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"Where is my mind?

Way out in the water

See it swimmin'..." (The Pixies, Where Is My Mind?)

It'd been one of those mornings on which Fran just hadn't felt like getting up at all. What good could come from it? She hadn't been able to picture getting up to do anything that wouldn't go terribly wrong that day. It'd started out as a thought that she'd known she shouldn't take at face value in the back of her mind, but as morning had marched on, she'd begun to turn it over in her head, and to ask herself what would happen if she'd actually done it. Would it have really mattered all that much? Would anyone have missed the jackal if she hadn't gotten up today? What if she hadn't gotten up the next day, or the day after that? Would it have made that much of a difference to anyone if she'd just never gotten up again at all? Then it'd hit her.

Coffee.

The smell of coffee had hit Fran's nose from the kitchen as her best friend and roommate had brewed it in the morning for them, the way they always had, and her features had softened, almost instinctively. It'd smelled so good. Maybe coffee had been worth getting up for that day, she'd shrugged to herself as she'd groggily gotten up after all...

***

"Come with me," Jackie blurted out.

"What?" Everything was over. The roach had finally gotten her quantum translocator back after all this time. She was all set to go back to square one, when she and Fran had first met, when she'd been just about to step through a portal through space-time that would take her to Earth, the jackal's homeworld, just as she'd always wanted to.

"Come back to Earth with me." It hadn't been easy for her to say once, let alone twice, yet Jackie stood her ground. "You'll like it, you'll see!" The portal would only stay open for a short time, and the quantum translocator could only exist on one side of it at a time. "It'll be different with me." There had always been something about the way she'd smiled when she'd said things like that. "You can show me around, just like I showed you around here." They'd talked about that a long time ago too, hadn't they? "I can become... a writer. I'll learn how to write some of those books you like. I'll cook for us. We'll eat food, real food, every day! We'll go on vacations. We can take care of some of those animals like you showed me on your phone..."

"I..." This wasn't going to be easy for Fran to say either. "I was going to try to convince you to stay here, as a matter of fact," the jackal admitted. "Here in the System with me."

"What?" The roach blinked. "But why?"

"I really believe in what we're doing here, Jackie!" Fran had found something to believe in in the System, more than she ever had on Earth. "If we all work hard together, we can turn this place into the kind of place where you always wanted to live, don't you see? Earth... Maybe I didn't talk about it enough, I don't really know. Earth already has a lot of the bad things about this place. It has so many bad things this place doesn't! Here there's no racism because there's no races, no sexism because there's no sexes, there's no cars, there's no death, Jackie, no death! With the changes the Free Radicals are pushing for, with your help, soon this place can have all the good things that Earth has, and a lot of good things Earth doesn't have!"

"I..." Jackie didn't like the direction this conversation was going. "I'm sorry." There seemed to be no helping it. "If I think about staying in the System, all I can see is an infinite amount of work stretching out ahead of me, doing all the same work I've always done for all the same people who already think all the same bad things about me that they've always thought... I don't want to have to imagine a future like that anymore," the roach shook her head. "A future where I'm only alive because I have to be, not because I want to be. Where I can always survive, but never really thrive. It's just not what I want out of life anymore. Earth is unexplored territory for me. It's something completely new, something I'll never experience if I don't go now."

"I can't go back to a world where there's death, Jackie," the jackal looked down. "Even after what happened with Dex, you have no idea what it's like to have everyone you care about disappear forever like that," Fran shook her head. "I can't explain to you what it feels like, but you'll just have to trust me on that as an Earthling who's experienced it. It's the worst feeling in the world. People ask me how I move on from it, and all I can tell them is, I don't. I live with it every day, with the uniquely shaped holes people left in my heart that can never be filled back up by anybody else. The only advice I could give someone in your situation would be to do everything you can to avoid being in a situation like that. I can't have to go through that again."

"It's hard," the roach got choked up. "It's the hardest thing, I know."

"I never lost a partner before," the jackal broke down.

"You never had a partner before," Jackie grimly chuckled.

"We made pretty good partners, didn't we?" Fran asked.

"You know," the roach gave the jackal the 'thumbs up', "I think we did." They hugged, and patted each other on the back.

"We were like, the best partners ever." This was going to be a tough one.

"You sure I can't change your mind?" They'd backed away a bit, looked at each other.

"You sure I can't change your mind?" But Jackie's mind was made up. "Well..." What they wanted out of life was just too different. "If you ever end up here through a rip in space-time by accident somehow, look me up." The roach smiled.

"If you ever end up on Earth, come and find me," Jackie replied. "I'll keep a spot warm for you." The roach turned around, about to step through the portal before it'd close in seconds, and looked back over her shoulder.

"Goodbye, Jackie," Fran waved at her on her way out through it.

"Goodbye..." It just hit her as she waved back. "Your name!" Jackie's heart sank. "I never asked your name!" But the portal closed behind her before the jackal could answer.

***

"Wait a minute," Fran's mom couldn't help but notice as she'd played, "these are all games about doing chores!" She couldn't believe it. "This one's about cooking, this one's about doing the dishes - look, this one's about mowing the lawn!" She'd laughed. "You're doing chores in games while you're putting off doing the same chores in real life!" Hadn't the young jackal seen the irony of it?

"It's only work if someone makes you do it, mom," Fran had replied, tongue-in-cheek. "Games have better music than real life, too," she'd added.

"Well then!" Her mom had given her a sly look. "Okay then." Then she'd simply walked away without saying anything. The young jackal had kept playing for a minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Then Fran had gotten up, gone to the kitchen, and she'd started doing the dishes on her own, humming her favorite video game songs to herself as she'd worked with a smile on her face.

She did them without being asked every day after that.

***

"Do you really think we should tell them?" Amber asked Kacey. "Won't they revolt?"

"It's a little late for that," the giraffe answered.

"They're not gonna like it," the deinonychus shook her head.

"Finding out we knew they could've had food sustainably the whole time?" Kacey raised an eyebrow. "No, they probably won't."

"Do you really think it's worth the risk?" Amber wasn't so sure.

"They're gonna find out eventually anyway," the giraffe shrugged. "May as well be from us."

***

"Hey, Ghost." Ghost turned to Orchid, throwing her scarf over her shoulder as she did. "Do you ever think about what it'd be like to do something other than work for the Commission someday?" The mantis stopped, and thought about it.

"We've done criminal investigations for such a long time, though." Orchid may have had her engineering background to fall back on, but Ghost had been made to Track through and through. "What else would we even do?" It wasn't a rhetorical question.

"Well, we wouldn't have to give that up," Orchid went on. "I just meant maybe not for the Commission anymore," she elaborated.

"You mean just for like... regular people?" It just wasn't done. "For Citizens like you and me would be?" Then again, people had been doing a lot of things that just weren't done lately, it seemed.

"Yes," Orchid nodded, "private detectives for the common person, you and me, what do you say?" Ghost lit up and, slowly, inhaled.

"Eh, sure," she shrugged, "why not?" The mantis exhaled. "People haven't called me 'Officer' for a while anyway," she smirked, throwing her cigarette on the ground as a cloud of smoke dissipated around her...

***

It was finally over.

With her mind wiped, the effects of the anomaly no longer affected Bertha's mind the way they had ever since she'd run into it. While she'd still forgotten her specific memories of what she'd shared with Macha before it, by being restored to her 'factory settings', it was now possible for her to start from scratch, without the madness. The pterodactyl and the giant centipede had been given a blank slate, one they could use to rebuild new experiences with each other altogether. The last mind-wipe device had finally been destroyed.

Bertha trilled and churred as Macha scratched her head between the eyes, the pterodactyl sitting on top of the giant centipede's head as they watched the sunset together on the desert planet.

***

"Now, fighting isn't just about power," Fran told Dex as she'd paced back and forth in front of her. "It's about flow, range, leverage, and direction..." The jackal remembered the instructions that the roach had given her well. "Now, you've got six limbs, not four, so we'll have to make some adjustments." Fran had a good memory for things like that. "Everyone's got different strengths and weaknesses."

***

Jackie fell such a short distance that she didn't get hurt falling in the water as such. She did make quite a splash, though. Spitting out water, she swam to the shore, came out of the water onto dry land, and shook herself off like a wet dog.

"Whoa!" The roach took in her surroundings. "What happened here?" She chuckled. "Has this place always looked like this?" She wasn't sure. "Or is this like..."

Jackie was talking to herself, wasn't she? It was so silent. All she could hear was a strange, low, intermittent sound, far off in the distance. An Earthling would've recognized it as the dim, faint sound of cars, driving somewhere further than you could possibly see. It was a sound you could hear almost anywhere on Earth, if everything around was quiet enough. Most Earthlings had heard it in the background for long enough that they no longer noticed it but, to the roach, it was a completely new sound. There were no cars in the System. She looked left, then right, thinking about what to do next.

"Oh, well," she shrugged to herself. "Let's go get ourselves something to eat."