The train was approaching its first stop. I wouldn’t be alone enough for long. 

 

I took a deep breath. I reached through my body, feeling every part of it. It wasn’t just my face that was inadequate; it was also my heartbeat, my blood vessels, my everything. I pulled the anger and sadness and fear out of my body, relaxing my heart and muscles, forcing them in line. My body wasn’t allowed to be sad or angry or mad. It had to be calm and content and happy and fine. And, so, that’s how I made it. 

 

I adjusted my heart, forcing it to slow down as I took deeper breaths. I took control of my muscles, soothing them and choking out my lizard brain’s influence on them. I stopped trembling. I shoved all of my dark thoughts back into that dark corner of my mind, where they regrettably had to stay for now. I was in control. I chose what I expressed, what everyone else could feel. The Facade was up. 

 

The facade of happiness, the facade of not needing Affini help. The facade that I now had to wear everywhere but my apartment, because there truly was no safe space. Not even a Terran therapist was safe. Of course she hadn’t honored the Healthcare Privacy Act after the Accord surrendered. What a piece of garbage. 

 

I stepped out of the train car, a smile on my face once again. I grabbed my phone, turned on the camera, and made sure that my mascara hadn’t run. Can’t leave evidence of sadness, after all. I had tried the “happy tears” excuse before, and it just didn’t work. They asked questions, which made The Facade so much harder to keep up. 

 

I didn’t want to think about what could happen if it could fail. I’d heard stories… seen what had happened to people who stepped out of line. Looking around, there was obvious evidence wherever my eyes travelled; about a fifth of the Terrans I saw had Affini owners, and half of those were on all fours, one of the most demeaning things I could imagine. They lost their personalities, their likes and dislikes. Some of them even lost their memories, all completely dispersed in a stupor of pleasure that they could never get out of. They were completely out of control of their lives; everything they did was controlled by their owner. Autonomy would be a thing of the past. Those were the stakes… if an Affini saw the state I was in, that’s what could happen; everything that made me me would go away. What little autonomy I had left would go completely down the drain. I’d be just like all the florets, being led on a leash by an Affini, some sort of brainless mascot who could never form a thought of her own. 

 

My attention had lapsed; I was shivering in fear. My biorhythm was a teensy bit off. The Facade, something that I had put so much effort into setting up, was already beginning to crack. This was stupid of me. I wasn’t allowed to focus on that kind of stuff. Hopefully, no Affini were paying enough attention to notice my agitation. I forcibly calmed my body down again, forcing the tiny shivers to completely stop. This wasn’t going to happen. If this had gone on much longer, it could’ve gotten me spotted and on a fast track to domestication… a fast track to a fate truly worse than death. 

 

I pulled up the address, and ran into the correct apartment building. There was no time to waste, after all. It was eleven floors up, and I was already a few minutes late. I considered using the stairs, but then opted for the elevator - it was much faster, and I didn’t need to care about physical fitness anymore. Plus, the Affini have effectively doubled the definition of a flight of stairs. 

 

The moment I walk through the (unlocked) door, Isabelle waves at me, sitting at a table that's barely in view, where everyone is. There’s Alex, the cutest guy you’ll ever meet (if a bit dumb), Isabelle, the most competitive out of the four of us, and Emma… well… she was Emma. 

 

Weird, public fetishes? She had those. Deep fondness of the Affini? Yep! It was like she had absolutely no sense of self-preservation. Drugs? She did a million of those. I honestly had absolutely no idea how we got along. Perhaps because, apart from the big issues, the two of us were oddly similar. We both had weird obsessions with nerdy stuff, although we nerded out about different things. She was obsessed with vintage keyboards and PC parts from the 21st century, whereas I couldn’t care less about anything like that. 

 

I guess the main thing that brought us together was that we were both slowly trying to establish our lives after the Affini had flipped everything upside down. We had almost the exact same insecurities. Talking with her was always interesting. 

 

These three were the only people who I’d miss after The Plan. My family had all either moved away or been domesticated. We’d already lost poor Rose awhile ago; that was a tragedy. She was the only other feralist in the group, so it had grown a bit more isolating after she had disappeared. I had no idea where she was gone, but… she wasn’t dead. People didn’t really die anymore, not after the Affini came. Somebody had probably domesticated her… At least she hadn’t ratted me out… 

 

“Vanessa! I’m glad you could make it!” Isabelle opened, “We were about to start a game of Pandemic!”

 

But it couldn’t be that different, could it? 

 

I finally walked into the apartment proper. It was sleek and modern, surprisingly similar to how it was pre-invasion, but a little bit more high-tech. The microwave had been replaced with an atomic compiler, and the hallways were wider and the ceilings were higher, but those were the only large differences. Mostly, it was just a familiar old apartment. The carpet was a nice, deep blue; it seemed like it had been replaced recently, and there were a bunch of decorations that I didn’t really pay attention to. Isabelle loved to decorate for reasons that seemed to completely elude me. 

 

Most of the time, we played board games in the living room. There was a TV there, which was thankfully off, as well as a wooden table with a couch, as well as a bunch of chairs. Pandemic: The Interstellar Update was already there, set up and ready for us to play. 

 

Pandemic had finally entered public domain a few years ago, so the ancient board game had enjoyed a tiny bit of a resurgence. But that wasn’t what we were playing; instead, we were playing the Interstellar Update. It was a fanmade expansion, created about six months after the Terran Accord had surrendered. We had agreed on that awhile back, but I hadn’t taken the time to look through the updated rules. I had no idea what was in it. 

 

The “pandemic” we were fighting was feralism. Instead of playing in the old lands of Terra, with a pre-climate change board, fighting types of diseases that had long since been eradicated… we were in various different Terran Accord colonies, fighting different types of feralism. A quarter of the colonies were home to terrorist groups, another quarter was home to the remains of the Terran Cosmic Navy, a third group of colonies was home to self-destructive feralists, and the final group was home to former trillionaires who wanted capitalism to come back. 

 

It was like Emma had designed it; it had her sickeningly sweet desire for submission flagrantly on display… The Affini were drawn in a tasteful manner which didn’t highlight any of their disgusting features whatsoever - they actually looked pretty cute, and the entire remainder of the Terran Cosmic Navy, the only military resistance to the Affini, was equated with a few thousand random suicidal Terrans, scattered across various different planets. 

 

Looking at the pieces and the boards, I felt a current of rage churning through my body. But this wasn’t the time, was it? I couldn’t give myself away, not with a wannabe floret in the room. The Facade was straining, struggling as I poured my willpower into it. Everything was fine. My body was just fine. My biorhythm was fine. I didn’t have any problems with this whatsoever. None. There was no problem that I could have with playing a game about horrible weeds turning my comrades into pets and squashing all the resistance until everyone submitted to their alien overlords. Nothing. NOTHING! 

 

“Ooh… can I be the quarantine specialist?” I asked, “or… whatever the equivalent of that is?” 

“Sure!” is Isabelle’s reply, “that would be… um…” She looks at the cards for a moment. “Oh yeah, the paravet!” 

 

The paravet… prevents Terran deaths from occurring on the planet where they’re standing, and any nearby planets. “So… outbreaks are replaced with singular deaths?” I confirm, “and… if we have more than 8 deaths… across the entirety of Terran space… the game ends?” Emma nods. 

 

So, in this expansion, the crowning achievement of feralism, the greatest tragedy that could happen in this game, which was about mounting a gigantic interstellar response to feralism… was to kill one single Terran. That was the worst thing that could happen. There was nothing about societal breakdown or destabilization, nothing about Affini or Affini interests being harmed… was that really all that could happen now? 

 

Emma saw my confused look, and clarified how this worked: “I mean… every death is a tragedy, right? It’s a sophont who will never be domesticated!” The word ‘sophont’. Of course Emma would say it. She was practically a floret already. Her brain was already cooked with hypnosis and porn and all sorts of horribly toxic things. 

 

But that was fine. We could talk about other things. 

 

Emma decided to be the floret, whose understanding of Terran culture allowed her to get rid of feralism cubes more efficiently. Of course she chose that. Isabelle was a psychologist, which allowed her to discover cures for feralism more easily. It was always a good role for her; it made her the de-facto leader. And, finally, not knowing which role would fit, Alex decided to take the generalist, which allowed him to do more things in a turn than usual. 

 

The roles were exactly the same, albeit reskinned, but the map looked completely ridiculous. It was impossible to wrap my head around where to move. The decks looked the same, but it seemed like the rules were weirdly different, and I had no idea how anything worked anymore. 

 

Everything was already set up, but the cubes were put in positions that I didn’t think were possible in the original game. There were capitalist Feralism cubes in the self-destructive feralism sector, for instance. 

 

“So… who goes first?” I asked. It’s a cooperative game, so we’d decide based on who’d be the most effective. “There are lots of threes next to Earth… So maybe Emma?” 

 

Isabelle responded immediately. “Nah… Alex should. He can just go here and here and here,” she starts, pointing in a convoluted path that I had no idea was possible, ”and then Emma can boost off of him and grab these cubes…” 

 

I didn’t understand the movement system at all. Didn’t the lines mean that you could travel to them easily or something? “Okay… so, I’m going after Alex, then. Should I go to Proxima Centauri and cure it?” I suggest. Isabelle’s clarification is quick. 

 

“You can’t go to Proxima Centauri… you can only move in multiples of two. If you want to go to a place next to your pawn, you have to use a triangle or a pentagon.” 

 

She pointed out the triangles and pentagons of the map, all of which were marked in red. In hindsight, I should’ve wondered why they were that color, but… oh well. “So… what should I do then?” I ask. 

 

“Well… you should probably transfer these cards over to me…” she replies, “and then that’s your turn! You should probably stay there to prevent any nearby deaths.”

 

That was it. I still had no idea how anything worked. The cards required to cure the different varieties of feralism were all foreign to me, although they hadn’t complicated it, just shifted it around. The hyperspace system was also incredibly weird, and I found myself relying on Isabelle to coordinate everything. My pawn barely did anything - all it did was sit, act as a source for cards, and passively make sure that no deaths occurred nearby, so that we wouldn’t ever have to worry about the rampant feralism next to Terra. 

 

I found myself quickly sinking to the background, doing what I was told to do, and not really having any other role to play. It was dull, it wasn’t that fun, and it just made me feel… useless. Sure, I was a player, and my pawn was doing things, but, practically, they could’ve replaced me with a bag of flour, and the game wouldn’t have been changed. 

 

“Vanessa… why didn’t you study the game?” Alex asked, a look of confusion on his face. He was probably used to me being the one running the show; I was pretty out of my element right now. “Oh… I was pretty busy…” I responded, absentmindedly. As for what I was busy with… I didn’t really know what I was going to say. None of them could know about The Plan , and I’d been unemployed since the megacorporations had been dissolved, so it wasn’t work-related. Basically nobody was looking for a Terran engineer; the Affini never trusted us with serious work. 

 

“And, anyway… I didn’t think The Interstellar Update was going to be any different,” I hastily added. That was a bit close. “I mean… it was just Pandemic… everybody knows Pandemic. I didn’t think it was going to change so much!” I reiterated, blushing a bit. I was incredibly embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. 

 

I studied the board, trying to figure out what to do. I’ve started to make sense of the weird rules, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it. 

 

“So… what if you give your cards to Emma… and then Emma goes to the mothership, figures out the cure for self-destructive feralism, and then spends her four banked actions eradicating it?” I suggested, tracing out Emma’s hypothetical path. 

 

Isabelle shakes her head; she’s already figured out a better idea, including… you guessed it, some esoteric rules that I didn’t know. Apparently, we get one free additional mothership per game - this compensated for the extra difficulty. We were allowed to choose when and where to place it. 

 

I let out a sigh in frustration. I never stood a chance, did I? 

 

As the game continued, and I stopped paying attention to it, the world slowly began to fade, almost feeling… less real. Instead, my thoughts began to grow louder, that dark closet where all my horrible thoughts were confined beginning to swell. We were doomed. Everyone was doomed. All of humanity was doomed. There was no escape… Well, there was one escape. Just a few more hours, and I was finally going to escape. 

 

Everything was going to be okay. The Affini were going to go away. I was never going to see any disgusting, unpredictable pets again. I was never going to have to deal with looking at humanity being leashed by alien overlords, being forced to beg for their food, their identities destroyed, their happiness governed by whether their owners took them to the park or not. I was never going to deal with their demeaning, patronizing looks, their desires to pet me for some weird reason. 

 

Everything was going to be okay. I hated every bit of the Affini. Their disgusting vine faces were twisted into a cruel mockery of humanity, their attempts at imitation making it eternally clear how alien they were. Their naming schemes were humanized, and yet they made no effort to even make human names, which revealed how they saw our culture: It was something to imitate without even putting any thought into it. They just looked up a couple of common cultural trends from our internet and mindlessly followed them. It was so stupid and naive… all it was was an act. And not even a good one. 

 

And then they decided to be nine feet tall when it was trivial for them to adjust their height; they could easily become as short as the average human… but no, they had to make us look diminutive compared to them, because they had to be the tall ones. “Vanessa?” They had to be superior, they had to make us look small and feel threatened by them. They were completely aware that they just wanted to invade our spaces. They didn’t want to be anything like us, and yet they still added the pretense of assimilation… what was even the point of adjusting their appearance if they were going to be alien anyway? 

 

“Vanessa? It’s your turn!” Isabelle complained, obviously mildly frustrated. This obviously wasn’t the first time she had said that, just the first one I’d noticed. 

 

“Oh… sorry… I was daydreaming,” I quickly replied, getting my bearings. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be doing, though I had a bit of a rough idea. 

 

“I’m giving you cards, right?” I ask, holding out two of the ones from the trillionaire zone. Everyone nods, and I let out a sigh in relief. At least I was still decent at getting my bearings… 

 

We were about to win. Well, Isabelle was about to win, anyway. There was just one teensy little vulnerable chunk of feralism cubes that they couldn’t reach. 

 

And, just like that, just in the nick of time, one turn before we won… feralism had a minor success. One Terran death had gone unprevented… and my Paravet pawn was so close to stopping it. It was about to be its turn, and it was just one hyperspace jump away from stopping one single death… 

 

This was accompanied by a monologue by Emma: Apparently, a single death, even though hundreds of these happened every single second, was a horrible tragedy to the Affini. Because, apparently, how dare those Terrans not live to be cute for them? How dare they force the Affini, of all people, to deal with the loss of a cute Terran to pet? I tried to ignore that. 

 

But, regardless, the game was nothing but a formality after that. Isabelle managed to figure out everything, cure all the feralism, and Emma’s floret pawn ran across Antares A3, our home planet (the one where the death had happened), eradicating the last few pockets. The game had been won.

 

Feralism had been eradicated. 

 

I definitely didn't want to cry. Not at all.