Genrenauts: Season One

by Michael R. Underwood

  “Eyes up, folks. We’ve got a breach in Romance. Scouting report is in your email; we’re scheduled for lift-off in thirty minutes. Roman, pre-flight. Shirin, wardrobe. Leah, you help Shirin. Mallery, you’re with me.”

  Somehow, Mallery got even more energetic, punching the air. “You’re going to love this world, Leah. It’s like an endless Love, Actually, only the queer characters actually get a place at the table. And women get to decide things for themselves. It’s got problems, to be sure, just like romance here on our world.” Mallery walked over and poured herself a cup of coffee from the freshly brewed pot as she continued.

  Shirin beckoned, waiting by the door. “Come on, newbie. It’s time to get ourselves some gorgeous Hollywood outfits.”

  King said, “T minus thirty, people,” as the group disbanded.

  * * *

  The wardrobe was, by itself, the size of a small warehouse, with divided sections by genre.

  “Is Mallery always like that?” Leah asked Shirin as the women unzipped roller-bag suitcases.

  “She was on high-transmitting mode. She’s just excited by new people. Don’t worry; the shiny wears off after a couple of missions. Though I think she likes you.”

  Following Shirin, Leah carted the tied-together roller-bags past the SF, Noir, and Horror sections to the warehouse within a warehouse that was the Romance section.

  Making their way past cotehardies and corsets, kilts and puffy shirts, they stopped at last among racks of clothing in the Contemporary Romance section.

  “It seems like she likes everybody.”

  “She reads people at the speed King reads books. If she thinks you’re good people, it takes a lot to change her mind.”

  Shirin punched in a key code, and a garage-door gate rolled up, revealing even more wardrobe options—two twenty-foot-long hangars filled with freshly pressed clothes. Tops, pants, dresses, suits, and more.

  “She’s ex-Broadway, right?”

  “Born and bred, as she says. She comes on a bit strong, but it’s reassuring. Like how you want cars to make sounds even when they’re electric, just so other people can hear them coming?”

  Leah nodded.

  “Who curates these collections?” Leah asked, trying not to drool at the tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes in this one subsection of the room.

  “Logistics tracks trends and styles, and takes our measurements to make sure HQ is constantly stocked with a selection to prepare us for a range of covers and scenarios off-world.”

  “They ordered ten worlds’ worth of clothes to fit me in a week?” Leah asked, looking at the section with her name on it.

  Shirin brought an armful of clothes on lines, stylish casual outfits for King—broad at the shoulder, long in the torso, in bold colors that went well with his brown skin, several shades darker than Shirin’s. “They ordered them in a week, and then Logistics tailored them so that they looked custom, store-bought, and/or poorly fitting, depending on the type of covers needed. In the post-apocalyptic region, everyone’s clothes are weirdly well-fitting, but in a way that looks ill-fitting.” The senior Genrenaut racked the clothes on the hangars that flanked each room.

  Leah took the clothes and started packing, remembering her days on the stand-up comedy circuit, fitting two weeks’ worth of clothes into a single roller-bag.

  “How often do these worlds, trends, or whatever change? It seems like Sci-Fi world pretty much stayed the way you know it, and has been like that for a while, alliance aside.”

  Shirin slid hangars along the line, picking through acid-washed men’s jeans. “No faster or slower than the average feeling of a genre changes. Get a flashpoint story, and things change quick.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t mean the DC Flashpoint,” Leah said.

  “No. Those hard resets haven’t happened since I’ve been on the job. Plenty of landmark works, though. Rapid change, but not all at once.”

  “So, there have been hard reboots?”

  “King just barely escaped a region-wide continuity wipe not long after he got started. Doesn’t talk about it, though. Every contact we’d developed there forgot us; all of the missions we’d logged had been written out of existence.”

  Shirin handed a set of jeans directly to Leah. They had the cultivated mussy look, so there was no need for hangers. “These go in Roman’s bag.” Leah opened another roller-bag and started packing the jeans. “Written out of existence? That’s not ominous at all.”

  “It’s been decades since a world has reset like that during a mission, so if we’re lucky, if it happens again, it won’t be on our watch.”

  “Can I ask for flats again?” Leah asked as Shirin moved to pick through some smaller clothes. Seeing as she was three inches shorter than Mallery, she figured her odds were good of picking the timing.

  “You can have flats, but we have to bring these, too.” Shirin handed Leah a pair of sunflower-yellow four-inch heels.

  “Just as long as I’m not expected to walk around the street in these things.”

  “Don’t worry, dear. Heels only get caught in subway grates when it’s dramatically appropriate,” Shirin said.

  “How long did it take before you always knew how to think in the right genre?”

  “We already do it, every day. We tell ourselves what kind of story we’re in, and we’re often wrong, because life is mostly every genre, sometimes at once. These worlds, they make sense. Now, for a ball gown, would you rather go with black or something more daring?”

  Leah sighed at Shirin’s latest selection. “Ball gown?”

  “Genrenauts’ motto: be prepared, and expect drama.”

  “So, we’re a TV network now?”

  “Hush, newbie. Keep packing.”

  * * *

  This was Leah’s third time traveling to another dimension, and it was almost becoming familiar. Or would, if it didn’t involve getting to travel in a freaking rocket ship. That would never get old. Or, at least, she hoped it never would. They sat strapped into the ship, which stood straight up like a NASA rocket. But instead of blasting off, the ship rattled, then slipped side-ways between dimensions, the view of the hangar roof replaced by technicolor strobes and the wiggly designs that she came to associate with their cross-dimensional travel. There was blissfully little turbulence, unlike some of the earlier trips.

  Minutes later, they slipped from the in-between into a new world. Gravity was still down, the rocket point-up. The front viewscreen revealed the inside of what looked like the roof of a warehouse.

  “Where are we?” Leah asked as Roman double-checked the instrumentation.

  King gestured to the view. “We maintain properties on all of the story worlds where landing out of sight is impossible but spaceships are still not in-genre.”

  “So, is this our safe house, too?” Leah asked.

  Mallery jumped in. “No, thank goodness. This place is drafty as all get-out, and even worse, it’s in Long Island City.”

  “What’s wrong with Long Island City?”

  Mallery unbuckled and climbed out of her seat, descending the rails along the side of the ship. “It’s so close to Manhattan, practically within a stone’s throw, but the neighborhood is split between soulless industrial and far-too-ritzy condos, with barely anything left besides. No, the company maintains an apartment on the Upper East Side for teams to do their business.”

  Leah started to climb down after Mallery. Roman released the hatch, revealing the poorly lit interior of a mostly empty warehouse. They formed a baggage line to bring down the gear.

  After a few minutes to lock down the ship and get their gear sorted, Mallery led them out. The warehouse was lit with motion sensors, and as they were walking through the vast room, one blinked on, revealing a medical station in one corner, and a whole lot of nothing else. She paced around the building a bit to test out the sensors, and to explore.

  “So, this place is just for landing the ship?”

  “Pretty much. Other worlds,
we tend to lay in supplies and surplus gear. Here, most everything has to be contracted or ordered fresh,” Shirin said.

  “Flowers, chocolates, Jet Ski rentals, things like that,” Mallery said. “It’s wonderful. I feel like Cupid every time we have a mission here. There’s a reason TV channels keep ordering matchmaker dramas even when they don’t take off. Same reason why we have dating shows. The romantic impulse is undeniable.”

  “For many people,” Roman said. “Some of us can’t be bothered.”

  “Only those with cold, dead hearts,” Mallery shot back, smiling.

  “Just try to keep from going full Manic Pixie Dream Girl on the mission this time.”

  Mallery laughed. “No worries about that. It’s not like I could play the suzaphone with a broken arm.”

  From the look on Roman’s face, this was an old, toothless argument among friends.

  King’s smile confirmed Leah’s suspicion. “Play nice, children. I’ll get us a cab.”

  Mallery cocked her head. “I thought you said you couldn’t get a cab in NYC even if you were wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit?”

  King grinned. “On our Earth, yes. Here, anyone can get a cab in five seconds flat.”

  And so he did.

  A half-hour of halting traffic on the Manhattan side of the bridge later, they reached the field office, which turned out to be a posh three-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a gorgeous building in Central Park East. Their previous trips had taken them to obviously foreign climes—the nineteenth-century American frontier in Western World, and deep space in Science Fiction World. The Rom-Com world was just…New York. The richest and prettiest possible New York, but still identifiable as the Big Apple she knew and feared for its inconsistent comedy club crowds.

  The apartment had smart, modern furniture, a fully-stocked pantry, and enough knickknacks and fiddly bits to make for a fine cocktail party.

  “Is this a field office or a superhero loft?” Leah asked, picking her jaw up off of the floor.

  “Why, both, of course!” Mallery snaked an arm around Leah’s elbow and led her through the rest of the apartment. Each bedroom had a different feel—one leaned eclectic NYC hippie with Tibetan prayer flags, herbs, and a peace-symbol blanket over the bed, one was super-literary-prep with wall-to-wall bookshelves, and the third was a hipster paradise, complete with ukulele, steampunky Victoriana daguerreotypes, and more.

  “How does the Council pay for all of this? This condo has to cost a fortune.”

  “Oh, on Earth Prime, it would. However, every Rom-Com protagonist in films has a swank apartment like this, even on lower-middle-class jobs, so that’s just how this world works. If I recall, the rent for this place is something like a thousand dollars a month.”

  Leah was aghast. This called for aghast. “My last apartment cost a grand a month, and that was in an only moderately shady part of Baltimore. This place should cost several times as much.”

  Putting her useless jealousy aside, Leah walked up to a double-wide window facing the park. The leaves were changing, making for a sea of rich oranges and yellows beside a crystal-clear lake. The view was postcard-perfect. And as a cherry on top, there was a couple rowing a boat in the lake, one carrying a parasol. And Leah could even make out a picnic basket. The energy of the place was contagious. Western world was cheesy and scary. Science Fiction was cheesy and a bit confusing. Rom-Com world was cheesy and delightful.

  “Can I just live here and report to work using a spare ship or something?” she asked.

  “No go,” Mallery said. “Long-term exposure to a story world has an elevated chance of wrapping us up into the world’s story. Worst case, you forget where you come from and become a local forever.”

  “Like, lose yourself in the Matrix kind of thing?”

  “Basically.” Mallery joined Leah at the window to share in the view.

  “Has that ever happened?”

  Mallery’s expression darkened. “Yes. So we come, we do our jobs, and then we leave. Just like our New York. Nice place to visit, but leave before it makes you hard, like the song says.” Mallery stared out the window for a long moment, hand wrapped in the curtains.

  Then, in a sharp motion, she turned from the window and called through the condo.

  “Assemble in the living room, please! We have a love story to fix!”

  Chapter Two: Meddling for Fun and Profit

  Mallery gathered the team around a table. She had pulled a flippable school-style whiteboard from somewhere. On the whiteboard were a trio of bullet points and a header:

  How to Find a Broken Story In Romance World

  1) Dating sites

  2) Major haunts

  3) Gossip network

  Mallery stood by the whiteboard, marker in hand. “Okay, so we know that the breach originated in this urban center. Chances are, we’re looking at a recent breakup or missed connection. We’re going to divide up the team to cover the three major sources of information for finding broken stories.”

  Mallery tapped the three numbered points in sequence.

  “Roman, you’ll get to work the dating sites. Use the back-end key I designed to get in and see who reactivated accounts in the last month, and feed some bait accounts into the algorithm to find some likely partner candidates. You’ll also want to reactivate the bait accounts we have set up.”

  “Bait accounts?” Leah asked.

  “We forge dating profiles using models from our own Earth, which we craft into archetypes that should attract romantic comedy protagonists—quirky but gorgeous.”

  Nice. “Got it.” It was like Person of Interest but for romance.

  Leah tapped away on her tablet, taking notes. Since Mallery was in the driver’s seat for this mission, King’s custom of requiring everyone take notes with legal pads was apparently suspended. King still took notes analog-style, sitting up, his legs crossed, but when Roman and Shirin pulled out their tablets, Leah followed suit.

  Mallery continued. “Newbie, you’re with me on major haunts. I’ll show you how to pick up broken stories in the wild. It’ll be fun. Hydrate now and decide on a cocktail of choice. Mixing your drink types is a rookie mistake, and I won’t have it on my mission.”

  Leah chuckled, continuing to reset her brain to fit the story world—in Western World you had to watch your guns, so of course in Romance World you had to watch your drinks.

  “That leaves Shirin and King on gossip networks,” Mallery said. “Pick up contacts and see where social circles have gone off. Focus on Midtown in the publishing business, NYU, and the fashion industry, but let’s not forget the sexy art jobs like architects and the theatre world. Most of our documented breaches in this territory are upper-middle-class, dating for less than two years. My analysis of latest reports from Scouting and Forecasting is in the mission folder. Text or email with any leads, otherwise we check in with progress tomorrow at nine AM. Any questions?”

  Leah had questions, but they could wait until she headed out with Mallery. Her first mission, they’d known exactly where the story had broken, and her second, Shirin’s contacts had put them on the trail within the afternoon. This was looking like it’d take longer. And even with an intimidatingly large organization supporting them, it seemed like this job always came down to fieldwork.

  Find one specific unhappy couple in a city of eight million. No big deal, right?

  Mallery walked past Leah, on her way to the bedrooms. “Suit up. Club attire.”

  Luckily, Leah had been allowed to pick out her own outfits, though Shirin had given her all of three minutes to do it, which was not nearly enough time to play with a several-thousand-dollar wardrobe of hand-or-at-least-algorithm-picked clothes.

  Leah wheeled her suitcase to one of the bathrooms, which sported a full-length mirror. She’d been told to pack three everyday chic outfits, two club/bar outfits, a just-in-case ball gown, and exercise clothes.

  Since the laws of dramatic progression suggested she save the fanciest clothes for
later in the story, Leah went with her less risqué club outfit—black palazzo pants and a white tank top with a blue chiffon throw over it. The more risqué one was a pour-yourself-in-tight print dress that Shirin had pointed her toward when her other two choices were deemed “too tame.” She reluctantly pulled out the yellow heels, hoping that there would be seats at the club.

  Leah emerged from the restroom to see Mallery waiting, decked out in a black cocktail dress and an epic-level push-up bra. Her bombshell look was somewhat undercut by the cast, but only just.

  “Whoa. That bra come with a permit?” Leah said.

  Mallery stood proud, hands on hips, one stance allowed by her cast. “We’re looking to get information. If people want to talk to my boobs instead of me, so be it. Now get back in there; we need to do makeup.”

  “I’m already wearing makeup,” Leah said, already knowing she was doomed.

  “Oh, honey. We’re going clubbing in the Lower East Side. That’s a full-face situation at least.”

  Crammed into the front bathroom, Leah became very aware of Mallery’s presence. Her body heat, her breath. Suddenly, it was very warm in the restroom.

  “Can we open the door?” Leah asked, moving a hand to the door and accidentally elbowing a very soft body part.

  Mallery winced, covering up. “Geez. Careful there.”

  “Sorry.” Leah opened the door, letting in some cooler air. It helped a little. “It’s a bit cramped in here. Wasn’t the other restroom like three times this size?”

  “Yes, but we were already here. I’ll finish up in the other room.” Mallery sidestepped out, leaving Leah to catch her breath.

  A minute later, Leah made her way to the master bedroom and its accompanying bathroom. She passed Shirin, who raised an eyebrow as she walked by.

  Leah gave a defusing smile and a shrug.

  The master bathroom was more than large enough to work comfortably. Mallery finished Leah’s makeup, then did her own.

  Leah felt like she was about to step onto a movie set, which made sense. Mallery had done her makeup better than she ever bothered to do for herself. Her college improv comedy troupe had used makeup for shows, but this was a whole other level. Compared to her last mission, it was totally normal. Every world had its own levels of weird, and Leah could imagine the whiplash that would come with jumping between worlds quickly in back-to-back missions.