Aleph watched the clerk ‘children’ working over the cans of their elders. Double checking maintenance lines, Tightening seals, adjusting manual levers. Squidgie was there with her, but not doing anything, just settled in the bubble to enjoy the extra oxygen while the rest of their kind toiled away.

“So you heard about that standard person thing von Squidgie? Elsie told us about it when she was talking about the population of redweed and some history and stuff”

Squidgie bunched up then spoke happily over the speaker from the translation box embedded in the bubble.

The sound seeming to come directly from them even though Aleph knew it was being emitted by that block of magic somehow.

“Oh yes, I checked the records related to it immediately after she explained!”

Aleph blinked, she’d been kind of getting used to Squidgie acting a lot like the puppies she saw other kids playing with back home. It still kind of surprised her when the Clerk actually took initiative like that. It can’t have been more then a few months since she first met the thing all awkward and adorable.

“Incidentally I believe Miss Aleph is entitled to an evaluation of at least six standard persons by the Redweed Census Guide to Standards and Measures. This is of course by my reckoning of your individual work ethic and training only! I am sure you can fairly safely multiply that by four via your interpersonal relation to Pylo and El-sie as a nepotism buffer factor and supply margin. I don't know if Pylo would account for that, but by the language El-sie used just now they will definitely argue for it. I would have told you earlier but assumed you already knew and were choosing to live below your station out of humility instead of ignorance”

Aleph blinked a moment then looked back down at the clerk, then around them. They were a pretty significant distance away from the hold that had been refurbished for the terran’s habitability.

Towards that last part they had been talking quieter and quieter, and if she was reading them right was now looking at her with awkward anxiety over her reaction.

“Wait you mean what Elsie is saying right now? How do you hear them from all the way over here? And what do you mean I should be getting a nepotism buffer added on over my own thing... and below my station? Squidgie... Explain? Please?”

Relief was an interesting expression to read on a face that consisted mostly of thin skin, bulky indeterminate sacks of something and a single massive amber-orange eye.

Squidgie was quite good at it, the other clerks seemed a bit less expressive.

“I am trading gossip and routing rights with other clerk gofers to supplement their income and keep me informed of the happenings within the terran enclave at all times. In case one of you has need of me when I am engaged elsewhere. It is easiest to simply keep the contracts as continuous rather than circumstantial so I am being kept informed of the discussion between Miss Pylo and Miss El-Sie.”

Aleph frowned a bit, that was a little bit creepy but then again she had yet to get a solid answer on how much Pylo or Tunie were aware of literally everything that occured on the ship. She had mostly been just ignoring it for her own peace of mind.

“I always intended to inform you, and it was not kept a secret, you could have asked any of the clerks involved and they would have fully disclosed it. Although I did decide I was going to bring this up soon as soon as El-sie mentioned you as examples in the lesson.”

She sighed and shook her head.

“Whatever, tell me more about that whole standard person measurement thing, It seemed like it upset Pylo regarding the wording? And I guess we misunderstood whatever concept it actually was supposed to be because of that? I thought it was literally just a count of ya know, total people, But I’m worth between six and, uh... twenty four persons depending on if you include how much I get along with Elsie and Pylo?”

"Well, Pylo objected to that, and she is by far the greater authority on translations, which this falls under."

Aleph raised a brow and leaned back a bit, careful to avoid jostling one of the four control sticks for the walker.

“But in very broad terms it is a measure of rough computational and task complexity resources. In Redweed it has been set to the standard of a Servile who is sufficiently nourished to avoid memory degradation. It maps directly to a common shared concept used in logistic planning, demographics and strategic and economic risk assessments across the reef, although Naturally the precise measure of a single ‘person unit’ is set to different usefully stable meter organisms or bulk processing substrates. I think I got all that right, it's what the footnote in El-sie's lecture said.”

Aleph blinked a few times.

“There were footnotes?! Wait! Are we allowed to read those? Am I cheating in the class now?!”

Squidgie boggled a bit then looked around.

“The purpose of the lessons is to prepare you with the necessary skills to prosper in the greater civilization of the reef, for the sake of your future community and species! There is nothing you could possibly access that would be considered cheating for these lessons.”

Aleph stared at Squidgie.

“I also read that in the lecture footnotes. Also, you just got some credits with miss el-sie from your share when I sold the information about needing to make that text bigger and slower scrolling.”

Aleph tilted her head to the side as she started to come to a realization

“Von Squidgie, I just realized I never asked... How old exactly are you? I mean I got that you were a kid or something but you learn really fast.”

Von Squidgie held itself up and preened a little bit. She was almost entirely sure it had learned to do that from watching her. It looked familiar despite being mapped to a bag of meat and skin with little hands poking out like a pillow fringe.

“I was born shortly before the departure from Redweed! That makes me approximately seven months old, give or take whether you account for the duration from Redweed local time, the dilation factor that is occurring aboard Tunie or the slight relative delay factor present due to Terra’s feeding velocity”

Aleph looked down at Von Squidgie and started to get a bit of a light headed feeling. Thinking back over the arguments and discussions she had with the other Clerks over all of it.

Had she adopted Squidgie? Or was it closer to say she had BOUGHT them? She thought she had just been giving gifts and being friendly but, if you squinted at it and accounted for weird alien interpretations...

“S-squidgie How many standard persons are you?”

Squidgie sighed heavily and said.

“Miss Aleph, I want to reiterate something Miss Pylo is currently yelling at Miss El-sie about right this moment. This is not a measure of universal or moralistic value of individuals... It’s just... Um... How important an individual or piece of infrastructure should be considered when protecting the vested interests and viability for a habitat. A very um how is she putting it that makes sense in Terran? Hum... Ah It is a very COLD thing and not to be taken for what you are starting to take it as okay?”

Aleph took a few deep breaths.

“Okay”

Von Squidgie nodded.

“Okay”

Then its voice perked up with a lighthearted delight.

“That said I am on my own measure... one point two... no wait that’s wrong let me run my impact numbers Sorry!”

Aleph blinks a moment then tilted her head the other way.

“Ahem! I am at least Ten standard persons by the measure of Redweed’s Metrics and if you include my trade agreements and networks easily thirty or so. Naturally this is all at your disposal and should readily be considered to be added to your own evaluation!”

She raised her brow.

“Are you sure? Because that sounds like maybe you changed your mind and fudged the numbers a bit there”

Von Squidgie was very good at somehow looking indignant, embarrassed, and panicked simultaneously.

“I would never ‘fudge’ calculations! That would be horribly foul! But this... Doesn't really make sense. The one point two is what the ledgers list... But if I run a proper capability and impact analysis as is recommended for determining standard persons... Ohh! I appear to have made a mistake somewhere my deepest ap-”

The world shifted, gravity turned slightly off alignment. The walker stumbled a moment and Squidgie slipped a little before catching themselves.

Aleph looked around as everything returned to proper alignment.

“Woah, that was weird I wonder what was going on ther-”

Aleph remembered one of the visits to the academy when Omega could not jury rig a solution for a needed exercise or did not have materials on hand to confirm a physical test Aleph had to pass. She forgot which, but she remembered in one of the brief bits of down time they had visited what a mid plate farm was like.

She remembered watching in amazed bafflement as a threshing harvester rolled over the fields of golden grains they grew down in the mid plate countries. Away from the hills and cliffs that favored the more manual practices her home village did.

What whirled past her vision was like that wheel of metal that spun so fast in operation she could not follow it. It was like the wheels of a train.

It was already in motion before she even realized what was going on.

As she tried to track and follow it she realized only after the fact that it was moving to try and intercept something.

And then there was a splash that momentarily burst outside the bubble near the stacks of adult clerk containers.

Aleph could only stare at the slowly rolling canister of one of the adults that had apparently been jostled loose. Already a team of youngsters were fussing over it and slings and cables and emergency feedlines were being pulled to reconnect it. But then she turned back to somewhere that was moving. And... What?

Took in the sight of what she only barely could recognize as Elsie. Looming over a splattered smear in one of the flatter parts of Tunie’s bulkheads.

She craned her neck a bit and saw they were doing something to the smear of bright red. Then force when she recognized it. Two thirds of a clerk juvenile not much different from Squidgie had been flattened by the falling adult a moment ago.

The ‘surviving’ third had burst like a overripe fruit and splattered apart. Some of the viscera was twitching. Wait no not twitching, it was pulsing in and out as if it was held frozen like a sculpture of destruction halted.

“S-squidgie! Th-Their hurt! We have to do something!”

“Miss El-Sie is already doing quite a lot of something”

She blinked, there was a light and when she looked at it she had to turn away, there was something that made her spine hurt happening out there. She only could conceive in hindsight that Elsie was holding in a series of grippers and those scaled hoses something that glowed bright and twisted the air like a heat wave.

Wait there was no air out there.

But light shimmered and weaved and convulsed as if under a mirage anyway.

As Elsie held a sickle of purest white porcelain over the smashed clerk child.

Within the hoop of that sickle the light convulsed all the more and she could see it was centered on the almost bubbling mass of jellied clerk.

How?

What was even going on?

“A-LePh ... PlEaSe InTeRcEpT pYlO and oThE-r-r-rsssss ... wE aRe vErY bUsY-y-y-y-y-eeeEEEeee”

The voice was flat and lossy in a way she had never HEARD Elsie sound before, if she was not getting the directional cues she would have not been sure who was talking.

For a while quite a lot of nothing seemed to be happening but the oozing mash of a clerk’s corpse dancing under a mirage in vacuum.

Then Pylo showed up.