"Yeah, I can work with that. Safe from what, I'm already going to be escorting the metal heads off the planet."

"Lurkers. My former employees. The weather. Assassins. Bugs."

"I am somewhat limited in my ability to protect you from assassins of any species or employment status but I can get you a weatherproof bugproof house in a nicely landscaped bit of not-currently-occupied, somewhere, and then not tell anyone where I put it?"

"Security by obscurity, huh. But there'll be wild lurkers a lot of places, they wouldn't necessarily have to know. You can't do electricitical force fields and motion-sensing cannons?"

"Force fields have not been invented. I can do an electrical fence that shocks creatures that touch it."

"If it can be a dome that's good enough."

"Yes, you can have an electric fence dome. Do you have any other architectural requests?"

"Mm. Do I ever. I think I trust you to swing by again after work to spend an hour going over bathroom tile designs and swimming pool shapes, though. I can call someone in who'll have more details on some lurker than name and time since they signed on and disciplinary record but what are you hoping you'll get out of hearing about that?"

"I was assuming you'd find me the most sympathetic single excuse for having one working here and if that excuse didn't hold water I could set about seeing how to replace any useful functions you're incidentally serving and dismantle the entire department."

"Oh, the single best thing we do for workers is letting them dodge a conviction that'd follow them later, there's no - secretly paying for their children to go to school, nothing like that. Given we're going from 'if you visit your folks in prison you might not be able to come back out since clearly you're a sympathizer' to the governor being in love with a famous traitor I think no one will care half as much about that in a couple of years, it'll solve itself. The functions I think you'd call useful are... keeping the dumber lurkers in check, limiting how bad the justice system can get, and keeping labor cheap enough and available enough that there's no incentive for eco-intensive automation that'd take power away from the shield wall."

"Is there some reason the smarter lurkers do not have some functional system for managing their dumber cousins?"

"Well, I guess the same reason moncaws don't have a legal system for seagulls."

"Are these, like, multiple species of lurker, not variation within one?"

"Yeah. Well, both, but there's a really big difference between a babak and a lurker toad, if the babak doesn't have brain damage."

"I would like to meet a smarter lurker."

"There are some free ones in the city, mostly in the yellow zone, or I can have someone bring us one."

"One who has had - contact with your system - might be most informative."

"I can have one here in a couple minutes, then." And if not stopped she will call someone.

He waits, tail lashing.

And eventually they are brought a lurker. This one is currently walking on all fours, but could stand up and use their hands. They're sort of apelike. Maybe if apes were members of the order carnivora. And purple.

The minister tells the lurker's minder to shoo, and he shoos.

"Hello, I'm Cam," Cam says to the lurker. "What's your name?"

"Urru."

"It's nice to meet you, Urru. I've never met a lurker before."

Nod.

Probably safer not to say anything other than to answer questions, Urru figures. That being how humans are, and this guy being sort of human probably.

"I'm trying to figure out whether the Extreme Labor department should keep existing, or stop, and if it should stop what is needed to replace it if anything, and one of the things it does is - to put it kindly - interface between lurkers as a group and the humans around here. How did you wind up here?"