Jackie and Fran's life of crime takes them into a whole new unexplored territory. Ghost and Orchid finally face down the final culprits in their criminal investigation.


“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” (Terry Pratchett)

“So these robot masters,” Fran’s roommate had asked her as she’d been playing Mega Man, “they’re supposed to have been built to do just this one job, right?” The jackal had nodded as she’d slid under a narrow opening. They’d added the sliding by that one.
“That’s right, yeah,” Fran had nodded, crackling as she’d been hit by an overhead spike. The floor ones killed you, though.
“Then they were like, ‘Screw it! I’ll get my own job, with blackjack and hookers!’, weren’t they?” The jackal had had to agree with that as well, when her roommate had put it like that. “I respect that.” Fran’s eyes had widened as her little blue bomber had finally exploded into several balls of light. “Stick it to The Man, robot masters!”

***

Byte had had so many electronic systems integrated into her metabolism over thousands and thousands of years that, at a glance, you could often no longer tell where her cybernetic enhancements ended and where her body began. The trilobite’s lair was even more of a workshop than a laboratory, albeit one where genetic engineering co-mingled with electrical engineering. A wide variety of plugs, ports, cords, buttons, and wires protruded from Byte’s body, barely distinguishable from the bells and whistles that naturally covered a trilobite’s body for the casual observer. As a shortcut in times of crisis, Byte had made it possible for her to activate various defense mechanisms in her lair using her body itself.
The trilobite’s lair was where she kept all of her research, after all. Some of it, it had taken Byte thousands of years to get to the point it was at and, for some of that, it seemed like the payoff for it could’ve been just around the corner, if only she kept pushing for a little bit longer. What it came down to was that, in the context of existing in the System and its way of life, the trilobite’s lair was something that amounted to the work of many of her lifetimes, that she would therefore value a lot more than any individual lifetime. This was the work that having Trackers cracking down on Byte would put at risk, and she’d had no intention of letting them do so.
Which would’ve been a lot easier to do if the hidden compartment in the trilobite’s lair hadn’t included what was left of Speaker, to say nothing of the other partially dismantled Citizens and Renegades that also graced her abode. After what had happened with Siren, Byte had expected Ghost to show up at her lair to try to take her down. One of the trilobite’s regular traps might have given either of the mantises some trouble but, after her plans with the remote controls for people had been thwarted so utterly, she thought she’d try something different.
Byte set up her systems so they’d be ready to hack into Ghost’s as soon as the Tracker would come in. She would’ve taken perverse irony in turning the mantis against her own partner. It would’ve been a workaround, just as they’d had to use for Plesioscope, but it might have had the merit of serving her immediate purposes in the here and now, at the very least. If Orchid hadn’t been the one to go in to arrest Byte using her plant abilities that’d sidestepped the trilobite’s expectations and defenses entirely, that is. The trilobite gave up her accomplice fairly easily, at that. Byte even criticized the way the mantis dragged her away just the way she’d criticized Kiwi’s carpentry, but the Tracker didn’t care all that much, truth be told.

***

Naming conventions were different in the System than they’d been on Earth.
That was one of the things that Fran had noticed about it when she’d first started living there. Since there were no families as such, there was no need for last names. Some first names were very much like ordinary first names back on Earth, mind you: Kacey, Jackie, Dex, Macha, Linda. A lot of people were named after plants, machines or animals, often in varying forms of combinations with each other as the situation called for. Some were named after concepts that would have meant something different on Earth but who represented what that concept meant in the System by their very existence. A lot of people on Earth had last names that had to do with their ancestors’ jobs, but the System took it a step even further than that.
Drill, Yoke, Sieve, Siren, Loom. A lot of people in the System were named after tools.

***

“My mom used to have these weird mood swings around chores,” Fran’s best friend had told her one day. “She’d ignore them for a really long time then all of a sudden it was like they all had to be done at the same time somehow,” she’d gone on. “So she’d tell me to start one, then suddenly tell me to drop it to work on a second one, then she’d get distracted and tell me to work on a third one, then while I’d be working on the third one she’d ask me why the first one wasn’t done,” she’d stuck out her tongue. “She didn’t mean harm by it, but it was a pain in the ass. I used to call it the Cascade Failure or, failing that, the Chore Avalanche.”
“You people have a little nickname for everything,” the jackal had shaken her head.
"She'd give me that look like I was a broken tool that wasn’t doing what it was supposed to."
“Some broken tools can still be fixed, though... can’t they?”

***

Grades had always been lucky.
The tardigrade literally had a four-leaf clover growing on top of her head. Grades had been an Arbitrator ever since the System’s inception, whenever that had been. This hadn’t been the only factor that the tardigrade had been lucky enough to have had work out in her favor in all that time, but it sure hadn’t hurt. It had already given Grades a considerable amount of sway over how the vast majority of the System’s Citizens lived their daily lives. Conversely, it had also made it virtually impossible for most Citizens in the System to have had any impact on the tardigrade’s own life whatsoever. Grades had worked hard to establish the dramatic power asymmetry she enjoyed, the way she’d looked at it, and she had every intention of keeping it.
The only thing that could’ve still stood in the tardigrade’s way had to have been another Arbitrator by that point. All Arbitrators had power, but some had more power than others. Grades had no intention of allowing the rest of them and their unreliable decisions to remain a threat for her forever or, worse, until one of the other Arbitrators would choose to act on it first. Kacey hadn’t trusted the tardigrade’s judgment for a long time. Over the millenia, Grades had made it a habit of making Citizens’ lives as hard as possible, as if reaffirming her hierarchical superiority over the rest of them had been an exercise that she had to keep repeating just to make sure it still worked. The giraffe had made a point of keeping an eye on her actions.
That was how Kacey had finally caught the tardigrade red-handed with the quantum translocator and the movement remote, and had paid for her discovery with her life.
In the end, there was nothing that Grades, even with the tremendous amount of power and influence that she’d painstakingly gathered over the ages, could’ve done against all other Arbitrators put together. You didn’t become an Arbitrator by accident. Most of those who made the laws for Citizens to obey got to treat the laws of physics as suggestions themselves. That was where a lot of the weight behind their judgments came from. While most of them were fine with imposing whatever laws on Citizens they wished, they felt differently about the idea of someone else’s will being imposed on them, whether that person was an Arbitrator or not. Thinking about what that meant put them in a unique situation to empathize with Citizens.
The tardigrade had never died. Grades had no idea what it was like. The tardigrade thought that Citizens allowed themselves to die casually, to inconvenience her, because they didn’t understand what a waste of resources it meant for the Commission to have to bring them back every time. The four-leaf clover on Grades’ head twitched when the Tracker walked in, ready to deploy her own plant-like powers in response to what she expected to be Orchid. Ghost took advantage of the tardigrade’s error of judgment with her cybernetic abilities to give her a reason to empathize with the System’s Citizens for a very long time. Being banned from being an Arbitrator for the Commission would be a huge adjustment without many other options.
Grades hadn’t exactly made a lot of friends among Renegades over the years...

***

Running food was unlike any other job that Fran had done in the System yet.
Superficially, there were elements of it that appeared similar to running anything else. You had to load cargo onto ships, pilot ships from here to there, and unload cargo off of them, but that was where the similarities ended. First you had to even locate sellers and buyers a lot of the time, which often wasn’t easy. All the work that Renegades had to do to hide their identities from Trackers so that they wouldn’t get arrested was work that you had to re-do backwards to be able to track them down for the reasons for which they did want you to find them, for which they did want to find you. Whole systems had been built and kept secret to figure out when and where to exchange information safely, without being compromised.
This was where a lot of the connections with people that Jackie had built all over the System over the centuries paid off. Even though the roach hadn’t run food in a long time, she still remembered everything that she needed to know to get right back to it after all this time. It’d been like riding a bicycle, it turned out, not that there were bicycles in the System, but still. The jackal had to be on guard duty a lot. The fact that there was only one person of each species in the System could sometimes make getting away with criminal activities especially difficult. This made it proportionately important for Fran to be able to keep an eye out for Trackers so that she could warn her fellow Renegades of it in time so that they wouldn’t get in trouble for it.
A long time ago now, the jackal remembered having asked herself what kind of series of events would lead someone into a life of crime, not having been able to imagine how that could happen to someone. It was only now that it’d actually happened to her that she’d understood why she wasn’t in a situation in which she could’ve told her old self about it in a way she could’ve understood at the time either. Somehow events had unfolded in a way that had proven impossible to disentangle from that.
One run, when shit went sour, Dex, Jackie, and Fran struggled to make their getaway from a crackdown. They realized that the Trackers they were up against were mostly fighting another, larger group of Renegades around them. There were even Tracker ships fighting Renegade ships in the sky over their heads.
Those particular Renegade ships looked unlike any other ships that any member of their trio had ever seen. They were in all sorts of weirdly unsettling shapes with little bells and whistles in all the wrong places, the kind that sent a shiver down your spine. It actually took the jackal a bit of questioning after the fact to make the last few remaining pieces of that puzzle fall into place later on.
Then they were all shot down by two or three Tracker ships, just like that.

***

“You know how she used to say places had ‘spirits’ to them, the way people and animals did?” Fran and her roommate had talked about things that the jackal’s best friend used to say a lot.
“I remember, yeah,” Fran had nodded.
“I... Everything around here reminds me of her, Fran,” the jackal’s roommate had broken down. “The games we used to play, what we used to watch, the books we used to read, the couch where we used to sit, the kitchen where we used to cook, the bed where she used to sleep...” Fran had taken her roommate in her arms as she’d shaken her head, filled with guilt and shame. “I could never want to forget her, but remembering her all the time is just so hard,” the jackal’s roommate had almost apologized.
“I understand.” The apartment was like this little museum to the life they’d all shared together for so long.
“This place has her spirit now, Fran, and I...” She hadn’t known where to go from there. “... And I don’t know what to do.” For once, she hadn’t had a plan for this.

***

Tracking down Kacey proved quite an undertaking even with the help of someone who knew where she was. The Trackers had already asked Loom, Solder, and Glew for help finding Tilly in the ice planet's caves before. It seemed to have gone well enough for them to accept doing so a second time, in any case. Finally arresting Siren, Byte, and Grades had gone over well with a lot of Renegades, it turned out.
This time, Plesioscope remotely guided them all into a secret ice cave that took them through a blood-chilling ice ossuary. In a 3-D maze around them, winding every which way like the inside of an anthill, everything was made of ice carved into the shapes of someone's bones. Stairs made of ice tibias and ice femurs, pillars of ice skulls, ice tusks and ice horns in the floor and walls, ice spines hanging from the ceiling, and doors carved to look like fanged, bony ice maws. Whoever had done this, she'd had some issues to work out.
"Holy fucking shit!" Everyone turned to Ghost askance. "Must've picked it up," the mantis shook her head.
At long last, the Trackers found, frozen solid in another giant pillar of ice at the center of a larger underground area, all the tiny little ants that, when they were all put together in their plant-giraffe ‘husk’, formed the hive mind of the missing subversive Arbitrator known as Kacey, presumed perma-dead.

***

“BLEEAARRRGH!” Doornail scampered out of the way as Fran stumbled out of her Revival chamber to throw up. “BLEEAARRRGH!” It didn’t look like she was going to throw up a third time this time. What an awful thing to get the hang of, she couldn’t help but think. “I... Where am I...?” The possum helped the jackal up from her stumble, steadying her on her feet. But where was Cuckoon? “This doesn’t look like the Revival chambers.” They were in a large underground garden, hidden from prying eyes under the surface of the forest planet, lush with everything that could grow without sunlight, from mushrooms to snake plants to spider plants to bioluminescent moss.
“The Tracker ships killed you,” Reclaim explained to them. “We figured you’d rather get brought back without having to have an Enforcer to deal with,” the hyena added, tongue-in-cheek. “You’re welcome.”
“You... made these?” Jackie was incredulous. “You people actually figured out how to make your own Revival chambers?” The Commission guarded the secrets of Revival jealously.
“Well, they’re not perfect yet, but,” Corsair replied, “they will be.” The meaning of what she meant by ‘not perfect’ hadn’t become fully apparent to them yet, but it would.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” Fran frowned.
“No, I don’t think so,” the puffin waved off.
“Are we your prisoners now?” the roach saw fit to ask.
“No,” Grassroots assured them. “You’re free to leave, but welcome to stay,” the grasshopper clarified. She seemed to be the one in charge, although that may have been relative then and there.
“What are these?” The jackal pointed at the weirdly-shaped ships.
“They’re bacteria,” Gasmask answered. “You know how the Commission are always saying the System is like a metabolism and we all have to play our parts in it like that?” They played the part of the bacteria.
“What’s that smell?” Jackie finally blurted out, turning her attention to a bubbling cauldron that was being tended by a rhipicerid beetle nearby.
“This, our honored guests,” Scattershot solemnly sprinkled spices over her cauldron while she stirred just the way she used to throw seeds for trees to grow, “is cooking.” The rhipicerid beetle took a deep, long whiff out of her cauldron herself, savoring its scent like the sweetest pheromones. “Hungry?” The roach’s mouth watered as one of Scattershot’s four arms offered them a steaming ladle...

***

“My mom was chill most of the time,” Fran’s roommate had told her one day, “but she’d really lose her shit when someone would break something,” she’d shaken her head. “It kinda fucked me up how mad she’d get, especially since she usually didn’t, does that make sense?” Not that she’d wished her mom had gotten mad more often, mind you, but the jackal understood well enough.
“Objects are still easier to replace than people, though, aren’t they?” Fran had opined.
“Say that to my mom,” the jackal’s roommate had stuck her tongue out. “Sometimes I used to wish I’d been an object, just so she’d have cared as much about breaking me.”

***

“They keep breaking the Revival chambers!” Amber exclaimed. “What are they even thinking?” The deinonychus couldn’t believe what she’d been hearing. “Don’t they realize they depend on those chambers to come back, same as everyone?” Kacey had been a dependable Arbitrator for the Commission since time immemorial, beloved by most, if not all. “The work in the System doesn’t do itself!” What could’ve happened to the giraffe to have made her lose her mind like that?
“The Free Radicals have their own chambers by now, Amber,” Kacey replied.
“And they work?” That was a different question altogether, wasn’t it?
“The vast majority of the time, yes,” Kacey answered cautiously.
“What about the rest of the time?” Amber had to know.
“The memory engrams become corrupted,” the giraffe looked down. “The new chambers were partly created by adapting mind-wipe technology, so they’re not foolproof yet.”
“Kacey, you know as well as I do, as well as all Arbitrators do that, when we created the System the way it is, we couldn’t afford any duplicates,” the deinonychus reminded her. “When we lose a single person, a whole species goes extinct,” Amber shuddered. “Is that what you want?” Kacey looked back at her unwaveringly.
“That’s precisely what I don’t want,” the giraffe retorted. “That’s why it’s so important I speak to you.” So important that someone had put a lot of work into making sure she couldn’t. “I have reason to believe those glitches are a feature, not a bug, that someone built them in to get rid of people they don’t like no matter what the cost,” Kacey explained. “If we find out who did it, I think they can be fixed so they won’t have that glitch.” It seemed like the best solution to her.
“We don’t want them to have functional Revival chambers, they should have to depend on us, don’t you get it?” How could the giraffe not put two and two together? “If we don’t filter Renegades, we won’t be able to assign them Enforcers, and there won’t be any law in the System anymore!” It wasn’t that complicated, was it?
“I’m trying to tell you they’re going to use other Revival chambers whether you want them to or not,” Kacey responded, “whether they’re functional or risky. The only difference will be how many of their memories make it, so I’d rather they have functional ones, wouldn’t you?”
“You should never have given them the benefit of the doubt,” the deinonychus scoffed. “You should’ve talked to us, we should’ve all taken immediate action to quash this in the bud when we had the chance,” Amber spat.
“You don’t understand the scope this has already taken,” the giraffe shook her head. “It’s only ever been individual Renegades before, this is something completely different, this is the first time another group than the Commission has worked together this much in the System’s entire existence,” Kacey went on. “They’re trying to create a whole other kind of society, an alternative to the Commission.” She said that like it was a good thing.
“An alternative is a threat to us,” the deinonychus frowned.
“It’s a threat you should take seriously, that’s what I’m telling you,” the giraffe nodded. “I don’t want a few of us to keep breaking the Commission’s Revival chambers either,” she clarified, “but I need to be able to convince them you’re not a threat to us, to work with me on that,” she pleaded.
“When did it become ‘us’?” Amber rolled her black hole eyes. “You’re an Arbitrator, Kacey!” Had she forgotten about that?
“That’s why I’m trying to Arbitrate between the Commission and the Free Radicals, Amber,” Kacey replied. “It’s the most important job of my career.” The ants that worked together to sustain her plant-like body crawled in and out of the pores in her skin as she talked. “The System’s whole fate depends on it.” The giraffe would become the Free Radicals’ ambassador and union representative to the Commission or die trying - again.
“What do they even want?” the deinonychus asked. “What are their demands?” This should be good, she thought.
“They want to be able to get Arbitrated over their communicators, they don’t want it to have to be in person, it puts people without ships at a disadvantage in negotiations all the time and it wastes energy and time. They want Enforcers to have oversight and accountability so they can’t get away with treating them unfairly. They don’t want to be at the whim of whether they get an Arbitrator who personally dislikes them or not. They want to normalize giving help without an expectation of immediate reward. They want to be able to have as many partners as they want. They want to be able to have legal access to real food, they think that can be done sustainably. They want more control over whether they have to work at jobs they hate or not.”
Amber sighed. “And why should we give them any of that, Kacey, can you tell me that?”
Kacey’s countenance darkened. “I’m not in charge of what happens, so don’t shoot the messenger about this, because that’s the last thing I want, but you really don’t understand how big this is,” she strove to get across. “This is like about a quarter to a third of everyone in the System.” She let that sink in for a second. “We don’t know which way people who aren’t aligned would go if they knew the full story, but think about it, Amber,” the giraffe persisted, “a lot of people have been sick of the way the Commission does things for a long time. If no one works to mend fences, the System’s going to have something it’s never had, something that, with cryonics and mind-wipes, with the way it’s built, it can’t possibly afford to have, not even once.”
Time and energy use were always factors in being able to bring people back - factors that could only be overclocked so far. “What’s that, Kacey?” the deinonychus tilted her head.
“War.”

***

“It was you?” Jackie couldn’t believe her eyes.
“That’s right,” Macha admitted.
“When I got the quantum translocator from Solace,” the roach turned to Fran, “she told me someone helped me pay for it, but she never told me who it was,” she added. “But why?” The dragonfly had always been hard to read.
“Free Radicals give things without expecting an immediate reward,” the pterodactyl dodged uncomfortably.
“Why give this to me in particular, though?” Jackie insisted.
“Look, you had a way out of the System when I brought you back, all that time ago,” Macha shook her head. “It was my fault you weren’t able to leave then,” she looked down. “I should never have stood in your way the way I did.” The roach winced.
“You thought you were saving me.” It still wasn’t easy for Jackie to admit even after so long. “What made you change your mind?” They’d argued about this so much back in the day.
“You’re not happy here,” the pterodactyl said matter-of-factly. “You’ve never been happy here, I don’t think,” she emphasized. “Maybe you’d have been happy somewhere else...”

***

“Hey Fran, we’re going out!” Fran’s mom had never told her to do anything around the house, left it entirely up to her. “Grab your jacket!” As it happened, the jackal had been piling up more and more clothes overhead in her closet trusting it to hold, no need to sort them out was there?
“Coming, mom!” Fran had screamed when she opened the door and all her clothes came tumbling down on top of her like an avalanche. “AHHHH!” For a split-second, as time had frozen while the jackal had seen her clothes coming down but before they’d reached her, the thought had flashed into her head: this is it, I’m going to die the way I lived, a victim of my own laziness. Her mom had found her and, once she’d reassured herself that her daughter had been fine, she’d laughed and laughed.
“I’m sorry, Fran!” She just couldn’t help it. “It’s just so funny, it’s so... you,” Fran’s mom had elaborated.
“Not helping, mom,” the jackal had grumbled on her back under her pile of clothes. “Hey, mom?” Her mom hadn’t made a move to remove any of her clothes from her, either.
“What, honey?” Fran hadn’t moved to remove them either, admitting defeat in the face of a superior foe.
“Why must you let me make my own mistakes like this?” The jackal had tried to shake her head as her clothes had muffled her voice.
“Now you won’t make it again,” her mom had said matter-of-factly.