Three weeks into his court-ordered civil service, Cyryl has attained a simple mastery over numbers that he never would have thought possible. He’s gotten to the point that, with his calculator, he doesn’t make a single mathematical error throughout his entire 12-hour shift. Not that Tymon trusts him enough not to check his work.
The only issue remaining is the mind-numbing boredom that makes him want to rip his fingers off.
Frequent breaks are required to get him through the day, and he almost spends more time in the gym than he does at the office. Though, half his time in the office is spent mingling with his co-workers, all of whom now call him friend.
“Oi! Klem!” Cyryl says as he hops into his coworker’s cubicle.
“Hey.” Klem says, hunched over his desk, not bothering to look back.
“Oooh, don’t be like that, Mr. Grumpy!” Cyryl moves in, slaps Klemens’s shoulder, then turns to sit on the desk. “Listen, I got a ask a favor.”
Klem sighs but sits up straight. He pushes his medium-length, undyed, red hair out of his face, then turns to Cyryl. His eyes carry the weight of 15 years’ worth of accumulated fatigue, and are framed by deep bags below them. He ran a bandit crew and robbed 12 trains before eventually being caught, which carried a sentence of 46 years. Normally peldaks will dye their hair brown, and their eyes grey, but Klem is too exhausted for it. His red beard hasn’t been trimmed in weeks, and the grey dye is starting to fade on his pupils, revealing the natural brown underneath. “Go ahead.”
Cyryl flashes a charming smile, “alright, so there I was, right? Playing one of the games at the old rec center, doesn’t matter which game or which recreation center. Well, low and behold, I won a prize!” Cyryl reaches into his pocket and pulls out two pieces of paper, “two tickets to a sayran musical!”
Klem nods, “I heard they’re pretty good singers.”
“Yeah! Sure. I think I’ve probably heard that too. Point is, there’s a limited number of shows, and I have tickets. Wanna go?”
“Uh…” He rubs his eyes, “when?”
“End of the month.”
Klem sucks his teeth, “ohh, sorry, I can’t. I always take a train at the end of the month and head back home. If I don’t regularly see my wife and son, I’d probably kill myself, haha.” His son, aged 63, has been with the same class of students for almost 40 years. In peldak culture, it’s considered inhumane for him to be moved away from all his friends due to the crimes of his father.
“Oh. Well, yeah, that makes sense,” Cyryl nods. “Gotta spend time with your family.”
“What about that girl you were seeing? You said you met one at the bar the other day, but you haven’t mentioned her again.”
“Hm? Ah, yeah, yeah. Uhh… it didn’t work out,” he shrugs. “She was kind of annoying and desperate, I can’t imagine spending time with her when I’m not wasted.”
“All women are annoying and desperate,” Klem says with a deadpan, dry voice. “If you’re waiting for some perfect girl that doesn’t piss you off more often than not, you’ll be alone forever.”
Cyryl looks around the cubicle, “so this is like a perfect job for you then? Spending most of your time away?”
He frowns for a moment, “I guess that’s a small positive. But it’s not like I hate my wife, or anything. 15 years of this and I’m ready to go home, if I’m being honest. When I get out of here, I think I’ll take her on a round of enlistment in the military.”
Cyryl nods, then glances out of the cubicle as Tymon hurries by with a stack of folders in his hands. “Ah! Hey, Tymon, Tymon!”
The short man’s ears perk, then he backs up until he’s standing in the doorway, “what?” Tymon’s voice is devoid of pleasantries.
“Hey, do you have a wife? How’s she reacting to your-“
The man’s brow narrows, “fuck off,” then he gets back to work.
Cyryl recoils, but Klem starts chuckling. “You can’t- haha, of course he’s not married, man.”
“What? How was I supposed to know that?”
“Cyryl. He’s… he’s short. Girls aren’t gonna want him.”
Cyryl raises an eyebrow, “so? I’m short too, and I get dates all the time.”
The average height of a peldak man is 6’10, and the average height of a peldak woman is 6’6. Cyryl is 6’9, while Tymon is 5’11.
“That’s… not really comparable.”
“Bah,” Cyryl hops off the desk. “Women are stupid, and the older ones are desperate. If he hasn’t gotten married by now, it’s probably his fault. I bet his personality.”
As Cyryl leaves the cubicle, Klem speaks up, “aren’t you unmarried too?”
“Fuck off, Klem.”
The intentional similarity makes both men laugh. Tymon, sitting in his cubicle as his long ears overhear the conversation, just rolls his eyes.
Cyryl heads back to his cubicle, quickly runs through the newest shipping manifest that was dropped off, then takes another break and heads to a new coworker’s space.
“Cynthia!” He yells as he jumps into the cubicle, causing the young woman to jump.
“Ahh! Y-yeah?” She turns around, “Cyryl?”
Cynthia’s wearing a long sleeve sweater with an ankle length skirt, covering up all her bruises and scratches. Her face is covered in bandages, she’s wearing an eyepatch, her right arm is in a sling, and there’s a clump of missing hair just above her left ear.
Cynthia had been accusing her husband of cheating for years. He never did, but he got so tired of the accusations that, for some reason, he thought it would be a good idea to intentionally plant evidence that he actually was cheating on her. His thought process was that she’d confront him about it, he’d pull out evidence proving he intentionally planted the evidence, and, somehow, that would convince her that she needed to trust him more.
Instead, she was so distraught that she waited for him to come home from work, and then ambushed him with a kitchen knife, intending to commit a murder-suicide.
In this ensuing struggle, he was stabbed and sliced 37 times across his body, while she had several bones broken from his punches and kicks. Almost all of their furniture was ruined, several walls were ripped down, and the attempted murder only ended after they fell out of the second story window and slammed into the roof of their car.
The judge sentenced her to four years of civil service in the bureaucracy, and her husband was given four years of hard labor. He’s currently on one of the newly acquired worlds, building a road in the sweltering sun, using the concrete powder that Cyryl is sending. According to the peldak standards, he was considered less at fault, so he got the preferable sentence.
Cyryl pulls out his two tickets, “so, long story short, I played a game and won these tickets to a concert where a sayran will be singing. Wanna go?”
Cynthia looks at him for a moment, her blank stare only interrupted by the occasional blinking from her uncovered eye. “Y-you know… you know why I got sent here, right?”
“Yeah, of course. You had a little fight with your husband.”
She narrows her brow. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for a married women to spend time with an unmarried man like that.”
“Like what? Going to a concert?”
“With a man who isn’t my husband, yes. My mind is put at ease by the fact that the only women my husband has access to are a bunch of disgusting, dwarfish savages with weird horns and… and head appendages. Would it not be hypocritical of me to then spend time with other men whilst he’s conducting his service to the state?”
Cyryl leans against the cubicle wall and scratches the side of his head. “I guess that makes sense. Bah, married life sucks. I’ll let you get back to it,” Cyryl gives a wave, Cynthia nods her head, and he leaves the cubicle.
He travels back to his own workstation, quickly finishes the new bit of paperwork that was delivered while he was talking, then moves to a new coworker.
“Hey!” Cyryl screams as he jumps into Urban’s cubicle.
Urban takes a deep breath, pulls his head from his desk, then turns in the swivel chair that he’s a little too big to fit in comfortably. Standing at 7’5 and stacked with enough muscle to bench press multiple tons with ease, Urban has no life or emotion in his eyes. His brown hair is long, his beard hasn’t been shaved in months, the poor man isn’t even halfway done with his 77-year sentence.
During the Dismantling of the Leonid Empire (the first war for the region which occurred about 20 years ago), everyone in Urban’s brigade was accused, then convicted, of various war crimes against the native population.
His brigade was assigned to garrison a bit of captured territory on the front line. This territory encompassed a dozen villages with a few thousand civilians. By four years into the conflict, every peldak was frustrated with how poorly the war was going. Elements within Urban’s brigade decided to take their frustrations out on the villagers within their assigned territory. Withholding supplies, extortion, forced labor, prostitution, theft, gambling, all sorts of activities unbecoming for a peldak. The leaders and members of this criminal ring were given upwards of 300 years of punishment, either in penal legions where they’re expected to die, or in the civil service. Those who took part in these activities, but weren’t the leaders, were given an average of 200 years.
After an investigation, Urban was determined to have had no knowledge that this was going on. Many peldaks enlist in the military just to feel the thrill of combat, and they ignore everything else around them. This is expected, but it does not absolve Urban of guilt. He, and the others, should have known what was going on within their brigade, so they were all given 80 years of civil service due to negligence. On the trip back to Peldor, there was a massive brawl aboard the spaceships between those who didn’t know, and those who did. It resulted in most of the ring leaders being hospitalized.
Officially, Urban’s sentence was reduced by three years due to ‘honorably accepting his responsibility’.
Unofficially, every ‘unaware’ member of that brawl had their sentences reduced.
“So, straight to the point,” Cyryl waves his tickets, “I got two tickets to a sayran concert for the end of the month, and I wanna take you.”
Urban’s dead, tired eyes stare through Cyryl for a moment. “I don’t really feel like going anywhere, sorry.” He glances to a calendar on his wall, with each day having a written list of how many days left in his punishment. It’s still over 20,000 days left.
Cyryl glances to the man’s biceps, which are so large they’re straining the fabric of his oversized shirt. “When do you find time to head to the gym?”
“I don’t. I haven’t gone to the gym in… a long time, I don’t think.”
“Tch. If I don’t go regularly, I start shriveling up. But nevermind that! Look,” Cyryl folds his arms and leans against the cubicle walls. “How many decades do you have left in your punishment?”
“Almost six.”
“That sucks. You know it, I know it, but you just need to accept it and not put your life on hold! Go out and do something in your spare time! Like, for example, a concert with your good buddy Cyryl.”
“…My wife sometimes drags me places to do things. I never end up having fun.”
“Well of course you’re not having fun! Don’t let some dumb woman drag you somewhere you don’t want to be, let your high-intellect coworker drag you somewhere that you will want to be, as soon as you realize how great it is.”
Urban sighs, “I appreciate the thought, but I think I’ll go to bed and down a handful of sleeping pills like I usually do.”
“Right, yeah,” Cyryl pinches the bridge of his nose. “That works too.”
With a nod, Urban turns back around and lays his head on his desk.
Cyryl steps outside of the cubicle, hands in his pockets. “Well,” he mutters to himself, “that’s everyone.” He taps his foot on the carpeted floor. In the weeks he’s worked in the bureaucracy, he’s either made friends with, or is on friendly terms with, everyone in the department, and dozens of peldaks who regularly visit the gym. “Maybe the couriers?”
Cyryl glances to his left, and Tymon is approaching with a stack of papers in his arms.
When the shorter man gets close, Cyryl raises his leg at chest level, blocking his senior’s path.
“What?” Tymon groans.
While not moving his leg, Cyryl pulls out the two tickets, “you like sayran music?”
“No.”
Cyryl puts his foot down, “fair enough.”
Tymon continues on his daily routine.
Crestfallen, Cyryl returns to his cubicle and spends the rest of the day spinning in his chair, waiting for more paperwork to bust out. He’s gotten remarkably efficient in his job, and can bite his tongue to finish each delivery in just a few minutes. He’s figured out the math and the process such that the only bottle neck is motivation. But when Cyryl is in the right headspace and likens his work to ripping off a bandage, it’s not so bad.
The day continues with occasional bits of conversation with the couriers, but there’s no luck in getting them to join either. When the day ends, Cyryl leaves with everyone else, letting Tymon go around and check everyone’s math with no interruption.
While his coworkers head down the outer staircase, Cyryl heads down the internal one which exits to the reception area.
“Good night, Cyryl!” Laura says with a bubbly voice and a wiggle of her long ears, letting the chains jangle.
Cyryl hooks around to the front of the crescent shaped desk, then crosses his arms over the front. “Hey, Laura. How was your son’s visit the other day?”
She smiles from ear to ear, “oh my gosh, Cyryl! You remembered? Teehee, you’re such a sweetie. It was sooooo much fun!” She speaks with a delightful melody in her voice, “we blah blah, and went to the blah blah blah, and he blah, brought over his cute new blah blah blah!”
As she speaks, Cyryl smiles and nods.
She keeps speaking, and speaking, and speaking.
“-?” She finally ends a sentence with a question.
“Excellent! Glad to hear it, so hey,” he pulls out the tickets, “I won some tickets to a sayran show, but I hate musicals. Would you and Aleksy wanna go?”
Her ears start flapping, underlying their conversation with a subtle layer of jingling metal. “Oh my gosh, oh my goooooosh! My husband loves musicals, of course we’ll go!” She gently swipes the tickets from his hands, then holds them against the light to inspect the time and location. “Awww, Cyryl, you’re so sweet, you know that? I don’t think I’ve seen a musical since my other-other-other granddaughter-“
Cyryl slaps the desk and pulls away, “excellent, glad to hear it. So hey, listen, I gotta real quick head home. I hope you two enjoy! Get home safe.”
“You too! See you tomorrow,” she says with a wave as he backs out of the front door.
Cyryl climbs on the first bus headed back to his residential district. He sits down, then leans his head on the cushion.
“Maybe…” He looks out the window as the bus begins a steady incline out of the valley, “maybe I should start considering how to get a wife. It’s gonna be a boring 30 years if everyone I know is always busy.”
The woman in the seat behind Cyryl suddenly jumps over and sits in the chair next to him, “heeeeey therrrrrrre, buddy!” She flutters her eyelashes, wiggles her ears, and puts all ten fingers on display to show her lack of a wedding ring. “I couldn’t help but overhear how you’re looking for a wife?”
Cyryl takes a deep breath, forces a smile, and arranges a dinner date within five minutes.
It doesn’t go well.