The Labors of Juliet (short story)
The Labors of Juliet was a Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids short story written and illustrated by Aristide Twain.
Contents
Plot
Juliet, of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' Department of Problem-Solving, has been temporarily banished from the Cupid Homeworld to an inhospitable desert in a Prime-adjacent universe, where she must romanticise a hundred living targets before her Fog Ship will allow her back to the Homeworld. She has been at it for most of a day and is making little progress.
Frustrated, she temporarily buries herself in sand to think, and reflects on the events which brought her here. Back in the Homeworld, she tried to skimp on her work to go see a movie by creating a duplicate of herself to do the work instead. This was illegal in itself — but the duplicate, being such an accurate copy, likewise didn't want to do the work, and creating a further duplicate, onward and onward until over a thousand Juliets were crowding the Cupid Intelligence Institute's offices.
This gives the exiled Juliet a flash of inspiration as she takes apart her Fog Ship, harvesting its non-essential components to create a further duplicate to help her fulfill her assignment. She and “Juliet-II” successfully complete the assignment. Upon returning to the Homeworld, however, the two Juliets find “their” home overrun with hundreds more copies of themselves stepping out of Fog Ships. The real Juliet-178 presses a button to return missing memories to all the Juliets in the room in the form of positronic radiation as they finally remember that they are in fact the duplicates. Each of them was made to think herself the original, and to carry out a fraction of the actual punitive assignment given to the prime Juliet.
Now that all is clear, the Sisters of Juliet are left to wonder what numbering scheme to use to keep themselves straight — and also where all of them but the prime Juliet are going to sleep, given that there's only one, small bed in the house.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- The story mostly takes place in an unnamed Prime-adjacent universe. At the end, the Juliets make their way back to the Cupid Homeworld, briefly passing through the Void.
Other
- Dats are mentioned.
- Juliet believes her aim with a bow and arrow to be “barely average”.
- The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids has a Department of Cinematography, which creates films to be screened for a Cupid audience.
- As a Mark II, Juliet is among the oldest Clockwork Cherubs. As such, she is older than most members of the Department of Discipline.
- The Department of Quasireligious Obsequiousness enforces the taboo that clockmaking, and specifically the creation of new Clockwork Cherubs, is “a task only fit for the Creator and the Great Foundries she had left behind when she had gone into her exile”.
- A Fog Ship's essential components are the engine, dematerialisation circuit and steering wheel. It has isomorphic controls. Juliet is able to extract from hers “a jumble of positronic components and dented wheels” that she can repurpose into a makeshift Clockwork Cherub, including the brakes, without which the Ship shakes and rumbles as it takes off. She also finds a spare Gemstone Heart made of glass in the glove box.
- Members of the Department of Discipline are known as Discipline Cupids.
- There is a Cupid Intelligence Institute building.
- Juliet lives in a “flat”.
- Juliet reflects that she'll need to ask Peter-707 at the Department of Vehicles for a big favour to cover up her duplicates' theft of miscellaneous parts from their Fog Ships.
Continuity
- Dats are mentioned. They were introduced in PROSE: The Euclidean Plane.
- PROSE: Of Romeos and Juliets served as an epilogue to this story, elaborating on the Sisters of Juliet's fate.
- In PROSE: The Cupid Suggestion Box, Juliet tries to undo the Sisters' banishment in Of Romeos and Juliets, commenting: “Just yesterday, the Department of Cinematography screened a new picture, and I wasn’t able to see it – the Sisters certainly would have been useful to have around then”, a clear allusion to her initial motive for creating the first of the Sisters in The Labors of Juliet.
Behind the scenes
Read online
The story can be read on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website.
