Chapter 3

“Ow,” said the giant butterfly as it was bowled over.

Calling this alien a giant butterfly was a bit of a misnomer; that was merely how Olyrean thought of it. Really, it was not quite like any bug that she had ever known. Its velvety, colorful wings were protected within a jeweled, beetle-like carapace, and its head and large, globular eyes resembled those of a mantis more than anything. It scuttled about on nearly a dozen long, thin legs that raised its roundish body up nearly to her chest, and it had a pair of three-pronged claws that served as grabbers. The creature was thoroughly alien, and also her best friend.

“Oh, Moyom, I’m sorry!” Olyrean helped the creature up, which was really not necessary; it had already recovered. She tried anyway and then yelped as a little bit of carapace broke off in her hands.

Moyom regarded this placidly, then, unperturbed, took the bit of shell from her and popped it into her mandibles, chewing thoughtfully. “You are the very fast being today, Olly!” she said, sounding manically cheerful. Which is to say, the small computer around her neck sounded cheerful for her.

Another way in which Moyom was different from most insects was that her species, the Ixxari, had once been drones that belonged to a psychic hive mind. Having been forcefully evolved over the millennia to serve the collective consciousness, and thus totally adjusted to telepathy, had left them without any idea of how to actually communicate without it. Which had presented a problem when her species had been liberated from the hive mind (accidentally, as Moyom told it, in a tragic incident involving an annual beach volleyball tournament and a tanker full of piña colada).

While there were many variants of Americanese based around the different biologies of its alien citizens (including one variant, ABL, or American Bonk Language, used exclusively by the Ravaging Nuudmort, a race of violent clam-people who communicated entirely by smashing their skulls into the nearest hard surface), it was difficult to teach any of these to a species that had almost forgotten the concept of language itself. So they had been equipped with computer translators, which interpreted their brainwaves and did their best to approximate their thoughts into some semblance of Americanese.

All of this had been difficult for Olyrean to absorb at first, unfamiliar as she was with the concept of hive minds, computers, piña coladas, or bugs larger than those she could step on. But amidst the confusion and chaos of her earliest days in Infinity America, she had found herself drawn to Moyom; perhaps simply because the creature’s colorful wings and glittering beauty had reminded her of the butterflies and beetles that had trundled about her ruined home of Rymand Vale.

Or, perhaps, it was simply because Moyom was a reminder that no matter how out-of-place she felt, there was someone else out there even more out-of-place than she was, and they were doing fine.

“Are you am now ready for trials of testing days?!” the computer on Moyom’s neck burbled as it happily flubbed its translation job. “I shiver in anticipation for you!” Moyom hugged herself and, indeed, shivered in what Olyrean supposed might pass for an anticipatory manner.

She gave her friend an awkward, crooked smile. Really, she’d prefer it if she weren’t being constantly reminded of the exam. It made her itch, and it was almost impossible to avoid thinking about how embarrassing it would be to fail. She knew Libby and Moyom well enough to suspect that they were already planning a celebration for her; if anything, the way the Ixxari kept on looking at her and clacking her mandibles (Moyom’s version of giggling) confirmed it. If she failed, she’d really have no other option than to sneak into the cargo bays and eject herself into space.

With her translator still going on about how exciting today was, Moyom scuttled across the yard to the waiting bubble-car. Olyrean followed close behind. The Ixxari dove straight through the car’s membrane and, after a moment of anticipatory hesitation, she did too.

A bubble-car is a unique form of transportation developed by the engineering AIs of Infinity America. To the eye, it looks like nothing more than a giant bubble with a hazy, smoky surface and pillows piled up high inside. Upon a closer inspection, one could see a complicated mesh of hair-thin wires running through the bubble’s skin.

It was the engineers’ answer to the question of transportation in very diverse areas of the republic, where aliens of varying morphologies might have to cram themselves into the same vehicle. Traditional seating arrangements became a little impractical when some species had two elbows and others had two dozen. But it was very hard to go wrong, they found, if you just made your car into a big rounded surface with a bunch of pillows. Except, of course, for the Weeping Lubboids, a species of masochistic eels with an allergic reaction to comfort. For them, the engineers had invented the mysterious and intimidating malletcar.

“I are having the mating gurgles for your softshell this day!” Moyom told her as they settled in. Olyrean was a little alarmed by this until, with a little more explanation, she figured out that Moyom was trying to compliment her skirt. She let her friend babble on about this and how beautiful the morning was (“A sun beats us most pleasantly this day”) while she watched the synthetic landscape stretch out before her as the bubble-car lifted up off the ground and tootled off.

Like most residential space stations, Moody Blue had been installed with artificial land for bio-Americans to enjoy. Olyrean had found an isolated patch of hilly forest that reminded her of her planet. Her house–on the outside, nothing more than a humble thatched cottage–was built right up next to the edge of the space station, against the transparent dome separating them from the void. Most folk preferred to live further in, where the illusion that you lived on a planet was more complete. But she liked being so close to the stars, though it was always a reminder of how far she was from home.

The bubble-car trundled downhill and away from her forest now, accelerating to a breakneck speed while piping in soothing ambient music design to give the comforting impression that, were they to crash, a broken neck would be a wild overreaction and they would suffer little more than bumped heads. The land beneath them became a series of rapidly shifting, multicolored stripes. These were Moody Blue’s other artificial environments, built for the comfort of most every species.

They passed over swamps for the star-toads, savannahs for the cackling hyena-heads of Sirius V, volcanoes for the lava elementals, brooding graveyards for vampires (blood-drinking), labyrinths of gray cubicles for vampires (emotional). And in the distance was a pulsing core of light: the station’s capital city, which shared a name with the station itself.

The bubble-car gave a little hum and then, with a little kick into higher speed, it shot off, leaving behind a roaring sonic boom. The striped landscape became a blur. Olyrean sank deep into the pillows with the force of the acceleration as the soothing music took on a tone of tinny denialism as it did its damnedest to assure them they’d survive a crash. At this speed, it wasn’t long before they saw gleaming silver towers passing by outside. They had arrived in the city.

The bubble-car slowed gently to a stop and set them down in the government square. Olyrean could not help but feel a little nostalgic as she pushed her way out of the car’s skin. It was these skyscrapers, after all, that she had seen most often when she first came to America; here that her civics classes had been held. Much of Moody Blue was built in a particular architectural style (Neo-Retro Space Americana Folk Raygun-punk). She didn’t understand the name, but it involved a lot of pointy bits topped by orbs and thin spires lined with wide rings that were supported by nothing. The buildings almost seemed to be fighting with each other over which could look more impossible, and getting pretty heated about it too. She still had no idea how any of this was done without magic.

Moyom crawled her way out of the bubble-car and joined Olyrean on the pavement. “A luckiness then!” she said, giving Olyrean a hug. “Make the mind-picture! I and you, in service of the makey-law! Together then!”

Olyrean made her best guess as to what her friend could possibly mean by that. “Well, I don’t know that we’d exactly be working together,” she said. Moyom worked as part of the diplomatic office, something which she quietly regarded as altogether inexplicable. She didn’t think SPECTRA would necessarily work with them all that often. But it was true that they’d both have jobs that called them to the government square. “We could share rides more often, though.”

Moyom’s legs skittered happily on the plaza. “Go, and kill this test! Eat their larvae!” Then she was off, the sunlight glinting off her carapace. She waved hello to a clam, which toppled over in shock and immediately began slamming its head into the pavement.

Olyrean watched her go. Then, squaring herself off, she made what she hoped looked like a very determined march to the SPECTRA office.

***

The SPECTRA office was located in a building known locally as “The Accident”, which was actually short for “The Accident Waiting to Happen”.

For the most part, it was a squat, square building, forty stories tall, shining blue-tinted silver. This was actually very boring and small by the standards of Moody Blue, so to make up for it, the builders had added a thin spire to the top that rose twice as high as the building did, and on the top of that built an enormous sphere three times the size of the building itself. Countless skybridges linked this sphere to the surrounding skyscrapers, some stretching across the skyline for miles.

This was where it got its name. The sphere drew all of the city into itself, like the center of a spiderweb. A way in which it was unlike a spiderweb, however, was that instead of gossamer strands it was made of thousands of tons of NuSteel and MegaGlass, so really it looked more like an enormous meteor that had been about to crush the city beneath it and had only at the last moment decided to stop, and was now stuck awkwardly in the sky, while the city had only just turned towards it like a startled stranger to say “Excuse me?”

When she had first seen the Accident, Olyrean couldn’t even bring herself to stand beneath it. When she learned the Americans had deliberately built it this way, she began to worry that she had just signed on with a bunch of lunatics. The entire edifice made even longtime inhabitants of Moody Blue a bit squeamish. These days, she took pride in being able to walk beneath it while only glancing skyward in terror once or twice. She’d not yet been able to screw up the courage to actually go inside the thing, however. There was supposedly an enormous shopping and entertainment district there.

“Maybe one day,” Olyrean told herself as she entered the building.

The Accident’s lobby was cavernous, quiet and cool. Olyrean’s shoes clacked smartly on the marble floor as she made her way to the elevator. On the other side of the lobby, a copy of Libby shepherded a group of newly-liberated Dobosians, meowing at them in their native tongue. The kittens, dressed in rags, stared about themselves in shock. They had really wasted no time with the liberation.

“Oh, the poor lost things,” Olyrean murmured to herself. She had been like that, once, so wide-eyed and innocent and so terribly naive to all of what Infinity America was. Now she had the luxury of indulging in a bit of condescending smugness about the newcomers.

Libby caught her eye and waved, and she waved back, then turned to the elevators. The Dobosians would be going upwards, where they’d first be given new clothes, a medical once-over and their first standard-issue flags. SPECTRA, on the other hand…

“Howdy, darlin’,” said the elevator as she stepped through its doors. “Now where can I bring you today?”

“Down, please. SPECTRA offices.”

Normally, this was the extent of the interaction she would have had with the machine. But rather than closing its doors and going on its way, the elevator’s warm lighting dimmed, and its synthetic voice (cowgirl setting) took on a hushed conspiratorial tone. “Brrr. Really, sugar? Hardly anyone goes down there.”

The Americans, Olyrean reflected, could have built so many of their devices without cramming a personality into them. She couldn’t for the life of her understand why an elevator needed to be given the capacity to argue with her. “Well,” she said, “down’s where I need to go.”

“It’s just that it’s so eerie down there, darlin’,” the elevator protested. “Dark. Nasty and strange. You sure don’t seem like the type.”

Alarm bells went off in Olyrean’s head. She had never actually been to the SPECTRA offices before. Most of the information about recruitment she had gotten through Libby. Her only contact with the organization itself had been a message arranging the exam, to which she had received a terse reply naming the time and location.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“What’s the type, then?” she asked cautiously.

“Why…well, I don’t want to imply anything. Truly I don’t.” The elevator hemmed and hawed, its lights pulsing thoughtfully. “It’s just, well…the sorts I usually bring down there are…shady. Spooky, I should say. You, why, you just look so sweet! Like a tall pitcher of cable oil. Not like those spy types at all.”

“Well, I do have an exam and an interview with them,” Olyrean said. “So down, please.”

“Why don’t I take you up instead?” the elevator insisted. “I know. There’s writers for a fashion magazine up there. You look like you’d make a good editor. Seems like a much better job, doesn’t it?”

“No,” she answered, trying to remain calm, “it doesn’t. What seems like a much better job is the one that I’ve spent weeks preparing for. So down, please.”

The elevator’s synthetic voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s just…something going on down there. Something weird. I can feel it in my circuits every time I pass by. Like something’s watching.” It shuddered, which was a very alarming thing for an elevator to do, especially when you were standing in it.

Olyrean’s temper snapped. She had no idea where the audio input on this thing was, but she leaned in very close to the elevator’s walls and pulled out a ballpoint pen. “I don’t care what you think’s going on,” she hissed. “You’re going to be feeling this in your circuits pretty soon if you don’t take me where I want to go. Which, again, is down. So down, please. Right now.”

The elevator’s lights immediately turned frosty. “Well,” it huffed, “there’s no need for threats–”

“Now!” Olyrean barked, and began jabbing the walls with her pen, looking for wiring. She was aware of people in the lobby staring at her, but she didn’t care. She was going to at least make it to the exam.

Luckily, the elevator didn’t give her any more guff. It didn’t say anything at all, in fact. It merely began its descent.

Down they slid into a dark tunnel. The speed picked up, and soon the elevator was plummeting so fast that Olyrean felt that she might float right off the floor. She grabbed onto a railing and glanced about nervously. There was still nothing but darkness beyond the elevator doors. Just how far down were the SPECTRA offices?

A dull bluish glow seemed to come from nowhere, from some foggy distance in the dark. And then Olyrean felt it. It began as a tingling sensation in the tips of her ears, but soon it had spread all over her scalp and then sunk straight through into her skull until there was a tingling in her brain.

Wild paranoia crept into Olyrean’s thoughts, like a burglar who had conveniently found the door unlocked.

What was happening? What did she think she was doing? Here she was, plunging deep into the earth at the behest of some SPECTRA agent she had never even met. All alone. Did she really think she could trust them? She didn’t even know what SPECTRA stood for.

It will be fine. This was all set up by Libby–

Libby? And who was she? A bodiless AI with endless duplicates…an alien. Like everyone else. She was surrounded by them, all alone on an entire planet of aliens. No, not even a planet, was it, a space station, because she had been too foolish to keep solid earth beneath her feet.

So what, Olyrean told the growing voice inside her. She’s a friend. Like Moyom.

Friend? How could she think any of them were her friends? Moyom was a giant bug who couldn’t even speak to her without the aid of a computer. And Libby? The AI interacted with billions of people every day. She was just a blip to Libby. There was no way she could be a friend to such a spirit.

No, she had reached far beyond her grasp. Gone off amongst the stars with strangers, far from her own people, foolishly thinking she could trust any of them. They had tricked her, lied to her and tricked her, they must have, and now she was all alone, all alone and down in the dark in their clutches and who knew what they were going to do to her–

Olyrean realized the elevator had stopped and its doors had slid open. She was squeezed into a corner, breathing rapidly, in a cold sweat. There was still nothing but darkness beyond, suffused by that dim blue glow from nowhere.

She swallowed. No, she told that shrill voice of doubt in her head. No, you’re wrong. With a monumental effort, she silenced it, stuffed it somewhere deep within herself, inside that same vault that contained her darkest memories: that of her homeland being destroyed, the sight of Um’Thamarr and the sacrificial pits, and the memory of her first date when she had drunk too much honeyed fairy-wine and then gotten sick all over her crush’s face right when he went in for a kiss.

That last one was buried deepest of all.

With her thoughts quiet again, she stepped out into the dark. As soon as she was out, the elevator immediately darted upward and was quickly out of sight. Now she really was completely alone. That terrified voice tried to break out of the vault, but she set the locks tight and firmly strode forth. She stopped after a few steps and frowned. The ground here was squishy, damp, and a little sticky.

“Hello?” she called. “Is this SPECTRA?” Then she screamed when suddenly a beam of light stabbed out from the darkness to illuminate her.

“OLYREAN!” a booming voice cried out, deep and grand and seeming to come from every direction at once. “OLYREAN Teralelien!”

It was deafening. She winced and clapped her hands to her ears. “Uh, yes,” she answered cautiously. “That’s me–”

“SORRY. WAS THE VOICE TOO LOUD?”

“YOU CAN SEE IT WAS, YOU SNOOD-GOBBLER,” another booming voice cut in. “TURN IT DOWN, DON’T KEEP TALKING INTO THE–”

“HOLD ON, WE’LL–”

“STOP TALKING TO HER! GIVE ME THAT!”

There were the sounds of a scuffle and a series of grunts. Then the second voice came back. “Olyrean Teralelien!” Now that it wasn’t so loud, she could hear its nasal, buzzing quality, like a bee or hornet, or perhaps something a bit more high-pitched, like a mosquito.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s my name.” She tried to get a good look at what she was standing on, but she couldn’t somehow. The beam of light illuminating her seemed only to catch her upper body and killed her darkvision.

“Are you ready for your test, Olyrean Teralelien?”

“Well, I think so. I’ve studied enough, I think. Is there a desk somewhere in here I can use? Or will this be an oral examination?”

There was a moment’s pause. “You will not need to answer any questions like that, Olyrean Teralelien. Not like the ones in your study sessions, anyway. Libby shared her records with us, and we are satisfied with the answers you gave.”

“What? She did?”

“Yes. We are satisfied with your memorization abilities, your problem-solving skills, and your capacity for unique and out-of-the-box thought patterns. That part of the test is over.”

“You would not be here,” said the first voice, “if we thought you were an idiot.” This one was thicker, globby somehow. Olyrean pictured its owner with a lot of jiggling jowls.

A part of her mind groaned in protest at this news, burst its seams, and immediately let all the information and answers that she had spent so much time accumulating float off into the ether. As nervous as she had been coming here, she had been looking forward to actually taking the test, accomplishing something. She felt a bit disappointed right now.

“You’re feeling a bit disappointed right now, aren’t you,” said the bee-voice slyly.

“Well, no, not as such…”

“You’re feeling disappointed,” the bee-voice insisted, “because back on your home planet, there was a coming-of-age ceremony that you never got to take part in. It kept getting pushed back because of the war. And you thought that doing this could be your way of fulfilling that little ceremony. Didn’t you?”

Olyrean clasped a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp. How could they have known that? She never told anyone. It had always gnawed at her. By the time her planet had been liberated, she was well past the age when she should have done the ceremony. It involved dancing at the edges of the Desert of Madness and waiting for a vision from a fae spirit, and…well, she wasn’t quite sure all of what it involved, because she had never done it and she supposed that now she never would. The Desert of Madness had become too dangerous. But she had told herself that this little test, strange as it was, could serve as her American equivalent.

“Olyrean of the Lilied Pond,” said the globby voice with idle smugness.

“That…that…no one ever called me that,” she stuttered. “That’s not my name.”

“It’s the name your parents had picked out for you. It’s the one they would have given you once you had finished your ceremony.”

And just like that, Olyrean was crying. It was tradition for your mother and father to give you an elf-name once you had finished your coming-of-age ceremony. It was also tradition for them to do a terrible job of choosing one, to give their kids a name that they really loathed, but she supposed ‘of the Lilied Pond’ was not so bad. She hid her face behind her hands, which was a foolish thing to do, because it only made her tears more obvious.

“How did you know that,” she managed with only a sniffle or two.

“It is our job to know.”

“It is SPECTRA’s job to know,” Mr. Bee-or-maybe-hornet cut in. “Do not worry, Olyrean Teralelien. Just because you have already passed one test does not mean that there will not be others. Indeed, you have already passed the second one.”

“Oh, and what’s that?” Olyrean pulled a star-spangled handkerchief from her jacket pocket and dabbed away her tears. “I managed an elevator ride?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bee, very seriously. “Surely you noticed something happening on your way down.”

“I…” Olyrean stopped. She realized that the voice that had been with her in the elevator, the one full of paranoia and loathsome fear, was almost entirely gone. Oh, she could recognize the seed of it in her thoughts, still, but it was a small and shriveled, silly thing, like a nasty sponge full of crud and mold, too dried out even to stink anymore.

“You withstood an admirable amount of psychic pressure,” said Mr. Bee. “Really, it’s true. At those levels of nostalgia and xenophobia emissions, most people would be screaming for their homeworld before they even made it halfway down.”

“What does that mean, though?”

A pause. And then the globby one: “What do you think it means?”

“If I knew what it meant, I wouldn’t be asking,” she answered somewhat testily.

“It could mean any combination of things,” said Mr. Bee. “Your race might be predisposed to tolerating other races already, perhaps merely because you come from a world of many different races to begin with. It might mean that you, personally, are particularly open-minded. Or it could mean simply that you are very strong-willed, or just not very emotional. You certainly recovered quickly when we made you cry earlier.”

“You did that on purpose?!” Olyrean was furious. “Was the Lilied Pond thing even real?”

The silence that followed that question was just a bit too condescending, so she tugged off a shoe and threw it out into the darkness where she thought the voices were coming from. She was rewarded with a squelch and someone muttering wet curses. She knew that this was probably a sign that this interview was going poorly, but she didn’t care.

“Those are–that’s my people!” she shouted. “Most of them were killed, you know that? Don’t you dare lie to me about something like that!”

“Very good,” said Mr. Bee, sounding very satisfied. “You’ve got some spirit in you. We look for that too. Are you ready for judgment, Olyrean Teralelien?”

Olyrean stood there in the dark. With her shoe off, she could feel that the ground here really was quite squishy and wet. All the words except for “judgment” had rolled right over her. She had just thrown a shoe at her interviewers and she was now very certain that she had botched this opportunity. She thought of how disappointed Moyom and Libby would be… “Wait, what did you say?”

“I said,” said Mr. Bee, “that we assign you the rank of Junior Operative of SPECTRA.”

“Here’s your shoe,” said the globby voice. It whipped out of the darkness and helpfully struck her in the forehead.

She caught it with a muttered curse before it dropped to the ground. “What–really?” she asked as she pulled it back on. “You’re not just…you know…feeling sorry for me, are you?”

“Please,” said Mr. Bee. He sounded insulted. “My species doesn’t have the emotional capacity for that. Allow us to introduce ourselves: My name is Veezeebub.”

“And I am Tordle,” globbed the other.

“We will be your handlers and contacts at SPECTRA. At least, for now. Are you ready for your first mission?”

Olyrean, who had only just managed to get her shoe back on, stumbled. “This is all happening so fast–”

“Right,” said Veezeebub. “I forget some species need time to process this sort of thing. Prepare for congratulatory gesture.”

There was a boop sound, and then confetti rained down on her.

“Gesture complete. Are you ready for your mission?”

“I suppose so,” Olyrean said unsteadily, brushing confetti from her hair. “But shouldn’t I have some sort of training or something…?”

“That’s not necessary. Not for this mission.”

She relaxed. Of course, they wouldn’t have her doing anything crazy right away. Probably her first mission was some training video, or a thought transfer from their neural archives. “So it’s just a little one, then?”

“We are SPECTRA,” Tordle scoffed. “We don’t do little missions. No, Olyrean Teralelien. You are going to help us liberate a planet.”