“This is nice,” I said, seated at the edge of the cliff face and tearing huge, fatty chunks of seasoned meat from my piping hot leg of mutton. Despite appearance, we still counted as within the town’s Safe Zone, and our adventuring clocks were still counting up—which made the ledge a perfect spot for a private lunch.
“It’s amazing!” said Cuby, eating at almost double the rate that I was and seeming for all the world like someone who hadn’t just been told a secret that could threaten the stability of her entire society.
I didn’t quite have the heart to tell Cuby that sharing meals—a very human sort of thing to enjoy—often involved more than just chowing down on a slab of meat like this one: that it involved preparing the food, having a space devoted to eating it in, and usually having more than one thing to eat along with more than one person to share it with. Not only would it undermine her current state of joy, but it was sort of… wrong. This was nice.
“I don’t get it,” I said, holding my leg of mutton aside for a second. “I haven’t been hungry since we got here, but now I feel like I’ve been starving.”
“Mmph!” said Cuby. After a great deal of chewing had taken place, she added: “the default setting is context-based hunger!” Then she tore another wad of meat out of her leg.
“Default setting?” I asked. “There’s settings?” Then, realizing that they must work the same way everything else does, I thought about it hard enough to bring up a menu that wasn’t a part of my UI. “Oh, I got it.”
“It’s in bodily functions,” said Cuby.
“Interesting set of settings,” I said, navigating to the relevant option to find a menu filled with things that fascinated me. Hunger was indeed set to contextual, which apparently meant that I’d get hungrier the closer I got to eating something—that I could tell if food smelled good, but only when it was right in front of me would my body start acting like it hadn’t been fed in a while, as it was doing now. “Hunger is the best seasoning, I suppose.”
There were more options. I could turn up how much pain I felt from attacks—the default was the minimum amount, unfortunately. I could turn my Eating and Hunger setting to “realistic”—which came with several warnings about food affecting mood, weight, and bodily comfort. There were Waste settings as well—I suppose for those who wanted to feel what it was like to have a true-to-life human shit. Sexual Function had its own bevy of settings to be toggled with—something I was not prepared to think about now. It was clear from the setting I had on right now that I would never actually get full—that I could just eat until there was no food in front of me, at which point my body would feel satisfied.
“The wonders of transhumanist videogames,” I said. “Potions of sociopathy, toggleable asexuality, and everlasting feasts.”
“Mmm?”
“This is so fascinating to me, is all,” I said. “These aren’t things that you can do where I’m from. But also….”
I kept navigating through the settings with my mind as I tore off another hunk of meat. The UI settings had something I was interested in: I could modify the simplified view on my spells. “This is nice,” I said. “I can get all my spells to always show their components and their spellcraft requirements. The math on these spell augments is getting a little crazy, and my Rune Trap Spell won’t make that better.”
“Mmph,” Cuby said approvingly. She looked over at my leg of mutton, then at hers, then swallowed. “Am I eating too fast?”
“Just make sure you chew enough, and you’re fine.”
“How do I know if I’ve chewed enough?”
“Does it hurt when you swallow it?”
“No. But it feels weird sometimes.”
“Well… see if chewing more doesn’t make it feel weird,” I said, trying not to burst into laughter at the absurdity of the conversation. I put my menus away and tried to focus on enjoying breakfast. We ate in mostly silence for a few minutes, and then Cuby said:
“So you’ll tell me all about what it’s like to be human, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “Though while I can tell you all about my life before I came here, I never particularly thought of any of it as ‘being human’.”
“So was everyone human, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Like Enzal before the Subjugation War.”
“If you say so.”
“And you didn’t choose to come here? It was like the lottery?”
“Yes,” I said. “And while there wasn’t much going on in my life… I’d very much like to get back to it. It’s nice to cast spells and all, but even I had people I cared about back home.”
“Oh,” Cuby said. “Like a mate?”
“No.”
“You were mateless, then.”
I glanced over at her in annoyance—a look she didn’t see, as she was busy attending her absurd slab of meat. “Yes.”
“All phrenodine are mateless,” Cuby said.
“I had a girlfriend,” I said. “But we split about a year back.” I shrugged. “We might’ve been a good fit, but she didn’t like the city.”
“So you were searching for a mate?”
“No,” I said. “I was too busy searching for a job for that.”
“A job?”
“A career. A vocation.”
“Ah. I see. You have to… find those where you come from?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We seek out employers who might have a position in whatever company they’re a part of that we can fill.”
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Cuby seemed to think on this a moment, then nodded. “I think I understand.”
“I lost my old job two months ago,” I said, wearied by the thought of it.
“What was your job?”
“I was a marketing manager at an ad firm,” I said. “Though that might not tell you much—I didn’t even really do the normal job that a marketing manager does. I worked at a company whose job it was to convince the general population to buy the products of other companies. My boss—the chief marketing manager—would come up with the big plans for how we did this. I assisted him because I was in line to take his job one day, but my actual main role within the company was multifaceted.” I paused, instinctively wanting to be careful about saying the next part. “One of the main things I did was research, actually. Not original research, is the thing, but….”
I looked over at Cuby, who had turned to give me her rapt attention. I’d never had someone so obviously interested in hearing about my job before, but I’d guess I’d never had the right audience—which was apparently a tree who wanted to worship me.
Was she a tree? I figured I should find a way to ask, now.
I frowned, wondering how to continue. “Well, where I come from there are researchers for a lot of different fields. And some of the fields, like psychology, are very relevant to the interests of advertisers because we want to know exactly how best to convince people to buy something. And so one of my main jobs was to process a lot of the research that my people’s researchers produced and figure out how it could help us sell things. And this was….” I hesitated before continuing. “It was fulfilling work in that it was demanding and required me to use my head. But it was also sort of….”
Morally bankrupt. Too strong a term. Morally questionable. Too vague a term. “It was good work… for me. But at the same time… more of the research gets used by people like me, trying to sell things, than gets used to actually help people. And it’s questionable whether everyone fighting each other to get them to buy this or that product is good at all. It’s….”
How did I explain this? How much of this was Cuby understanding, and how much of the assumptions that she had to make about my meanings were wrong?
“Look: people need to brush their teeth in order for their teeth to stay healthy.”
Cuby, who was nibbling her leg of mutton as I explained things, suddenly looked at me with wide eyes. “We do?”
“Well, we don’t—I didn’t see a setting for it, so I’m assuming the system will just keep them healthy if we have Hit Points. But yes, people do.”
I sighed and took a bite of my mutton. “So people form companies to make toothbrushes and all the related products that you need to keep your teeth clean. And then they spend exorbitant resources competing in the market to get people to buy their toothbrush and not their competitor’s. I’m the guy who uses the research done in our ivory towers, our universities, to figure out how best to do that.”
“But how do you do that?”
I sighed. Smiled. Cuby would have no way to know how humorous I found this next part, but that just made me enjoy it more.
“You show a bunch of dentists in a massive citadel of dentistry, something unlike anything that exists in the world,” I said. “The citadel consists of high-ceilinged rooms made entirely out of Macbook Air.”
“Hmm?”
“Oh, sorry—out of glossy white panels.”
“Oh, okay.”
“The dentists convene in a room to frown in consternation as, on a gigantic viewscreen, a computer-generated simulation of grotesque—but not too grotesque—little monsters congregate around some simulated teeth. Then they nod in judicious approval as the product—a toothbrush—sweeps the little monsters away. Essentially, health products are all about purity and authority: the citadel of dentistry is meant to aggrandize the authority of the dentists beyond all reason, because people trust doctors when it comes to health products. And the pure white everything is meant to contrast the nastiness of the little monsters that represent the bacteria that will thrive if you don’t brush properly. Your end note is an image of the product and the insistence that the hyper-authoritative doctors choose this one, this toothbrush, above all. And if you know the research—well, it can account for everything: how gross the little monsters should be, how bright the lighting should be, how clean-shaven the dentists should be… and that’s how you sell a toothbrush.”
Cuby was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “I think… I think your world might be different from the humanity I would have imagined.”
I looked over at her and smiled. Then I started laughing, and soon I realized that I couldn’t stop as it became the kind of full-body laughter that I had rarely experienced in my life. Cuby laughed with me, though I could tell she was a little confused, and I fell back onto the ground and shook, feeling almost hysterical. Sure, I might never see mom and dad again—but I got to explain how to sell a toothbrush to a member of an alien species, and if that wasn’t a giant leap for mankind, I didn’t know what was.
“Okay,” I said after awhile, catching my breath. “Okay, I’m not finished.”
“Mmph?” Cuby said, perking up.
“Well,” I began. “The thing is, or was, I guess—that, oh, it’s hard to say. I loved my job in a lot of ways. It required a lot of thought, and it was competitive in some ways, and I had a real say in how things were done—not typical for someone my age in a company the size of mine. But also,” I said, hearing my voice turn a little sour. “I couldn’t help but notice that the entire thing was a waste of everyone’s time. Nobody is going to suffer because they choose one toothbrush over the next: we figured out how to brush our teeth a long time ago, and so many people spending so much time competing about this is just an enormous waste. But what was really bad about it was how much the research had been warped by these competitions—I started to really think that the researchers were more incentivized to help us play our petty games than to help people figure out how to be happier, healthier, to live better.”
I shrugged. “But what can you do? The researchers aren’t bad people. I wasn’t a bad person. The people we were selling to weren’t bad people. The whole system could have been composed of nothing but good folks who wanted to make a living. And there’s… I don’t know. There’s a kind of joy that comes with products trying to sell themselves. That sound ridiculous, I know—but at the end of the day, I love that toothbrush commercial. It’s fun and funny and helps me see the absurdity in being a human being because it reaches into absurdity to work on people.” I shrugged again, then sighed. “Anyway, I lost my job when things got shuffled around—I was being trained by my direct superior to do his job one day, but our company got bought, he got promoted two steps overnight, and his replacement had different ideas as to who should be doing my job.”
I tried not to let this darken my mood too much… but seriously, fuck that guy. Fuck the years I’d spent working late nights and giving it my all, being more thorough in my research than I knew I ever had to be. If I were honest with myself, two things had stalled my job search more than it had needed to be: how much I dreaded having to start the climb over at some place new, and the slowly-growing sense that as much as I liked my field, I was doing something that was ultimately useless, or even bad for the world.
“Okay,” I said, sitting up. “That’s enough of that for now.” I checked my adventuring clock. “And we’re almost due to be back on the road.”
“But I want you to tell me everything,” Cuby said.
“We’ll have time,” I promised. “But if I talk too much about where I came from, I’m going to get very depressed.”
“Oh,” she said. “I suppose I understand.”
“I want to hear all about what a phrenodine is, though—but maybe wait until we’re back on the road. Say: did you happen to pick up any more grenades in town?”
“Nope!”
“I think we should do that, then,” I said. “If you’ve got to buy ingredients and build them it could take the rest of our time… and Haroshi still has us on a tight clock.”
“Sure!” said Cuby, standing and dematerializing her mostly-finished leg of mutton. “Let’s go! I’m really glad you ate breakfast with me, Alatar. That was even better than I thought it would be.”
I smiled, glad to see that Cuby was finding joy in having a human side, now.
Then we leapt from the edge and began to glide toward the midpoint of the waterfall, where there was an entrance to the town’s open underground.