52 Project #52: Nate and the Hyperpurples (Patreon)

This is directly related to a short I did for Inktober 2019, Build. At some point this will be the first chapter in a novel, most likely.

A device was singing. Blearily Nate opened his eyes and stared at it for several seconds, momentarily confused as to what it was and why it was singing to him, loudly.

Right. That was a phone. And that was the ringtone he’d set for calls to his jobsearch number. He reached out and swiveled the face of the phone toward him, swiping to accept the call. The phone’s settings would automatically reskin his face as looking perky, awake, and probably fully dressed, and also definitely not wearing his sleep bonnet, but he had to at least orient himself vertically to the phone or it would produce some really bizarre artifacts. Since being actually vertical would involve more wakefulness than he wanted, he spun the phone so that it was horizontal, just like him. He did have to raise his head off the pillow, though; the software wasn’t quite good enough to compensate for some of his head disappearing into a pillow.

“Hello!” said the giant chicken on the screen. “You are Nate Wheeler, I hope? I took the liberty of checking your time zone and it is typical for humans to be awake at this hour, so I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Wait a minute. That was not a skin for video calls. That was an actual giant chicken.

“Uh, yes, this is Nate Wheeler,” he said, staring at the… well, okay, it wasn’t exactly a giant chicken. Its very, very bright blue, very, very tall crest was made of feathers, like a cockatoo, rather than the fleshy crest of a rooster. And it had more of a lizardy snout than a beak. Most of its facial feathers were brown, a shade only slightly lighter than Nate’s own skin, and its eyes were less like a chicken’s side-facing eyes and more like the close-centered eyes of a bird of prey, but without the hooding that predatory birds usually had.

“Honored!” the not-a-giant-chicken-or-even-quite-a-bird said. “I am frequently known by the name Bakoon! You are the Nate Wheeler who is seeking work as an engineer, I hope?”

“Spaceship. Yes. Uh, but I’d take a wide variety of different engineering jobs, but I was specifically looking for work on a spaceship.” The not-a-giant-chicken was a Diwar. The aliens who had given humanity the stars, at the expense of a good bit of collective self-esteem and most of the engineering jobs that were remotely interesting. Diwar did not hire humans as engineers for the same reason that medical hospitals did not hire clowns as nurses. “Um, is this about a job?”

“I am hopeful,” Bakoon the Diwar said cheerfully. His voice was masculine and had traces of a European accent of some kind, which meant absolutely nothing because Diwar were mimics like parrots or mynah birds, and would usually end up with the exact same voice as whatever trainer they’d studied English from. But a crest that big usually meant a male. Usually. “Would you still have an interest?”

“Um, yeah, I’m still looking.” This was worth sitting up. Nate did so, spinning the phone around on its holder’s axis so that it was now vertical, just like him. The image would have frozen while the phone was in motion or as soon as the cameras detected that his head was moving out of frame, so he wasn’t worried that the Diwar would see that he was getting out of bed. And the bedroom behind him wouldn’t show on his call skin; he’d recorded himself at the university library, in front of shelves of books, as his job search skin. “What kind of job?”

“Well, an engineering job of course, but the details are… somewhat confidential. I would like to meet with you and discuss! I will say that this role would be highly compensated, with great opportunity for advancement, fame and fortune.”

Nate blinked. “Fame?” Since when did engineers get famous?

“I can see my tailfeathers, so far ahead of myself I’ve become! If this proposition intrigues you, please come to Disque Hall at Drexel University, at 3 pm today. I will hope to see you!”

The Diwar ended the call. Nate looked at the time. Already 11:30 am. Shit. Bakoon hadn’t given him a chance to object to the time; he barely had time for a shower and shave if he wanted to make it.

On the other hand, if he was meeting with Diwar… would they really care if a human was showing some scruffy facial hair? Maybe he had time to grab breakfast? No, he couldn’t take the risk; there might be other humans involved in the hiring process for whatever this was. Shower, shave, deodorize, grab some clean clothes, and that was all he’d have time for.

***

Nate had been living off UBI, trying to find a job in the field he’d trained in, for a year and a half at this point.

There were human engineers who worked on building spaceships, or keeping them maintained while they were in space. They generally worked under the supervision of a Diwar; the aliens seemed to find it hard to believe that humans were remotely competent at anything related to STEM, and liked to insert themselves into any industry that used their technology, which nowadays was most of them. And there weren’t very many of them, and most of them came from Europe or Japan, not the US.

Nate’s mom had been on him, the entire time he’d been in college, that he should pursue acting instead. “There’s no jobs left for people who want to use their brains on Earth,” she’d say, with no small amount of bitterness – Ava Wheeler had been a physicist before the Diwar had shown up and more or less handed humanity the answers to all the questions physicists had been trying to solve, and she’d been considered too old to retrain to the level that Diwar physicists were at. She’d spent Nate and his sister’s lives raising them, trying to catch up to Diwar physics, and trying to push them into entertainment careers like the most infamous of stage moms.

The thing was, Nate knew he was a decent actor, nothing particularly special, and he knew that almost every young person on the planet who didn’t want to work in a restaurant or live off UBI was trying to get into entertainment in some way. Writers, artists, gamers, athletes, anybody who could create amusing videos of themselves doing normal human things like playing with dogs… and actors. The competition was enormous. And he didn’t think he was anywhere near good enough to break in to interstellar work, not like his sister, and he wasn’t going to trade on her name to get a better break than he deserved.

He was good at engineering. He loved it. It was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. It was also even harder to break into than acting. It’d have been different if he’d wanted to be a civil engineer and build roads and bridges, or something else that stayed on Earth and hadn’t been completely revolutionized by Diwar technology. But Nate wanted to work in space. Or work at space. Space something. And most of the work in space was relatively menial, because it was the Diwar who genuinely understood the technology and who owned most of the ships. Earth was building ships of their own, but even there, Diwar did most of the design and engineering work.

If the Diwar were hiring human engineers for something… why?

***

The maglev dropped him at one of the two stations at the university.

Nate had actually graduated from Drexel, so he was familiar with the campus. It was a short walk to Disque Hall, where Drexel’s department of physics had historically been, and which nowadays had a heavy Diwar presence. Bakoon hadn’t told him which room number, so he asked at the security desk. The security desk had no idea.

Then the giant fluffy chicken stepped off the elevator and made a beeline for Nate. “Welcome! Welcome, my boy! You are a boy, am I correct? I did not mistake your gender?”

Bakoon looked much more like a giant chicken in person than he had on the phone, to be honest. He was about five and a half feet tall, wearing a blue-feathered cape in the same color as his crest, with a downy golden interior. He had two legs, heavily feathered, his thick talons almost covered in his fluffy brown feathers, and four arms – two long, ape-like arms connected to his body on the sides, with four thick, finger-like appendages, and two small ones close to his body, positioned like a velociraptor or a T. rex, with four delicate, slim talons. The large-arms were heavily feathered, like they hadn’t quite made it all the way to evolving into wings but they were giving it their all, and the small-arms had feathers at the top above the elbow, and then bare wrinkly skin and bone like a bird talon. All of the claws on the talons had been blunted and then painted with elaborate red whorls. Something tunic-like hung from his large-arm shoulders, essentially just two rectangular pieces of cloth held together by golden clasps on his neck. They left his large-arms completely free; there were flamboyantly large and flared sleeves in the front for his small-arms, which he held clasped in front of him. There was a gold-colored belt around his middle and up around his back; loops on the belt held multiple pouches and sheaths for tools.

“Uh, yeah, I’m male,” Nate said. He’d met Diwar before, but this one dressed much more flamboyantly than any of the ones he’d met in college.

Bakoon’s head went up higher than a typical bird head, his beak-like snout distinctly lower than the level of his golden eyes, which focused front, but were wide apart and seemed to lay directly on his head, not in sunken orbits like a hawk. The blue feather crest was in full display, lifted high and fanned out on the top of his head. When he spoke, Nate could see serrations inside his mouth, like he was in the process of evolving from a reptile snout with teeth into a bird beak, but hadn’t quite finished the transition. He was gesturing expansively with one of the large-arms. “We have all been veritable tension belts, awaiting you! Come, come!”

Nate followed Bakoon into the elevator. “So, can you tell me about the job?”

“Not yet! The walls still have ears. That’s how you say it, correct? To express that there might be people listening to you, who should not be?”

“Yeah, that’s the right expression.” They got off the elevator. “Can you at least tell me if it involves going to space?”

“Maybe! All your questions will be answered momentarily.” They reached a room with no sign on it labeling what it was for, and Bakoon swung the door open. May I refresh you? A snack, a drink?”

“You got a bagel with melted cheese and a Coke?”

“Of course!” Bakoon went to an inner door and yelled. “Rikwaal! A bagel with melted cheese and a Coke for our guest?”

“What kind of cheese?” a feminine voice called back. “Cream cheese is typical with bagels but isn’t usually melted! Also what kind of bagel and what flavor Coke?”

“Hey, I don’t want to put you guys to a lot of trouble,” Nate said.

“Nonsense! The food printer is entirely capable of making such a basic human dish! Just let Rikwaal know your specifications!”

A white not-exactly-chicken head stuck through the door. She actually looked a lot like a cockatoo; her crest was pale yellow. “I didn’t spend all this time configuring and programming this thing to never use it. We can’t put fruit in the bagels, but I’m sure we can do anything else.” Her voice was crisp, with an American East Coast generic accent, similar to Nate’s own when he was code-switched into mainstream.

“Make it a poppyseed bagel, melted provolone, and just a normal regular Coke, no special flavors or anything.”

“With ice? You’re American, so I’m guessing ice.”

“Yeah, I like ice.”

As the white-feathered Diwar retreated back behind her door, Nate said, “So, can you tell me any more about this job?”

“Direct and businesslike! Well done,” Bakoon said. “Too often your fellow Humans waste precious time talking about things of no relevance. Time, after all, is the one commodity none of us can buy!”

Given how many Humans were employed doing menial jobs for aliens in space because it was the only way they could get the opportunity to see other worlds, Nate could have argued that point; anyone wealthy enough could buy people to do jobs for them, thus saving themselves the time. He could also have pointed out that right now, Bakoon was wasting his time talking about time wasting. He said neither of those things. “Do I need to sign some kind of NDA? You said this was confidential.”

“Yes, yes, that’s exactly what we planned. Rikwaal! You have a contract for non-disclosure ready, isn’t that so?”

“On the tablet,” Rikwaal yelled back.

“Of course, of course!” Bakoon picked up a tablet sitting on the unmanned reception desk. “Rikwaal has prepared this for you. She’s our project manager, by the by.”

Nate raised his eyebrows as he read it. It had normal NDA language throughout most of it, but was significantly more restrictive. He wasn’t allowed to talk about the fact that he’d been recruited by the Diwar for a job whether he got the job or not. If he was hired, he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone who had hired him or why or what he was doing. These restrictions would be in place until a press release went out about his position. “I can’t even tell my mom I got a job?”

“Oh, by all means, tell her you’ve acquired a job. You simply cannot tell her what the job is or that it involves Diwar in any form until the press release goes out.”

“This is the kind of job where you send information about it to the press? I’m looking for an engineering job, not some kind of… I don’t even know, what kind of job involves press releases?”

“This one,” Bakoon said. “Which I am positively dyingto tell you all about, as soon as you sign that contract.”

Well, it wasn’t like he had any better opportunities. Nate signed the contract. If he got the job he’d be able to tell Mom about it eventually (press releases? Why?), and if he didn’t then there was nothing to tell her about.

“Delightful!” Bakoon pronounced, throwing his large-arms wide. Nate actually had to step out of the way. “Have you, by any chance, ever heard of the Great Build?”

“Uh… I think so. Isn’t it some kind of Diwar sports competition?”

“Sports!” Bakoon flung his large-arms up again. “If by ‘sport’ you mean ‘tedious competition of physical bodies performing a task no one cares about’, then hardly! But if by ‘sport’ you mean ‘rigorous intellectual challenge undertaken in competition between the best and brightest’, then yes, by all means!”

“Okay…”

“The Great Build is the ultimate challenge to the Diwar! A year – which is approximately thirteen and a half of your months – spent creating something, overcoming technical limitations and solving engineering problems, to eventually present to a body of judges to be awarded accolades, or dismissed as lesser!”

“So it’s a contest.”

Bakoon snorted. “If one wishes to describe it with such mundane terms, then yes, I suppose it’s a contest.”

Rikwaal came out with Nate’s bagel and Coke. “Sorry for the delay. The food printer is acting up. Again.”

“I told you we should bring Mip along,” Bakoon said.

“Mip said, very clearly, and I quote, ‘No, I’m not going to go to Earth with you! You people want to be insane, then fine, but leave me out of it.’”

“By the most technical of definitions, that was a translation, not a quote.”

“By the most technical of definitions, you are being a pedantic smear.” She turned to Nate. “Let me know how it came out, okay? It wrecked my breakfast and I had to order out. Did you know there are only three restaurants in Philadelphia that make Diwar cuisine?”

“I have solved this difficulty by ordering from sushi restaurants. The poke bowl is quite appealing,” Bakoon said.

“Yeah, they’re not open at breakfast time. Something about, Humans don’t eat sushi for breakfast.”

“A lot of us would like to,” Nate said. “But I guess not enough of us to keep the restaurants in business that early.”

Rikwaal was dressed the way Nate expected Diwar to dress. No cape. A similar tunic-like garment like the one Bakoon was wearing, but with straps made of the same fabric rather than clasps, and it was plain and dark blue, a nice contrast to her white feathers. Hers had additional straps holding the tunic together across her middle, approximating the shape of a human blouse with very, very wide sleeves. She was also wearing a belt in roughly the same place as Bakoon, but hers was white and had only a holder for a tablet and a small purse-like object large enough to hold a few credit cards hanging from it. Unlike Bakoon, she was wearing something that resembled short pants, except that it had a hole for her tail. The pants were a complementary shade of blue to her tunic, not quite as dark. She held out the plate with his bagel with one short-arm, and a cup of Coke with the other. Both the cup and the plate had obviously been recently printed, little bits on the edge still soft.

He bit into the bagel. “This is pretty good. I’m usually not a super big fan of printed food, but this one actually got the cheese right. That’s usually the biggest challenge; it’s hard for them to mess up breads unless they’re really delicate, but cheese is… well, it sits on a really fine line. It’s easy to make the oils separate from the curd, or make the cheese too hard or too soft, and I guess your printer toasts it too. That can be a challenge. A lot of food printers with toast functions will either burn your food or, like, heat it up two degrees and call it a day.” He realized that he was rambling about a subject that most likely Bakoon would consider ‘a thing of no relevance’, and shut himself up.

But Rikwaal responded, animated. “I know! I spent half a day programming the thing and I think the hardest part was that it didn’t want to follow my toast protocols. I ended up having to hack it and to stick a sensor on it to detect the start of a burn right before you can taste it.”

Nate wasn’t used to project managers who could hack food printers. “I never thought of that. Sounds like a good way to handle it.”

“On the subject of the Great Build,” Bakoon said, “in which we do not create or reprogram food printers. We are participants in the Great Build. Our team is known as the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples.”

“Hyperpurples?”

“Ah. We see into the range you refer to as ‘ultraviolet’. Since Humans cannot see these colors, you have no native words for them, so we Diwar, when speaking English, refer to the colors as ‘superpurple’, ‘hyperpurple’, and ‘ultrapurple’. To us they actually look quite distinct, as unlike each other as red from orange and yellow, so it perhaps is not the best naming convention, suggesting as it does that these are somehow all fundamentally the same color. But, it is the convention the Diwar chose years ago.”

“We had a committee analyze your languages and figure out how to express things you don’t have words for, about thirty years ago. The surprising thing was how many words we have to describe beer flavors that we had to translate as things that don’t really sound at all like beer flavors, like fruity.”

“Fruity actually is a beer flavor,” Nate said.

“A connoisseur of beer? Dare I hope?” A beak could not actually smile, and though a Diwar snout wasn’t quite a beak, it was too beaky for smiles. But somehow Bakoon’s facial expression looked like he was broadly smiling, even though there was literally no way he could do that. Nate had seen similar expressions on parrots before and had always wondered exactly what about their faces was making them look like they were smiling.

“Uh, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I drink microbrews, not like Budweiser and that kind of thing.”

“Delightful! Perhaps you can introduce us to some local brews!”

“Stay on topic, Bakoon,” Rikwaal said. “The Build?”

“Oh, yes. We are the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples… as I mentioned. The only team ever to come from Fillit Province!”

“Unfortunately there’s a reason for that,” Rikwaal said.

Bakoon tilted his head to look at her, and then leaned his head forward in a way that seemed almost aggressive. Rikwaal tilted hers, and Bakoon moved his head back. Nate had no idea what any of that meant.

“And you want me to…?”

“Join the team!” Bakoon swept his large arm out and fluffed his crest. “Be the first Human to participate on a Diwar Great Build team. Help us in designing and building something so audacious, so creative, so amazing, that we cannot help but gain positive attention, even if we don’t win.”

“Wow,” Nate said, taken aback. “Uh. Yeah, that sounds amazing! I mean… that would be fantastic. But why me, specifically, and also why a Human?”

“As to you, I have business dealings here with the university. I spoke to some of the professors, and perused school records, and came to the conclusion that you would be an excellent candidate. You’re not the only Human we’ve approached with the opportunity, but we’ve prepared a simple test to see if you have what we require to assure our place within the Build for years to come.”

“What he’s not telling you,” Rikwaal said, “is that we suck. Our team has literally come in last for four years. Any team that can’t make it out of the 10th percentile for five years in a row gets booted. And if we get booted I will never hear the end of it from my mother, not to mention that none of us would exactly have great career prospects. So the team decided that adding a Human to the mix would maybe inject some creativity and unpredictability into our performance.”

Bakoon did the head-tilt-and-lean-forward again, which Rikwaal ignored serenely. Nate guessed that that was the equivalent of a glare, for people who couldn’t substantially change the shape of their eyes’ appearance on their face.

This was all starting to make sense now. “I get it,” he said. “You don’t need me for engineering skills, you need me to be a performing monkey. A dancing bear. No one cares how well the bear dances, the thing everyone cares about is that it can dance at all.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the bitterness and anger came through more and more clearly as he spoke.

“Mm, you are not entirely wrong,” Bakoon said, “but also, not entirely right. You see, the competition rates us in three domains – creativity, skill of implementation, and followership. The number of watchers who’ve chosen us as a team to follow.”

“We suck at implementation,” Rikwaal said bluntly. “And we haven’t managed to be particularly creative, the last four years, either. Bakoon and Le’ir manage to get us some followers through showmanship, but there’s nothing much to follow, so most of the audience tunes out.”

Nate scowled. “And my job is to be a performing monkey, so everyone wants to watch.”

“One could say that, but you are mistaken if you think no one cares how well the bear dances. The Great Build demands rigor! Competence in the extreme! You would, at the very least, need to be able to transcend what our audience thinks Humans to be capable of. Show yourself to be on the level of at the very least, an inexperienced Diwar engineer.”

Rikwaal added, “And I imagine that some performing monkeys are just trained, pushing buttons for a treat… but some are actually good at getting the audience’s attention and running with it. I mean, I don’t know anything about monkeys, we don’t have any primates on Diw, but they’re your close cousins, right? They’re pretty smart for animals?”

Nate swallowed his deep irritation at being compared to a monkey. It wasn’t a racist microaggression. The Diwar were dinosaurs, by human standards; from their perspective, every human being was a kind of monkey. “So you figure, Humans are good at entertainment, you’ll pick a Human to entertain your audience?”

“Exactly!” Bakoon said.

“Not exactly.” Rikwaal lowered her head and glared at Bakoon. At least, Nate was no expert on Diwar body language, but that sure lookedlike a glare. “There’s definitely more to it than that.”

“Yes, of course,” Bakoon said. “We Diwar generally see Humans as creative but impractical. We want you to give us ideas that sound ludicrous, and then help us bring those ideas to glorious realization. While being a better engineer than anyone has ever seen a Human be, and while being charismatic and showmanlike so you can get and hold the audience’s attention even after the novelty of your presence wears off. The Build lasts for a year. No one’s going to watch a dancing bear for a year, unless the bear dances superbly.”

“So you picked me because you know about my drama minor?” Nate said sharply.

“You have a drama minor?” Bakoon perked up.

“You’re Human. We assumed you’d be good in front of a camera,” Rikwaal said.

“Not all Humans are good at performing, at all. Before you people came along, we thought of ourselves as a species that invents, and discovers, as well as a species that creates art and performance. Most of us aren’t any good at performing.”

“And not one single one of my extended family has ever been an engineer,” Bakoon said. “Or a performer. They consider me a genetic sport. Had I not so closely resembled my father, there might have been questions as to who, exactly, fertilized my mother’s egg.”

“Yeah, okay, everyone’s got their own preconceptions about other species, but you Diwar really did take over all our engineering and science. We didn’t take over your native entertainment industry.”

“You actually did,” Rikwaal said. “Mostly because Diwar suck at story telling.”

“Speak for yourself, friend,” Bakoon said. “I excelat spinning tales.”

“We had some tests planned for how you’d do in front of a livestream recorder, but if you were a drama minor, you might have some records of past performances we could look at instead. We really did pick you based on what your advisors said about engineering aptitude.”

“Perhaps we should have been looking for showmanship as a criterion! I will admit, it was short-sighted of us to imagine that a good Human engineer would also be good in front of a recorder, simply on the basis of being Human. But if indeed you studied drama as well, then perhaps our choice of you was purely serendipitous.”

“Where do you guys come from again?” Nate asked.

“The Hyperpurples all hail from the quaint fishing province of Fillit! We supply all of Diw with… I don’t know how to translate the specific words.”

“Crabs, mostly,” Rikwaal said. “Crabs are like felines. You see them on every planet.”

“Well, yes, crabs, but I was thinking of the ri’heenyu.”

“Oh, yeah. Picture salmon, but they’re saltwater only, and they don’t go home to spawn, and they have green flesh from all the algae they eat, not pink.”

“So not like salmon at all,” Nate said.

“Eh, the taste is kind of similar, and it’s a similarly fleshy fish.”

“My parents are fishers,” Bakoon said, “as are my siblings, my cousins, my avunes, my grandparents, and so on and so forth. But I have always heard the siren call of invention! To build things, to make ideas into a reality, was my only interest as a child!”

“If you’re trying to figure out why he talks like that, it’s because he went to college in Herwun. Our capital city. And then he decided he was ashamed of being a Fillito, so he adopted the most not-Fillito speech pattern he could come up with. It’s not an English language thing, he talks like that in Diwar, too.”

Bakoon frowned. Nate had no idea why his expression looked like a frown, given that he could not in fact frown with his snout-beak, but he had the very strong impression that it was a frown. Maybe it was because Diwar eyes could scowl, and Bakoon was not quite scowling, but not quite not scowling. “I was never ashamed of Fillit Province,” Bakoon said. “I merely felt it was misleading to imply to those who are non-Fillito that I share the knowledge and interests one would expect from a Fillito.”

“Like how to fish,” Rikwaal said. “They haven’t let him fish since the time he tried to electrify an inlet to stun the fish.”

“My plan was mathematically quite sound.”

“Except for how many fish it would have killed, and ruined the freshness.”

“You are hardly an expert fisher yourself, Rikwaal.”

“Never was. I kept the metrics on my family’s fleet of fishing boats.”

If he took this job, and so far he wasn’t at all convinced he should, Nate could see he was going to have to put up with a lot of these two verbally sparring with each other. “So let me get this straight. You want me to give you stupid ideas, help you build them, and perform in front of the cameras in front of an audience of thousands of Diwar—”

“Millions,” Rikwaal said.

“I dare say it may be in the billions now.”

“No, it’s not. I manage the metrics, remember? The Great Build is regularly viewed by 720 million Diwar on a yearly basis, with an additional 200 million occasionally tuning in during some years, or popping in to watch for a few days and then leaving.”

“920 million is close to a billion.”

“Fine, millions of Diwar, then,” Nate said. “Does that basically sum it up?”

“That sums up what you’d do for the competition, but your actual job would involve a lot of training and study on top of that.”

“A great deal. We must bring you up to Diwar levels of knowledge within the first few months. It will be challenging! Rigorous! If you consider yourself unable to manage such an intense course of study, you are of course not obligated to take this position.”

Nate wasn’t going to let Bakoon use reverse psychology on him, but this – minus Bakoon’s passive-aggressive comments – was the first thing he’d heard that left him strongly in favor of taking the job. The Diwar trained very few humans, and there were entire domains of their knowledge that they simply didn’t share. “Does that include the Interdicted Disciplines?”

“If you sign a pledge that you will not share your knowledge for the purpose of making war, nor will you share it with anyone who does not sign a similar pledge, then yes, we have absolute authority to train you in any discipline that seems relevant.”

“Your planet still doesn’t have a unified central government,” Rikwaal said. “We can’t take the risk that your existing separate states might make war on each other with our technology.”

“Come on. Humanity’s been in space for forty years now. The UN has a lot more teeth in it than it used to, before you guys came along.”

“Yes, yes, but the decision is unfortunately not in our hands. We are merely a sporting team from Fillit Province, not politicians or influential leading lights of society, as yet.”

Well. It wasn’t as if Nate disagreed with the restriction against using Diwar technology for war; tensions between human nations still existed, and war was overall pretty terrible. Maybe it made sense that they wouldn’t teach humans certain things unless the humans pledged to never use those things for war. The thought of actually getting to learn Diwar physics and engineering in the Interdicted Disciplines was heady. He’d be able to write his own ticket anywhere on Earth that did engineering at all, or become a professor with near-instant tenure if the college could enforce his students pledging against war.

“Ok. I’m sold, I guess. Happy to be a dancing bear for a year if it means I have a chance of learning the advanced stuff you guys won’t teach the rest of us.”

“Excellent!” Bakoon declared. “I will inform the rest of the team!”

“You will not,” Rikwaal said. “He’s gotta pass the test first.”

“Oh. Ahem.” He actually said “ahem” rather than making a throat-clearing noise. “Yes, of course.”

“What kind of test?”

“A test of thinking outside boxes! A challenge to your creativity and skill!”

Rikwaal sighed.

***

They brought him to a room where there was a chaotic pile of transparent chips that were about the size of his pinky fingernail, all over a table and spilling onto the floor. There was also a small robot. The robot, about a foot tall, was built in a Diwar-like shape rather than a humanoid shape, but it had very large eyes, proportionately much bigger than Diwar eyes, or human eyes for that matter. It was as if a Japanese animator had been given the task of making a cute Diwar robot, and had applied extremely large eyes for cuteness. The robot was painted in bright primary colors, with a thin visible speaker grille in its slightly open beaklike mouth.

“This,” Bakoon said in an apologetic tone, “is your assistive equipment. It will follow voice commands in English, to assist you with the task.”

“We figured you needed something,” Rikwaal said, “since you only have two arms.”

“Humans are pretty good at getting by with our two arms,” Nate said, in a mild tone of voice because sounding as irritated with the condescension as he felt would be a good way to not get the job.

“Most Diwar engineers working on a task have robotic assistance,” Bakoon said. “We regret, though, that all we’re able to offer you for assistance is… this.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Bakoon became very interested in smoothing down the feathers of his left large-arm. “It’s… well, it’s hardly up to the standards we’d prefer to use—”

“It’s a child’s toy,” Rikwaal said. “We borrowed it from Le’ir because the budget wouldn’t support buying anything more sophisticated and bringing it to Earth. Or buying anything, really. He’s held onto it since he was a kid.”

“In English, we would call it something like a… Buildy Buddy.” Bakoon was still very interested in preening his arm. This looked like it was conveying the same emotions humans would by staring at the floor or ostentatiously not making eye contact.

“A Buildy Buddy,” Nate repeated.

“Well, of course the name in Diwar Standard isn’t quite the same. It’s more of a portmanteau word than alliterative, but I thought this would be the best translation.”

“It’s not like you’re likely to need it for much,” Rikwaal said. “Maybe bringing you tools or something.” There was a large collection of tools, electronics boards, and various doodads all over a table that ran along the wall.

“Okay,” Nate said, hiding his impatience. “So, what’s the job?”

“These are memory chips. Most of them can hold a petabyte of data,” Rikwaal said. Nate whistled. The solid state memory chips humans used in their tablets and phones were a little bit smaller – not much, they were close to the limit of what humans could usefully manipulate and not lose in a carpet – but typically held only a few terabytes. “But about ten percent of them—” she held one up against the light with her small-arm’s talons—“are double capacity.” She picked up another and held them both up. “Take a look.”

Both were transparent. Both were the exact same color. Both had a numeric sequence on them that was too tiny to read and was written with Diwar hexadecimal numerals anyway, but looked to be about the same length. But when Rikwaal held them in front of the light, Nate could see that one of them was very slightly darker on the inside.

“And… what? I’m supposed to separate the two-petabyte chips from the one-petabytes?”

“In three hours,” Bakoon said.

Nate looked at the pile of what had to be thousands of the chips. He looked at the two Rikwaal was holding. “Is there any significant difference between them? Like… am I supposed to plug them all into that laptop to check their size?”

“You can’t plug any of them into the laptop,” Rikwaal said, “since this is a Diwar standard and that is a human laptop. Also that would take you much too long.”

Well, he definitely had to agree with that. Finding ten percent of several thousand, when they weren’t visibly different unless held to the light, was already the kind of task a fairy tale character would probably need the help of a kindly bird bringing her flock in to help after the hero had put the bird’s babies back in her nest for her, or something.

“As for any other indicator of the difference,” Bakoon said, “you have your two examples and you have your tools, and components for various devices you might choose to build. The rest is up to you to resolve!”

Great. Nate hadn’t saved any baby birds recently.

***

The two Diwar left the room, leaving Nate to his own devices… as many of them as he might decide to build in three hours, anyway. What he really wanted to do was rant about how ridiculous and unreasonable this task was, but he considered it very likely that they were watching and listening, so he needed to stay professional.

He decided to get acquainted with his tools. “Hey, Buildy Buddy.” Nothing. “Hey, little robot.” Shit, why hadn’t he asked how he was supposed to address the thing to get it to respond? They’d said it understood English. “Robot guy! Buildy Buddy! You dude!” Nothing. “Can you hear me, little robot dude?”

The robot chirped.

“Oh, ok. So I’m supposed to call you ‘little robot dude’?” Nothing. “Shit. Um, do you understand English?” Chirp. “Can I call you Buildy Buddy?” Chirp. “What happens if I ask you something that’s more complicated than yes or no?” Nothing. “Is it okay if I jump out a window and kill myself?” This time the sound wasn’t a chirp, more like a squawk. “Ok! Yes and no! We’re getting somewhere!”

So Buildy Buddy understood English, but could only say yes or no, in… Diwar Standard? Baby talk? Some made-up toy language? And if the question was more complicated than yes or no, Buildy Buddy couldn’t answer. “Buildy Buddy, can you go get me a screwdriver?” Chirp, and the little robot rolled along the table full of tools, found a screwdriver, picked it up with a large-arm, rolled back, and handed it to Nate. Its lower body had wheels rather than Diwar legs.

“Buildy Buddy, is this a double-capacity disk?” He held one of the chips up in front of it. Nothing. “Buildy Buddy, can you tell the difference between a single-capacity and double-capacity?” Squawk, but not exactly the same squawk. The response to his query about committing suicide had been loud and somewhat angry-sounding, like an infuriated chicken. This squawk was quieter. Maybe Buildy Buddy was programmed to alert parents if the kids were trying to do something dangerous? It still probably meant no, though. Nate hadn’t seriously expected that to work, but he’d had to try.

He inventoried his tools and components. There was a lot. Lasers. Scales. A centrifuge. Screwdrivers, hex drivers, crimpers, wire, a tiny soldering iron, an AR visor… what was that for? Nate put it on, and saw the words “Magnification: 100%” floating in the top right corner. “Visor, increase magnification to 200%.” Nothing happened. Then he found the up and down buttons on the right temple. Yep, that was a magnifier. Maybe there were other things it could do, but if it wouldn’t respond to voice commands, Nate had no idea how to get it to do anything.

The laptop was running LonelyIX, a variety of Unix with all the networking protocols stripped out aside from direct ethernet cable connectivity. It could be connected to a single other machine, or to a LAN running specific protocols, but it had no ability to connect to the internet. The OS was generally used on servers where it was important to keep them isolated from the Net, such as AI research or top secret projects. So the Hyperpurples thought it was very important that he not have Internet access for this test. That made sense, as annoying as it might be. Its lock screen had a timer on it, showing Nate’s time ticking down.

He tried weighing the two chips on a very tiny scale that had been provided. The double capacity was, in fact, slightly heavier, in the nanogram range. Nate tried weighing the chips; at twenty-three chips he found one of the double-sided ones. He realized there was no way he could separate the chips out just by weighing them, in the time frame he was given.

Could he do something with weighing large groups? There were larger scales that had the capacity… but no. There were thousands of chips. He’d have to weigh in small enough batches that he could get some idea of how many double-sided might be in a particular group.

OK. Inspect the chips with high magnification. See if there was any other trait he could use to separate them. He had two examples of the double capacity, and twenty-three of the single, counting the original sample he’d been given.

Wait a minute. Was that… seriously?

“Buildy Buddy, can you read the serial number on these chips?” Chirp. “Do you recognize the first character in the serial number on this chip?” Chirp. “If I show a new chip to you, can you say yes if the chip serial number starts with this character?” Chirp. “Can you say no if it doesn’t start with this character?” Chirp. “Am I wearing a purple hat?” Squawk. OK, it wasn’t stuck. It legitimately was answering yes to his questions.

“Let’s see how fast you can read,” he muttered.

He laid out chips for Buildy Buddy to chirp or squawk at. For the first fifty, he tossed them on the scale first to make sure they were, in fact, following the pattern he’d noticed. One of the fifty came up wrong, and he observed that it started with a different character than any of the others had. Meanwhile, of the forty-three he’d identified as single-sided on the basis of the serial number, there were seven that started with a fourth character. So it looked like the chips could have at least four separate kinds of serial numbers, starting with different characters.

“Buildy Buddy! We’re going to change it up some. Say yes if the serial number starts with the same character as either of these two chips, and no if it starts with the serial number of either of these two. If you see any other character outside of one of these four, I want you to roll backward five centimeters and then roll forward five centimeters. Got it?” Chirp.

What followed was an hour of lining up chips for Buildy Buddy to check, pulling out all the ones it chirped at, shoving aside all the ones it squawked at, and on three occasions, pulling out one it rolled back and forth on to weigh it, then modifying his instructions. All the chips he tested turned out to either weigh the same as the other single sided chips, or the same as the other double sided chips; there was no weight variance.

He was now two hours into his allotted three when the thought occurred to him. “Buildy Buddy, are you able to pick up these chips?” Chirp. “Can you put them in a pile?” Chirp. “I want you to take the ones where the serial number starts with one of these three characters, and pile them here. The ones where the serial number is any of these four, pile them here. If you find any other characters starting the serial number, give the chip to me. Can you do that?” Chirp.

There was his friendly bird. Buildy Buddy was not quite as fast as he was at picking up chips, but by now he had memorized what the characters on the chips looked like, and could identify them for itself. So while Buildy Buddy was going through the pile autonomously, he could sweep chips in front of himself, use the magnification on the visor to check the initial character of the serial number, and pull out the double-sided ones.

The laptop had a camera. If he had thought of it earlier, he could maybe have written a program that let the laptop use its camera to check his work, or maybe to check chips on its own… Buildy Buddy had two large-arms. It could have been stacking chips for the laptop camera and assigning them to one pile or the other, while it was picking chips up with its other arm. But it was too late to make use of the laptop now.

He was working on the last three when the door opened and Bakoon entered. “Time!” the Diwar called. “The test is over!”

On the assumption that at a 10 to 1 ratio, the last three he hadn’t looked at were probably single-sided, Nate swept them into that pile. “Done.” He stood up. “These two piles are double capacity. The rest are single.”

Bakoon cocked his head. “You are sure of this result?”

“Pretty sure,” Nate said.

Rikwaal poked her head into the room as Bakoon strode over to the table and stared at the Buildy Buddy. “Well, that was… interesting,” she said.

“You used a child’s toy,” Bakoon said, still staring at the Buildy Buddy. “All of these tools and instruments, and you used a toy.”

“And the fact that these are all the same brand of chip and apparently they have some coding in the serial number,” Rikwaal said. “I had no idea. I’ve never even looked at these serial numbers.”

“Yes,” Bakoon said. “Nor have I. You know that wouldn’t have worked if by coincidence the company who makes these hadn’t decided to use different characters for the single vs double capacity?”

“You’re Diwar,” Nate said. “It’d be efficient for a company to differentiate the serial numbers of separate products so they can’t overlap, and you guys usually go for efficiency.”

“True, but…”

“So, did I pass or not?”

Bakoon was plainly struggling. “We expected… an engineeringsolution of some type? Create an algorithm to allow you to identify the chips by differential weight. Use the magnifier and the laser in combination to detect the differential refraction of light passing through the singles and doubles. Something like that. Not… you just had the toy read the serial numbers and do the job for you!”

Nate shrugged. “You give your kids some pretty sophisticated toys.”

“We will have to check to see if your solution produced the correct results before we can say if you’ve passed the test—”

“No, we won’t,” Rikwaal interrupted. “You’re hired.”

“What do you mean?” Bakoon asked, aggrieved. “Of course we have to check if his solution worked!”

“I’d welcome that, actually,” Nate said.

“Sure, but it’s not necessary for him to join the team. We didn’t come to recruit a human whose solutions are always accurate. We came to recruit a human who could think of things none of us would. And using a kid’s toy to help him scan the serial number instead of using some more traditional engineering solution is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping for.”

Bakoon’s crest, which had puffed when he became agitated, slumped back against his head. “I… suppose you’re right. It is a very… different… solution.”

“I mean, go ahead and check it,” Nate said. “I’m pretty sure it’s accurate, regardless of what you think of the method.”

“What made you think of such a thing?” Bakoon asked.

Nate laughed with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “So, on Earth, we have stories for children that we call ‘fairy tales’. A lot of these stories involve some witch or monster setting the main character an impossible task. Sort this entire bag of grains and separate the rice from the barley, that kind of thing. Only, the main character is so good and kind, they’ve helped some kind of magic creature early in the story. I remembered one where the character saved a bunch of baby birds that fell out of a nest, and the mother bird was so grateful, that she said the kid could call on her any time he was desperate for help. So this witch makes him do this sorting task, and he calls the bird, and she comes with her whole flock and they sort the grain for him. Or whatever it was. I was really, really young when I read the story.”

“And you took inspiration from this story?” Bakoon asked.

“Well… Buildy Buddy was chirping. I mean, the sound it makes when it means ‘yes’ sounds exactly like a chirp from an Earth songbird of some kind. And I made the connection. Buildy Buddy sounds like a bird, a bird helped the character in the fairy tale, maybe it can help me. Also, after I tried weighing them and realized it would take me way too long to weigh them all, I was inspecting them to see if there was anything I could see that was different about the chips, and I saw that all the ones whose weight was the same as my example of a single capacity disk had the same squiggle starting the serial number, and the two I had that I thought were double capacity based on their weight had a different squiggle. And I can’t read Diwar fast enough to be able to identify those squiggles, especially how small they are, but I decided to see if Buildy Buddy could do it. Turns out it could.”

“So,” Rikwaal said to Bakoon. “The human used a storyto help him solve an engineering problem. You see how this sells itself, right?”

“I mean, I don’t usually solve engineering problems with fairy tales,” Nate said, feeling like this might be going in the wrong direction. “Usually I use math.”

“But the audience,” Bakoon said, his crest starting to lift again. “Yes. The audience will expect the human to know stories and be good at presenting them in some way; if he uses a story to solve a problem, they’ll be riveted! Who knew you could even use stories to solve problems?”

“We actually do that a lot,” Nate said. “We’ve built things because someone wrote a story about the thing and an inventor read the story and thought, Hey, I bet I could actually make that thing.”

“Amazing!”

“You guys do tell stories, though, right? I mean, you’re not… it’s not like you don’t have an imagination for fiction.”

“Of course we do,” Rikwaal said, “but humans are just better at it.”

“I think that’s probably a cultural thing. Diwar could probably learn to come up with amazing stories, too, if you wanted to. I mean, I was in Florida for spring break a couple of years ago and I met a Kai who was learning to scuba dive. She worked at the beach gift shop selling hermit crabs and shells.”

Both crests lifted. Nate got the impression that that particular lift indicated being taken aback. “A Kai, swimming? Earth is full of wonders,” Bakoon said.

Nate had felt the same way when he’d met the catlike alien – Kai famously did not like water, the same way Earth cats didn’t. It had made him realize that a lot of what the Diwar, the Kai, and all the other aliens thought about each other, or humans, was probably pretty close to human racist beliefs like “black people have rhythm” and “Asians are really good at math.” The Diwar really did know a lot more than humans, and had a culture built around excelling at STEM fields, but biologically he very much doubted they were actually better than humans.

And he might have the opportunity to prove it.

“So. Do I get a salary on this job?”

“We all do,” Rikwaal said. “Until the Build, at which point we will probably lose and be kicked out of the competition and we’ll all have to get real jobs.”

“All the skies forfend,” Bakoon said fervently. “Let us hope this strategy saves us from that fate!”

“What’s the next step, then?”

“Do you have an interstellar passport?” Rikwaal asked.

“Uh… no.”

“Then the next step is, I get you an appointment to get an emergency same-day passport because this specific country of all your nations refuses to modernize, and I book you a ticket on our flight back to Diw, and we all go back home and introduce you to the rest of the team. You’ll like Le’ir. You won’t like Enshru, nobody likes Enshru. Irta and Mip, depends on how they feel that day.”

“Be fair,” Bakoon said. “She’s had a difficult life. I am moderately fond of Enshru.”

“Wow. Uh, when I got up this morning I was not expecting to get a job out-system. How long do I have to pack? What am I allowed to bring? And how long before the Build, like, how long will I be out there with you guys?”

“Bakoon, we’ve got his email, right?” Bakoon nodded at Rikwaal’s question. She continued. “I’ll send all that to you in email, then. The Build is about ten of your months away; it’s annual, but Diwar years are shorter than Terran.”

“Or, looking at it a different way, the Build begins now,” Bakoon said, “and what is ten months from now is our opportunity to show off what we have made in the intervening ten months.”

Ten months on an alien world. Not just offplanet, but outside Sol System entirely. Nate had never even been to the Moon.

A grin slowly spread across his face, and grew bigger uncontrollably until he was smiling so wide, he was almost laughing. At this point he didn’t care what the salary actually was, as long as it was enough to afford room and board and some souvenirs on an alien world. This was a job he’d have taken for free.