The story follows two citizens of in the galactic dominion whose lives seredipidiously intersect on occasion, and how their actions impact each other, usually inadvertently. Citizen Natasha is technician assigned to repair a fault on one of the remote agriculture platforms. When she gets there, she finds it abandoned except for Citizen Bosley and a service droid named Murphy who is himself not exactly working optimally. It turns out that the platform had been decommissioned but no one ever bothered to tell anyone. In the decomissioning process, Bosley screws up in a the-whole-place-blows-up way and promptly blames Natasha. There's no proof of who did actually caused the problem, and in the subsequent he said/she said contest, Natasha ultimately takes the fall for everything.
The story then follows their two separate lives. Natasha is demoted to janitorial duties and Bosley continues to fail upwards to eventually become Supreme Minister of Defense. Both he and his countpart at a rival planet invent (i.e. they both buy the same plans from a shady salesman) a "solar snuffer" which is a doomsday style weapon that's supposed to literally extinguish a star. And because both Bosley and his counterpart are prime examples of the Dunning–Kruger effect, they both push the other to the brink of war because they think they're outsmarting each other. Fortunately, the plans they bought were actually for an automatic wheat thresher (with both of these guys so inpet, they had no clue what they were actually looking at despite Natasha explictly telling them what they actually built) so no stars are snuffed when the machines are turned on. But Bosley, in his priviledged childish rage, launched all of his conventional missiles at whatever they happened to be aimed at, which fortunately happened to be a satellite where that shady salesman was using. Bosley is then arrested and found guilty of a large number of crimes while Natasha opens her own repair shop with some of the friends she made along the way.
I'm leaving out quite a bit there. Deliberately. Because while the story is well told and flows smoothly, the real focus is the character moments. There are a number of extended sections with minimal dialogue and just one of the characters getting on with their day. We follow Natasha, for example, for six pages before she says her first words and that's just small talk with the pilots of the shuttle she's on. Despite that, we learn a decent amount about not only Natasha but the world she inhabits. There's a surpisingly lot that goes on just by showing someone lining up in a queue just to get a paper with her day's workload on it. Herring and Mcintyre (they're both credited as writers) know when to let the story just speak for itself and use dialogue in a very natural-sounding manner.
Herring's art has a definite charm to it as well. It's definitely cartoonish and the figures are simplified in many ways, but he makes effective use of his lines to convey a lot of nuance of emotion. Again, letting a raised eyebrow or ever-so-slight grin say what isn't being said out loud. The printed version has the colors muted somehwat compared to what's online, and I think it gives the art an additional warmth, which further adds to the charm. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not but the impact is a positive one, I think.
What I find most interesting is how, despite being a very sci-fi story, it has a lot of elements of today's society in the culture being shown. It's not precisely dystopian, but it doesn't exactly look like a society anyone today would willingly choose to live in. Watching Bosley fail his way into promotions while Natasha is penalized, essentially, for being a woman... well, the parallels with today aren't hard to miss. It was rather an interesting look at many of those elements and it really only diverges from what we see today at the very end when Bosley actually has to face the consequences of his ineptness.
Despite the narrative going to the very edge of intergalactic war, it's a surprisingly small story, focusing on the lives of a few people. Yes, there's a massive government and the inevitable corruption around that, and there's big business out to make money regardless of who it hurts or what laws might be broken, but it's ultimately how Natasha realizes that she wants something different than the vast majority of people and what she does to step out of the monotony of doing what you're "supposed" to do with your life.
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