Genrenauts: Season One

by Michael R. Underwood

  “What is your agent’s status?” another councilor asked.

  “Mallery York is in serious but stable condition. She’s the third operative from this base to be critically injured in the last month. I’m concerned about the nature of these recent breaches—”

  D’Arienzo, friendliest of the Council, cut King off. “We are aware of your concerns, and the reports from team leaders about these so-called aberrations in the breaches. Our science division is investigating the readings, but thus far, we have no reason to believe that this is anything other than a seasonal high tide of dimensional disturbances—”

  “With all due respect, Councilor—”

  Gisler cut him off. “Respect means not interrupting your superiors.”

  Status. Respect. Propriety. His own team called him a stick in the mud, but if they only knew the Council …

  D’Arienzo continued. “We thank you for your efforts, and for your report. Debrief your team and stand down to ready status.”

  “Understood,” King said. And with that, the call dropped, the screens going blank.

  “Pricks,” King said under his breath once he was certain nothing would pick up his back talk.

  Which was outside the room and ten paces down the hallway.

  But that was the way of things. The Council were mysterious and aloof. But without them, none of this would be possible. They’d discovered dimensional breaches and travel between the worlds, and kept their eyes on the big picture, maintaining the delicate balance between dozens of worlds. They had earned the right to dictate terms.

  * * *

  Two coffees in, Leah watched King walk into the break room and make himself some tea.

  “So, what do you think of this operation?” he asked.

  “You’re all kind of suicidal. But I love it. There’s no way even being a professional comedian could be this cool. Sure, it’d be less dangerous, but … cowboys, and lasers, and spaceships!”

  “And that’s probably all in your next two pay periods,” Shirin said from the couch. Boots off and legs up, she had her nose in a thick tome of a biography.

  “With Mallery injured, my team’s understaffed for the foreseeable future. So, if you want it, there’s a probationary position here for you. Your start would be back-dated to yesterday when you walked in the building.”

  “Isn’t there some security screening I have to do?”

  “I did all of that already. So, do you want the job?”

  Leah was expecting the offer, since she’d manage to pull off the fight with her slapdash plan, but seeing the Genrenauts in traction had given her some pause. She could walk away right then and if King delivered, she’d have the solid gig, she could build her career and put this all behind her.

  She thought back to the team at the table, to the look in Maribel’s eyes as Matt Williamson dropped to the floor. She thought about Frank’s cooking, Shirin’s laugh, and the feeling of jet thrusters beneath her.

  Red-pill, blue-pill time. She could go home, keep filing other people’s paperwork while daydreaming material for her shows, or go down the rabbit hole into a totally bizarre and dangerous but exciting line of work hacking dimensions and saving the world with stories.

  Mom and Dad would say to stay with the familiar, to dig deep and commit to her comedy that she had chosen over her family. But she’d gotten into comedy because it was the best way she knew to make a difference, to tell the stories she wanted to hear. In the Genrenauts, she could do all of that and never have to take minutes during a Strategic Revenue Best Practices presentation again.

  “Can I Sandberg for a moment and ask about the pay and benefits?” She’d never argued a salary before, but she’d gone into a firefight for this job. A little negotiation wasn’t going to cost her the gig.

  King pulled a slip of yellow legal paper out of his jacket and passed it to Leah.

  She unfolded the paper and was disgusted at the lowball figure until she realized there was an extra zero at the end.

  “That first number is salary. In dollars. U.S. dollars?”

  King said, “That it is. And below that is the health package.”

  Leah scanned the bottom half of the paper. The plan was positively European. Including a lot of life insurance. Unsurprising, but not super-reassuring.

  “This job will call for long hours more often than any of us like, but I think you’ll agree that the compensation is worth the overtime.”

  So, to review, she could stick with her mind-numbing but safe job and bang her head against the stand-up circuit with one gig a week until she refined her act enough to earn more work, or take a ridiculous-percent pay increase to do six impossible things before breakfast.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal,” Leah said, extending a hand. King’s grip was unsurprisingly strong.

  “Welcome to the team, then, Probie.”

  Really? “Why Probie? This isn’t NCIS.”

  “The show didn’t make that up. Fire departments and other agencies use it. And so do we.”

  “But this place isn’t government, right?”

  “No,” King said. “We’re technically nonstate actors, and if most governments found out about us, we’d probably be locked away forever. So read the NDA very, very closely.”

  “How’s Mallery?” Leah asked, eager to change the subject from how much of a newbie she was and the hazing she should expect.

  “She’ll be fine,” Roman said. “No major arteries hit, and she’s already restless. Ms. Rachelle had to come in and up her sedative so she won’t tear her stitches.”

  Roman offered a hand to Leah. “Welcome to the Genrenauts.”

  They shook. “Hope you survive the experience,” he added.

  His cribbing of the famous X-Men line put Leah even more at ease. She already felt at home with the troupe, this band of storytellers and hustlers. And she couldn’t wait to tell off Suzanne at the office and move her army of office animals out of the cubicle and into the Genrenauts break room.

  “Sounds good. But for now, I’m going to go and crash.”

  “Not so fast,” King said. “Just because you’ve been cleared, doesn’t mean you get to skip the rest of the paperwork.”

  The team lead handed her a pen and a manila folder that was at least three inches thick. “I’ll need these on my desk within the hour. Then you can head home. And be back tomorrow by eight for orientation.”

  “I take it back. I’ll die of boredom. Anything to avoid paperwork.” Leah hung her head as she exaggeratedly padded to a table, dropping the manila folder to as much despondent effect as she could muster.

  A minute later, Roman sat down across from her, a tablet and earphones in one hand, a pair of bottled beers in the other. He twisted off the caps with his palm (nice trick), and passed one to Leah.

  They toasted, and Roman put in his earbuds. He opened a digital comics reader on his tablet, leaving Leah to the stack. Leah repeated the ridiculous salary to herself as she scanned the stack of papers.

  Camaraderie, adventures in storytelling, a fat paycheck, and health insurance. What more could a girl ask for?

  END EPISODE ONE

  Episode Two:

  The Absconded Ambassador

  Chapter One: Saving the World with PowerPoint

  Working as a Genrenaut was like being a member of a theater troupe run by a burnt-out hippie who melded Devising with MBA management: the ideas were outlandish and random, but the execution was 100% corporate. There were reports, meetings, and lots of emails—but while the format was familiar, the content was delightfully bizarre.

  Emails had subject lines like “Cultural Trend Forecasting Report,” “Best Practices in Alien Relations,” and more. The required reading and viewing made Leah Tang feel like a double-booked media critic for the City Post, and the meetings, overseen by the alternatingly imperious and playful Angstrom King, were half weekly process and half crash course in graduate-level dimensional narrative theory, a subject that Leah hadn’t even known e
xisted a week ago.

  King advanced another slide as the team sat in a conference room. King stood at one end of the table, opposite the screen. Shirin Tehrani sat upright, taking notes longhand on a legal pad, never looking down, but somehow still writing impeccably. Leah would have to ask for lessons on that, too. To Leah’s right, Roman De Jager had his boots up on the table, tablet in his lap, chair leaned back five degrees short of toppling. Roman tapped through a pattern-recognition game while King continued his breakdown.

  King had never once chewed Roman out for his lack of focus, but Leah had realized over the week since she started the job that Roman was focusing—he just needed something to distract his hands and part of his brain. She’d had classmates like that—too much going on to only ever be doing one thing.

  A poster on the wall opposite Leah showed the Genrenauts seal, a constellation of worlds, a regular blue-and-green Earth in the center, all of the others bearing a logo for their genre—crossed revolvers for Western world, a heart for Romance, rocket ship for Science Fiction, and so on.

  Memorizing the logos had been a day-one job, right after her genre fluency evaluations.

  The organization’s motto curled around the worlds:

  Every World a Story, Every Story a Proper Ending

  The latest slide was so corporate it hurt, showing a set of wire diagrams. But what they represented was anything but normal. “Our Forecasters have reported increased dimensional activity,” King said.

  “All five bases corroborate, showing narrative breaches up fifteen percent year over year.”

  “So we can expect overtime to continue, then?” Shirin Tehrani asked. “My son has a recital this weekend, and if I’m off-world, I’ll be in the doghouse for months.” Shirin sported a pashmina scarf and wore her hair braided, a steaming mug of coffee sitting at her place-setting, making this her third cup of the day.

  “I’m afraid not,” King said. “Twenty-four-hour on-call status will continue until disturbances taper off or until we’re back up to full strength.”

  Another Genrenaut had come back with serious injuries two days ago, putting their in-house medical wing up to capacity. Rachelle, their head nurse, was threatening to walk if she didn’t get the payroll to bring in temporary help.

  King continued. “Forecasting expects the Romance world to be the next to show a breach, given the drop in use of and satisfaction with dating apps and a reduction in applications for marriage licenses. However, Wright’s reconnaissance run yesterday didn’t show anything amiss, and the readouts aren’t indicating a breach, so …”

  “We wait.” Roman slid his feet off the table and leaned forward, setting his tablet in front of him.

  “Indeed. You’ll find new genre briefing priorities in the team’s Cloud Box. Leah, this is your priority for today. Your entrance interview ranked you Yellow on Rom-Com, but Red on category romance.”

  Leah shrugged. “My mom was the Harlequin fan. I never took to them.”

  “Your personal tastes will inform your perspective, but any field agent, probationary or no, is expected to be conversant in all of the genres for which we’re responsible, which means that you’ve got a date with your eReader.”

  “Yes, oh captain my captain,” Leah said, saluting with a fist over her heart.

  King clicked through one more time, and the presentation ended with the Genrenauts logo.

  “You have your assignments,” King said, shutting off the projector and walking out of the room. To Leah’s eyes, King had been harried over the week, way more stressed back home than he’d been in the field. She was still getting to know everyone, though, so maybe stressed was just his default. She’d noticed that this week he ate ham hocks, collard greens, and skillet cornbread, where all he ever ate the week she started was steamed chicken and broccoli.

  Leah snatched up her tablet and turned to Roman. “Any favorites you think I should start with?” Roman gestured to the tablet. Leah handed it over.

  He swiped through to a text file and started tapping. “I’m partial to the romantic suspense. But the MacKennas are really witty historicals. Probably more accessible than other stuff the tastemakers put on the reading list. I’ll forward you some of Mallery’s favorites. She’s our specialist for that genre. “

  Active agents were evaluated on their genre knowledge: the ability to identify and explain genrespecific archetypes, plot arcs, and aesthetics—the same skills that would let them operate effectively in that genre’s world to find and address story breaches.

  Leah’s first mission had been a whirlwind. She’d only seen a tiny portion of the support staff required for the Genrenauts’ operation to function. Besides the field agents, there were medical, admin, the tech division that kept their ships in order, as well as the quartermasters that worked on the various dimensional properties from different story worlds, from cybernetic enhancements to artifacts and spell books.

  Leah was amused but not surprised to hear that the tech division recruited heavily from the Imagineers, in addition to the R&D departments of leading tech firms. There was the forecasting team, which brought Big Data analytics to the multiverse, studying stocks, cultural trends, sales patterns, and media coverage to try to forecast and identify ripple effects from story worlds.

  Finally, there were the curators, who worked with the forecasting team to determine which films, music, TV, and books were making waves in Earth Prime—the manifestations of flows from story worlds. They studied viewer metrics, distribution deals, award lists, and more. Seeing everything from the outside, it looked and felt like a Rube Goldberg machine at times.

  But it was still more fun and more profitable than answering phones and processing expense reports.

  Leah plopped her tablet down on a beanbag chair and went to the kitchenette to pour herself more coffee.

  Just as she was raising the mug, the divine smell of the local blond roast tantalizing her nose, a harsh klaxon went off.

  The Breach Alarm.

  Leah took a long swig of coffee, then set it down with the reluctance of leaving a new lover in bed to leave for work. She turned to Roman for commiseration. “Craaap.”

  Shirin hadn’t even gotten to sit, instead turning in place as she walked into the break room to head right back out.

  “What? This is the fun part. To Ops we go.”

  Ops was the nerve center of Genrenauts HQ, where Preeti Jandran and a half-dozen other staffers monitored the weird science end of the business, using sensors and systems no one had bothered explaining to Leah and which she was happy to leave as a mystery, as long as they pointed her in the right direction.

  Walking into Ops, Leah once again felt like she had stepped into NASA, or maybe an IMAX room. Or a NASA IMAX room. Twenty screens filled the far wall, the floor packed thick with consoles and sensors and workstations.

  King stood by one such station, looking over the shoulder of Preeti, the team’s designated handler. Preeti’s fingers whirred across a keyboard, one screen showing what looked like seismic activity, the other tuned to a CNN news feed.

  “What’s up?” Shirin asked.

  “We’re picking up several red flags. Space X just lost a shuttle in mid-launch, and the ISS is reporting cascading software failures.”

  “Which means a breach in Science Fiction world,” Shirin said by way of explanation. Since each world had a thematic tie to Earth Prime, when there was a breach on a story world, the ripples on Earth would come along specific lines, manifesting on Earth in mostly predictable ways.

  On her first mission, a breach in Western world had rippled over to create a rush of gun violence. And when Fantasy world broke, its breaches would ripple over as sectarian violence and destructive tribalism.

  Preeti nodded at Shirin’s evaluation. “Our latest recon to Ahura-3 showed everything in order, with an upcoming diplomatic summit. But sensors show the station as the epicenter of the ripples.” “That’s enough to get started,” King said. “Suit up, team. Probie, you’re w
ith me.” Leah followed King as he set off again at flank speed.

  * * *

  King chewed up the floor as they made their way to Bakhtin Hangar. “This is not the ideal world to have for your second at-bat, I must admit.”

  “I was raised on Trek and Battlestar, man. I’m good.”

  “Genre awareness by itself is not sufficient for this world. This breach has been tracked to Ahura-3, in the space opera region. Ahura-3 is a hub to dozens of species, accommodating thousands of languages, biological and cultural variances. Only Roman, Shirin, and one other field agent on this entire base are rated to head an operation in that world.”

  “But won’t it just be bumpy forehead aliens and pseudo-European political intrigue?” Leah asked, going off the first (and shortest) of the matryoshka-like cultural briefings of the story worlds in the base’s jurisdiction. The Science Fiction world was dominated by the Space Opera and Military SF regions, alongside contemporary action-adventure stories and Cyberpunk. But the region hadn’t seen a landmark formal or narrative innovation since the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. At least, so said the Genrenauts analysts.

  King let her question sit as he swung open the doors to the hangar, showing two of the three ships in their berths. The ship they’d taken to Western world was being rolled out to the launch pad, dozens of techs running diagnostics, checking gauges, and so on. The ship was one of three active in this hangar, and so carried the super-specific name of US-3.

  Quite a production. And all buzzing away in a corporate campus that looked more like an insurance office from the outside than a base for dimensional adventurers.

  “By that logic,” King said in the tone of a disappointed professor, “you’d tell me that the blues is simple because it only uses four chords. Try telling that to Nina Simone and B.B. King.”

  Leah nodded. “But we’ve got universal translators, right?”

  “Thankfully. We couldn’t do anything there without them. But linguistic translation and cultural translation are very different. You’ll stay with Roman, Shirin, or myself at all times. No running off, even if you have the best idea possible. Your initiative with the Williamsons is admirable, but there are too many pitfalls in this region for a green agent, and we’ve finally gotten you through orientation.