Chapter Text
CHAPTER 1
Keepers of Forgotten Knowledge and Seekers of Tales
Archivist Ulric Jorgensson of the Svalbard Central Library utterly despised his job. Were the word “hate” tattooed on every nanoangstrom of his flesh inside and out, it wouldn’t match one billionth of the hate he felt for it. He hadn’t always hated it so much that he felt he could only describe it by paraphrasing the words of a fictional and utterly malevolent supercomputer. In point of fact, for the first few years, he’d loved it because it was exactly what he wanted to do. The problem was, the job had changed.
He’d signed on for a chance to study human history through the format that really mattered to him: its stories. And ever since a bribed judge decided that “vomit forth a torrent of horrible procedurally-generated fake sequels” was enough to claim and exploit lapsed copyrights, the research he’d so loved had been corrupted into helping corporations plunder humanity’s past and tear its soul out.
Svalbard’s library boasted vast vaults of knowledge beyond what was publicly available to the rich and powerful of Terra, and Ulric knew those vaults. He was stuck in this job because he wasn’t about to lose the opportunity to find out more about how life actually was for common people centuries ago, and his superiors were similarly stuck with him and his hate because he was the only one left who knew how to find anything thanks to a combination of budget cuts and wartime conscription to fight the ever-advancing menace of the Affini.
Ulric sighed as he approached his office, sparing a wry smile to the poster of a colorful cartoon character on his door, a blonde man in a blue and yellow jumpsuit giving a thumbs up over a radiation hazard symbol. No one else had gotten the reference to begin with and only a handful outside his closest friends had even asked, but having been nicknamed “Vault Boy” as an insult, Ulric couldn’t resist the temptation to reclaim it and run with it.
Booting up and logging into his computer, the library’s chat and emails revealed that quite a lot had happened after he’d clocked out yesterday. The Affini were in-system and working their way toward Earth. The strange plant-aliens said they wanted to care for everyone and keep them safe, and of course the Terran Accord said they wanted to enslave and/or eat everyone.
He’d seen the propaganda from both sides, and the Affini Compact’s did have the advantage of being some of the best examples of “defection bait” he’d ever seen. And the strangest thing was that they didn’t have a Tokyo Joe trying to demoralize humanity by calling them out for being the evil, greedy shitheaded bastards they collectively were. They just kept gently asking folk to accept their care. Granted, the whole “turning people into devoted pets” thing was creepy, but the propaganda at least showed that those pets seemed to range from genuinely happy to too stoned to care.
Human propaganda always had cracks in it that showed the ugly truth underneath if you knew how to look, and the Terran Accord’s was worse than most in that regard. Maybe it was just that he didn’t know where they’d be to spot them, but as far as he could tell, there weren’t any such cracks in the painfully earnest Affini propaganda.
Honestly, it was much harder to process the impending end of the world as he knew it than it should have been because the rest of his messages made it clear that his entire chain of command had all resigned, at least some of them to flee off-world. “Fuck. I’m in charge…”
“I’m in charge…” he muttered again, staring at his screen and feeling like his stomach had dropped to the planet’s core. Everything that happened here was now his responsibility. He had to deal with payroll and office politics and real politics now. HE , of all people, was now somehow supposed to deal with grant approvals and sweet-talking donors and trying to talk to those motherfuckers who ground up humanity’s past and turned it into sausages-inna-bun as vile as anything Sir Terry Pratchett had described without either offending or murdering them.
He knew panic attacks when they hit, and started taking deep, deliberate breaths to keep from feeling like he was dying, trying to force his body back into something approaching equilibrium. Both those efforts and the panic attack itself were shattered when an emergency warning message appeared, demanding immediate activation of all remaining reservists.
The adrenaline already in his system threw his mind into high gear and his thoughts raced down the paths of the most likely scenarios. The Practical of the situation assembled itself in his mind.
Throwing everything you had left at an enemy was “glorious last stand” stuff. Which meant the Affini were winning easily. There very likely wouldn’t be a board of trustees to report to after the aliens took over the world. The aliens who apparently disdained money and were horrified by capitalism. The plants wanted to take care of people and make them happy. The Theoretical that had triggered this panic attack would never come to pass. And he was in a position where he might actually be able to do some good for once.
“I’m… in charge,” he said again, with a growing and not-quite-sane grin and a definitely not-sane laugh he’d spent weeks perfecting for the RPG sessions in ancient game systems he ran for his few friends. Still, the rational part of his mind had to admit, this one was a much more genuine cackle than he was used to.
One of those friends all but kicked open the door to his small office. Elise Virtanen looked at him, awkward and grumpy as she always was any time she had to pretend to still be ‘Elias’, “The fuck is that laugh for, Vault Boy? Perkele, we’re gettin’ invaded!”
“El,” Ulric used the safer nickname for one of the library’s more colorful members of the writing staff for now, grinning madly, “I’m in charge. Fuckers left ME in charge.”
“That’s your Sparky grin… oh…” the weight of realization hit Elise, “HR’s gone too… perkele…”
“I have no idea what kind of weight it’s going to carry in the next few days, but I’m messaging The Jeff to use his sysadmin privileges to update your name and gender in our files. The Terran Accord might be over before the end of the week, but you’re not gonna have to wait until the next World to officially be you.”
“Thanks… boss,” she responded with a grateful smile before shaking her head, “You’ve been waitin’ to reference Shadowrun’s big fuckin’ backstory paradigm shift since it became clear the Affini were kickin’ our asses, haven’t you?”
“Eyup,” Ulric said, still grinning, then shook his head. “Okay, so we need to make a plan on what’s going to happen after the Dread Accordion squeals its last odious notes.”
Elise couldn’t help but giggle at the stupid nickname her dork of a friend had come up with for their own government, but she had to admit the way with words that made him such a great GM made his jokes far better than those of the stuck-up cowards who’d fled. “There’s like six people left so we might actually be able to fuckin’ get somethin’ done.”
Ulric sent a flurry of messages to the remaining library staff, and they agreed to convene in the second-best conference room.
Ulric looked over his ragtag bunch of misfits, and tried as hard as he could to channel captains of ships stuffed full of such oddballs, “Almost everyone has left, and HR’s last act before fleeing en masse was to put me in charge. Guess they liked the cut of my jib and the sound of my town.”
Jeff Jeffries, an IT professional with plenty of reason to be annoyed at his parents, laughed as the rest of the group groaned at one of Ulric’s ancient references, noticing that it was literally just their RPG group left, “Looks like the Svalbard Scribes are the only ones who cared about this place enough to stay. I motion that we update our website to shame the heretics.”
Elise responded, “Perkele, motion fuckin’ seconded. I write the copy, Steve works up some images, you update the page?”
“I can set a filter to auto-delete two thirds of the cussing, so that should be fine,” Jeff snarked back.
“Juu… I do get a bit sweary when I get mad,” Elise stuck her tongue out at the end of her overdramatic and hilariously inadequate confession.
Himiko Nakatomi, a junior legal clerk who’d been dragged into the group by her boyfriend and found she enjoyed the shenanigans and the gaming, rolled her eyes, “Ulric-san, you’re grinning like you did before kicking Steve-chan’s ass last wargaming night. What’ve you got planned, boss?”
Ulric nodded decisively and casually flipped off the security camera, no longer caring what some hypothetical OCNI spook watching them thought, “I think it’s safe to say the Dread Accordion’s on its last song, so we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to manage running this place the way it’s been run. Half the people between me and Director Chelmsford in our chain of command quit because of the thought of having to do that . No, we’ve got a different quest before us. To save our library, make sure it has a place in the coming World, and maybe see about making sure what’s in it is accessible to everyone .”
Esteban Gutierrez, the aforementioned boyfriend who’d dragged Himiko into the group, facepalmed, “You’re gonna bug the big alien plant-monsters with your whole ‘IP in a Post-Scarcity World’ thing, quiaff?”
“Aff,” Ulric replied with slang from the setting of a game the two of them had resurrected together and played often.
The last member of their group, Diana van Kruger, was an intern just barely past being a teenager whose ‘rich as in RICH ’ family lived in Antarctica, and she’d fled to the other side of the planet at the earliest possible opportunity to get away from them. “I hear the Affini don’t like capitalism, so I might be too busy cackling with glee at my parents’ downfall to help much… but to start off with, I motion that we adjust our dress code to a minimum of ‘not naked’ and just dress like we do when we’re not working. It’d be a lot comfier with everyone actually getting to really be themselves.”
“Second motion fuckin’ seconded!” Elise immediately responded, and everyone agreed.
“So,” Diana continued, “we meet the Affini as we are instead of as… the heretics… wanted us to be. The plants ‘just want every sophont to be happy’, right? Maybe showing them what this place really means to us will help.”
Ulric thought for a moment, “That’s actually a very good idea, Di.”
Two days after the Human Domestication Treaty was signed, Caerulea Kitan, Second Bloom, received an odd message forwarded by the Office of Transitional Neoxenoveterinary Archeobureaucracy. It looked adorably interesting by Terran standards, requesting that a representative of the Affini Compact with an appreciation of storytelling meet with representatives of a library.
She hummed, vines twisting slightly as she messaged one of her friends through the OverNet.
<DancingLotus> Hey Vittatum, have you catalogued the public-facing site for the Svalbard Central Library? The cuties there have requested a meeting with a representative with, and I quote, “an appreciation of storytelling”, and I feel a need to do some research.
<WebSpinner> Give me a moment, Caer.
<WebSpinner> Oh Everbloom, I want to accompany you now. Have a look.
<DancingLotus> That’s certainly an… interesting site for such a prestigious institution.
<WebSpinner> Grabbed some of their internal communications, looks like the boring humans ran away while we were still dealing with the ships in the outer solar system and left the truly interesting ones in charge.
Caerulea shook her head, looking at the ridiculous news article at the front of the page, with “Missing Persons” posters for the people who had been the upper management of the library a month ago and rather unflattering, if hilarious, descriptions of their shortcomings peppered with quite a few words in an obscure Terran language that wasn’t in their database and that she hadn’t had a chance to learn yet. From context, she highly doubted that those words were complimentary. The timestamp on the news article let her know the Affini hadn’t even reached Terra when it was posted.
Checking the staff page on the site, it looked like there were only a handful of humans left in the library, and all of the pictures looked to be much more candid than she expected in the circumstances. Each of them was smiling, for one thing, and none of them were wearing business clothes. Their biographies were just as eclectic, and she could tell that the one called Elise had written the front-page article. If anything, her language was even less restrained when referring to herself.
<DancingLotus> Vitt, these Terrans are adorable.
<WebSpinner> Yeah, Caer, and those aren’t fake smiles. I can tell~
<DancingLotus> Hmmm… They do seem to be going out of their way to be unlike their “missing” superiors and show that they enjoy their place of employment. If it’s a manipulation tactic, I think it’s working, just not the way they likely expect~
<WebSpinner> oh no the biggest book nerd on the ship wants a bunch of librarians as florets how completely unexpected
<DancingLotus> Hush you. ::p