Free All Beasts Together (The Commander) by Randall Farmer Page A

countryside, or attract the attention of the nether regions of the FBI.”
    I made a show of inspecting the room to see if she was, perhaps, talking to someone else.  “You’ve got to be kidding.  You heard my story.  I’ll be lucky to get home alive.”
    “I didn’t say the job was possible . You took a life you shouldn’t have.  This is a ‘succeed or die’ task, or, shall I say, many tasks.”
    Clearly, ‘black marks’ meant something different to the Focuses than they meant to me.  They showed a lot of brass, to be handing out jobs like leashing Arms as punishment.
    Ann interrupted.
    “From the look on her face, Arm Hancock doesn’t know about the demographics, Lori.”  Oops. Slipping on the control there if a normal could read me.
    The growing rapport between Lori and me broke.  A part of me wanted to be the Focus’s prisoner.  Another part of me wanted the Focus as my prisoner.  Another just wanted out of here before my control fell apart into shreds.  Behind all her icy masks, I was positive Lori approved of me in some way. “One set of projections ends up with virtually no non-Transforms left in the world in 75 years, Arm Hancock,” Ann said.  “All the humans left would either be Focuses, Monsters, tagged Transforms, or Crows.”
    “Huh.”
    “Where would that leave the Arms, Carol?” Lori asked.  “Where would you get your juice?”
    I licked my lips.  I had actually read the article Ann referenced, in Nature, one of the few articles in the journal I actually understood.  I had never thought through the ramifications, though.  “Well, there are always recalcitrant Transforms.  We would be the enforcers.”
    “Ever work out how few Arms would be needed?” Ann said.
    I did the math.  “Shit.  I’m not sure the United States, with its current population, could even support one Arm.  Arms need so much juice!”
    Ann nodded.  “Exactly.  We need to find another solution.  The most obvious one is for Arms to be able to get juice from Focuses.  We don’t know how, yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure it out someday, somehow.  Perhaps the male Major Transforms fit into this equation, too.  We don’t know.  For all we know, the real solution is something else entirely, but I find that unlikely.  In any event, the first point about the demographics is that, in the long term, Arms need Focuses.
    “The second point is what we quaintly call the Romanian solution.  Have you ever heard the term before?”
    I shook my head.  “All I know is Romania claims their health care system has solved Transform Sickness and they have no Transforms in their pure and clean nation.”
    “They solved it by killing all the Transforms,” Lori said .  She showed anger and disgust as she spoke.  “It works, too.  If you kill all the Transforms, the incidence of the Transform Sickness goes way down.  On the other hand, what they do is inhumane beyond words.  Whenever you get sick in Romania, you get hauled to a clinic and tested.  If you test positive, you’re shot, right then and there.  They don’t particularly care about false positives.  To make sure no one escapes the checks, everyone informs on everyone else.  Romania has become so bad they give normal communist nations a good name.”
    I kept my face stony, and I kept silent.
    “The kicker is that there are factions within the United States government, within the FBI, and within the medical community itself, proposing we enact the Romanian solution to save the nation from the Transforms,” Ann said.  “It may be only a matter of time before all the non-democratic nations with Transform Sickness problems follow that path.  Consider living in such a place as an Arm.  If Transforms are shot before they even finish transforming, where is an Arm to get juice?”
    I thought for a moment about the point these two made.  “What you’re saying is that if we get too many Arms in the US, and they all