Stouffville, Ontario Canada (647) 962-1997 gwstudios@rogers.com M-F 8:30am - 2:30pm & 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Month: March 2022

101 Dastmalchian’s.

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Polka dots, polka dots every where on this rainy drizzly Friday in March. And not a single dog in sight. Puddles of cats up to your ankles. This coat itches and the collar has hairs embedded in it. My vest made from donkey chest is a tad ill fitting through the middle, must be a little saddle worn. I should put another feather in my cap as I stir the macaroni pot with my shoes. Do you hold your drinks with your fingers in the liquid? I held my wine glass by the stem as though writing with a pencil. 101 ways to wash cars in your Jeans. Acid wash Vs. Pre ruined garbage bags for sale only seventy dollars a pop. But for you, my friend, I’ll do seventy five.

I would classify my interior design aesthetic as plastic caught in trees, and other helpful euphemisms. Like an oil slick on your morning coffee that shouts “Don’t stray too far from a toilet.” A juxtaposition of jumbled malaphors, and too much grey on grey on grey, with cappuccino browns and textured caramel ceilings, with black toilets, sinks and tubs, using gold filigree inlays. A real what’s what of whatever you can throw in the sink to stick. Popped nails and prematurely cracked dry wall speckled with toothpaste. Minty fresh! Damn near useful.

Morning comes too early, and the night disappears too quickly. Thank Fuck It’s Gone or (TGIF) to my friends out there in radio land. I have a voice for print, and the face of radio. But I have a mean limp when I walk this way. Bawk bawk ba-gawk!

Let me tell you what kind of person I am.

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I’m the kind of person who hates having an appointment in the middle of my day, because I can feel it looming over me. So I don’t like to start anything prior to the appointment in case I forget about it, or turn up late. So in most instances I sit and wait, minute by minute until the appointment arrives. I hate that. So today I forced myself to run some errands, which took 45 minutes, possibly 50 to complete, that on any other day, I would have had to rush to complete after my appointment was done. But now those three things are done, and I have a full hour left to sit and wait. The waiting always makes things worse. I wasn’t nervous about it all week, or last night, or this morning when I woke up, but now it’s filling me with anxiety and bubble guts. Argh! Hate that. Oh well c’est la vie.

So day 100! Woohoo! Milestone for sure. Did you catch yesterday’s back to back chapter entries for the interconnected series Ghost of the Dirty Starling? Fun stuff. Those Bison drones sound gnarly, and a tad volatile. Hmmm… foreshadowing perhaps? Or just another side trip I can make later on if need be? Good to give yourself off ramps occasionally, I believe. I was going to do something funny with Norman and Gerty, but changed my mind. I like the self serving killer for hire in a tutu. I also liked the fact she knew enough about murder to do her gloating afterwards too. None of this providing your captive with extra precious seconds or minutes to formulate a plan or escape out of sheer luck. No sir! Gun’em and then gloat. Like a good little hitman – hired gun, contract killer etc etc..

I might be fortunate enough to pick up some bakery bagel display unit design work today or in the near future. Which is great. I kept in touch, once every six months since Jan 2020, with all of the folks I freelance for, and recently those connections have become active again, as people feel as though the pandemic is coming to an end. I have thoughts on that, but I am also a huge fan of the work coming in as well. Work in, and invoices out, this is good for business.

Had my oldest child help me with some cleaning in the garage. I had to tear down some tables and stands I had for equipment. I have a larger table saw now, so I need to recover some space by placing my jointer and my planer together on a low lying wheeled cart, so it can be tucked under the rails of my hybrid saw. I can’t have that space go to waste anymore. I have completed projects eating up space, which I need people to collect, or accept delivery of. It’s all bought and paid for, and I knew I would have to hold on to it all, but now it’s getting on a bit, four plus months later, and I would like to not have to maneuver around it any more. It’s not a huge deal, but it aggravates me. I’m not working with 40,000 square feet here people. Think, tall single car garage stuffed to the gills with house hold stuff, Christmas  lights, bikes and wood working tools. Not a pretty sight to behold.

If I had the money, and paid work, I would use a dedicated dust collection system, and air cleaner, rather than my ShopVac. But it’s nice and compact, and I can store it under tables and shelves with ease. But the dust means you have to work in a mask at all times. Not a real problem,  since I use a fair bit of Walnut, and you want a mask for that stuff anyway. I have my eye on a hickory slab waterfall coffee table I want to make later this Spring/Summer/Fall. Could be a real looker if I take my time with it. I have the angle iron I need for a rigid router sled to flatten the slabs. I am looking forward to it a lot! I will also venture to build adjustable leveling saw horses to hold said router sled. So those will be fun to build too.

“Come on shit birds, let’s take it from the top… again”

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Roars the captain of the Jolene Roger into her microphone. Captain Morgan is sweating profusely under the strain of her training regimen. Teaching sixty newly haptic integrated soldiers to use her patented Bison drones is taking more time, effort and patience than she is willing to fork over. “For fuck sake people, formations, remember the formations. If you collide those fusion reactor cores will lose their magnetic seal and you’ll all go up in a cascading failure. We’ve been over this every day for seven weeks now. Stop trying to drive it, and become it. The Bison drone should feel like an extension of yourself, it’s not a fucking demolition derby car.” She shrieks, her earphones ringing with feedback from the over taxed mic.

The sixty member group are not living up to her dreams and there is significant resistance to the haptic systems link to the soldiers neural networks. Namely, they don’t use nanotech to a high enough degree for her liking. Her original plans only required an eight percent uptake in nanotech to fill in the gaps between stimulus and reaction time, but she may have been too conservative. She is resisting upping the limit as her spies on board the Righteous Chord and The Dirty Starling are sharing some horrific news regarding the Fire Teams and Tanker crews. So they’ll have to get better on their own, as she can’t risk losing her team to some unknown nano sickness, and thus risk losing her favoured spot with Admiral Garneau.

At the back of the war room commanding officer Gonzalez is over seeing the technological side of things. Keeping an eye on the engine spec’s, and watching that no one crosses over into another’s engine ploom, and melts themselves in six thousand degree Celsius plasma jetting out of the rear rocket booster packets located at the aft of each drone. Her thick black hair now streaked through with grey, and her once plump face now sallow and ashen. Except for the deep purple black puffy bags under her eyes. She is as mystified by the lack of progress as her captain is. All sixty souls scored so well in the subconscious training program. Reaching the required ninety percent efficacy with the gear to be able to go live with the actual physical drone. Every single person has seen at least a twenty percent drop in proficiency with the Bison drones. As a massive glob of sweat clings to her eye ball, she toggles the direct comm’s to captain Morgan.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere. We have to think about putting them back inside the tanks again. We’re missing something important. Some crucial step that the tank offers, and reality lacks.” Croaks Gonzalez with a grimace  knowing her captain is not going to take her repeated suggestions with the tone they are meant. “Say that again and I will float you out of this cargo hold, along with the old man you’re so sweet on. Get me?” Captain Morgan hisses through her headset. “Yes ma’am.” Chirps Gonzalez meekly. “We don’t have enough tanks for all sixty drone pilots as it is. We don’t have the time, nor the resources to build more anyway. We’ll be at the rendezvous point in two weeks time. This HAS to work as intended. A waking, remotely operating fighting force that doesn’t rely too heavily on nanotech.” Captain Morgan growls through gritted teeth.

Out along the port side of the ship the teams of Bison drones are running their attack patterns, and tossing around asteroid chunks like a giant game of robot hot potato. Every so often two or more Bison drones get too close together and the proximity klaxons blare inside the war room, and the pilots all grimace and swear and lose track of their formations, and then paint jobs get singed, and sensor arrays get ruined as drive plooms turn everything to slag.

The saving grace of captain Morgan’s patented design are all of the plug and play off the shelf pieces that can be pulled off and replaced in mere minutes and not days. The onboard armory dry dock for the Bison drones looks like a massive barn full of cattle head stocks.

With the fifth near miss that could detonate the whole fleet of Bison drones captain Morgan calls in to CO Gonzalez and has her direct them in to the maintenance docks. A lengthy debrief is slated for an hour after the last of the drones has docked, and the pilots logged out of their remote command station. With a weary smile CO Gonzalez walks over to the pilots to chat with them. Ushering them into the showers and then following them to the cafeteria for a hot meal. The conversation is light, and the morale is low among the pilots. In the middle of her meal a soft ping emanates from her wrist communicator. A private message addressed to captain Morgan from someone named Gertrude from the Sanitation Department. As the message notification flashes with a tiny red flag, Gonzalez clicks on the message to read it. The captain has just forgotten to turn off her message forwarding while instructing the Bison drone pilots. Not uncommon for Gonzalez to read and respond to high priority messages for the captain. Being next in line, there isn’t much that she isn’t privy too. A moment later the message prompt turns green and Gonzalez can read the message in full, and toggle through the attachments. The message itself was short, it just stated that the priority trash was taken care of. There were six attachments, each one an identical image of a wrist communicator. No, not quite identical, the registration numbers, singular to each unit was different. “What the fuck is this?” Gonzalez whispers to herself. A moment later a response from the captain comes through, along with a transaction id number. “Is this what I think it is?” Gonzalez says with a sinking queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Part Thirty Five: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Standing alone in the bowels of the sanitation department

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Gertrude is talking away animatedly to a closed bay door to the Jolene Roger’s tertiary recycler as a soft puff of acrid smoke drifts by up towards the whirling air scrubbers. The sub basement to the vessel is where only a select few ever bother to tread. Although the department is among the cleanest aboard, the distaste people have towards waste water treatment and the recycling of all other materials on board makes the brown jumpsuit wearers somewhat of a pariah among the crew. Once Gertrude took off her tutu, and started to prowl the ship with her trash cart she might as well have been invisible, with all of the non-attention she could attract. Hence her being rather chipper about outsmarting the three would be attackers from the ship’s largest bar and dance club. Feeling rather smug about how well her drunk girl passed out on the floor of the bar by the toilets on the last night in port had worked. She managed to engage her target in one swift motion to knock him out, and roll on top of him to provide them both cover. The moaning and gyrating had been a last second decision that really paid off, a stroke of genius really, Gertrude would have to remember that if she makes it back from UB313 alive.

Looking at the stainless steel doors polished to a high sheen, Gertrude is leaning now against the door running her fingers lazily up and down the frame while chatting amicably. “You should have seen me Norman, it was straight out of a Hollywood block buster. I see the three guys watching you, so I set my trap, right? Yeah – I wait for my moment and then pounce! Bam. Dude, you should have seen your head go. Crunch – right into the space between the floor and the bottom of the pillar. I didn’t mean to tug you down so hard. But I had to subdue you for it to work. My plan that is. Ha. If your drunk ass had of done anything except lie there under me those goons would have discovered my ruse for sure! My ruse? My scheme? My master plan. No wait, scratch that, none of this is cool, let me start over again…” hops Gertrude from the door at the tell tale sound of approaching footsteps on the open grate flooring. “Gerty! You down here again? – you and your dramatic monologues eh? Is there a show coming up that I don’t know about Gerty? I do love your stage plays. A Street Car Named Deserea was my favourite!” The older man says. “Desire.” Gertrude responds. “I’m sorry?” Repeats the older gentleman in his own immaculate brown jumpsuit. “The street car is Desire, not Deserea.” She smirks at the older man. “Oh yeah. Ha! What a goof I am. Is there a show Gerty ?” He half begs half pleads with a huge smile on his face. Gertrude loves to see her fans, especially when it’s one of her bosses boss. “I’m just practicing right now, but you’ll be the first to know when we reengage with entertainment again Jules.” She smiles sweetly at him through her giant brown eyes, her white toothy grin shining brilliantly. “That’s the ticket.” He snaps his fingers, and points at Gertrude. “Oh – right. The reason I came down here. There seems to be a puddle of medical waste in the hall. I guess the med tech’s aren’t double bagging their stuff again. If you can clear that up and just dump it straight into the recycler, you can take the rest of your shift off to work your monologue. I liked ruse, it felt authentic, and ‘of the moment’ as you like to say.” Quips Jules over his shoulder as he walks back out of the way from the recycler input doors. “Not a problem Jules!” She shouts in a sing song fashion.

Taking a beat to make sure the foot steps are receding into the background Gertrude takes a good long look at the polished doors. After a pause she says. “Ha. Norman, you almost had me there! Sneaking blood onto the floors, nice try.” Walking to her cart she grabs a mop and a thick yellow bag and some absorbent pads. Wiping up the bulk of the puddle, placing the soiled pads in the bag, and then mopping up the glistening pink spot on the floors she whispers to herself. “Almost got me Norman. Almost.”

Taking the cart and the mushy plastic bag back to where she was recounting her story to Norman she opens up the bay doors again. The interior is totally empty. Reaching half way in she plops the yellow bag of blood and soiled pads into the center of the chamber. Leaning out and closing the safety doors she pushes the green button beside the floor station terminal and with a whisper soft whir the unit drops its load into the incinerator. A minute puff of acrid black smoke drifts by Gertrude’s face as it hangs lazily in the air, like a grey haze. Only to be pulled softly towards the softly whirling air scrubbers above.

Gertrude sighs to herself and says. “That’s why I do my monologues after the fact Norman. Those three goons were lazy thugs, they were tactless. I have style and grace. Captain Morgan will pay me handsomely for disposing of you after asking too many questions.” Smiling daintily to herself Gertrude takes her cart back to her allocated storage space, and wanders off into the upper decks of the Jolene Roger. The engines have kicked on, and she can feel the added weight pulling on her through the soles of her feet from the thrust of the boosters.

Part Thirty Four: Ghost of the Dirty Starling

99 Days : The Story of the Day Before the Day Of The BIG DAY.

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Also known as Thursday March 24th, when I will hit the 100th day of writing every single day without fail. Some entries were short, some sweet and most are nonsense. But the trick of it is, I did it regardless. On the brighter side during those one hundred days I have created thirty two new chapters to my short story series. Filling in some gaps while propelling the story forward.

I think I was rather sad when I finished book one, if you can believe it. Happy I had achieved nearly 60,000 words of coherent melodrama, struck something from my bucket list, but felt also like I had lost something too. Took me just about nine months later to get out of my funk and commit to writing anything again.

Today is an inclement weather day, due to freezing rain, so the whole family is home along with me today.

I don’t have any big plans for tomorrow. In topic or otherwise. My milestones seem to just pass by lately. Talk of new cars or family vehicle, needing to buy the eldest child a new and larger bicycle, talking about the build process for the screen door? Who knows. I sure don’t.

“Does anyone else think it’s weird that…

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Both Gurinder and Bennet Jr got hurt in exactly the right ways to be placed directly into the captain’s new drone program immediately after getting seriously injured?” Drawls the very drunk interim supply clerk and dock worker Norman Chan a little too loudly. His friends at the hip high bar table all look at Norm sideways over their drinks. “Not this again!” The chorus goes up from the group around Norm. “Come on man, we leave port tomorrow afternoon, let’s just get drunk, fuck and forget about shit for a few hours, man! Just let it go. People are starting to stare.” Slurs a particularly drunk Bennet Sr. His hair a messy tussle of greasy grey. “He’s my son – right? Right. So, so… I’m just glad they had the spinal column haptics that gives him full mobility again ok. That container mishap crushed a good portion of his back. He could, he, he could have died man. Be happy he isn’t dead!” Shouts Bennet Sr over the din of the music blaring in the crowded bar. “I know, I know!” Norm waves his hands, palms out. “It just seems suspicious is all I’m saying.” Norm takes another long pull from his mixed drink. Bennet Sr leans over to rest on his shoulder and says. “Oh hey, that smells good, what is that Norman?” He slurs cheerily, his momentary lapse of melancholy driven away by drink. “Sex on the beach.” Norm says. “What!?!” Shouts back Bennet Sr. “I said Sex on The Beach!” Norman bellows, just as the music goes quiet waiting for the beat to drop. A huge portion of the crowd turns to look at the now flushed and thoroughly embarrassed Norman. The beat comes crashing back in and the crowd cheers! “YEAH!” Norman turns away from his group of friends and winds his way through the packed dance floor of the bar, away from the bar top he was using to steady himself between drinks. Working his way back towards the men’s room at the farthest reaches of the narrow room. The long interior wall is one long bar with mirrors behind it making you feel like the space was wider than it was, in the middle were lengths of bar top between pillars and a few free standing tables, mostly faux wood finishes dominated the bar. Then a walk way, and several day bed like couches under the floor to ceiling cement glass windows that looked out into space. But now caught the glinting sight of the Mars Six Sub-Orbital Aerial Base where the Jolene Roger was docked for Resupply before shipping out to Pluto for an offensive against the Insurgency, and their black ops base stationed at UB313. Passing by the hot and sweaty crowd Norman fails to notice as a few heads turn to follow him as he walks through the crowd. The three men in a triangle formation watch as Norman walks between them and on to the toilets at the back of the room. The smallest of the three watchers types quickly on his wrist communicator without looking down at it. He is smiling and being social with a few women at his slab of the bar. Within moments the three gentleman get a return notification, and slowly they peel away from their gatherings and walk nonchalantly to the men’s room.

Norman passes the last part of the bar and reaches up to grasp the pillar just out away from the wall before nearly falling over a drunk woman legs. How he missed the bright pink tutu is anybody’s guess. Leaning down, gingerly he asks if the young woman needs any help regaining her feet. Instead she pulls him head first by his collar into the space where the pillar meets the floor and he blacks out. Crawling onto Norman’s body she begins to writhe around and shriek incoherently. The gathered crowd turns their backs in an attempt to ignore the weird behavior. With the crew on edge with war looming nobody is willing to get in the middle of anyone’s business tonight. A brief moment later and three men bolt into the bathroom locking the doors behind them. Their shouts, and the sounds of gun shots are muffled by the music and the heavy doors. From the floor the woman rolls of Norman, and fireman carries him out of the club. No one gives them a second look.

Several paces outside the bar the woman sets Norman’s unconscious body against the wall to slump into a crumple of limbs. She removes her dark wig to reveal her bright green, close cropped hair. Ditching her ruffled tutu, and knee high boots and stockings to unfurl her brown jumpsuit that was tied off at the waist and appear like an on duty custodial staff member. She pulls a cleaning cart out of a hidden compartment in the hallway wall and pushes Norman’s body into the over-sized garbage bin. She proceeds to take him down into the sanitation decks well below.

Part Thirty Three : Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Auditory hallucinations and why I can guess when my phone will ping with a notification.

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Also included are phantom buzzing from my leg pocket, feeling as though I have wet knee caps, and a physical tick on the soles of my heels that fluctuate randomly between themselves – repeatedly. Though I can miss a phone call quite easily, I do always have a sense regarding notifications and emails, for one reason or another. Strange. Very strange sensation.

So how if your Tuesday going? We have officially broken into Spring, so either heavy rains, sub zero temperatures or snow are on the horizon for us to enjoy. Rain can wait until April, but I’d rather not do the whole shovel, live with, and then the slushy melting sequence of snow either. We can handle bursts of cool to cold wind, but let’s keep the precipitation to a minimum for right now ok? Ok!

That time shift huh? Ugh. Hate it. But I will say this, having a later sunset is rather pleasant. Makes the kids not want to go to bed, but after nine days off with March Break, they could do with having a schedule, and heavy physical activity running around with their friends. The spring break really let us ignore the time change for the better part of a week, but it came calling in full effect on Monday, believe you me. It didn’t seem to bother the kids much though, which is a nice touch.

Yesterday flew by! Maybe that was just my experience of the first monday back after the break, but holy cow! It zoomed by.

First day back after the break…

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And I’m seeing an awful lot of maskless people and children. This is so not going to be a good couple of weeks. Unless a miracle happens some classes are definitely going to shut down, and people are going to get violently ill. But what do I know, I’m just a dude who has watched things open, and cases spike, and things all clamor to shut down, every sixteen weeks for the last two years or so. Same as you. An announcer at a fireworks event in town was talking about how glad he was that the pandemic is over! – over? Over, he says confidently. Oh buddy, this isn’t over, it’s ramping up to hit an all time high.

To everyone else who wore a mask when out and about today, a big thank you goes out to you.

Should potentially be a quieter week on the work front. I have two of the three large reports out the door. The last, and probably the largest or more cumbersome will come in next month, most likely. So now I can focus on the house for a change. Get to that Spring cleaning, tidying up, and possibly purge broken toys, and collected junk from the winter. I’m going to wait another few weeks before I wash, mend and store away all of our winter gear. This is southern Ontario, and could get a snow storm in mid April from out of the blue. But I love it when we get to open window weather! Birds are more active around here again too.

Maybe I’ll skip the infrastructure stuff for my garage and get right back on the screen door for the back of the house. I found some weather striping too, so I don’t have to be crazily precise about my first ever door build. Well, not exactly. I have put doors and lids on custom boxes, but never a full sized door to go on a house. Built from scratch. Have hung a few doors, repaired one or two aswell. But this is new, and kind of intimidating, if I’m being totally honest. Worst comes to worst I’ll just paint it white, if the Ash doesn’t look as nice as I have hoped once situated on the house itself.

The grass needs some work this year. I don’t see myself as the ultimate green lawn kind of guy. The kids burn patches down to the mud where they play in the same spots constantly, so I’m not willing to spend a lot of money to just have that happen to an expensive green lawn. I like that they play outside a bunch, so why introduce some aggravation to it on my end. But we have the supplies on hand to properly wash out vehicles now, and exterior windows/brick/drive way too. Should keep the kids busy on a Saturday or Sunday once the weather turns for good.

We are back to Monday, how is everyone feeling today? Are you all back onsite for work? Seems our politicians should have to be, and maskless too, if that’s what they are going to do to our public school kids. But I digress.

Can I just say, I’ve only just realized I surpassed the 40,000 word mark for new short story / creative writing material this year! (2022). That puts me over the 100,000 word milestone I was looking towards! Passed it without even realizing it too. Isn’t it amazing how some of the hardest goals we put up, can be surpassed with almost no fanfare whatsoever. Some wins feel a little hollow huh? No matter, on-wards until the story is done!

Brain my fried – yesterday,

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By writing two new installments of my interconnected series, and it gave me panicked and jumbled dreams, so going to tread lightly today. To quote Homer Simpson “I hope I didn’t brain my damage.” Ha. Sure felt like it late last night, but that could have been residual funnel cake coursing through my veins after a late evening out with the kids watching fireworks in the drizzling rain and fog.

Take it easy on this lazy Sunday-Funday.

“I have some… interesting news.”

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Commanding Officer Monica Gonzalez says to her captain. The captain, a stern looking woman of about fifty years of age. Her hair a closely cropped buzz cut on one side of her part, and jaw length grey bob on the other. “Do tell.” Yawns the captain from her chair in the officers lounge. “The admiral responded, well, no. Not responded. He sent us a message that came in thirty hours after we sent out ours.” Quips the CO. “Like two ships passing in the night.” Barks the captain with a slight hiccup. Her brandy sloshing around in her snifter, the ice cubes clinking with the motion. “Yes, just so. He needs us to activate the Jackal Protocol. I assume you know what that means? I looked in the hand book, and through our active duty archives but came up with nothing.” Shrugs Gonzalez. With a blank stare the captain has gone motionless, and the pink flush of the alcohol slowly gives way to an ashen green grey colour. “Did he now.” A long pregnant pause follows, as the chatter of the lounge falls in to fill the silence between them at their private table. After a few deep breaths the captain toggles her wrist communicator down to medical and cycles through some tabs and alternate screens that Gonzalez had never seen before. “Meet me in the aft cargo hold at 0:200 hours, and bring coffee, and protein bars, lots of it too.” Standing up abruptly the captain nearly runs for the door to her private office aboard the bridge. “But why ma’am” Gonzalez asks stunned. “The admiral has just lost confidence in the integrated Fire Teams and his Nanotech boosted walking Tankers. We need to get my pet project off the ground and fully operational – now!” The shout from the usually stone cold captain brings the rest of the officers in the lounge up short. Eyes wander between the captain and the CO, blank looks on their faces during the seemingly heated exchange. With a flurry the captain exits the room, and the CO heads down to the commissary to gather the required food stuffs.

“Jes-us fuck-ing Key-rist! What happened to you out there today Gurinder?” Exclaims a bed ridden man in the med bay. Gurinder, a solidly built man of about forty says “I was de-gloved, if you can fucking believe it. Don’t look that up by the way.” He snarls. “How did that happen?” The bed ridden man says. “I’m always so careful, so fucking careful. The CO even told us repeatedly how dangerous resupply can be here at Mars Six Sub-Orbital Aerial Base, and I still got frostbite during the transfer of the LOX, that I went directly to the baths afterwards in shock – apparently, to soak the bone chilling cold out of me. I got turned around in the process and tried to thaw my hands in a plasma stream, and scalded them instead. Sloughed the skin off in one bubbling mass of wet tissue. The frostbite had killed the nerves so I didn’t notice until I dropped both of my hands into the pool.” Gurinder drawls looking down at his feet in the infirmary. “Bright side is, the doctors said I could try those swanky new haptic gloves. You know the ones we all had to try on before shipping out?” Says Gurinder. “Yeah – yeah, the ones that were always too fucking tight.” Offers the bed ridden man. “Yeah, second skin, what they called it. Turns out once you lose your first skin they fit like a charm. But putting them on.” Gurinder pauses here, for a lengthy bit of awed silence. “Not uh, not fun. Leave it at that. But check it out, no seams. The Nanotech integration filled in the gaps and I can touch and feel again. Also, I might add, no nerve pain.” He grins dopishly. “Noice!” Whoops the man from his bed. “So what do they do?” Replies the man from his bed. “I’m actually en route to the testing facility in the aft of the ship. I knew the Jolene Roger had something up her skirt for us in this fight!” Bellows Gurinder. “Keep it down out there!” Shouted an orderly. “We’ve got an influx of wounded people in here.” The orderly shrieks again. “It’s the worst one day record for onsite injuries ever!” Shouted the orderly to the whole room. “What the fuck is going on here today?” A med tech barks in retort.

“You’re not going to like this Gonzalez, but drastic times calls for drastic measures. I need these haptic nerve drones manned, and I couldn’t wait for specimens, so I took some extraordinary steps.” The captain crooned in a melodic whisper. “A couple of manufactured accidents here and there, one or two key personnel have their equipment tampered with, and a few happy coincidences due to the planned misfortune of others.” The captain chuckles warmly. “Chin up. The admiral needs results, The Company needs results, and my Bison drones are going to lead the way. Don’t worry, no one suspects you of anything, and your name isn’t even associated with my patented Bison drones. Look, here come the first batch of pilots now.” Pointing down along the enormous cargo hold to the group of men and women filtering into the huge space as a clump. All in all about fifteen people, some with dark metallic hands, and others with long black snakes running the length of their spines. After a few minutes the crowd had walked the full length of the room to stand infront of the captain and CO Gonzalez. Standing in a semi circle near a grouping of med pod suspension tanks. The captain clears her throat and steps away from CO Gonzalez and addresses the room. “Ladies and Gentlemen welcome. You are looking at your new home for the foreseeable future. Over the next ten days you will be fully immersed in running your new Bison drones to get up to fighting speed. So, without further ado, find a suitable tank. Haptic gloves in the standing tanks, and spinal columns into the ones laying down please. No need to talk. You’ll understand soon enough. The subconscious training will teach you everything you need to know, and once you all pass the training, you’ll be able to watch your Bison drones from the safety of our newest war room. Quick – quick. Hop in. Time is wasting people.” The captain’s smile fades quickly as the gathered group doesn’t move. “Get in the fucking tanks before I float you all out of the cargo airlock.” She barks. There is a series of squeaks and scrapes as the gathered wounded climb half heartedly into their icy cold suspension tanks. The clunks of the safety seals locking into place echoes in the cavernous room.

Walking back to her spot near the center of the tanks, the captain hits a series of buttons and watches the group begin the first moments of their ten days of subconscious training. CO Gonzales stands at attention beside the captain, her mind racing, her stomach doing flips.

Part Thirty Two: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.