Iktrng led Huck through the wide door into the common room and dropped the bloody warrant cube on the metal table.

"That what I think it is?" asked an insect very similar to Iktrng.

"Yup. They'll be behind us. Lots of them."

The few insects in the room sprang to action and exited hastily. Iktrng motioned Huck toward a low chair.

"Make yourself comfortable. I need to find a visor that fits you. I don't know if they come in Earthling."

The big ship's hum grew noticeably louder and the room vibrated hard enough to knock Huck out of his chair. Iktrng ignored it and pressed a panel and it slid up. He withdrew a large box and dropped it on the table then helped Huck back into his seat. He sat down across from Huck. "So. Questions?"

"So many questions," Huck sighed.

"Yeah," the mosquito sighed back. "Let's start with easy stuff. I'm Iktrng Darby-Orris, you can call me Ik. I'm a junior associate at Brgclaw, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, and Blewp. I'll be part of your defense team." Iktrng picked up the cube and wiped it between two arms and read it. "It says you're wanted for the murder of a Fbithling." He read further. "An important Fbithling."

"I'm quite certain I didn't kill anyone, most certainly whatever that is."

"I'm Fbithling. We make up most of the universe."

Huck scratched his neck. "Oh, so he looked maybe like you?"

Iktrng cocked his head and wiggled his proboscis. "No, silly, he'd have been in his ship. Which does kind of look like a very large Fbithling," he realized. "So yeah, maybe."

"How important was he?"

"Important enough to get you charged by the Office of Justice."

"Who are they?"

Iktrng opened the box on the table and rummaged through it, pulling a few objects and dropping them in front of Huck. "The Office of Justice is the government. They're 'they.'"

"Did you shoot those jellyfish guys?"

"Yup. Article fourteen, subsection C, rule 22.01a, paragraph six. They're required to negotiate bail, and if they refuse, then opposing Counsel - that's me - can claim custody by combat. Try on one of those."

Huck picked up one of the devices and it made a low tone.

"Not that one."

Huck dropped it and picked up another. "What do I do with it?"

"It goes in your face."

Huck looked at the tool in his hand, which appeared to be a microscope fused to a circuit board and melted onto a stapler.

"Put it close. If it fits it'll fit."

"What if it doesn't fit?"

"Do it slow just in case." The bug's proboscis wiggled again and Huck realized he was laughing.

Huck raised the object to his eye and it hummed at him. He put it down and tried another, then another. "So is this what you do? Shoot government henchmen and take people into space?"

Iktrng pulled a few more visors from the box and considered his answer. "No. Terpodloxl and I go back a long time. We're on opposite sides of the law now, but before that we worked together. His wife is going to hate me now."

"I'm sorry. I really could have gone with them, I guess."

"No, that wouldn't have been good. You'd be dead right now."

Another mosquito came into the room and sat next to Iktrng. "Do visors even come in Earth sizes?" It waved one of its big arms in front of Huck's face and delighted when Huck followed it.

"Qooq says they come in every species in the universe. I don't think that means Earthlings though. Huck, this is Twunly. She's in charge of provisions, you tell her what you need not to die and she'll try to find it. Also we voted her our ship's human doctor, so if you get hurt she'll be the one trying to keep you alive. She's really the only thing in the universe keeping you alive."

"Try not to get hurt," Twunly joked.

Huck looked at Twunly and felt for a moment like he saw a different expression in her mosquito features, something that he could reasonably call friendliness. It sent him over the edge. He dropped the metal ball in his hand and looked sternly at the bugs across the table. "I need you guys to take off those masks right now because this is obviously a prank of some kind."

Twunly's tentacles shot upright and she froze stiff.

Iktrng wiggled his proboscis at her. "Huck, tell Twunly you're the fifty-third Dynac of Esbenfar."

"What?"

"Just tell her."

Huck looked squarely at Twunly. "I'm the fifty-third dynarc of elmerfunk."

Twunly rocketed from her low chair and backed up, all of her many arms held in front of her except the one in which a softball-sized visor appeared. "Iktrng, what the hell is that? I'm rebooting."

"Wow, so they just poof like that?" Huck picked up a larger sphere from the selection, but it hummed at him as well.

"Huck, tell Twunly you can control her mind."

Huck laughed and played along. "I'm in a ship full of talking mosquitos zooming through space on the run from jellyfish federal agents. Of course I have the power to control her mind."

"It's unbelievable," Twunly whispered.

"I know."

"Do you have any idea what, how much, uh, where," she stammered. "Anything. Just anything."

"Yup."

A third mosquito walked in and cautiously surveyed the strange scene. "I told you I put the Earthling model in his room," it said to the other mosquitos.

"You did." Iktrng stood and left without another word.

The new bug positioned itself in front of Twunly, who was still in a state of minor shock. "So you're Huck Sanders?"

Huck nodded.

"I hear Earthlings don't live very long."

"One of the, uh, other Fbithlings said something similar before we came here."

"They measure in Earth years," Twunly spoke up. Her body relaxed some. "Four and a half days each for us. Huck, this is Rheffig."

Rheffig made a grumbling sound and shook his head. "Man, that's gotta be tough. A few hundred days of life if you're lucky. So you're born, get to mate once or twice if you hurry, then get old and die."

"I don't guess we see it that way. And the Lord says marriage is a sacred promise." Huck wasn't sure what he was defending but recognized Rheffig's tone.

Rheffig froze and his antenna straightened, a reaction almost identical to Twunly's. Huck felt like he might be offending them somehow, but suppressed a desire to apologize.

"Hey Huck, tell Rheffig who you really are," Twunly kidded.

"Oh yeah, I'm the fifty-third dunbar of helmetfudge," Huck laughed.

"You mean the fifty-third Dynac of Esbenfar," Rheffig corrected.

Huck straightened his posture and snapped his heels. "Yeah, that's it. It is I, the fifty-third Dynac of Esbenfar," Huck announced with a flourish.

Rheffig removed his visor and banged it on the table and put it back. He lifted a shaking top arm to point at Huck.

"I know, say that again. I'm the fifty-third Dynac of Esbenfar," Huck yammered.

Rheffig left the room shaken.

"Stay here, Huck." Twunly followed Rheffig.

Huck tried a few more visors but all of them hummed at him. Iktrng finally returned with a larger box and put it at the end of the table. "So it sounds like Earth has really amazing biodiversity, Huck. I didn't know this, but you have almost twenty million different species living on your planet right now, and I couldn't even count all the zeroes for the ones before you." He struggled to lift a metal and plastic sphere slightly larger than a basketball from the box and dropped it with a thud on the table in front of Huck. "These things come one-size-per-planet. This is the one for Earth!"

"That's not going to fit in my face."

"It will. Really it's not even a matter of fitting, the visor just temporarily occupies the same physical space as your head in some dimensions you don't use. It's only a few microns thick right now, you're just a few microns thicker. Remember all the useless juice they squeezed out of you?" Iktrng made a squeezing motion with his small arms.

"Yeah, why did they have to do that? And why did they all come to my room before you and the jellysquids showed up?"

"You just graduated from one of the only universities on your planet that teaches about invisible people in the sky. Did they really not cover photonic timing loops or basic molecular mass scaling?"

Huck tried to lift the visor but found it too heavy. "I didn't graduate yet. And no, the Bible doesn't have anything about photographic timing locks." With Iktrng's help they raised it high to scan Huck's eye. It beeped and disappeared. He blinked a few times and lines jerked across his blurry vision, then a small red dot appeared in the upper left corner of everything.

"Keep your head still while it figures out what dimensions you're in," Iktrng coached.

Huck felt pressure in his sinuses for a moment then completely normal, then better than normal. Iktrng no longer appeared as a mosquito, but as an alarmingly normal human. His extra arms didn't even stand out until he moved them.

"Can you see?" Iktrng asked.

"Yeah. There's a red dot. You look like me. Sort of."

"It's still booting up. When you see an orange dot tell it you're human. You don't have to say it, you can think it." Iktrng packed the other visors into the box and back into the storage compartment in the wall. "Huck, the reason they came to your room before we met is because..."

Twunly and Rheffig came back into the room with two others, the four of them chattering excitedly. The dot turned orange and Huck told the visor in his head that he was an Earth human and it beeped at him again. His vision flickered quickly and was back, but with more details.

All five people in the room had their name and a four digit number above their heads. A dozen weapons spread across them glowed red, and as he looked across the weapons additional details including what appeared to be makes and models flashed above their red outlines. He scanned the room, finding details about everything he focused on for more than a beat populating not only his vision, but fed to him via smells, sounds, and even imbuing muscle memory. He had access to not only knowledge of everything, but experiences of everything.

"This is amazing," Huck choked. "And scary."

"Qooq only does one thing, but they do it really well," Twunly agreed. As she finished her statement her outline flashed blue.

Huck knew that flash meant she was telling the truth, knowledge imparted to him in a tool-tip from the visor implanted somewhere in his memory. He also knew what all of the other information popping up around and flooding into his brain about Twunly and Eubpar and Iktrng and the rest of the crew meant. Their extensive criminal records were printed directly into his memory in real-time as the visor retrieved them. The history of Brgclaw, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, Darby-Orris, and Blewp downloaded and he flinched a little.

"Oh yeah, there's that part too," Rheffig said amusingly. "The curse of all knowledge."

"You're just space pirates," Huck groaned.

"No, we're attorneys," Iktrng explained.

"You don't want to meet space pirates," Rheffig added seriously.

"You call yourselves attorneys, but this Qooq thing says you're on the run for a lot of crimes. Three of them are breaking very bad people out of jail. With bombs!"

Avaifr held up a long arm. "I build the bombs."

"Does the government play fair where you're from?" Iktrng asked.

Huck thought about it, and his visor immediately began downloading memory data about the Office of Justice. The room sat silent for a few moments while he processed thousands of years of recent history, only a fraction of the unfathomable length of time the OOJ had been systemically terrifying the entire universe.

"Okay then, we're the good guys."

"Now think about space pirates," Avaifr joked.

Huck told the visor not to automatically fill his brain up with that information and it very fortunately followed his command. He pretended to be disgusted anyway and the room laughed and threw several other questionable topics at him, all of which he blocked and feigned reactions to. Each time the laughs grew louder and Huck found himself enjoying the act.

"Hey Huck, tell Eubpar and Avaifr who you really are," Rheffig eventually prodded.

Huck still didn't understand the joke but had the punchline down by this point. He stood up on his chair and raised his arms in the air and stuck out his chest. "I am the fifty-third Dynac of Esbenfar!" he sang proudly.

Avaifr and Eubpar reacted as expected, which elicited another round of laughs around the room.

This was Huck's first time experiencing the punchline with the visor's image enhancement, and the translation from Fbithling to Human conveyed more fear than Huck anticipated. Before he could say anything his readout changed. Across the top of his vision in large bold text read VERIFYING and his head tingled with a mix of smells and sounds and other sense data he couldn't process. He fell dizzily from the top of the chair, his hearing and balance obstructed somehow by numbers. "Um guys, what does verifying mean and why am I tingly?" he asked, hearing only a muffled sequence of tones replacing his voice.

"Oh crap. Eubpar, get us off the scope right now!" Iktrng shouted. "Avr, flood out all the signals. Twunly, prep a bed."

The crew disappeared in a panic. Rheffig cleared the table and Iktrng half-dragged Huck to it.

"Huck, we need to get that visor out, but it's not going to want to come out while it's searching. No panic, buddy, but this is kind of going to hurt slash void the warranty."

Huck put his hands over his eyes and ears. "Why!?"

"Look, if that visor can't find a reason not to believe you're the fifty-third Dynac of Esbenfar, then you and me are going to be the cause of a great big war that might kill everything in the universe. So get down buddy, we need to get that thing out of the dimensions you're not using and back into ours."

"Why wouldn't it find a reason? And what if I am him?" Huck asked, laying down on the table.

"It's a it. And it won't find a reason, Huck, because Qooq's algorithm can't tell if you're telling the truth or lying."

Huck suddenly understood the punchline. "I always flash blue."

"Yeah, Huck. Everything you say."

"Surely that happens sometimes."

"Never. Now let's get that thing out of you before the universe gets a broadcast that the Dynacistry has logged in. Tell it to come out. And hold still because this override tool hasn't been updated in a while."

Huck felt a pain behind his ear. He held his hands up and willed the visor out. His vision flashed error codes and low hums sounded in his ears. "It's giving me errors."

"Override it. Tell it there's a technical emergency. Oh! Tell it that it's hurting you!"

Huck thought the message to the visor and his vision went dark and he felt the tingly feeling on his hands again. He blinked and the visor thudded through his hands and bounced onto the floor, knocking the wind out of him. "That wasn't so bad," he heaved. Then a rush of pain flashed up his spine and into his head and he rolled into a ball, clutching at his ears. Huck's headache was unlike anything any being from his planet would ever understand outside of a few underpaid beta testers, occupying dimensions and time and simultaneously intersecting his own, yet not entangled. Much of his pain in fact came from temporarily understanding the physics of what was happening to him.

Iktrng toggled his comm and threw Huck over his bony shoulder. "Twunly, we're heading to you now." He kicked the heavy electronic sphere out of the way. "And we'll just leave this in the box until we can come up with a plan that doesn't end the universe, right Buddy?"

"It's all fun and games until somebody claims to be the return of the Dynacistry," Huck moaned. He flashed blue to Iktrng.