Chapter 5

It was a curious thing to have a job in Infinity America, Olyrean thought to herself, as she watched the candy-stripes of Moody Blue’s wildly varying landscapes pass below her from the bubble-car.

First off, there were the robots, and Artificial Intelligences, and the lesser automata that didn’t quite rise to the level of having full citizenship. There were an awful lot of them, and probably more of them than was obvious, since many wore the same sort of lifelike faux-bio shell that Baxter had. As far as Olyrean could tell, synthetic Americans did most of the work, and what’s more, they liked doing it.

Well, ‘like’ was probably too mild a term. They obsessed over their jobs, even the menial ones.

Her little robot vacuum, for example, was ecstatic about its duty of sucking crumbs out of the carpet. There were cheerful number-crunching AIs who actually enjoyed accounting, an eternal reminder that no force of natural evolution could have ever produced them. Robotic drones built all the buildings on Moody Blue, gathering together in great buzzing swarms that could throw together a new skyscraper in a matter of hours, after which they’d be given a break, spending their time boasting to strangers about how many elevators they had installed, getting into fights over who had bolted the most beams together, and finally being told to go put together a new mixed-use district just to keep them out of trouble.

With all this artificial labor, Olyrean had been puzzled at first by the idea that anyone at all would have a job. If it had been up to her people, the Sun-Elves, nobody would have worked. Lounging about in the forest had always been their highest goal. Indeed, to keep up the impression of elfly grace, the only ‘work’ the elves permitted themselves to do in front of other races was artistic endeavours like painting or flute-playing, though sometimes very special exceptions were made for forging enchanted swords or magical rings.

But apparently, there were some jobs that AIs and robots simply could not do, which Olyrean found comforting, in a way. Now, no one had ever managed to explain to her why exactly robots couldn’t do certain jobs, and when she asked for clarification, she mostly got a lot of coughing and awkward shuffling and worried stares out into the middle distance. It had to be true, though, because most bio-Americans did still work, and in fact would be somewhat embarrassed to be unemployed. Olyrean could not help but notice, however, that many of these jobs were very strange, and did not seem to do very much other than create a mess for the robots to clean up.

Like, for example, the home inspectors.

Olyrean had first met them when she had begun hunting for a home on Moody Blue, shortly after her introductory civics classes. She had foolishly thought that she could just move into an existing empty home, but her first meeting in the lavish offices of the Home Inspectors Association had quickly disabused her of this notion.

“Moving into someone else’s house?” the lead inspector had said, aghast, when she brought the subject up. His team, sitting around a conference table that looked suspiciously as if it were made of solid gold, had erupted into a series of very birdlike startled squawks and outraged chest-puffery, on account of them being birds. They were an alien race known as the Gofoolisters; they looked a little like exotic owls, their feathers a rich hue of green and purple, if owls had five eyes and beaks so wide they took up the entire bottom half of their heads, and also they glowed.

“Um, is that a problem?” Olyrean asked awkwardly. She was trying not to loom over them, but that was difficult when the person you were talking to was two feet tall. The issue was solved by pushing her chair far back from the table and shouting slightly.

This had elicited another round of shrieks and chirps until someone had finally figured out that she was a brand new citizen. “Well, I don’t know what they’re teaching you in those civics classes these days,” the lead owl said, “But I suppose you can’t help your ignorance. You see, miss, Infinity America is a society of science. We’ve figured out all the little details down to a T.” This was met with a lot of clucking of general agreement.

“Oh, I see…”

“What you immigrants from scarcity economies so often don’t understand is just how badly the energy of the previous occupants of your homes has been affecting you. They leave their spiritual residue and energy all around, and then this gets smeared all over your personal soul-field and it causes all sorts of trouble.” He glanced around to his comrades, who greeted this statement with much ruffling of feathers and quick nods of agreement.

“It did?” Olyrean was stunned. “I never knew. What sort of trouble does it cause?”

“Maliferous odors,” quacked one home inspector.

“Depression and poor love life.”

“Foot rash.”

“Wow,” said Olyrean. It was true that she had dealt with all these at some point during her life, but she had never imagined that it might have been caused by spiritual residue. In fact, her parents had always told her that her ancestors were in their family home, watching over them and protecting them. But, she supposed, her parents weren’t the ones with a civilization that stretched across space and multiple realities. The Americans must know what they were talking about. “What’s the solution?”

The solution, apparently, was to build an entirely new home perfectly tailored to her individual preference, and to tear down old homes whenever someone moved out of them. She wasn’t even sure what it meant to have a home tailored to her preference, but that was what the home inspectors were for. Home inspectors were very good at this sort of thing, according to home inspectors.

They had teams of construction drones build her a house on her chosen lot of land, and then they followed her around with some squeaking instruments that they assured her were measuring her soul-field as she did a walk-through of the home. They weren’t quite satisfied with the first few that were built, so they had the robots tear them down entirely and rebuild. Olyrean had been saddened at first–she rather liked the first cottage she saw–but, well, it was hard to get too emotionally attached when the construction drones built her a new, even more beautiful one within half an hour. Finally, they had declared her home to meet their standards, and left her to it.

She wasn’t sure exactly what those standards were. Her cottage was very nice, of course, and she had been able to give some input on its construction. She was especially fond of her bedroom window, which she wanted to open up onto the stars. But whether she felt particularly attuned to the place, she wasn’t sure. And she couldn’t help but notice that she was still depressed from time to time, and she still got rashes, and also her love life left a lot to be desired. It was true, though, that there were no more odors of the maliferous variety, although she thought that might be because Baxter was very good at keeping the place clean.

And she had other questions: What about public places? Shouldn’t people be miserable all the time there with their soul-fields being messed with by thousands of strangers? And she still didn’t understand why this was a job that only bio-Americans could do. Couldn’t robots handle the instruments for detecting the soul-fields as well? What was all this stuff she was seeing in the news about investigations into Gofoolister researchers being a bunch of quacks and pseudoscientists?

She had composed these questions into a thoughtful message and sent it out over the Omninet, but the only reply she received from the Home Inspectors Union was a reference to what looked like two trillion pages of legal disclaimers on the subject and a mildly threatening request to not contact them anymore. It was all very confusing, but still, home inspector was a very respected profession.

Now she was going to be even more respected than they were. Being part of a liberation team was one of the most celebrated jobs in Infinity America, coming in just a bit behind Omninet V-celebs and exotic dancers. In fact, a number of those had gotten their start on liberation teams. The V-celebs, that was, not the exotic dancers. Though if Olyrean had brushed up on her history, she’d have known the most beloved exotic dancer of all time was Breexemas the Glurbtisculous, a Buuglubian who bucked the asexual biology inherent to (for lack of a better pronoun) her species to embrace the more abstract forms of erotic expression, and whose jigglings were so mind-blowing that she had gotten no fewer than five planets to agree to hold immediate elections if only she would stop.

She had never had a job before. (Olyrean, that was, not Breexemas the Glurbtisculous). Or well, she had, among the Sun-Elves; she’d been an apprentice to a Master Scribe, the Ones Who Ink The Letters, the Record-Keepers of Holy Elven History and the Tales of the Ancients, only it seemed to her that one got the hang of the actual writing part pretty quickly and that most of her actual job had been hauling great barrels of fairy ink to and fro (the manner by which one got ‘ink’ from fairies best left unmentioned). But since coming to Infinity America and completing her civics classes, she had not had much of a schedule other than helping her neighbor, Mr. Fudwudder, tend to his cabbage patch. Such a labor-free life should have been the elven dream, but it had left her feeling listless and without purpose.

Still, to go from being jobless straight to a liberation team–and to meet her team so quickly, too. She wondered who her comrades would be. Maybe some of them would be humanoids. Maybe they’d be very handsome. For a brief moment, she indulged in a daydream involving herself and a tragically hypothetical young team member that followed the plot of some of the more ridiculous romance holo-films she had stumbled upon on the Omninet with suspicious fidelity.

“A mouth on you is very quiet this day,” Moyom chirped.

Olyrean’s fantasy vanished like a popped bubble, a simile she found a little disconcerting as she was brought back to reality, where she was in a bubble-car hurtling through the sky hundreds of feet above the ground. “Just, you know, thinking about the job,” she muttered.

She glanced at Korak, who’d been quiet the entire ride as well. The lizard-man lay back on the bubble-car’s pillows with his claws folded across his stomach and his gaze fixed steadily upon a flickering tumult of holo-screens floating in front of his face, which were so numerous that his head appeared to be nothing but a shifting map of glowing rectangles. She could just barely see through them that his mouth was moving slightly, but if he was saying anything it was soft enough that she could not hear.

They had shared a bubble-car, since they were all headed in the direction of The Accident. Around them sat the discarded remains of their breakfasts. Ixxari mostly survived on sugary nectars, so Moyom had just asked Baxter for a bowl of mixed honey and syrup. Korak, on the other hand, had wanted live cockroaches, which to Olyrean’s quiet dismay Baxter had actually been able to dig up from somewhere in her house. Her own croissant lay untouched on a nearby pillow, her appetite the victim of watching Korak pick antennae from his teeth.

Moyom caught her staring. “Watch and I will show you an amazement,” she said. She reached out and began to poke and prod at the lizard-man, tickling his neck.

“Uh,” said Olyrean. Her friend was, even by the standards of the many utterly alien species that made up Infinity America, a little strange, and there were times when Olyrean worried that the Ixxari’s questionable mannerisms were going to get her into some serious trouble. This was one of those times. She couldn’t help but remember how eagerly Korak had gobbled down the roaches and wondered what she would do if she found herself being poked in the face by, say, a gigantic turkey sandwich.

But the lizard-man just ignored her as Moyom continued to molest him. Finally she seemed to trigger some reflex and his frill flew open with a shoont-flappa-flappa. Moyom clasped her grabbers together and burbled laughter through her translator. “You see? Circles within circles! He unfolds! Beautiful he is, yes!”

“Uh, very nice,” Olyrean agreed, “but maybe you shouldn’t be pawing at him like that–”

“It’s fine,” Korak said suddenly. He waved his claws and some of the holo-screens disappeared until his face was only partially obscured. “It needs to be regularly deployed. The frill, that is. To, uh, air it out.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

It was the first thing he had said the entire ride, and Olyrean was struck with that sense of obligation to make conversation that most mammalian species feel when someone who has been mostly quiet has finally spoken up. This really is a mammalian thing. Mollusks don’t get like this, for example. Neither do arthropods.

No, when arthropods are faced with an unusually quiescent guest, rather than prodding them into conversation, they entertain themselves by imagining all the things their guest might say, which was what Moyom was currently doing. In her mind Korak was quite eloquent and exciting, for reasons which most non-Ixxari would fail to understand, but had to do with a certain racial affinity for the aesthetics of symmetries and fractals. She had a fondness for the lizard-man; it would be inappropriate to make direct analogues to the feelings that might appear in any other species' repertoire of emotions, but if one had to put a name to it, it could most closely be described as ‘a crush’.

The arthropod approach to silence certainly has its charms. You can really hear yourself think, with a bug, and when you do speak up they’re often attentive to what you say, so they can see if their predictions were correct. Olyrean, unfortunately, being a mammal, was compelled by some ingrained instinct to ask pointless questions that, if she had put a little thought into them, she might see would clearly have embarrassing answers.

“Oh,” she said, “uh, and why is that?”

Reptiles, unlike mammals and arthropods, are more of a mixed bag when it comes to behavior and cultural predilections. So it was more down to Korak’s individual strangeness that he answered, with startling bluntness about personal hygiene, “Scale fungus, mostly.”

“I too have the growths in carapace seams!” Moyom declared, shifting closer to him. Her wings rattled beneath her beetle-shell. “A grooming, I know to do this. I would share my mandibles with you if you suffer. Your pretty scales will shine.”

“That’s nice,” Korak said, idly knocking away her grabbers with a distracted claw. “Look, we’re here.”

It was true. Within the last few moments, their bubble-car had soared seamlessly between the wild silver towers of Moody Blue, and was now hovering impatiently above the plaza beneath The Accident, waiting for them to depart.

Olyrean stifled a little flash of anger on behalf of her friend as she pushed her way out of the bubble-car’s skin. Granted, Moyom was being a little forward–well, alright, very forward, with…flirting? Was that what she was doing? It was hard to tell–but either way, she could tell that her friend liked him, and the lizard was being very dismissive of her. To be fair, Olyrean thought that she herself might be more than merely dismissive of someone who came up to her and began poking her face. Loyalty to her friend, however, demanded she be offended on Moyom’s behalf. She was complimenting him, and he should pay attention and at the very least listen.

She didn’t like this lizard very much, she decided.

“Have a good day, Moyom,” she said. Then she expertly rearranged her expression into one of frosty unconcern and turned to the lizard. “And you–Krack, was it?”

“Korak,” Korak corrected.

“Of course,” she said in a tone that could have made a solar tick with a full digestive plasma-sack shiver. “I don’t usually have such a hard time with names. I suppose you just didn’t really stick out. Well, goodbye. May your day be as pleasant as your company.” The parting smile she gave him was sharp enough to draw blood.

That, she thought as she walked away, was an appropriately elvish, rude way to send someone off. It might have been a little unfair, but she completely adored Moyom and couldn’t stand to see her treated poorly. Her people, she thought with no small sense of racial pride, knew how to give someone a good snubbing.

It was immediately spoiled by Moyom and Korak falling into step beside her.

“Uh,” she said, “Moyom, what are you doing? Isn’t your office across the square?” She studiously avoided looking in Korak’s direction.

“Hah! A spatial sense you have.” The translator computer that hung around Moyom’s neck displayed a laughing face on its screen to help with emotional communication. This was probably a misjudgment on the engineer’s part, because Moyom’s emotions were often bizarre. Olyrean had no idea what was funny right now, for example. “Today I am in your Accident, as your mouth says. I kiss you with companionship! A new assignment! A new delight!”

“I see,” Olyrean said. She gave a small start and stifled a yelp when Korak spoke.

“My new job’s in the Accident too,” he said. “You work there? Maybe you can show me some good places to grab lunch.”

If he was hurt at all by what she had thought would be her parting barb, his tone gave no indication, though it would have been hard to tell from his expression. His face was buried beneath holo-screens once more.

“Of course,” she said weakly. The building’s automatic glass doors swung open before them, and she stepped into the cool air of the lobby. “Well,” she said, desperate for some kind of escape from the awkwardness, “Have a nice day, and have fun with your new jobs, you two!”

She waved goodbye and screamed internally as they followed right behind her through the cavernous lobby. Of course, they would actually need the elevators. Of course. The awkward silence that had built up between them now seemed almost thick enough to have an actual physical presence, like she was wading through mud. It was made all the worse by the fact that neither Korak nor Moyom seemed to have the decency to acknowledge how terrible this all was.

“Olyrean, are you the sick-having? Your pretty ears, they turn red. I have seen this of you when fever burns,” Moyom said with some concern.

“I’m fine,” Olyrean said, desperately wishing she had bought those deluxe leather ear-sheaths she had seen on the Omninet last week. “Fine, really.”

She resolved to not make any more awkward goodbyes until she was certain that they were actually headed in another direction from her. But that certainty proved elusive. They went to the same bank of elevators she did, hopped on the same elevator with her. When the elevator asked them where three little sweetie-pies like themselves needed to go, they all answered with the exact same floor.

Once there, they took the same path down meandering green-tiled hallways that were reminiscent of nothing more than some great titanic organism’s digestive system rather than a feature of a building meant to convey them efficiently to where they wanted to go, and then they all stopped quietly before the same doorway.

“What exactly did you guys say your new jobs were…?” Olyrean asked, as she turned the handle. And then she opened the door and all her concern with the matter fled. She gasped.

It was not the room itself that surprised her. At least, not to any great degree. It was much more humble than she expected. She had thought that the sort of room where a liberation team would meet for the first time would have been, well, a little more grandiose. But rather it was a very simple and somewhat small room with a bank of holo-projectors along one wall and a simple fold-out table and some chairs in the middle. On top of the table was an open box of pizza, already cooling.

It wasn’t that which surprised her, either, though the pizza did smell shockingly delicious. The source of her astonishment was the man that sat chewing thoughtfully on a slice, watching a miniature hologram of an anthropomorphic cat being tormented by a mouse and chuckling to himself.

Jack.

Jack Hallen.

The soldier who had, a year ago, come through the portal to her world; who had taken her from the battlefield and away from Um’Thamarr, the orcs, and so much death and ruin and ushered her into the arms of Infinity America.

He looked the same now as he did then, his face square and grizzled and lined with fading, interesting scars; his hair peppered gray and a distant, noble look in his eyes. He even still wore the same battle-pocked power armor, painted red, white and blue. It seemed like a very bad idea to be wearing it, as it was clearly too heavy for the chair in which he sat, which even now was beginning to buckle beneath him. Even so, she found that she could not imagine him without it.

“Jack!” she cried out. “Jack Hallen!” she added, after a moment’s consideration.

The man jerked, startled, and dropped his slice of pizza. He frowned as it landed cheese-down on the table with a very faint splat. “Oh,” he said regretfully.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Olyrean said, rushing forward. “I didn’t mean to surprise you–here, I’ll get it–”

“No need.” He lifted one armored hand and pointed one armored finger and said, “Zap,” and then there was another zap, and a laser shot out of the tip of his finger and disintegrated the fallen pizza. He took another slice, turned kindly eyes and a broad smile to her, and said, “Oh, hello, Olyrean. Would you like cheese or pepperoni? I think there’s some anchovies in there, too.”

“Wait,” said Korak, as Olyrean laughed and sat down next to Jack, who promptly slid the pizza box her way. He waved the holo-screens from his face as if he were batting away flies. It took him a few moments until they were all gone, but once they were he took a good look at the two of them. “You–you’re actually Jack Hallen?”

“I am Jack Hallen,” said Jack Hallen.

The lizard turned to her. “And you know him?”

The image of a smiling man with a hat that looked something like a mushroom growth and a pencil-thin mustache winked at Olyrean from the top of the pizza box, beneath fat letters spelling out Tony’s Pizzeria. “I do,” she said, opening the box and grabbing a slice of anchovy. “He was…well, he was there during my planet’s liberation.”

Though Jack had done more than that, of course. He had come to visit her in the months after her rescue, during her civics classes, when she had felt so alone and frightened and confused. Well, not her, specifically. He had come to speak during some of their lessons. Those were some of her favorite days, since Jack mostly told interesting old war stories, rather than actually, well, teach anything. But he had always said hello to her, and he had always remembered her name. And he had, after all, rescued her. So she didn’t particularly care whether he taught anything at all.

Korak could only stare at the both of them, agog. “This man’s a war hero,” he said. “I’ve seen the holo-films–you’re the most decorated soldier in the history of the UWA. What are you doing here?”

A wry smile perked up at the corners of Jack’s mouth. “Welllll,” he drawled, taking another bite of pizza, “I suppose I’m here for the same reason that all of you are.”

Olyrean, whose surprise and delight at seeing Jack had made her momentarily set aside the odd coincidence of Moyom and Korak following her to the place where she’d meet her team, put two and two together. “Wait,” she said, “Do you mean to tell me–”

She was interrupted by a sound like a firecracker going off and a shower of red, white and blue sparks. When they had cleared, Libby stood on the table. The hologram she projected was a little shorter than she usually was, only about three feet tall.

“Surprise!” she yelled, the frills of her dress and the curls of her hair bouncing along with several other parts of her as she jumped in excitement. “You’re all on the liberation team! I arranged it like this! I hope you don’t mind.”

Olyrean had dropped her pizza during Libby’s explosive appearance, in coincidentally the exact same manner and the exact same spot in which Jack had dropped his. “What do you mean, arranged it?” she asked.

“Well,” said the AI, “The whole meeting, you know. You, Korak and Moyom, that is. I knew all of you would be on the same team, and I thought it would be fun if you got to meet each other even before you knew! That’s why I sent you all to the same bar.”

The memories of last night were no longer dipping in and out of Olyrean’s mind, fleeing when she tried to grasp at them. Now that she had woken up a bit and gotten rid of her hangover, they were all there. Just of suspiciously low quality, like holo-films which had their data corrupted, or as if they had been filmed through thick fog. She did remember that it had been Libby who had suggested the bar. She could tell by Korak’s startled expression that she had done the same to him.

“I tried to get the other members to meet you too,” said Libby, pouting at Jack, “but–”

“Is that why you were nagging me to go out?” Jack laughed. “Evenings are suit-maintenance time for me. You know that.”

“You weren’t maintaining your suit. You were playing video games.”

“It’s also video game time,” said Jack. “Man has to have his hobbies.”

Olyrean, in the meantime, was delighted. She didn’t know by what methods the members of a Liberation team were chosen, and well, she could take or leave Korak, but Jack and Moyom were the two people she would have most liked to have with her. Well…Jack would certainly keep her safe, but Moyom–well, it would be good to have Moyom there, just as a friend, regardless of the impact she’d have on the mission. She was a little confused by the fact that Jack seemed to be the only one with any expertise on liberating planets, though.

This train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Oh, that must be our last member,” said Libby. “Come in!”

The door swung open, and Olyrean’s heart dropped into her stomach.

Behind it stood a familiar figure. A loathsome figure. A figure whom Olyrean had hoped she’d never have to see again. Or, if she did have to see the figure, hopefully it would be a mere glimpse as it was ejected into the void of space, or crushed by a Titan-o-mech, or blown apart by rockets, or eaten alive by the Hyper-Rygillian pox.

She had spent quite a lot of time fantasizing about the delightfully painful deaths this figure might suffer, in fact, though it was a mental habit that she had recognized as unhealthy and had quit, with some reluctance. But now, seeing that figure here, with all that it implied, all those awful and wonderful imagined deaths rushed once more to the forefront of her mind on a tidal wave of hate.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she shouted.

Brugga stopped in the doorway, blinking his bulging yellow eyes in surprise. He was as wretchedly ugly as the last time she had seen him, when he had worn black iron and wielded a whip and politely told her he would make her his pet. Now he wore an ill-fitting suit whose buttons strained against a prodigious gut. He opened and closed his mouth, then looked down at the bottles he held beneath his arms.

“I bought ginger ale,” he said.