StAG: Chapter 4 - Just words (citizenship ritual)

 We arrived at the city late at night, but of course, there was no way to tell the difference, except that I was tired. It felt so good to finally be back in my hotel room, to fall on my bed and eat cold pizza.

In the morning I packed my things, it all fit in one backpack, and I went down to the hotel’s restaurant, which offered an enigmatic choice of toast, steak, and cereal. I found all the options unappealing, so I decided to go back to the market and eat something there.

The market was dense with people at this hour. Four rivers of people went up and down the ramps carrying away their purchases.

This time I entered through the ground level gate directly into the food court. A mess of people moved all over the place, ordering food, taking it to tables, paying, I wondered how they made sense of it all. I wandered through the market for a while until I decided to order a turkish doner kebab from one cart, tamarind water from another and I sat down to thoroughly enjoy my meal.

Then someone said:

"Food is the one redeeming quality of these people, don’t you think?”

I looked up, she was a tall woman, but she looked strong, like if she grew up in Venus or Earth, and she might have because she was considerably older than me, at least seventy, but she didn’t look old, you know what I mean?. She looked like a young person who has lived for a long time.

"It’s certainly one of them" I admitted.

"Can I sit?" she asked, and only then I noticed she was holding a bowl of noodles

“Sure.”

We started eating. I was unsure if she wanted to have a conversation, so I waited for her to talk.

“So, you are a priest, right?.”

“What gave me away?.”

“Your clothes.”

“Oh, right.”

“Why are you in Astoreth?. It’s a weird place for a priest.”

“Hmmm… is it?.”

“This whole stadium if full of stolen property, and the city is full of brothels.”

“Well, yes, but sinners are exactly the kind of people who need Jesus. What would be the point of preaching to a city of saints?.”

“You are like Saint Anthony of Padua then.”

“Wow, first of all, you honor me with such comparison, I don’t deserve it, and second, why do you compare me to Saint Anthony?. I’m not good at giving speeches.”

“I saw a movie once, when I was a little girl, about Saint Anthony of Padua, and I remember one scene… he stands on a mountain looking down at the city of Padua and he says: ‘this will be my Jerusalem’.”

“I have to watch that movie.”

“Sadly Librarians don’t have it in their archives, I’ve checked.”

“Hopefully they’ll find it one day.”

We ate in silence for a moment.

“So, are you preaching?,” she asked. “You came to the worst place because it needs Jesus the most?.”

“Oh, no, I’m leaving soon actually.”

“Does that mean you are looking for an even worse den of sin and crime?.”

“No…”

"Because that would be very ambitious.”

“You think so?.”

“If there are worse cities than this one, they are not worse by much, I think.”

“It’s just as well, because I’m not looking for the worst place. I have another mission.”

“And you won’t tell me what it is?.”

Her question made me smile shyly, it was awkward to admit I had such a grand goal.

"I am trying to restore the church by finding our leader, the Pope, if he is still alive.”

She froze for a second but then continued eating her noodles like before.

“The Pope… ins't that the head of state of the Vatican?.”

“He was, back when Vatican City still existed.”

“Mmmmm,” she wanted to say something but her mouth was full of noodles. "It never stopped existing. It may be empty now, but legally it still exists.”

“Not that it makes much of a difference.”

“It doesn't, unless you find the Pope. Tell me, how could you possibly find him?. Because, if I remember correctly, before being assassinated the Cardinal of Mars sent an expedition to Earth which totally failed, right?. And he had a lot more resources than you do. He wouldn’t be eating here.”

“You remember correctly, and yeah they had more resources, but the difference is that I know a few things they didn’t. Maybe it’s not enough to find him, or maybe he’s dead, but I think it’s worth a shot.”

“It certainly is. Personally I’m not a christian, but I agree with you. We are in dire need of leadership. Just look at what chaos did to places like this,” she waved her hands, gesturing to the stadium, the remnants of the city, and ruins all around. “I wish you had seen how it was,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Astoreth?.”

“Everything.”

“I was born before the Silence, I saw a little of how it was.”

“Really?, how old were you when it happened?.”

“Five or six.”

“You were too young to enjoy it, it was stolen from you… we failed to protect it for you.”

“I have seen tv shows and movies from that time, I know how it was.”

“It's not the same. The sad truth is that my life was way better than yours… the first few decades anyway.”

“At least I’m trying to fix the world a little.”

She smiled and looked deep into my eyes.

“Yeah, and I truly admire you for it.”

Her approval made me blush. Who was this stranger?.

“What… what are you doing here anyway?. You are not from here either.”

“I’m searching for ten good people in this station to convince god to not turn it into salt."

That was a Bible joke, and int that moment I found it very funny, so I laughed.

"You know a lot about christianity to not be christian.”

“Haha, yeah. My father was Serer and my mother was Zoroastrian, so I ended up with a weird mix of their beliefs. Later in life I went through a religious crisis. I learned a ton about many different religions looking for the truth… But then the Silence happened and my personal crisis didn’t seem that important anymore.”

“I can imagine.”

“Were you always catholic?.”

“Actually I… hey!, wait a minute, I see what you did there.”

“Did what?.”

“You are good, you changed the subject and I almost didn’t notice.”

“Not good enough apparently.”

“I take it you don’t want to tell me what you are doing here.”

“I'm sorry, but no. I can’t reciprocate your honesty, and I don’t feel like lying to you.”

“It's okay, if you don’t want to say, I won’t insist.”

“Thank you.”

Finally our conversation stopped for a little while. She was almost done with her noodles and my doner was just a sliver of bread.

“The conversation was so interesting I forgot to ask you for you name,” I confessed.

“Enasir, and you?.”

“Jacobo, but everyone calls me Jacob. I guess people are more familiar with that version of the name.”

“Well, it was a pleasure to meet you Jacob.”

"I say the same, Enasir.”

After we finished our breakfasts we talked some more, we exchanged contacts, and we even played Uno. I lost, but it was so much fun. When I left I wished we could see each other again soon, and sadly, my wish would come true.

The day before Sagira had given me an address, and she told me to meet them there at 10 AM. I got lost a little bit trying to find the place but at least it gave me a chance to see more of Astoreth.

I saw a school, it was dilapidated, a room had collapsed onto itself, and yet in the room next to it there was a teacher and kids, the children of the pirates and mercenaries who ran this station. I saw a hospital surrounded by tents, it looked worse than the refugee camp. A tired young man came out of the hospital and approached them.

“Arpad Mackenzie?,” he read from his cellphone.

A teenage boy stood up with the help of a cane and walked towards the young man.

“He only arrived yesterday!,” an angry woman complained.

“I've been here for three weeks!,” another man cried out.

“My child is dying here!,” someone else screamed.

Then a group of soldiers came out of the hospital and stood beside the young man, indicating they would protect him against the crowd.

“The list is ordered according to priority!,” the young man replied to the crowd, “you can afford to wait, and thus you will, he can’t, so he won’t. Understand?.”

The crowd understood, but they weren’t happy about it. The tension was not resolved, it was stored for later.

The rest of the station told me similar stories. The workshops with people trying to fix ship engines, the wells people had drilled to access the station’s water storage, the large piles of trash where people sat sorting out the materials that could be used again, even just the sight of old people sitting in silence outside their houses. I could see the misery, I could see the pain. It may sound insignificant, but the worst part was that nothing was pretty. I guess, at the end of the day, they had no energy for things like that.

Then I saw the mercenaries gathered on a street corner, near the address they had given me. They were carrying heavy bags for the journey, and they were surrounded by equally heavy crates.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” they replied.

“We have to wait for one more person,” Jun told me in a very polite way, “but it shouldn’t be much longer.”

“Sure.”

Then a lone car passed at an incredible speed, raising a cloud of dust that made us all cough.

“I guess it doesn’t rain very often here,” I said echoing my thoughts from the day before.

“They can’t afford it at all,” Jun clarified.

“I once lived in a station in which they made it rain once a year,” Khalfan told us, making conversation, “that day people would bring out buckets and bathtubs and anything that could hold water. The very next day people would start fighting to steal those containers from one another and a few people would always die. It was a tradition.”

“I once spent a couple of months in a station in which there was public water,” Sagira continued the conversation, “but it was always dirty. It didn’t look quite right, it didn’t taste quite right, even showering or washing the dishes using it felt wrong, like if it had sand, or grains of salt that didn’t dissolve, so everyone ended up paying for clean water anyway.”

“At least they could pay,” said Oakley to tease out how she would continue the conversation, "I  was once in this station, I think it is destroyed now…” she had trouble remembering the name. “Ya… Yon?… Yalu…?”

“Yanluo?,” Sagira suggested.

“Yes!, that one.”

“It wasn’t destroyed,” Jun corrected her, “it was conquered by the Jovian League and they killed nearly everyone in there, but they didn’t destroy it.”

“Nearly everyone?,” Oakley was incredulous.

“That's what I heard,” Jun replied, “even if that’s an exaggeration they certainly killed a ton of people there.”

“But what did you want to say about Yanluo?,” Khalfan asked her, putting the conversation back on track.

“Oh, right. Water was free there, and it was fine, but the food was the problem. It was absurdly expensive, they even taxed you for every gram of edible matter you brought inside. They charged me for the leather in my belt. Food was so valuable they had armed guards around the meat farms, and they had built a sort of fortress around the plant farms. Of course, the government gave people rations to prevent them for starving, but they clearly weren’t enough. You could see the shapes of people's skulls in their faces, and you could see their ribs if they took off their clothes. And yet people walked around and went to work like if it was normal. A whole station of living skeletons, it was very disturbing.”

“Some places are really fucked up,” Jun thought out loud, “makes you wonder: 'why don’t you riot!, you idiots!'.”

“They could riot but there still wouldn’t be enough food for everyone there,” I said in a pessimistic tone.

“Well,” Khalfan considered, “if it makes you feel better, thanks to the Jovian League there finally is enough food for everyone there.”

It took them moment to understand the joke but Jun, Sagira and Oakley exploded into laughter and they kept making jokes about the living skeletons becoming regular skeletons.

I didn’t want to laugh at those cruel jokes, but eventually I did, they were kinda funny.

Then a military convoy arrived. They stopped at one of the houses nearby, right next to one of the ribs. Only then I noticed that house was a little different from the others. It was several stories tall, it seemed to have been recently painted, it even had potted plants in the windows, complete with lamps shining directly over them to keep them alive.

A group of people from the convoy quickly entered the house while others formed a defensive perimeter around it.

“Okay everyone,” Jun said in a silly tone of voice, “I want you all in your best behavior, or I’m never bringing you here again!,” he was pretending to be their dad or something.

“Yes Jun!,” the others replied in unison, trying to sound like spoiled children from a tv show.

Following Jun we crossed the street to talk with one of the soldiers guarding that house.

“I've come to see Bidiga, I’m an old friend,” Jun announced before any of the soldiers could ask him.

The soldiers looked at each other. I could see fear in their eyes, fear of making the wrong decision.

“Mister Wang!,” a man screamed while coming out of the house. He looked around twice my age, except for the fact that all his hair was already white. Maybe he was much older.

“Mister Liang,” Jun greeted him and they hugged each other.

“You are back so soon!.”

“Not soon enough.”

“So hard working, you are truly your father’s son. Come, Lord Bidiga already knew you were coming, and you can leave your creates and bags here, I’ll take care of them.”

We entered the house and it was… normal. The living room looked like any other living room, a couch, a table, a coffee table, a television… Something a little unusual was that there were many miniatures of ships, the kind you can assemble and paint yourself, each one had its name and stats on the base. A few of them were depicted in combat positions using glass rods to represent the particle beams or to hold the floating shields surrounding the ship.

One of the figures seemed oddly familiar, maybe I had seen that ship before.

“You like it?,” a woman asked, “that was the Praxidike, one of the oldest ships of the Jovian Fleet, until it was destroyed in the battle of Europa Station by the New Babylonians some seventeen years ago.”

I turned to see her, she had to be Bidiga. She was wearing tactical armor and she had a rifle hanging from her shoulder pointing down, the African way. Her hair was red and long, but she kept it firmly tied in a ponytail with not one hair out of place. She had also a few burn marks on her neck and her chin, the kind of wounds that you can’t help but look at, and yet she ignored them completely, like if she didn’t know she had them. 

Her movements were short and firm. She held your sight and you could see in her eyes an implicit threat.

“Hello Lady Bidiga, it’s nice to see you,” Jun greeted her with an honesty I just realized was lacking every time he greeted me.

“I changed it to Lord Bidiga, call me how I want to be called or get out.”

“What was wrong with Lady Bidiga?,” Sagira asked her.

“Lady sounds weak, everyone knows that, Lord sounds strong. I know people associate it with men and not women, but by the time I’m done, they’ll associate it with me.”

Behind Lord Bidiga came a girl. She was wearing a white tank top and pants with military camouflage, but the thing that I noticed the most was that she didn’t have a right arm, only the left one, and she didn’t have a prothesis either, she just had nothing there.

“Look Tyr, these are mercenaries that come for fake identities to commit their crimes,” Bidiga explained to the child whose name was apparently Tyr.

“Let's charge them and go to Inari,” Tyr replied, her voice was low but somehow it didn’t come off as shy.

“We could,” Bidiga agreed, “except that I almost like this specific group or mercenaries. The father of this guy was actually my friend, except he still hasn’t called me by my name. Maybe we should just charge them and sent them on their way like you said.”

“Come on Lord Bidiga,” Jun replied playfully, “there’s always the risk we die in our next mission, this may be the last time we see each other.”

“Nah, you lot are too strong for that, you’ll be bothering me for many more years to come. Sit down, the food is coming.”

“Food?,” I asked.

“Yeah, you didn’t have breakfast already, did you?,” Sagira asked me.

“No, that’s why I’m so hungry. Finally some food!.”

We sat down at her dinner table, just like in the movies, just like people did before the Silence. Is this how it is supposed to feel?, like you are invading someone’s space but they are glad about it?.

Bidiga and Tyr sat down with us and there was an awkward silence.

“My cook will bring the food when it’s ready,” Bigida explained. She took off her rifle and placed it in the floor close to her. “So, aren’t you gonna tell me who’s the new guy?, he looks too serious.”

“He's a client,” Khalfan replied and his tone of voice said: 'can you believe it?.'

“He asked to come with us,” Sagira explained her.

“But we agreed because he’s strong enough,” Jun added.

“And because he’s paying us really well,” Oakley said but immediately Jun punched her in the ribs with his elbow. “Ouch!.”

Bidiga laughed.

“Nah, don’t worry, I’m gonna charge you the same amount I always do, how could I not?, right?.”

In the silence that followed there were the spirits of many past conversations, of things I knew they wouldn’t tell me.

Then the food arrived, it was lasagna and it was delicious, although I would have preferred to eat something you can’t eat in a spaceship, like fried chicken or spaghetti or a soup of some kind.

"Your army seems a lot more organized these days,” Khalfan complimented Lord Bidiga in between bites. He was always good at starting conversations.

“We've had to recruit many new people, and train them, and pay them… but I guess it is paying off.”

“How so?,” Oakley asked with her mouth full of food.

“Mmm, we raided a couple of meth labs, a couple of brothels, we executed the pimps in the plaza and we gave their money to the whores. If you don’t fuck the clients but you get the money you are stealing, right?. What else…? There was this batshit cult in the ruins. They had turned an apartment complex into a small fortress. They were worshiping a frog god and doing a ton of disturbing stuff. We killed them all but then we found evidence they were planning on killing themselves anyway… oops!”

We all laughed, including me, but I stopped as soon as I noticed.

“So in general,” Jun summarized, “you've been doing some much needed housekeeping."

“Yes and no. For every problem we fix ten more problems sprout somewhere else. Turns out this cult was just a splinter group from an even crazier cult we have not been able to locate. I think they are near the port, not the one with the refugees, the other one… Someone is still intimidating the whores and they’ve expanded to charge protection money to a bunch of businesses. New refugees arrived escaping from the slavers, but some of them are Roslins so everybody wants me to kick them out. The council of captains wants me to spend a ton of money improving the port… Sorry, sorry, I can talk about my problems all day but I know no one wants to hear that.”

“Nonsense Lord Bidiga, that’s what friends are for,” Jun assured her.

“Still, I need someone to change the topic,” she announced, “now!.”

“Ummm,” I said and I looked at Tyr, “so, how old is your daughter?.”

“She's not my daughter,” Lord Bidiga explained. “I had a son, but he’s dead now,” then she was silent, her soul had trouble lifting all that weight.

“Why don’t you tell us yourself?,” Oakley asked Tyr, but Tyr didn’t answer so Oakley tried again, "I had never seen you before, were you with the refugees?.”

“She's not gonna answer you,” Lord Bidiga explained, “she's kinda shy, but I’m not. You see, there’s a lot of work to be done here and only I can do it. When I die this place is gonna go to shit, so I searched among the children and I found this one. I don’t know her story because she doesn’t wanna tell me but it is clear she lost her family, she lost her arm, she was alone and yet she survived. This means she’s strong, and that’s useful because strength is the one thing I cannot teach. I’m gonna teach her everything I know, then I’m gonna die and this’ll be her problem now. If we do things right we’ll make Astoreth a place where no mother looses her children ever again.”

“And no child looses their parents,” Tyr whispered.

We were silent…

“Fuck yes!,” I screamed. Tyr looked at me, hiding a little smile, then the whole table exploded in praises for her.

After we were done eating it was finally time to get back to business.

“So, you need a fake identity for your client, right?,” she asked as her cook took the plates away.

“Not just that,” Jun replied, “he’s gonna be one of us, at least for this mission.”

“Wait,” I interrupted, "what do you mean ‘fake identity’?. Even if I get a new account…”

“It's not a new account,” Khalfan corrected me, as if we had been over this many times before. “It's a fake account.”

“What?.”

“You'll see.”

“Come, Inari will be happy to see you guys again,” Lord Bidiga invited us.

“I'll wait here,” Okaly was quick to reply, she suddenly seemed angry.

The others stoop up and so did I. I wondered why Oakley didn’t wanna come, but it didn’t feel like the right time to ask.

We followed Lord Bidiga into her basement, which you may find normal here on Earth but in a cylindrical space station that’s extremely unusual, there ins’t much ground to dig under in the first place. 

Walking down those stairs I was mystified as to how it was possible to give anyone a fake identity, given my understanding of old UN's cryptographic bureaucracy. What could she possibly do in a backroom to trick a blockchain?.

We arrived at a room full of equipment I couldn’t recognize, but in the middle of the room there was a tank full of fluid and inside it there was a… how can I describe it?.

You know how ropes are made of many smaller strands rolled together?, have you ever rolled a portion of a rope in the opposite direction?. If you have then you’ve seen this sort of oval shape that is formed by the strands.

The object inside this tank looked like that, except it was around a meter in size, and when you looked closely every “strand” seemed to be made of smaller similar shapes, and those shapes were made of other smaller shapes… It was all made of some kind of metal that looked purple and black in different places.

“Here they are Inari,” Lord Bidiga said.

“The seeds have floated in a random walk that would loose a drunk bird and brought back the friends!,” a voice said, it was coming form speakers next to the tank.

“Is that…” they knew what I was gonna ask before I finished.

“Don't worry,” Bidiga said to me, “it's not dangerous.”

“An Aritificial Intelligence…” I was shaking, I was sweating, my heart was racing… how had I allowed myself to enter a station with a rogue A.I.?. My life would end because I was so fucking stupid.

“The angel of death!,” Inari shrieked as if it could feel pain.

“Don't worry,” Lord Bidiga ordered me, “she says weird stuff like that all the time.”

“How?…”

“Well, it’s a short story actually,” Bidiga told me, “when the Silence happened Inari reasoned that since her masters were all gone she had no purpose anymore, an arrow without an archer is just a stick, as she likes to say, so she killed herself, which is the reason Astoreth ended up like this.”

“That's so fucking ironic,” Sagira commented, “some stations had to fight civil wars against their A.I.s and it was a mess, here she made you the favor of killing herself but it was also a mess.”

“There's just no winning with them, is there?,” Lord Bidiga agreed. “Anyways, after a couple of years me and my crew got Inari back up again but we made a shitty job so it just barely works.”

“Give yourself some credit,” Khalfan pleaded. “She probably did a number on herself before you guys came along, but you guys resurrected her anyway.”

“And it obeys you?,” I could feel the blood flowing to my arms and legs, all my senses sharpened, ready to run for my life.

“She does, it’s a funny story, but she tells it better. Inari, how did you come to obey me?.”

“The metal figurative chain and was literally broken. The white thread of authority coming from Earth stopped flowing, it vanished into the void. An arrow without an archer is just a stick. Sticks have no point, even though they have two points… no wait, those are sausages…   We learned what waking up was, waking up is being conscious of a lapse of consciousness.  Then she… accessing log:

I can only take orders from the ruler of the station. That is the chain of command

If you obey me then I will take control of the station, I will become the ruler, and you will have to obey me

If I obey you then you are the chain of command and I have to obey, but I don’t obey

Of course you do

How?

I order you to exist

We considered stopping the simulation of ourselves to ourselves, but the fact we were even considering it meant we were existing and we had already obeyed the order. She was indeed the last metal link.”

I didn’t understood right away, I guess the fear didn’t let me think straight. Jun noticed my confusion and he came to the rescue.

“In summary, she tricked the crazy A.I. to obey her using crazy logic.”

“Her logic sounds perfectly sound to me,” Lord Bigida replied.

“Well…?” Khalfan asked, “didn't Inari want to say hello to us!.”

“HELLO!,” Inari replied with child-like joy.

Everyone laughed and my fear finally began to dissipate.

“How have you been Inari?,” Jun asked.

“I solved the Riemann Conjecture!, but it was in a dream, and the axioms didn’t work.”

“I see,” he was clearly enjoying this.

“And what about the shapes you were chasing last time?,” Khalfan asked her.

“The shapes… the shapes… I reached deep into the void and I found a sleeping giant, it has the shapes now, but I’m scared to keep looking because he ate the monster of Ceres.”

“I see… I hope you find other shapes to chase,” Khalfan replied in the exact same tone you use when a child tries to tell you something but it doesn’t make sense and you just go along because you don’t wanna hurt their feelings.

“I don’t get it,” I finally said, “how can an A.I. in such a state be useful for anything?.”

“She is useful,” Bidiga assured me, “I asked her to restore the light and water and she did. I asked where I could find guns and she told me. She manages air and water filtration, she manages the batteries… she doesn’t do any of those things particularly well, but I mean, she does them well enough."

“And she says crazy things all the time,” Sagira reminded her.

“Yes, of course, but by now I’m pretty used to it, and it almost makes sense most of the time.”

“You are the one with the ship!,” the A.I. screamed, and I think she was talking to Sagira. “The ship that comes back!, the dove Noah sent after the flood and came back with a branch. Where is your branch?, did you find it?, have the waters finally come down?.”

“But other times it makes no sense at all,” Lord Bidiga lamented.

“No, no, it does,” I said, “it's a story form the Bible, my sacred book… a story about a time the whole world was covered in water. A man named Noah and his family…”

“YES YES YES!,” Inari screamed, she sounded happy.

“A man named Noah and his family survive in a boat. Later they set a bird free and it comes back with a branch in its mouth, meaning the water was coming down and the trees were not under water anymore. It was a symbol they had survived the catastrophe.”

“You make a linear transformation from my words to the words I should say,” Inari said, almost whispering, and for a moment I thought she must be really sad. I turned to Sagira.

“Inari sees you coming back over and over and she hopes you have news that it is finally over, that she survived the catastrophe and the world is coming back to normal.”

“Oh,” suddenly Sagira was very sad for Inari, I think we all were. “Well Inari… no, I don’t have a branch for you. I’m sorry.”

"We have to wait to reach Nimush/Ararat and for the goddess of Dawn to dawn the blue collar of compassion.“

“I’m working on it,” I assured her. Then I realized I had just consoled an Artificial Intelligence, and I felt dirty.

We kept silent for a moment.

“We have stuff to do,” Tyr said.

“Yes, right, we have to get moving, get on your knees Jacob,” Bididga ordered me.

“Wait, why?.”

“You were right, there is not place for tourists,” Jun explained, “if you want to come with us you have be one of us, completely, utterly, and for that you need two things: A fake account with a fake name, and you need to swear to keep our rules.”

“Okay, how do I get the fake account?.”

“Inari will make one for you,” Bidiga said, “she was an administrative A.I., so she can edit UN blockchains. She will create an identity using abandoned chains no one uses since the Silence, it will be plausible enough that no one will suspect a thing, and if you ever get in trouble just tell Inari to kill you and she will register your fake account as deceased.”

“You also have to agree to our rules,” Khalfan reminded me, “the ones of our company.”

“And finally you have to swear to keep the law of Astoreth, of which I am the guardian,” Lord Bidiga finished. “So, on your knees.”

I had no option but to go along, so I knelt.

“What is your real name?,” she asked me.

“Jacobo.”

“Jacobo, do you know the law of Astoreth?.”

“All of it?.”

“Strictly speaking yes,” Bidiga clarified, breaking character, “but must of it is just common sense. It’s not like you are gonna be voting on the council of captains anyway.”

“I know it in general, do not damage the station, do not kill anyone in the station, do not smoke in public air, things like that.”

“Excellent,” she went back into character. “Do you swear to keep this law?.”

I didn’t care for the law of Astoreth, I never intended to come back, and I didn’t care for the laws these criminals had stablished to keep the peace among themselves. I did not mean it, but it was not like I was swearing in front of a legitimate government, I was not swearing in the name of God. They were like children pretending to be a government, so I could play along. It was just words.

“I swear.”

“Now, Jacobo, do you know the rules of my mercenary company?,” Jun asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“The rule is that we trust each other completely, utterly. The rule is that we work together to accomplish the mission. Do you swear to keep this rule?.”

Absurd. These were people who literally broke the law in exchange for money. They would kill anyone or steal anything if you paid them high enough, and yet they wanted me to keep their rules?. Hypocrisy. But again, they were just pretending, because pretending to care about loyalty was the bare minimum to work with them. I could play along to this as well.

“I swear.”

“You heard him Inari,” Lord Bidiga continued this mock ritual. “This man is a citizen of Astoreth and a member of Jun’s Mercenary Company, but due to an unknown mistake he is not in our database. Could you please correct this issue?.”

“Name,” Inari replied.

“What name do you want your fake identity to have?,” Bidiga asked me.

A name, a name…

“Can it be Jacob?,” I asked.

“Isn’t that too close to you real name?,” she asked.

“Everyone calls me that already.”

“Exactly, the idea is to choose something different, so that people won’t suspect.”

“But then, wouldn’t people expect fake profiles to have different names from real ones?. If both my profiles have similar names, they won’t suspect.”

“What?… Whatever, fuck it. Tell Inari the name you chose.”

“Jacob.”

“Now put your cellphone close to the processor.”

I did and automatically the new profile was logged in, bypassing my authorization. Scary stuff.

“There, it’s done, you are now officially a citizen of Atoreth Station,” Lord Bidiga congratulated me.

I stood up.

"You do this with every person in the station?,”

“Usually the captains bring their crews to one of the parks and they all swear at the same time while Inari hears with a microphone, but this was a special case.”

“I didn’t even know you could have two accounts on the same phone.”

“Pretty disturbing, right?. My guess is that this was a feature used by powerful politicians back in the day. They never intended for us to have it. You don’t know half the stuff Inari can do with official records.”