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'If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll spend its whole life believing it's stupid.' (Albert Einstein)

"Ugh, really?"

It'd already taken Fran half an hour to get to the bridge. It'd been raining that day, fittingly, she remembered having thought then. She'd tripped and almost fell flat on her face on her way. The jackal had instinctively reached down with her arms to stop herself from falling. 'How badly do I want to die?' it'd made her ask herself. 'I don't even want to hit my head on the ground.' She'd dropped her phone and had to go back for it. Even though Fran had wanted to die, it'd been important to have her phone with her, for some reason. When she'd reached the bridge, it'd occurred to her she didn't want to end up paralyzed in a hospital bed. She'd used her phone to look up if anyone had ever jumped from this bridge and how it'd turned out for them.

This had been a shit bridge to kill yourself, if you asked the Internet. It had bad reviews from suicidal people who'd tried to kill themselves on it and lived, only to become confined to a hospital bed for the rest of their lives, just as the jackal had feared. Some idiot had even jumped from it as some sort of stunt with no intention of dying, having gauged it as safe enough to do so. She'd been warned away from bad therapists and bad hospitals before, but never bad bridges. Apparently there was a higher, better bridge to kill yourself from somewhere else, but walking there was like an hour, in the rain at that. She'd stumbled on some pictures of her pets while looking up information about the bridge. Fran had sighed. This just wasn't her day.

"Aw, fuck it," she'd told herself after all. "Too much trouble."

***

"She looked like she'd never seen a botworm in her life," Gasmask recalled, "I can tell you that." Ghost had tracked down the canary to the salt mines in the salt desert on the desert planet. "Good pickax, though."

The desert planet would never be the mantis' favorite, that much was for sure. "I imagine decent tools must make quite a difference, working in a place like this." Not that the Tracker could afford to let things like that affect her own work, mind you.

"Well, for me working here is a step up from where I used to work," Gasmask explained. "The sea slug I replaced here was a lot more desperate to get out of here than I was, no doubt about that!" Ghost shuddered. What an unenviable fate...

***

"Why do people who like Trackers hate Enforcers?" Siren tended to have specific answers in mind to most of the questions she asked.

"I don't know," Tyrant admitted. "Why do you think?" the dinosaur tilted her head.

"Most people have been saved from Renegades by a Tracker or know someone who was," the blue jay started, "but most people have also been assigned an Enforcer or know someone who has as well."

"So it doesn't make sense for people to hate us, does it?" the tyrannosaur asked. "They're the ones fighting each other." Siren nodded emphatically.

"Without Enforcers, what do Citizens even think we'd even do with the Renegades that Trackers catch?"

The tyrannosaur shook her head. "We couldn't do anything."

The blue jay pointed at Tyrant, the way people do when they think they're sharing a great insight with you. "What we do is the only reason what Trackers do means anything," she concluded. "We're the maintainers of people." How could the mosquito they supervised as she worked understand the sacrifices they had to make?

***

"Oh, I pick up all kinds of things from Byte when I'm working for her at her treehouse." Kiwi was raking fallen leaves from under just one such tree as they spoke.

"Is that right?" Orchid knew enough to know that, in the System, gossip wasn't just History - it was intel.

"Oh yeah." After the water planet, desert planet, and rock planet, the mantis was back to investigating on the forest planet again. "She was just talking about something like that the other day, now that you mention it." The Tracker would get around to the ice planet anytime now.

"Like what?" Orchid asked.

"She's been working on some project with Grades she doesn't want anyone to know about." When the bird was around to work, the trilobite treated Kiwi like she was part of the furniture. "She said Jackie messed it all up, though," the bird chuckled merrily. "A shame, really," she chirped.

***

"Not even to go to space, though?" Fran had been doing the dishes in the kitchen while her best friend and roommate had been watching one of those military sci-fi shows that used to be on all the time.

"Not even!" the jackal's best friend had replied. "They're still the military, aren't they?" That wasn't a good thing.

"But you get to go to space!" Space was a big deal.

"Would that really make a difference, though?"

Fran's roommate had turned to her. "Hey Fran, would you rather be doing the dishes in space, or down here?"

The jackal's best friend had turned back toward her as well. "I believe the question was, would doing the dishes in space be better than doing them down here?"

***

Fran was doing the dishes. In space!

A lot of work that needed clean water to turn into unclean water took place near a water filtration plant on the water planet, it turned out. It was more efficient that way. Their new workplace was situated in a cave-like structure behind a waterfall that connected a river to a lake.

She had to alternate between dishwashing and laundry work to make ends meet after getting revived from her giant centipede encounter. Laundry work took place near the water filtration plant for the same reason the dishwashing and drink-making did. People would bring their clothes in, the jackal would wash them for them, and they'd leave. Superficially, it seemed simple enough. One thing was that people in the System came in a wider variety of shapes and sizes than they did on Earth. Another was that, while seasons didn't affect the planets as such, some people had to move between planets more often than seasons would've changed on Earth, needed clothes for any weather on hand all the time. Fabrics had varying requirements.

Fran's mind would wander as she'd do dishes sometimes. When she'd lived on Earth, she'd sometimes imagined that dishes were alive, that they could feel being washed. She had to stop because she'd get too sad when she'd break dishes, rarely though it may have been. It occurred to the jackal that the lake, river, and waterfall were a bit like a bigger version of the faucet and sink she used - or that the faucet and sink she used were a bit like a smaller version of the lake, river, and waterfall, as it were. You could take something - clothes, dishes - that seemed unusable, wash it, and there you go, it'd be usable again. Fran often wished she could wash herself clean of the bad things that had happened to her, of all the mistakes she'd made.

She wouldn't have thought that dishes would have been much of a thing in a System where food was illegal, at least not unless she and Jackie had turned into Renegades when she wasn't looking. Nevertheless, drinks and drinking were definitely legal, and it was easier to get drink than food in the System, even for Citizens. There were bars where people could go to get some, although they were more upscale and less geared toward mass consumption than they were on Earth. Drinks were more expensive to get than pills because you could technically never have one and be just fine. A glass of water could calm your nerves, and a glass of juice was a refreshing treat to reward yourself after a full day of hard work, wasn't it?

Alcohol was around, to be sure, but in a life without food, it's important not to underestimate how sought after anything consumable with flavor on its own could even be. Alcohol didn't really predominate the way it did on Earth. It's true that alcohol shipments were likelier to draw the Commission's attention than other drinks were. Renegades who'd run food would often run alcohol, because it made sense for them to. Be that as it may, most Citizens who ran alcohol didn't run food, and most Trackers knew it. Dex liked bars, the roach told the jackal about. She'd say they tended to lend themselves to a certain degree of tolerance for ambiguity. As a hybrid form of life, she happened to have an appreciation for that.

Jackie mixed drinks at the bar Fran did the dishes at. Where filtration was about separating fluids it had been deemed didn't belong together, mixing drinks was about putting two or more fluids that were usually kept separate together instead. "Do you ever wish you could filter out memories like they filter water?" the jackal asked her. "That you could just keep your good memories of someone, but filter out the bad ones somehow?"

"If I've learned anything in my time working here," the roach answered as she cleaned a glass, "it's you swallow some pills with a drink, partner." Jackie raised the glass to her.

***

"I just don't think it's necessary, that's all," Pangaea said gingerly. "We've mixed crinoid with flamingo, cuckoo with silkworm, ants with giraffe, and for what?" The panda had fought for Citizens not to get their cybernetic enhancements back when they got revived a long time ago. "And at what cost?" It hadn't turned out so well. "Did you ever think of that?" If yes it meant they agreed, if not it meant Pangaea was especially insightful, as she saw it - it was designed so she'd win either way. "Nothing in life is free." The panda's eyes kept wandering to her bamboo staff hungrily as she'd speak, only for her to struggle to pry them away. "What are we losing in exchange for this?" Even without money, people became mired in the logic of loss and gain.

"I guess I hadn't thought of that." Flattery seemed to be what Pangaea was looking for, Orchid figured. More importantly, it didn't commit the mantis to anything the way that agreeing outright would've. "So you haven't seen Tilly, then?" One mention of the needle-backed hedgehog who hadn't been seen in a while had been all it had taken to set the panda off on a rant about the use of cybernetic enhancements in general.

"I have not." It seemed Pangaea's reputation was well earned, the Tracker mused.

"Just checking." Orchid hadn't missed that line about the ants, though.

***

[FLICK!]

["-ish is happy."

"How do you know if it's happy or not? You're not a fish."

"How do you know I'm not a fish? You're not m-"]

[FLICK!]

["-other was holding him by the heel when she dunked him in the River Styx. Even though the River made every other part of him invin-"]

[FLICK!]

***

"Maybe it won't be so bad." Chime was trying to be encouraging.

"You think?" Robber didn't sound convinced.

"It's a fresh start." The hummingbird was definitely drawing from her own experience, the duck had to give her that. "Your life probably wasn't going so well if things turned out for you the way they did, was it?" Chime asked.

"I don't know," Robber admitted. "I don't remember."

***

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yes?" Tricorn tilted her head, awaiting Ghost's question. "What?"

"Remember those space pirates we brought in after the breakout that killed Cactus?"

The triceratops' expression hardened. "All too well." It was clear from her tone that they hadn't exactly made a good impression.

"Orchid tells me she saw Corsair come out of one of the Revival chambers around here."

Tricorn gestured expectantly. "What of it?"

"Could you or Collider take a close look at the Revival chambers to make sure they're working right again?"

The triceratops furrowed her brow. "Didn't we just check them after you brought back Kacey the other day?"

"Yeah, but something weird's happened with one of them recently," the mantis explained, "and you know what else?" What had happened to the duck had messed her up a bit.

"What?" That may not have even been the worst of it.

"I'm almost sure I didn't hit Corsair to kill."

Tricorn's countenance darkened. "We'll look into it."

***

Cuckoon went up on her tiptoes, struggling to get up high enough that she could bend her neck forward to look down into the Revival chamber. From the inside, the cuckoo's face must have looked just the way it had looked to Fran when she'd woken up in one after being killed by Bertha herself. Like someone's face looking down through a manhole on the street expecting to find something other than sewers, something like a cosmic egg about to hatch for all the world to see.

It happened too fast.

There was no way she could've seen it coming. Cuckoon would never have seen it coming regardless of how fast it happened. She was the kind of person who'd always expect the best from people, no matter how many times she'd seen the worst. It was her blessing and her curse.

Just like that, the cuckoo was lying on her back by the Revival chamber, a surprised expression on her face and a hole in her forehead. The force of the shock had knocked her right off her feet on her back, a dash of color splashed around the back of her head on the ground around her for good measure. The culprit was out the door before anyone could see her.

***

"Does it ever bother you?" Fran had accepted herself the way she was, but she'd still cared what her mother had thought, to some extent. It was hard not to. "That I won't have kids, I mean?" The young jackal's mother had been an accepting person in general, but she'd still been brought up in a radically different social context than her daughter had been, Fran had been aware of as much.

"Why would it bother me?" Different social contexts had emphasized different priorities in life sometimes.

"I don't know." Some ace transwomen must have experienced maternal instinct, she'd assumed. "Some parents think it's important." This young jackal did not.

"Does it bother you?"

Fran had raised her eyebrows. "Why would it bother me?"

Her mother had shrugged. "Some transfolk think it's important." She just didn't want her daughter to feel like she wasn't really a woman because she couldn't carry a child, was all.

"I don't." In fact the idea had always kind of freaked the young jackal out, in a way she'd imagined would've felt much the same whether she'd been trans or not.

"Then don't." She couldn't even picture herself ever adopting a child either, not really.

"Does that make me selfish?" She could barely take care of herself on a good day, let alone a child.

"I know you, Fran," her mother had told her, "and you know what I know about you?" Fran had shaken her head. "Regardless of who they are, you'll find people in life you'll really care about," her mother had assured her, "and you'll take care of them with your whole heart if it kills you."