Another morning, another headache. “Seriously, Miles. What are you doing up there at night?”

He didn’t respond. Bucket in hand, I was on my way to the water source early in the morning. I would usually get the water for the day even before my mother got up.

“About getting you out of my head... we didn’t talk about it yesterday, but—”

‘Working on it,’ Miles interrupted me.

“What? How?” I said.

Ever since yesterday afternoon he would only respond to me occasionally and curtly. Apparently he was quite busy. Somehow.

“Anyway, that’s not it. What I want to talk about is what happens after that. Say we find a way to get you out of my head... I would be without Calling.” And if I lost my Calling after taking on a job...

‘We’ll figure it out when we get there. Don’t worry too much, I’ll make sure you guys will be okay.’

The longest response I had gotten all day. It would be easy to just trust him, but I’d rather have a concrete plan. Not to mention that he always sounded so sure of himself, but two days ago he hadn’t even known what a water source was.

Miles was focused on getting out. I don’t think he meant us harm, but I wasn’t sure what he would do if it became a question of me or him.

I arrived at the mostly empty square and, with no line at this time of day, I was able to go right up to the water source. I placed a stone on the cube and looked at the sigils while I waited for the bucket to fill. Curiously, one of them was scratched up. I had never noticed this before.

“Hey, Miles. That sigil on the right, was it scratched up like that yesterday?”

‘Yep.’

Even after the bucket was full, I stared at the scribblings for another minute or so. We had copied them one-to-one onto various surfaces. Albeit without scratches. I wondered if it needed to be different to work somewhere else. But to figure that out, you would have to understand it. Which Miles does... Yet he hadn’t instructed me to make any modifications yesterday.

Let’s suppose this cube turns blue stones into water, and the sigils control that somehow. Omega... language... instructions... Miles’ words from yesterday floated through my mind.

“DECL (CTR)... REL[0;0;0]... IN... SFC (DIR;0;1;0)... CONV (MNA)—” I mumbled as I stared at the sigils, before Miles interrupted me.

‘What!?’

“Huh?”

What was that? Did I just read the sigils? I was still staring at them, but all I saw was the same old scribbling.

‘You understand it?’

“No, I... don’t know what just happened.”

‘Curious,’ Miles said, before going silent again.

I looked around over the empty square. Nobody had seen or heard me. That was probably for the best. I picked up the water-filled bucket and made my way back home.

***

Mother was already making breakfast when I entered the kitchen through the back door. “Good Morning,” she said, smiling at me.

I replied in kind, sat down the bucket, and helped her. I was still confused about what had happened at the water source, but for some reason I didn’t feel like telling my mother about it. While eating together, we only made smalltalk. Afterwards, I tidied the kitchen.

“Are you going to the job agency later?” she asked while I was cleaning the dishes.

“I will. I think I don’t want to work for Gean, I will try to find something else,” I said.

I would have to talk it over with the currently silent voice in my head, but I had decided that I wanted a different job. The thought of interacting with Gean directly made me feel uneasy.

“What does Miles say?” she asked.

“Honestly, he’s been pretty quiet. I don’t know what he’s doing. But I won’t take any risks. We’ll discuss it before I leave.”

Mother and I talked a while longer, before she left for work. I would usually only see her in the mornings and the evenings. Sometimes only one of the two. I knew she worked a lot, and I wanted to get a job as soon as possible, to lighten her load.

A thirty-one year old woman wouldn’t usually have to work this hard. She was supposed to have a partner. But one night, five years ago, Father hadn’t come home from work. A beast had gotten into town and killed four people before the guards managed to stop it. My mother told me that Father had been the only one for her; she hadn’t married again.

“Miles, I need to talk to you.”

‘I know,’ came his immediate response.

“So you are listening.”

‘Occasionally.’

I asked him if he’d be able to get me into another job. After the Calling ritual, you were supposed to already have a sense for what kind of job you would be most suited for. More often than not, that job would then be what people did for the rest of their lives.

As far as I knew, Researcher Calling jobs usually involved being in an office all day. I had also heard that Researchers could be an odd bunch. Intelligent, but not necessarily sociable. Sounds familiar...

‘Based on what your mother told me, and the test Gean gave us, I’m fairly certain we should be fine. These job tests don’t actually test whether you’re a master in a given profession. They basically just test the theory. Which is good for us.’

My mother had told him what her own test had been like the other day. She had felt the seamstress in her, and after just a few questions at the Job Agency, and a quick practical test, she was given a job at a tailor in the market district.

“Mother had a practical test, however,” I said.

‘Yep, but she’s a Handiworker.’

Oh. I understood. A Researcher doesn’t do anything practical. It’s probably all numbers and theory. That’s why Gean had only given me math questions, that’s the knowledge I would’ve needed for doing his job. Miles wouldn’t be able to help me become a soldier or a carpenter, I wouldn’t have the muscle memory that came with these Callings. But theory Miles could handle.

“You really do have the Researcher Calling, don’t you?” I asked.

‘Not exactly. I’ve learned everything I know without a ritual.’

“How?”

‘By picking up a book here and there.’

It wasn’t unheard of for people to learn things outside their job. I liked reading books myself. Once, Mother had even told me about an old man she once knew, who had spent four decades learning enough to switch jobs into an entirely different Calling. But even then, he would’ve had at least some base knowledge to work with, that he received during his ritual.

“How old are you exactly?”

‘How old, hm?’ Miles said and then paused for a moment. ‘Going by your calendar, I would be about one hundred and twenty.’

I stared blankly at our kitchen wall. “Excuse me?”

‘Speaking of time. Those sixteen hour days here are kind of irritating.’

***

I was on my way to the main square. That last comment from Miles had come without any pain whatsoever. He had stopped responding to my questions again right away, but I could practically feel his amusement over my confusion.

One hundred and twenty... There were no people that old. As far as I knew, the oldest person in town was ninety-something. The man was kind of famous because of his age. I have an old geezer in my head... Assuming that he wasn’t making it up.

“Keep your secrets then,” I whispered, giving up, while walking up the main street.

I arrived at the main square and made a beeline for the street leading down east, where I would eventually come up to the Job Agency. This part of town wasn’t nearly as busy as the rest, as there were only office buildings here. Most people didn’t have any business with the agencies. The most notable exception being the time shortly after your Calling ritual, when you had to get a job.

The Job Agency was a surprisingly small building, compared to the others around these parts. Only one story high and barely 30 meters wide, looking at it from the front. I walked through the wooden front door and found myself in an open office space, with several desks strewn around. All but one had office workers and younger people sitting at them, some of which I recognized from the room where I had waited for my ritual.

The woman sitting at the one unoccupied desk motioned me to come over. I approached and sat down on the chair across from her.

“Good Morning. Your name, please?” she said.

“Tomar Remor,” I responded.

She skipped through the files lying on her desk, but appeared to come up empty. Then she motioned me to wait, stood up, walked to a shelf at the wall, and looked through some more files, before carrying two of them back to her desk.

“Tomar Remor...” she said, reading my file as she sat down. “Researcher. We don’t have a lot of you this year. Do you have a specific job in mind?”

I thought her question over for a moment before responding. “I’m supposed to be a statistician, but I’d like to know what other options there are.”

“Alright,” she said without any qualms. “It’s not unusual for Researchers to choose a different field.”

She looked through her files again and pulled one out, before skipping through the pages in it. “Though it is unfortunate, statisticians are quite uncommon.”

“I’ve heard,” came my response. There had apparently been only one for the past twenty years.

She picked out one piece of paper and laid it down on the desk in front of me. “This is a list of Researcher jobs we have available. You know best what knowledge your Calling has granted you, so please feel free to pick something out. I’ll be right back.”

As I started browsing through the listings, she stood up and walked away, to talk to one of her colleagues. The very first listing said “Statistician!” in bold letters, with an exclamation point. Gean really is desperate. I went through everything, line by line, until Miles spoke up.

‘Wait, back up. What was the fifth from the bottom?’

I scrolled back up and looked at the entry he had pointed out. “Stoner.”

‘Haha. Now that’s a nice job.’

I didn’t know what a stoner did, nor what Miles found so funny about it, so I read the description.

Stoner

Management of shard acquisition and distribution networks, statistical analysis of water source usage, research of water distribution, monitoring of population growth and its effects on available resources.

Available: 2

Miles stopped laughing abruptly. ‘Tomar, what are shards?’

I looked around carefully to see if anyone could hear me, before I answered him in a hushed voice. “Stones. Like the blue ones. I thought only the priests called them shards.”

He was silent for a moment before speaking again. ‘Are there other colors as well?’

I was about to answer him, when I noticed the woman sitting back down across from me. I nodded while looking at the job listings, to let Miles know that there were stones in other colors. Though I had only ever seen blue and white ones. The blue ones were used daily by most families, the white ones I had only ever seen during the ritual.

“Have you decided?” the office worker asked.

‘Take that one!’

Once again, I felt left out. Why did Miles want me to choose that job? However, he would essentially be the one doing it, and the pay wouldn’t differ too much between jobs in one Calling unless you got promoted.

Pointing at the listing, I told the woman that I wanted to become a stoner, which Miles laughed at once more.

“Very well,” she said, before shuffling through papers again and finally putting a test with two pages before me. “This is the stoner test. Twenty questions, thirty-two minutes. If you get everything right, we’ll make it official.” After a glance at the clock she said “You may begin.”

***

Miles had breezed through the questions as if he had known every single one beforehand. It took him all but fifteen minutes, and I guessed he could’ve gone even faster, had I been a faster writer.

I was officially named one of the stoners that would start this year and got a slip of paper that detailed where I was to go, come next week. It was almost anticlimactic. I left the building, with my spot quickly being taken by a girl that had arrived after me.

I was walking back in the direction of the main square as Miles commented ‘See? Easy.’

He certainly made it look easy. But it couldn’t be.

“How long would you have to study to pass this test without Calling?”

‘Hm... the coverage was pretty broad, I admit. Maybe eleven years?’

Eleven years to pass the test. I was fifteen, so I would’ve needed to start at four. And that was just for proving that you had the necessary knowledge, there would be more to it once you actually started the job.

What I had been told all my life held true, you couldn’t gain enough knowledge to start working before you came of age. Not without Calling. And especially not if you had other responsibilities as well.

“Good job,” I said.

‘Hmhm,’ came Miles’ curt response from inside my head.

Just as I stepped into the main square, a hand slapped me on my shoulder. “Morning, Tomar. I got to say, I’m a little disappointed you didn’t want to work with me.”

I turned around to see a grinning Gean look down at me. Even with me standing upright, he was two heads bigger than me. He had an imposing presence, especially in the neatly cut black suit he was wearing. I was a little startled by the surprise attack, but managed to calm myself.

“Sorry, sir. The job didn’t seem quite right for me.”

“Too bad. Too bad,” he said. “A stoner though? Not the most exciting choice, is it?”

It hadn’t even been ten minutes since I left the Job Agency.

Great, he’s monitoring me.

‘Great, he’s monitoring us.’

Miles and I thought in unison.

He must’ve wanted me to know, it was too blatantly obvious with the way he approached me. Should I play along? Come out and say it? Maybe run?

“‘I think it’s an interesting field, and I will be directly involved with getting vital resources to all citizens. It seemed like a noble profession,’” I parroted what Miles said in my head, while I had still been unsure what to do.

Gean rubbed his chin. “I suppose so. A good boy, aren’t you? I’ll let you be on your way then. But I’d still like to sit down some time, I’m sure we have a lot we could talk about yet.”

With that, he walked off in the direction of the Registration Agency, as I continued on my way home.

“Am I still okay?” I asked Miles.

‘What do you think?’

“I think he’s suspicious about something. But he doesn’t know for sure. He’s digging. But as long as I don’t make any mistakes... it should be fine?”

‘There you go.’

It would’ve been nice to know what exactly would constitute a mistake, however.