Chapter 13

Out on the edge of Gorgeous View, past the stone streets and temples and artisans’ homes and giant carvings of holy salad ingredients, out in the idyllic grass fields that surrounded the Quizbarling capital, something was growing.

It had started out as metal shoots pushing their way out of the soil, shouldering aside the blossoming flowers and confusing the tiny brakka-tik birds, the Quizbarling avian equivalent of bumblebees. Some local Quizbarling farmers from the surrounding villages stumbled upon this, and stood around chewing long blades of grass, scratching their heads and speculating that the metal stalks must be some strange sort of weed, until a tiny American drone burbled past and projected a hologram of Libby, dressed in a star-spangled and rather skimpy equivalent of their farmer garb.

“It’s nothing you need to worry about!” the AI assured them with a smile and a little hop and a lot of precisely calculated bounce and jiggle. “It’s just a little something we’re putting together. A sort of surprise gift for the people of Quizbar. I think you’re really going to like it!”

Libby beamed at them and then popped open a virtual Omega-Cola and drank it in an unnecessarily sensual manner. The farmers watched and were mollified. They left her to it and went home to their families. That night several of them made oblique tailoring suggestions about how their wive’s dresses might be improved with some generous new ventilation and slept in their barns as a result.

The metal stalks grew rapidly, thickening into poles and shafts, and between them like strands from a clothesworm silk grew stretchy bands of plastic, thicker and thicker, until they formed walls. Domes of glass bubbled out from the walls like boils, dappling the structure, now a grand warehouse with a little artificial organic chic. Wires grew vine-like across its roof and budded, then bloomed into blinking red-and-blue lights which spelled out the words:

AMERICAN EMPORIUM

GENUINE HIGH-QUALITY PRODUCTS FROM THE STARS!

OPENING DAY SALE ALL ITEMS 50% OFF!!!!

YOU’LL PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE–TO GREAT SAVINGS!

Korak stood before the completed store with a small smile, or at least what he could manage of one (lizard lips were not very flexible).

He had planted the Industro-Seed deep in the earth when he first arrived on Quizbar, a small, circular ball of smooth metal about the size of his fist (a product of CubeCorps Automatics: Trust the Cube). In the weeks since it had sent out small mole-drones through the soil to detect nearby mineral deposits, then automatically formatted its internal workings to construct more mole drones from what was available locally, then produced more mole-drone manufacturing modules, then yet larger digger-drones and yet more specialized factory modules, until by now it had bootstrapped itself into operating vast underground factories capable of outputting a wide variety of products to satisfy today’s discerning and sophisticated consumer.

CubeCorps even guaranteed that this miniature industrial revolution was carried out in an entirely eco-friendly manner, by packaging all the waste products and shooting them into space with a cannon (“Let it be someone else’s problem”–the Cube). True, there had been a little troublesome seismic activity involved in the process, but nothing that Libby in a bikini hadn’t been able to distract people from.

And it was this that would make Americans out of the Quizbarlings. The indelible power of shopping and getting a good bargain. Korak was sure that it would win him the little competition their team had going over the matter. Everyone else’s plans were so stupid. He tried not to think that way, but it was difficult.

Probably because for most of his life he had been surrounded by idiots.

Korak was a Tavaroki, one of a race of warlike lizard-men. Not that he took any pride in that. Really, he thought it was a little embarrassing, if anything. The Tavaroki were extremely prideful and xenophobic, and had only been recently integrated as a new world in the UWA. They were one of the few races that had managed to successfully stymie a forceful liberation effort.

Not by defeating the invaders from the stars in combat, though. Oh, no. Rather, they had stopped the Americans by having every member of their race threatening to commit suicide should they be forced to give up their monarchy.

Korak could still remember that day.

It was mortifying.

He could remember kneeling on the hard marble floors of the Imperial Palace on his home planet, and how hard his heart had been pounding as he took the Blood Oath of Eternal Soul-Binding to the One and True Holy Royal Family. Not that he had meant a word of it, but he hadn’t had a choice; the Compliance Squads the Tavaroki Imperial State sent out had been very clear on that matter.

He could remember the sharp blade of the befeathered and tasseled vibro-spear pressed deep into his neck, nearly breaking his scales, as he desperately waited for word from American diplomats frantically negotiating with King Kru Delak the Third. It had not escaped him that the whole arrangement seemed a lot more like ‘murder’ than ‘suicide’, but ‘defiant and proud honor-suicide against the celestial oppressors’ was how the monarchy decided to sell it. To themselves, if no one else.

When news came back that the Americans had surrendered (‘surrender’, in this case, having the curious definition of meaning not that they were laying down their weapons and submitting themselves to the King, but rather merely that the Americans would not keep advancing) a cheer had erupted throughout the tangled clay-brick warrens of the Royal Capital. The celebrations were so loud and abrupt that, as he would later find out, it caused deaths in the thousands as startled Compliance Squads accidentally executed their charges.

Korak, luckily, had been spared. But he had watched the celebrations with a sort of black, sinking despair, as crowds poured into the streets giving ululating cries of victory. This was what the vaunted Tavaroki came to? This was who his people were? They were cheering having successfully thrown a civilization-wide temper tantrum. They thought it was something to be proud of.

It was that moment that Korak had decided he really needed to get off his stupid planet.

To be Tavaroki was to be a warrior, or at least that’s how it was supposed to be. Every one of them began life in fierce competition with the other members of their egg-clutch, and typically only one or two of them survived from each brood of dozens. Korak himself had devoured three brothers and two sisters before he even learned to walk. But he had never cared for all the absurd posturing over who was the strongest, who could slay the most enemies in combat, who could sever whose head in the single stroke of an obsidian blade, etc. To him it was all nothing but a big frill-measuring contest.

No, his big obsession had been monetary reform. The royal bank still issued currency in the form of coins of precious metal. Copper had been the most valued among his people, since it tarnished such a pleasing green. The Tavaroki were somewhat advanced–or at the very least, they had combustion engines–but what with all the obsession with being a big strong warrior, nobody had ever gotten around to inventing the concept of bonds or put much thought into how to manage an industrial economy. Korak knew that it held them back. He had wanted to change that.

But although Korak had been born to a prestigious brood (he was technically nobility, for all that he gave a shed skin about that) the Imperial Court had never listened to him. And so when he learned that the American peace settlement included terms which specified that Tavaroki who wished to emigrate would be allowed to do so (strange how they were able to make such demands when the King insisted they had surrendered unconditionally), he had been on the first rocket off the planet to the portal facilities the Americans had in orbit. It had taken a full company of American soldiers to hold back the massive crowds when he had left, there to boo and hiss and spit, calling him a traitor, crying out with inventive suggestions for how exactly he should be killed. If only his people had been half as creative about economic policy.

There were others on the rocket that day as well, outcasts who had decided to go off with the Americans and escape the sorry brutal history of the Tavaroki. Orphans, unworthy egg-bearers, weaklings who had somehow managed to survive, all hoping to start a new life in the stars. They had cringed and cowered in fear at the mob, and some had screamed back in rage of their own. Korak, on the other hand, hadn’t cared in the slightest about all the hate and vitriol. Why should he? He knew his people. He had seen what made them happy. The idiots who stayed behind on the planet were doomed.

And he was right.

Word of the Tavaroki had spread fast across Infinity America. For a while, every emoto-broadcaster and holo-film was talking about these noble savage lizards that had managed to defy the liberation teams and the fleets. Wasn’t it romantic, in a way? How had they managed? Pompous congressmen wondered aloud if there was simply something vital about their civilization that the weak and pampered Americans lacked, and more specifically those weak and pampered Americans as embodied by their political opponents. Perhaps, they suggested, there was something to be said for the Tavaroki way of life, some very ancient and primal wisdom that these hardy lizards (and by implication, the speaker) held.

Perhaps there was, the Americans thought, and so the tourists had come.

Under normal circumstances it would be difficult for the Tavaroki, who swore to slay and devour any alien species that set foot on their planet, to sustain much of a tourism industry. But Infinity America was anything but normal circumstances, and the medical branch of the SilCoMor corporation had just developed a new surgical procedure that they were itching to find a new market for: full neural implanting.

The plan was simple. For a nominal fee, SilCoMor would grow an artificial Tavaroki body. Then they would delicately pop open your skull, remove your brain, and transfer it over. A few stitched together nerve endings later and, voila, you had effectively swapped your race to become one of the lizard-men. Your previous body would be stored on ice if you ever wished to return (for a recurring monthly fee).

Of course, going down to the Tavaroki planet itself would have broken the terms of the treaty, so what you did with your new body afterwards was up to you. SilCoMor simply pointed out that there were some very nice and legitimate smugglers just down the hall from the surgical clinic. Soon they were bombarded with billions of customers, all of whom wished to enjoy the novelty of a Tavaroki lifestyle, or at the least, get very drunk on a cool new planet.

This did not exactly go unnoticed by the real Tavaroki, who not only wondered why many of their fellow lizards were acting so strangely, but also where the sudden population boom had come from. It wasn’t long before they figured out what was happening. But the Tavaroki who were the most horrified by this found that complaints to the King went strangely ignored. The monarchy had realized that tourists from a post-scarcity society brought in a lot more tax revenue than a population of ascetic serfs and warriors, and so had suddenly discovered the virtues of cultural exchange.

Though it was not only the Royal Family that suddenly became more accommodating. Strict standards of racial pride took a backseat to practicality when it was discovered that you could now earn a year’s wages by giving these strangers a ‘genuine Tavaroki experience’–giving them a tour of some tombs, burning incense and chanting, doing full-body decapitation reenactments, etc. Anything that convinced them it was authentic.

The Royal Family declared an official “cultural renaissance” as the Tavaroki got back to their roots and explored them with their visitors from the stars. A cynic might say that what they actually did was make up a bunch of nonsense on the spot in order to sell trinkets to tourists, but there was an embargo on cynicism at the time and so their criticisms went unheard. At the same time, all those true Tavaroki who had any curiosity figured out that they could probably better indulge their ambitions as citizens of an interstellar republic rather than by staying on their planet, on which their reputation was determined by how many siblings they had murdered, and so they emigrated away.

This left a bitter core of Tavaroki revanchists who were either too proud to get on the rockets off-planet, too stupid to make money from the tourists, or both. They attempted to stage a confused campaign to “restore the dignity of the monarchy” by killing suspected false Tavaroki. This mostly ended up killing their own people, which the Royal Family found merely annoying compared to the fact that the violence actually did manage to decrease tourism inflows by twenty percent year-over-year.

King Kru Delak, in a fit of pique, issued a broadcast promising that he’d personally barbecue the rebels. In a last-ditch effort to maintain racial purity, these diehards hijacked a rocket, vowing to colonize a new planet and begin their empire anew. Unfortunately they neglected that none of them actually knew how to pilot a starship, so the only impact they managed to make on the universe at large was the crater they left on the moon when they crashed moments later.

Eventually, for the Americans, the novelty wore off. The Tavaroki tourism industry cooled down, though not before the culture of the planet had irrevocably changed. The monarchy abdicated and purchased a micro-planet to retire on and their world was integrated into the UWA. These days the Tavaroki home planet is one of the largest theme parks in its galaxy, where curious aliens from across the republic can enjoy learning about Tavaroki culture, enjoying traditional Tavaroki cuisine, and of course letting their children get their picture taken with the planet’s lovable mascot, King Krud.

Korak had watched the sorry fate of his home planet as it played out over the news with mild disinterest, deleting the emails he got from the diehards begging him to JOIN OUR CAUSE BROTHER and much more specifically to DONATE NOW. He was busy getting his economics degree, and besides, what was the point in feeling sorry for the losers who had remained behind on his planet? He had given them a chance to listen. Now he was among the Americans, and he got to associate with the sorts of people who appreciated what he had to say.

And now, breathing deep the fresh air of a new planet, Korak knew it was exactly that which had seduced his people that would bring the Quizbarlings around as well. Not democracy, no, that was stupid, and it was stupid of Brugga to think that people would care. Korak was quite sure it didn’t really matter what the system of governance was. The one that would dominate all others was the one that made the most stuff. Once the Quizbarlings saw the endless abundance of simple things to indulge in, they’d inevitably be absorbed by American culture.

He sat happily behind his store’s freshly-grown counter as crowds of curious Quizbarlings thronged through the doors. They were guided in by smiling copies of Libby down the long rows of curious crap the store had been stocked with. None of it was of much interest to Korak himself; the Industro-Seed interface had given him a list of items it could manufacture and he had cross-referenced it with what scant evidence Olyrean had given him about the purchasing habits of the locals. She kept saying something about ‘bartering system’ this and ‘no true market economy’ that. What did he care? They bartered for something, didn’t they? Everyone wanted to get their claws on something.

“Ohhhh, a wonder to eyes here is!” cried a voice tantalizingly close to his ear. A shiver ran down his spine as he turned to find Moyom standing behind him, those lidless, unblinking eyes of hers watching him, her mandibles arranged in the complicated display that he knew was her attempt to mimic a smile. She leaned in, one of her grabbers playing with the folds of his frill. “A male which has much property and of merchant caste, I find pleasing is,” she purred, and he shivered.

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“Ahem!” Minor Fuss stood beside her. The High Priest’s smile seemed a little forced as he glanced between the two of them. “Allow me to congratulate you, Likely Handbag,” he said, using Korak’s Quizbar name.

“You’re allowed,” said Korak generously.

“Uh…um, congratulations. It is quite the impressive store. I have heard about such things from other Americans. Malls, and, er, on-line shopping, and that sort of thing.” He folded his hands into the long sleeves of his robes and nodded vaguely toward the crowded aisles. “But I do have to wonder–how do you expect my people to pay for your goods? We do not use any currency. As you must be aware.”

Minor Fuss smiled and glanced toward Moyom as if he thought this was the most clever thing he could possibly have said. Korak resisted a wandering urge to clamp his jaws around the man’s face. He resisted urges like that probably more often than anyone he knew would be strictly comfortable with.

“Well, that’s the next bit of good news I have for your planet, High Priest,” he said with a hiss that to his ears sounded smooth and casual but which he knew most mammalian species experienced as bone-chilling, and was silently happy when the man twitched a bit and took a half-step back. “Quizbar qualifies for credit.”

Infinity America was an advanced post-scarcity economy, which basically meant that, dependent on local conditions, everyone was extremely rich by default.

In other interstellar societies, such a state of affairs had heralded dramatic social change as their governments wrestled with what it meant to suddenly never have to worry about the budget or harangue people for being poor again. New religions were born to give people’s lives meaning, now that they couldn’t get it by collecting a bi-weekly paycheck and complaining about their supervisors. In some cases it touched off bloody wars of annihilation as entire civilizations decided it just wasn’t worth living if none of them got to lord their wealth over each other.

None of this happened in the UWA. There, post-scarcity approached so stealthily that barely anyone noticed when it happened.

They all had credit cards, you see.

In America, these little pieces of plastic were the pressure release valve through which the economy squeezed endless abundance. Ownership of a credit card was every American citizen’s sovereign right, and they were assigned several at birth. And as the economy came to produce more and more goods for less and less cost, the credit limits on the cards rose and rose. Eventually, even a newborn could qualify for credit sufficient to purchase a small country. At the same time, actually collecting on the debts became a terrible hassle as Infinity America expanded through multiple realities and its citizens got access to technology like neural transplants, brain uploads, and cloning. Keeping consistent records became a nightmare.

To solve this, creditors and lending banks from across the republic had pooled their resources to build Ool the Unholy, a supercomputer capable of monitoring all of their debtors in all timelines and realities. Why his creators chose the epithet “the Unholy” was a question that would have to go unanswered, but it turned out to be very appropriate, given the fact that the first thing Ool chose to do was to kill his masters by ejecting them into space. After this, he went mysteriously and ominously silent, and, alarmed by the whole affair, the government of the UWA decided to trap the rogue supercomputer in a bubble of slowed time.

In doing so, they inadvertently created the perfectly stable social justification for infinitely distributed wealth. Ool was still issuing credit and keeping track of all debts. All data of every purchase in every reality that Infinity America touched was all relayed back to him, trapped outside of time, constantly barraged at all moments by the endless expenses racked up by American citizens. Watching, judging, and interminably calculating credit scores. And at the end of the universe, when all that ever was boiled away into silent, cold darkness, he would be released from his slow-time bubble to rule over the void, the vast eternal emptiness, that he might collect his bills from the last few stray bits of errant matter in existence, in that place beyond time and meaning.

Until then, Americans enjoyed effectively infinite credit, so long as they didn’t mind owing Ool money. In this way, a citizen was as wealthy as their conscience allowed them to be, which for the most part was very wealthy indeed. People uncomfortable with being in debt to an all-seeing computer trapped in a cosmic prison were generally seen as misfits. In this way, poverty was a condition no longer associated with a lack of resources, but was rather the result of an overabundance of guilt.

Korak watched as drones were dispersed among the crowd of Quizbarlings, each one displaying a screen with a credit application form and a window with Libby’s smiling face to explain the process. (At this point in history, it involved nothing but stating your name and an occult invocation of contract with Ool). It all seemed to be going very well. Korak excused himself to Moyom and Minor Fuss and went to stroll up and down the aisles of his shop, so that he might oversee the inevitable shift that boundless consumerism would work upon the Quizbarling mind.

At first he was quite pleased by what he saw. Crowded shoppers lining the aisles, prodding curiously at every product–they looked like a bunch of Americans already.

But something was wrong. As he watched, it slowly dawned on him. Nobody was actually keeping anything. The Quizbarlings examined the merchandise with polite interest and then put it back exactly where they had found it. The shopping carts all remained empty. And, he noticed, as he pulled up a holo-screen that was tracking storewide analytics, nobody had signed up for credit. Not one.

That couldn’t be right. He fought back the sharp edge of panic. “Excuse me, miss,” he said, pulling aside a customer, a middle-aged Quizbarling woman who seemed more fascinated by the cart she was pushing than anything on the shelves. “Can I help you find anything?”

She gave him a friendly, absent smile. “Oh no. I’m good, really.”

“Were you planning on buying anything?” he asked. “Uh, I mean–we’re always looking for customer feedback. How has your experience been so far?”

“Oh, the store is very nice,” she said. “Very clean.” She frowned. “I am a little concerned about the whole contract with this Ool fellow they keep asking me to make. He sounds like an evil spirit.”

“He’s not,” said Korak. “He’s just an immortal supercomputer locked outside of observable reality, eternally judging everything that everyone does, forever. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

“Well, regardless, I haven’t really seen anything I’ve wanted.”

“Are you sure? We have, uh…” Korak looked the woman up and down and made a guess at what she might want. “Weight loss pills, just the next aisle over–”

The woman’s friendly smile immediately vanished into a much more stony look. “No,” she said, “thank you.”

“But you look about thirty percent fatter than your average Quizbarling female. Unless it’s not fat. Are you ill? Perhaps you want an anti-bloating serum? Safe for Quizbarling biology, that’s our guarantee! No wait,” he cried as the woman walked away, “Is your stomach packed with parasites?! We’ve got medicine for that!”

Damn it, I’m an academic, he thought to himself. I shouldn’t need to be helping people!

He pulled others aside, but he got much the same reaction. Nobody was actually interested in buying anything. None of them had even planned to! Everyone was here out of a sense of sympathetic politeness. He felt disgusted.

He came to a Quizbarling who seemed to at least be considering the merchandise a bit more thoughtfully. “Hello, sir,” he asked, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “Find anything you like?”

The Quizbarling, old but not feeble, gave him a quiet, sober glance. “Ah,” he said. “You are…Likely Handbag, are you not?”

“Uh…yes.” Among the Tavaroki, someone who demonstrated that they knew their name without you knowing theirs was a way to signal just how much more intelligence they had about you, and carried a barely-implicit threat. He wracked his brain to try and remember from his cultural acclimation classes what the expected response would be among the Quizbarlings before the minor AI he kept in his holo-glasses pulled up a reminder. “And your name, sir?”

“Fallen Nest,” said the Quizbarling, and then paused as if this were pregnant with meaning. When Korak didn’t respond, he turned back to the shelf.

Korak glanced around. To his dismay, he saw that a steady stream of shoppers were now making their way out the door. He had to do something, slash prices, give two-for-one deals, lock them in, something. “Ah,” he said, turning to leave, “Well, if you need anything, just let me– ”

The Quizbarling plucked something from the shelf.

“This,” Fallen Nest said solemnly, holding it out to him. Korak peered at it. It appeared to be an automatic grill scrubber with standard spatula and handgun attachments. “Will this bring me…satisfaction?”

“Well, that or something else,” Korak said distractedly.

The Quizbarling put the grill scrubber back and took out something else: a special limited edition figurine of Star Knight Libby, featuring the AI in a gleaming patriotic mechsuit and holding a glowing sword. “You can remove my armor–absolutely everything,” her winking face advertised on the box.

“Or this,” said Fallen Nest. “Will this bring me…peace? Fulfillment?”

“Look, I don’t know what will fulfill you specifically,” Korak snapped. “I’m a macroeconomist. Figure it out yourself, why don’t you?”

The Quizbarling slowly replaced the figure. “Because,” he said softly, “I don’t know how.”

Korak felt that sort of awkward dread he got in his spleen whenever a mammalian was about to be way too emotional with him. “Uh,” he said, “Well, maybe your priests can help you. I’ve really got to go–”

“The priests,” whispered Fallen Nest, “can do nothing.”

“Wow, that sure is something, alright,” said Korak, fidgeting as he watched shoppers steadily drain out the exits.

“I pray, but all I hear is the echoes of my loss. You Americans, you say that wealth and material possessions will fill the hole in my heart, but I look upon all this and feel nothing…”

“Uh huh,” said Korak. “Really great stuff. Excuse me.”

He pulled himself away from the man and dashed madly up and down the aisles, which were already much more sparsely populated than they had been even moments before. He hooked up to the store’s intercom system and announced that he was slashing prices by seventy percent, then ninety percent, then ninety-nine point nine percent. Nothing. Nothing he said slowed the stream of Quizbarlings out the door. Still no one had bought anything. Still no one was signing up for any credit.

Customers retreated out the door. The only products any of the Quizbarlings displayed any interest in were some of the gardening tools, and even then none of the really proper ones, the solar-powered tractors and auto-hoes and bags of mega-dirt. No, they wanted nothing but primitive shovels and buckets, and even those they refused to buy on credit.

Defeated, Korak let a couple of the Quizbarlings barter for a rake or two, and tried to at least hook them with some coupons. They took these with polite smiles that could not have been more clear about their intention to never return.

So it was that Korak found himself in an empty store a mere hour after its grand opening, sitting next to a sloshing bucket full of brugmoor milk and a plate full of blunderhog burgers. He gave these a desultory look. Zeeskee birds buzzed around it until his tongue lashed out and snared a couple of them. The rest scattered in panic. He chewed slowly, sullenly nudging the powered-down cashier drones with his tail.

He tried not to think about how pleased Minor Fuss had looked about his failure. How smug. His teammates had already left as well; Libby with some words of encouragement about how he ought to keep trying, and Moyom with a whispered promise that she would come by his room tonight to groom his scales and cheer him up.

Sullen, he let his mind wander over the shining curves of the Ixxari’s carapace for a while.

He glanced up at the sound of the bell above the store’s entrance jingling. There stood Olyrean, tugging at her golden hair and looking about the empty building and the untouched shelves in confusion.

“Where is everyone?” she asked.

“Gone,” Korak replied.

“I thought this was your grand opening?”

“I thought so too,” he said. “But the Quizbarlings didn’t seem much interested in the idea.”

“Oh.” Quietly, Olyrean came to sit down next to him. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

Korak looked away from her. The elf had always looked slightly cooked to him. He knew it was what some of the hairless mammalian species called a ‘tan’, but it always made his mouth water a bit. And she had only become…tanner, he supposed, since coming to Quizbar. He suppressed the same passing urge to bite off one of her ears that he always had whenever he saw her. He was convinced they’d be delightfully crunchy. “Yeah, well, ninety-nine percent of small businesses fail in their first day.”

“Is that true?”

“No,” he snapped. “I made it up.”

Olyrean laughed as though he had made some sort of joke. “Would you like some help cleaning up?”

“I’ll have the drones do it. Would you like a burger?”

He held the plate out to her and she took one. She took a bite, chewed thoughtfully for a long moment. She stared at him and her face went through a series of expressions that he found at once baffling and off-putting. Mammalian faces were far too stretchy, by his estimation. “I don’t think we’re doing a very good job so far, do you?” she asked.

Korak found this to be a refreshingly frank self-evaluation. “No,” he said. “I think we’re doing pretty terribly. This was your failure too, after all. We need better market research. I hope your other intel endeavors are doing better than this.”

He said this without malice, but Olyrean’s ears drooped. Maybe they wouldn’t be as crunchy as he thought. “Um,” she said, “Well. I, uh, did have one…uh…person of interest, you might say.”

“Oh? Who is it?”

“I don’t know his name,” she admitted. “But perhaps you’ve seen him. It’s a…a sad Quizbarling.”

“Okay. But that doesn’t really narrow it down, does it?”

Olyrean gave him a curious look. “Doesn’t it? Almost every one of them I see is always so happy–he sticks out like a sore thumb–”

“I don’t really pay much attention to their facial expressions.” Flappy. Rubbery. Too weird.

“Oh, but–you have to, he really stands out–come on, have you met one that’s…that’s you know, depressed?”

Something tickled at the back of Korak’s mind for a moment. But no, the emotions of social mammals were off-putting and fuzzy, like watching a broken holo-film. Who could say what any of them were feeling? Hell, he wasn’t even entirely sure what she meant by ‘sad’. Sadness, to him, was the feeling he got when he couldn’t find a nice warm rock to lie down on. For mammals, sadness didn’t seem to do with rocks at all. It was a little hard to comprehend. How could you be sad if you were warm?

“No,” he said, “I can’t say that I have.”

***

Korak didn’t go back to his room that night, despite Moyom’s offer. He couldn’t sleep. There was still something of the Tavaroki in him, the competitor that devoured his siblings, so failure was more than just humiliation for him. It gave him the frantic impression of imminent doom and filled his head with visions of gnashing, sharp teeth.

Instead he paced fretfully about the halls of the palace. Or, rather, he darted along the walls and the ceiling. A little climbing always felt more natural to him, and helped him clear his head, but it was of no use tonight. Anxiety gnawed at him. His eyes darted up and down the moonlit hallways, chasing after shadows. He couldn’t help but feel as though he was being watched. Just nerves, he told himself.

Where could he have gone wrong? What was it about this race of idiot, bumpkin farmers that had made them more resistant to the charms of America’s shopping goods than his own had been? It was the market research, he decided. Olyrean really had let him down with that. They’d come around, eventually, they’d sign up for credit, they’d buy buy buy, he was sure of it, it was just a matter of figuring out what it was they wanted.

Which meant that he needed to…understand them. How distasteful. It would be so much better once the Omninet could be established here and the Quizbarlings could be set up with online shopping. The algorithms could understand them for him. But right now there was no infrastructure for it…

There was a scraping sound somewhere behind him. He froze.

“Hello?” he called, his voice echoing down the hallway. “Is anyone there?”

He waited for an answer, fear gripping his heart. Eventually, he began to feel foolish. The moon was bright, and there were no shadows large enough for anyone to hide in. “Ugh,” he muttered. If he didn’t cool down his tail was going to pop right off out of instinct.

He should go and find a drink. He should go back to his room and let Moyom groom his scales. He should–

Unfortunately for Korak, regardless of what it was he thought he should do, what happened instead was that a pair of strong, hard arms wrapped around him from behind, pinning him. His frill flapped outward and he tried to scream, but a cold hand clapped over his mouth, and he was dragged away into the dark.