Chapter 6

Olyrean sat at the conference table, quietly seething.

Seething was the right word, or at least she hoped it was. It was, at least, the proper descriptor for how she felt internally. Her head felt as if it contained a small ocean on whose surface several volcanic islands had just exploded through. White-hot magma ran through her veins and dripped down into her stomach, which had sunk so dismally low that it felt as if it might be located several floors below her. She was so angry that her vision blurred and she actually felt sick.

Externally, however, she was afraid that what she was doing might come across more as sulking.

Brugga sat across from her and a little to the side, studiously avoiding her gaze. He was chatting cheerfully with Korak, pizza sauce smeared on his upper lip. He was babbling on about–well, who knew, really. Nothing that mattered. He shouldn’t be talking at all. He didn’t deserve ownership of a tongue.

Her hands twitched.

Moyom gently prodded at her elbow, offering her another slice of pizza, and Olyrean took it, jamming it into her mouth before she noticed the cheese was still piping hot. She didn’t care. She sat chewing it down, savoring the pain, glowering at the orc.

Seethingly.

God, but he was ugly. He was, she decided, actually even uglier than the last time she had seen him. Which was really somewhat of an accomplishment, because America was full of products and procedures and surgeries and genetic tweaks and twiddlings all designed to enhance your beauty. Olyrean herself had her skin smoothed by Rejuv-o-Cream, teeth whitened by laser drill, and her wavy blonde hair brightened and made fuller and wavier by a genetic procedure that the doctors had assured her had only a very small chance of making her sterile. She still had some recordings around from before she had all of this done, and she was always astonished by how frumpy she looked in the past.

But Brugga…

Sweat stained the pits of his jacket and had turned the once snow-white collar of his button-down shirt a dirty yellow beneath his flabby chins. His face was tattooed with scars from a long history of a war with boils and pimples that the latter currently seemed to be winning. Whenever he flashed a smile, he displayed teeth that appeared to have gotten into a heated discussion with a hammer. It didn’t occur to her to suppose that orcs considered attractive those very attributes which she found most disgusting, but if it had, she wouldn’t have cared.

Once (disgusting) Brugga had arrived with his (gross) ginger ale, Libby had said they ought to go around the table and introduce themselves. The mission itself, she explained, could be talked about later. Right now they were just all getting to know each other.

Olyrean had sat numbly through the introductions, barely listening. Jack and Moyom she already knew, of course, and Korak had described himself as an economist. She thought she could remember him talking about this the previous night, trying to explain to her how procuring the ingredients in her cocktails would have bankrupted most early industrial societies.

Both she and the (wretched) orc, through some unspoken compact, avoided mentioning how they (very unfortunately) knew each other, and gave the most perfunctory of introductions. (Hateful) Brugga had apparently just finished his (likely inadequate) civics classes, and had done so well in them (ha!) that he had been assigned a position as an instructor himself.

‘Civics classes’, of course, was a bit of a misnomer. The introductory suite of programs for those liberated by Infinity America was tailored to the needs of their race.

For example, the Sun-Elves had not needed much to adjust to their new life. The form of government they were most familiar with was some form of weak aristocracy tempered by the presence of informal councils of elders. When informed that they were going to be holding elections from now on, the aristocracy, already accustomed to not holding any real power, had more or less shrugged and said ‘why not’, while the councils of elders had seemed downright delighted by the idea that someone else was going to have to do the chore of making decisions for a change. And since the elves were already familiar with the concept of sharing a world with other races, such as humans, dwarves, gnomes and unfortunately the orcs, the idea of an Infinity America full of hundreds of different aliens was not so strange once you got used to the fact that some of them had tentacles.

So in Olyrean’s case, she really had just gone through a few rounds of civics classes, which to her had seemed remarkably lax. Just a brief introduction about what democracy was, which was simple enough to grasp, a cautionary primer on some of the stranger aliens. The only stumbling block, really, had been the elvish tendency of calling everything besides themselves a ‘lesser’ race. That was a habit that had to go. Very little history had been included, which was fine by her, though it was very unelfly. The elders had always been going on about the fabled and fantastic and gratuitously recorded history of the Sun-Elves, which, personally, she had always found a bit boring. The Americans, on the other hand, had so much history that they seemed to have forgotten most of it.

The elves, though, could really be considered the best-case scenario of integration. There were other species which required much more effort to be liberated. Take, for example, the case of the Hooveeballix. This was a race of giant amoeboids that reproduced by what America’s leading biologists had very scientifically decided to call ‘splattergenesis’. That is, they reproduced by means of multiple fission, in which a single individual would split into many smaller copies of themselves, but the process required some external force to get going, usually excessive.

The way this worked out in Hooveeballix society was that bitter enemies took care to be very gentle with each other, while it was considered an act of utmost intimacy and love to beat someone to death with a hammer. The Hooveeballix were, unfortunately, also xenophiles, and this led to some tragic misunderstandings. They stood to this day as the only alien race to be incorporated peacefully into the UWA while also murdering their entire liberation team.

Orcs, on the other hand, did not have so much of a fundamental biological compatibility problem (though Olyrean would have said that their odor qualified), but they had come from a culture that thought slavery, eating other races and pledging their eternal allegiance to an evil dragon god were all fine ideas, which caused a little ideological friction when it came to being citizens of a democratic republic. Most of them were still under careful watch back on her home planet, where specialized conversion teams were trying to puzzle out how to civilize them.

Good luck with that, Olyrean thought.

Brugga himself had been released early, since he was exceptional in taking to the new rules of American life. Or at least his instructors had said. She had her doubts.

It wasn’t merely that he was an orc. After all, the orcs she had grown up with were only one breed of them. There were other orcs, from other realities, some of which were very different from the ones she knew. There were smaller, much more piglike orcs; greener ones with funny accents that had a strange obsession with teeth; noble, dignified orcs with an innate connection to nature that were rather novel when she first met them but now seemed like much more of a bore. She could just about accept the idea that an orc could be an American.

But Brugga? She had watched him whip elves to death. He had wanted to make her his pet. Her blood boiled. He wanted to make me his pet!

“Olly?”

She gave a start, then realized she had been staring firmly at the tabletop and gripping it, white-knuckled. She glanced up to find Korak, Moyom and Jack looking at her. Brugga seemed to have become fascinated with an empty corner of the room. Projected onto the table was the hologram of a creature that was little more than a ball of fuzz with a long, needle-thin snout.

“We were just going to play a few rounds of Snood Hunt before we settled down to talk about the mission,” Korak said. “We were asking if you wanted to join in.”

Olyrean looked around the table and forcefully chiseled a smile into her face. “Sure,” she said, hoping that her voice didn’t sound as strained to them as it did to her. “I’m just going to go use the bathroom real quick. I’ll play a bit when I get back.”

Korak shrugged. She left the room just as they began to hurl their spears and the holographic Snood began to squeal and run about in panic.

She stalked through the twisting, too-green hallways clenching and unclenching her fists. Twice she became so annoyed by the greenness of the hallways that she wheeled to the wall and jabbed her finger at it, ready to yell, and only just managed to contain herself.

Finally, she made it to the bathroom. She shut the sound-proofed doorway behind her and held her breath for a moment. It was a very nice bathroom, all gleaming white tile with slight traces of gold inlay, kept perfectly clean between visits by maintenance drones.

Not a speck of dust or grime could be seen, and everything was just so. Perfect. It was exactly the sort of public bathroom you wanted to walk into, if you must, and for a moment it afforded her such a sense of satisfaction that the white-hot anger she had been holding back was almost entirely calmed.

Then she peered into a stall and noticed that the toilet paper roll had been put on backwards.

She screamed.

She screamed, and balled her fists until they were tiny hard knots and hammered at the mirror. She desperately wished it would break. She could really do with breaking something right now. The mirrors she had grown up with, those would have broken with a nice, satisfying shatter, and then she could have slumped to the floor and cried. That was the way these things were supposed to go.

This mirror, however, was unbreakable, and all it did was ask her, quite offended, what it was she thought she was doing. This only made her angrier and caused her to scream louder so she didn’t have to hear its stupid complaints. She was so angry that it felt as if her head might just drift right up off her neck like a balloon and burst against the ceiling.

And then in a flash of blue and red, Libby was there, staring with frightened alarm. Olyrean felt a sort of vicious glee at that. She had managed to scare an AI. Nothing ever did that.

“Olly!” Libby cried out, wincing at every pound of her fist. “Olly, please stop! You’re hurting yourself!”

Olyrean was about to tell her not to be stupid, that she was hurting the mirror, but she bit back on her retort when she noted that there was indeed blood smeared across the glass and speckling the sink and the fine white tile and her own clothes.

She drew back her fists. Her knuckles were skinned and bleeding. Her throat was raw and throbbing from how much she had been screaming. She thought it likely that she wouldn’t be doing much more screaming any time soon, so she let out one last strained, small shriek and then slumped against the wall, breathing heavily.

“Well,” said Libby after a few moments, “have you got it all out of your system?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Olyrean raised her head and tried to reply, but she found that the last scream had robbed her of her voice. She shrugged ruefully.

With a sigh, Libby waved her hand, and after a few moments a panel in the wall opened up to release a small swarm of bird-sized drones.

They flew in a circle around the bathroom, surveying, burbling and chirping to each other, before springing into action. Most of them went for the blood spatter that Olyrean had left behind, shooting out small streams of steaming foam from strawlike nozzles before happily slurping it back up and spitting it into the sink. Some of them went for Olyrean herself, cleaning the spots she had left on her outfit. One of them fussed over her knuckles, wiping them down. She hissed slightly as it coughed an antiseptic mist onto her cuts.

Another hovered before her face and shot a small scanning laser into her eyes. “Open wide, please,” it buzzed at her. Olyrean did so and then jerked back in shock as it spat something into her mouth. “Lozenge,” it told her, before she could spit it back out. Then it rejoined its brothers as they all tumbled after each other back into the hole in the wall, making it just half a second before the panel slid shut behind them.

The bathroom was clean and sparkling once more. So was she, except for some barely-noticeable cuts on her fingers.

“Better now?” asked Libby.

Olyrean didn’t hear her, and instead sucked on the lozenge. Whatever was in it had already soothed her throat, but she really didn’t feel like talking.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” said the AI. She brushed down her skirt and hopped up to sit on the edge of the sink. Tiny trails of stars lingered in the air behind her. “I have to say, I wasn’t really expecting that sort of reaction.”

“Not expecting it?” Olyrean scoffed. She would have shouted, but her voice was too weak for that. “He’s an orc! Not just any orc, an orc from my planet!”

“I know that.”

“You know? You know? They killed and enslaved my people, did you know that?!”

“Of course,” said Libby. “That’s sort of the point.”

Olyrean could only stare dumbly at her.

“I thought…well, the Executive AIs thought, and I agreed…that it would make a fine storyline,” Libby explained. “I mean, you know the documentaries…”

There were always brief documentaries made from every liberation team’s efforts on a particular planet, released onto the Omninet. Olyrean had always found them fascinating. Not only were the teams freeing a planet, but oftentimes there seemed to be so much romance and witty banter and informative advisories about which sports drinks best quenched your thirst.

“I do,” she said. “I watch them to go to sleep.”

Libby nodded. “Well, we just thought…it would be a good hook. You understand? We’re always on the lookout for situations that might spice things up. It can’t just be war crimes and crying orphans every episode. We thought, you know…two species, former deadly enemies, now working together to liberate others? Strong catch, right? Oh, don’t look at me like that, you didn’t think the docs were all totally spontaneous, did you?”

“No,” Olyrean said very stiffly. “I’m not so stupid. Just…last season, with the Nuudmort and the sentient mold. Did they really get married at the end…?”

Libby waved a hand idly. “I think they’re just dating now. Listen, the point is that we thought it would make a good message. But if you’re too racist–”

“Racist?” Olyrean sputtered. “Racist?! I’m not racist–he enslaved my people!”

“And then you were liberated,” Libby said calmly. “He couldn’t help that he was raised in his flawed, ignorant culture, could he? I mean, put yourself in his shoes. The very same might have happened to you. In fact, if America had arrived just a few millennia earlier, it would have. Did you know that you Sun-Elves used to hunt orcs for sport back on your planet? Bet they didn’t teach you that one, did they?”

Olyrean froze and shivered very slightly, like a struck bell. A creeping cold nervousness spread from her stomach through her veins. No, nobody had ever taught her that particular little episode of elven history. “I’m…sure they must have had their reasons,” she muttered. “You don’t understand. The orcs were monstrous.”

“Oh yes,” Libby said. “We’ve got some very interesting archaeological digs on your planet now, you know. Finding a lot of old mass graves of orcish women and children with their heads very neatly removed. It used to be an elvish tradition to polish and paint their skulls, it seems. Very artistic. Very good reason for all that slaughter.” She rolled her eyes.

Olyrean was experiencing the odd sensation of knowing that now she would have been horrified to learn of such a dark chapter of her race’s history, while simultaneously being aware that had she learned of it merely a year or two earlier, she would have been greatly amused, even proud of the fact. It was a little unnerving, like watching a movie you loved as a teenager as an adult and finally noticing that there seemed to be an awful lot more in the way of explosions and gratuitous nudity than there was of any coherent plot.

“So what are you saying?” she spat. “We deserved to be enslaved? Is that it?”

“No, of course not. Deserving doesn’t figure into it. Nobody deserved any of this. You didn’t deserve to be a slave, and he didn’t deserve to be raised a slaver. But what justice is there in hating people who had never been taught right from wrong? Brugga’s taken well to his civics lessons, and he knows better now.” Libby shrugged. “Besides, you don’t actually know whether he enslaved any of you specifically. It’s not right to hold him individually accountable for the crimes of his race.”

She didn’t know, Olyrean realized. Libby didn’t know that she did in fact know Brugga; didn’t know that she had watched him, specifically, whip and break his slaves. Didn’t know that he had tried, personally, to make her his pet. She stared at her friend, so perfect and composed and cheerful, with her patriotic little frills and her red-and-blue hair all done up in a bow and just so sweet and well-arranged and untouched.

She imagined telling the AI, watching that perfect composure crack, just a little. At that moment, she decided not to. At least not yet. Libby always seemed to know so much. Let her be wrong, for once.

“Let’s say you’ve got a point,” she said. “I…just…do I really have to work with him?”

“Oh, Olly, of course not.” The AI stepped toward her and swept her up in a hug. It was a ghost of an embrace, of course, touchless. She was a hologram, and there was no physicality to her. “The Executive AIs wouldn’t make you work with someone you weren’t comfortable with. Especially someone who caused you so much distress.”

“So you’ll kick him off the team?” Olyrean asked hopefully.

“Wellll, no.” The AI stepped back, holding onto her by the shoulders, not holding onto her at all. “The policy is that the one who causes the trouble has to leave, I’m afraid. But we could find you some other work, I’m sure of it.”

Olyrean was very quiet. She thought of SPECTRA. She thought of what it would mean to quit her first assignment before it had even begun. She thought of tired days melting away, blurring together, tending Old Mr. Fudwudder’s cabbage patch. She thought of Jack, and all he must have put up with to liberate her.

“No,” she said. If Jack could put his life on the line and fight in who-knew-how-many wars for her sake and for others, she could tolerate putting up with an orc for a single mission. “No, no, that’s not necessary. I’ll be fine. It was just a little repressed anger, that’s all. Seeing your civilization burned to the ground just…sort of does that, I suppose.” She barked a laugh so forced that it probably could have pressed charges for assault.

Libby nodded sympathetically. “Oh, I totally understand. You bio-Americans aren’t the only ones with emotions, you know. I can imagine how being enslaved might be a little damaging. In fact, I’ve run millions of simulations with different initialization parameters to explore the experience, and I found it rather unpleasant!”

“I’m sure you did,” Olyrean muttered. She hoped her outburst upon seeing Brugga hadn’t already jinxed things. Moyom and Jack must both know what was behind it, she realized. She had spoken to her friend about her past, and Jack had actually been there. Korak might be the only one who was actually confused.

Together they made their way back to the conference room. Or really, Libby just walked beside her, because when Olyrean got back she found that her friend was already there. She had never left. AIs were strange like that.

She joined in the game of Snood Hunt, all smiles and laughter as they splattered the holographic Snood’s innards against the walls and floor. She even forced herself to be civil to Brugga, politely passing him the Snoodhammer when it came time for him to be the Squasher, thanking him for the ginger ale, making sure that he got his slices of pizza. She could put up with it. She could smile at him. She could be sweet as sugar to this evil green freak.

Brugga began to seem a little nervous about how polite she was being, which only made her that much more gleeful. Why, she could be so kind to him that he’d die. Just die.

“Oh, nothing!” she declared very loudly when Moyom asked her what was wrong. “I’m just so glad I get to be on a team with you and Jack and everyone else and it’s just such an honor I’m happy I’m so happy.”

Moyom twittered her mandibles and groomed her antennae fretfully, but said nothing.

Finally, when the pizza and soda were gone and they were all content and entertained, Libby spoke up and said how glad she was to see they all got along. This was just an initial compatibility meeting for the team and, she said with a discreet wink in Olyrean’s direction, they had passed with flying colors.

The mission they were joined together on was to liberate the planet Quizbar, and they had all already received information briefing them on the local culture and situation, in some way or another. Over the coming weeks they would learn more about the specifics of their jobs and undergo an acclimatization process to the planet before they left. Their new schedules had been sent to their domestic AIs, and she would be happy to see them over the coming weeks.

They left together from the conference room, chatting among themselves as they walked their way through the winding green halls, boarding the elevators together, who exclaimed that they all just looked like little peas in a pod. Through the lobby, into the plaza, where bubble-cars bobbed in the air, waiting to take them home. There, as the others climbed in, Olyrean caught Brugga’s sleeve to hold him back a moment.

“Brugga,” she said, “I wanted to talk to you real quick.”

The orc, who had been avoiding looking at her for the past hour or so, chuckled nervously. Then he seemed to steel himself. “Of course,” he said. “I wanted to say something to you, too.”

“Oh. Why don’t you go first?”

Brugga glanced toward his waiting bubble-car, drummed his fingers nervously on his lapel, and took a deep breath. “I…I just wanted to say…I’m sorry.”

Olyrean stared at him.

“I know,” the orc went on. “Nothing I say is ever going to make up for it, of course. For, uh, you know. But I’m sorry for…for…well, everything. The way things were. Before we were, uh, liberated. For everything that we…that I…did.”

Olyrean continued to stare. Brugga blushed, which turned his face an alarming purple, and coughed awkwardly into a fist that was roughly the size, shape and smell of a month-old ham.

“I know how wrong it was, now,” he went on. “My instructors taught me that. They also told me I’d be unlikely to, uh, ever actually get forgiveness from my…victims.” He offered her a small smile, then seemed to quickly think better of it and became somber once more. “But I just wanted to say I’m sorry, anyway. If we’re going to work together, well…I…” He trailed off, looking at her expectantly.

“That’s very nice to hear,” Olyrean said, after a moment. “Thank you.”

A small hopeful grin spread across the orc’s face. “Uh,” he said, “you’re welcome. You had something you wanted to say to me, too?”

“Oh, I just wanted to ask a small favor, really.”

“Of course. Anything.”

Olyrean stepped very, very close to the orc. So close that he tried to step back in alarm, but she caught hold of the lapel of his suit and he froze like a cornered Snood. His stink washed over her in a wave so powerful that she could almost feel it, but she ignored it. Her eyes bored into his.

“Could you kill yourself?” she said, quietly.

Brugga became even stiller than he already was, which he could only achieve by ceasing to breathe.

“Please,” she said. “Please, can you kill yourself?”

“Uh,” said Brugga, “Um.”

“It doesn’t have to be painful,” she clarified. “You can go however you’d like. But can you just die? Can you? Please?”

Brugga didn’t answer her, and eventually she released him. She stared at him for a brief moment longer, then hurried across the plaza to join Moyom in her bubble-car. At the last moment, she turned, and with a crooked smile offered him a little half-wave. Brugga tried to wave back, and only managed to raise two fingers. She didn’t wait. Through the bubble-car’s skin she leaped, and then moments later it was soaring off, with a toodle-toodle-toodle-teeeeee whine.

“Well,” Brugga said to himself, “Shit.”