The main event of the Jamboree on the water planet is about to begin! Will Dex talk Jackie and Fran into participating? What could happen if they did? Ghost and Orchid enlist some assistance that helps them unearth some of the System's most disturbing secrets. We learn more about how Fran's chosen family back on Earth related to video games.


"Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang, and the music played…" (The Specials, Ghost Town)

Fran used to love listening to video game music on her computer with her headphones on. It had been one of the things that she’d done to cheer up when she’d been down - to regain Will-To-Lives when she’d been getting low on them, as they’d have said in their household by then. For a time, despite everything, she could block out everything she didn’t like about the world around her to escape completely into another world, a world that didn’t have anything to do with the jackal and her problems. In that world, she’d had a different name, she’d had a different life, no weird baggage, nothing but a world to save because it’d made her heart sing. It’d invited her to imagine a world that would’ve been worth saving.
She’d let out all the emotions she’d have to hold in around other people the rest of the time. No obstacle couldn’t be overcome if you’d been persistent enough, she’d felt. Fran had closed her eyes to let herself sink all the way into the music. She’d cry and laugh at the same time, letting out all her joy and sorrow without caring where one ended and the other one began.
In that world, she’d been free.
***
“What are you in for?”
Loom turned to Glew as they walked. “Me?” The brontosaur had accompanied Ghost, Orchid, Solder, and the glowworm on their journey to the ice caves. “Nothing, why?” The mantises had been trying to think outside the box by simply asking the toucan and Glew for help directly.
“She means,” Solder stepped in, “what’d you do to get assigned here with us?” If you told people what to do, they’d feel used - if you asked them for help, they’d feel useful, the Trackers had reasoned.
“Oh, I’m no Renegade.” There had been another reason for the mantises to have brought the glowworm and the toucan along besides just their skills as well, mind you. “I’m just here to help look around in the ice tunnels with my neck.” If the Trackers had questioned Glew and Solder directly, they’d have probably been suspicious and resisted revealing anything.
“Are you a Tracker?” If the mantises simply took the glowworm and the toucan along for the ride and gave them an objective to focus on, though, there may have been a chance that one of them would forget herself and accidentally say something useful on the way, they’d figured.
“No, why would you think that?” Loom asked Glew.
Solder gestured at the brontosaur and at Ghost. “You have matching scarves!”
***
“You should try it too!” The Jamboree gave each Citizen a chance to shine when they could afford to go. That was another thing about it.
“You can’t be serious.” Every Jamboree, a few days in, there would be an open demonstration for any set of skills anyone wanted to show off on a center stage in front of the vast majority of the Jamboree’s attendants.
“Maybe you’d like it.” In practice, not everyone got to attend as often as they’d like but, in theory, if everyone could’ve somehow shown up, the series of demonstrations should’ve been kept open for as long as it would’ve taken for everyone there to have gotten a chance to take part.
“What if they don’t like it?” Dex was trying to talk Fran into signing up for it.
“Who cares what they think?” Stage fright fought for the jackal’s soul with a deep, newfound desire to become a part of what she’d always only watched and heard.
“If I don’t care what they think, why am I doing it?” Since there were no races, only one member of each species, the System didn’t have ‘cultures’ the way they existed on Earth as such, they had Cultures of One.
“They’ll like it, you’ll see!” There wasn’t a culture that had invented fire dancing, there was one moth who’d invented it and her name was Linda. “You won’t like everyone else’s performances.” Linda’s progress was the status of fire dancing. “They’re still doing them.” Every Jamboree, you could track the progress of every Culture of One that was available at the time.
“Dex has a point,” Jackie chipped in.
“Are you doing one?” Fran asked.
“Hell no,” the roach laughed.
“What does that mean?” Dex turned to Jackie quizzically.
“Must’ve picked it up,” the roach shrugged. “I’ve done mine a million times, people are sick of them by now,” she waved off.
“I don’t know, you haven’t done one in a while by now,” Dex remarked.
“Don’t you start,” Jackie warned.
“You’ve gotten a lot better since last time, at that,” Dex went on.
“I’ll go if you go,” the jackal offered the roach.
“Oh, fine,” Jackie sighed. “Deal.”
***
“What do they do the rest of the time?” Fran’s roommate had just punished a monster in an ancient video game for having committed the ancient video game crime of walking back and forth. “Do you ever think about that?” There hadn’t seemed to have been much else for the monster to do when she’d walked in, mind you.
“Oh, yes!” she’d nodded while she’d fought yet another monster. “I have opinions about that, as a matter of fact,” the jackal’s roommate had added, tongue-in-cheek.
“Like what?” The game’s protagonist had just found a way to break through a secret passage somewhere.
“It’s taken them a while to finally address a lot of the absurdity of in-game physics like that,” Fran’s roommate had started off. “These days, you walk into a bandit cave, there’s like, one of the bandits is cooking, two of them are arguing, one of them is guarding the place, they’re like, a full-on bandit community, you know?” The jackal had nodded. “They were doing something when you showed up. I feel like that also reflects overcoming a failure of imagination on a social and individual level on a wider scale though,” Fran’s roommate had elaborated.
“What do you mean?” The game’s protagonist had gotten a power-up! A short musical theme had cheered her success.
“Well, think about it,” the jackal’s roommate had continued. “When colonizers showed up everywhere, all they could do was think of the world in terms of it having been built and organized around their needs. Something had to force them to learn to think beyond that.”
“That’s true.”
“You go about your day and you see people in terms of how you’re interacting with them then: bus driver, teacher, street performer, co-worker, cashier. You picture where you see them around them whenever you think of them like a fighting game character’s background. But like... You don’t picture them at home, eating, sleeping, needing love like everyone else. It takes a specific mental effort to think of other people in terms of their needs, not just in terms of yours.”
***
Part of Ghost was glad she hadn’t seen what the creature had been up to before they’d showed up. It’s true that it would’ve been useful for her to see because it could’ve given her a better idea of how to solve their case. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she’d have wanted to have to spend the rest of her life with those images in her mind.
Ghost, Orchid, Solder, Glew, and Loom all gasped when they walked in. In all their time in the System, it was nothing like anything they’d ever seen. They’d all Cleaned people at some point or other in their lives, but this was on a whole other level.
There were no corpses in the ice cavern they’d discovered as such, but what they found chilled them all to the bone nonetheless (well, only Solder and Loom had bones as such, but still). Something about it might have reminded an Earthling of a wax museum right out of a horror movie, but with ice instead of wax. Not the ones where the wax figures look like they’re about to come to life, to be clear.
The ice cavern was full of ice sculptures of Citizens being killed in a variety of grisly methods, each designed to strike the mind with more revulsion than the last. Their corpses themselves had long since been Cleaned. Intellectually, the five ice spelunkers knew that at least most of the Citizens that the ice sculptures represented had probably already been brought back to life and had probably already been back to work for a while. Be that as it may, here laid their tortured memory of death still, frozen in their perpetual state of unrest as if in some way, somehow, the pain that they’d experienced then and there would always continue to exist.
Orchid asked herself who would do such a thing and why. Whoever had done this wanted to be able to remember the pain she’d inflicted on Citizens for a long time. They seemed to be getting closer and closer to Kacey’s killer, but what would happen when they found her?
And there, in the center of it all, was a giant ice pillar with Tilly in it, stuck in suspended animation with an expression of abject terror frozen on her face...
***
The attendees’ performances left Fran’s jaw agape.
An anemone played drums with a clownfish who played wind instruments. Dyson used her tongue as a whip on targets. A cyber-caterpillar played herself like an accordion. She marveled at Crane’s weightlifting. Chime’s singing brought a smile to her face and tears to her eyes. Dobson put on a light show with her body like a rave. The jackal applauded the swan’s figure skating. Sponge’s trunk gave a splashy water show. A koala put on an eye-laser sharpshooting show. An albatross gave a poetry reading. A polar bear broke some ice blocks with her hands. A spider played the harp on her own web strands. She cheered the rainbowfish and zebrafish’s synchronized swimming. And yes, Linda fire-danced. She was pretty good!
“It’s your turn.” What a tough act to follow. “Knock ‘em dead!”
***
“You can’t play games by yourself anymore,” Fran’s best friend had shaken her head, “It’s not allowed.” The jackal had raised an eyebrow at her. “I basically stopped playing games for a while in the early aughts when everything became an MMORPG or an FPS,” her best friend had gone on. “When I was a kid, games were like this comfort thing I’d do to recover by myself when I’d start feeling overextended around other people, you know?” Fran had nodded. “Being around people meant failure and success mattered, people would judge you if you failed. If I failed at a game by myself, no one had to know. It was freeing. Now you have to be on a team and if you’re not a team player people get mad. That’s not a game, it’s work.”
***
“Jackie?”
The roach pulled out her communicator surreptitiously, switching to written communication so she wouldn’t disrupt the attendees’ performances. ‘S’up, Ghost?’
‘You at the Jamboree?’ the mantis wrote back.
‘We’re watching the show off as we speak,’ Jackie replied. ‘What’s this about?’
‘If anyone there seems a bit too good at ice sculpture, please let us know, kay?’
***
Fran finally stepped onstage in front of everyone, hundreds of Citizens attending the Jamboree all sitting in a big concave circle around her facing her in the center, waiting to see what she was going to do next. While everyone else’s demonstrations were often gauged in reference to the last time they’d performed, no one there had ever seen what the jackal could do before, so they had no idea what to expect. All the expectations they’d have in the future would probably be shaped by this first performance. You only get to make one first impression, after all. The roach had helped her set up her recovered phone so that she could play music from Earth over the loudspeakers from it as she’d perform. They were just coming on. It worked!
Fran’s heart raced. She’d picked Hail From The Past, her favorite Castlevania song.
She stood up under the spotlight, arms over her head thrown back as the first few notes trickled in like a few grains of sand starting to fall on her head to trail down her skin. They say to dance like no one’s watching, but, for once, the jackal wanted to dance like everyone was watching. You wanted that. The sound enveloped her like a cocoon, the stage her playground, the music her sword and shield. For a second, she just let it wash over her, letting anticipation build as her heartbeat slowly synchronized with the notes. The light show created the illusion of a desert around Fran. The temperature onstage had been raised slightly and fans had been turned on to complete the impression of the desert wind, to give her a home field advantage.
She let the first wave of sound push one of her arms down across the other then switched for the second, arms slithering over her head like snakes on a gorgon’s. The jackal’s arms fell like they turned to sand at her sides, trying to catch each other only to be foiled by their own dissolution. Her body dropped as if in a pool of quicksand on the ground before she carefully returned to normal, ready for whatever came next. Dancing was shapeshifting. You became whatever the thing you thought about was, and moved to make people see it too. That was how she thought of it. This had always been Fran’s dream, she didn’t want to blow it. She let the wind catch her arms like windmills, letting them drag her along for the ride.
She turned and turned, letting the wind push and pull at her arms from in front of her and from behind every which way, caught in an updraft that sank into a dust devil to come back up on a dune. The jackal stopped for a moment then, as if by itself, her foot started tapping the ground to the beat, soon joined by her clapping hands, soon joined by the clapping hands of the audience around her. She smiled. They were getting into it! Fran started moving in expanding counterclockwise circles then seamlessly into contracting clockwise circles as part of the same movement, following the music as it rose and fell. Her arms turned into snakes trying to escape everywhere around her, but she got them under control, confident they’d never try to run again.
The jackal had completely forgotten all about Earth, the System, Trackers, Renegades, food, syringes, barter, the investigation, everything but the movement and the sound, her and the crowd, here and now. She was now the desert that was all that mattered. She became a sandstorm, stumbling forward like a person dying of thirst in the desert only to turn into a scorpion on her hands with a foot dangling overhead. Fran seemed to stumble back, barely catching herself forward before throwing her arms right back over her head into a backflip on her hands, her feet landing behind her almost casually before she stood back up from it like a whole new person. She kept moving to the music, becoming things, taking the crowd with her.
It was glorious. She could live for moments like these, if she had to, she thought.
***
“I can’t play games alone anymore,” Fran’s roommate had shaken her head, “It feels stupid.”
The jackal had raised an eyebrow at her.
“I was basically a shut-in when I was a kid,” Fran’s roommate had gone on. “I’d play games alone, watch TV alone, listen to music alone, read books alone, all in silence. It took me half my life to break out of that. They use talking machines for neurodivergent people like us to talk to just to spare real human beings from having to talk to us, but we deserve a chance to interact with real people. Now I watch TV so I can share jokes over it. I play games so we can give each other advice about it. I listen to music so we can ask each other questions about it. I read books people lend me to discuss them with them. I can’t think of media as a way to escape people now, just to connect with them. I never want to envision having to be that person again.”
***
“She was in a deep state of suspended animation,” Collider explained. “We’ll do our best, but like, if I told you we can guarantee we’ll break her out faster than Sawtooth, I’d be lying to you, Officer.”
“Just let me know as soon as you can get her out of there,” the mantis sighed. “Did you learn anything thawing out Sawtooth?”
“We learned our projections about how long it’d take to get her out were way off,” the hadrosaur shook her head. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“No, I get that,” the Tracker nodded. “I just want to waste as little time as necessary,” she explained. “I have a feeling Tilly might blow this case wide open.”
“There’s something you should know,” Collider added darkly.
“What’s that?” Ghost threw her scarf over her shoulder.
“Whoever did this to her ripped her needles right out of her back,” the hadrosaur shuddered.
***
Jackie held up her knitting needles and her carving knife in three of her hands for all the world to see, ready for her turn to come.
It was going to be a juggling act.
It had surprised Fran at first but, when she’d really thought about it, it had ended up making a lot of sense to her. A lot of the roach’s life had already been spent trying to keep too many things going in the air at the same time. It was a fitting extension of this that she would’ve practiced how to do this as well as possible on a physical level, just as she had to be able to do metaphorically. It may have helped her practice a similar set of skills, in its own way.
Jackie took a deep breath, gathered momentum, and - all hell broke loose.
At that point, a lot of things started happening at the same time. A giant plesiosaur made of glass lifted her neck out of the water near the Jamboree. A lot of Renegades came at the Jamboree’s installations and attendees in droves. It was like a coordinated attack coming at them from every direction, without warning or explanation. A directed sonic blast started coming out of the giant glass plesiosaur’s mouth, cutting a swath of destruction across the entire area.
The roach almost dropped her knitting needles and knife, but, good thing she didn’t.
The attendees ran everywhere in a panic as shattered construction materials fell and water leaks sprung up in the water park around them. The air was almost hard to see through, thick with dust and water droplets as it was. The chaos was similar to the chaos that Bertha had caused on the desert planet, come to think of it, but the jackal also noticed the differences right away. These people weren’t just lashing out at random the way the giant centipede had been.
These people had a plan.
No one seemed to know exactly what was happening. It all happened so fast. A pack of Renegades fell on Dex, Jackie, and Fran, and the trio had to defend themselves from their attackers.
An armadillo chased the jackal into the kangaroo’s reach but, before her hook reached Fran, the jackal side-rolled into the kangaroo’s legs knocking her on her face. A ladybug chased the roach into a lemur’s uppercut, but Jackie threw her torso back sliding under it between the lemur’s legs. Dex did a ‘handspin’ on her crinoid tendrils, flamingo legs in a side split kicking a pangolin and seahorse on each side. As the armadillo struggled to find a way around the prone kangaroo, the jackal grabbed the kangaroo’s heels to swing her around into the armadillo’s face. The roach did a wall leap to dodge the lemur’s sweep, drop kicking her into the ladybug. Dex went back onto her crinoid tendrils, her legs throwing a tapir’s head into a waterbug behind her.
Fran got an idea and pulled her earplugs out of her pocket. Back on Earth, she’d often used to get overwhelmed in noisy areas because of her neurodivergence. She’d started carrying earplugs with her everywhere she’d gone to make her life easier in case she ran into a situation like it. Now, the jackal installed them in her ears, then located and moved a waterslide-like structure so it’d be aimed at a springboard just the way she wanted it. Protected from the worst of the sound, or at least more used to pushing through being overwhelmed by it than most people, she climbed up the ladder, rode down the waterslide at top speed, and bounced on the springboard, launching into a series of flips aimed right at the giant glass plesiosaur’s open jaw.
Fran slid down the giant glass plesiosaur’s neck like another waterslide, corkscrewing on her way down to land inside the plesiosaur’s clear body, her control center, where she was being piloted by someone the jackal recognized from when Jackie had told Fran about her.
It was Siren.
At first it had seemed plausible that random Renegades would also have been attacking a Jamboree. It had certainly come as a surprise. Even the more frequent attacks on the Revival chambers were still something that people were getting adjusted to. No one had ever attacked a Jamboree. In the context of the chamber attacks, they did seem to establish some precedent. The blue jay’s loyalty to the Commission had never seemed in question. Either Siren had been an undercover Renegade infiltrating the Commission the whole time somehow, or it was the Commission who’d ordered this attack against the Jamboree, wanting Citizens to blame Renegades. In that moment, these weren’t the foremost thoughts in the jackal’s mind, mind you.
All she could think about was how, after everything that the blue jay had already done to Fran’s partner in the past, as if that hadn’t already been bad enough as it was, after Dex and the jackal had struggled to convince the roach to perform despite her reluctance, after Jackie had even pushed past it herself, Siren had to show up, and fuck that up for Jackie too.
Some people who saw what happened from the shore assumed Fran must’ve physically shattered the glass from the inside, possibly slamming the blue jay’s body into it somehow. Much later, the roach got the jackal to admit what really happened was that Fran did something to Siren that hurt her so much that she emitted a note so high that it shattered the entire giant glass plesiosaur around them. What the jackal did to her as such, Jackie never got her to admit.
***
“I think for me a lot of it comes down to I’m good at it,” Fran had told her best friend as she’d played. “There’s so many things in life I’m not good at, you know?”
Her best friend had looked up. “Really, you think so?” The game’s protagonist had leapt expertly, swinging off a vine with perfect timing.
“Oh, yeah!” The jackal’s avatar had rolled, spared from the swinging blade by a hair’s width. “I can’t cook, I can’t code, I can’t drive, I can’t build furniture, but I can sure as shit play video games!” She’d chopped off a monster’s head effortlessly, without even fully paying attention. “No one can take that away from me.” She’d collected the cloud of coins the monster had burst into before moving on.
“Why’d you stop for so long?” Fran’s best friend had tilted her head.
“I don’t know,” the jackal had shrugged. “Lot of reasons. No reason. Long story. I forget. Maybe I had to forget to come back. Good to play again, though.” The game’s protagonist had broken down a door with a swift kick through it.
“If a shark doesn’t swim it dies, if a rabbit doesn’t chew it dies...” Fran’s best friend had thought out loud. “If you have wings, but you don’t fly too long, maybe they fall off.” The jackal’s virtual avatar had conquered a series of walls and ledges with some well-practiced wall leaps, unfazed. “You gotta be able to do your thing that says ‘me!’ to live, don’t you?”