FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

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"What does she do, exactly?" Fran's best friend's story had been about a serial killer.

"She never even touches them," the jackal's best friend had started. "She just talks to them. She learns everything about their lives, their weaknesses, their fears, then she says and does everything she can to make them kill themselves."

"She makes them do her dirty work for her," Fran had summarized.

"That's how she gets away with it. People act like words can't hurt you," her best friend had remarked. "I wanted to write a story to emphasize they can."

"Why does she do it?" the jackal had asked.

"She really thinks everyone would be better off dead. She thinks she's doing them a favor."

"What does your protagonist do?"

"Well, she tries to find the killer and stop her but, like... She also tries to get to the killer's victims first, to counteract the killer's reasons to die with her own reasons to live."

"But you've been having a hard time finishing it?"

"Yeah," her best friend replied, "I've been scared I wouldn't be able to find the right words to make my protagonist win the argument."

***

While a few of Fran's work days on the rock planet did go by without her talking anyone other than Jackie at their end, on others, people would sometimes talk to her as she'd work or while she'd be on her way from one location to another. When she tried to start conversations with some of her co-workers herself, though, she found that not all of them welcomed the interaction, brushing her off to return to their work. She first appreciated those who talked to her better. When it became difficult for the jackal to pry herself away from some of these conversations long enough to get enough work done in time for what was expected of her, she did begin to empathize with the others as well.

It wasn't always an easy tightrope to walk. Something or someone would pretty much occupy your hands or need your attention at all times. Her pleco fish co-worker, for one, was definitely more interested in cleaning than in talking.

One of the co-workers who would talk to her a lot was a hummingbird with a hamster wheel in her chest. Chime would always seem happy to see her, chirping at her arrival as though they were old friends reuniting after having spent a long time apart. With time, Fran realized that this was a reaction that the hummingbird had developed to deal with her condition. After having talked to Chime more than once or twice, the jackal began to notice that the hummingbird would bring the same conversation topics up that they'd talked about just a few days ago. She'd seem to forget conversations they'd had altogether so much that Fran started out wondering if she'd been imagining them herself.

The truth was that Chime really did forget a lot of what happened to her with the passage of time, even only a short time sometimes. As a response to trauma that had happened to her a long time ago, her mind had started automatically forgetting anything it deemed painful or negative in any way, without conscious control. It did this as a survival mechanism, to protect her from the damage that unpleasant memories would cause her otherwise. It was like a pocket with a hole in it, and memories would fall out. The hummingbird had started always acting as though people she met were old friends so they wouldn't be offended she'd forgotten them if it was true. She hoped they'd go along with it long enough for her to make a new friend if it wasn't.

Some of her partners had felt disappointed by the fact that she didn't seem to be able to keep track of how much work she or her partner would do, and had ended up leaving because they'd assumed she'd been taking advantage of them on purpose. Conversely, some of Chime's partners had realized that she truly couldn't keep track of how much work either of them did, and who had used her condition to their advantage at her expense to make her do more work while getting away with doing less themselves. The roach had given her the idea of taking a rough set of notes about people she knew and worked she owed on her communicator, to have it serve as her portable memory.

The hummingbird was just one of the jackal's talkative co-workers who she'd started out liking a lot, but who she'd ended up also feeling overwhelmed by somewhat. When she figured out how Chime's condition worked, she felt bad for having felt this way. Even though she knew intellectually that, even if she had hurt the hummingbird's feelings, she probably wouldn't have remembered it'd happened in a week, it still felt wrong for her to rely on it like this. Even if Chime didn't remember, Fran would, and that would be bad enough. One day, the hummingbird ran out of the work she owed on the rock planet and, just like that, her ship left for space without saying goodbye.

The jackal weirdly missed her, even though she'd probably not be missed back.

***

"You mean, like, disabled people with prosthetics and stuff?"

"Yeah, but I also mean that, if you extend your perspective wide enough, we've already been cyborgs for a lot longer than that," Fran's best friend had elaborated. "We need glasses, canes, dentures, pacemakers, hearing aids, all the way back to pirates with hook hands, peg legs, glass eyes, powdered wigs, and gold teeth," she'd gone on. "Technology becomes part of our body. If it's missing, it's like part of us is missing, you know?"

"I know I feel naked when I leave the house without my phone," the jackal had observed.

***

A long time before Jackie had met Fran, something had happened to her that she hadn't revealed to practically anyone ever since. When she'd been working in the mushroom forest on the forest planet, she'd sometimes found it especially difficult to resist the idea of biting some of the giant mushrooms when no one was looking. They were so big and some parts of them were so fragile that it seemed that no one would notice that she had just because a few small pieces of them were gone at the time. Still, the roach struggled and resisted for a long time, afraid that she wouldn't be lucky enough to get away with it, that she'd get in trouble with the Commission, that she'd get assigned an Enforcer to follow her around for lifetimes.

Kacey had been working as an Arbitrator on the forest planet at the time. She'd worked atop a great big mushroom skyscraper, its center hollowed out into a full-on tower with stairs carved out of mushroom. Once, after having had a particularly bad work day, in a moment of weakness, Jackie had finally given in after all. The giraffe had looked up under a tall mushroom to find the roach curled up in its top, looking down with her legs braced against its stem, hidden from view from anywhere except the Arbitrator's exact location.

With a piece of mushroom in her mouth.

Jackie had felt a chill go up her spine when she'd heard Kacey's communicator go off. "Anyone there?" Their eyes met. The roach had stopped breathing altogether as the giraffe had paused before answering.

"I don't see anyone," the Arbitrator had replied, lowering her gaze to move on as if she hadn't seen anyone do anything.

***

"Ice, get the ice!" Fran's roommate had recommended.

"No, fire, get the fire!" the jackal's best friend had advised. Fran was gaming sitting between both of them on their couch, trying to make a decision while dodging monsters' attacks onscreen.

"You anarchists always set things on fire," the jackal's roommate had jested.

"You commies all live where it's freezing," her best friend had joked back.

"You mean like, Cuba?" her roommate retorted tongue-in-cheek."

"Ice is a coward's weapon," Fran's best friend had asserted.

"Why is that?" the jackal had asked.

"You pick ice so you can go slow. They can't hurt you when they're frozen. You can go right past them. Fire means they can hurt you so you better hurry but," Fran's best friend had gone on, "the cumulative burning damage makes them remember what a bad idea it was for them to try to hurt you for a long time."

"I think maybe you scare me a little sometimes."

"Thanks," the jackal's best friend had grinned back wickedly.

***

"OW!"

"Keep up, wimp!" The mosquito wasn't sure whether Siren had just dragged her along so that she'd hit her head on one of the petrified forest's petrified trees on purpose or by accident but, at the end of the day, it didn't matter. "Look where you're going!" If it had been on purpose, the blue jay had plausible deniability but, even if it wasn't, she clearly hadn't tried to avoid it all that much. She had no real incentive to.

"I can walk well or I can walk fast but I can't do both ma'am," the mosquito had weakly protested.

"Then that's what you get," Siren snapped back tersely. She rolled her eyes to the heavens with an exasperated sigh. The problem was that everyone else was too nice, because they were weak. If they'd been as unforgiving as the blue jay was, everyone would do everything better and faster everywhere, all the time. They'd understand what happens when they don't by now, Siren was sure of it.

***

"Byte actually tried to teach Chime engineering one time, if you can believe that," Jackie told her.

"Are you serious?" Fran raised her eyebrows.

"Well, Chime tried to learn engineering from Byte might be a better way of putting it," the roach stuck out her tongue.

"How well did that go?"

Jackie shrugged. "How well could it have gone?" The roach had also learned a lot of the engineering she knew from Byte, it turned out. "Every time Byte tried to teach her something new, she always had to throw in some insult along with it." It had taken Jackie a long time to disentangle the things that the trilobite did because it really was the only way to do something from the mere preferences that she'd enforced. "Of course, since Chime's mind would forget anything unpleasant that happened to her, she'd forget the advice she'd received right along with it every time." Regardless, in terms of raw engineering skill, Byte was one of very at what she did, everyone in the System had to recognize.

"And now?"

"Chime's the worst engineer, but she's the happiest person I know."

"What about you?"

The roach would never forget what a coil spanner was. "I'm an amazing engineer." She'd never forget where the trilobite had told her to put hers either.

***

"I swear they do it on purpose," the tardigrade had rolled her eyes.

"You really think so?" the deinonychus had asked.

"They rely on us completely," Grades had insisted. "They don't even try not to die."

Amber's black hole eyes had stared into hers. "Have you ever died, Grades?"

"It can't be that bad," the tardigrade had dismissed.

***

"What I don't like about these games is," Fran's roommate had started, "they pit your civilization against the other ones by default. You don't really get to experience what non-competitively building your civilization without interference, or by collaborating as much."

"What do you like about them?" Complex systemshad always appealed to her.

"I like that you get to experiment with how invention decision trees could've happened completely differently, and still have gotten successful results," the jackal's roommate had acknowledged. "We say 'pre-industrial' societies as if industrial was this natural direction for societies to go, but there's really any other direction a society could go, you know?"

"Wouldn't it be cool if you could speedrun a game like that in a way where it's like, if you hold right here for five seconds, you can clip right from feudalism straight to gay space communism without having to go through capitalism! You save, like, three minutes of gameplay," Fran had half-kidded

"I wish someone had done that in the game we're in," the jackal's roommate had replied.

***

"Are there any books on this thing?" Fran was still trying to figure everything out about what made communicators different from phones or not.

"What do you mean?" Maybe this was one of those things that people just called something different in the System than they did on Earth?

"Stories, I mean," the jackal clarified. "History books, fiction books, any real or made-up stories you have, you know?" It may have been a good way to understand people in the System better to see what kind of books they liked to read either way, she figured. "Instruction manuals?" Might have helped her with piloting and engineering.

"What does 'History' mean?"

"It's stories about what happened to a bunch of d..." A bunch of what? Dead people? But what could be History where everyone who'd ever died was still around? "It's what you remember about people you know." When you wanted to know what had happened to someone, you looked them up and asked them. "... You've been giving me History lessons since we met, when I think about it." Suddenly what had appeared to have been idle work gossip seemed like History being passed on. Few in the System could afford to stop working long enough to read.

"Oh, good!" Jackie gave her a thumbs up. "Glad I could help." The Commission kept people's criminal records - Citizens kept their own channel logs and transaction logs for themselves. "What did you mean by made-up stories, like, lies people tell about other people and stuff?" the roach asked. "Like rumors?"

"No, no, I meant like, a full fiction narrative with imaginary characters, acting out a series of events that never happened, but that someone came up with." Jackie furrowed her brow. "Like, if someone wrote a story about a roach, but it wasn't you," Fran elaborated.

"But, everyone would know it was me," the roach protested, "I'm the only roach there is." The jackal hadn't thought of that either. "Who else is it going to be?" On Earth, a story about a jackal could've been about any jackal, but here, a story about a jackal would always be a story about her. "At the end of the day, it either happened to me, or it didn't," Jackie shrugged. "Although people who experienced the same events will sometimes have radically different memories of what happened, so it's your call who you trust, I guess." What would Earth have looked like if everyone who'd been shortchanged by History had still been around to give their version of events? "What are instruction manuals?"

"It's a book that tells you how to do something, like piloting or engineering, for example," Fran explained.

"Here, if you want to learn how to do something, you find someone who knows how to do it and ask them." The System had no corporations or money, so mass-published instruction manuals didn't seem to make as much economic sense. It seemed better to bargain with specific individuals in terms of what unique perks you could ask in return for teaching them how to do something. The roach's offers to the jackal to teach her how to knit, wood-carve, pilot, and repair now appeared to her under a different light as well. "We'll go to the Nest sometime. See these?" Jackie showed Fran two tools that went together that the jackal had misplaced before. "These tools are partners, like us. Make sure they stay together, okay?" the roach grinned.

Fran grinned back at her. That'd be easy to remember. The jackal still keeps them together to this day.

***

"I don't know if zoo or museum is the right metaphor for it," Fran's roommate had tried to explain. "I always wanted to be able to have enough money to buy this great big house where all my friends could live, where they'd never have to work again and they'd always be safe, right?" She'd assumed she hadn't been alone in this, but still. "When I write a story, it's like on some level, I'm creating this little world where all these little people who are kind of like the people I care about get to exist and, no matter how much time passes, they'll always continue to exist. They'll never go away. They'll always be there. Sometimes I just wish I could just hold everyone in the world in my arms at the same time, and tell them all it'll all be okay, you know?"