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It’s like everything here on Earth: if food retailers tried to follow to the letter every one of the thousand specifications that the Law demands, they’d go broke. They know it, we know it… the Law knows it. There used to be a corps of inspectors who got all the gifts for pretending to have bad eyesight. And the rest of us, twiddling our thumbs and dying of envy. Fortunately, five years ago Amendment 538 gave us total power by turning us into the only control force all over the planet. No more than what we deserved, if you ask me.

So, if you see a grocer selling vegetables that smell like dextrinone, or chickens that are a little swollen from synthetic steroids, and he invites you to breakfast—don’t hesitate, accept. Sure, it’s a bribe… but you can bet he won’t set his own table with any of the garbage he sells. Most likely that’s stuff he keeps for extraterrestrials, so you won’t be harming any humans with your “laissez faire.”

And I assure you, in exchange for being tolerant, you’ll eat true delicacies. Those are the great pleasures of life, the most basic ones: sex and food. A man has a right to pamper his palate, doesn’t he? After all, he isn’t some xenoid with a brass gullet.

Yeah, because those bugs don’t care whether they’re eating crap or caviar so long as the chef swears that it’s some exotic Earthling dish. Idiots.

Aside from sybaritic pleasures, my advice is that, if you want to be a father someday, don’t sink your teeth into any of the succulent produce you see in the windows, or let yourself be tempted by the cheap, juicy ten-day chicks that look as big and fat as forty-day chickens. They don’t do much harm to the metabolisms of the weird guys from other worlds, but those synthetic hormones can really mess up your innards—or your children’s, if your wife and you decide to have any in the natural way. Though, personally, I’d invest a few extra credits and get a good custom genetic design. Clean, safe, efficient.

As for the rest, you have to be tough on the retailers and small industrialists who contaminate the environment by dumping their rotting and carcinogenic waste and their untreated sewage straight down the drain. Fine ’em! As often as you have to! So they’ll learn once and for all that in the long run it’ll be cheaper for them to install a waste treatment plant than to keep breaking the environmental protection laws.

As you can see, even though I make fun of it, I’m halfway on your ecology and conservation bandwagon. Simple pragmatism: survival instinct, not religious fervor about bugs and flowers.

Earth is our planet, isn’t it? Just because the guys from beyond Pluto own it now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t care anymore, or that we should commit suicide by drowning in our own shit. Not to mention, that would also mean losing the tourism that still barely keeps us afloat, which depends so much on our virgin forests and all that…

What else…

Oh, yeah. Practically the most important thing: They must have talked to you about staff rotation in the Academy. Three months here on patrol, three in Deterrent Force, three in Homicide, and so on and so forth. A cute little system that one of the big bosses must’ve dreamed up—with the idea, I guess, of preventing the poor agents and regular old sergeants from feeling too tempted to fall into the horrendous venial sin of corruption… No doubt the moron thought he was an absolute genius for coming up with that.

But don’t let it get you down. Every law has its loophole: we’ve come up with our own system. They never rotate an entire department all at once, so when it’s time for us to separate and you know what your new post is going to be, I’ll personally tell you who makes the rules over there… And he’ll give you the instructions, the contacts, everything you’ll need to take over from the agent you’re replacing, in every sense.

Understood? Yep, Markus, you’re a smart boy, just like I thought. Quick on your feet. And you smile. I’m glad you like these proposals. As you see, belonging to the glorious Planetary Security force isn’t as bad as lots of people think.

A few more bits of advice. Sorry if I’m starting to sound pedantic. I’m getting old, and not having kids of my own has made me feel a little paternal towards young rookies like you who don’t know anything about life yet. Besides, I really do like you.

Get used to improvising. Forget the Manual. There’s no system of rules that can cover every possibility. Every day, an agent runs into situations that don’t fit the standards.

For example, if you’re patrolling a dark street and you find a minicontainer with two kilos of telecrack in it, and there aren’t any witnesses… Or if some cloned Cetian damsel is impressed by how tight you wear your uniform trousers and wants to know what your favorite brand of sex lubricant is… The decision is up to you.

I have a personal rule: Never let a child, a woman, or an addict down. You can always go a little bit out of your way for your neighbor, don’t you think, Markus?

Of course, if you attract some Colossaur’s attention, I recommend that you start coming up with excuses faster than an aide in the diplomatic corps. They say even their vaginas are armored.

Not to mention the acetic acid that the guzoids of Regulus secrete… I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

Ha. The spicy stories I could tell you…

You don’t know how lucky you were to join Planetary Security when you did. A few years ago, an agent who refused too often might end up in suspended animation, inside one of these tanks. The xenoids practically owned us, and they didn’t like any kind of refusal.

Now we have certain rights.

And we’ve fought good and hard to get them, I swear. Ten years ago, saying “Planetary Security agent” was the same as saying “piece of garbage.” To make them take us into account, we had to show those stuckup xenoids that there was no way they could control Earth without us. At least not without wiping out three quarters of the population.

Out of curiosity, where were you born, Markus? Right here in New Miami? Thought so. A smart urban kid. I’m a clever country boy. From a little hamlet on the bank of a river off in the boondocks, between the hills and the jungle: Baracuyá del Jiquí. They still haven’t figured out that we’re in the twenty-first century yet. They’re still living in the nineteenth there.

Every time it rains a little, the Jiquí River bursts its banks; the main street, which is the one and only street in my town, turns into a lake, and you have to get around by raft instead of on foot. We didn’t have access to the holonet in my house—not even electricity. We carried our water in buckets from the river.

I didn’t see my first aerobus till I was ten. Up until that moment, my highest ambition when it came to transportation was to have my own horse. My mother and father didn’t have many entertainment alternatives or any idea what contraceptives were, so they had fifteen kids—nine sons, six daughters. Ten of us survived. Seven boys, three girls. At the age of forty-three, my mother looked seventy.

I wasn’t old enough for them to take seriously, or young enough for them to pamper. I got the worst of both worlds, being in the middle. My older brothers beat me because they were stronger, and I had to take care of the little ones because they were younger.

By the time I was I was ten, I realized I wouldn’t inherit so much as the dust from the little bit of land my father farmed. I wasn’t too fond of spending the whole day glued to the field, anyway. What I most wanted was to live in a real city, not die making scratches in the Earth. And since I was always pretty dense, and not even any good at sports in spite of having this big old body, the only way I could figure to make my dream come true and get out of there was the uniform. So as soon as I turned sixteen, I ran away from home, with my little bundle of clothes and my one pair of shoes. I listened to those holoposters that promise you heaven and Earth, and I enlisted in the Planetary Security corps. I would have done it sooner if I could’ve fooled them and pretended I was older than I was. Even though I looked twenty, they’d only have to run the numbers to figure out I wasn’t even eighteen yet.