FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Waste not, want not."

[FLICK!]

"[-'told me to be careful so the people who take the recycling out of the bags don't cut their hands on them,' the actress on the talk show had said, 'and it just hit me right then - how many of us even think of the people who have to do that as real people in the first place?']"

[FLICK!]

***

"I may have our ticket off this rock!" Jackie may have been skilled at the repair work she did on the rock planet, but she didn't care all that much for it, truth be told. "There's no time, walk and talk." The roach stopped Fran, already on her way out. "Oh! Grab one of those great big bags."

"New job?" the jackal asked as she complied.

"If you're up for it," Jackie specified. "You might not, I'm not sure." The roach was trying to get across that it'd still be okay if Fran wasn't, but on some level, it was clear that this was something that was important to her.

"What is it?" It seemed like a good idea to ask before agreeing or not.

"It's a Cleaning job," Jackie said ominously.

"I can do that!" the jackal assured her. "I do cleaning jobs all the time." What a curious concern for the roach to have, Fran thought.

"I don't just mean cleaning, I mean Cleaning," Jackie clarified. "Are you sure you're ready for that...?"

***

[FLICK!]

"[-Nations did not take the life of the animal for granted, but showed gratitude to the world for giving it up so that they could live. They hunted in cycles in different regions, giving time to the animals to repopulate their herds. So as not to be wasteful, they would use each and every part of the animal's-]"

[FLICK!]

***

"You have to get it all right, down to every last detail," the possum explained, "otherwise there's no point to it." The bricks in the ceiling and walls of small dome around them kept it warm even though they were made of tightly packed snow. "One detail wrong, they can tell." The warmth didn't thaw the snow bricks either, the cold wind from outside refreezing them as they melted. "All your beautiful work's ruined, you know?" It had taken some work to get right, but Doornail could be the patient type, if she had to be.

"I guess you'd think of it like that, wouldn't you?" Ghost had not really been sure that her own work had been all that beautiful herself lately.

"Speaking extemporaneously," the possum saw it fit to add. "I haven't done anything like that in quite some time." Doornail had always talked with her hands a lot.

"Collider told us if it was a fake, it was the most exact replica they'd ever seen."

Lounging among her scattered electronics with her hands fluttering about, it could have been hard to tell if the possum had reached for something that could've been used as a weapon somehow, and the mantis' faceted eyes closely followed them. "That's what made you think of me, isn't it," Doornail exhaled sharply.

"We've known each other a long time, haven't we?" It had been quite a trek through the frozen wasteland for the Tracker to reach the possum's workshop. There was never any good spaceship parking nearby. Ghost had to make this count.

"If you were going to turn me in, you should've done it a long time ago." Doornail had known that the mantis had known that the possum had still been doing business with Renegades for a while, even though she was allegedly no longer a Renegade herself.

"Level with me, Doornail," the Tracker went on straightforwardly, "Is something deeper going on with Renegades these days?" Half-open machines with their cords and wires pulled out lying around the snow dome could almost look like bodies with their entrails pulled out, if you looked at them in the wrong light, Ghost couldn't help but think.

"What do you mean?"

The mantis lit up, smoke wafting out of the hole at the top of the snow dome that allowed excess heat to escape. "I feel like I'm only seeing the top of the iceberg," the Tracker shook her head, "but I can't even guess at what's underneath." She felt like she didn't know enough to know what question she should've been asking. "I can't shake the feeling something big's going down that's connected to this case I'm working on somehow." It was frustrating.

"Look, Ghost... Can I call you Ghost, Officer?" Ghost rolled her faceted eyes. "You're not the worst Tracker I've dealt with. You tend not to mess with us if we don't mess with you. You've let me get away with things other Trackers wouldn't. I don't actually hate you, just don't tell anyone I said so. Point is, if I heard anything about anything like this, and I was gonna tell someone, at all... It probably would be you." High praise from the possum, as it was.

"I'm not going to turn you in, Doornail. I don't even suspect you personally, to be perfectly honest with you. I had to see whether I can rule out it's a fake because, if not, it could mean someone's found a way to stop us from bringing people back at all."

Doornail's eyes went wide, her jaw agape. "That sure has a way of gripping the mind," she euphemized. "I'll bear that in mind. Anything else I can do for now, 'Officer'?"

The mantis held up a clawed finger as she dug something out of her belongings to show it to the possum. "You wouldn't happen to know how to unlock something called a phone, would you?"

"A what?"

***

[FLICK!]

The coyote had chased the roadrunner like their life had depended on it. Every time, it would lead the coyote right off a cliff, where a fall that would've killed any mortal creature awaited. Yet we would see the very same coyote get up to chase the roadrunner again in the very next scene as though nothing had happened at all.

[FLICK!]

***

"Oh my God...!" The roach still didn't know what that meant. The jackal's mind barely registered the hovering roc

ks and stones around the site of the fall, which would normally have captured her attention a bit more. Jackie's previous question to her made more sense to her then. It occurred to Fran that she should probably have asked what the difference between cleaning and Cleaning was before having agreed to the latter, but she'd made her bed so she'd lie in it, she told herself.

It had been a bad fall.

Seeing organs in a pristine state growing on Beaker and Glory's organ trees in their grove back on the forest planet had been one thing, but this was something else entirely. When Citizens died, the Commission would put them back together to bring them back to life largely from the same molecules that they'd consisted of when they'd been alive. It had to be someone's job to pick up their remains so that they could be revived more conveniently. Typically, this otherwise unenviable line of work was chosen by Citizens who were in desperate economic circumstances, and used its shortcut as a necessary evil to dig themselves out of the hole. If they did this, they wouldn't have to work for pills on the rock planet for a while.

That's what Cleaning was.

The jackal had always been the squeamish type. Losing her mom had hit her hard. Her fear of the deaths of her loved ones and her fear of her own death seemed to go beyond what she observed in others. Fran came to think of them as phobias. She often couldn't help feeling sensitive to other people's suffering, even if they were people she didn't especially like. Having it happen to anyone at all was still too close for comfort to having it happen to her somehow. Intellectually, the jackal knew that things in the System were different, that the dead coyote they were Cleaning would be back on her feet in an amount of time to be determined by how much she owed or not. Her body, her stomach, didn't know the difference, though.

Despite everything, she forced herself to try to help the roach Clean the coyote for as long as she could. Fran made it about a quarter or a third of the way through before she threw up. She almost made it halfway through after that before she collapsed from shock outright.

***

[FLICK!]

"[-cavenging, it was believed that jackals escorted the dead from the Land of the Living to the City of the Dead. They were associated with the use of canopic jars, which were used for the preservation of the mummy's organs. Of course, in the real world, these noctur-]"

[FLICK!]

***

"Did I make it?" Fran asked weakly as she blinked her bleary eyes awake.

"I should've known better," Jackie looked down at the jackal with a look of concern on her face.

"I'm sorry," Fran scolded herself, "I've failed you."

The roach shook her head. "I shouldn't have dragged you along without warning you," she clucked her tongue.

"For you, Cleaning is something that just happens," the jackal understood. "It's just something that people do, that they've always done." When you couldn't do work no one else could do, you had to do work no one else would do - and she couldn't even do that.

"To you, where you're from, when you see someone like that," Jackie went on, "it means you're never going to get to talk to that person again, doesn't it?" Fran paused, and nodded grimly. "I didn't really think about that. I mean, you told me people where you're from don't come back. I understood what that meant intellectually, but, like... I get why you reacted so strongly after we fought the space pirates now, when I really think about it. This is a big deal for you. If I came from Earth, it'd probably be a big deal for me too. People are probably a lot more careful than we are about treating life like something valuable and fragile where you're from, aren't they?"

"You'd think so."

***

[FLICK!]

"[-'Kids these days have no sense of the meaning of life and death anymore,' the old lady on the street had said scornfully. 'It's from playing all them viddy games they play. They think you can just hit the reset button on everything. Now, in my day, when my sister Janet went to join my aunt Clara up in Heaven with-']

[FLICK!]

"How about we play something?" she'd asked, popping their favorite fighting game into the console.

"Thought you'd never ask," Fran had grinned as she'd happily grabbed a controller to play with her instead.

"Prepare to die!" And they'd laughed together in the face of death.