Thorin recognized his friend’s shaggy, raven hair from across the pub.
The friend saw him out of the corner of his eye. “Traxila 12-Year for him, too, Yuni,” he said to the plump, red-haired and rosy-cheeked barmaid as Thorin took the bar stool next to him.
“Been here long, Frito?” Thorin asked his friend.
“Mmm,” Geoff grunted. He hated the nickname, Frito, but his fourth drink had put him past the threshold of caring, and his seventh and eighth had numbed his tongue to a degree.
The two friends sat quietly, sipping their drinks. Frito finished his. Yuni brought him another.
Frito ate some Fritos.
Thorin was already starting to sense that Frito had something on his mind, so he asked him about his day and steadied himself.
“Fifteen years!” Frito ejaculated immediately. “To the day!”
“I know,” Thorin said as Yuni poured him another alien whiskey. “Fucking Badgers.”
“You know what really gets me?” Frito spit. “Do you know?”
“Yes,” Thorin said under his breath before saying, “No, Frito, what gets you?”
Frito ranted without taking a breath. “How many planets do you think the Badgers have wiped out by now? A thousand? Ten thousand? Species we’ve never heard of and never will, conquered and enslaved until they’ve been worked to extinction, thousands of them, and not one has ever stood up and stopped it all.”
“But that’s not what really—” Thorin began resignedly.
“—What really kills me, Thorin. What really kills me, is how it got like this.” Thorin stopped listening. “What really kills me is that the fucking Badgers got lucky. They left their home planet that they probably don’t even remember anymore, left it, flew to another planet, realized they just happened to have just enough of an advantage to take it over, and then did it.”
Thorin knew the next line. “So they got stronger because of it, and that just made the next species easier to overtake.”
“Exactly!” Frito loved it when people agreed with him. “Take over, grow, build, learn, repeat, so on and so forth, and now no one can stand up to them! Thousands of worlds since that first one, and not one has stopped them.”
An angry, furry, black-and-white face looked into the pub. Frito got quiet for a moment. The face moved on.
“Y’know,” Frito started more quietly, “If this was a movie, we’d be that world.”
“Yup,” Thorin said.
“Remember movies?”
“Yup,” Thorin said.
There was a long pause. Frito asked for another drink. Yuni did not give one to him.
Thorin broke the silence. “At least they take care of us.” He saw Frito’s look of shock. “At the biological level, I mean. Horrors we never could have imagined fifteen years ago, right, yeah, but look. They give us food, and water, and alcohol, and sex, and we’re all healthier than we’ve ever been in ten thousand years.”
“Well yeah mate, they can’t exactly let us die. We can’t work when we’re dead, because that’s when we stop moving.”
Another, shorter pause.
“Remember mortality?”
“Brevity, man. That’s where it’s at.” Frito was becoming melodramatic. “The cool comfort of oblivion, man.”
Thorin and Frito sat. Frito drank some water.
“What do they even get out of us, man?” Frito said. “They’re stronger than us, smarter, taller. There’s nothing we can do for them that they can’t do better themselves.”
Thorin shrugged. A clock chimed 3 o’clock. The black-and-white face returned, followed by its accompanying furry, rotund, yet thoroughly intimidating body. The Badger shouted slowly in Traxilian for Shift 3 to report.
“Fucking Badgers,” Frito murmured as quietly as he could.
Thorin and Frito walked silently out of the pub and into a sprawling room full of cloth covered partitions. No sound could be heard apart from a quiet, arrhythmic tapping, drowned slightly by the buzz of the bright lights overhead.
At a gap in one of the partitions, Thorin waved goodbye to his friend and walked down a hallway, his footsteps dampened by the soft floor.
Thorin entered his work area. A note from Frito was on his screen. “Remember forty hour work weeks?” it said.
Thorin smiled, then stopped. He opened a spreadsheet.
He typed.
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