FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"People get them without thinking." Fran and her roommate were watching her pets chasing each other around their living room. "They get them for their kids."

"That's the thing!" she concurred. "They think of animals as lesser lifeforms than people for their kids to 'practice' on for when they have kids of their own."

"Lifeforms that don't 'matter' as much if their kids mess up," she'd frowned.

"I guess it's better for people to bring them back than to get rid of them when they realize it's not working out, but still." The jackal's pets had lived in other households that had ended up bringing them back to the rescue rather than keeping them before she'd taken them in. "They get attached, you know?" That's how you got a fear of abandonment. Fran should know.

"I'm glad they adjusted to living here so well, all things considered," she'd smiled.

The jackal had promised herself this would be the last place her pets would need to live.

"Just think," she'd said. "It's so different for them. For us, they're around for what, one eighth of our lives, if that, right?" She'd nodded. "For them, we're around for their entire lives..."

***

"That was a dinosaur, wasn't it?"

Jackie raised an eyebrow. "What about it?" The roach hadn't stopped knitting and carving for a while.

"I'd never seen one," Fran shook her head.

"Huh!" Jackie never thought of dinosaurs as different from other species in any way. "Why not?"

"They've been gone from Earth for millions of years," the jackal explained.

"Why is that?" The roach tilted her head.

"I dunno," Fran shrugged. "Got careless?"

Jackie furrowed her brow. "Weren't you on Earth?"

"No, I've only been alive for a couple of decades," the jackal reminded her.

"Whoa!" The roach's jaw dropped. "I mean, I know you told me you don't have Revival chambers but, like..." It was one thing to know on an intellectual level, but another to internalize its implications. "I don't know, I guess I just didn't put it together how short your life must've been," she grinned apologetically.

"Is there petroleum here?" Something about Jackie's phrasing had gotten Fran thinking. "In the System, I mean?"

The roach shook her head. "Never heard of it." Of course, the jackal thought. "Why, you need some?" If their dinosaurs were still alive, it meant they'd never turned to oil in the ground.

"Not as such, no." They'd only have had one of each kind of dinosaur in the first place. "Just curious." Fran was getting more of a sense of how much kidnapping a power source like her could've meant to the pirates.

"My first Enforcer was a dinosaur," Jackie mentioned offhandedly.

"Not that one, though?"

"Mine was a stegosaur. She had those red crystals that they make lasers with growing out of her back, like the ones they mine on the rock planet." The jackal had never seen the red crystal mines of the rock planet, but she could imagine.

"What was she like?"

"She was just..." The roach sighed. "Very cut-and-dry, you know?" What was a nice way of putting that? "Very by-the-book."

Fran got the idea. "Bit of a stickler, wasn't she?"

"Drill knew every rule by heart," Jackie chuckled dryly. "She could recite them all from beginning to end with the exact same words every time, and did."

"Passionate about her job?"

"I don't know if 'passionate' is the right word," the roach stuck her tongue out. "She didn't seem to hate me, or even love the Commission, for that matter. She seemed emotionless. Drill wouldn't have been able to explain why any of the rules were what they were. She wouldn't have understood the question. She followed rules because they existed. That's what rules were for. For some reason, I kept forgetting what the rules were. She'd remind me as many times as I'd need her to. By the end of it, I'd have given almost anything to see Drill feel something, anything, just to prove she was a person like the rest of us. Still waiting on that."

"She must've driven you nuts."

"You have no idea!" Jackie laughed. "Had her for way too many lifetimes lemme tell you."

"You got that for food smuggling?"

"I wasn't smuggling it at first," the roach explained. "I got that for eating. Smuggling food is worse than that."

"I would think so," Fran acknowledged. "Gateway meal?"

"If that helps you," Jackie granted. "It's like, instead of making me a better person, Drill's repetitive self-righteousness just... ticked me right off, you know?" The jackal nodded. "It was just a taste, but enough to make me understand how much the Commission broke our spirits by denying us food, how much it meant that they did. I started thinking that not just me, but everyone should be able to have food, all the time. It was a mad dream and, well...".

"Rude awakening," Fran euphemized.

"It took them a remarkably long time, in my defense," Jackie remembered. "To this day there are people out there who can't work as Trackers anymore because they couldn't catch me," she smirked.

"Sounds like they had that coming."

"Depends who you ask, I guess," the roach shrugged.

"Was your Enforcer for that a dinosaur?"

"Nah, treehopper."

The jackal was almost sure that was some kind of tree bug. "Forest planet?"

"Caught me with an apple in treetops," Jackie explained.

"They put you with her longer, huh?"

"Now she was passionate about her job. She didn't hate me, but she loved the Commission. She was a true believer in the role they play for Citizens. Yoke could give you an explanation for every rule the Commission ever came up with the exact way Drill couldn't. She thought the problem with Renegades was they didn't understand why the rules are what they are, that if they understood the reasons for them, they'd no longer choose to break them. She thought they could all 'get better' if she steered them right, that if everyone followed the Commission's rules, everything would be best. Yoke meant better than Drill, I'll give her that."

"She was just wrong," the jackal grasped.

"That's the thing," the roach concurred. "Can't get around that, ultimately. It was like looking at a clock that worked perfectly but that was set to tell the wrong time. She believed so strongly, she tried so much harder to be better than Drill that, even though I knew she was wrong, I couldn't help feeling guilty about 'failing' her by breaking the Commission's rules. She worked that way because she tried to form a rapport that made it personal. Part of me resented Yoke for manipulating me and resented myself for letting her get to me, but I still felt guilty."

"Thorny situation," Fran winced.

"You could say that," Jackie clucked her tongue. "Worked for a while, at that."

"Wow."

"First I just stopped smuggling food. I brought it down to eating bits and pieces of food here and there, hoping no one would notice. After a long enough while of living with it, I felt bad enough that I stopped eating too. Everything started hitting me a lot harder after that. Food had given me this buffer against how much everything hurt that I'd taken for granted by then. I'd forgotten how to live without it, and I was too scared to go back. I couldn't believe I'd been able to get away with it so long. It'd seemed too good to be true, and too good to last," she regretted.

"What did you do?"

"I threw myself into my work, all the way in. I figured it'd be easier to keep my mind off food if I kept busy with something else all the time."

"Makes sense."

"I was working at a dam with a heron with a water wheel in her chest. Work became my escape. People want me to work, so the more I do, the better I deserve to feel, don't I? Mathematically, it seemed airtight. I started working all day then for more and more of the night while Sieve would sleep. Eventually I just worked all the time. At first she loved it. It was practical that I was getting so much done and gave her more time to do other stuff. Sieve didn't have any complaints about that. It seemed like a win-win situation. Who needed to sleep anyway, right?"

"But you can only push yourself so far before you hit that point of diminishing returns, can't you?"

"Where were you when I needed to hear that back then?" the roach stuck her tongue out. "When sleep deprivation caught up with me, I started dropping things, tripping on things, bumping into things. I'd remember numbers wrong or do things in the wrong order, things like that. Sieve became annoyed with me and started questioning whether or not it was still in her interest to be my partner. I wanted to go back to sleeping, but I kept having to stay up to fix the mistakes I'd made during the day, hoping she wouldn't notice."

"Vicious cycle." The roach nodded. "What happened?"

"You know those big turbines they have in dams, they have those on Earth too, don't they?" The jackal shuddered. "Well, one time I was so tired while I was walking near one that I just kinda..."

Fran cringed. "Don't those have, like, handrails around them?"

Jackie looked at her grimly. "They do now."

***

"Darn, I'm dead!" Fran's best friend had exclaimed.

"You are?" They were sitting in the jackal's best friend's room. Fran watched her game.

"I may as well be," she clucked her tongue, "with the beating I took just now."

"You still have some healing left, right?" The jackal's best friend's character was still on the move, she could see.

"Yeah, but I already had to use too much," Fran's best friend gritted her teeth, struggling with a resilient enemy as she spoke. "It's too early in the game for me to have used this much."

"You can still get more later though, can't you?"

The jackal's best friend had shaken her head. "You can't get back enough by this point to be able to beat the last boss," she'd explained. "Not with how much damage you have to be able to take to be able to beat it."

"But you're still playing, though?" Fran had asked.

"Of course," her best friend had grinned. "I want to see how far I can get."