Vessel for Offering – Ch. 1

This was certainly a good idea, this shimmying about inside ducts and vents and metal casements which thunder alarmingly beneath the unwanted weight of his passing. His life has been reduced to a pointless series of mechanical motions: forward with the elbows, plant them on a seam for traction, drag the carcass behind; pause a moment to catch a breath because it’s only been, after all, a few hundred meters of constant inchworm contractions through a space barely large enough for his shoulders to pass, let alone his entire body. Someone who didn’t know better might be tempted to think that he was going soft if he stops too often.

So, he fixes his eyes straight ahead and tries to gauge his progress, but the flashlight’s beam is jiggling too much for him to make an accurate guess. The strap that’s supposed to keep the light snug against his forehead has been pulling loose for the last ten minutes. It’s just another aggravation to toss atop the mounting pile. It stinks in here, too. Not the clean, coppery stink of sheet metal and industrial coolant that one should reasonably expect from ductwork, but some noxious chemical combination of sweat, dust, mildew and other assorted skanks that defy ready identification. He thinks about just succumbing to the heat and exertion and odor and just allowing himself to pass out. Let some other idiot worry about how they were going to get him out of here.

Oh yes, it had been a good idea, indeed. Whoever had devised this plan in the first place should be given some sort of citation. With a hammer. To the forehead. Until he was freaking dead.

Now the truth is that he’s an adult. He’s been inside his share of tubes and tunnels and cramped, clammy spaces. He’s not normally one to give up in the face of a little grit. It’s not the getting dirty that he minds at all, nor the heat and odor, nor the hysterically gibbering claustrophobe chained up in the closet in the very back of his mind. Rather, it’s all the intersections. The right angles, to be precise.

He hates those. Hates ‘em. Absolutely.

There are only so many joints in the human body capable of performing a ninety degree maneuver. The pelvis, the knee, the elbow, sometimes the neck, a few other odds and ends. A man forcing himself through a skintight metallic tube like raw bratwurst crammed into sausage casings uses all of them, and then finds that he must manufacture some new ones (or at least makes the old ones serve new purposes) if he doesn’t wish to get himself permanently wedged between a terminal hither and yon.

He’s been finding creative ways to torture his body thusly for the last hour or better, so he feels qualified in making the determination that as right angles go, he hates the one he’s confronting now most of all, a particularly diabolic specimen in the cosmology of Demonic Perpendiculatory Choirs he’s been formulating as he has gone along.

One of the planes in question is a chute of unpleasantly heated air boiling up from the main cooling tanks of the Van Nuys reactor. The other, the one he currently occupies, is a (currently) slightly less infernal duct branching back toward the Sub-Deck Kappa, Section Six tech-maintenance pod. Under normal circumstances, this duct is supposed to be a standard internal cooling tube loaded with envireon refrigerant and absolutely human tissue toxic, maintained at a steady hypothermia inducing eight degrees centigrade. Which it was, right up until about an hour ago when they’d cut off the flow at the main valve and flushed the tube with neutralizing agents for the sole purpose of shoving him in through the nearest access vent.

The tube is supposed to be kept chilly because of the core, of course. Or rather that because without the induced chilliness, the vents that cooled the core would very shortly start to bake, then warp, then ultimately fail to provide safe and adequate heat exchange, which in turn tended to quickly result in things like radioactive contaminants spewing under extremely high pressures into other parts of the ship that don’t seem upon initial inspection to be related to this duct in this place at this particular moment in time. The engineers have stressed all of this in the very recent past, over and over again. The engineers said that under normal operating circumstances the exhaust from the core is saturated by the microscopic envireon particles until it all evens out, until there’s a nice equilibrium point established that keeps everyone happy and glow free. An elegant system, frightfully complex, not to be messed with except in cases of dire, dire emergency lest ducky circumstances suddenly and catastrophically unduck themselves.

From his perspective, things are far from ducky already, here where the HVAC tube lips over into a vertical shaft that plummets all the way down to the reactor core. (Though the air in the shaft itself has been by this time scrubbed and rescrubbed, thoroughly nanomesh strained, then scrubbed once more for good measure until all the nasty radioactive bits have been purged and it was perfectly safe for consumption. Or so they said. “They” being a fairly nebulous concatenation of People Who Knew Such Things and People Who Issued Assurances so normal folk wouldn’t have to worry about the obscene risks they were asked to take.)

Wedged at the zero point between planes, contemplating the theoretical infinity of these axes with his nose and eyes and top of his head peeking over the edge of the HVAC tube and his re-breather unit bruising his cheeks because unlike the straps for his headlamp, these are too tight, is Ray Marlowe. He is sweating profusely inside his rubberized, slip resistant coveralls. His face is smeared with dark lines that look like camouflage grease paint, but really only mark the places where he has wiped the perspiration from his brow with the condensate, dust-bunny grit that inevitably gathers inside HVAC tubes.

Ray has lain here contemplating his assault of the vertical shaft for a number of minutes now. It is a delaying tactic, a shameless procrastination. He has no interest in continuing the chase. The molten heat of superheated reacting agents emanating up from the core streams past his face in waves as thick and suffocating as a winter stack of grandma’s old feather comforters. He imagines as he peers over the edge that he can see the lava glow of the cooling tanks four hundred meters directly below his current position, like peering into the mouth of a dubiously quiescent volcano.

It is an unpleasant and completely fabricated hallucination and he knows it. He just doesn’t particularly want to do the part that comes next.

This is how it works: Nature, in its vast and quasi-nefarious complexity, has determined that there is a corporate value in the evolution of a particular type of creature whose sole contribution to the planetary biosphere is to recycle the detritus of other creatures. These are the scavengers, the bottom feeders (quite literally) of the animal kingdom–your hyenas and rats and barnacles and other generally disgust-inducing entities–who serve the imminently valuable purpose of making certain that waste products disappear and carcasses are broken up into conveniently smaller bits and that most other living things don’t find themselves buried up to their necks in the byproducts manufactured by basic processes like living and eating and procreating and excreting and eventually keeling over. Perhaps even more importantly, they make certain that no biological resources go to waste in what is ultimately a closed ecological system.

The lesson being: nature is a closed environmental system.

Starships, curiously enough, are also closed environmental systems.

Once upon a time, some hotshot, smartass engineering geek with too much imagination or more creativity than sense determined that most folks who traveled about in starships were sick and tired of being made physically sick and tired by the cocktail of laboratory biogenerate mosses and molds and single-celled organisms typically employed for the purpose of recycling starship waste. Biological organisms, no matter how carefully engineered, had a distressing tendency to overproduce themselves, to evolve into annoying flesh or structure devouring slimes, to spontaneously generate lethal spores or find other, similarly disturbing ways to manifest a hostile response to having been subjected to the extreme environment of outer space.

Similarly, this aforementioned engineering geek realized that it would create another subset of discomforting circumstance to pack a starship with rats and hyenas and the like in order to process waste products with a level of efficiency approaching that of the natural world. Hyenas have too much of a tendency to eat indiscriminately if allowed to run loose, thus posing a danger to the edible-looking human types who happen to crew starships. And live rats, as well as having promiscuous reputations that would have created serious population control issues inside a few generations, had displayed a historically documented fascination with items like electrical wiring and electronics boards and any of the thousands of other technological gewgaws which were tedious to replace, unreasonably sensitive to abuse and more or less essential to the proper functioning of an in transito starfaring vessel.

Thus, the doubly aforementioned hotshot engineering geek, who was really merely a cog in a team of engineering geeks, designed, developed and built environmentally and aesthetically consistent mechanized rats to take the place of their organic counterparts in the vacuum-sealed circle of life that was the space voyaging craft, Paraclete. (As well as all other space voyaging vessels, Ray might suppose if he chose to think about it at all. Which he didn’t. At this point in his career arc, Paraclete was the only starship in which he happened to possess anything like a passing interest, and it had more than enough happy little idiosyncrasies to keep him occupied. Other ships could go screw themselves, or more likely, screw guys like him who were charged with keeping the idiosyncrasies from becoming glitches, the glitches from becoming problems, and the problems from sooner or later blossoming into critical threshold events that would make the klaxons blare and people run about in a variety of serious or intense postures searching either for someone to blame or someone to come up with a good idea for keeping said space voyaging vessel from plummeting into the gravitational field of a brown dwarf that had no right to have planted itself directly in their flight path.)

Ray Marlowe has been charged with the singular task of retrieving one of the wayward rats that populates the service decks of the starship which has, for reasons unknown, gotten itself stuck and broken somewhere in the tube above him. If possible, he would like to complete this mission without having to subject himself to the vertical ascent of the primary core cooling shaft. He ponders the possibility of just remaining where he is and calling out sweetly to the malfunctioning unit in hopes that it will scurry down to him. The rats are equipped with a frightening array of aural, optical and chemical sensors. On the other hand, so are human beings, and there’s nothing in his experience that is more detrimental to professional dignity than a grubby man crawling through ventilation ducts being overheard by half the ship’s service crew imploring the return of a drone rat as though it was a recalcitrant kitten.

He really has no desire to subject himself to that sort of abuse.

He unclips the signal tracker from the breast pocket of his coveralls. Ziggy has already calibrated the device to pick up the rat’s unique-signature radio transmissions, but Ray punches in the particular rat’s code sequence once again. He hopes that Ziggy has made an error, that the tracker will give him more useful (i.e. less hazardous) information than it did prior to his tube crawling adventure. It does not.

What it does tell him is that the rat has not moved in the last hour. This would normally be good news. There are few things worse than chasing an ambulatory rat with a software bug through kilometers of cramped tube. But this rat has chosen to lock up its mechanicals somewhere roughly one hundred meters above him, clinging by electromagnetic crampons to the wall of the vertical cooling shaft. He knows from the error reports spat forth from the rat dialogue processor back in the shop that the rat detected an anomalous concentration of radioactive discharge through the vent and gave pursuit. The concentration was well within the bounds of human health concentration guidelines, but like most input/response parameter driven machines, the rats give less of a hoot about what is optimal than about what they perceive as the proper functioning of their universe. Microscopic particles of radioactive isotope were apparently an offense to this rat’s binary worldview.

Ray was not normally a fan of individual initiative. Rogue rats like this one were part of the reason.

He curses a half dozen times as he returns the tracker to its designated pocket. A dozen more expletives escape in the process of contorting his body to access other, more remote pockets on his coveralls, followed by a full cannonade of scorched-earth profanities while he maneuvers the newly retrieved magnetic cups over his knees and hands, and triple-checks that they’re strapped tightly in place.

He tests the distance from his tube to the far wall of the cooling shaft. By hanging most of his upper body over the edge, he can almost brush the wall with his fingertips. He also manages to almost lose his balance and drag his entire body into freefall down the length of the cooling tube, and it occurs to him that he doesn’t like so much having valued parts of his organic being dangling over the roiling exhaust of a reactor’s core. A new approach is called for.

What he eventually settles upon is the rotation of his body in the cramped HVAC tube so that he faces away from the ship’s gravitational center. From this position, it’s simply a matter of clamping onto the vertical wall above him, locking the magnetic grips, and slowly extending his reach until he’s drawn himself completely out of one tube and into the other.

Fixed at the palms and knees to the solid flexsteel ductwork, he is more than capable of hanging in place as long as the laws of electromagnetism hold. Except, of course, that he’s attached to the wrong side of the tube. A situation that can only be remedied by detaching one arm and one leg from the wall and extending them across the shaft to the other side, then anchoring there, setting the grips, deactivating the first set and ferrying them over to the new landing zone and fixing them in place once again. He spends a great deal of time reminding himself that it is essential he carry out these steps in the proper sequence before actually performing them.

After that, it’s a strict regimen of mind-numbing and laborious effort. Unseal right hand cup, reach up, plant and set the grips. Unseal left hand cup, reach, plant, grips. Unseal right knee cup, extend, plant, grips. And so on, all the time trying not to think about the fact that he’s trusting his entire weight to the physical (and theoretical) properties of four scuffed and unimpressive electromagnets roughly the size of a coffee mug if you stacked them one on top of the other. Not to mention assiduously avoiding the thought that that if the magnets failed, he’d plummet four hundred dizzying meters straight onto the nanomesh filters that stood between him and the cooling tanks. Assuming he survived the fall, the mesh would be almost certainly be irretrievably damaged, thus flooding the vent with a fog of steam and radioactive pollutants that would boil his eyeballs in their sockets, sear the hair right off his head, probably curl the skin from his bones like a bunch of old parchment and, if he was lucky, kill him after a few uncomfortable minutes.

Not thinking such things performs wonders for his concentration, and Ray makes admirable progress in a short time.

Five meters below the rat, the tracker begins to vibrate in his breast pocket. For half a second, Ray believes he has just suffered a mild infarction and nearly wets himself. He looks up, sees the rat looking down at him–hanging upside down on the wall, in fact–and experiences a woozy shudder of vertigo. Two ships passing in the night, Ray thinks, then gets his balls firmly in hand and humps it the rest of the way until he has the rat’s nose pressed against the top of his head.

The nose is cold, which is what he would expect from a robotic multi-function sensor drone encased in a pseudo-metallic fiber carapace. If the casual observer somehow neglected to notice the rat was constructed entirely from non-organic materials, he or she might be struck by how rat-like the rat was–the expected chubby rat body, the long rat face, the coiled and icky rat tail. Even the delicately clawed and prehensile paws were rattish. Ray didn’t know if this extreme mimicry had been aesthetic or functional, only that it was a little creepy in a hip sort of way.

At this moment, the rat is doing a big bunch of nothing except hanging on the wall.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” Ray says.

At the sound of his voice, the rat’s small, dark eyes brighten. Its antiquated ten gig processor runs through a voice recognition routine that ties Ray’s particular vocal pattern to an id conversion algorithm that identifies him as an authorized maintenance profile. The rat recognizes him as help, and utters a forlorn chirp.

“Not a complete blowout. That’s something.”

The rat answers with a complex chatter of beeps and whistles translated directly from the binary signal. The diagnostic server down in the shop would know exactly what those meant, and what the rat has recommended that he do to fix it. Ray, on the other hand, has no idea.

He maneuvers himself a bit higher on the wall of the shaft until the rat is even with his chest and plays the beam of his flashlight over its chrome carapace for indications of structural damage or scorch marks from overheated motors. There’s nothing obvious, and this is definitely not the place to begin taking the drone apart.

“Okay, buddy, let’s see if we can’t do this the easy way.”

Ray shrugs his left hand free of its magnetic cup and wiggles his fingers beneath the rat’s body until he’s got it wedged in the crook of his elbow. He tugs against grip of the rat’s crampons. The rat doesn’t move.

“Voice command override, Mr. Rat.”

It responds with an affirmative-sounding squeak.

“Release electromagnetic locks.”

Where there should be a click, there is only silence. Ray tries again. “Cut power stream to electromagnetic locks.”

The rat chitters hopefully at him, but that seems to be the extent of its assistance. Ray tugs on its torso a few more times with no better result.

“This isn’t good, buddy,” he says. “You know what we’re going to have to do now.”

It does not, in fact, know. Nor would it actually care if it did know. Ray understands this, but he hates it anyway. It’s sloppy for one thing. And it offends him on a visceral level, mostly because it makes him feel queasy.

He extracts himself from the rat and retrieves the small saw from the zippered thigh pocket of his coveralls. For a few tedious moments, he plugs in new batteries, exchanges blades, flips between settings. He doesn’t want to have to monkey around with his equipment while he performs the surgery. Like a battlefield triage doctor, he wants the amputations completed with the minimum of fuss.

The diamond tipped saw sounds exactly like a dental drill. He has to force himself to keep his eyes open, to actually watch what he’s doing. His brain flops around inside his skull as though squirming away from his optical input. His stomach crawls away somewhere in the vicinity of his anus and begins to pout. Ray cuts through both of the rat’s forepaws before he remembers he should be holding the tail.

He doesn’t breathe until the work is done, the saw is jammed back in its pocket and the rat, roughly the size of a burly tomcat, is snugged against his belly. For seven full minutes afterward, he does nothing but apologize. He keeps his eyes averted from the four shiny and bodiless paws clamped to the shaft wall.

The rat chirps merrily, poking its nose into ribs and gall bladders, sniffing at belly buttons and livers–performing god-knows-what sensory examinations of this new biological terrain.

“Don’t bite me,” he says.

It does, of course. Ray figures that makes them about even.

***

They’re resilient little creeps, these rats–nearly as resilient as their true-life counterparts. The rat is on its side on the worktable, making more of its annoying chirrups and wiggling its nose at the minute fluctuations in the atmosphere’s chemical signature. Every few seconds, it flexes the new limbs Ray has attached from his stockpile of spare parts. The severed limbs have gone into a bin of damaged parts ripe for scavenging or experimentation or simply held in reserve to jerry-rig workable replacements when they had inevitably used up all the pristine components. A co-ax fiber line stretches from the rat’s anus to the diagnostic server array, with the business end being plugged into an access port in the back. In this way, the rat and the computer exchange loads of pointless information about its recent malfunction.

Ray supposes this is what passes for happiness in a robotic rat.

He sits on a stool beside the table, illuminated by a ring of glaring halogen light. He’s already examined the rat at magnification levels that can only be described as stupid. He’s studied its carapace for structural integrity flaws. He’s performed manual diagnostics on the three dozen or so servo-motors that pass for joints. He’s taken apart all the (supposedly) hermetically sealed sensor boxes and run them through computer mediated test cycles. As of an hour ago, he’d had the rat separated into enough pieces to make a watchmaker wince.

Now the tools are mostly put away, the assorted screws and bolts and cotter pins more or less put back where they came from. Currently, he has the motherboard access panel in the rat’s flank open. He touches an electrode stylus against various contact nodes, then scans the single line LCD display for irregular messages. He already knows the crampon problem was a bad electrical relay. He replaced that before he put on the new limbs. Now he’s just messing around, performing standard maintenance so he maybe won’t have to see this rat again for a hundred thousand kilometers or so.

Despite the fact of their impending separation, he’s taken to calling this rat Nomar. Ray has freely admitted to a near pathological obsession with naming his animals Nomar. Four dogs, three cats, eight fish and a lemming at last count. The lemming could be considered heretical, so it was just as well it only survived for a couple of months.

He finishes with his tests at about the same time as the diagnostic server. Ray unscrews the co-ax cable, closes the panel. The rat rolls onto its paws, either obediently or expectantly, Ray can’t really tell.

“Up for a test drive, Nomar?”

Nomar rises up on his hind legs, nose-scrunching and paw-waggling, then piles off the table onto Ray’s lap. It clutches a rapid descent down his coverall legs and seems to find the replacement limbs reliable enough. Ray follows the rat to the shop door. He cracks it open enough to peer out into the gangway, but doesn’t see anyone.

He peers intently at Nomar until he thinks he has the rat’s attention. “If Ziggy catches us, we’re completely busted, got it? So keep a low profile in the public areas. And try not to look like you’re following me, okay? We’ll shoot up to the Garden Level, then right back down for reconfigure and re-deploy.”

But Nomar is ignoring him. He’s already got his nose wedged between the door and the frame, snuffling at the air and engaging ambulatory motors in an attempt to squeeze through the gap. Before the rat can chitter its frustration, Ray lets him out and follows at a brisk pace. They make it maybe ten meters.

“Ray!”

He doesn’t want to turn around. As a matter of personal policy, turning around seems like a very bad idea…though perhaps not so bad as not turning around, because nobody booms his name down a cavernous gangway with that queer mix of menace and psychic exhaustion like Ziggy. And blowing off Ziggy would constitute a career-endingly bad idea.

Ray rotates on his heels and hisses at Nomar to wait for him, then wanders back toward the shop, and toward Ziggy who stands a little way farther down the corridor, just outside the door to his office. Ziggy has struck his standard pose–hands on hips, neck bent slightly so he peers down the bridge of his nose, head swaying back and forth like a pendulum, as though he’s already anticipating a need to make refusals.

Zig is a large black man, balding, but compensating in the follicle department with a devastating fu-manchu moustache that turns the entire lower half of his face into a forest of bristling pubic hairs. He’s big bellied because Nina, his wife, is one of those rare and wondrous women who can make tofu and protein paste actually resemble something edible. He has the jowls of a bulldog and the temperament to match. The diploma framed on the wall in his office says he’s an engineer, but Ray knows that’s only technically accurate. Ziggy is a hardware hacker retired to administrative oversight. Ray is the only one who calls him Ziggy. Everyone else refers to him as Section Chief Zighowser.

Face to face, Ziggy continues, “You’re not taking that drone abovedecks.”

Ray starts to make the what drone is that? motion with his hands, but he catches a glint out of the corner of eye. When he tracks it, looks down, there’s Nomar up on his hind legs, steadying himself with his paw around a roll of Ray’s trouser fabric.

“Traitor,” he grouses.

Nomar tugs on his leg and whistles.

Ziggy shakes his head. “Commander Sorensen has been pretty danged clear, I think. To everyone but you, that is.”

“There was a memo,” Ray agrees.

“And the memo said?”

“Drones are confined to engineering levels, conduits and appropriate task-sensitive decks and zones.”

“And?”

“Drones are proprietary Federal Space Agency technology.”

“And…”

“They’re not to be considered pets, but members of the engineering crew.”

“There’s something about that you don’t understand?”

“I guess not.”

Ziggy gives him the nod that says the topic is closed for discussion–a brisk up and down. Like an avalanche viewed in slow motion, he folds his legs beneath him and kneels on the deck where he can drop the full weight of his professional attention on Nomar. The rat lacks the good sense to shy away.

For a number of seconds, Zig probes the new limbs with his fingertips while Nomar applies a diplomatic quid pro quo logic in order to inspect the flesh of the Section Chief’s arm. A tongue-cognate sensor whip flicks the sweat from Ziggy’s palm, saving it for some hideously complicated chemical analysis later.

“This the one from this afternoon?”

It’s a pointless question, an icebreaker. There are something like six thousand rats assigned to Paraclete, five of which are active at any given time. Shop rumor has it that Ziggy can individually identify each one of them by physical or behavioral characteristics at twenty meters in a gloomy storage bay after having consumed half a bottle of hooch, and still probably give you the drone’s correct serial number. Ray answers with the properly noncommittal, “Uh-huh.”

“Electromagnetic lock?”

“Relay.”

Ziggy nods as though this information is something other than completely useless and projects the impression that he’s filed it away somewhere important for later review. “The limbs look good. The drone seems to be integrating the new hardware adequately. Decent coordination of extremities. Sound movement tracking. Solid range of motion.”

This is no doubt a sidelong way of suggesting there were methods to test hardware replacements without the necessity of physically wandering all over the ship.

They’re called People Skills, Mr. Marlowe! Perhaps you should look into requisitioning a starter set.

Ray only shrugs. “He didn’t complain. My boy was a model patient.”

Obviously, Ziggy is working up to something he wants to say. Ray is very sensitive to the waffling style of administrative pre-conversational foreplay. It usually means he’s done something so mind numbingly stupid or thoughtless that it has attracted the attention of the Powers That Be, who have thundered their displeasure from the Bridge Deck mountaintop into the Sub-Deck valleys via the comm unit on Ziggy’s desk, and the Zigster is so worn from the verbal manhandling that he just can’t muster the energy to pass it on.

Ziggy says, “You know that HVAC tube we purged was the main coolant pipe for the Bridge.”

“Sure. It was right there in the schematics. I took the liberty of informing the galley well in advance that any attempt to serve ice cream for dessert in the officers’ mess tonight would probably be a bad idea.”

As usual, Ziggy narrows his eyes, trying to guess how much of what he has just said is true. “I won’t tell you how pissed off the Commander was.”

“Maybe we should write this down. I think it’s a notable first.”

“Shut up for a minute and listen to me, Ray. I’m trying to tell you that it was good work, regardless of what anyone else might have to say about it. A hard job done nice and quick and by the book. Most of the system vets would have written off the hardware and let it go at that. Don’t want to inconvenience the captain, you understand.” All along, Ziggy continues his examination of the rat, though to Ray, it looked more like the two of them were playing some arcane version of pat-a-cake. “Do you know why I give you the type of job orders I do, Ray?”

Ray chews his lip thoughtfully, then says, “Because you hate me? Because you know I don’t have a permanent berth and need to stay in your good graces if I want a job next time out? Or maybe just because I’m gullible.”

He grins widely, but Ziggy only shakes his head.

“It’s because you know how to treat the hardware, son. You’ve got the right priorities and you make the right decisions under pressure. You do your job without any fuss and without screwing around with the politics. The other vets don’t seem to see the situation with the correct level of clarity.”

“Bunch of pussies.” Ray makes sure to crack the smile a bit wider. “Does that mean I can have your job when you quit?”

“I don’t think so.”

At least they’ve cleared that up. “Well, thanks for the pep talk, boss. It’s good to know I’m appreciated.”

Ziggy hauls himself back to his feet, once more the scowling, hand-on-hip administrative juggernaut. He sighs heavily, as though their interaction has taxed the reserves of patience he was only pretending to possess.

“Don’t take the rat uplevel.”

“Right. Understood.”

“I’m telling you.”

“I’m listening. Complete focus on my end.”

Ziggy rolls his eyes and flips subjects, some rogue neuron in his brain having misfired and convinced him without any evidence or historical proof to the contrary that Ray is actually going to do what he says.

“Nina made some cookies for you.”

“Your wife likes me. She thinks I’m hot.”

“She thinks you need someone to take care of you so you don’t starve.”

“As far as women are concerned, that’s like the same difference, man.”

“You can pick them up when you’ve logged out for the night. I’ll leave them sitting on my desk.”

The conversation over, Ziggy wanders back into his office and closes the door so he can maintain the illusion that he’s about to be obeyed. Ray watches him go, contemplating the door for several seconds in silence. Nomar gives him only that long before more trouser tugging ensues.

Ray winks at the rat. “Lunch, you say? Sure, let’s go.”