all begun to make some sort of sense. It was there, in those classes full of countless aliens from dozens of recently liberated worlds, that she had met Libby again.

It was the first time she had actually talked and gotten along with an AI. It was simultaneously surprisingly normal and very strange, to be friends with a disembodied spirit of pure computation, which was American magic. Libby had tried to gently explain that this wasn’t magic, but then she had started talking about tiny lightning shooting through patterns etched in special metal, and Olyrean knew magic when she heard it.

“You know,” she told the star-spangled AI as she pulled on her clothes–a very tasteful and subdued outfit with just two flags on the cufflinks and one on the lapel of her jacket, and a pencil skirt with swirling red and white stripes–”You could have told me that the cargo ship was approaching.”

“Well, maybe flashing the driver was something you wanted to do. How was I supposed to know? I mean, don’t you still do your whole naked dancing thing?” Libby gave a start. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. You can do whatever you want! That’s what America is all about.”

“It’s called frolicking.” Olyrean frowned as she buttoned up her shirt. “And it’s…I don’t…it’s not, uh, what do you people call it?” She blushed, a little ashamed at not knowing the word. Americanese still did not come completely naturally to her.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

“Exhibitionism?”

“Right. Well, whatever you call it. It’s not that.”

“Oh, of course,” said Libby, “it’s very different.” She sounded very respectful, but a small smile tugged at the corner of her red-and-blue lips. Olyrean considered the AI her friend, but sometimes she got the impression that it was secretly laughing at her.

Libby shimmered and faded and reformed herself atop the counter, kicking her legs, as Olyrean moved from the bedroom to her kitchen, and Olyrean almost stumbled avoiding her. It was difficult, at times, to remember that she did not actually have any physical presence. Olyrean could walk right through her, if she wanted, but AIs in general considered it extremely rude when people did not play along as if they were actually solid.

“I already told Baxter to brew your coffee extra strong this morning,” Libby whispered conspiratorially. “I figured you could use some extra pep.”

“Indeed she has, miss.” Another figure stepped out of the shadows, a stiff-backed but very handsome sun-elf in a trim, slick tuxedo. Baxter, her domestic robot. The only sign that he was mechanical, or so Olyrean thought, was that he moved with a grace just a bit too smooth. Also his joints whirred a bit.

Baxter glanced towards Libby and gave a weary sigh. “Of course,” he said with a slightly wounded air, “I am perfectly calibrated to your needs, and I had already decided that you might like an extra dose of caffeine.”

“Thank you, Baxter,” Olyrean said.

“In fact, I have predicted your particular coffee intake needs for the next three centuries, and so far not once has my model been inaccurate.” The robot’s tone was so sharp that it could have made atomic-edge razor blades hang their heads in shameful inadequacy. “But oh, I suppose the reminder was…extremely helpful.” Libby coughed and suddenly seemed very interested in examining the marbling of the countertop.

“Thank you, Baxter,” Olyrean said more firmly. He’d go on all day like this if she let him. “Could I have my breakfast now?”

The robot’s eyebrows shot up so high she thought they might float off and get stuck on the ceiling. “Of course, mistress.”

When Olyrean had first bought Baxter, he’d been nothing but a silver skeleton. The shop had upsold her on a synthetic shell to make him appear more biological. She had still been a little sour at orcs over the whole ‘killing your family and enslaving your entire race’ fiasco at the time, so she had paid for him to look like an orc, that she might get a sense of satisfaction out of ordering one around. The thrill had quickly run thin, however, and not least because Baxter responded to her threats only by sulking. As her civics lessons had continued, she learned this sort of thing was considered very un-American, so after a time she had bashfully told Baxter he could choose his own appearance if he wanted.

She hadn’t been expecting him to choose to present as a sun-elf so handsome that she had to make an effort not to stare, though. When questioned, he told her that it was his job to make Olyrean comfortable and he had chosen a form that, by his calculations, would most efficiently stimulate the pleasure center of her brain. When Olyrean had babbled that this was definitely not necessary and perhaps he should choose a different form, he had only raised his eyebrow and said, “Oh, so I can’t decide for myself?” So now she lived in perpetual fear of what the neighbors thought she was getting up to with her robot, and perpetual denial about how much interest she had in said getting up to.

With a theatrical sigh, Baxter handed her a plate of eggs and toast and some coffee. Olyrean sipped from her mug and tried very hard not to stare at the robot’s rolling hips as he walked off. “What are you smirking at?” she snapped at Libby.

“Nothing!” Libby leapt down from the countertop. “So how are you feeling about the exam? Do you think you’ve studied enough?”

Olyrean grimaced and gulped down a mouthful of coffee. “Oh, I don’t even want to think about it,” she muttered.

The placement exam. She had spent the last year of her life training and studying for it. It was to determine her aptitude for SPECTRA, the intelligence agency of Infinity America. Well, one of them; there seemed to be dozens, with a dizzying array of acronyms cropping up in the news. She thought SPECTRA seemed sufficiently competent, though. Nobody even knew what the acronym stood for. Clearly they were good at keeping secrets.

She had spent weeks having Libby quiz her in preparation, though the last set of practice questions had been awfully strange…

Q1: Which of the following is the most stable form of government?

1. A) Representative Democracy.

2. B) Representative Burgerocracy.

3. C) Burgerative Representocracy.

4. D) Demotive Repreburgocracy. [WARNING: IF YOU ARE IN A UNIVERSE WHERE THIS IS ACTUALLY THE FORM OF GOVERNMENT PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY]

Q2: Which of the following colors is most classified? (If color as a concept does not exist, please ignore this question).

1. A) Liberty Blue.

2. B) Forbidden Yellow.

3. C) [REDACTED]

4. D) Reen.

Q3: D.

1. A) C.

2. B) B.

3. C) Q2.

4. D) :O! The question noticed me!

Then there were the free-response questions. “Prove you exist in 250 words or less.” “If you are reading this question, you have already answered it. Explain why.” Olyrean didn’t even really understand her own answers, but Libby had told her she had done great. It didn’t stop her from being nervous, though.

Rather than fretting about it, she took her breakfast to the couch and turned on the Holographic Sensation Projector and immediately her living room exploded.

She was suddenly floating through the air, above the surface of a greenish, murky-looking planet, dense with foggy vegetation as far as the eye could see, except for where there was a large lake of fire burning, eating away at the vegetation and turning the fog to tatters. Swarms of aliens that looked like little unbearably cute pink fluffballs with one large wet eye and no limbs to speak of rolled away from the flames, singed and weeping enormous tears.

“Tragedy strikes Pfflgarr Five today,” a very somber voice intoned, “countless Pfflgarrians lost in horrific firestorms after the crash of a cargo ship carrying ‘Ol’ Xubriq’s Classic Texan Hot Sauce’, classified as a class-5 bioweapon…”

A hot sauce bottle floated by. On its label was a smiling starfish-like alien giving the starfish equivalent of a thumbs-up. A wave of despair and sorrow washed over her and suddenly the troubles of the Pfflgarrians seemed like the most weighty tragedy in the entire universe.

Olyrean groaned at the false sadness and wiped back her tears as she checked the channel. She thought it might be fake news. Some stations specialized in it, airing nonexistent tragedies, simulated complete with emoto-broadcasts so you could get the full impact and really feel how awful things were for the victims. Baxter was always watching this sort of nonsense.

But no, when she checked she saw that this was a real news report, so she grumbled and waited. She sat through this report, then another about the newest fashion trend sweeping the universe (“Living hats are all the rage! One hundred percent pure bio-bred fashionwear!” declared the announcer, playfully patting a beret that frowned haughtily at the attention and lit a cigarette), then a commercial that tried to make her sexually attracted to skincare products (she turned the emoto-broadcast down), and then finally what she had been waiting for, a broadcast from the proceedings of the Hyper-Senate.

She turned the emoto-broadcast back up and felt a surge of patriotic pride swell within her. The Hyper-Senate was an enormous circular chamber large enough to seat hundreds of thousands of senators, aliens of all shapes and sizes, some with biologies exotic enough that they needed special equipment installed around their seats just to be able to breathe. The hologram was broadcast so that Olyrean felt as if she were sitting in the chamber herself, right in the middle of her living room.

The Hyper-Senate, at any given time, might be split into various committees and subcommittees, sometimes discussing as many as two thousand laws or budget proposals at once. It was complicated work, governing a republic that spanned over three thousand planets in forty-five different galaxies and seventeen alternate universes. However, right now, it was engaged in the one business that always united their attention: surveying other worlds for liberation.

Hanging in midair in the center of the Senate floor was a portal through which scenes from other worlds and universes were playing. Dozens of Libbys were scattered throughout the Senate, cheerleading the whole affair. Sometimes she appeared human, as she usually did to Olyrean; other times she took on the shape of other alien species: bubbling tentacled monstrosities, wolf-headed monkey-birds, thin globular membranes filled with glowing gas. But no matter which species she projected herself as, she was always heavily red, white and blue. Olyrean never quite managed to get used to how there were so many copies and different versions of Libby out there at the same time.

Vice President Murtlebix stepped forth. He was a small, toadlike creature wearing a damp business suit that clung unflatteringly to his round, flabby body. His three bright orange eyes darted in different directions as he held up a webbed hand for silence.

“First candidate for Liberation,” he croaked, “Dobo IV!”

In the air of the Senate a small bluish planet hung in the midst of a twinkling void.

Murtlebix took on the tone of an excited auctioneer. “Dobo IV is a planet in the tail end of the Wex-Wryland possibility mapping, residing near the center of the Wort Cluster. Magic-capable, pre-industrial society. Population of roughly three hundred million, with a single mammalian sapient species. Its dominant form of government is…” He licked his lips with two tongues, coating them with poisoned spittle, and salaciously intoned, “feudal monarchy.”

A thousand shrieks and squawks and belches of outrage filled the chamber in a chaotic din. Olyrean booed along with them.

As the Vice President continued to speak, the camera slowly zoomed in until scenes from the planet’s surface played before them. The inhabitants of Dobo were a species that looked a lot like extremely fluffy bipedal kittens. There were images of them bounding through fields, chasing butterflies, nuzzling with each other, and just generally being adorable.

Libby’s voice rang out over this: “The Dobosians–is that right? Is that how you say it?–well, anyway, the Dobosians are, as we can all see, a sentient species clearly capable of the pursuit of happiness. Intelligence reports suggest that their favorite activities are chasing bugs, staring off into nothing and then suddenly running into walls, knocking delicate objects off of high places and vomiting on carpets. But living as they do, trapped beneath disgracefully unelected leadership, most of them never get to do so much as break a single glass. This is the life of the average Dobosian!”

The scenes changed, showing the kittens now toiling away beneath the hot sun in muddy fields that seemed to stretch on forever. They fell over each other clumsily, fumbling with their farm tools. According to Libby’s narration, they were farming a leafy plant whose local name translated to “God’s own high”. They piled mountains of the stuff on wagons and dragged them away to other kittens adorned in crowns and dripping with jewelry, who proceeded to roll around in the leaves and then appeared to try very hard to eat their own shadows.

“Ninety percent of most Dobosians’ lives is spent farming this drug for their rulers, while never touching a shred of it!” Libby declared.

The camera zoomed in brutally on their big, wet eyes as they wept and cringed beneath their taskmasters’ whips. The taskmasters themselves were kittens, too, but the camera work was done very carefully to capture a look of sadness and regret in their eyes. We’d really rather not be doing this, they seemed to say, if only we were not indoctrinated into a system of divine right to rule, petty self-serving corruption, and authoritarianism. That might seem like a complicated message for a look of the eyes to convey, but the cameras really were very good.

It was hopeless. The Senate was in a frenzy. Large words hung in midair above the pitiful spectacle: LIBERATE? Y/N. Bars beneath the question showed the percentage of votes given to each option. “YES” rocketed rapidly to one hundred percent.

Olyrean cheered. She was very pleased with this. She had followed Dobo’s progress through the whole convoluted political pipeline; it was the first real story she had been interested in once she had learned how to track the news. From the moment it had been detected by the space probes, through its recommendation through the subcommittee on bipedal mammalian liberation efforts (the same subcommittee that had recommended her own world for liberation), and now to the voting process.

The Dobosians–if that was the proper name for them, she realized she wasn’t quite sure–wouldn’t have to toil under slavery any longer. Very soon they’d be free, just as she was. Her eyes blurred with tears. In the hologram, dozens of the Libbys jumped for joy as the vote was verified.

“Olly!” one of them called. “Olllllyyyy! Your ride is here!”

With a jolt, Olyrean realized that this Libby was not part of the hologram; it was her Libby, trying to get her attention. With a gasp, she turned the hologram off, experiencing only a moment of disorientation as the Senate suddenly became her living room again. In her panic she knocked over the remains of her breakfast onto the carpet. A little robotic vacuum darted out from beneath her couch and gobbled up the remains of the toast. “Thanks!” it chirped.

“Good luck, Olly!” Libby called after her, as she dashed out the door. “Just relax! You’ll do great! You were born to do this.”

“I don’t see how that can be possible.” Olyrean swiftly tugged her jacket on and checked herself in a mirror. It was still strange, sometimes, to see herself dressed in American business clothes, rather than the elfly garb she had grown up with.

“It’s an expression,” the AI told her. “Like ‘spill the beans’ or ‘smash the snood’. The point is you’ll do great!”

Olyrean hoped she was right, but that didn’t stop her from being nervous. She was so distracted by the butterflies in her stomach, in fact, that she ran right into the giant butterfly waiting for her on her front porch.