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Tag: intrepid individuals

“What do you remember about the accident out there, anything you can give us…

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Could help us piece it all together more coherently.” Says the mousey looking woman from the internal affairs office. If she didn’t have such a short bob of a hair cut, and refrained from looking so sincere or earnest you’d think she was a real hard nosed bitch. But such as it was, she came across as mild and genuinely compassionate. Both traits, I would imagine, she’d need to work extra hard at hiding if she ever wanted to make a fully fledged investigator or a detective, or be more than some hard nosed bastards go’fer. “Not much really. I don’t even remember going in to work that day. I’m still foggy on how long ago this all went down.” Sitting in the white plastic chair, chained to a soft cream coloured formica table with a reinforced plate steel under structure, I’m over come by the itching of my wounds. “Can I get a… you know a hand, my face itches and I don’t have arms anymore. Is it really neccessary to restrain me, bodily. I can’t even walk unassisted yet.” The blast at the dock yards had done a real number to The Company. Not to mention, stolen my arms, killed a very promising career in robotics, and left me with ruptured tendons in both my legs. Those would heal, but my fine motor skills in welding robotic arms in zero g had all but evaporated in one loud, concussive boom. “Am I a suspect. I mean jesus, that blast took both of my fucking arms man. That’s my livelihood. Seven years at the university, four more years as an apprentice, and then having to get my level three certs before doing anything even remotely close to the cusp of cutting edge. No, man. No, fuck. That. Bullshit. I ain’t no suspect, I was fucking robbed. Someone took my life from me, took everything in one fell swoop. So you cut the shit. Cut these restraints off me, and tell me how long I’ve been in this hospital. I know I’m still aboard the station, as everything here is fucking blue!” God damn am I agitated. This line of questioning has been going on for what feels like twelve hours now. Maybe more than that. I don’t know. My blue room, with blue lights and blue sheets, and blue curtains has no windows or media displays. The blue hallway I get frog marched down, on ruptured tendons no less, has no visible details telling me the date, nor time of day, or even what shift we’re in. “Ok, mr. Gendry, you’re right. We don’t need to put you in leg chains, that’s me being a bit over zealous. This is my first real case as a lead investigator.” There she goes, showing contrition, helping me out. I could learn to like this woman, if she weren’t the first face I saw after losing my limbs and any future I had in robotics fabrication. “According to our records the blast happened eleven days ago, around oh three hundred hours. You were on the last shift, or first shift of the day. Not sure how you would describe that. Why don’t you tell us again what you do, erm… did. If not that day, just on the regular. What your job was, is…” the formica table is empty, save for a few sheets of paper and a manilla folder with my work history and medical reports printed inside. Leaning back in my chair, oddly off balance with no arms to cross over my chest, I start into my tale. “Listen, I’m kind of an animated talker. I’m going to need arms, robotics, prosthetics, or regenerative. Whatever they’ve got me insured for that I can try to recapture some of the old glory of my work/life balance. Just as an aside. You know. Robotic appendages are my passion. Wrote a thesis on them, did a practical application on them too. Got great Mark’s. Top of my class. Even got a recommendation from the dean of the university, old Big D “the minotaur” Bradley.” I am positively beaming, I’m so damn smug.

“So as a typical dock worker, I bunk down in standard crew quarters, you know the ones out on the torus, like less than five hundred meters from where I work sixteen hours a day. The glory of rotating continental shifts. Pays well though, eh? Yeah, buddy. Big bucks for those with a class three cert. Not many folks round here get that far along. Especially in robotics, and those outboard drill rig appendages.” I can feel the juices flowing, getting into my story now. Who boy! “Yeah, so lately I was tasked with building a real robust system that can switch seamlessly between ice hauling, towing and full on drilling. Those three elements all have very different tolerances and needs for stress loads, torque, and the ability to swap in/out bits on the fly. A real pig of a job. Designing one is difficult enough, but three, in tandem. Christ! The calculations on the timing alone was enough to write a years worth of papers on. Chip load, bit speeds, stressors out the ying yang. Anyway, I got it designed on paper and then had to fabricate a proof of concept on an old mark twelve The Company had lying around, something called The Jolene Roger.” A sudden jolt, as the investigator sits up straight, comes to life. “Wait, you built a test rig on a mark twelve that had just be laying around? Those were only put in use around Pluto. How is it one ended up here?” Writing furiously on her note pad, looking to the folder to see if she’d over looked this interesting detail. “Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t ask where the resources come from, I just build what they ask me too. May I?” Looking up from her notes, the investigator motions for me to continue. “As I was saying, I had to fabricate my proof of concept. So I spent a huge number of hours gathering plate steel, titanium blocks and pistons and shielded hydraulics components and got about eighty hours in before, Boom! Do you know if the rig survived the blast? Some of my welds were exquisite. Like liquid pearl on glass.” A tap on the window of the door brings our discussion to a sudden halt. From behind the door, I can see an older gentleman from the investigative team motion for the woman to step out into the hallway. Quickly, and quietly I watch her slip out of the room. My back is to the wall, and I’m sat facing the door with just the formica table and an empty chair in front of me. The older man is talking into her ear directly, she nods almost imperceptibly. They both look back through the window of the door at me. A flurry of activity ensues as the investigators leave, and a junior officer comes in to take me back to my hospital room. I never even learned her name. No idea what caused them to run off after all those hours of examination and questioning. Must have bigger fish to fry.

“Sorry for the wait Mr. Gendry, or Jack, is it? We had to wait for your official discharge to come through from both the police force and The Company investigators before we could release your new arms to you. They’ve been especially formulated to you based on your biometrics, and the last psych evaluation you had only a couple months ago. We realize the trauma might have pushed you outside your baseline, but we think you’ll find that you can get back to work with only a minor period of adjustment. Seems that recco’ you had from the dean ofvthe university meant you got pushed to the top of the pile for these experimental limbs.” The technician takes me through a laundry list of specifications regarding my new bionic arms, and how to best care for them. Three hours later and I’m heading down the lift to my crew quarters. Life is finally back on track for Jack!

Waiting patiently out on the gangway in the dry docks are a group of unruly out of system technicians. Desperate to harvest the secrets contained in the black boxes buried deep inside the mark twelve capsule The Jolene Roger. The explosive mining charges have been set all over the mobile gantries, the separatists are waiting for the right time to pounce. In the shadows of the torus, an insurgency is building.

 

PART VII

“Yo, Daryl, you’ve been summoned.”

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Says the giant of a Martian born man who works on smaller single pilot vessels in our dry dock section of the torus. “Don’t gimme that look man, they sent word down from above, the HR director herself wants a meet and greet with the illustrious Daryl “the minotaur” Bradley. She asked for you, by name, so go upstairs, and see what the fuck is going on.” The Martian is a seven foot tall Hulk of a man, by the name of Barry Ludens, curt but a great shop foreman with a dry wit. A joke like this wouldn’t even occur to him. People in the lounge wince when they hear Daryl’s nickname said aloud, and to his face. People learn early on not to mention the moded red mechanics coveralls he wears with the ultra wide neck. Daryl is nestled into a crash couch winding down after a couple of shifts off, coping with the tragic death of his and his brother’s last great apprentice Andy. His brother Doug is seated beside him, dinner plate in his lap, mouth full of diced steak. “Dougie, we been here, what… like twenty seven years now right? You ever, even once heard about a meet and greet with one of the fucking board of directors?” He is slowly climbing out of the industrial crash couch, groaning under the strain of his considerable bulk, and the pressure on his not so young knees. Even in low gravity, age, and stress catch up with the best of us. “No D, I ain’t never heard of that before. You think we missed something on The Last Great Venture and some one else, or a whole crew died due to negligence? Maybe I should come too, you know, moral support or show our work order documentation. We certified that shit three times over, I know it!” Doug looks agitated, word from upstairs never comes down here to our cramped crew quarters without passing through ten miles of interconnected HR flunkies asses and mouths. A human centipede of middle management tweaks to sop directives. Daryl standing half in, half out of the door to the crew lounge, staring intently at the martian foreman Barry. “How the fuck do I even get up there to see the big wig any how?” A look of sincere consternation upon his cracked and worn face. The last forty hours of mourning Andy’s passing has hit the whole sector hard, and our crew quarters the hardest. The room is littered with empty beer bulbs and smells like salty tears and sweat. “Not a problem D, if you head over to HR cubicle seven beside the bay doors, there will be a flunkie there to take you up. Let us know what it looks like from up there in their ivory tower eh?”. And with that last rejoinder, both men head out the door, down the gang plank and off to their separate duties.

Pling, pling chimes the door to the board room. With a soft woosh the double doors open, and I step passed the threshold and into an immaculately clean office space, full of crystal, real leather and an actual wooden table. Standing in front of the gigantic bay windows is the HR director, last name Taylor. That’s as much as they were willing to tell me on my trip up here. Over her shoulders the large expanse of our particular dry dock operation can be seen. From this vantage point, we look like ants in a tilt shifted photograph, the scale of the dock yards, the full enclosure, and all of those people busy at work is dizzying. Even our massive moving gantries where we park our mobile tool benches and chests look like children’s toys from up here. HR director Taylor is fitted out in a tasteful burgundy pant suit. It isn’t baggy, but nor is it too tightly fitted. Turning away from the view, she finally registers my presence. “Daryl Bradley, so glad you could make it. I’m so glad you could find the time to come and see me. I know you’ve recently been struct by tragedy.” Motioning towards the board room table and a couple of waiting seats, equipped with a view screen set to stand by and some bulbs of either pristine un recycled water or the purest vodka I’ve ever seen. “I didn’t realize I had the option to decline, Ms. Taylor.” Taking my seat opposite her, I marvel at how form fitting yet comfortable the chair is. Damn, this shit makes you want to fall asleep in it. However do these people stay awake during meetings. “Ah, yes… sorry. I do realize this is rather…undocumented. To say the least. Certainly. Listen, you are an intelligent man, so I’ll cut the shit. We here at The Company are terribly sad that your latest apprentice was murdered. You know, I oversee all three hundred of the dry docks on this station, and by far. By. Far. You have the best record on safety, and on people making their certs, and on satisfaction with your teams repairs. That mark eight was never supposed to be anywhere near here. But the crew asked for you by name. Specifically. Do you know how rare it is that a flight crew out of Neptune knew who you were, or even bothered to bypass the appropriate channels to get that experimental craft in to your work shop, under your watchful eye. The logistics and insider knowledge is astounding! no, no. Don’t worry I’m not accusing you of subterfuge. I’m paying you a compliment, that in the eighteen years I’ve been here, I have never once encountered. Now I know you’re a god damn fantastic mechanic, and you stay on deadlines, and keep your budget within reasonable margins. The best people working anywhere on this vessel came out from under your tutelage.” Ms. Taylor is now up on her feet, gesticulating wildly, as she walks the length of the room. All I can do is sit quietly, astounded by what I’m hearing. Though I sense a terrible and foreboding but, coming. “Daryl, do you mind if I call you that? Daryl, I have zero technical skills here. I understand very little of what you lot do here. I’m a people person. I get you the people and resources you need, then I get the fuck out of the way. You know, one of my fondest memories here was during the boom period of sixty three. I spend forty hours helping your crews find some compound w, and a much needed tube of preparation h. Now, I never did find those items, but you guys made me feel like I was a part of the team. Hell, the reason I got promoted so quickly onto the board of directors was because the two other junior directors I worked with got maimed or killed during their rotations on crews in other sections of the torus.” She has a wistful look upon her face at the fleeting memories. “We’ve got a serious problem here Daryl. That jag off that killed your brother’s apprentice, was moon lighting as a moon separatist. If word gets out, this whole station will erupt and blow out at the seams. For morales sake no one can know. The fewer the number of people who can recall that greasy fucks face, the better. That’s why, for your exemplary ability to teach, I’m promoting you off the shop floor and into a tenured teaching position within the machine shop. New personalized quarters, full meal plan, and no more death defying shifts crawling over ships. No need to thank me, the paperwork has gone through. It cleared the moment you came up the lift. Biometric scans for the win!” She looks genuinely pleased with herself. And with a flourish, I find myself back out in the hall, being lead down to the elevator banks. Wondering, what the fuck just happened here any how?

“Hey, there’s the big man. Back from the land of the lost I see. What’s up D, you look stunned? Oh shit, you getting a stint in rehab or something?” The question is left hanging in the air. Silence floats up to meet it. With a dull thud, Daryl flops onto an open couch. Running his hands over the well worn cracks and creases. Admiring the brilliant green light shining on the instrument panel. He turns around as though to talk to the whole room at once. “Doug has been promoted to lead all training in this sector of the docks. All dockets and work orders, change orders etc, now run through him. He’ll set the schedule from here on out. All foremen report directly to Doug. Notices have gone out all ready. I made a few notes, and some other long overdue promotions are going through, and a couple of raises. Those are my last acts before I leave for my new, university, full tenure position.” An audible gasp, as though each pair of lungs has drawn in all available oxygen in the cramped room. A heart beat passes, then two, then four.

Out on the gangway a loud commotion can be heard, emanating from the central crew quarters where the dock section leader bunks down. The sound of raucous cheers and corks popping can be heard. Music begins to blare over the loud speakers. All thoughts of misery evaporates in the tidal wave of cheers and shouts of good will. Notifications of raises and promotions begin to chime in on personal communicators.

 

 

PART VI

“Hey, Dougie, wake up!, Somebody’s called in sick and I need another able bodied mechanic for the…

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Last Great Venture capsule repair job on the docket today. Yo! Wakey wakey, we’ve only got forty minutes until shift change. You in, right? This comes at triple time for you if I have my math right.” The half sized door to my bunk compartment is closing even as he continues to speak. Through the clamor behind my brother Daryl, I can see the other mechanics in the cramped company lounge getting ready for bed, or gearing up for another big day on the job. The dry dock is a massive hub of activity seventy miles off the dark side of the moon. A huge spinning torus with berths for all manner of vessels commissioned by The Company. A massive multi planetary conglomerate that footed a huge portion of the bill for manned space flight privately, and thus once it gained a foot hold in the business of exploration and mining, turned it into a choke hold that shows no sign of wavering in any capacity. Except for the ever increasing need for skilled labour and experienced flight crews, The Company looks to have a near endless trajectory towards growth and colonial expansion. The number of zeroes in their bank accounts boggles the mind. One reason why working for them is so lucrative, They put resources back into themselves, and make no bones about rebuilding, retro fitting, or recycling parts and designs that are proven to work, no matter how costly. They pay well, if you know what you are doing. They care for the flight crews and mechanics just the same. Mind you, we eat better, but have very challenging continental shifts. Three eight hour stints every twenty four hours. Keeping a schedule is paramount to success around here.

Stepping out of my tiny bunk, and zipping myself into my safety coveralls in one smooth motion, I give some serious thought to grabbing a long steam shower and forgoing food, but as I amble through the door I can see a monster of a hot breakfast spread, set out for the last night shift, and fix myself a plateful before the clock ticks down diving into the nearest open couch. The lounge is cramped, with low ceilings, and walls covered in video screens and view ports of the vast expanse of dry dock. It has emergency seating available for a full crew compliment of about thirty burly mechanics with no elbow room to spare. Should the base suddenly lurch to life there would be a mad scramble for everyone to find safe harbor in a crash couch, or their private travel pod that line the exterior walls making the lounge a sort of bull pen in the middle. The crash couches are beaten to hell and well worn, but each one has a crisp glowing green light to signify they are in prime working condition. The room, just like the whole base is colour coded. Mechanics rooms and work station areas are a dark rich red, food prep and entertainment levels are green, health care is blue and managerial posts are yellow. Our clothes match, except we all have separate load outs for pockets and our everyday carry. The horn to signify the shift change is going to blare any second now, I can see my brother Daryl through the thick yellowing glass of a view port, as he’s coming back to usher me into the dry dock space. Parked beside our living quarters are all of our tool chests, equipped with mag lev bases. Those are our livelihood, and we protect our tools with biometric locks and a swift hammer to the skull for those dumb enough to have proclivities towards theft. Poking his head in through the door to the crew lounge Daryl chimes in. “Dougie, The Last Great Venture is a mark eight, so we’ve got her parked down the far end by the exhaust vents. She’s not in too bad of shape internally, but we’ve got to check the entire hull for environmental damages. Boring, time consuming, but I need a trusted set of eyes leading up the team. You up for it?” He’s not as tall as me, but with the neck of a bull and a short temper he leads his team with gusto, and is imposing all the same. His red safety coveralls have been moded to suit his specific safety concerns and needs, namely a neck as thick as a child’s torso. Out in the dry dock there is slim margin to survive should you fuck something up. Hence the gruff attitude. In his position you watch a lot of good people grow cocky, inattentive, then die horrible, gruesome deaths. A needless waste, so he has become hyper alert, and it wears on him around the edges very quickly. I’m up out of my seat, dropping my garbage in the recyclers and incinerators, hopping to the door in a single bound due to our low gravity. Daryl turns on his heels and I follow him down the gangway, passed the laundry dispenser, collecting my tool bench as we head to the berth at the far end where The Last Great Venture is docked. Along the gangway several other tool chests are parked and in various states of disrepair, as additional teams are working all over the massive ship.

“Wheew…” I whistle. “Jesus, she’s beaten the fuck up. This is environmental damage? From where? the ice rings around Saturn mixed with a metric fuck tonne of shrapnel grenades, and a blown up parts depot?… my god, the whole hull is going to have to come off. Tell me you have extra crews crawling between the inner and outer hulls looking for micro punctures and penetration damage.” The ship is huge, mark eights are the largest capsules made by The Company. Compared to the original bad boy, the Non Sequitur, this thing is twenty times the size, and just as durable. Unless you drive it at mach five through a parts counter consisting of nothing but industrial sized nuts and bolts and titanium tipped shrapnel. “What sort of moron do you take me for Dougie? Have some faith little brother. I had three rotating crews put on it the second I laid eyes on her. What a shit show eh? Oh look, here comes Andy, our beloved, and beleaguered apprentice. Shall I have him search for the… what was it again, the capacitor or the capacitator?” It’s a tried and true make work prank we pull on all our apprentices, like searching for blinker fluid, or in our case finding a gasket for the flux capacitor. Hilarious, when done out of love. These behemoths have a parts count near nine million pieces, so the likelihood that a green mechanics apprentice will get the joke right off the bat are slim to none. Plus, apprentices are typically shit on in the ship yards until they earn their full level one certification. We don’t take on apprentices very often. Our non specific set of skills intimidates lots of people. Specificity is great, if you are a neurologist, but if you have the aptitude for it, a generalist mechanic is a very lucrative and exciting profession. Never a dull day when you’re certified to do a bit of everything on all classifications of vessel.

A short young man, of about twenty is racing along the gangway beside The Last Great Venture, pushing his equally spotless tool chest, his apprentice grade pink coveralls are sparklingly clean. His hands aren’t permanently stained grease black yet. He’s been our trusted side kick for nearly eighteen months by now. He’s beaming from ear to ear in the sight of the mark eight. She is a glorious piece of machinery. Her massive bulk dwarfing every other ship in our section of the dry dock. Would have been a real sight to witness the pilots maneuver this beast into its berth. Our section of dry dock repair bay is just one of about three hundred on the outer ring of the torus. A truly magnificent sight. The torus itself is ugly in its utilitarian design, but awesome in scale. Part of why we’re on the dark side of the moon, so as not to ruin the lunar view from the earth’s surface. Andrew is rocking back and forth, eager to hear what he’s going to work on today. Any other day and we’d fuck him over without even thinking about it, but this is a mark eight, and she needs millions of dollars worth of work done, and I don’t think we can push our deadlines any more than what The Company has allotted us. “Andy, you bring your mag boots and mag lev harness connectors with you today?” Looking over Andy’s shoulder at the hull of the ship before us. “If so, saddle up, we’re on ship in fifteen minutes. Be at the aft articulated vent shielding, ready to climb up. Bring visine, as this bitch will kill your eyes today.” I can see his grin growing larger than his face can bear. To actually go up and walk the length and breadth of a mark eight, and see the berth from all angles is a once in a year opportunity. Very rare for a green mechanics apprentice. Andrew is very lucky indeed. “Andy?…” turning from the ship to look directly at me. “Yeah Dougie?… erm,… Doug. Sorry.” I chuckle, as I glower at him. “Put on your knee pads, otherwise your pristine coveralls will be charcoal black by the time you’re done. Change out the inserts on your respirator too, that environmental shielding comes apart in your fingers and turns to super fine dust that will clog your lungs up real fuckin’ quick.” Packing up our gear, we head aft to climb aboard the hull of The Last Great Venture. The clock is ticking, credits are rolling and we’ve got several hundred thousand punctures to analyze and repair. The noise is cacophonous, and the air is tangy from sparks and spent ozone. Pneumatic drills and die grinders are throwing up clouds of orange microscopic dust. The light is dim and has an amber glow from all the spent environmental hull plating. Water vapor is hanging over the ship like a woolly sweater. In among the sparks a chill settles over us as we trace every millimeter of the mark eight’s external surface. Testing doors, vents and air locks. Checking welds, and rivets alike, all with an eye towards certain death if even the smallest wounds to the hull shielding aren’t found and mended. Hours crawl by, as we sweat, swear, bleed, bow and scrape over every facet of The Last Great Venture.

Shift change klaxons sound off, and we climb down, gingerly off the vessel exterior. Andy is so excited he practically jumps from the capsule to the gangway, a solid fourteen foot gap. Us worn and weary guys use the hand rails and antenna arrays as make shift ladders and work platforms. Pulling up beside our tool chests we unlatch the mag lev  locks and push our gear back to our crew quarter storage spaces. Up ahead, there is a commotion at the main junction between the dry dock berths and our section of crew quarters. People are jostling each other, and a scuffle is breaking out. Before it really registers, Daryl is off like a shot, ready to take control and make sure cooler heads prevail. “Daryl!” I shout over the din, trying to get in through the tightly packed bodies, close to the scrum. I desperately want to stop anyone who might try to swing a wrench at the back of my brothers head in a fit of rage, or as an act of retaliation. “Daryl!, what’s going on man?” I’m within arms reach of him, when the crowd around us starts to part. A slim, wiry fella is wrapped up in a full nelson, blood on his knuckles, his pink coveralls bunched up around his face. “Dougie!” Daryl says through gritted teeth. “Just the guy I was looking for… check his Id, I don’t recognize this guy from our section.” Daryl has the skinny, greasy man locked up tight in his grasp. “No id tags on him, what’s the deal here bro, you trying to get into a tool chest that’s not yours or somethin’?” The skinny man grins at me, a good selection of his teeth are missing, or have turned black. His lank hair is thinning and he smells like shit, and decay. “Yeah nah man, yeah nah. You’se know, just doin’ mah thang…” he’s twitching and jerking with each word. A junkie of some sort. Probably found a jumpsuit in the laundry and thought he’d steal and sell off someone’s hard earned tools. The gathered crowd wants to flush him out an air lock, but instead Daryl drags him over to a yellow cubicle stationed at the edge of the gangway, a good two hundred meters from any section of crew quarters. Standard hr protocol. We’ll live where we work, but management can’t get within one hundred meters of our recreational crew quarters. We have supervisors that are part of our crews for personnel matters outside of work hours. “No, we can’t wease him, we’re not murderers. He can go sit with HR, for a protocol rehabilitation session or ten to set him straight… ” pushing the greasy looking man into a chair, his slightly dusty pink apprentice uniform looking drastically out of place among all the men in filthy red coveralls after a full shift. “Dougie, you see Andy around, I want to discuss his progress on The Last Great Venture shielding before he retires to bed.” Daryl, is looking at me, concern etched across his face. The dirty guys coveralls are awful pristine to have come out of this side of the laundry facility. “Eh no, I haven’t seen him. He was so excited from work today he raced on ahead of me.” Andrew’s grinning face is no where to be seen in the crowd, or through the dirty view port that looks into our crew lounge.

“Sorry man” the HR flunkie says, “They just found his stripped body buried in among the tool chests. Looks like our greasy friend here came upon Andy unawares, while he was locking down his unit, hit him over the back of the head with a fire extinguisher. Direct hit to the base of the skull. It was quick. From the grin still on his face, he never felt a thing… ” the words fade out to nothingness. A slight buzz fills my head. Another dead kid. This one, now he had potential. He’s going to be difficult to replace. Somewhere external to us the shift change klaxon is going off. I have eight hours before I have to be back on. Daryl is going to be ornery for a while to come. Fucking junkie scum. Should have put him out on the float like the crowd wanted. I feel a stiff drink or ten are on my immediate horizon. Outside the bleak emptiness of space continues to float around us, undisturbed.

 

PART V

Well holy shit, I managed

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To write thirty one times in the month of January. I was not expecting that to happen, at all. I had high hopes for perhaps, seven to ten written pieces, but thirty one!?! No, no chance.

Work is starting to gather at the edges, so I won’t be going all out this month, but if some creative thoughts come to me, I do hope I’ll put pen to paper, as it were.

Thanks to those who read my micro short stories. My favourite three are intertwined and tell the same continued story. Big fan of space, isolation, revenge, and loneliness. In case my writing doesn’t tell you that, I’m telling you that now.

Hope to see you around here over the rest of 2020, and beyond. The flu was generally awful, I don’t reccomend it to anyone, if they can help it.

It’s strange, the things you come to miss while out here…

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The slow methodic drip of a faucet, or being bathed in the orange glow of the late afternoon sun, the singing of birds, or the sound of the wind rustling leaves across an old growth park. Echoes of children’s laughter bouncing off of brick and concrete. There is none of that here. At first, that made me very happy, I could finally knuckle down and focus on the laundry list of experiments I was tasked with performing by the very savvy tech guys at The Company. But now, up here, alone and isolated in the cool blue glow of phosphorescent lighting, beige cloth walls with all that sound proofing and accident protection, it’s driving me crazy. What I wouldn’t give to turn back towards earth, and hear my little girls squabble endlessly over dolls, crayons or whose turn it is to pick the next television show. The observation deck, a small bubble of a room, comprised mostly of a glass like dome where all of my technical equipment is housed. Can be quite chill, although sometimes tiny rivulets of condensation from my breath will gather on its concave surface, and gather in small pools along the outermost edges where it meets the soft padding of the bulkhead. I keep tiny polaroids of my girls taped up in there. Reminding me, constantly why I do what I do. All alone, adrift in space.

I’m currently the lowest ranking member of The Company to captain his own ship. It wasn’t always this way. When I started out this mission I had three other senior members of this crew. Three very brilliant, but problematic men. Part of an old school fraternity, a brotherhood of sociopaths and sexual deviants. I can almost imagine a large crowded meeting room down on earth at The Company HQ, where the last long amber rays of the afternoon sun would filter through some rustling leaves, and cast long deep shadows across some corporate types face. Slat shaped shadows from the tall Venetian blinds, creating a regular pattern of amber and darkness hiding portions of their faces. Phones ringing haphazardly, reams of papers all over the room, binders full of details and full ash trays and lit cigarettes with whirling eddies of smoke littering the rooms, and through it all, partial globs of conversations. “They came very highly recommended…best in their fields… brilliant minds… oh no, not too many people choose to work with them a second time… troubling attitudes, but gifted. Yes the three men achieve great results… no, no, no one would step forward… yes, suicide, found by the wife. Yeah, twins on the way… do not envy the fourth man on that next mission. Hope he knows how to comport himself during periods of high stress… can he take a joke?” There would be chuckles, and giggles or guffaw, but in the end those three bastards would get cleared to fly with me. Nine hundred million miles between us and earth. There would be no second chances to make a first impression.

Now yes, it’s true. I killed all three of my crew. I did not set out to do so. But I did it none the less. No, I will not go into it, suffice it to say that few things will test your resolve like suturing a tear to your own anus via a mirror and a needle and thread. I am not a weak man. I did not cow to them. But I exacted my revenge over the course of twenty four hours after they made their final play on my person. I’ve known military life. I can take an awful, awful lot of shit from my superiors, but not someone’s misplaced sense of desire to dominate a subordinate. No, to the man who held me down, he lost an arm at the elbow to the pneumatic press I was operating. Turns out I’m not as fast on a tourniquet as I tested on earth during med protocols. Whoops. To the gentleman who tricked me into the tightest spot on the ship, a technical corridor that houses all of the larger caliber electrical cabling, he got a sprinkle of fines from the Oort cloud in the rim of his helmet and gloves. Brilliant scientists, all of them. But bro’s don’t clean and inspect their gear to the same degree a lowly generalist grunt like me does. Failure to secure a one hundred percent connection during a space walk left him dead instantaneously at the opening of the air lock. The same airlock I fired the acting commander out of by purposefully failing to reach equilibrium with the vacuum outside our vessel when he had to go out for some last minute repairs. Launched him off the craft at nearly two hundred kilometers per second per second, from a cold stand still. Didn’t even damage the doors as his body was sucked through before it had opened more than a few millimeters. Like I said, I didn’t start this, but I fucking well ended it on my terms.

Truth is, we were way too far out for The Company to do anything about it. You don’t send out the cops for triple homicide when the guy who did it confesses, but can still produce the same money making results, and will likely never return to earth, or come into contact with another living soul. I guess space madness runs in the family. My uncle was the engineer that built the now famous capsule the Non Sequitur. This vessel is a variation of that design.

“Computer put a dozen new washers on the to build list, for when I’m in the machine shop next ok…” I’m currently shirtless in the dry, cool air of the Give More capsule. Also known more affectionately by the design staff as a mark five, or Mk.V . “Bzzrt… sorry inquiry invalid… please write down on the control pad, items to add to the official parts build list… verbal dictation function not supported… dictation function not supported… dictation function not supported…” a red blinking light is flashing rapidly in case I missed the memo. “Useless, you know that Roger, you’re absolutely useless… ableist too. What if I lose a hand or both arms huh, how you expect me to write this shit out then?” Crawling over some cabling, I find a wrist pad and write out the reminder. “Bzzrt… inquiry invalid. Roger is not my identifier. Also, crew shortage klaxon will sound off in twelve hours. We are understaffed for this mission. Crew levels are mission critical.” The beaten up yellow box is present on every surface of the ship. Wired up nodes that criss-cross all systems and manned spaces, initially designed as part of the medical monitoring system, but evolved to speak and communicate with the ships hardware and software for ease of experimental program integration. Like the ships brain, but less exciting. I’m a pretty great science generalist, and a damn great machinist, but a programmer I am not. Fuck. Why’d Danny have to go and do me like that, before he could upgrade Roger to be able to take verbal commands, or at least hold a conversation that didn’t pertain to ships diagnostics. Been a real dull thirty seven hundred days of this mission so far. Fuck him, fuck those goofs. Bastards, the lot of them. “How many times do I have to turn off that crew levels alarm… must you remind me twice a day, every god damn day, what I’ve done. You, sir. Are a terrible, terrible friend. Fuck face.”

Returning from the observation deck to the crew quarters I think, better go attune the sensor and radio antenna array some time soon. Gotta tight beam all this data back to earth. God I miss my wife and kids. What I’d give to hear a faucet drip. Nothing here, but the cool empty chill of space, adrift in the void. Would be very easy to go insane up here. Gotta find Roger a suitable communications package, or patch, or something. Maybe medical systems has a psychiatrist plug in I could tap into to get some rousing conversation going. “Hey Roger, make a note that I should check and see if you’ve got a psychiatrist plug in for conversation!”. The yellow box in the crew pod chimes in. “Bzzrt… dictation function not supported for official programming inquiries. Incorrect inquiry format, message not recognized. Roger is not my identifier…” rolling to my side, as I zip myself into my bed chamber. “Thanks Roger. Fuck you too.” A heartbeat later a chime in reply can be heard. The lights grow dim as my resting heart rate shows me drifting off to sleep. It is currently two am ship time aboard the Give More capsule. Outside the vessel it is black and empty. Breakfast will be at oh nine hundred, same as the thirty seven hundred other days gone by.

 

PART IV

“I don’t know what to tell you Michael, it’s going to be a lonely existence…

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Out there for you, and there is very little in the way of what I might offer you to assuage that.” It says in its usual cold, crisp,voice. I adjust the control panel to bring the voice down to some velvety, dulcet tones. Always so very soft and measured in my ear. Seemingly coming from the center of my own head. Standing still in the dark room, my nose pressed up to the cold rain patterned glass, I can see pin lights and movement below stretching out for miles. A vast wasteland of a city whose name I have long forgotten, splays out below. Partially hidden behind fog, haze or low cloud cover of an orange tint. I’ve been told that I am approximately two hundred floors up and that I live in a pristine, hermetically sealed glass coffin. It has all the very best someone of my peculiar talents might ever need or require. I have been told I’m a once in a lifetime creation. A synthesis of pure artistic expression made human-ish. I produce all of the best music available to the incredibly wealthy, and for that they lavish more than just praise upon me. Far more than that. I am gifted with the knowledge that they will never let me die. As long as I am able to produce, my well being and every creative whim will be indulged. Outside the glass floor to ceiling windows is a lifetime of stark contrast for everyone else.

Pacing about my rooms, I’ve a well worn path that I take, passed rows and banks of instrumentation, blinking lights, nodes, dials, and keys. The mixed and pulsing syncopation of modulators, saw tooth effects, phlanges and signal boosters and interrupters is a familiar beat in my life all their own. I’ve used my own heart beating in more arrangements than I care to think about. The light is dim, I love the ambient glow of my technology more than any incandescent, phosphorescent or led bulb that I’ve ever found available. The walls are glass, with finger prints and streaks from disinfectant cleaners. The air in here is clean, but stringent. I’m an ardent tapper, on each and every surface, keeping time with the melodies and transitions that occupy my life. The poor, miserable bots can’t keep up, and their ticking, and clicking has been known to interrupt my flow. I only allow them in with me while my files are compiling or I am asleep. They creep and crawl over the glass like blind mechanical spiders, spritz and wipe, spritz and wipe, incessantly.

I don’t get many visitors up here. For the most part I enjoy it that way. But my patrons found a few unexpected scars on my wrists several years ago, and opted to provide me with Kenneth. He stood for something, but I have long forgotten what that was. He’s a node in my brain and he’s tied to a medical system buried elsewhere in the building, constantly monitoring me and my well being. Roi and all that, you know. A lack of mortality when so much of it is available comes at a cost, whether you care to pay it or not.

“What seems to be the trouble tonight Michael? You seem stressed out, do you require medical attention. Shall I have a med bay suite set up for you to retire to this evening…” Kenneth is right there. If I close my eyes I can imagine him standing only a few inches away, the softness of those words, like a baby’s breath on the back of my left ear. But Kenneth is not here, he’s an implant. Come to think of it, beyond our conversations together, I haven’t seen, nor heard from anyone else in ages. Wouldn’t matter if I had. I have extra bones and organs and all manner of wonderous things available in the med bay suites. All automated. All given freely, though, with no chance to refuse. “No need Kenneth, I am simply trying to brainstorm the next big thing to broadcast to my/our hungry fans… looking at them all down there, like colorful ants, many miles removed gives me a renewed sense of wonder. Rain on the windows, winds on the glass. The offbeat twinkle of lights in the late night darkness. It feeds me. It…” I trail off, as I am want to do. I can feel something. Inspiration.

“I don’t know how you do it Michael, but I fear it must be a cold and lonely existence for you here.”

“Welcome aboard the Non Sequitur capsule, flight commander…

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Neil Todd, it’s a real pleasure to meet you in person. I mean, you know… I follow your missions very closely down at Houston Central Command, but as a capsule recycling technician I couldn’t wait to welcome you back to your ship for your next mission.” The tech is a portly woman of about twenty years of age. Her hair is pulled back in a tight braid. Her green coveralls covered in a slew of nicks and tears from repetitive injuries taken on the job. She must be very ambitious to have made lead at this age. It’s not a glamorous position, but techs like her keep the craft in peak performing condition, and well stocked. “Will lieutenant Jenny Todd be joining us soon commander?” I can see her smile growing bigger with anticipation. My wife is a force to behold. She can capture the attention of a football stadium with her wit and charm. People gravitate to her, as though she had her own gravitational pull. “Flight Commander Jennifer Todd will be joining us at oh four hundred. So less than ten minutes if all our instrumentation is properly synchronized.” I’m very attentive to even the merest of slights against my second in command. She also happens to be the mother of my two daughters. And my reason to get up every morning. “Oh, yes… sorry. I forgot about the field promotion that Cmdr Jennifer Todd earned recently. Please excuse me…” the tech is crestfallen, she attempts to slink out of the airlock, and extricate herself from our encounter. “Oh, please… come on, stay. I’m just fucking with you… uh, Capsule Recycle Technician Stacie Bradley.” A brief pause, then you can see the relief wash over her face, the twinkle in her eyes is back. Her shoulders relax out of their tensed up hunch.

“Ok now, ease it back, that’s it, nice and slow now… watch out for those waypoint markers, they’re closer than the last time we shipped out.” I say it in jest. My wife knows this ship better than I do. She is one of the best pilots I’ve ever flown with. We’re the first mission ever to have two Flight Commanders, and we are proud of it. No way were going to split up just so we could captain our own capsules individually. No, the Non Sequitur was where we conceived both of our daughters, it’s where we’ve raised them ever since. Except for the brief interludes between missions, spent in low gravity on the base around the dark side of the moon. Our girls have never known earth. They are brilliant, beautiful and talented junior cadets. A chip off the old block. Tenacious, just like their mother. A woman who is my second in command first, and a devoted wife and mother second. There is nobody else I trust my life, and ship with more.

“The Company has asked us for a run down on the payload again. Seems like there might be an anomaly with the manifests. We are showing added weight on board that they can’t account for… Yo! You who. Neil!… you read me?” Jenny is barking into the intercom, she knows damn well I can hear her, especially at this range. “That’s a copy, Cmdr Jenny. I was given a gift of some super expensive, but real artisanal Chinese coffee, has a hint of spice to it. It’s lovely.” I say it with a smile in my voice, I know what’s coming next. “It’s cinnamon isn’t it. You fucking bastard, you know how much I hate cinnamon!” She enunciates each word harshly. “Well, more for me then I guess. Each bulb has this lovely poem on them, in a very traditional script. Mandarin, and Cantonese. They are a work of art. Shame we have to incinerate all trash for the recyclers.” We are making small talk. The first twenty nine weeks to get out past Mars are tedious and boring. We’ll be testing out equipment as we slowly build up speed. Can’t turn the main ion engines on until we have enough room out in front of us. That reminds me, I have to check in on the sensor and antenna arrays. Part of my daily ritual, I do it so often it becomes automated, deep in that reptilian part of the human brain.

Everyday, day after day, after the girls are asleep and her command shift has ended, Jenny comes to the observation port to gaze at the void before us. I’m always here, tucked behind the fold down table that nestles into the bulk head, eeking out all that I can from the sensor and antenna arrays. She knows she’ll find me here. The first time out to Pluto is something you never forget. So she comes up here and seems to be able to capture the awe every single time. I am unable to do this, and I’m not mad. I love to see her smile. Just like our girls, her dimples pop when she is genuinely happy. Her orange flight suit is immaculate. Jen helps to run a tight ship. She keeps the girls occupied with small science related tasks, and cleaning. Lots of cleaning. They got to skip basic, and flight training by virtue of having been born into it, so to save them getting too cocky, we have them wash everything imaginable. Not to mention their two famous, and intrepid parents. Jen was popular and extremely talented as a test pilot in the air force. I garnered my accolades by designing a capsule for The Company that can take a hit from an asteroid and bounce rather than implode or burst into ten million one micron pieces, us passengers included. For that they let me fly with the best of the best of them. That’s how I met my wife, she piloted the early makes and models of The Company’s capsules. Love at first flight.

There is a heavy layer of smoke, like a painted veil, or gauze in front of my face, it stinks of burning electrical. There are sparks shooting out wildly from exposed wires. I’m tumbling end over end, with both a pitch and yaw. My vision is red, I can feel the sting of blood in my eyes. My head is pounding, I think I’m going to be sick. I can’t tell which direction is up. What is that noise… everything is going black. Why are there horns. God damn my head hurts. Fuck, I’m about to pass out. Fuck, fuck… fuck.

 

PART III

“Hey, we’ve got an alarm here, main bus three, now four’s on the blink too, five and six…

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What the hell is happening.” The control board is lit up like a Christmas tree, warning buzzers, klaxons and every light that blinks is going haywire. “Hey tech, are you seeing this… is this a glitch? This should absolutely not be happening. What is going on out there.” Me and everyone else at Houston Central Control are on our feet, phones are ringing off the hook and support staff are being woken up. The room is in chaos. The Company builds these capsules to ridiculously stringent specifications. Each system built with three redundancies, all on separate breakers, housed in various locations across the bulk of the craft, shielded under plate steel, or lead casings. They recycle them, over and over again because they are so robust. You could plow a five tonne asteroid into the things, and they’d just… bounce. Took some engineering to achieve that feat. The “Non Sequitur“, it really is a remarkable space faring craft. Ugly as sin, spartan in design, but it’s gods be damned sturdy as a mother fucker.

“Can we get all team leads to the tenth floor conference room, repeat, all team leads to the tenth floor conference room, stat!” The voice on the pa system is tense, and the volume has been cranked to ten. No one is going to want to claim they didn’t hear the dispatch from the guys in charge. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Outside the control room, the tone is very somber, punctuated by flurries of activity, followed by countless hours of waiting. The shadows beyond the windows stretch and shrink, stretch and shrink as the hours bleed into days, then into weeks. The once eager faces have grown grey, pale and worn. Five o’clock shadow has become the norm, in what is usually a very rigorous and stringent dress code. Walk down any hall way and you’ll find cots with passed out technicians, scattered across every corner, every nook and cranny crammed with unwashed bodies.

“So you’re telling me… after three weeks…that he’s simply not responding to our calls? Do we know if the radio and antenna array are in working order? What do we know… people! Listen. Shut up. I need you to sound off. NOW.” Bruce is about to snap, we’ve been coming to these meetings since day one of the catastrophic event aboard the Non Sequitur, waiting for something new to emerge from the raw data. He’s worked CapCom control for two decades now, and nothing even remotely eventful has ever happened. Not even a dropped call. His skin has taken on a yellow tinge, and his eyes have sunk deeper into his broad face. He looks as though he hasn’t showered or slept in days. He has picked up smoking again, so much so that his fingers tips are stained a dark mustard yellow. His over grown dirty fingernails are tap, tap, tapping on the conference table impatiently. “Well uh, we know that he’s… um, Todd…, yes sorry, Flight Commander Neil Todd, we know he’s still alive because he’s the only one with the bio-metrics to log in to conduct the scans off of the sensor arrays. The data packets are flooding back in, terabyte by terabyte. It doesn’t make much sense, what we are seeing.” The under staffer is visibly nervous about relaying this information. “What?” Says Bruce “The radios are transmitting to us? But he isn’t responding to our queries? That’s very unlike Cmdr Todd. What the fuck happened up there.” Bruce is not taking this new information well, he and Cmdr Todd go back quite a ways. Their kids were all born at the same time, both of them. “Well, we um… have some strange readings…” Terry, the capsule tech specialist chimes in. “The Co2 scrubbers must be malfunctioning, they are way below where they should be. They should need to be replaced every ten days, but we’re what, twenty one days in, on the same one…” he is pacing around the room, fingers pinched on the bridge of his nose, grimacing over the incomplete data. A sudden bang at the door startles the group in the conference room. Opening the door is dr. Sanjai, the loose bun on her head is dropping strands of hair over her face obscuring her now red rimmed eyes. “I can elaborate on that Terry, we were finally able to scour through enough of the data packets in the information dumps to mine the medical subsets. I’m so sorry Bruce…” she says stepping passed the threshold, and into the room. “Jenny and both the girls were killed in a blast. They were exposed to the vacuum of space while asleep in their bed pods.” Everyone is awestruck, Bruce sits down abruptly in his swivel chair at the head of the table. The crew quarters are the most heavily shielded and armored portion of the capsule. It’s where protocol sends you to ride out a gamma burst, radiation, or an asteroid impact. “From what we can tell Cmdr Todd suffered a blunt force trauma to the head, his brain waves sank to near dead for a period of approximately sixteen hours. I think… I… I… I believe he may have suffered brain damage in the blast. And from our other metrics, probably a good chance of substantial blood loss. If it weren’t for the antenna array logins noted on a daily basis, I would have believed him dead.” She is standing stock still in front of the room, a stunned silence fills the space. A thick cloud of cigarette smoke covers the low hanging ceiling. There are water spots on some of the drop ceiling tiles. The Company likes to see its money go into the program, and not wasted on ground staff creature comforts. Bruce, after a brief pause is up on his feet again, he resumes pacing in front of the dusty blackboards. They are covered with all the minutiae of organized space flight. “What about guidance, navigation, payload, what are his consumables like, what state is he in. Best guesses, any details, no matter how fine, are welcome.” Bruce falls back into his chair, as though the weight of the world is clutching at his shoulders and pulling him backward. A mousy slender wisp of a man steps through the gathered group. “Derick here, hi guys, from what we can tell both the navigation system and the engines themselves are fine. We have evidence that some of the crew quarters emergency lighting panels are sending out rapid fire bursts, must be sparks firing almost constantly, like the tail of a comet down off the back of the capsule. I mean, like, this is crazy, whatever hit them managed to pin point the crew pods, out of ten pods, the only three grouped together that happened to have people occupying them got blasted, gutted, fucking near vaporized. I can’t believe it…” he has his detailed spec print outs nearly crushed in his hands. You can tell he is fighting the urge to gather a consensus among the gathered technicians and scientists, for just how insane the statistical probability of this is. “The math shows him to be heading off course, hard to gauge at this point, he must have caught one hell of a bounce, that’s what I’m thinking, but right now he’s about seventy thousands miles wide of where he should be. By the time he gets out to the elliptical range of Pluto it could be as much a six, maybe seven million miles off course. It’s really worst case scenario at this point.” The life drains out of him, and he staggers backwards, dr. Sanjai points him toward an open chair. Once again Bruce comes alive, leaping up from his leather chair. “But he could course correct right? We’ve heard that navigation and engine control are operational. What’s our protocol on a redirect from here?”. He looks hopefully to Derick. All hopes are dashed as the single main priority of these missions comes crashing back into focus. There can be NO ability to redirect these missions from earth. Tensions are too high, too much is riding on their success to allow subterfuge from an errant tech or saboteur. He’s got enough food and supplies for ten men over a five year journey. It’s all down to Cmdr Todd.

Isolated out in the far reaches of space, humanities success rests entirely upon his beaten, bloody shoulders – alone.

 

 

PART II

“You know what I love the most about being out here?…

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The unobstructed view of the galaxy around us. Don’t you just love it!” She says, looking back at me, over her right shoulder. Her orange coveralls tied firmly around her waist. Her socks, and her shirt are a brilliant white, not a speck of dirt on them.

“Hmmm… no, all I keep thinking about is how isolated it is out here, and how far we are from anything, or anyone.” I say, staring down at the now ice cold bulb of mock coffee. It’s inky, black-brown packaging has golden markings all over it. I can’t read it. It was a gift from the Chinese agency, from last Christmas. It smells faintly of roasted cinnamon.

“Well, I really can’t get enough of this view, I mean what a breathtaking vista that is spread out before us.” She says it with that ear to ear grin she always has. It makes her dimples pop, her ice blue eyes twinkle in the brilliant starlight. Every day now, she comes to stand at the same view port, always looking forwards – to the stars. I’m hunched over a tiny table that converts to tuck back into the bulkhead. I stand up, and toss my bulb of frozen black coffee into an incinerator bin. This capsule, the Non Sequitur, was meant for ten, still feels cramped, even with just the four of us. A long cylinder of off white padded curved walls, illuminated in phosphorescent white light that has started to show some wear and tear. I will give them this, The Company does love to recycle. This is my seventh uneventful mission out here with one of the jury rigged crafts. “You know… we… I… hmmm, that first twenty nine week stretch out to Mars was tedious. I didn’t get any worth while readings, and there is no sign of the anomaly.” I am not happy. This line of work was supposed to be cutting edge. For fuck’s sake, it is space travel, and you promised us adventure, aliens, or at the very least a chance to bring about the singularity before the fall of mankind. We ventured out here in search of something, anything, anything at all that could be the key to unlocking our full potential as a species. And all I got was this lousy t-shirt. “I am not looking forward to eighty more weeks of this before we make it out to Pluto.” I have been glum for quite some time. I never could muster the same enthusiasm for these missions. Even with the pressure of the world on my shoulders. I just don’t care anymore.

“Same time tomorrow then darling.” She giggles as she says it. Every time with this same schtick. I’m annoyed, but I chuckle anyway. “Of course babe, say hello to our girls for me.” Jennifer vanishes in the dim light, leaving me all of the sparse, utilitarian room. The bright padding fades away to reveal the gathered filth and blood splatter of neglect. The fabric throughout the cabin is stained jet black in places, it reeks of smoke, and decay. The lights inside the observation pod have not come on in quite some time.

Outside the capsule, sparks continue to fall away from the craft’s hull like a giant rooster tail of cascading embers. A large black burn stretches across the jagged edge of what’s left of the crew quarters. There in the distance are vague forms of a woman and two children, suspended in their bed pods, both flash frozen, and boiled in the vacuum of space. The capsule is half a million miles off course, even though the engines and navigation survived the attack in one piece. Denial, much like the void of space, does not discriminate.

 

PART I

 

*****

And NOW for shits and giggles you can listen to me narrate Chapter One .

“What do you think happened here”

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He says from over my shoulder. I am looking at the body in front of me, laid prone on the floor in a massive puddle of dark icor. “Well, hmmm… from the looks of it, I’d say he put two in the chest, and one in his head, painting that wall over there with bits of brains, skull fragments and hair.” I stand up slowly, have been having nasty head rushes as of late, when getting up from a crouch. “No, not that, my sandwich! Look there’s like one strip of bacon, and like half a leaf of lettuce. Jesus, don’t the rookies even look at this shit before they bring it to us.” He’s mad, turning this way and that, looking to get up in someones face, anyone within arms reach. “Oh come off it. Lunch was an hour ago, put that down and help me put together a reasonable theory of the case.” I spit the words out, realizing my lunch didn’t do much to satisfy my hunger today either. Irritated, we walk out the front door of this rat infested apartment, with its dangling light bulbs, and chipped paint on all the trim. The shared hall is choked with cops, and partially dressed angry neighbours. They’re all in a huff over the noise, and foot traffic coming and going at all hours. Really they’re just mad they can’t smoke crack or meth while so many cops are around. The floors creak under the additional strain of so many bodies. The temperature inside this hundred year old building is intense. Humidity of high summer has condensed on the walls, dribbling down to make foul smelling pools mixed with discarded cigarette ash, and garbage.

“Oh hey! Mind that puddle over there by that green door.” An elderly gentleman says, he has an indistinct, yet exotic look to him. Thinning dark hair, and a far too short kimono over what I could only describe as neon pink fishnets. “Huh? What’s that sir?”. I shout over the din of the gathered crowd. “Well, just steer clear of that shit. You know old lady Darcy’s a hoarder. That cloying smell of rot, vomit, and god knows what is her doing! Can’t even open her front door, it’s so chock full of shit in there.” He is becoming animated with all the young officers around, staring at him. “Some delivery dude came round here last week in fucking flip flops, had to go see a doctor because that puddle of sludge caused a pus ridden growth on both his feet. Fuck’in nasty. Banged on her door for like an hour, in a rage, he was. Poor kid. But what do I know…” My partner mimics the wanking motion with his left hand, the poor man’s soggy blt flopping about in his right. Mayo has collected on his lip, mixed in to his five o’clock shadow. He smells of cheap cologne, and sweat. We turn for the stairs, the black railing is peeling, it shows about twenty layers of caked on lead paint, and walk down the five flights to our squad car. The temperature outside isn’t any better, neither is the smell. Through a cracked window the radio cackles with an indecipherable muffled call. Followed by several clipped responses. In a rumpled tan suit, my partner shouts over the top of the car to me. I don’t hear it.