CHAPTER 1 As you stagger home from the riot, your best friend tells you that your life is over. Some background is required for such a statement. Riots - always started by humans, all the anthros, despite their power, are very, very afraid of potentially upsetting the majority - have become common in Agrobalia recently. Instead of calls for more rights, a contraction of hunting hours, or, for that matter, any meaningful desire for sociopolitical change, they're simply outpouring anger at a social contract that has treated them as second-class citizens since the war ended, and has more recently been treating them like cattle. Such events are surprisingly communal; ghetto block parties often act as substrate that grows massive human swarms who engage lines of anthro state officers mere streets away. The proliferation of social media and drone-taken aerial photography has made this rather obvious; various front pages regularly promote overhead shots of well-lit, human-crammed hab-blocks and condominiums embedded in rings of burned-out commercial property, generating the appearance of the humans being some kind of encroaching plague that had established beachheads or landing zones in the inner city and slowly eaten it alive from the inside out. The reality is quite the opposite. The specific riot you had attended ended rather well, with equal losses being taken by both sides. The anthros loose one when they get pulled out of the wall; even their impressive size and biological advantages are no use against an endless horde of angry humans attacking them from every direction. The humans loose people when the anthros pull one inside the shield wall. The fact that actual lethal weapons (anthros don't count) haven't been used against you implies that their users have no desire to kill you, and therefore that said humans aren't instantly killed; death, however, is a preferable alternative to being taken, and since you still have a condo to loose (not an actual house, mind you; houses are for the anthros and the collaborationist humans), you've decided to never be on the front lines on nights like this. Unfortunately, this did not stop an elephant officer from hurling one of said front-liners into you like a beach ball. You are winded, bruised, and not moving quickly. This is a problem, since curfew will not wait for you. You do not want to die, you do not want to be drained of your precious bodily fluids, and you really do not want to be enslaved. Unfortunately, your aforementioned childhood friend has other ideas. Still more background is required. Human vocal cords and maxillofacial structures are incapable of pronouncing her actual name. Courtney is the closest approximation that can be made by someone who doesn't have retractable fangs, extra sinuses, a snout, or a prehensile tongue. Courtney is one of the byproducts of the aristocracy (anthrocracy? anthrocracy) that had wormed its way into the post-war order. Her particular house had, as one of its guiding tenets, a multi-generational goal to produce a (rough translation) "ruler species" via carefully-controlled political marriages and breeding programs. Courtney was born to a tiger industrialist and a lion prince, seen as "too large" (one afternoon in a high school janitor's closet, she confessed to you in an overly-cautious fashion that she had to be delivered via C-section, like it was some great personal shame upon herself) and subsequently treated as the family's "problem child", which is to say that she, unlike her significantly-smaller and therefore more-"viable" siblings, was dumped into the country's public school system at age 8 and babysat by a well-meaning but naive flunky with a blank check. Nobody but you and Travis sat with her at lunch on the first day; what you now know to be engrained, deep-seated, and weighty societal preferences meant most kids didn't want to interact with the person whose parents forced their families into ghettos and whose ancestors ate human flesh. Additionally, common child logic dictates that nobody wants to sit with the student who's seven feet tall in the third grade. You and Travis decided that Minecraft on a tablet the size of your desk was more interesting than conforming to such biases. Travis and his family fled the country after they were marked as dissidents five years later, but the friendship stuck. You never got to go over to her house, though. Being outside is dangerous at night, but being inside an anthro's house (or, indeed, any type of private property they own) is dangerous at any time of day. You played wingman to Courtney throughout your time in school; she was there for you when your parents broke up over a political dispute; you were there for her when she had her "major disciplinary incident" (an epic brawl between her and some rich, private-schooled daughter of a rival family outside the junior high; Courtney lost, but you used a steel pipe to put an unfixable bend in that fossa's snout when she followed Courtney into the nurse's office to tell her that "hybrid aberrations like her should have been aborted"). She was there for you when said evil bitch came back in high school; she nearly got fangs into you before they were knocked out. You were there for her when she violently turned down her pre-arranged marriage to some sleazy, second-rate corporate heir of an industrial magnate, meaning she had to stay over at someone else's until her mother stopped throwing pots and people around and her father stopped clawing the slaves. Of course, that had been after your parents were gone and before their mortgage savings had run out; if they had seen her with you, they probably would have shot her on sight. It was interesting to see someone her size trying to fit through doors that barely came past her torso. There was enough of a connection between the two of you probably would have hooked up in another life or place, but you think (obviously, it was never something that came up in discussions between the two of you; acknowledging your differences was never comfortable) that Courtney realized the power imbalance between the two of you was something that would make a relationship non-functional. When your partner is an 10-foot-tall, superhuman, blood-drinking natural killing machine with a weekly allowance more than your annual salary, a penthouse larger than your family's home, and a legal right to enslave you if you set foot outside at night or on her property, being able to give unbiased consent to anything becomes rather difficult, since saying no might result in anything from nothing to being raped to being drained of your precious bodily fluids. Even if she wasn't actually trying to hurt you, she would have had so much power over you in such a situation that even her subconscious decisions would negatively affect you. It's best that you're apart. The phone call you received from her has reinforced that view. Even more background is required. Courtney trades information about external geopolitics (after all, when you can afford powerful computers and encryption software, you can bypass the country's security, information barriers, and firewalls rather well) for information about what's going on on the "street level", so to speak. This is usually done via a private phone; you have both learned to swap out SIM cards as often as you brush teeth, because, judging by the level of funding they're receiving and certain recent high-profile executions, the recently-formed federal-level Internal Security taskforce can track even the lowliest human or richest anthro if said parties are careless. If she were any other anthro, you wouldn't be doing this; you don't know the specifics, but you do know for certain (Courtney has told you, though; is that still a measure of the truth?) that there are ways for the most well-off anthros to "acquire" humans they want, and that giving them information on your whereabouts is the first step when it comes to losing everything. Regardless of security concerns, it's a welcome diversion from your job at the ammo plant; Courtney is the only thing unpredictable in your life, and really the only light in it. She has no reason to keep calling you. She could join the officer graduate school and help put the "human filth" down in the streets whenever it overflows. She could be a pundit on the cable networks and radio, ranting about how humans are "mentally, physically, and sexually inferior" to anthros. She could be second-level managership in her family's line of brothels and industrial plants and live in a palatial mansion while being attended by shock-collared slaves. You suppose it's unfair to think that of her, though; she clearly never stopped thinking of you, after all. You wonder what she does for fun; you just plug yourself into your crappy laptop (you call it the computato) for hours on end on the weekends. Rocket simulators are fun. Reading about space programs is fun. It's a shame that you're essentially not allowed to have a job related to actual engineering - you just push buttons and fix the occasional thing that breaks down. You really cannot stop thinking about her. It's unhealthy. Anyway, here you are, speedwalking down a rapidly-darkening street. T-2:00 until the shock of your life. Your el-cheapo phone rings. You and Courtney have coordinated your calls to fall on one of her non-class periods and one of the times when the apartment-house-thing you live in is mostly vacant; it just so happens that you're not there yet. Usually, the bell, siren, or other irritatingly loud noise marking the beginning hunting hours would have gone off by now, but since the humans have been getting better at hiding, they've stopped marking their beginning - presumably, in order to catch people outside. Today's call is different. Usually, it's a little more conversational - you'll call one another by name, swap the code phrases that you agreed on last call to avoid impersonation by an Internal Security agent, and ask how things are going on one another's ends before you "brief" one another on something. For you, it's usually something like your life, the latest spacecraft design document you dug out of one of the pre-war online archives that hasn't been taken down yet (after all, humans can't accomplish anything without their benevolent overlords, or so the party line goes), or a pattern in munitions distribution you noticed at the factory; for her, common themes include a discussion of the latest geopolitical trends, an assessment of how safe it would be for you to leave the country at that particular point in time, or a rant about how the faculty and students at the state academy are horrible and she'd like to render them hospitalized or worse. Those last ones are getting disturbingly frequent. You wonder if it's all getting to her. You exchange your code phrases - yours is "zygomorphic to a three-sphere"; hers is "the obfuscation of shrimp doorknob production". Instead of pleasantries, she immediately cuts to the point. "Lora's after you." "What? I thought she's, ah-she was irrelevant. I thought she was in grad school by now. She's got time to go after people like me?" Lora - another name-approximation of a pronunciation that isn't friends with human vocal biology - is the fossa who's down some teeth (snap kick by Courtney) and a chunk of snout cartilage (surprise attack by you). You were under the impression that she had left your lives after Courtney fed her her own dentures. Evidently, she has not. "She's definitely got time; as a matter of fact, she's specifically gunning for you, with the full backing of her dear mommy and daddy. Frankly, if I were my parents, and someone did to me what we did to her, I'd give me the go-ahead too. Anyway, according to a friend of a friend of hers, she's currently on vacation, meaning that she can...throw, so to speak...about two weeks at you. She's in town with the full loadout - all the latest toys, and she's apparently stress-testing a few out for her parents. All over the Class-1. She believes I'm a non-factor, clearly; she's smart enough that she'd be on the down-low otherwise. I imagine she thinks I think you're some kind of pet that I'm not comin - that I threw away back in grade school, and that the only reason I pushed her stuffing in the second time was because I wanted dibs." Class-1 is technically a military communications channel, but at this point it's essentially social media reserved for anthro social circles. Courtney is your sole window into it. "You think she's going for - " "Yes, she's absolutely going to try to catch you. I don't know the specifics of what she intends to do after that, but they're permanent, one way or another. She really, really hates you; while there's no by-name mention of you on her accounts, there are direct references to "someone who made their life a hell", "childhood abuse by an upstart ape" and - get this - "Loranian Gardening Incorporated: Cutting Down Tall Poppies since 2035. You know how the folks who are really into the, ah, lifestyle [she means human hunting] always give themselves some kind of name, or a title? That's hers. It makes ya wince, ya know? She's self-styled as some kind of "avenger of the anthro ruling class" who's "saving them from the predations of the hordes of those who don't know their place in life". Get the picture?" You get the picture, alright. "How does getting out of the country look from where you are? We both know it's something I've not really considered up until this point, but I also haven't had the Agrobalia Corporate Correction Group's little princess announcing, uh, *intentions* towards me up until this point, so since I'm in this situation, I'm all ears." "That's a complete non-option. She's been using her channels - you know the ones - to try and get a web around you. What'll happen is that your passport won't have met standards, or something, or you'll suddenly be wanted for a busted taillight, or you'll end up in airport detention because of something that gets planted on you - the usual. Personal land travel does not work when the entire subcontinent has some variety of extradition or legal-enforcement treaty with Agrobalia, and she'll have your tickets invalidated if you try to get out on a boat. She's not at the point where she has the police helping her on the side - the missive hasn't gotten to them yet, despite the fact that all such directives are priority ones - but she's already locked down your escape methods and now she's going to try to acquire you." "How would you rate my shitty, second-rate apartment as a bolthole?" "Good, up until she starts going through your tax records." "I fudge those." "...goddamn, humie. You know it would have been off to the auction block the second they caught you doing that. In that case, good, up until she starts auto-searching the national facial cam database so she can figure out where you live. After that, she'll use a bot to go through lists of employees at major workplaces until she finds which city you live in, and by then the police'll have gotten the memo and they'll be looking for you on face-cams." "You seem to have thought through this an awful lot." "It's what I would do." "...uh, 'kay then. D'you know any way whatsoever for me to hide deep? Like, get off the grid? I know the human-advocate and anti-slavery groups have methods..." "I do, actually, but you're really not going to like it." "Why not? Being free is being free. I can live off of a manual-labor job, I just need to be careful enough to not go to the same homeless shelter too often." "Aside from the fact that they're shutting those down faster and faster these days, well...about that freedom thing." "What about it? If I'm off the grid, I'm off the grid, right?" "I was thinking of something different. Not a manual-labor job, not going homeless, none of that." "What something different? This - you're starting to concern me. If this avoidance method of yours is so good, then why don't people use it all the time?" "Do you trust me? Like, with everything, including your life?" "You're really starting to concern me." "Kalem." "What? You're being awfully evasive, I'm worried. My plan won't put my life on the line - I trust you with yours - I mean your plan *and* your life - but -" "OF COURSE IT WILL, you dunderhead. We both know the folks who try that kind of thing last for months at most. Kalem, the way that you stay safe is me section-fouring you." What. Section Four is the portion of the Agrobalian Constitution that legalizes the private capture of, sale of, transfer of between owners, and/or enslavement of humans outside between certain hours in the day. Courtney is talking about enslaving you. Holy shit. You suddenly feel like your dad died all over again - the same sense of the loss of a loved one (in immediate retrospect, yes, you do believe you loved Courtney, at least in a platonic kind of way, and now in the past-tense), the crushing hopelessness that coincides with a sudden lack of options in life (not one, but two wealthy anthros now out for you, one way or another) and the overwhelming sensation of a sudden loss of control. "You mean that." "Yes, Kalem, I mean that. You just said you trust me with your life. When this goes through - " "WHEN? What do you mean WHEN? You ALSO cut yourself off when you were describing - Lora - talking about high school! You said you think she thought you thought I was "some kind of pet", and then you cut yourself off when you were about to say "coming back for me!" "Kalem, this - " "DON'T "KALEM" ME!" I'M NOT DONE! YOU *ALSO* SAID "It'S WhAt I wOuld Do." THAT. THAT'S THE KICKER. THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?" "..." "..." "...Courtney, have you actually been PLANNING to do this to me? Like, ahead of time?" "Look, it's not something I want to do *to* you, it's something I - " "ANSWER." "...it was a contingency." "Meaning?" "Look, we've both seen the way things are going recently. Well, I saw all this - the bad stuff - coming back in '30. That was when my mom kicked me out - " "Your parents KICKED YOU OUT? On top of all - THIS - NOW you tell me that YOUR PARENTS KICKED YOU OUT?" "Stop interrupting me. It's not justified anymore, now that I'm not saying something that's frankly really scary and I understand if you don't like it. I didn't want you to know because I knew you would respond like this while not actually being able to do anything about it. Our government has already put enough of a mountain of shit on your plate. I don't need to distract you from scrubbing it off." "..." "Anyway, yes, my mother - with dad's approval, bastard's been trying some kind of long-term blood-drinking-slash-hyperbaric therapy lately, hasn't been in touch - gave me the boot. I managed to hijack some of their stock options on the way out, though, used that illegal backdoor I mentioned 9 calls ago to wipe the relevant bits of my record from the genetics database, and then blew the backdoor out of the water so they couldn't track me. For all intents and purposes, I'm an Exstulfian resident, here to sample the, ah, local interspecial culture, as our great nation's travel bureau so...succinctly puts it. I reinforced that by booking a plane ride home from study abroad by myself, rather than taking the one the academy set up for me; that way, all the gear got seen, scanned, databased, etceteramente." "Gear?" She ignores you. That's another layer of ominous. "Anyway, I started putting together this particular contingency option back in '31 - it's rather complex, I'll tell you about it later. I knew I could never get you out of the country if someone had actively put out an inner-circles claim on you - not even registered as a pet - so I figured that "shelter in place" would work. Of course, I didn't activate it until now, because I didn't want to infringe on your- " "This is infringing on whatever things of mine you were about to mention." "This is infringing because I'm trying to save you, Kalem. You'd do it for me, I'd do it for you." "FOR? You want to ENSLAVE me!" "I was thinking more along the lines of "roommates", ok? As I explained before you kinda-justifiably cut me off, it wouldn't be something I want to do TO you; it's something that I want to do WITH you." "If you do this, I will be giving up literally all of my rights. How can't that be a problem for me?" "I'm not going to exploit you, and I'm definitely not going to let Lora do it either." "Really? Slavery seems pretty goddamned exploitive to me." "Kalem, one of the traits I admire most about you is that you find willingly giving up to something you think is wrong to be a personal mark of shame. A lack of people like you in charge is why this country is such a dystopian hellhole. That's why I'm fine with having to go through this whole scoping-out process to make it to you; you do your best to get away, so you don't feel like some kind of failure, we both win in the end; and neither of us get hurt." "If this - bullshit, this is really bullshit - if this is what it's come to after nearly a decade and a half, then I'm very much interested in hurting you. I don't count being a walking Slurpee as a "win". "I'm not going to bite you -" "Really? That seems like an awfully specific denial. Got another idea lined up? "No. I want you to be you, and you can't do that if that evil bitch has you on a leash." "..." "..." "I have no reason to do this." "I know. I would encourage you not to fight back, because it increases the odds that she'll get you instead of me. I would not be making this phone call and expressing these intentions to you if I was not completely confident that you knowing I'm coming wouldn't matter. Over the next few days, I just want you to know that I'm trying to help you and not hurt you, and, regardless of how scary things might get for you, that that will never change." Courtney hangs up. You shudder. You've read about people feeling like ice has been poured into their veins after receiving similar phone calls. You don't feel like that. Instead, it just feels like somebody ripped a chunk out of you and then wove bungee cords together across the gap to try to close it - that sort of compressing, tight sensation you feel right before you throw up. Sometime between receiving that information and now, you made it inside your apartment. You didn't even notice. It's a rather grim sight. You live in a single room on the second floor of a relatively old building which was subdivided into apartments after the war (the proprietor had to pay their bills, after all; once your wife's been drained of her blood and half your income stream has drained with it, life gets hard). There's a family spread across the other three upper-story rooms, a bathroom down the hall, and an assortment of assorted hangers-on (you mean that; they're hanging onto life by staying here, and the proprietor lets them stay in return for work). Anthros are not allowed. In a sane world, it would also be a sort of halfway house for the homeless, but homeless people are a thing for different countries; when your nation has a federally-mandated curfew during which the anthro ruling class is legally allowed to enslave and or drain anyone they catch outside, homeless people tend to vanish. There are not a lot of things in your life; your survival-wage job doesn't let you have them. The few collaborationist humans out there (usually, the ones responsible for repair and maintenance of anthro property; humans that enter anthro homes with certain varieties of governmentally-sponsored and corporately-issued work passes are safe from capture as they perform their labor) seem to be able to live twice as well while spending half as much money as you. Your personal theory is that, since you can only afford low-quality things, such as cardboard-lined shoes, plastic utensils (you own your own set of utensils, and refuse to use those of anyone else; people have been cutting corners with hygiene standards recently), and this shitty apartment, said things break down disproportionately quickly. Therefore, you need to spend half as much money to buy things, but you need to buy them four times as frequently, which ends up with you paying twice as much overall. Clothing? Cheap, and augmented with plastic and cardboard, like some kind of weird cyborg apparel. A lot of your linings and fillings have been replaced with recyclable, easily-sourced materials over time; it's less expensive than buying new ones, and roughly as effective. Room? Fifteen feet long and ten wide. Fading, vanilla-yellow paint and uninsulated windows. A metal bed frame salvaged from a bombed-out hospital, wearing a surprisingly clean and non-lumpy mattress. A bare bulb hanging by a string, and opaque plastic sheeting hung as blackout curtains. A strange sort of brown, cross-indented foam ceiling that looks like a chocolate bar. An overwhelming smell of cigarettes (you don't smoke; having a healthy cardiovascular system is the bare-minimum for staying alive in this place) permeates the room. Clothes hang from the ceiling. Your arsenal is hidden behind the boards under the dining table, which is an upturned cardboard box with a tiny electric oven on top of it. Education? College, surprisingly enough. That's actually what split you and Courtney - college. You didn't even make it through bulk-rate technical school before your father died and took the remaining half of your family's funds with him. Courtney could afford - nay, had the red carpet laid out for her by - the state academy. This was quite typical; usually, the fate of the unfavorite children of an anthro family is to be installed into the government via a state-sponsored education, so as to work their way into positions of power and further their lineage's goals. She tried to bring you along via a variety of methods ranging from the dignified to the...less-so, but Dad wouldn't have a family member put their lives into an anthro's paws, no matter how obstinately well-intentioned. Courtney still called weekly despite it. That final call was really inconsistent with all her other ones. Why on Earth would she have said that? You wonder if you were talking to the same person you'd been having all your other phone calls with. During your calls with her, she would constantly complain about how she has to put up with everyone from anthro supremacists to hunting "lifestylers". Someone who constantly bitches (rightfully so, mind you) about how her classmates are "sociopathic enslaving fucks" generally does not engage in sociopathic fuckery in her off-time. You can think of two rationales here: either she no longer sees value in the two of you being friends, in which case she's probably lying about Lora in order to manipulate you somehow, or Lora is so much of a threat to you that she's pulling out every stop she can find. You're in a lot of trouble either way. Anyway, job. You produce munitions (or, rather, you operate the machinery that produces munitions) for one of the various state-run military plants. The latest federal economic plan has called for a 50-50 division of production between cities and the countryside; it's been all over the official news. The Tronerian Republic is making advances to the southwest, or something. You're lucky to be working at one of the city plants; the countryside ones are near-closed systems, which intake replacement "skilled workers" and raw materials and output everything from concrete to machine parts to the riot-control canister you pulled out of a smoldering crowd-control vehicle about a year ago. A constant influx of captured humans are sold to the government and disappear into these blacksites. You don't know the specifics of what goes on in those facilities, but rumors of "forced reproductive planning" and industrial-scale blood farms inevitably squirt out, and the anthro population is booming in a way that can't be explained by consensual blood-giving. Given that that boom is steady, however, it seems that the steady supply of black-sited humans are being used to replace "stock" rather than to augment it. The death rate must be astronomical. Courtney, citing foreign sources, told you that aside from individual, private owners, the second largest purchaser of human slaves is the Agrobalian Centralized Production Front, the overarching military-industrial entity that maintains controls on the country's wartime economy. Speaking of weapons, that reminds you of your last category: self-defense. Agrobalia usually only allows the shitty stuff to be sold to the general public, because humans with any form of killing ability are a liability: the only two things you've bought from an actual store are a collapsable survival knife and a metal baseball bat that you drilled a hole in and filled with playground sand. Your other, more illicit weapons are the aforementioned canister of chemical irritant spray, and a makeshift gun of the type often produced by local resistance groups. You can't even tell what caliber it is; all you have are operation instructions stamped into the sheet-metal handle and a trio of cartridges, each smaller than the lower half of your thumb. Who thought this joke would work on an anthro? It probably wouldn't even instantly kill a human. God, why couldn't you have been born outside this shithole? The sirens still have not sounded yet, but judging by the scream you heard on your way in, hunting hours have started. There are multiple reasons for this curfew; anthros have always needed humans for various purposes, whether as friends, food, or...worse. It's partially to keep the masses in check; despite making up 84% of the populace (a surprisingly low fraction; due to the anthro breeding programs the government has implemented, the country's anthro population by proportion is 150% or more that of other nations), humans possess a mere 53% of civilian wealth and a minority of private property. Fear keeps them in line - fear of being left out on the street, fear of going bankrupt and then being left out on the street, and fear of what might happen to their families if those things occur. It's a precarious balancing point - if the humans rebelled, the power imbalances involved would ensure they lose everything, but so would the anthros; therefore, the anthros give the humans the illusion of safety if they follow the rules, while simultaneously "milking" them for everything they can. It's partially a government program to provide food for anthros. Given that anthros require human blood to reproduce, humans are vital to the anthro lifecycle - blood is also a bit of a performance-enhancing drug. However, bites usually cause dependency and addiction via saliva introduction; "safe" bites are a myth perpetrated by those with no education in basic biology, much in the same way that "safe" sex without a condom is. Foreign societies solve this via multiple methods; some use yearly mandatory blood drawings into a communal pool, which anthros can then access when attempting to have children, and others encourage feeding/personal relationships via tax credit. The one you live in is trying to solve it the quick-but-horrific way to increase the numbers of the people it actually cares about. Most of the draw of curfew for anthros, however, is the possibility of acquiring a human for themselves. While sales of enslaved humans (and there are always some of those, if not a lot of them) are fairly high, the vast majority of those who catch them usually keep them. Humans in such a state are subject to wide ranges of conditions - "housepet", "sex slave", "indentured servant", "juicebox", or some combination of the four are the most common ones. Industrial-scale slave labor is uncommon; captive humans, despite their relative prevalence, are still rather rare, and working one to death with hard labor is a waste of a significant investment that could otherwise serve for the rest of their lives. The value they provide is always worth it in terms of upkeep; for the usually-wealthy anthro population, it's not exactly hard to escape-proof a house and provide for registration, food, veterinary, and the occasional change of clothes. A thriving secondary industry has popped up around such things; "special" renovation services (building cages, fortifications, soundproofing, and the like), for instance, are usually supplied by anyone from a handyman to a bank vault company running a side operation. Humans that enter anthro homes with certain varieties of governmentally-sponsored and corporately-issued work passes are safe from capture as they perform their labor; however, having to put up with household slaves begging for their freedom (or, in some cases, a permanent end to their misery) is usually something that only the most dead-inside or sociopathic humans can put up with, meaning that most that provide those services are anthros - and the more sadistic or supremacist ones to boot. There are, of course, exceptions - or rather, Agrobalia is the exception. For starters, there are all the countries outside yours; you, of course, have never been there, because the only humans that are allowed to leave this nation are the brainwashed meat-puppets who have been trained from birth to constantly extoll the virtues of their lifestyle (the only people they convince to return with them are idiots, of course, but that doesn't stop the nation from sending them out anyway; the writing is on the wall when it comes to the pending economic collapse, and new blood [so to speak] is always "welcome", no matter how unintelligent it is). The anthro populations there are generally smaller, but significantly less oppressive - that is to say, not at all, and they're sometimes not even in charge of . A lot of them actually enter romantic relationships with humans. That doesn't happen around here; the small subsect of humans that would actually want to live with one are "sadly" disappointed by the laws prohibiting it, as well as by their complete ostracization by friends and family members. That's not a problem for you - after that phone call of Courtney's, you have neither. Anyway, back to the daily grind, you suppose. 5:30: wake up 6:00 (when hunting hours end): be out the door to the metro 6:30: be at the plant 6:45: pass all security/purity checks and the daily briefing/propaganda session; beginning of first shift 10:15: end first shift 10:25: begin second shift 1:55: end second shift; begin lunch; have your 30 minutes of social interaction for the day 2:25: end lunch; begin third shift 6:55: end third shift; claw your way back through all the security (gotta make sure the labor isn't stealing gunpowder or valuable machine parts, after all); fight your way through the crowd of humans all trying to make it home before curfew starts 7:25: pass your house on the way to the block mart; pick up a couple of slimy, inflated, genetically-engineered monstrosities, scuttle back home before hunting hours begin. They've been creeping backwards recently; initially, it was "8:30", and now it's more like "8:00 but if nobody cares if they grab you at 7:55". On top of that, you now need to worry about being hunted by a pair of domineering dickbags. Your time in this apartment is probably going to end soon; everyone knows the horror stories about entire families whose property has been liquidated and whose residence status has been transferred from "resident" to "utilization". You're going to pack as much as you can into your bag - you never know if you'll be able to come back here. You can't take the mattress or the bed, but everything else can be repurposed: weapons are weapons, cardboard boxes make good knee and elbow padding when pulled apart the right way, clothesline can be used to keep makeshift armor made out of ceiling tiles on you. With that out of the way, it's time for daily action 141 out of 153: dinner, during which you will carry out daily action 142 out of 153: practice unloading and reloading your gun. Food is, as pre-mentioned, is mostly slimy, inflated, genetically-engineered monstrosities sourced from the local blockmart. You swear that once you saw a green blueberry with thorns - god knows what they get up to out in the sticks. You're all for manipulating the building blocks of life as a method of ensuring people get fed (apparently, the Tronerian Republic has figured out how to vat-grow artificial human blood capable of perfectly imitating the real thing as military rations, or so you've heard) but that doesn't seem to be what actually happens in Agrobalia; it just reduces the cost of keeping the second-class citizens alive long enough to be claimed. In this case, dinner is a large and rather unappealing block of meat that jiggles when you poke it. It is vaguely pinkish. The second it leaves the tray, liquid begins to pool on the plate - it's been inflated with water to increase its weight, and therefore its price. Typical. As your oven fries the water out of it, you wonder how you're going to get out of this.