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"Nobody's gonna show you the way, nobody's gonna hold your hand..." (Zeal & Ardor)

"We can't even imagine what it was like for people on boats back in those days," Fran's roommate had said. "When they'd cross the ocean, it was like, on this humongous timetable we just don't have enough context to understand, you know?"

The jackal had nodded. "Today, it's like, six hour plane trip? That's a long plane trip."

"They'd be on those things for months! They had scurvy!" her roommate had exclaimed.

"They must've fought like families stuck together in cars on road trips," Fran had shaken her head. "I always picture them like those Russian submarine movies where everyone's always fighting." The better ones had aliens sometimes.

"Imagine for a second nothing between you and a hundred sharks or a giant squid but a few pieces of wood like that." The jackal had shuddered.

***

Byte's log cabin kept out the cold about as well as Doornail's snow dome had. "No." Kiwi had built the cabin for the trilobite as well, it turned out. "Absolutely not." Orchid had finally bitten the bullet and gone down to the ice planet after all. "I don't have to answer any of your questions." Burning wood crackled in the fireplace as the snowstorm raged outside.

"I haven't asked." The mantis did not seem to have caught Byte under her best disposition, whatever that may have been. "Why not decide after I've asked?" The trilobite didn't seem convinced.

"Because if I refuse after you ask, you'll think it means you asked the right question," Byte countered. "You must've already decided I must have something to hide as it is." She wasn't wrong. "Why ask me at all?" The smell of burning wood permeated the air around them.

"Because you're one of the best technological experts in the System," the Tracker answered. "We're working on a case with some very advanced technology." For a moment, the trilobite looked at Orchid, who was basically a plant, looked at her fireplace, and seemed to ask herself how well the mantis would burn.

***

"It's when the technology fails me, you know?" Fran's best friend had said. "Like, when I used to have to bus places, if my bus showed up late, people would be like, 'Where were you?'"

"But it wasn't you, it was the bus," the jackal had shrugged.

"That's the thing," her best friend had gone on. "Now that I'm the one driving, I know where I was, I can tell them." It could be hard to have to depend on others for things sometimes.

"You don't know where the bus was," Fran had understood. "That's like, your question, isn't it?"

"I think that's the same reason I tend to get pickup, not delivery, these days" her best friend had reflected. "Why have someone bring me something when I can go get it myself, right?"

***

A lot of people in the System needed to have things delivered, it turned out. Fran found this out when, after they'd both worked on the water planet for a bit, she and Jackie started running what she could only describe as some sort of interplanetary delivery service. People on each planet needed things that came from other planets, and made things that people on other planets needed as well. With Citizens' work schedules being as tight as they tended to be, a lot of them couldn't afford to spend the time it would've taken them to go get those things from or to go bring to things to other planets themselves. They had to hire other people to do it for them - people like the roach and jackal, as it happened.

It helped her understand how the System's planets worked together, not on their own.

Glass blown on the desert planet was taken to the water planet to build underwater bubble cities. Salt from the salt desert was used for snow and ice on the ice planet. They brought some of the ice from the ice planet to the desert planet and down to the rock planet's volcanic underground to help Citizens cool down as they worked. Water taken from the water planet had to be taken to the forest planet to water the vegetation and to the desert planet to keep workers hydrated. Wood from the forest planet was shipped to the ice planet so it could be used to build and to burn and to the water planet to build floating structures. Metal mined from the rock planet was used to make saws for the forest planet and shovels for the ice planet.

A place for everything, and everything in its place, as it were.

Beyond that, Citizens who worked at the Revival chambers often needed samples of various elements to complete the molecules that they'd be missing from the Citizen they'd be trying to reconstitute. The more intact a body was, the fewer extra molecules they'd need, but the more damaged a body would be, the more extra elements they'd need to compensate. Even though they'd usually exist in different contexts, the elements that formed the five planets were still made from the same molecules that people's bodies were: nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, calcium, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, zinc, copper, nickel, silicon, lead, tin... Some were easier to get on some planets than others but all of them had sources for some of it.

Nothing was lost and nothing was created; everything was transformed.

***

"Everyone's not always gonna be good at the same things, right?" Fran had seen a lot of trans people joke about how all trans people know how to code. "That's why people do things for other people and have other people do things for them." The jackal had had no idea how to code. "Nothing wrong with that, is there?" For a long time, she'd questioned whether or not she'd been really trans because she hadn't known how to code. "It's part of why we choose to live in a society in general, isn't it?" Perversely, something meant as a lighthearted gesture of inclusion had made her feel excluded, like she wasn't who she said or didn't belong where she was. "No one can do everything, but everyone can do something."

With time, she came to interpret this as meaning that transness was coding, that just by acknowledging their own transness to themselves and to others, trans people were rewriting the source code of society itself.

***

"It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before," the albatross admitted. "I've seen some pretty crazy stuff, you know what I'm saying?" Ghost nodded. "Nothing like this, though," the bird shook her head.

"You were on the surface when it happened?" The mantis had found the bird working in a deep underground cavern, where the sound of bubbling lava, its reddish glow, and the smell of smoke suffused the atmosphere around them.

"That's right," the bird nodded.

"What did it look like?" For a moment, the Tracker asked herself if she could use the lava near them to light one of her cigarettes, but it probably wasn't a good idea to try, she decided.

"I want to say it was almost like a black hole?" The albatross seemed to be struggling to describe it, which made sense, if she'd never seen anything like it. "Like one but not, though, I mean, you could tell it wasn't one at a glance, right?"

It was so hot that Ghost even removed her scarf. "What do you think it was?" There was no harm in asking, was there?

"If I had to say, I'd say it looked like some kind of vortex or... portal somewhere?" The bird scratched her head.

"A portal? Where?"

To an Earthling, the reflection of the lava's light on the albatross' face in the darkness of the cavern around them may have made her seem like she'd been talking of the depths of hell itself.

"I'm not sure, but," she said, "if I went through that, I wouldn't count on coming back if I were you..."

***

Fran had always had the worst sense of direction. She couldn't find her way out of a paper bag with both hands and - actually that last part wasn't quite true. Back on Earth, getting a portable map on her phone had changed her life.

Jackie used the time they spent piloting her ship around from planet to planet to develop navigation systems. One of the things she'd programmed her ship to do as they'd flown was to collect data about where celestial objects were in space, how fast they were going, and which direction they were headed. Since a lot of things in space tended not to be in the same place at the same time, creating a map of space was more complicated than creating a map of a planet's surface. By aggregating the data from travel from each planet to every other planet over a suitable time period, it became possible to extrapolate projections the roach would then assemble into programs that became part of ship computers themselves.

This would in turn become part of how autopilot, the closest space equivalent to cruise control, became possible. The jackal suspected the five planets may have been largely terraformed, and may or may not have depended on where they were in relation to a star for their temperature. One way or another, Fran understood that, without seasons or animals, it was ships like Jackie's going from planet to planet that played their role in maintaining the five planets' otherwise isolated ecosystems. If the System had been a field of flowers, Citizens would've been its pollinating bees. If it had been an organism, Citizens would've been its red blood cells, redistributing oxygen wherever it was needed at the time. They were the cogs in the machine that made the System's clockwork turn.

***

"Am I out of time?" Dex tended to be in much less of a hurry than most people in the System tended to seem to be, and didn't always notice the passage of time as sharply as they did.

"What do you mean?" The tree's roots in the mangrove around them reminded Orchid of the way the hybrid's flamingo legs would stand still in the water as well.

"You're following up on Sticks and Stones' offer, aren't you?" So did the stilts that supported Dex's house over the water's surface under them, come to think of it.

"What offer was that?" Even the leaves of the palm trees and ferns around the hybrid's house kind of looked like sets of her crinoid tendrils emerging from the top of her flamingo torso.

"You mean you're not?" Dex had to remind herself it was important not to make it look like you were trying to avoid a Tracker's questions at any point. "They wanted me to become a Tracker, gave me some sort of deadline to decide," she explained. "I assumed it was up." What a force to be reckoned with that would've been for Renegades to contend with, the mantis couldn't help but think.

"I haven't heard anything about that," she shook her head. "You'll have to ask them." The hybrid had no intention of doing that, but decided not to get into that.

"What does bring you to my neck of the woods, then, Officer?" Dex could sound remarkably pleasant with people she was scared of, when the situation called for it.

"I'm here to give you a warning, in fact." The hybrid's heart skipped a beat, almost imperceptibly.

"Am I in trouble?" She'd often worried the Commission would catch up with her someday, after all.

"Could be," Orchid clucked her tongue. "Not from us, mind you," she hastened to add.

"What then?" That was a relief, at least.

"There may or may not be a killer who's targeting hybrids on the loose." The mantis did her best to choose her words as carefully as possible. "She's already gone after Kacey and Cuckoon." That was decidedly less of a relief, Dex thought grimly. "You may be next."

***

"I just don't feel safe, you know?" Fran's best friend had always refused to get on a plane. "I mean, it's one thing to fly short distances yourself if you have wings or something, mind you."

"Really, you'd do that?"

"I'd be in control of that," she'd explained, "not trapped in some big deathtrap flown by a complete stranger. If there were adjustments to make because something came up, I could just make them myself instantly. I could feel what's happening to me," she'd gone on. "I don't like all these layers. I'd rather experience reality directly, not through something or someone else, you know?"

"It's not organic," the jackal had understood.

"I don't like having to rely on people I don't even know for something this important," her best friend had concluded. "What could happen?"

***

It was only a matter of time until they'd get attacked by a Renegade ship. "Who do you think it is?" Intellectually, Fran had thought about it as something that could happen, that had to happen eventually, even. Still, on an emotional level, it surprised the heck out of her when it did all the same.

"I gotta be honest," Jackie had replaced the jackal at the controls, "that could be like a hundred people." The roach had ticked off a lot of people these last few centuries, to say the least. "Maybe just someone who wants to mess up this particular delivery for all I know." They were bringing glass flasks, bottles, and beakers from the glass blowing plant on the desert planet to Beaker and Glory's organ grove on the forest planet. "Doesn't really matter right now I guess," Jackie stuck out her tongue as she flipped various switches around her to change how the controls would respond to her for the situation at hand. "Strap yourself in, it's gonna get ugly."

The jackal was definitely not at this piloting level yet, yet she caught herself observing and trying to remember which commands the roach was inputting into the ship's systems in case she'd ever need to know later. "Not gonna lie," Jackie went on as the other ship kept shooting at them, "we're playing for some higher stakes than usual here a little bit." Fran was still getting used to the concept of living somewhere where higher stakes than your life were even a thing. "I mean, not that getting killed is fun or anything," the roach euphemized veering a hard left, "but getting our ship destroyed?" She shook her head doing a sharp right turn, the Renegade ship still following close behind. "That'd be a real pain to have to deal with, lemme tell you," she stuck out her tongue.

"You've done this before, haven't you?" Jackie zig zagged left, going into a full 360 horizontal loop that, even though they were still being followed, meant that their pursuer's shots were all lost to their centrifugal motion.

"All the time," the roach answered, slanting the ship 90 degrees left to dodge a shot as she did. "Well, maybe not all the time," she shrugged, slanting it 180 degrees right to dodge a second one. "A lot, though," she settled on, deflecting a third shot with a 450 spin left outright.

"You've been here for a while, to be fair," the jackal granted as Jackie took their ship into a clockwise spiral that the other ship stubbornly followed them into.

"It's different when it's near a planet than when it's out in space like this," the roach gestured with one hand, still piloting with her other three. "There you can hide behind structures or trick people into flying into them," she explained, bringing their ship up.

"So can they though, can't they?" Jackie nodded as they went into a nosedive.

"That's the thing yeah," she recognized, bringing the ship all the way up until it was upside down over their pursuer, "it cuts both ways," she finished as she went back down and right side up behind the other ship to start following it instead.

"Can you get her?" The Renegade ship dove down to get upside-down under them before coming back right side up behind them itself.

"Let's find out," the roach grinned, abruptly dropping her ship under its projected trajectory like a bag of dirt as their pursuer sped on ahead of them, suddenly finding nothing where they'd just been. "YES!" Jackie pumped her first as her shot pulverized the unsuspecting ship ahead of them. "This, I like to call the Death Drop." Fran, frightened out of her wits though she'd been, was finding the roach's enthusiasm communicative in spite of herself.

"I'd never heard that before." If they could survive this, she thought, they could survive anything.

***

"I'm baaack!" Cuckoon warbled, poking her head out of her Revival chamber like a prairie dog poking its head out of its hole in the ground. "Well?" She looked left, then right, then left again. "Didn't anyone miss me?" She stepped out of the chamber, vexed, and started taking a bit more of a look around, wandering down the corridor looking for Cactus, Tricorn, Collider, the pleco fish - anyone, really. "Where did everyone go?"

***

"No, I'd never seen her before either, now that you mention it," the blowfish answered Ghost in the mirror desert. "Why do you ask?" The mantis' communicator chose this particular moment to go off, as they were wont to do.

"Ghost here." The Tracker only had time to raise a forefinger at the blowfish in the time-honored gesture that meant 'Sorry, gotta take this' as she picked up.

"Are you alone?" Doornail sounded markedly more conspirational than usual, if that was possible.

"Why, what's going on?" Ghost asked, stepping away from the blowfish to a more private distance.

"Remember that 'phone' you asked me to unlock last time you came to see me?" How could the mantis forget?

"What about it?"

The possum's words when she spoke next hit the Tracker like a bag of hammers. "Ghost, I think this 'phone' may be of alien origin."

***

"They just seem completely out of place, don't they?"

"They're not cars," Fran had agreed.

"They act like they are!" her roommate had shaken her head. "They'll drive right in the middle of the road, stop at traffic lights and stuff, like they can't tell how dangerous that is." The jackal had nodded.

"Bikes are out of place everywhere these days," she'd observed.

"That's the thing," her roommate had acknowledged, "I hate it but I also sort of get it. Did you have a bike when you were a kid, Fran?"

Fran had had to stop, and think about it. "Not really. Maybe. Yeah!" she'd chuckled. "I took forever to learn how to ride it and barely ever used it when I did."

Her roommate had laughed. "I used to bike all the time when I was a kid! I'd take that bike everywhere, or it would take me everywhere, depending on how you look at it," she'd remembered. "There were secret little bike paths all over my hometown, I knew them like the back of my hand."

"Now they can't really be on the sidewalk, they can't really be on the road, there's barely bike paths anywhere, and a lot of them have problems," the jackal had listed off.

"You always see politicians in pictures with their bikes, you know?" her roommate had grinned sardonically. "They're all in the pocket of big oil though," she'd dismissed.

"They'd have to have built everything differently with them in mind for them to really work in the first place, and they didn't," Fran had concluded.

"Bikes were built for a better world."