THE ERRANDS
All 42 errands, from the 18 people who hand them out: what each one asks for, what it pays, and what it opens next.
Everyone else on every map is either trying to kill you or is a boss explaining why. These 18 are the counterweight — people the horde was inflicted on rather than people the horde is, still doing a job that stopped making sense some time ago. Nothing can hurt them, and the horde is warded 44 px back off each of them, exactly as it is off the merchant.
An errand is offered on one map, taken and finished on one visit, and chained only to other errands from the same person: the quest log belongs to the run you are in rather than to the hero, so a chain can never cross a map or be picked up where you left it.
GOODCO HQ8
Handed out on GOODCO HQ, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
WALTER PRICE
Severance processing, a department of one, four years into closing out a company that has not employed anybody since the line learned to run itself. He types the forms on a machine that needs ribbon because the system he was told to file them in stopped accepting new records the same week it stopped needing him. He is not confused about any of this. He is simply not willing to be the man who left it half done.
PRIYA NAIR
An unpaid contract intern nineteen hours into a shift nobody scheduled. She was told to log the night line's output and has kept logging it — through the lights going down, through the staff going strange, through the welders on the racks starting to look up as people walked past. The clipboard is the only part of the job that still works.
UNIT 7-ECHO
A first-generation SUCCESSOR, decommissioned eleven years ago and never collected. It holds the last order it was given and will not act past it without a countersignature. It has watched the models that replaced it replace the people who built them, and files that under CHANGES TO THE LINE.
THE MOON7
Handed out on THE MOON, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
HOLLIS VANE
A contract auditor sent up to reconcile what GOODCO was shipping off Site T against what GOODCO said it was shipping. He got as far as noticing the two numbers were different and that the difference was warm. Nobody collected his findings, and nobody collected him. He still holds the clipboard, and the column he could not make balance is still open.
BENNY KOVACS
A living salvage hand off the same stranded run as the trader, and the reason that run has a survivor at all — he carries two tanks because once he did not, and watched a friend run out of air with the ship in sight. He has been walking the same grid squares ever since, on the theory that somebody else is out here doing the same.
THE RADIO OPERATOR
The ghost of a mission-control relay man who sat the far-side shift and never got the handover. He is still calling a Houston that stopped answering, and will not leave the channel until somebody rogers it. He heard everything the dust heard, which is more than the mission logs admit.
MARS6
Handed out on MARS, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
DR. IRENE FALK
The colony's terraforming botanist, and the last human on the payroll down here. Her work is the only thing on Mars that will still matter in a century, which is exactly why nobody upstairs has asked her about it since the year she arrived. She has kept the trays alive through two power cuts and one evacuation she was not told about.
CU-RIE
A survey rover that drove itself into a drift eight months ago and has been politely requesting recovery on a frequency the colony stopped monitoring. Its dish still turns. Its logs are complete. Nobody has ever read them, which is the only thing about the situation it considers a genuine fault.
LEDGER UNIT 12
The colony's accounting unit, still reconciling a book in which every net-worth column now reads the same number. It has flagged this as an input error two hundred thousand times and filed a correction request after each one. It is not permitted to close the book without a countersignature from the party the transfers went to, and that party has not answered a request in eleven years.
THE RIFT7
Handed out on THE RIFT, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
THE SHIP'S COOK
He went below to put the midday meal on aboard a brigantine that was later found sailing along quite happily with nobody aboard. He maintains the crew are merely late. He keeps the meal warm on principle, and has views about the standard of provisions in a place with no ports.
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER
One of three men who went out to trim a light in a gale in 1900 and were never found. He is still trimming it — the lantern has not gone out — and he is still two men short. He does not talk about the gale. He talks about the other two.
NOBODY IN PARTICULAR
A man in the clothes of a job he cannot name, in a place where the missing end up. Everyone else who fell in here at least brought themselves along. He arrived without the part that says who arrived, and has spent however long it has been trying to work out what is missing from a description he cannot read. He is very calm about it, which is the worst part.
BOOT HILL6
Handed out on BOOT HILL, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
CLEM
The saloon's barkeep hand, and the only machine in the park that noticed the guests had stopped coming. It has polished the same glasses every night for eleven years rather than admit the shift is over. It knows every hand in town by serial, and which of them have lately started behaving like something else is driving.
MISS DOLLY
The park's wardrobe mistress, human, on staff since the first season. She dressed every hand in town and was never once written a line of dialogue. She has outlasted both founders and is entirely clear-eyed about which of those facts the park would find more embarrassing.
BROTHER CALLOW
The park's church hand, scripted for the eight o'clock sermon and the three o'clock wedding, holding a prop book the props department filled with whatever bound paper the parent company had spare. He has read from it twice a day for eleven years. He cannot read. Nobody has ever needed him to, and nobody has ever opened it to check what he is holding.
THE GARAGE3
Handed out on THE GARAGE, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
RUTH
Ada's mother, who has a key to the garage and always has. Once the voyages start she is simply there between them, standing by the engine parts, because waiting at home means staring at the phone. She was never once scared for her daughter — she raised her — and what she asks for is the one thing a search party cannot bring back: something of Ada's.
THE BUNKER5
Handed out on THE BUNKER, and finished there — the quest log belongs to the run you are in.
CHEF ANATOLE
The last human on the kitchen staff, cooking five courses a night for men who taste none of it. He keeps the toque starched because the day he stops is the day this place is exactly what it looks like. He has counted the pantry down to the week and has not told anybody the number.
THE CONCIERGE
The residence's concierge unit, which has served no guest anything in four years and files a flawless nightly report on the standard of service regardless. It is the only thing down here that still calls the residents GUESTS. It has never been asked why the doors only lock from outside, and would answer honestly if it were.
