“Next!”
Miliam approached the counter, feeling very much like she was back in the DMV. Aoibhe had abandoned her to her fate and taken a seat near the entrance to the room. Apparently that was why she’d declined to have the phones initialized- it was something to do while Miliam was stuck dealing with this.
“What can I help you with?” asked the white-winged woman at the counter. Miliam tried to remember what Aoibhe had told her to say at least half an hour ago.
“I’m looking to register as an immigrant?” she asked, unsure of herself.
“Alright, just one moment…” the woman said, reaching for a tablet and tapping the screen a few times before handing it to Miliam. “First go ahead and fill out this form, and then we can talk about the details.”
Miliam accepted the device and looked at the questions, which were fortunately in English. That wasn’t a huge surprise given that Aoibhe knew the language; it was likely the common tongue. She found herself stumped by literally the first field: last name. Technically she still had one, but she didn’t really feel like that person anymore. While she could come up with one on the spot, she’d already done that with her first name, and didn’t really want to decide so quickly a second time.
“What if I…don’t have a last name?” Milliam managed to ask after a pause, not sure how the question would be taken. The government employee looked perplexed for a moment, before asking a question Miliam didn’t understand the relevance of.
“Which colony are you immigrating from?”
Miliam glanced back at Aoibhe, who mouthed a name. Nodding to herself, and having read that entirely correctly, Miliam turned back to tell the worker.
“Ass Soaps.” She didn’t know why anyone would name a colony that, but people could be weird, and she’d lived near a town called ‘Cumming’, so it wasn’t that bad.
“I’ve never heard of a colony named…Ass Soaps. Do you mean Glass Slopes?”
Her face immediately lighting on fire, Miliam nodded repeatedly while trying to ignore Aoibhe’s laughter in the background.
“It’s alright, I get it, this is a nerve wracking process. Glass Slopes though…that would certainly explain it. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. Those independent colonies always attract the loonies,” the lady said in a reassuring tone, making Miliam wonder what the hell was going on in Glass Slopes. “You’re not the first, so it’s not a required field. Just think about it and decide on a last name for when you get your citizenship.”
Miliam thanked her and went back to the form, spending what felt like an eternity filling out her first name, hair color, and a variety of basic medical history and education level questions, current place of residence- she wrote down the Seppa’s Prize-, current occupation- unemployed-, and so on, before coming back to the three she really didn’t have an answer to: eye color, height, and weight. The latter two were a reasonable enough question that she could get away with asking, so she started there.
“And…what if I don’t know my height and weight?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got spells for measuring both for just that situation. A lot of people haven’t measured or weighed themselves recently when they get here. May I?” The woman held up a nondescript grimoire. At least, Miliam assumed that’s what it was. She was getting to the point where she was just going to assume everything was a grimoire until stated otherwise.
“How much detail does that give you, exactly?” Miliam’s main concern was that she wasn’t really hoping to learn her full measurements in an immigration office, but she also worried that the spell might let the caster see through her clothes or something like in an airport scanner.
“Just your mass in kilograms and your height in centimeters. It’s a government-issue grimoire, so the spells are preset and our usage of it is reviewed.” Mollified, Miliam gave her assent and the woman pushed some buttons on her little grimoire, which greatly resembled a TV remote. After just a few seconds she leaned in to whisper the answers, which Miliam was thankful for. “173 centimeters and 54 kilograms.”
Miliam hurried to write those down, but she had no idea what the numbers translated to in freedom units. Thanking the clerk, she decided to ask Aoibhe what the answer to the final question was, since she knew the full circumstances involved. She asked the clerk if she could step away for a moment and made her way to Aoibhe’s seat.
“Aoibhe, what’s my eye color?”
“Bright orange,” was the answer, which made Miliam immediately suspicious that she was being messed with.
“You’re kidding. That’s not even a real eye color,” she asserted, only for Aoibhe to take a photo with her grimoire and flip it around to reveal Miliam’s face, which she was now seeing for the first time. She thought the girl in the picture was rather cute, and she felt a warm, pleasant feeling inside at the knowledge that it was her. But just as Aoibhe claimed, orange eyes stared back at her, set in a face framed by the silver hair she already knew she had.
“I kind of assumed it was on purpose.”
“Who would make their eyes bright orange on purpose?”
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“Plenty of people. Were you not paying attention to all the different hair and eye colors people had on the way here?”
“I thought they were aliens!” Miliam hissed.
“Why would aliens just look like humans with different color palettes?” asked the alien that looked like an Irish person in a funhouse mirror. Miliam just shook her head, then filled out the field for eye color on the tablet and returned to the counter in disbelief. She handed the tablet back to the employee there, who looked it over to make sure everything was in order.
“Alright, looks good. Now, I’ll be giving you an information packet that you’ll want to read later, but we can go over the important details now to make sure you’re fully aware.” She looked at something on her side of the counter; probably a checklist she needed to go through. “Per the Gaian Collective charter, as a member of a Collective species, you have expedited priority. There will be a two year probationary period before you are granted citizenship, during which you will need to have an employment record and at the end of which you must have no convictions or ongoing trials. Acquittals or not guilty verdicts will not count against you.”
“That’s it? No tests or background checks or anything?” Before answering, the woman tapped something on her screen to check off the first point.
“If you were from a non-member species you would have to undergo a more rigorous process. Member species don’t have as many hoops to jump through…though explaining all the reasons why would take too much time.”
“Do you get a lot of immigrants from non-member species?” Miliam asked, inadvertently derailing the conversation.
“Mostly sahagin. There’s a lot of ocean floor we’re not using, and a lot of industries benefit from having workers that can exploit resources down there.” The woman paused, waiting to see if Miliam had any further questions before continuing.
“Huh. And how many member species are there, anyway?”
“Around a couple dozen or so, I believe. We’ve got…humans, fay, dwarves, gnomes, harpies, centaurs, naga, merfolk, dokkaebi, sasquatch, huli jing, dryads, oni, lupines, and satyrs, just off the top of my head...and I think it can get up to around three dozen if you include the ethnicities that don’t like being lumped together, particularly a few of the harpy and oni-“
“Uh, that’s all right, I just wanted a number,” Miliam hurriedly interjected before things could get further into the weeds. She was tempted to ask where the clerk’s race fell, given that ‘angel’ hadn’t been one of the species mentioned, but she was smart enough to realize it was almost certainly a matter that fell into the discussion on ethnicities she’d narrowly avoided. For her part, the government worker seemed to realize she’d been getting off track and checked her screen to see where she’d been.
“Anyway, the other important thing to note is that you will not have access to government services until you acquire full citizenship.”
“What services are those, exactly?” Miliam wasn’t really expecting access to them anyway, but it would be nice to know what they were in advance. Though, for that matter, she didn’t wake up this morning expecting to be in an immigration office. In all the stories she’d read, people just kind of popped up in a new world and bounced about as they pleased.
“Healthcare, housing, schooling, and basic necessities are the main ones. You can still pay for medical services and housing, of course, but you won’t have priority unless it’s life threatening as far as healthcare goes.”
Miliam blinked a couple times.
“Citizens get free housing?” she asked, wondering how that worked. The healthcare wasn’t that unusual on Earth and basic rations sounded like a food stamps program, so those she just filed away as information for Future Miliam.
“Right. Glass Slopes just lets people be homeless, if I remember correctly? In the Collective, shelter is a basic right, although the accommodations are essentially just a small room with a bed and some storage, along with access to public bathing facilities.”
“Does the government just keep like, tens of thousands of empty rooms available on every planet for when people need them…? Isn’t that expensive?”
“Well, this was all decided hundreds of years ago, so I’m fuzzy on the details, but I think at the time it was determined to be cheaper in the end than dealing with all the complications of a homeless population.” The woman shrugged, a motion that Miliam noticed involved not just her shoulders, but also her wings. “Rights groups were also pushing for it, so I suppose it was a rare instance of pragmatism and compassion aligning. I believe they do cut down on expenses by having residents clean unoccupied rooms.”
Miliam wondered what other things were different from back home. It was kind of hard to ask though, given that she still unsure if she was in the future or a different timeline, so any questions she asked might be entirely nonsensical from the perspective of the…angel?...in front of her.
“Now, one service you do have access to is a basic smart grimoire so that we can contact you if needed. Will you be needing one?”
“Ah, no, my friend bought me one before we came here,” Miliam told her, pointing towards Aoibhe, who took notice and stood up.
“Alright, I’ll need to take down your contact information and register the device- oh, thank you,” the clerk said, accepting Miliam’s grimoire from Aoibhe. She held device close to something on her side of the counter and a ‘ding’ was heard a moment later. “There we go…your information packet will be sent directly to your grimoire, so make sure to review it at your convenience.”
“Thanks,” Miliam said as she accepted the return of her grimoire. Hopefully it worked the same as a phone, but if not, she’d just ask Aoibhe. Speaking of the elf, she turned to her next. “So what are we doing next?”
“Next…I was planning on getting a quote for the ship’s repairs, but on second thought, we should get you some new clothes,” Aoibhe said, a wicked grin on her face that told Miliam she’d just been designated as a dress up doll.
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Codex Entry: Independent Colonies
Independent colonies are planets that have entirely rejected association with a particular government and elected to settle somewhere outside of controlled space. Nations can only control as many systems as they have resources to place ships in, so there is plenty of unclaimed real estate in the gaps this leaves.
These independents are often formed by tightly knit fringe groups, particularly religious ones. There is no unifying theme to them, but they are often regarded poorly by those living in nations, both due to their often extreme and regressive customs and the sheer insanity of living outside the protective umbrella of a fleet. Independent colonies are lucky to have a handful of poorly maintained corvettes for self defense, and will sometimes form deals with pirates and other outlaws to bring in more income and avoid becoming targets themselves.
Although independent colonies are usually formed to escape what they view as government overreach or to enforce morals outside the mainstream, there is a noted tendency for them to undergo gradual shifts in culture over time, eventually leading to moderates taking over and petitioning for member status wherever their ancestors originated from. The extremists then pack up and leave to form their own colony again, starting the cycle anew.