FSE

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'Everyone has secret words that can save them.

Everyone has secret words that can kill them.' (Unknown)

"So they weren't slaves?"

"Not technically," Fran's best friend had answered.

"I'll be gosh-darned," the jackal had shaken her head. "Whenever people mentioned slaves, I'd always picture those people pulling the blocks to build the pyramids, you know?"

"Most of us do!" her best friend had admitted. "They weren't forced to do it as such, though. If they didn't do it, they'd just starve to death.".

"Isn't that just capitalism, though?"

"I knew there was a reason I liked you." Fran had grinned back.

***

"No, the worst time still has to have been the lava," Jackie decided.

"You fell into lava?"

"In my defense, I didn't fall, an albatross pushed me. I had it coming, but still," the roach shrugged.

"Wait, what?"

"It must've been a while back," Jackie furrowed her brow. "That volcano's been dormant long enough they've made a geothermal plant out of it by now. In short, the turbine was fast, at least," she grimaced.

"What happened with Sieve?"

"She was pretty mad at me," Jackie chuckled. "Putting me back together after that turned out to be expensive and, uh, she had to fish me out of there herself." The jackal shuddered. Against the horror of having known how final death would have been back on Earth, she'd never imagined a situation in which your last thoughts while falling to your death would have been 'Someone will be so mad at me!' It was... unsettling.

"That's when she left, isn't it."

"That hit me hard. She's partners with a rainbow trout at the water filtration plant by now I think. Having been able to work the dam with Sieve had been like this thing that proved I could finally fit in in the System, you know?" Fran nodded. "If I could at least have that, maybe not having food wasn't so bad after all."

"So without it..."

"I fell right back into food like a moron," Jackie shook her head. "It was like, why even try, right?"

"It's easy to start thinking like that," the jackal conceded.

"That's how Searchlight caught me with seaweed from the anemone garden."

"You stole it?"

"I went to get it myself in full diving suit." Fran saw Jackie's hands start knitting and wood-carving imperceptibly faster. "It's as inconspicuous as it sounds," she scoffed.

"I bet."

"That's how I ended up with the worst Enforcer I ever had."

"What does an Enforcer do, exactly?" Jackie nearly missed her mark with a needle, barely catching herself.

"You don't have Enforcers on Earth?" She missed her quantum translocator badly enough as it was.

"We have something," the jackal retorted, "they're just not called that. Do Trackers like Ghost take Renegades to space jail?"

"What's jail?"

Fran's jaw fell agape. "You don't have jail?"

"Maybe we do," Jackie replied, "maybe we just don't call it that."

"It's a place where our Renegades get locked up for their crimes," the jackal explained.

"They stay there?" It was the roach's turn to be surprised. "They can't leave?"

"The worse their crimes are, the longer they stay locked up, at least in theory," Fran elaborated. "They can stay for ten, twenty, thirty years, depending on how bad."

"Don't they have work to do?" Jackie asked incredulously.

"Some of them work from jail, but not most, as far as I know."

"That's wild," the roach remarked. "When Speaker, Robber, and Glew get revived, they'll be assigned Enforcers." Those had to be the parrot, duck, and glowworm pirates they'd killed earlier, the jackal gathered. "Most deals are informal, unless you bring in an Arbitrator to mediate, but that's the exception, not the rule. When you Renege on one, you lose the Commission's trust, so they have someone follow you around to make sure you pay them back what they're owed." When you can't go to jail, jail comes to you, Fran couldn't help but think. "The Commission can't afford to have people not working. Work piles up too quick." And it had to be on-site, so the Commission hired people to become jail, jail-that-follows-you-around.

"When you eat or smuggle food, whose deal are you Reneging on?" the jackal asked.

"Your deal with the Commission as a Citizen to let them use food to make shots, pills and, more importantly, to Revive us in the Chambers, as they see it," Jackie answered.

"How do they make you pay them back?"

"Planet maintenance, energy production, Cleaning, stuff like that. Someone has to do it."

"What if someone doesn't want to? What if she can't?" Those were two very different questions, the roach noticed. "What do they do?" The Commission treated them as one.

"Renegades haveattacked Enforcers to try to escape. Enforcers make sure they don't try twice."

"Are Enforcers allowed to hurt Renegades to make them work?"

"Not technically. In practice though, if an Enforcer says a Renegade attacked her, says a Renegade tried to escape, that she had to restrain her..." she trailed off.

"What happens to Enforcers if their Renegades do get out of doing the work they're supposed to do?"

"Depends," the roach answered. "Sometimes they can't be an Enforcer anymore. Sometimes they even get stuck with an Enforcer of their own."

"Lot of pressure, isn't it?"

"Tough break." Jackie did not sound especially stricken.

"How does the Commission justify not having Enforcers work so long?"

"By making sure every Enforcer is enough of a deterrent that, in the end, the numbers still add up in their favor."

Fran blinked. "Are your hands moving faster?"

"Siren would say Drill and Yoke were fools," the roach went on. "They thought I couldn't remember rules, that I couldn't understand them, but not her, no, she knew better," she shook her head. "She said all I didn't get was how much breaking rules would hurt," she added, "and she'd make sure I'd remember that."

"What did Siren do?"

"She'd keep making me redo the work I'd done, she'd make me drop work I'd almost done so it'd keep regaining interest, she'd make me do work she'd owed other people, she'd trick me into working against Renegades I'd worked with. She'd deny having told me to do work she'd told me to do after I'd done it, she'd tell me every mistake I'd made proved everything bad everyone had always known about me, she'd set impossible deadlines with no breaks, she'd insult me, she'd say she'd make me into an example no one would ever forget. Siren told me that I'd never escape from her and that, even if I did, it wouldn't matter, because after how she'd have poisoned the well against me, no one would ever want to be my partner again anyway."

"How did you escape?"

"I killed myself." The jackal was going to say something, but Jackie wasn't done. "Over and over and over."

"I'm sorry," Fran shook her head. "Do you need to stop?"

"People don't kill themselves a lot around here." The roach's hands were definitely moving faster. "Strategic reasons, I mean, sometimes. I used to know this smilodon who got stranded on the ice lake that one time, but like, not as a thing, you know?" The jackal nodded. "They bring you right back, it's expensive, and you remember it every time," Jackie stuck her tongue out.

"Why did you?" Fran asked gently.

"I wanted them to stop bringing me back on the grounds that what Siren was doing to me was ethically unacceptable. They said they couldn't do that because the System couldn't afford to make do without my contribution to it."

"What happened?"

"I tried to escape the System outright. Back then, I just wanted to be able to die far enough away that the Commission couldn't bring me back. They sent Macha after me to drag me back, and offered me a deal."

"What brought this on?" The Commission didn't strike the jackal as easy to deal with.

"Bringing me back over and over was costing them too much. Spacing out my revivals helped at first, but the work I wasn't doing because I spent longer dead caught up with it."

"What kind of deal?"

"My debt was... reassessed a bit after some of Siren's liberties with the truth came to light. I was set free for then. It never stuck to the point where she faced consequences, but the Commission did promise that, if I did Renege again, she'd never be my Enforcer again, for what it's worth. Macha volunteered to be my partner for a few lifetimes to help me reintegrate."

"That sounds nice of her."

"It really was, the more I think about it," the roach sighed, "especially after everything she must have heard people say about me by then." The jackal hadn't meant to touch a nerve. "I wish things had worked out better with her. That's when I had these put in." Jackie's antennae crackled as she knitted and wood-carved. "At first, they were just a way to save power for the ship. After a while, I got to thinking. The Commission may have had another reason for sending Macha after me, right? What if they didn't want me to find out that..." It still sounded crazy to the roach even though she was talking to an alien herself. "... there are other places in the universe than the System and its Commission and their rules, places like your world. Places I could live."

"So you tried to escape again."

"I really thought the antennae would make a difference that time." Nope, still wasn't funny. "Couldn't have made it that far without running out of power before, you know?" Current arced between the roach's knitting needles. "But Macha dragged me back again, she's partners with Ankylowatt now, and the Commission set me up with my very last Enforcer... Ghost."

"Wait, our Ghost?" But how?

"You know, it's funny," Jackie shook her head. "I must've died a thousand times, but of all the things I've been through since then, to this day, some of the things she said to me still - AGH!"

She chopped off her finger.

***

"So they didn't even care about the Mongols?" Fran had asked.

"Not at first," her roommate had explained. "They just wanted to keep their intellectual citizens' hands so busy building it they wouldn't have enough time to think. The Mongols were provoked by it."

"What didn't they want their intellectuals to have enough time to think about?"

"Probably about how bogus it was that they were being forced to throw away their lives building some wall," the jackal's roommate had theorized tongue-in-cheek.