Even Paradise Needs Maintenance

by Bo Balder

When the bartender suggested to Jones that she take the recently listed ambassador gig with the squid aliens, she thought he was nuts.

“Why me?” she said. She liked helping him out in the bar, but job advice… “I don’t have any experience with aliens. Or with being an ambassador.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have a special vocation yet, and you’ve done these weird jobs before,” Brie said as he inspected his arrangement of special liquors. He’d arranged them by color this time. He was pretty OCD about his bar.

“What! I do not do weird gigs,” Jones said.

Brie winked at her. “Yes you do.”

She threw a wet towel at him.

The part that stung was the vocation thing. She should long have found hers by now. Young citizens spent much of their time discovering their vocations, but her youth had been spent gutting and salting fish on an icy plastic patch on the North Pacific Gyre. She’d immigrated to Australia, or Paradise as its citizens had started to call it after the sea levels rose. After, she’d gotten an education, collected her free income, and did community duty whenever the pangs of her Calvinist conscience got too insistent. She’d never wanted to be an artist, or a doctor, or even a social animal like Brie who lived for the colorful mixes of people and music he created every evening.

But Brie’s words still smarted. So she put in a bid right there in the bar.

And here she was, Ambassador Jones de Vries, the ambassadorial download package still fresh and tingling in her head. Dandelion hair sprouting free as always, though the fashion was for elaborate braids. She wore freshly printed, wrinkle-free clothing in subdued navy and even sandals. Since space travel was a waste of time and money, the aliens and humanity just exchanged information. She escorted the rental avatar body to a table in the New Bondi Beach restaurant, ready to receive the alien personality. A pot of seawater with live shrimp had been put on the table, so the squid-like alien would feel at home.

In spite of herself she was excited. Actual downloaded aliens! Engaged in a two-way trade with Earth for porn and documentaries, mostly.

If the alien hurried up she could be finished in an hour, go out on the town and have some fun. The avatar twitched and just like that, something other than the servo AI stared out from its eyes. It gulped. It gibbered. Jones politely averted her eyes.

“Good afternoon, Ambassador Earth. Thank you for the delightful view,” it said.

That was fast. It must be an old hand at wearing this human body. Probably why the incoming alien had named the serial number for the rental. It was a slender, Asian-looking male body, the same height as Jones, who was tall for a woman at 1.82 meters.

“Welcome, Ambassador Goo ha Day Twaa. My name is Jones. Australia welcomes you to the table. Would you like to eat first or shall we discuss trade?”

A stupid question. A rental avatar could only ingest special sludge. But her protocol download directed her to ask, so she asked.

As the alien opened its mouth to speak, a bright flash popped in the corner of Jones’ eye. She started to turn her face towards the flash to see what had happened, but then the wall of sound arrived.

This was not good. “Don’t look. Duck!” she said.

She didn’t know if it knew the idiom for duck, but it followed her lead and crawled under the table. She didn’t like huddling so close to the avatar. It was ordinary organic vatflesh, but now that it had housed the ambassador’s downloaded data for two minutes, it oozed squick. Or maybe the smell just meant the shrimp bowl had overturned.

All over the restaurant, people huddled beneath their tables. Did that even help against bombs? A siren blaring out connected straight to Jones’ inner mouse.

“Will this event interrupt our trade negotiations?” the avatar asked.

Well, duh. “I think it likely, Ambassador. Perhaps we should postpone our talk. I extend formal apologies of the Trade Negotiation Board for the unannounced interruption.” Jones let the diplomatic speak roll from her mouth while she concentrated on laying low and not getting bombed. She didn’t really care about the alien or its loaner body at this point.

“I shall withdraw here. I expect our next appointment to be without interruption,” the avatar said, its voice flatter than before. As if the alien had already withdrawn some essential flavor as it gathered its information for the upload.

Jones waited for the telltale twitch of the alien’s departure. Sirens bellowed outside, a tang of smoke tainted the air.

When she left, she should probably drag the avatar body along so she wouldn’t get slapped with extra rental charges. Then again, the Board would cover those in situations of emergency. Well, she could try. The avatar could even carry her or shield her if things got worse.

Jones looked on her phone for the avatar’s user key. No signal. Her stomach started a slow roll. How serious was this? No, she shouldn’t exaggerate. The bomb probably just knocked out a local amplifier tower, not a satellite. No way.

Yet, it was kind of a strange coincidence this happened just when she was entertaining the squid ambassador. Maybe it was her responsibility to assume intent. That meant she had to get out of here, fast. Escaping over the parapet down to the beach seemed the safest option. She should check if the ambassador had managed to leave yet.

Had the rental agency given her paper copies of the avatar contract? If so, she couldn’t find them. At least the Avatar’s ID was tattooed on its forehead. Maybe the password from when she’d opened it up for the ambassador was still valid; it had been less than half an hour.

“Avatar 51366, follow me, this human being, ID AU20109283472. Shield this human from harm.”

The avatar turned its head slowly, as if under water. Oh no.

“Please refrain from giving orders. Ambassador Goo ha Day Twaa is still present in this body,” it said. “I could not upload. It’s your duty under the treaty of 2044 to preserve this information.”

Frack. So not what she needed. The ambassador’s information had to end up intact, which meant it needed a breathing body to keep its organic brain working. Nobody wanted the aliens to get angry and interrupt the steady stream of virtual hentai.

“Can you download on a data device?” she asked. “I’ve got two hundred terabytes here.”

It turned its eyeballs up to think. Funny how they’d programmed that in. “Insufficient by a factor of eight to the power of eight.”

“Then we make a run for it. Get up, jump down on the beach and run after me. I will keep you safe.”

“Agreed.”

Jones rolled over to the parapet. Not as much fun as it looked in the movies. Probably the stuntmen had muscles she hadn’t. Every time her face came up, she saw the alien flailing its limbs as it rolled after her.

She clambered over the railing, banging her knee, and dropped down on New Bondi Beach. The alien flubbed the climbing as bad as the rolling, but in the end managed to lever its mass over the parapet. It flopped down and uttered a cry of surprise or pain or both.

“Gravity,” it panted.

Jones had got that. She grasped its hand and heaved it up onto its feet. It fell down again.

“Don’t override the reflexes,” she said. “That body knows how to walk.”

“I think the body is signaling pain. I’m guessing some kind of damage?”

The fool thing had twisted its perfect avatar ankle.

“Set it down straight, keep your weight on the other leg, and let’s run. We need to get out of here.”

The alien tried, but it had fucked up the walking algorithm or something and toppled again. “Help me,” it said.

“You have to get up,” Jones said. “I can’t carry you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re at least twenty kilos heavier than me. Crawl.”

She was starting to feel very exposed in the hot sunlight on the emptied beach. Sirens sounded in the distance, but nothing stirred in or near the restaurant. Where were the authorities? By now everyone still walking should have been deputized as police or aid workers and received the appropriate emergency download.

In the end, she got down on her knees and demonstrated crawling. She kept deciding to run off and save her own ass, rather than risk her life for a device with like two minutes of precious alien memory, but something in the ambassador package must have prevented that. Damn government jobs.

She crawled on over the sand. The alien was giving it a good try, but it really hadn’t gotten the hang of using its hands and knees.

“Keep moving,” she said. It was about five hundred meters across the now deserted beach to the next shelter.

Rapid footsteps approached. Two hairy-faced guys in full combat gear with guns. No government patch on their foreheads. Right. This was about the alien all along, as she’d suspected. Maybe a religious faction that didn’t want the rest of humanity to watch tentacle porn.

“Grab the avatar, it’s got a squid inside. Take the woman as well.”

“Hey, I’m an AU citizen, sworn in as an ambassador. You don’t want to mess with me,” Jones said. They should have given her a combat package and a gun-printing license. Snark was all she had to fight these guys with.

∞

Jones and the ambassador were tossed into a dinghy and taken on a trip for what seemed hours over sea. Jones figured the direction to be roughly New Zealand, not that this would help her in any way. The day was about half gone when a blot appeared on the horizon. The blot resolved into an old plastics processing plant, based on one of the country-sized plastic garbage patches that circled the oceans. A plastic patch was the last place on Earth she wanted to be. She’d escaped from one just like it, the moment she turned eighteen and could apply for citizenship somewhere better and warmer. Not to mention a place where there was no plastic plague.

Australia had taken her in, given her citizenship and educated her. She’d never felt any desire to go home again. Her parents had died of the plastic plague, her grandfather had died of the plastic plague, and her extended family looked to be going the same way. They were all stubborn North Pacific Freeboosters, determined not to become citizens, offended by the very idea of voting and doing government duties for the good of all. And now the kidnappers were taking her to one of the damn things again, like she’d never escaped, like time had turned back. Unsettling.

She clasped the avatar’s arm for reassurance, ignoring the questions on its face.

The kidnappers docked and brought them to a low, freestanding building with rough recycled plastic walls. Inside they were shoved into an actual holding cell. For stroppy or thieving employees? Jones couldn’t decipher the language in the Roman lettering, so it couldn’t be an Australian facility. She slumped down against one of the grainy plastic walls, stuff as dense and strong as concrete.

No, she needed to be active now. She straightened up and stretched. Spending hours on the bottom of a bouncing boat, tied up, had not improved her state of wellbeing.

The alien sank down. It moaned softly and then stopped, swiveling its eyes to her. “Why did I make that sound?”

“It’s a reaction to pain and stress, most likely,” Jones said.

“You don’t have either?”

“I’m not in pain, but I am stressed out. I can’t access the net, the government can’t find me without it, and I’m responsible for you. It sucks.”

The alien flexed its fingers as if working a suction pad. “Sucking is a good thing?”

“Not in this context.”

“Accepted. What is our next action?”

“I’m going to sit down and think. How I can get us both out of here intact? And I’m gonna have to do it bare brained.”

“Yes,” it said, and looked at her expectantly.

“Yeah, also, it’s not gonna be instantaneous. I’ll let you know when I’ve got something.”

She sat down against the wall and brooded. The alien copied her body language, but shifted and fidgeted until it had found a position that suited its male body and its different center of gravity.

Jones turned away until she no longer had the alien in view. Its face twitched a continuous message of awkward wrongness. Muscles attempting to convey alien micro-emotions that had no actual equivalent in the human-like brain of the avatar. She could think better if she didn’t have to see its jaw muscles squirm.

How to get out of here? She didn’t have any weapons. The plastic walls of the cell could never be clawed or kicked out. If she managed to bend the thick mesh door, she’d still be in a building full of kidnappers. She thought of setting a fire, but apart from having nothing to set a fire with, she’d die of toxic fumes before she could melt off a millimeter of cell wall.

Maybe the avatar had retractable tools hidden in its fingertips, left there by a previous owner who happened to be a burglar. Yeah, right.

The ambassador package in her brain wasn’t helping either. It counseled her to sit tight and wait for the kidnappers to demand their ransom. It would probably, given the religious nature of most of the Disenfranchised, be something in the nature of: “Stop downloading alien porn. Our God doesn’t like that.”

She didn’t have the power to stop that. If the kidnappers wanted a law, they’d have to propose one and the citizens of the nations, conglomerates and opt-outers of Earth would vote on it. They weren’t going try that because they would never get enough votes.

The kidnappers were talking and walking around just outside. She’d have to wait until dark to make her move, hoping most of them would sleep.

But she was an ambassador. Ambassadors talked their way out of things.

She got up and slapped the mesh door. Alien acid spit would be great right now. Too bad she only had a virtual alien on board. “Hey! Don’t forget about us! I want a toilet, food and drink.”

It took a while, but finally a kidnapper, an older man with an impressive neck beard, brought bottled water and sandwiches packed in hard plastic wedges.

“Thanks. Toilet?” Jones said.

The man pointed out that the stainless steel bowl in the corner was an old-fashioned mechanical toilet.

“Why did you take us?” Jones asked. “What is this about? Can we talk to someone in charge?”

The kidnapper twitched at her with his bushy eyebrows. “What kind of person are you, consorting with aliens? Do you perform sex acts for them?” His English sounded weird, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be from a God Nation. He probably thought her English had an Ozzie accent, or maybe he could hear the patch pidgin of her childhood.

“Certainly not,” Jones said, still in negotiation mode. “I am a government appointed ambassador. I’m an AU citizen. And you? Disenfranchised? God Nation?”

“How can you work for them? Maybe because you’re some kind of mongrel yourself. You may be blond, but you got skin like a nigger and eyes like a chink. And no white person has hair like that.”

Jones winced. All her life she’d been teased over her exploding dandelion hair. For the rest, she wasn’t familiar with the terms he used, but she was fairly sure he was trying to insult her ancestors. Racism was an ancient meme that Jones had thought dead. How would her Welsh, Alyawarre, Indonesian and Dutch forebears have answered this idiot? “Fuck you too.”

It didn’t register much of a hit with Neckbeard. The citizens of Disenfranchised nations usually spouted more standardized propaganda. God Nation then, since they did speak English. A long way from their home turf of America, but maybe they were a local variety.

The man left. Unlike the avatar, her fingertips were completely natural, but Neckbeard still hadn’t come within her reach for a single moment.

Jones checked her phone again, like she had every five minutes since their capture. Nothing yet. Although it must still be day outside, a chill had started to seep into the air. She rubbed her upper arms to stimulate some warmth.

This was stupid. She needed a working phone. Or weapons. Or hundreds of years while she gnawed through the plastic with her teeth. How to get a message out for help? First things first though. “Ambassador, please turn your back,” she said.

“Why?” it asked.

“I need to relieve myself.”

“Can I watch?” it asked.

“No you can’t, which is why I asked you to turn away!”

“But I want to. It’s interesting.”

“This isn’t National Geographic. You don’t get to watch me as if I’m wildlife. Now turn away.”

It turned away. “Something in your voice made my stomach feel unpleasant. Why?”

Jones peed.

It sighed. “The sound of water through air. Lovely.”

Jones gritted her teeth and zipped back up.

She felt much more relaxed, even sure she knew where she was now. From the ancient toilet, this must be MuoviKier, one of the earliest recycling companies to tackle the continents of floating waste in the ocean. It had been closed down way before her time. The knowledge wouldn’t help in any direct way, but she could picture herself on GoogleEarth now, a tiny dot circling the oceans.

She sat down to enjoy her dinner. The water was lukewarm and the sandwiches dry.

The ambassador crept up to her. “That smell. Should I eat?”

Jones chewed and frowned at the same time. “Drink only, I think. Avatars have special digestive systems. Probably best not to try.”

“Can I watch, then?”

Sheesh. She turned away from the avatar’s greedy gaze.

When she looked for somewhere to toss the empty sandwich pack, she got an idea. Phone. Phone with no connection right now. But if it managed to get outside the dead zone the terrorists had created, it would be full of clues. She whispered a brief report into it and sealed it as best she could in the packaging. She put it in the ancient toilet and flushed it away.

Darkness fell. She paced the cell to keep warm. It might loosen up her brain as well. How could they make contact? Like elephants, by stomping on the ground? They lacked the mass, they were on a raft, and elephants had been extinct for decades. She’d heard one of the African conglomerates had recreated them, but the odds against a stray herd swimming around in the Tasman Sea seemed high.

The ambassadorial package yielded data on Geneva conventions, Morse code and waterboarding. Not very useful. Just in case, she set the ambassador tapping out messages on the walls. The terrorists banged back and shouted at them to stop.

Walls.

She wasn’t thinking right. Those were not her venue of escape.

The ceiling was out since it was a solid sheet of plastic, but the floor consisted of roughly melted together plastic flotsam. The old processing plants had just raked in garbage and melted it into hollow raft modules to put their plants on. These raft modules couldn’t be too big or they’d break on the waves. Jones had grown up on one.

Maybe that’s why she’d only gotten the idea of going through the floor now. Damaging the raft? Letting in the sea? Brine filled her mouth at the memory. The icy water had clamped around her midriff and prevented breath. She’d seen nothing but towering waves, just one second after falling off the raft. She had no memory of her rescue and never liked the deep sea after that.

But this was the Tasman Sea, where the waters were warm and she would probably live for a day before dying of sunstroke and dehydration. Much better odds. But still. Wasn’t it better to die honorably at the hands of Neckbeard and associates than brave the sea at night?

She crawled around the floor, groping for a weak spot. No go.

“What are you doing?” came the inevitable question from the avatar.

“Shh. Looking for weak spots in the flooring,” she whispered. “Come help me. Maybe we can get out through the sea. Can you swim? Your kind does live in the sea, right?”

The avatar’s forehead muscles contracted asymmetrically. Jones didn’t know what emotion that signified.

“Is it like walking? Then the body should be able to do it. Otherwise, what you call seas on my home world do not consist of fluid or gravity or any conditions on what you call sea.”

Unfailingly unhelpful, every time. But at least it tried. In a funny way it was keeping her spirits up.

Her fingers found a rotten patch of plastic. She pulled and poked at it. It didn’t yield much result. She got up to pee again.

Oh, oh! She was either very dumb or her subconscious was trying to keep her out of the sea by giving her selective stupidity. She knew how they could get out. Waiting until just before dawn would work best.

“When are we leaving?” the avatar said, too loud.

“Shush. I have a plan.”

She lay down with her back to the avatar and told her inner clock when to wake her. She stuck her hands in her armpits and shivered.

“Ambassador Earth,” the alien said in a grating whisper. “I’m in some discomfort.”

Sheesh. She wasn’t going to grace that with an answer.

“Ambassador, please help. The body is twitching. What does it signify?”

Jones rolled over and touched the avatar’s face. It was icy.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Ah!” it said. “I get it. The body tries to warm up by performing minute muscle contractions. Is there a less uncomfortable way to deal with it?”

Jones sighed. “Come over here. We’ll share bodily warmth.”

The avatar gasped.

“And no more than that. This is not a porn scenario, got that?”

Jones lay back down and cuddled up against the avatar’s back.

“This is surprisingly comfortable. I had no idea body warmth would produce so many endorphins. My home shoal makes me feel safe and known, but I see humans only need one person for the same effect.”

“Good to know. Where’s your shoal now?”

“At home, safe. Envying me for this opportunity, no doubt. We all trained as human ambassadors.”

“I’m an only child,” Jones said, to her own surprise.

The alien shifted. “We’re having a good time, aren’t we?”

At least it was upbeat.

And it was right. She, too, was a mammal with a body that produced endorphins. Belly against warm back made her feel safe and connected, even without the full shoal of civilized society around her.

∞

At the requested time, Jones’ inner alarm clock beeped. Time to go. What a pity they hadn’t been rescued yet. She’d just have to rescue herself. She nudged the avatar with her elbow. Kind of surprising it had the capability for sleep.

“You awake?”

The avatar rose up fluidly. Jones envied it while she straightened out kinks in her spine and knees. She was only in her early thirties, why did one night of sleeping rough break her up like this? She should use her government earnings to upgrade her self-care nano package.

They were going to escape down the toilet. Not very nice, but the only way to get out. Her stomach roiled at the thought of deep scary water, but she ignored it.

The avatar bent over, grasped the ancient toilet bowl and pulled. Nothing happened.

“Harder,” Jones said.

The avatar pulled again. “I’m getting system overload warnings,” it said.

“Ignore them. They won’t affect the brain,” Jones said. Not that she was sure about that, but the government would foot the damage bill.

The toilet bowl tore loose from the brittle, degraded floor with a screech.

The sheer thought of having to get down into the plastic-plague-infested ocean made her dizzy. Not now. She couldn’t get a PP anxiety attack now.

“Hold my hand,” she said to the avatar. “Squeeze it. Now. Say, het komt wel goed schatje.”

“What?” The avatar grasped her hand. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s Dutch. It’s what my grandpa used to say to me when he was ill. Say it. It calms me down. I need calming down.”

“I didn’t realize humans were so fragile,” the avatar said. “It come twell ghoot schatya. And also, I never had so much fun on a mission before.”

What do you know. The Amb was having the time of its life.

Jones took three deep breaths and jumped.

The world burst open in a flash of light. A torrent of cold water smacked her back against something solid. All her senses jumbled, roiling water, swimming shapes, booming. Were her eyes open? Shit, she needed to get out, she needed air.

Where was the avatar? Someone clamped something on her face. She kicked and wriggled. She couldn’t breathe! As she wrestled to get the thing off her face, someone grabbed her roughly around the waist and tugged her away. The thing on her face was a breathing mask, and a suited diver was tugging her backwards, away from the floating wreckage around them. She found the avatar, eyes wide open, as usual enjoying every moment of its strange human adventure. She wished she could say the same for herself.

The diver propelled her upwards. Another pair of strong, efficient hands dragged her into an inflatable. A medical patch was slapped onto her arm. They were safe.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she gasped, heart still racing in spite of being safe, and for some reason annoyed at having been rescued. A saner, calmer part of her brain informed her she probably would have drowned or been discovered by the kidnappers if they hadn’t dragged her away. Then she caught sight of her bare flesh, on her arms, in the gap of her shirt, speckled with minute plastic particles.

She screamed. “Get it off me, get if off me!”

A cold hand grasped hers. The avatar, sans medical patch. “It come choot chatya.”

“No, no, it’s the plastic plague, get it off, get it off!”

The medical deputy looked into her eyes. “Keep breathing. That’s what the patch is for, it’s already locating and destroying any PP bacteria that might be contaminating these waters. You’ll be fine.”

Maybe the reassuring words did their work, or the patch was shooting her up with some chill juice, because at once Jones felt calmer. She watched with growing detachment as the avatar was checked out by a mechanic, the rescue dinghy racing towards a larger ship. It looked like a battleship out of ancient movies. How quaint.

“Hey, Amb,” she said, her own voice coming as from a great distance. “You better upload now.”

“If you’re talking to the avatar,” another voice said, “he’s on standby. Your buddy’s gone.”

“He’s not my buddy!” Jones protested, but her eyes prickled and her throat ached. Asshole ambassador, for just taking off. She’d gotten used to its stupid curiosity and question-rich unhelpfulness. Stupid squid.

When she started to feel better, she sat up, trying to become herself again so she could transfer to the battleship on her own steam.

“How did you guys find us?” she asked.

Rescue guy one grinned at her. “Your phone! Excellent idea. We had our eye on this old plant already, and then it popped out of the loo. Saved us a lot of trouble and hostage negotiation.”

Jones felt herself swell with pride. Plague, usually she wasn’t this sappy. Not bad, for a first time ambassador.

“So how did you guys get picked for this job?” she asked idly. “Must be some download package.”

“Nah,” rescue guy two said, the one with the cute freckles. Rescue chick, from the voice. “We train for this for years and years. It’s a vocation, not just a temp job.”

Jones sat up straighter. She’d never heard of people having strong vocations outside of the arts, medicine or nature preservation. “Never knew you lot existed. You get a lot of work?”

Freckles turned a serious face to her. “Babe, we may live in paradise, but not everyone out there thinks we should. We get called out more often than you’d like.”

Jones mulled this over. “So the rim states aren’t doing too good a job at keeping the God Nations inside?”

Freckles shook her head. “Not just American God Nations. There’s pockets of them everywhere.”

Jones had sorta kinda known this, but had blithely assumed everyone had the right to choose their own brand of misery.

“Thing is, if they just kept their old hatreds to themselves, nobody would care. But they really like to bring the suffering to others. Their mission in life. Hence, us T cells dedicating our lives to keeping them out,” Freckles said.

As Jones climbed up the ladder to the for-real battleship on shakier legs than she wanted to admit, she couldn’t shake Freckles’ serious face and more serious words. The thing was, the kidnappers hadn’t seemed too different from the kinds of guys she’d grown up with on the Northern Gyre. Hard working, not too bright maybe, fixed in their patterns. What if you got fixed in the wrong pattern? Those fishermen would have been hell on outsiders, and once she’d thought that was normal. Maybe they just didn’t have the desire to change their lives. But she’d gotten out.

She’d been welcomed into Australia, given an education, a home, an income, the vote. She hadn’t found her vocation yet, but she dutifully performed whatever community service was asked of her. But not a millimeter more. Maybe rescue guy had it right. Maybe it was time she started giving back for living in paradise.

The ancient warship traveled home. The debriefing, by more freshly deputized government officials than she’d ever seen in one place before, went by in a daze, as if she was a few inches to the side of the whole process.

Home felt just as strange and cottony. Jones closed her eyes and felt her way around the room, seeking sounds and textures to make herself feel real. Her eyes were still frazzled with afterimages of bright morning sunlight, the tanned faces and white smiles of the rescue guys joking around her, the empty eyes of the rental avatar.

Food. She ate a bit of everything she had in her pantry and refrigerator. She dialed up some ridiculously expensive nonlocal specialties but was unable to finish them. Showering and putting on clean clothes didn’t help either.

She stomped her feet. It hurt, but the pain didn’t feel real. As if the actual Jones was still huddled in the recycled plastic holding cell, feeling cold and miserable instead of warm and clean and safe.

Someone knocked on her door. With a sigh she went to get it.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me, ambassador,” an unknown female voice said. “I thought I’d rent a female this time, so you wouldn’t feel so awkward about the male body. We have negotiations to complete.”

Jones opened the door a crack. On her porch stood another nondescript rental avatar. “Ambassador? Is that you?”

The world returned with a thud. She flung her arms around the rental and hugged her. “I’m so glad to see you! You just up and went without saying good-bye.”

The avatar stared at her. She could see the alien personality behind the eyes, turning her words over in its suckers or whatever metaphor it used. “Can I come in or would you prefer to negotiate in a public space?”

It thought they were on the clock again? She’d been thinking sick leave for at least a month.

“I informed your government I will not accept any other negotiator. Dealing with you is most entertaining.”

She opened her messages. Her many, many urgently blinking messages. She opened the last one. The terms were insanely generous. Exchange of hours worked for community labor, for a start.

She didn’t really care. Community service wasn’t that bad. The handsome face of Rescue Guy floated before her mind’s eye. Time to give back. As thanks for effectively rescuing her from a life of ignorance and drudgery. Even Paradise needs maintenance.

Okay, she was going in.

“I have one condition,” she said. “What do you say we start out the negotiations somewhere we can get very, very drunk?”

It goggled. “Alcohol? Inebriation? Lead on!”

Jones stepped out. “Take a left, Amb.”

It felt like the beginning of a beautiful, yet professional, relationship.