Code Monkey!

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This video shows the concept of the Mandelbrot Set that is important for David in this chapter.

For a moment, David held his breath, wondering if Pamela would say something to him and blow his cover. Instead she merely glared at him. David shifted under her glare, suddenly unsure if she was glaring at him because she was still mad at him, or just because she thought he was now part of the organization that had captured her and taken her prisoner. Either way, it was uncomfortable being under her gaze like that.

“Is something wrong?”

Reynold’s voice startled David, and he broke his gaze with Pamela. “I’m sorry?” he asked.

“You seemed caught up in something,” Reynold said. “I was concerned that something might be wrong.”

David looked back at Pamela. She was looking away from him this time, as if she hadn’t seen him or recognized him. “No,” he said. “Everything appears to be in order.”

Reynold wiped his forehead again, then gave a little grin. “So you think everything’s okay?”

“I didn’t say that,” David said. “I’m going to have to do some more investigating.”

“Certainly, of course. What would you like to see next?”

“Actually,” David said, looked Reynold straight in the eye, “I think I need to explore on my own for awhile. Check things out. Make some notes. I hope that’s all right.”

“Oh,” Reynold said, and David was gratified to see the other man’s cheek flinch. “Of course. You’ll certainly be given full access to every part of the facility. Well, with certain exceptions.”

“Exceptions?” David asked, raising an eyebrow. “What exceptions?”

Reynold shifted in position, and wrung his hands. “Well, you know. The standard areas. Personnel, that sort of thing. Obviously, you understand.”

“Obviously,” David said. However, the caveat frustrated him. In particular he wanted to visit the personnel department and examine the files there, though he had no idea if they would provide him with any interesting information. It had been years since he’d worked in Human Resources, but he thought he would still understand the language if he saw it and tried to read it.

Reynold didn’t move. He simply stood, wringing his hands and looking worried.

“Is there something else you wanted to tell me?” David asked. He was beginning to sweat himself. How long would he be able to keep up this charade?

Reynold shook his head. “No, sir. Just, ah, just wondering what you’re going to do next.”

“I’m going to investigate and explore, of course,” David replied. “Unhindered, I hope.”

“Unhindered. Of course you will be. I’ll leave you to it.” With that, Reynold turned and moved away, striding purposefully, it a bit nervously, out of the holding facility.

David let out a breath he hadn’t even been aware he was holding. When the door had swung shut behind Reynold, David turned and looked at the guard at the desk. “Go ahead and take a break,” he said.

“Thanks,” the guard said, standing up. He went out the door and let it shut behind him.

David went up to the iron bars of the cell that Pamela was in. She stood up and came over to him.

“David, what in the world is going on?” she asked.

“It’s crazy,” David replied. “They think I’m with the board of directors or something.”

Pamela narrowed her eyes. “Why would they think that?” she asked. “Did you say something to them?”

David shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Maybe they were expecting someone who looks like me or something.”

“Well, it’s still good to see a familiar face, even after… well, after what happened.”

David blushed. “Yeah, about that. I wanted to tell you that…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pamela said, interrupting him. “I understand completely. I was out of line and shouldn’t have said the things I did. If I hurt you, I didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry. I was just angry. I still am, I guess, but…”

David interrupted her. “No, Pamela, that’s not it. I wanted to tell you…”

“Hey, what’s going on?” said a voice behind them.

David turned. The guard had returned, carrying a paper cup. “Fraternizing with the prisoner? Can’t say I blame you.” He smirked as he stepped back behind his desk.

“I was questioning her.”

“Questioning? We’ve been trying since she showed up, and she hasn’t given us a thing.”

“I thought maybe I’d try a different approach.”

The guard looked at Pamela appraisingly. “She say anything useful?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, that’ll change. If we keep her here long enough she’ll want to talk.”

David nodded, glad that the guard hadn’t said anything about harsher interrogation techniques. Apparently OSHA did have some say over how corporate incarceration facilities were run. The Tindalos Corporation didn’t want any trouble, which was a good thing.

He turned back to Pamela. He noticed with some surprise that she was still wearing the green dress from earlier. Then again, not much time had actually passed since Nina had had them stuffed through a translation portal. He’d thought much more time had passed, given the time he’d spent in the marine research facility and the time he’d spent traveling through various portals before finally showing up here. But now that he thought about it, he realized that it had probably been a couple of hours at most.

“Are you going to let me out?” Pamela asked.

David did his best to put on what he hoped was a properly disdainful corporate grin. “We’ll work something out,” he said.

Pamela sighed and sat down on the bench. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever.”

# # #

David wandered the tunnels of the Skullcrusher Mountain facility, trying to come up with a plan that would get him and Pamela out of here without any trouble. And he knew, of course, that every minute he spent here was a minute closer to someone finding out that he really wasn’t a member of the Tindalos Corporation’s Board of Directors. Not knowing where Skullcrusher Mountain was geographically was certainly going to be a hindrance.

The air inside Skullcrusher Mountain was cold and sharp, and breathing it in almost made David’s lungs hurt. He kept his breathing steady, though, making sure he didn’t give himself away with his nervousness to any of the passing employees or guards that worked for the Skullcrusher Mountain corporation.

Trying to come up with an escape from a situation like this was totally beyond his experience. He wondered briefly if Pamela had ever had to do something like this in her temp job, and decided that she probably had not. The temporary employment corps at Tindalos had probably never put her into a situation where she had to escape like this.

He tried to figure the whole situation out as he wandered the tunnels. He suspected that Nina was more than she seemed, and he was pretty sure that Reynold was completely out of the loop, whatever loop there was. He wondered about the Tindalos Corporation as a whole. From his limited experience, the Tindalos Corporation had both incredibly sophisticated technology, but also seemed to have terrible internal communication.

Maybe that was something he could use to his advantage.

He paused in mid-stride, just beside a woman in a white lab coat and black slacks who was carrying a clipboard and pen. She stepped quickly to one side, sideswiping him efficiently without giving him a second glance.

If Tindalos’s lack of internal communication was something he could take care of, he thought, then wasn’t it possible that someone else had already been taking advantage of that very same fault? Was that something that could have been going on here? Who would be taking advantage of that sort of thing? Honestly, corporate communications were so bad that David had been able to pass himself off as a member of the Board of Directors; in fact, Reynold had leaped to that conclusion himself.

Which probably meant that someone from the Board of Directors really was meant to be showing up here, in which case David knew he’d better get moving.

A way out occurred to him. He had spent so long as a low-level corporate drone, both when he worked in Human Resources at a big university and then as a beginning programmer for Interstitial Interfaces, that he had never even considered what it would be like to be thrust into a position of upper management or power, and that’s — more or less — what had happened to him just now.

He turned about and started heading back the way he had come. He wasn’t sure of all of the twists and turns that he’d taken on his peregrinations through the tunnels of Skullcrusher Mountain, but he thought that if he just kept his wits about him and kept up an appearance of knowing where he was going and what he was doing, he’d eventually find his way back to the incarceration facility where Pamela was being kept.

# # #

“Bring her out of her cell,” David demanded of the guard at the desk.

The guard looked at him quizzically. “On whose authority?” he asked.

“My own,” David replied. Then he added, “I speak as a member of the Board of Directors of the Tindalos Corporation.” He held his chin up high, striking what he hoped was a confident and commanding pose. He was pretty sure he could pass himself off as a member of the Board of Directors at this point, but was in a hurry, just in case a real member of the Board showed up.

“Let me check with Mr. Thompson,” the guard said, reaching for his Bluetooth earpiece.

David didn’t know who Mr. Thompson was, but he assumed it was Reynold. He decided to gamble. “You saw me here with him earlier, didn’t you? He already know this is happening.”

The guard looked dubious for a moment, and David wasn’t sure his ruse was going to work. He stood his ground and didn’t allow himself to waver.

Finally, the guard shrugged and said, “Sure, whatever.” He grabbed the keys off the desk, then went over to the door of the cell that held Pamela and unlocked it. “Get out,” he said to Pamela.

Pamela looked at David with a look of alarm on her face. “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“Further questioning,” David replied.

Pamela sighed as she sat on the bench and slipped her shoes on. “I’ve already told you everything I know,” she said. “There’s nothing left to tell you.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” David said. “Follow me.”

David left the incarceration room and started making his way through the twisting stone tunnels of Skullcrusher Mountain, looking back every now and then to make sure that Pamela was following him, even though he could hear the tapping of her heels on the stone floor. He kept a careful eye out for Reynold or anyone else wearing an expensive looking suit. These would be, he knew, management, and he wasn’t sure he could handle any questions about where he was taking Pamela.

After several minutes, Pamela rushed forward to walk next to him. “Listen,” she said, “I really need to tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

“What I was trying to tell you earlier, that I’m really sorry for the way things happened between us. I shouldn’t have said the things I said, and…”

David interrupted her. “No, you were right. I was feeling intimidated, and I shouldn’t have been. Rusty helped me figure it out, and I shouldn’t have said the things I said.”

“Who’s Rusty?”

“The giant squid at the marine research place.”

“You talked to a giant squid?”

“Well, technically a colossal squid. And a really huge one too. A lovesick mega colossal squid. Anyway, he helped me figure out that I was wrong, and that I should just get over myself.” He took a deep breath. “I hope we can try again.”

Pamela smiled up at him. “I’d like that.”

David couldn’t help smiling himself. “Thanks.” He really wanted to bend down and kiss her, but he sensed that right now would be the wrong time, not when they were trying to make their way out of Skullcrusher Mountain.

“So where are we going?” Pamela whispered.

“Out of here,” David replied. “I’ve been around a lot, and I think I know the way.”

“We can’t leave yet,” Pamela said urgently. “There are sasquatches incarcerated throughout the facility. We have to figure out a way to get them out.”

David came to a stop and looked down at her. “Why? I mean, not to sound cold-hearted, but once we get out of here and expose everything, the sasquatches will…”

Pamela shook her head. “They have a big role to play in this whole thing.”

David furrowed his brow. “What kind of role?”

“I don’t know. I just know that they do. I have kind of a sixth sense about these things. We have to figure out a way to get them out of here.”

They had come to a stop in one of the endless tunnels of Skullcrusher Mountain, but this one was empty of people. No corporate personnel or black-suited guards wandered this tunnel, and David could see no sign of surveillance cameras or microphones. “Do you have any ideas?” he asked.

“No, of course not. But you’ve seen more of this place than I have. You must have a better idea of how to get us out of here and how to release the sasquatches than I do.”

David thought back to his wanderings through the Skullcrusher Mountain facility. He didn’t recall seeing anything in particular that could help with this situation, but he wasn’t sure what he would be looking for, either. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, David. Think. Please.”

“I don’t… Hang on…” David thought to himself. An image was coming into his mind. A scene from a film. He wasn’t quite sure how he could apply it, but…

He grinned.

“What?” asked Pamela.

“Have you ever seen Star Wars?”

#

The conversation had turned out to be more frustrating than he had originally thought it would be. He’d meant the very first one that had come out, the one that was retitled “Episode IV: A New Hope”, but she’d only seen “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” and she hadn’t liked it. That was reasonable, because it had been an awful film, but she hadn’t even given the original trilogy a chance.

But he’d explained to her the scene where Han Solo and Luke Skywalker had taken Chewbacca to a prison cell on the Death Star claiming that they were doing a prisoner transfer.

“How does that help us?” Pamela asked.

“Well, I’m thinking we could do the same with one of the sasquatches. Or at least I could. You’d have to stay here.”

“I don’t understand. Didn’t you say that they had landed the ship on the Death Star and were trying to do the prisoner transfer thing to get to the princess?”

David nodded. “Well, yes. But I was thinking I could get one of the guards to release one of the sasquatches to me, if I claim it’s a prisoner transfer to a separate holding cell.”

“Hm.” Pamela put her hand to her mouth and pinched her lower lip thoughtfully. “Yeah, that would probably work.” She grinned. “After all, you’ve already convinced them that you’re a member of the Board of Directors, and you’re not even wearing a suit.”

David looked down at himself. It was true; he was wearing an old shirt with a tie he’d borrowed from his father a few years before, and a pair of wrinkled slacks. He wasn’t sure how in the world he’d pulled it off. “I guess you’re right,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just wait here,” David replied. “I’ll be right back.”

#

It was weird, David thought as he made his way back to the incarceration center. There was a time, while he was dating Kristin, that he thought he understood relationships completely. It was, he had thought back then, just a matter of give and take, sacrificing and receiving. But then they’d broken up and suddenly he hadn’t understood anything at all. Relationships were just too complicated.

And now that things were starting to go well with Pamela again, relationships were even more confusing. He would look at one aspect of a relationship — any relationship, not just his relationship with Pamela — only to find that it was even more complicated on a smaller level. Love, he thought, was fractal in nature; no matter what part of it you looked at, you would find that it was more complicated on lower levels, all the way down, and would never really simplify. Not at any level. It was like looking at the Mandelbrot Set; every time you looked at any one of the tiny little extrusions on the edges of the main set, it would resolve into a little copy of the same image, with the same complications, repeating and repeating all the way down.

Relationships, in other words, were complicated.

When he got to the incarceration facility where Pamela had been held, he looked around. Part of him had gotten used to walking the tunnels here without notice, but now that he was planning on releasing the sasquatch he was more self conscious than he had been before.

“Back again?” the guard said to David.

The guard’s question took David by surprise, and he jumped. “What?”

The guard’s eyes narrowed and he glared at David. “Everything all right?”

David quickly took control of his emotions and facial features, trying to look like the same calm, cool member of the Board of Directors that the guard had thought he was earlier. “I’m fine,” he said curtly.

The guard looked taken aback by David’s forceful tone. He cleared his throat. “How can I help you sir?”

David nodded toward the sasquatch that still stood alone in its cell. “Prisoner transfer,” he said. “I’m taking that sasquatch to incarceration facility two.”

“I didn’t hear anything about that,” the guard replied. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Are you going to let me take the prisoner or not?”

“This isn’t quite according to procedure. Usually there are forms to fill out and…”

“You let me take Pamela Smith,” David pointed out.

The guard nodded. “Of course, but this is different. She was just a girl, but this is a sasquatch. I’m going to have to confirm with the Vice President of Security. Just a second.”

David stood his ground, doing his best to look bad-ass, but his heart was racing, and he could feel a bead of seat forming on his temple and starting to roll down his cheek. He wished he could perform some sort of Jedi mind trick on the guy, the equivalent of Obiwan Kenobi’s “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” trick from the very first Star Wars movie. Of course, he had no such tricks that he could pull off. So he decided to rely on chutzpah. “So my earlier credentials with you aren’t sufficient? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course not, sir,” said the guard. “I just meant…”

“That’s enough,” David said. “I’ll just go ahead with transferring the prisoner, and this incident will go unreported. What do you say?”

The guard’s mouth twitched as he pondered this. David could tell that he was trying to decide whether he should call up his own superiors or just let David do as he requested. Finally, he relented. “All right,” he said. “But I’ll need you to sign the prisoner release form.”

David nodded. “Of course. That’s perfectly appropriate.”

The guard filled out a form, then handed it over to David. David looked it over, then nodded curtly. “All in order,” he said, taking the pen the guard handed him, and signing his name to the form. “Now, can we get this moving please? I’m in a hurry.”

The guard grabbed the keys from where they sat next to him on the desk, then went over to the cage where the sasquatch sat forlornly on its bench.

“Come on, gorgeous,” the guard said. “You’re being transfered.” He turned to David. “Of course they don’t speak English. They’re dumb beasts, not much smarter than a gorilla.” He smirked. “Some folks think they’re smarter than that. What do you think?”

Even though David knew the sasquatches were smarter than most people, he shrugged. “Who knows? They’re a nuisance, aren’t they, and that’s what matters.”

The guards laughed. “You got that right.” He opened the cage. “Come on out of there. Ook ook.”

The sasquatch stared at David. David stared back, then, when he was sure the guard wasn’t looking in his direction, he winked. He hoped that the sasquatch would take the signal in the same way that a human would.

The sasquatch grunted, then stood up and walked over to David.

“Aren’t you going to bind him somehow?” David asked.

“Nah,” replied the guard. “They’re pretty docile.”

“Good.” David turned to the sasquatch. “Come on, let’s go.”

#

He led the sasquatch through the network of stone tunnels. Employees and black-clad guards passed the two of them without giving them a second glance, as if it was not unusual at all to see one of the huge creatures wandering the tunnels and rooms of a corporate facility.

When they got to the side tunnel where Pamela waited for them, she stepped out of the shadows and approached them. “You did it!” she said to David.

David nodded. “It wasn’t that hard. I just told the guard that I was transferring the prisoner, and he just let me do it.”

Pamela smiled, then turned to the sasquatch. She spoke to it with a series of grunts and growls, the language that David had come to recognize as sasquatch, even if he couldn’t understand it yet.

After a brief conversation between Pamela and the sasquatch, Pamela turned back to David. “I think they’re set,” she said.

“What are they going to do?”

“They’re going to go up to Chiron Beta Prime and take all of the people up there home. I think that’s really sweet, don’t you?”

David thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s definitely the right thing to do. But what do we do now?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Pamela asked.

David shook his head. “I’m at a loss.”

Pamela smiled. “We go back to Interstitial Interfaces.”

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NOTE: With this chapter, I’ve passed the 50,000 word mark needed to win National Novel-Writing Month. But if you’ve been a loyal reader all this time, don’t worry; I fully intend to keep going with Code Monkey! until I finish the actual story.

The climb up the side of Skullcrusher Mountain far more difficult than David had imagined that it would be. The rocks and the dirt made it nearly impossible to get a solid foothold on the side of the mountain. The dirt kept sliding underneath his feet, and the rocks kept sliding as well. And while the surface near the translation booth was level, or at least somewhat level, the side of the mountain grew steeper and steeper the further he went.

It seemed to David that the opening in the giant stone skull at the top of the mountain was likely not the only entrance into whatever secret lair or headquarters or corporate offices lurked at the heart of the mountain. After all, what kind of corporate president or evil genius or whatever would want to climb up this mountain every time they wanted to get to their lair. Or whatever it was that was inside here.

A rock scuttled free from whatever bit of dead grass had secured it in place and struck David on the forehead. It hadn’t struck him that hard and it didn’t seem like it had drawn blood. But it stung and it made David feel even crankier than he had already been.

There had to be a secret entrance here somewhere. The thugs who had taken Pamela had not simply vanished into thin air, taking her with them. That was simply impossible. Wasn’t it? David was forced to admit that many of his ideas about what was and was not impossible had taken a beating over the past couple of weeks. Still, in this case, he preferred a more mundane explanation. If there was a secret entrance, then there was a chance that he could find it, and wouldn’t have to teleport himself or find a portable translation unit like the one that Pamela had.

He looked back at the translation booth he had ended up in. It looked like one of the larger boulders that littered the side of the mountain here. It was hard to believe that inside that rock was a form of technology that most people couldn’t even imagine outside of science fiction novels and television shows. Reality, he mused, was a lot more complicated than fiction.

It wasn’t just the reality of the technology that had ended up far more complicated than he had imagined it would be; he had come to realize that dealing with people was even more complicated. The role-playing games he played with his friends, like Dungeons and Dragons, as well as the games on his computer, like World of Warcraft, tended to simply things quite a bit. The way fighting and combat was handled in Dungeons and Dragons was necessarily simplistic and nothing at all like how a fight would be conducted in real life. But it had to work that way. Any game was an approximation at best of how the real world worked.

He vaguely remembered that being true when he was in his engineering classes in high school; even the most complicated model of the world was still just an approximation. And it was something he’d learned in his English classes as well: the richest, most complex novel, with the most depth and the most well drawn out characters were just the same, approximations of the world around them.

Had he really ever had an experience with the real world? Or had he spent his days engaged in games and books and shows, experiencing only fragments and approximations of the world around him?

So deeply involved in these ruminations was David that when another rock slid loose from the dirt and struck him on the shoulder, he barely noticed. He simply brushed the shoulder where it had hit him, winced a little bit, and went on.

Real life — with its lovelorn telepathic giant squid, its translation facilities that could teleport you around the world and into outer space in the blink of an eye, and its technologically savvy sasquatches — was far more complicated than even the most complex game that he’d ever played. And when you threw in a variable like Pamela, any resemblance to a game or a model of real life just went totally by the wayside.

There. That was it. Pamela was an undetermined variable, a point of chaos that threw the entire system into disarray. She was the butterfly that flapped its wings in China and caused a hurricane in San Augustin.

She was also, David mused, the inspiration for a number of cheesy metaphors.

Still, he had to admit to himself that the turbulence that Pamela could bring into his life, while scary, was a welcome change from the doldrums he’d found himself in with his job and his life. And he’d just thrown it away because he was intimidated by it; intimidated both by Pamela and by the changes she could bring into his life. Rusty the giant telepathic squid had been exactly right.

Well, David promised himself, when he found her and rescued her — assuming she needed rescuing, of course — he would do his best to smooth things over and bring the turbulence back into his life.

“Hey. Who the hell are you?”

David was startled out of his reverie by the voice from above him. He looked up and saw a small man standing over him. The man was wearing black jeans, black boots, a thick black leather jacket, and a pair of leather gloves. Over the man’s left breast was an embroidered patch depicting what appeared to be a stylized squid inside a double hexagon. Beneath the hexagon was emblazoned, in small letters, “Tindalos Holdings Ltd.” Attached to his shoulder was a radio, similar to the radios that David had seen police officers wearing in the field. “I said, who the hell are you?” he said again.

David clambered unsteadily to his feet. “I’m David,” he said. “David Haskell. I’m a friend of Pamela Smith’s.”

“I don’t know who that is,” the man said, and now David couldn’t help noticing that the black-clad man was carrying a large and deadly-looking pistol holstered on his right hip, and a much deadlier-looking weapon on his back.

“Oh,” David said. “Well, uh… I work for Interstitial Interfaces?” he tried.

The man in black narrowed his eyes. “Okay, I’ve heard of them. But I don’t know you. How did you get here?”

David pointed back at the huge boulder that housed the translator booth here. “From there,” he said.

“Translation,” the man sniffed. “You’d better come with me. There’s some folks who’ll want to meet you.”

“Good,” David said. “I’m hoping to meet them too.”

“Good. Get marching.” The man did not draw either of his weapons, but he rested his hand menacingly on the butt of his pistol. He obviously did not consider David much of a threat. He led David toward a pile of boulders that hid a metal door in the side of the hill.

The man pressed a button on the side of his radio. “Yo, Twinkle Toes, it’s Snake.”

A voice crackled from the radio. “I told you not to call me that.”

The black-clad man — Snake, apparently — grinned at David. “He hates being called Twinkle Toes,” he explained. Then he pressed the button on the side of the radio again. “Say again, Twinkles? I didn’t hear you on account of the prisoner I’ve got out here.”

“Any ID on the prisoner?” said Twinkles.

“I’m looking it over right now.” The man lifted his finger off the button on the radio and turned back to David. “Give me your wallet.”

“I don’t have it. I lost it on Chiron Beta Prime.”

Snake sneered. “Chiron Beta Prime, eh? I don’t believe you. No one gets up there and gets out,” he said.

“I did.”

Snake sneered again.

“And so did Pamela.”

“I still don’t know who that is.”

The radio on Snake’s shoulder crackled again. “Snake, you got that ID yet?”

“That’s a negative,” Snake said into the radio. “Guy says his name’s David Haskell but he’s got no identification on him at all. Says he lost it on Chiron Beta Prime.”

“Impossible,” Twinkle Toes replied. “No one gets off Chiron Beta Prime.”

“This guy says he did. He also says he’s a friend of someone named Pamela Smith. That name ring a bell for you?”

“Negative, Snake. Better bring him in here.”

“I would if you’d open the freakin’ door.”

“On it,” Twinkles said.

With a hydraulic whine, the metal door before David slid to one side, revealing a tunnel behind it that had been carved out of the rock. The floor was was smooth, but the walls and the ceiling were rough. String of incandescent lights had been strung from the ceiling, illuminating the tunnel with a dim yellow light. The air inside was dry and warm, and like the air outside, smelled faintly of sulfur. On the ceiling just inside the door there was a glossy black hemisphere. It reminded David of the closed circuit camera domes he’d seen in some shopping malls, where security didn’t want the customers to know which direction the camera was facing.

“Is this really Skullcrusher Mountain?” he asked Snake.

Snake glared at him again. “How could you get here and not even know that?”

David nodded. He now knew for sure. “And is the mountain really a volcano? I mean, it smells like sulfur here.”

“I don’t know,” Snake said. “I’m not paid to know that sort of thing. Now march.”

David headed into the tunnel.

# # #

They walked for a long time, and David was starting to feel convinced that Skullcrusher Mountain was nothing but a large network of tunnels inside the mountain, with no rooms or chambers or anything like that, even though they passed plenty of doors and even a few other people. Occasionally Snake would talk into his shoulder mounted radio, muttering phrases about the prisoner he was escorting, stating that they were now headed into Tunnel 47-A and so on: phrases that made absolutely no sense to David whatsoever.

Eventually, though, they arrived at another large metal door built into the stone wall. Next to the door was a panel with a series of unlabeled glowing buttons and a speaker grille. Snake pushed one of the buttons and spoke into the grille. “This is Snake, employee ID 411287613BD bringing prisoner David Haskell in for processing.”

“Come on in, Snake,” said a voice from the grille, and David recognized it as the voice of Twinkle Toes.”

The door opened onto a large domed chamber. A series of four small cells, separated from the rest of the chamber by vertical iron bars, lined the walls of the chamber. David looked into the cells and noticed that none of them were occupied, save for one. In that one cell, a single sasquatch sat on a bench and looked at David morosely. The doors on three of the four cells were open.

David stared at the sasquatch. They seemed to be all over the place. It seemed impossible that he had never seen one before just a couple of weeks ago when he and Pamela had ended up in British Columbia for the first time.

A desk lurked near the door that David and Snaked had just entered. Behind the desk hulked a large man in the same black clothing that Snake wore. He had the same Tindalos Holdings logo on the breast of his leather jacket. His blond hair had been cut into a severe flattop, and his head looked positively block-like.

“Hey, Twinkle Toes,” said Snake to the block-like man behind the desk. “Got that prisoner, designated David Haskell.”

The man whose name was obviously not Twinkle Toes stared at Snake, then at David. His brow alone looked thick and muscular enough to break David in half. “Just put him in Cell 3,” he said. “And stop calling me that.”

David looked at the cells and realized just then how much trouble he was in. If he was dropped into the cell and simply left to rot with no hope of ever getting out… Well, he hadn’t though until now that this might be a serious possibility. What if this was as far as he was going to get? What if he would never get a chance to talk to anyone who was in charge? What if he never got to see Pamela again?

He looked over at the sasquatch in the other cell. It looked back at him with its huge, red, soulful eyes, and blinked slowly. There was no way to know how long the sasquatch had been here in captivity. And whether it was ever going to get out.

When Snake pushed David’s back, David stumbled. He hadn’t been expecting that. He recovered his footing just in time to avoid falling over. “Ow,” he said.

“Get in the cell,” Snake ordered.

David turned and looked at him. “How long until I get out?”

“Not my problem,” Snake said. He rested his hand threateningly on the butt of his holstered pistol again. “Now move.”

David nodded. He had no choice. Get into the cell and probably wait forever to get out, or get shot. Neither option seemed attractive, but at least the first gave him some hope of seeing Pamela again.

“All right, all right,” he said.

Snake shoved David again. “Move it. Into that cell right there.” Snake indicated the cell on the end, separated from the cell with the sasquatch by one more empty cell.

David went into the cell before Snake could bruise his shoulder blades seriously.

# # #

It was, in a way, just like his time on Chiron Beta Prime, without the added luxuries of being able to talk to other people or move around or even a job to keep him busy. There was a clock on the wall above the main guard’s desk, and David had learned that his own internal clock was completely wrong; when he had judged that a full hour had gone by, he’d look up at the clock and discover that it had only been fifteen minutes. It was like his high school days, when he’d try to avoid looking at the clock on the classroom wall until he was sure the class was almost over and then discover that the class had only just begun.

Time passed. David tried to talk to the sasquatch, but it was completely uncommunicative. Either that or it had not learned any English at all; David would speak to it, and it would simply look at him with its big soulful eyes. Eventually David gave up.

After four hours had passed, a female guard whose name tag read JANET appeared and gave him a plate full of food: a couple of slices of turkey, some mashed potatoes, and some peas. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said.

David blinked. “Is it Thanksgiving?” he asked. Could he have lost over a week of time somehow?

“Maybe,” Janet said. “Our policy is to keep our guests somewhat disoriented when it comes to dates and times. That clock up there,” she continued, “has a mechanism inside that will slow it down or speed it up at random times, just to keep our guests disoriented. It’s a marvelous system, don’t you think?”

David took the plate of food and the plastic spork she offered. “Thanks,” he said grudgingly.

“My pleasure,” Janet said, smiling. Then she turned back to the cart she had come in with, and gave a large plate full of grass and leaves to the sasquatch. She grunted once at it, and it snorted in response.

Why the hell does everyone know how to speak sasquatch but me? David wondered irritably.

# # #

More time passed, and, thanks to what Janet had told him, David had no idea how much. Twinkle Toes left the desk and was replaced by a medium-sized woman with a severe, stern look on her face that was just as fearsome as the one on Twinkle Toes’s.

Finally Snake returned and approached David’s cell. “Okay,” he said, “it’s time to get going.”

David stood up. The hours of tedium had dulled his senses, including his sense of balance, and he nearly fell over as he stood. His heart thudded in his chest and his stomach churned. Snake could be leading him to meet with the head of Skullcrusher Mountain, or he could be leading him to his death. There was no way to tell. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” Snake replied.

David looked over at the sasquatch one more time. It looked back at him, and winked.

David did a double take. He had never expected to be winked at by a sasquatch, but he decided to take it as a good sign. Maybe the sasquatch had an idea of what was going on around here and knew that David wasn’t about to be taken away to his doom.

Or, at least, David hoped.

Snake led him away, again shoving him in the back painfully as he did so. Reluctantly, David marched along; he moved fast enough to avoid being prodded by Snake’s powerful fist, but he still tried to take his time; he wasn’t anxious to meet whatever fate awaited him at the end of the walk.

Snake shoved him down yet more tunnels and past yet more doors until they came to a very large door marked “Central Command.” This door, like the one to the brig, had a panel next to it, with an array of multi-colored lit buttons and a speaker grill. Snake pressed on one of the buttons lit in blue and leaned in to the speaker grill. “This is Commander Snake,” he said into the grill. He repeated the employee ID he had given last time. “Prison David Haskell is here.”

“Good,” replied a voice from the speaker. The voice was a rich baritone, smooth and calm, with a faint hint of a British accent. “Be so good as to show him in, please.”

Snake tapped several of the lit buttons in the panel in rapid sequence, and then the door slid open to reveal a large domed chamber. The floor, walls, and ceiling in this chamber had been carved smooth. Bright lights had been set into the ceiling, and the room looked as bright as any office that David had been in. Mounted on the walls at regular intervals was a series of flat screen monitors, each showing scenes from various offices. Seated in front of each monitor, in expensive looking Aeron chairs, was a man or woman, wearing formal business attire. Next to each one was a small waste can, and on the desk in front of them was a small plant. There was no sign of any personalization at any of the work stations. Each of them stared at the large monitor above them and typed furiously into keyboards or spoke rapidly on earpiece headphones that they wore.

In the middle of the room, a huge oak desk sat. Seated behind it, in a huge leather chair, a short, reed-thin man sat, like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise. He had black hair that he had slicked back from his face, and a thin mustache. The blackness of the hair and mustache contrasted sharply with his skin, which was shiny and faintly yellow, as if he suffered from jaundice.

“So,” the man behind the oaken chest said, looking at David. “You’re David Haskell. You don’t look like much, do you?”

“I don’t…” David started to say, but his brain froze on him. He had no idea who this person was, or what he wanted from David. He cleared his throat to try again. “I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to cause any trouble,” he said, and he hated himself for sounding like a wimp.

The man behind the oak desk sneered at him. “A lie,” he said, “a patent falsehood. You have done your best all along to sabotage my operations, along with your co-conspirator Pamela Smith.”

“Wait,” David said, “who are you? What is this place? What are you doing here?”

The man’s sneer faltered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” David went on, feeling slightly emboldened by the man’s sudden slip in character, “exactly what I asked. Who exactly are you? What are you doing here?”

“You mean you don’t know?” the man said. “Or are you asking just to be deliberately obstinate? Or are you simply naturally contumacious?”

“You tell me,” David said.

One of the women who had been sitting at her workstation had been listening in on this. Before the man could answer, she stood up and rushed to his side, and whispered into his ear.

The man settled back in his chair, his expression softening. “You’re not an overseer, are you?”

David thought about this for a moment. An overseer? What was that? Some sort of corporate thing, he thought. Maybe this guy wasn’t the head of whatever was going on here; maybe he was just another corporate drone like Nina. Except, of course, Nina seemed like she was more than just another human resources manager. He decided to play along, and hope that he could get out of here before he got into serious trouble. “Yes, in fact, I am,” he said.

“Very well,” the man said. He cleared his throat and stood up. He was even shorter than David had originally thought. “Just to play along with your game. I am Reynold Arneson, and I am, as you can see, Vice President in charge of subsidiary surveillance for the Tindalos Corporation. Operations here are working smoothly, as you can see, and our production rate has been…”

David interrupted him, acting like a frustrated board member who was demanding more truth from the CEO than the CEO was offering. “Yes, yes, of course you are. And what have you found out?”

Reynold’s face paled even further. “Found out? Found out about what?”

“About the troubles that are plaguing the corporation? The issues that each branch has had, and who’s behind them.”

“I’m afraid I still haven’t determined that,” Reynold replied. “You know that this has been on ongoing investigation and…”

David shook his head. “You should know at this point that that’s simply not acceptable.”

Reynold started at David for a few minutes. Finally he shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m confused,” he said. “Are you or are you not with the Board? Because I was told I had ultimate authority over this investigation and that I would not be questioned. At all.”

David felt his blood go cold once again. It was the second time he’d ever felt that sensation. “Just tell me what you’ve found out.”

“Well,” said Reynold, looking uncertain again. “As you know, each subsidiary of the Tindalos Corporation has been experiencing unusual problems which have led to serious difficulties.”

“For example?” David asked.

Reynold cleared his throat. “Well, SHUB Biologicals was attacked by a strange sort of winged creatures that we have not yet been able to identify. Interstitial Interfaces was apparently attacked by zombies, though that one was rapidly covered up, thank gods. And Coulton Robotics… Well, you know what happens when you allow sentience to spontaneously evolve from complex positronic ecosystems.”

David nodded, as if he fully understood what that meant. “Have you found any commonalities between all of the incidents?” he asked.

“Besides the fact that they all happened at Tindalos subsidiaries? No, no commonalities have been identified.”

David put his hand to his chin. “Hm.”

Reynold took a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and used it to wipe sweat from his forehead.”Do you have any other questions, Mr…. um…”

“Jones,” David replied. His palms were sweating and he could feel his heart pounding in his throat. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep this facade up. He was determined to do so as long as possible, though. “David Jones. Call me David.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Jones.”

“And yes, I did have one more question. I was brought into a holding facility when I first arrived here. It felt like a prison to me. Can you tell me what that was for?”

“Oh, we have had some trespassers. We have a serious problem with sasquatches around here, for example. And just this afternoon we apprehended a young woman who arrived in the same translation facility that you showed up in.”

That was obviously Pamela, David thought. “What did you do with her? I didn’t see her in the holding facility I was in.”

“She’s being in the secondary brig. She claims to work for the Tindalos Corporation Temporary Employment Corps, but we haven’t been able to identify her employment.”

David suppressed a smirk. Reynold had said that Pamela’s employment couldn’t be verified; yet at the same time he seemed to take it on faith that David was indeed a member of the Board of Directors. “Take me to the secondary brig,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you like to see the rest of our facility, Mr. Jones?” Reynold asked. “Our surveillance unit, perhaps, or our research and development laboratory?”

David shook his head. “No. I’m sure you’re aware that there are OSHA standards in place for corporate treatment of apprehended individuals.” David had no idea if this were true, but he had worked in Human Resources long enough to learn the language of the trade. And it sounded good. “And we certainly don’t want a lawsuit, do we?”

“No, of course not,” Reynold said, wiping his forehead again. “I’ll escort you to the secondary brig myself. Just follow me.”

# # #

David had taken it on faith that Interstitial Interfaces was an evil corporation. In his experience, most corporations were evil. The evil of a corporation can be tracked as a function of the size of a corporation. And the relationship was not linear; if a corporation doubled in size, then the level of evil quadrupled.

He thought it had something to do with the operating costs of an organization. The larger a corporation, the more it cost to simply maintain its infrastructure, so it needed to become more evil just to get the money to keep itself going. And that evil manifested as price gouging, reducing choices for consumers, treating employees like minions, and so on.

Of course, the relationship wasn’t always true. There were some small companies that were more evil than the largest corporation, and large corporations that actually seemed intent on doing some good in the world and bringing value to their customers. But such examples were the exception, and not the rule.

Now, though, he’d learned that Interstitial Interfaces was not only a large corporation in and of itself, it was a one subsidiary out of at least three of a much larger corporation; a corporation large enough and evil enough to actually have policies of internment for trespassers onto local facilities. And with astonishingly high technology; teleportation, or “translation”, for example, and a deep sea research station which could maintain surface level pressures at benthic levels. Not to mention Chiron Beta Prime, which was probably a Tindalos facility, which only made sense.

Reynold led David through more tunnels; the Skullcrusher Mountain complex seemed like it was nothing but stone tunnels. They passed through several large rooms, each packed with people working at computer terminals or at laboratory benches. David found it difficult to comprehend that there were so many people working here in the Skullcrusher Mountain facility. And each of them looked busy and intent on their work. None of them looked bored or were standing around at a water cooler or anything like that.

Eventually, Reynold led David to a closed metal door, much like the one that Snake had led him to, the one that entered into what Reynold had called the “holding facility”. Reynold spoke into the speaker grille just as Snake had, then pressed a series of glowing buttons. The door slid open, and Reynold stepped through, and David followed.

This holding facility was just like the one that David had found himself in just after his arrival, with the desk in the center and a series of barred cells lining the walls. Over the desk was a clock, which David assumed was much like the clock in the first holding facility, in that it probably slowed down and sped up at random in order to disorient the people being held in the facility.

He looked around the cells. There were two sasquatches in this facility already. And in the cell between the two of them, seated on the small bench, was Pamela.

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The weekend passed without incident. It passed without anything happening at all, really. David spent the entire weekend holed up in his apartment playing games and watching movies, leaving only to pick up the fast food meals that he did not have delivered. The phone rang once, and he jumped at it hoping it was Pamela, but it wasn’t. It was only his mother, calling to finalize plans for Thanksgiving. He agreed desultorily to show up at his parents’ house late Wednesday to hang out with the family. He hadn’t treated his mother fair, he knew. He loved his family. But none of them were Pamela. And none of them were even like Pamela. Because of the way his family interacted with the family of his ex-girlfriend, she — his ex-girlfriend, that is — would probably be there as well.

He wondered about Pamela’s family. She’d never mentioned them. What were her parents like? What did they do? What kinds of Thanksgiving traditions did they have?

He shoved the thoughts out of his mind. Not thinking about her was the best thing he could do right now.

Other than that one phone call from his mother, David ignored instant messages sent to him. He went on a few lone quests in World of Warcraft, ignoring his guild when they pleaded for his help with their raids. He ignored his email and Facebook messages and blogs, and hoped for no distractions at all.

On Monday morning he thought about calling in sick, but decided it wouldn’t be a good idea, given that he had just skipped out on over a week of work without calling in sick or taking vacation time or anything. The missing time was going to eat into his paycheck as it was, and he couldn’t really afford it.

He took a reluctant shower, shaved half-heartedly, and dressed in clothes that probably should have been washed the week before. He drove to work, uninterested in riding his bicycle even on a clear and cool November morning like this.

The offices of Interstitial Interfaces looked the same to him as they had always done before. It wasn’t as though he were expecting them to look different, but it felt like something fundamental in the building had changed.

Of course, it wasn’t the building. It was his relationship with it, and with Pamela.

He went through the front door of the building, and hesitated. The receptionist’s desk was there, of course, and Pamela was standing behind it, looking over Paul’s shoulder as he updated some software or installed a new firewall or whatever it was that Paul did to the Windows computers around here. Pamela was dressed in a simple green dress with sleeves that went about halfway down her upper arms and a skirt that ended a few modest inches above her knees. The dress showed her figure perfectly, and with her short dark hair she looked absolutely stunning. Looking at the way she leaned over Paul, David felt an irrational wave of jealousy.

Pamela looked up at David as he entered the lobby. “Good morning, David,” she said. “Did you have a good weekend?”

David nodded. For a moment he was unable to speak. It was almost as though Pamela were taunting him with the outfit she wore, making him realize what he had chosen to give up. It didn’t make sense, though; Pamela had not struck him as the kind of person who would do that kind of thing.

Paul looked up from Pamela’s computer, winked, and grinned. “Heya David. Great morning so far, huh?”

David shrugged. “I’ll be at my desk,” he announced.

A stack of bug reports sat on his desk, waiting for his attention. Several build tests had failed overnight, and, as usual, the cuprit was his own code. He sighed, set his backpack on the floor and hung his coat over the hook on the wall of his cubicle, and sat down.

There weren’t that many bug reports, only a dozen or so. And they were all easy fixes, too, as far as he could tell. But it was funny that there were files here he hadn’t even touched for over a week that were still failing; how was it that no one had even looked at them, he wondered. They obviously weren’t important parts of the code, just small methods that were hardly ever called. The login screen had been his most visible project, and he had managed to fix that one up — with Paul’s help — some time ago.

He knew what was going on. He was being given small assignments, projects which could easily be completed by any of the more senior programmers on the staff, but which they simply didn’t have the time for because they weren’t priorities. These were projects that would have a negligible impact on the system as a whole, if they had any impact at all.

Sighing, he switched his computer on and loaded up his development studio software.

There was a footstep behind him. David swung around quickly, hoping it was Pamela, but it wasn’t. It was just Nina. He tried not to act too disappointed.

“David,” Nina said, “I need to speak to you.”

The first thing that David thought was, Not again. It seemed like Nina was asking for a meeting with him every single day.

He suppressed a sigh. “Right now? I’ve got a lot of bugs that I’m working on.”

“They’ll keep. Let’s go.”

David stood up and followed Nina from his cubicle to her office. There was a part of him which thought that, as often as he had gone there, he would be over the nervousness by now, but his hands were still sweating and his heart was still pounding. Perhaps this would be it, the final meeting with her, the meeting where she would tell him that he was finally fired, that his skills were just not up to par and that he had to get going and find a new career.

When he got to her office, though, he was surprised to see Pamela sitting in one of the leather chairs in front of Nina’s desk.

“Thanks for coming in, David,” Nina said. “Take a seat,” Nina added, gesturing toward the unoccupied leather seat next to Pamela’s. She went behind her desk and sat down in her own chair.

For a long moment Nina simply stared at the two of them, her eyes darting back and forth from David to Pamela and back again.

“What is this about, Ms. aniN?” asked Pamela.

“Just a moment,” Nina said. “I’m just collecting my thoughts.”

For several minutes, none of the three of them said anything. David looked over at Pamela, but she was very pointedly looking away from him.

“Is this about Pamela and me?” David asked.

Nina nodded. “In a manner of speaking.”

“There’s no relationship,” Pamela said. “Whatever relationship we might have had we ended on Friday night.”

Nina raised one hand. “That’s not important to us now.” She leaned forward. “I just have a single question that I need to ask the two of you.”

David furrowed his brow. “What’s that?”

Nina stood up and put her hands on her desk, then leaned over. Even though she was shorter even than Pamela, she looked intimidating. She looked back and forth and both Pamela and David in turn, then said, “Who do you work for?”

David was taken aback. But before he could answer the question, Pamela spoke up. “I don’t understand the question. I work for Tindalos. And they put me to work for you.”

Nina turned to David. David blinked and said, “I work for Interstitial Interfaces.”

“No,” Nina said to both of them. “There’s more going on than you’re telling me.”

Pamela looked over at David, looking directly into his eyes for the first time since Friday night. Her face was a mask of confusion.

David simply shrugged. He was as confused by the situation as Pamela apparently was.

Nina sat back down. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” she said, “but I intend to find out. What should we do with you until you feel inclined to talk, I wonder?”

What Nina was saying sounded ominous to David. “I swear,” he said, “there’s nothing going on. Neither of us are doing anything that you need to worry about. Just let us go back and do our jobs.”

“David’s right,” Pamela said. “Really, I’m just a temp.”

“A temp who’s been sent here to spy on me,” Nina said.

David looked over at Pamela, then back at Nina. He wasn’t sure, but it seemed pretty likely that Nina had gone over the deep end. Why would Pam want to spy on Nina? Why would Tindalos want to spy on the manager of one of its own subsidiaries?

Besides, that wasn’t the mission that Pamela had said she was on. She was supposedly working to find out what was causing the problems that the other subsidiaries had. And Nina’s office had been attacked by a zombie so obviously she was having troubles too, even if the zombie attack had been covered up effectively.

Unless, of course, they thought that Nina was the one causing the problems, and had staged the zombie attack herself.

But wouldn’t Pamela have told him if she were spying on Nina like that? No, not necessarily, David realized. Pamela had never been entirely clear on what her mission was. He wanted to think that Pamela would have been entirely truthful with him, given what they had been through together, but they hadn’t really had much of a chance, had they?

He winced when he remembered the conversation from Friday night.

Nina snapped her fingers. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” she announced.

“What are you…” David started to say, but before he could finish, panels in the walls on either side of the room slid open. Two droids, each resembling the T-1000 that had attacked Pamela and David in her apartment, stepped out.

“No, you can’t!” Pamela shouted, standing up. “This is uncalled…” But before she was finished, she had vanished. There was a faint popping noise, and a cloud of shimmering dust hovered in the air where she had just stood.

So that’s what a translation looks like from outside, David thought wildly to himself.

“Your turn,” Nina said to David.

David blinked, and then the world was gone from around him.

# # #

He was back in the marine research station. The crystalline dome behind was behind him, and before him was the glass tube that he’d been inside before. Lights on the outside of the tube illuminated the benthic seascape beyond. David saw plenty of odd vegetation, tubs and leaves that reached from the ground to the feeble light that filtered down from above. There was a structure nearby that resembled a gigantic rib cage, and David thought it might be the skeleton of a dead whale.

At least, he thought, he’d been here before, so it was familiar.

He went into the dome and looked at the tiny little laptop computer that rested on the pedestal. Just looking at it he wasn’t able to figure it out. Wires and cables led out of the sides of the little laptop. A thin power cord draped over the edge of the pedestal and terminated in a wall socket on the side. The presence of such a mundane feature as a wall socket gave David pause. He stared at it and wondered what the power source was. Maybe there was a generator underneath the dome or the research station, or perhaps the station got its power from the motion of the underwater currents. Or maybe not; David recalled hearing that the waters so far were still.

Which made David wonder for a moment about pressure. The first time he’d been down here he’d suffered no effects from deep sea pressure, and certainly didn’t have to go through any sort of decompression process when he emerged into San Augustin. And he felt no different this time either.

He decided there were more important things to think about.

The tiny laptop computer had four USB ports, and wires had been plugged into each one. One of them, in fact, had been fitted with a four port USB hub, and cables of a full spectrum of cables separated from it. The cords and wires, with the exception of the power cord, were all gathered together by a series of cable ties, and had been threaded into a large hole in the surface of the pedestal, just next to the laptop itself.

David stared at it, and wondered what the hell to do next.

Well, he had to start somewhere, and he had to figure out what to do, fast. Who knew where Nina’s droids had taken Pamela. She may have even been taken back to Chiron Beta Prime, and who knew what the evil robot Steve would do to her there this time around.

He lifted the screen of the laptop. It was completely black. A green light on the front of the device flashed lazily, and David decided it must have been put into hibernate mode upon being shut down the last time someone had used it. Had anyone used it since Pamela and himself? There was no way of knowing.

He located the power switch on the computer, a silver rectangle with the universal symbol for on/off engraved into it. He pressed the button and was pleased to see the laptop’s screen light up, accompanied by a cheerful little electronic tone. The black screen was replaced by a simple blue screen with a simple white box in the center, and a single word above it, written in a white sans serif font:

USERNAME?

He hesitated. What in the world was Pamela’s username? Would her username still work if she had gotten into trouble with Nina?

Well, he thought, hopefully her username was something very simple. He tried to recall her last name and entered that into the screen: SMITH. The keyboard was tiny, and his fingers consistently hit the wrong keys. But if he could get used to the keyboard, though, he might want to get one of these thiny things for himself.

USER NOT RECOGNIZED, the computer responded.

PSMITH, he entered.

USER NOT RECOGNIZED.

PAMELA.SMITH

USER NOT RECOGNIZED.

David cursed and lifted his hand to give the computer a slap on the side, just as he had done thousands of times out of frustration on his own computer. In this case, though, the tiny laptop looked so small and fragile, like an egg, that he couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing.

“TRY HER FIRST NAME,” a voice said.

David jumped. He should have expected the voice of the colossal squid in his head, he supposed. But he hadn’t really gotten used to it the first time. “What?” he said in reply. He looked through the glass of the research station and found himself once again facing the giant squid’s huge yellow eye.

“PAMELA’S FIRST NAME,” the squid repeated. “THEY’RE NOT VERY IMAGINATIVE.”

“Huh.” David looked down at the computer. He wondered if there was a security protocol which would lock the computer up if unrecognized usernames were entered a certain number of times in a row. It was something he would have done.

Well, it was worth a shot.

PAMELA, he typed in.

ENTER PASSWORD, replied the computer.

“Hey, that did it!” he said to the squid. “I wouldn’t have set up a username so simple. It seems really insecure.”

“I FIGURED IT WOULD WORK. AS I SAID, THEY’RE JUST NOT VERY IMAGINATIVE.”

“Who’s not imaginative?” David asked.

“THE PEOPLE AT TINDALOS CORPORATION. WHO DO YOU THINK PUT THIS RESEARCH STATION DOWN HERE?”

“I guess I thought it was Interstitial Interfaces.”

“THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. TINDALOS IS THE PARENT CORPORATION.”

David looked down at the screen. PASSWORD, it said. The cursor blinked at him malevolently. “So what do you think the password is?”

“I HAVE NO IDEA.”

“Hm,” David said. He was not disappointed in the giant squid. After all, it could not be expected to know everything. In fact, that the squid knew so much about Tindalos and computers seemed rather surprising to him. He’d have to ask about that.

In the meantime, though, he tried to remember what he knew about Pamela, since knowing a person usually gave you an insight into what their password might be. He knew that despite all of her other skills she was not computer savvy in the slightest.

PASSWORD, he typed.

ACCESS DENIED, the computer responded.

Well, he figured that was too much to hope for.

PAMELA2, he typed.

ACCESS DENIED.

1SMITH2

ACCESS DENIED.

“Dammit.”

David looked down at the keyboard and tried to think of what else he knew about Pamela. It was surprisingly little, now that he thought about it. They’d spent so much time together on Chiron Beta Prime, but their conversations there had been so banal and dull because of the constant worry about bugging and surveillance by the robots. He knew that she had a favorite pet cat who was living with her parents right now because her apartment didn’t allow pets, and that she went and visited just about every day after work. What was that cat’s name?

Oh, right.

TANGERINE, he entered.

The screen did not even flash “Access granted”. The only thing that happened was that the screen flashed white for a moment, and then suddenly the screen was filled with icons and documents. David was surprised to discover that the tiny little laptop was running a version of a Linux desktop that he recognized.

“That was pretty simple,” he told the giant squid. “It was her pet cat.”

“WELL, THAT CERTAINLY MAKES SENSE. PAMELA HAS NEVER STRUCK ME AS PARTICULARLY INTELLIGENT.”

“Hey,” David said. “Take that back. Pamela’s one of the smartest people I know.”

“SHE OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT COMPUTER SECURITY.”

“And I suppose you do?”

“A BIT. I KNOW YOU SHOULDN’T CHOOSE SUCH AN EASILY GUESSED PASSWORD.”

David stared right at the squid’s giant yellow eye. “Tell me, uh… say, do you have a name?”

“OF COURSE I DO.”

“What is it?”

“DON’T LAUGH.”

“I can’t promise anything.” David expected the giant squid’s name to be something that human beings would not be able to pronounce at all, something with lots of sibilants and squishy sounding consonants.

He was taken by surprise.

“MY NAME’S RUSTY,” the giant squid said.

David raised an eyebrow at that. “Rusty? Your name’s really Rusty?”

“I SAID DON’T LAUGH.”

“I’m not laughing. Anyway, tell me. How often do you actually log in to a computer?”

Rusty the giant squid was silent for a few moments. David took advantage of the silence to scrutinize the icons and documents on the desktop. Nothing immediately jumped out at him as a tool that would translate him from one location in space and time to another. It had to be custom written software, of course. and it seemed so odd to him that the translation device would be hooked up to such a fragile looking little computer.

Of course, it was entirely proper that the system would be running Linux. Windows would be entirely inappropriate for this kind of application.

“OKAY, SO I HAVEN’T EVER ACTUALLY USED A COMPUTER,” Rusty said.

“So how do you know so much?”

“I PICK UP A LOT SPENDING TIME DOWN HERE. THERE REALLY ISN’T MUCH TO DO EXCEPT LISTEN IN WHEN PEOPLE SHOW UP HERE IN THE RESEACH STATION. SO I JUST LISTEN AND PAY ATTENTION.”

“And you talk a lot,” David said, beginning to feel frustrated both with the squid’s loquaciousness and with the mess that was Pamela’s desktop configuration.

“NOT USUALLY. IT’S JUST THAT YOU’RE THE FIRST PERSON WHO HAS EVER REALLY LISTENED TO ME.”

“Oh,” David said. He looked over the icons on the desktop. There was one labeled “Translation Activation”, and he clicked on it. Unfortunately the only thing that happened was that the screen flickered, and then remained exactly the same as it was.

“IT’S NOT EASY BEING A MEGA-COLOSSAL SQUID, YOU KNOW,” Rusty said. “I’M THE ONLY SUPER-INTELLIGENT MOLLUSC IN THE OCEAN. AT LEAST IN THIS PART OF IT.”

David sighed. He clicked on the main menu button and waited for the system’s main menu to appear. He scrolled through the various options but did not find anything that seemed useful.

“BY THE WAY, HOW ARE THINGS GOING WITH PAMELA?” Rusty asked.

“Oh, we broke up,” David said. “Dammit, why is she so messy with her icons?”

“THAT WAS STUPID. WHY DID YOU BREAK UP?”

“It’s a long story,” David replied.

“WE’VE GOT TIME,” said Rusty.

David bit his lip. “Well. Basically, she’s got a lot going on in her life, you know?”

“SO SHE BROKE UP WITH YOU.”

“No, that’s not what happened,” David said. “I just knew she wouldn’t be able to put up with me. I was cramping her style, you know?”

“YOU BROKE UP WITH HER, THEN?” Rusty said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“YOUR REASONING IS FLAWED,” Rusty said. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘CRAMPING HER STYLE’, BUT IT DOES NOT SOUND AS THOUGH BREAKING UP WITH HER WAS HER CHOICE.”

David shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”

“DID YOU REALLY WISH TO BREAK UP WITH HER?”

“Well, no, not really.”

“THEN YOU ARE A FOOL. EVEN I KNOW THAT.”

David grew angry at that. “Yeah? I seem to remember you were afraid to do anything about the woman you loved.”

“ACTUALLY, OUR LAST CONVERSATION EMBOLDENED ME. I WENT TO THE SURFACE AND ATTEMPTED TO COMMUNICATE WITH AMELIA.”

“Oh.” David felt ashamed of himself for teasing Rusty. And, actually, for breaking up with Pamela. Maybe Rusty was right. Maybe he really was an idiot and a fool. He remembered the mental gymnastics he had gone through to justify the breakup to himself.

Perhaps Pamela was right. Maybe he really did feel like he had to be the one having the adventures instead of sitting on the sidelines while she did the important things, even if she discounted her own importance by saying that she was “just a temp”.

Maybe, in fact, he actually felt threatened by Pamela. Maybe that was why he’d actually broken up with his old girlfriend Kristin as well. She was fun and sweet, but she was devastatingly intelligent as well, and knew far more about computers than he did. Maybe he had felt intimidated by her intelligence and her skills. When he’d broken up with her, he’d used similar logic to that he’d used on Pamela.

Yep. He was definitely a fool. And an idiot as well.

“You’re right,” he said to Rusty. “I am a fool.”

“I TOLD YOU SO.”

David’s intention to save Pamela grew stronger. He wanted to find her again, to apologize and get back together with her. Not that the two of them had really been together in the first place, but there was definitely potential there, potential that he thought he ought to explore, even if she did intimidate him. That was just something he had to deal with himself.

Once again, he returned to the tiny computer in front of him. He examined the cluttered desktop again and tried once again to make sense of it. There were so many icons on the desktop that many of them overlapped.

“YOU KNOW, YOU DON’T HAVE TO USE THE TRANSLATOR INTERFACE.”

“I don’t? How do I get out of here then?”

“YOU JUST SWIM TO THE SURFACE.”

“I can’t do that,” David said. “The pressure would kill me.”

“PRESSURE? WHAT PRESSURE?”

David tried to figure out how to explain the concept of atmospheric pressure to a creature that lived its life in the deepest levels of the ocean. He decided it wasn’t possible, so he just didn’t say anything and went back to the computer screen.

“Tindalos Corp Translation Facility” read an icon that he had just uncovered from what looked like a personal document entitled “Thanksgiving Groceries”. He clicked on the grocery list and dragged it to one side, then double clicked on the Translation Facility icon. To his surprise, a window opened on the screen and the lights above the pedestal glowed into life.

“HEY, LOOKS LIKE YOU DID IT,” said Rusty.

“I did something,” David replied. “Who knows if I did the right thing.”

On the screen there was a single drop-down menu. He clicked on it, and it displayed what looked like a list of locations where translation facilities were located. Instead of location by name, though, they were listed by geographic coordinates, save for the ones entitled MARIANAS TRENCH RESEARCH STATION and CHIRON BETA PRIME. He guessed that he was currently at the former of the two.

He wished again that he still had his phone and its GPS capability; with that tool he would have been able to translate the coordinates on the drop-down menu with actual locations. And there were at least two dozen locations.

Of course, there probably wouldn’t have been a signal down here, unless someone had thought to put up a cell tower in the trench. That was entirely possible, he mused, given the technology levels he’d seen so far in the Tindalos Corporation. And he found himself surprised at how easily he was coming to accept the sorts of things he was encountering. Even his conversation with Rusty had seemed relatively normal.

Maybe the computer had a GPS program installed, he thought, or Google Earth, something that would let him find a location on the earth based on coordinates. He went through the menu again, but found nothing that looked useful in that regard.

Okay, he thought. Maybe he should just select a location at random and hope for the best. As long as he didn’t select Chiron Beta Prime, he should be good. Or at least alive. Hopefully.

He selected the first location on the list, and clicked on the button that said ACTIVATE, then waited.

The lights above him flickered, then glowed brighter. At least something was happening. Then he felt the usual sense of disorientation and then the world flickered around him.

When he opened the door of the translation booth the first time after the translation, a blast of biting cold air blew in. He looked outside and saw a world of sparkling whiteness, as if the entire world had been covered in ice. At least the sun was out, and as large and bright as it should be, so he was sure he was still on Earth. He just had no idea where.

One thing he was sure of, though, was that his clothes were not at all suited for this weather. His thin slacks and dress shirt were not suited for any environment outside of the office building. And Pamela would be even worse off in the clothes she was wearing.

He looked around, braving the cold enough to peer at the ice outside to see if he could see any footprints, either Pamela’s or someone else’s. There were none. But that didn’t mean this was the place that she had ended up.

He rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them up. Think, he told himself. The droid had translated her somewhere, but it must have been somewhere where she would be able to survive, at least. Nina had hinted that she wanted both of them alive, just not together. He had no idea why.

This was all so far beyond his experience. He had never dealt with this sort of thing in his life. Well, not in real life at least. Sure there were villains in all of the games he played and in the comics and novels he read, but they all acted rationally and clearly and were also easy to spot. Nina was confusing, and David had no idea who she worked for, if anyone, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do next.

He stepped back into the translation booth and shut the door. With the wind gone, the booth warmed up immediately.

This booth had the same set up as the other one: the same pedestal, the same tiny laptop computer on top of it. David looked at the laptop, which was open, and saw that Pamela’s account was still logged in. That’s convenient, he thought.

He clicked on the drop-down box again and pulled up the next set of coordinates. They were meaningless to him, of course, but he shrugged and clicked the ACTIVATE icon on the screen. Again the lights above flashed and went dim, and once more the world flickered around him. Again, the inside of the translation booth did not seem to change.

He opened the door again. This time the door opened onto a rugged mountainside, covered with dirt and rocks and dead grass. The air was warm here, and smelled vaguely of sulfur. When he looked up to the summit of the mountain, he saw a huge boulder at the top that had been carved into the shape of a giant human skull.

David felt his blood run cold. It was an expression he’d heard plenty of times, but he’d never experienced it. But looking up at the giant carved skull, that’s exactly what he felt.

This is not the place for me, he thought, and turned to duck back into the translation booth. But just before he did, he glanced at the ground and saw footprints.

They were odd prints; a solid triangular shape with a single point behind them. They were strange prints, and David could not imagine what sort of creature could have made them. He followed them for a few yards; and then they stopped and were replaced by small human footprints.

Ah, he thought. Pamela. She had been translated here, had stepped out of the booth in her high heeled shoes, had walked along for a little ways, then taken off her shoes. Typical Pamela.

Pamela’s footprints continued on for a few more yards, and then stopped. Where they stopped, two other sets of footprints, treaded and huge, like huge men in thick boots, took over.

Which made it definite. He’d found where Pamela had been translated to. She’d been sent here and then taken by two thugs. Picked up and taken inside Skullcrusher Mountain.

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They were back in San Augustin. David recognized the interior of the statue where they had emerged before, the equestrian statue with. Beside him Ingrid was stooped over; and beside her, Pamela looked positively minuscule.

“We’re back,” he announced.

Pamela nodded. “Yes we are.”

“What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t know what’s going on. Obviously something sinister is happening, don’t you think?”

David nodded. “Yeah. Steve the robot said we were learning too much. And your domestic robot teleported us to Chiron Beta Prime.”

“Well, I for one would like to change out of these awful clothes.”

“Uh.. Pamela, I don’t think we can go back to your apartment. Not yet.”

“Oh. Yeah. Todd. He’d probably translate us away again, wouldn’t he?” She sighed. “Can we go back to your place? I think we need to regroup or something.”

“Yeah.” David furrowed his brow. “You know, I don’t even know what day it is.”

“Neither do I.”

“Can you ask Ingrid?”

“Oh, she won’t know. Sasquatches don’t have the same sense of time that we do. We’d better find a calendar or a clock or something. Come on, let’s go.”

Pamela took David by the hand and led him out of the base of the statue.

It was dark outside, and the streets of San Augustin were empty. David guessed it was probably early morning, maybe around two or three o’ clock. There were no clock towers in this part of the city, not even on any of the banks, so it was impossible to say for sure.

Pamela looked up at the sky. “Looks like it’s around four in the morning,” she said.

“How can you tell?” David asked.

“It’s simple. Just look up at the stars.” She grinned at him. “They’re still pretty good at telling the time, even after a few thousand years. They don’t move much, you know.”

“Oh.” David looked up at the sky himself, but he had no idea how to tell time by the sky. He was pretty good at telling when it was dawn or dusk, and roughly about noon at certain times of the year, but telling time by the stars was simply not something he could do.

“Damn, they still have our cell phones, don’t they?” Pamela said. She sighed. “I wish we’d been able to grab them before we left.

“Well, it was kind of a last minute thing,” David replied. He turned back to Ingrid. “Thank you, by the way,” he said to her. “We really appreciate it.”

Ingrid made a grunting noise and stared at him with a confused look on her face.

Pamela grunted at Ingrid, and then the sasquatch grinned. She growled back at Pamela, made a couple of snorting noises. Then the door of the statue base closed.

David turned to Pamela. “You just keep impressing me,” he said.

She grinned up at him. “I hope I can keep impressing you,” she replied. “I like you a lot, you know. I think…” She blushed. “I think we might really have a future together.”

David couldn’t help grinning at her. “Okay. So. What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know either. I would think that going to a motel or something would be the best bet. There probably wouldn’t be any evil robots or anything there.”

“Good, let’s do that.”

“Except I don’t have my wallet with me. They took it from me on the asteroid. And I don’t have any cash with me. Do you?”

Pamela shook her head. “They took my purse, too.”

The two of them looked up and down the street. David tried desperately to think of some sort of plan. The office would be closed, and probably bugged as well by the same forces that had deployed Todd to Pamela’s place. His parents were in Kentucky — they had moved there for some reason that had escaped David entirely — so he and Pamela could not go there for safety. And sleeping here on the streets was simply not an option.

“You want to risk going to my place?” he asked at length.

“You know,” Pamela replied, “that might actually be safe. The T-1000 won’t be there. And it probably isn’t bugged or anything. I doubt that they figured out we were together in any way before we were translated to Chiron Beta Prime, and after that they probably wouldn’t waste the resources.”

David nodded. “That makes sense.”

“How far is it to your place?”

David grimaced. “Er. About four miles from here, I think.”

“Well then. I guess we’d better start walking.”

# # #

It took them nearly two hours to walk back to David’s apartment from downtown San Augustin. The one thing that David ended up appreciating from their time at Chiron Beta Prime was the shoes; they ended up being comfortable and well-suited for walking long distances even if there wasn’t much space for walking inside the prison asteroid.

They walked in silence most of the way, David’s head swimming with everything that had happened over the past few days, or however long it had been: the sasquatch, the giant squid, the evil robots, the time on board Chiron Beta Prime… and, of course, the kiss.

He wondered what Pamela was thinking, and what kind of mood she was in. Her eyes were downcast most of the way, and even though she was walking quickly she gave the impression that she was plodding along, moodily.

“Are you doing okay?” he asked her as they arrived at the front door of his apartment.

She nodded. “It’s been pretty crazy, you know? I think I’m still just taking it all in.”

“Yeah, me too. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to think about all this stuff, or what I’m supposed to do about it.” He stopped directly in front of his apartment door. “Dammit,” he muttered.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have my keys. The robots took them as well.”

“You don’t have a spare hidden around somewhere? I have a hide-a-key rock in front of my apartment, just in case of something like this.”

David shook his head. “No, I never got around to that. I just worried about people finding the key and breaking in.”

“So how do we get inside?”

“Maybe ask the manager?” David said. “Though I don’t think she’ll be in her office. Not for another couple of hours at least.”

“Can you maybe climb in through one of the windows?”

“No. There’s a window in the bathroom that’s got a broken lock, but I’m way too big to fit through it.”

“Well, maybe I could try. I’m a lot smaller than you.”

David hesitated. She probably was small enough to fit through that window, and if he gave her a boost she should have no problem reaching it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the last time he’d been in his apartment, it had been cluttered, with dirty clothes on the floor of his bedroom and dirty dishes in the living room and kitchen. And now he worried that the dirty dishes might have become intolerably moldy, might even have living organisms on them, some of them demanding rights.

Still, there was no other way.

“Okay,” he said. “But I’ll have to give you a boost up to the window.”

“That’s okay,” Pamela said, “I don’t mind at all.”

David led Pamela around the corner of the building. They reached the bathroom window, and David was gratified to see that it was still slightly ajar, though no wider than before.

“Right here,” he said.

Pamela nodded, and David knelt down and made a step with his hands. Pamela stepped gracefully into his hands, and he lifted her up as she grabbed the edge of the windowsill. She pulled at the slightly ajar window, until it was wide enough to let her through.

She pulled herself up through the window; to David it didn’t look easy, but she managed it with grace and dexterity. Once she was all the way through she leaned out the window. “I’m in,” she called down to him. “I’m going to go around to the front door now.”

“Great,” David said.

“Boy, it’s really filthy in here. When was the last time you cleaned your bathroom, David?”

David shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago.” Which was a lie, of course. It had been more like a couple of months. Living alone with no romantic prospects and no friends who came over regularly caused him to feel less inclined toward cleaning the apartment on a regular basis.

Of course if this thing between him and Pamela became serious, then he’d have to start cleaning more seriously, more often. That would require some changes in his habits, but he could probably do that pretty easily. If Pamela came over on a regular basis, then perhaps she could even help.

“Okay,” Pamela called. She sounded like she was grinning. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”

David went around to the front of his apartment and waited by the front door. It was cold out, which wasn’t unusual considering that it was November, or so he assumed. And though the shoes that had been given to him on Chiron Beta Prime were comfortable and good for walking long distances, the clothes themselves were not good for keeping out the cold. He shivered inside his shirt and hoped Pamela would hurry up.

After a few minutes there was a rattling at the front door, and the door opened. Pamela stood just inside, smiling. “Good news,” she said. “No evil robots or killer androids in your apartment.”

“Well, that’s definitely good to know,” David replied. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

“Do you think we should go to work in the morning?” Pamela asked.

David nodded. “Yeah, I think we should. Um. Unless it’s the weekend.” He went over to his computer and jiggled the mouse to bring the monitor back to life. He was pleased to see that it was still running, though he hoped it hadn’t been hacked into since he’d been gone.

“It’s Friday,” he announced, checking the date and time at the upper right corner of his screen. “November twentieth.”

“Wow,” Pamela said. “We’ve only been gone a week.”

“I thought it was a lot longer.”

David checked the time. “And it’s about five o’ clock in the morning. Yikes. We can probably get a couple of hours of sleep before we go into the office, I think.”

Pamela nodded, and looked around the room. “Okay, I can sleep on the couch. Tomorrow — I mean later today I guess — we need to see if we can find some cash and then figure out what to do next.”

“Well, you can sleep on the bed,” David said. “I’ll go ahead and sleep on the couch.”

Pamela looked over at the bed, at the unmade sheets and tossed about cover. “No offense, David, but I think I’ll sleep on the sofa. I’m sure you’re nice and hygienic, but…” She left the implication hanging in the air.

David was actually glad about that. After a week — only a week! — of sleeping on the floor of their quarters on Chiron Beta Prime, he was looking forward to sleeping in his own bed again. And there had certainly been times when he’d thought he wouldn’t ever see his bed again. “Okay,” he said. “But at least I know I have a spare blanket for you.”

“That would be really nice.”

David dug around in his closet, and found a bed set that his parents had given him for his birthday last year. It contained a full set of sheets, a blanket, and a comforter. He unzipped the plastic package, removed the comforter and shook it out. It still had the new clothing smell to it, but he figured it would do.

When he got back to the living room, Pamela had already fallen asleep on the couch. She looked small and vulnerable there, and he didn’t have the heart to disturb her. He covered her with the comforter, and she sighed contentedly and pulled it up to her shoulder. David brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, and smiled at her. She really was beautiful. David was simply shocked that she seemed to find him attractive at all.

He really wasn’t sure he was worth it. She was beautiful and sexy and had a lovely face. She moved gracefully and with elegance; everything about her was perfect, he thought.

She really didn’t deserve him.

Sighing, he went back to his bed, determined to think over the events of the past two weeks and try to make some sort of sense of them. Instead, he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

# # #

“You want to come back?”

David nodded, and did his best to keep from yawning; under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be appropriate to yawn in front of Nina. “Yes, I’d appreciate it.”

“You’ve been gone for over a week. We had just assumed you were abandoning the job. We’ve already begun the process of hiring a replacement.”

“Well, I didn’t abandon the job. But I’m sorry I was gone.”

Nina stared at him, a look of severe disapproval on her face. “And you were with Pamela the entire time, were you not?”

David’s heart skipped a beat. “How did you know that?”

“It is obvious, is it not? The two of you were gone the same amount of time. The last time you were seen, you were in the company of each other. And you both return on the same day, hoping to get your old jobs back.”

David had no idea what to say in response to that. He cleared his throat. “I guess so,” he said at last.

“Just as I thought.” Nina looked down at the papers on her desk in front of her. David noticed again the way she held the paper in both of her exquisitely manicured hands, hands held perfectly straight. It was as though she was utterly obsessed with symmetry, to the point of ambidexterity. David wondered if she really were ambidextrous, or if it were something she struggled with constantly.

“Does it really matter?” David asked. “Would you deny me my job if I were spending time with Pamela? It doesn’t really seem relevant to me.”

Nina sat back in her chair. “Really? Did you know we have a policy against employees engaging in romantic relationships with each other?”

“Oh,” David said. “I didn’t know that, actually.” He felt that gnawing sensation inside his belly again, the sensation that something was trying to eat its way out of him. The sensation he’d come to recognize as resentment; resentment, or nervousness. He wasn’t sure which one it was this time.

“Well, now you do,” Nina said. “And we have these policies for a reason. Office relationships are never a good idea, no matter where you are working. And here we cannot have employees distracting each other in their jobs. So you need to make a choice, Mr. Haskell. Your job, or your relationship with Pamela.”

David furrowed his brow. “Does this mean I get to actually keep my job?”

Nina nodded. “Honestly, Mr. Haskell, you are not our best employee, but I do think you and I have made a great deal of progress. I want to keep working with you to improve your performance and help you become a more productive employee. After all, it is not just your job we are working on here. I know you want to build your career, not just with us but within the industry. Am I right?”

David thought about this. “I suppose so,” he said.

Nina smiled. “Good. Now, go ahead and head on back to your desk, okay? I think you have quite a bit of work to catch up on.”

David knew he had been dismissed. He stood up. “Thanks, Nina.”

“Not at all. Oh, and please send Pamela in to see me, will you?”

David nodded. “Sure.” He left Nina’s office, closing the door behind him (Nina had a closed door policy, unlike most of the managers David had ever worked with). He headed up to the reception area, and saw Pamela at the front desk.

“What did she say?” Pamela asked.

“Well, she said I can keep my job.”

“Yay!” Pamela actually clapped her hands, like a little girl. “That’s great! I’m so happy for you.”

“And she wants to see you now.”

The smile on Pamela’s face softened. “I kind of figured she would, actually. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise.”

“I think she’s going to let you stay on,” David said.

“You think so? Why?”

“Just… Just because I do.”

“Well, I have confidence in you.” She stood up, stepped around the desk, and went up to David. She started to put her arms on his shoulder, but David, remembering what Nina had said to him, stepped back.

“What’s wrong?” Pamela asked him.

“I just think… I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t appropriate for the office, you know?”

Pamela looked to the left and to the right. “I don’t see anyone around, do you? Who’s going to see us?”

“I guess I’m just paranoid. We can wait until after work, can’t we?”

She gave him a quizzical look. “David, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” David said. “I should get back to my desk. Nina said she wants to see you right now.”

“Okay.” Pamela stepped back from David, and assumed a very serious look. “I’ll come by your desk when I’m done with Nina, okay?”

David nodded. “Yeah, that would be great.” He tried to smile but could feel the failure on his face.

Pamela did not seem to notice, however. She stepped back to the bullpen, the area where most of the workers for the company did their work, and vanished behind the glass door.

David watched after her for a few moments as she made her way past the cubicles toward Nina’s office. Then, when she was out of sight, he sighed, and went back to his desk.

# # #

Pamela came by David’s desk half an hour later, and dropped an plain brown envelope on his desk. “For you,” she said briskly, and went on.

David knew that she had spoken with Nina. And that Nina had given her the same speech that she had given him. He had no idea how Pamela would take it, but he was pretty sure that Pamela would do the right thing. She was nothing if not conscientious.

But what was the right thing to do? David wondered. Would she quit her job so that she could date him? Or would she break up with him so that she could complete her mission. David had no idea; he was not even sure what he would do if he were in her position. And his choice was much simpler: he could break up with Pamela, or he could quit his job. And the stakes if he quit his job, while dire for him, were not nearly as great as they would be for Pamela. She had a mission to do, to find out what was going on at Tindalos Corporation and get to the bottom of it.

And he had a feeling that there was more to what was going on than just a case of industrial espionage or corporate politics, or whatever was going on.

He sighed. He knew what he had to do. For Pamela’s sake and for the sake of what she was doing, he had to break it off with her. He had to simply call it off before it got too serious. It would hurt her, and would probably hurt him as well but it was definitely for the best.

He took the envelope that she had given him and opened it. There was a single piece of paper inside, and there was nothing but a single line on it.

LET’S MEET AFTER WORK, it said.

David sighed and put the paper aside. There was not much he could do right now. Except for the right thing.

# # #

They met in the parking lot outside Interstitial Interfaces after work, then started walking back to David’s apartment. They walked in silence in spite of Pamela’s attempts at conversation; David simply did not feel like talking to her right now, not with what Nina had said hanging over his head.

When they got back to his apartment, he used the spare key that he had found under his telephone to open the door, and they went inside.

Pamela stopped immediately inside. “Okay, David, what’s wrong with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t said a word to me since this morning, and last night I thought we were getting really close. I know what Nina said to you because she said the same thing to me, but I don’t care about it. Nina can just go screw herself, you know what I mean?”

David sighed. “I know. But this is important. You’ve got this big thing going on. It’s important. ”

“What are you talking about?”

“This whole thing with Tindalos Corporation. You know that there is more going on there than just some industrial espionage or something like that. Right?”

Pamela nodded. “Yeah. I know. I mean, I have no idea what is really going on, do you?”

“You would be in a better position to know than I am.”

Pamela looked thoughtful. “I suppose you’re right about that. But still… What, are you saying you don’t want to see each other anymore? What are you saying to me?”

“You know it isn’t a good idea,” David said. “Not after what Nina said.”

“You’re just worried about your own job, aren’t you?” Pamela narrowed her eyes at him.

“No, of course not.” He thought about this for a second, and realized that she was right. “Okay, yeah, a little bit. But really, this is more about you and what you’re doing than me.”

Pamela sighed. “Okay, fine. Whatever. I guess you know best, don’t you?”

“No, Pamela, it’s not that. It’s everything. It’s this Tindalos thing. It’s the thing with the sasquatches and the giant squid…”

“Giant squid? What giant squid?”

David paused. He realized he hadn’t told Pamela about his conversation with the giant squid when they had been in the underwater research facility. “Well, when we were in the marine research station, I kind of had a conversation with a giant squid.”

Pamela’s eyes widened and she looked surprised. “What? Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“It was a private conversation.”

“Your conversation with the giant squid was private?”

“It was sort of telepathic. And it was lonely.”

“David, you need to tell me these things. You never know what might be important.”

That clawing, grasping feeling in David’s stomach was growing again. He tried to pinpoint its source, but, as always, it was just out of his grasp. He sighed, trying to dislodge the feeling from his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t think it was important. It was kind of a private conversation. At least as private as a conversation between a person and a telepathic giant squid can be, you know?”

Pamela gave an exasperated sigh, and her eyes glistened. “Fine,” she said. “You know, it doesn’t really matter. I think Nina was right. A relationship between the two of us would just get in the way of our jobs. And you have your own career to think of, right?”

David felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. This wasn’t quite the way he had expected this conversation to go. Then again, he wasn’t sure what he had been expecting. He had known that the relationship with Pamela was going to come to an end before it really got started, but at the same time, the thought hadn’t really sunk in. It hadn’t really felt real. He had thought that even with the knowledge that things had to come to an end, they really wouldn’t.

Pamela wiped her eyes, and David felt his heart break. It was for the best, he knew that, but he still felt guilty.

“Well,” she said, “that was quick. And over a stupid job, too.”

“It isn’t just my job,” David said, “and it isn’t just what Nina said. There’s a lot more. I mean, you’ve got this incredible life going on…”

“Oh, please. I’m just a temp. I earn crappy pay and my benefits suck. Do you even know what my deductible is?”

“No, I mean… Well, you’re traveling all over the place. You go off to other planets and all that. You barely flinched when we ended up on Chiron Beta Prime, and I just couldn’t cope.”

“I thought you did pretty well,” Pamela said.

“Yeah, but just barely. And you deal with zombies and you have to know all this stuff. I just… I think I bring you down, or cramp your style.”

“Oh, I know what’s wrong with you.”

David furrowed his brow. “What’s that?”

“You just feel threatened. You’re just like every other guy in the world.”

“No I’m not. I think it’s great that you have all these skills and adventures. I just think you deserve better than me.”

“Oh, please. That isn’t it at all. You know it isn’t. You’re just like every other guy. You have this idea that you’re supposed to be in charge. You’re supposed to be the one with the adventures and I’m supposed to be the one who’s sitting back and acting like the helpless sidekick. You can’t stand that the situation is reversed and I’m the one with the adventures, right?”

“No, that isn’t it at all!”

“Yes it is. I’m not a nerd like you but I’ve seen some of the movies and I know what goes on in some of those games of yours. The man is always the hero, and the woman is just the one who sits and watches.” She sighed. “Well, fine. I thought we had a really good thing here, and a really great possibility, but I guess it isn’t going to work out.”

David really wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that he just was not like the other men she knew, but he sensed she was upset and he knew that there just would be no talking her out of her conclusion. He could try telling her over and over again that this really was the best for both of them, especially her, and for their careers and especially her own mission, whatever that was, but he knew there would be no point. Pamela had made up her mind, and there would be no changing it.

Still, he simply could not let it go. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “It’s really not what you’re thinking. I’d really be happy if we could stay together but it’s just not the best thing for us. Not right now, at least.”

Pamela nodded, but it wasn’t a friendly nod. “It’s fine, David, whatever you say.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “You know, we still have to figure out what we’re going to do for money, and where I’m going to stay, and get me some new clothes and everything. I don’t suppose you have any of that figured out?”

Grateful for the shift in conversation, David shook his head. “I have a spare credit card around here somewhere, one that I’ve never used. So that’s something.”

“Well, you should probably get a cash advance on that if you can. You don’t want to leave any sort of trail behind, you know?”

“Yeah.” David nodded, and wondered why he hadn’t thought about that himself. Pamela was always just a step or two ahead of him. That’s what made her so much better at what she was doing than he would have been. “I think I can just go to the bank and do that.”

“Okay, we’ll have to be careful.”

David hunted around for his spare credit card. He had gotten it while he was in college, at one of the booths that the credit card companies had set up inside the student union in order to lure in students with more money from their parents than sense. He had kept it all these years just out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia, making a token purchase with it every now and then just so it wouldn’t be canceled by the agency. Every now and then he got a letter telling him that his limit had been increased but he never even touched the limit.

He kept the card in his desk drawer, and he found it after digging around for it for a few minutes. “I should get a new driver’s license too. And a Social Security card I guess.”

“You shouldn’t carry your social security card around with you,” Pamela chided.

David shrugged. “And my library card too. I never imagined how annoying it would be to have my wallet taken from me by a bunch of evil robots on an asteroid way off the Earth, you know?”

“Hm,” Pamela said in response to David’s lame attempt at humor.

David was struck with a powerful sense of deja vu. He had no idea where it came from but it carried with it a sense of loneliness and desperation. He sighed, pocketed his credit card in the pocket of the plain khaki slacks that he still retained from his time on Chiron Beta Prime.

“I just thought of something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“All those people still stuck on Chiron Beta Prime. We can’t just leave them there. We have to figure out some way to get them all home.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Pamela said. “I have a few ideas.”

“Like what?”

Pamela glared at him, her eyes narrowed and her normally smiling mouth drawn into a tight line. “You know what? You’ve made it quite clear that you don’t want to be part of my world. So beginning right now it doesn’t matter to you. Right?”

David had never, in his recent memory, felt like he’d been physically struck just by words. But here it was, the firmest rejection he’d been given by anyone in years, especially by someone that he cared about.

“So,” Pamela continued, “I would really appreciate it if we could go now. I would really appreciate a loan of some of the cash, if that’s all right.”

David was filled with a strange desire to set things right now, to get her back to a place where she still liked him and was still nice to him, even though he knew they couldn’t quite get back to that spot. He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to get back to that place, but he wanted to try. “Yeah, that’s no problem. Think of the money as a gift.”

“I’ll pay it back,” she said. “Oh, can I use your phone? It’s a local call.”

“Yeah, absolutely. Who are you calling?”

Pamela glared at him. Her eyes still shone, and her face was still bright red. “Tindalos,” she said. “I haven’t reported in yet. And maybe they can hook me up with a motel or something.”

“You can stay here, you know.”

“No I can’t.” She picked up the receiver of the phone from its base unit and punched in a number. “I need privacy for this, so I’m going into the bathroom, okay?”

David nodded. “Yeah, no problem.”

Pamela went into the bathroom with the telephone and shut the door behind her.

David did his best to ignore the soft voice that emanated from the bathroom. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, and he knew that if he stood right next to the door he’d figure it out but he didn’t want to intrude on her privacy.

He sighed. He had thought that his life sucked before. Now with Pamela just out of his grasp, it sucked even more.

When she came out of the bathroom she was still frowning. “Well, it’s all set. If you don’t mind taking me to the mall so that I can get to my bank and get some cash, then I can just get some shopping done and you can go on home.”

“I don’t mind giving you the money,” David reiterated.

“Nope, don’t worry about it. The Tindalos Corporation is reimbursing me for the clothes and stuff I lost on Chiron Beta Prime.”

“Wow, really?” David said, surprised. “Can they help me out as well?”

She nodded. “Yeah. They’re going to deposit some money into your checking account. They’ll do it tonight.”

“Oh. Good. Thanks.” David had been vaguely looking forward to an evening with Pamela, but now that was apparently not going to be an issue. He had known it was unrealistic, but somehow he was still disappointed.

“So can we go now?”

“Sure.” David grabbed his spare keys, and the two of them left his apartment.

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The omnipresent Christmas decorations and the constant Christmas music did nothing to ease David’s annoyance at being stuck here inside the robot controlled giant asteroid that was Chiron Beta Prime. It didn’t help that there was no way to tell the time nor how long they’d been there. The artificial sunlight was constant, with no alteration of light and dark. There were no clocks anywhere, and Steve Winston had confiscated his watch shortly after showing him and Pamela to their apartment. So there was no way of knowing how long they’d been here. David estimated it had been a couple of days, just based on the number of times they’d slept — him on the floor of the apartment the robots had designated for the two of them and Pamela alone on the king-sized bed. (Of course, she’d protested at first, arguing that they should alternate at least, but that she was perfectly comfortable sharing the bed with him. David, however, found that he was both too gentlemanly and too shy to take that step at this point in their relationship.)

Despite his shyness, David had gone out of his way to talk to some of the other people inside the asteroid. And none of them had any watches, cell phones (as if there would have been a signal here anyway), or any other way of telling time. None of them knew how long they’d been here. And none of them knew exactly why they were here in the first place.

It was too eerily like “The Prisoner” — the original version with Patrick McGoohan, the one that was good, as opposed to the crappy American remake — for David’s comfort. It just gave him the creeps.

Sometime after their third sleep cycle, David asked Pamela if she had any idea how they were going to get out of here.

She shook her head, looking annoyed. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s just that you seem to have more experience with this sort of thing than I do.”

Pamela glared at him. “You mean, with being captured by malevolent robots and imprisoned in an asteroid in deep space with no way of getting home?”

David was chagrined. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re a temp, and…”

“Oh, don’t remind me,” Pamela said with a sigh. “I’d really hoped that at this point in my life I’d find a regular job and paycheck, and everything. Look where being a temp has gotten me.”

“I’m sorry,” David said again. It seemed like he was always saying he was sorry whenever he was around women. He wondered if other men had the same experience. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Oh, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to snap at you, David. I’m just frustrated. This whole situation sucks, don’t you think?”

“Oh yeah. I just wish I knew what time it was. I mean, that would help just a little bit.”

“You know, I heard that the human sleep cycle is actually slightly more than twenty-four hours. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Have you ever heard that?”

“I don’t think I have,” David said. “I guess I have no idea how long we’ve been here.”

Pamela shook her head. “Nope. And I can’t help thinking we have to get home. We have something important to do, you know?”

David nodded. Pamela had talked about the Tindalos Corporation, and about how different branches of the corporation, different subsidiaries, were having mysterious problems. He hadn’t given it much thought. it had seemed like corporate troubles to him, and corporate problems just didn’t interest him. It seemed like industrial espionage was involved, or that there was intrigue of some sort, with one branch trying to undermine the others for whatever reason. Who knew? He had his own job and he was at least sort of comfortable with that as long as Nina aniN didn’t call him into her office too often. His interest in corporate wheelings and dealings was limited to being certain that the company he worked for stayed in business because he wasn’t sure where he’d go if it went out of business.

“Doesn’t it just seem like corporate issues, though?” he said. “In the long run, that doesn’t seem that important. Not important enough to keep us here at least, you know?”

“Maybe,” Pamela said, “but I can’t help thinking we’re missing the big picture. I think there’s something else going on. Something more important. After all, we don’t even know for sure if it’s Tindalos keeping us prisoner here or not.”

“Huh,” David said aloud. “I hadn’t even considered that.”

“So we really have to get us out of here.”

David was about to remind her that this is how the conversation had started, but he thought maybe that wasn’t the best plan at this point. “I don’t have any ideas,” he said.

“Neither do I,” Pamela sighed.

And so it went. Steve gave them jobs: Pamela was assigned to work in the commissary, where she at least got a discount on the goods for sale there, and David was assigned to work on one of the farms. It was annoying. He wasn’t cut out for manual labor, after all. He was meant to work with computers, he was sure of it. Tomatoes and cucumbers and berries just weren’t his thing, though he certainly enjoyed eating them. He did find it fascinating that their meals in the cafeteria consisted of more than the foods they grew on the farms. It implied that they did import some food from Earth, which suggested that there was at least a way to the asteroid. David filed the information away in his mind for future consideration. Perhaps there was a way to take advantage of that information.

“We had this one customer come in today,” Pamela said after one of their shifts was over. “Totally obnoxious. Insisted on spending an hour trying on outfits.”

“That’s weird,” David observed. And it was. The clothing on Chiron Beta Prime was limited to uniformly gray and beige slacks and shirts. Women were allowed to wear skirts as a variation on the theme, but that was the only variation that was offered. “How could she spend an entire hour doing that? It’s not like there’s any difference at all between different outfits.”

“It wasn’t a woman,” Pamela said. “It was a man.”

“Wow,” David said. “What, was he trying on skirts, or something?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.” David thought about this. He’d known a few cross-dressers in his time. It didn’t bother him that much. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I guess.”

“No, there isn’t,” Pamela said. “It was just curious. And, of course, it was annoying. He kept insisting on trying on all these different skirts. As if there were any difference between them. Well, I guess some are a little shorter and some are a little longer, but that’s all.”

With no immediate possibility of escape and no variation in schedule (that David could determine; without any way of tracking time there was no easy way of even figuring out what their schedule was, exactly), their conversations and their time together became increasingly banal.

“You know,” Pamela said, “with all the Christmas decorations and Christmas music and everything, you’d think it would be Christmas at some point, right?”

David shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t know if the robots had actually considered that.” He was feeling bitter, and he didn’t think anyone could blame him. At this point, he figured, he’d probably lost his job.

The day after that, while working in the fields, David thought he saw a familiar shaggy figure loping through the pine tree orchard on the far side of the wheat field. He stared after it for a few moments, until one of the other farm workers, a man named Jack, asked him, “Did you see something out there?”

David looked into the trees for a few moments before deciding that the motion had simply been his imagination. “No, I guess not.”

“Yeah.” Jack sniffed. “If you’re not careful you’ll see all kinds of things in the trees. Make sure you get enough sleep, right?”

“Right,” David said.

That evening — or afternoon, or morning, or whatever it was, some time when he and Pamela were in their apartment together at the same time — David asked Pamela, “How did you learn to speak Sasquatch, anyway?”

Pamela smiled at him. It was the first time he’d seen her smile at him for some time. At least, in a way that wasn’t sarcastic or sardonic. “I told you, as a temp I picked up a lot of skills.”

“Yeah, but what assignment in particular. You don’t just take classes in sasquatch, you know.”

“You don’t?” Pamela said, but David could tell by her tone she was joking. She chuckled, then said, “I had an assignment working for the Department of Forestry in Placerville, inventorying various types of pine cones for various groups. One of our regular clients was a sasquatch who was trying to corner a certain type of pine cone or something. I don’t know. Nice guy, though. Or girl.”

“Couldn’t you tell?”

“All sasquatch look alike to me. And this one’s name was Pat, too, so who knows. Why do you ask, anyway?”

David looked around the room. “Do you think these rooms are bugged?” he asked.

Pamela suddenly looked fascinated. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like there’d be any point to it, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. But if the robots thought we might have a chance to get out of here, don’t you think they might try to stop us somehow?”

“David, what do you think you know?”

David looked back and forth. He wasn’t too sure why. It was a universal behavior with anyone whenever they were going to tell a secret. “I think I saw something.”

“What?”

He leaned closer to Pamela and whispered in her ear. “Pamela, I’m pretty sure I saw a sasquatch in the orchard earlier today.”

Pamela’s eyes widened. “Really? Here? On the asteroid?”

David nodded.

For a moment, Pamela looked excited. Then her expression softened. Her eyes narrowed, and she frowned. “It probably doesn’t mean anything. Or you were seeing things. I can’t imagine that there would be any sasquatches on Chiron Beta Prime, can you?”

“That’s the thing,” David said. “If there’s a sasquatch here, then we can probably get home! There must be a translation facility here on the asteroid, and if the sasquatch could get here, then we can get off!”

Pamela shook her head. “No, David. There’s no way. We’re stuck here.”

“But can’t we…”

“No, David. It’s not possible. You heard what Steve said. We’re going to be here for the rest of our lives.”

David felt frustration building inside of him: that same sensation that had clawed at his solar plexus just a few days before on the way to work, that had resolved as frustration and resentment at Nina aniN and his job. “Pamela, what’s wrong with you? I thought you hated it here.”

“No, David, I’m happy here. And you should be too.” She winked at him, and suddenly David understood. She believed that the room was indeed bugged

The clawing sensation inside his chest finally ebbed. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I should be happy. I probably just saw some shadows in the trees.”

Pamela smiled at him. “There, you see? Pretty soon, you should be happy too. It’s nice here at Chiron Beta Prime.”

# # #

The next day — at this point, David had given up on trying to keep accurate count of the time that was passing on Chiron Beta Prime and was just calling any period between sleeping cycles a single “day” — before his shift on the farm David went and walked around the orchard where he thought he’d seen the sasquatch the day before. There was no sign of the creature, nor was there anything like the translation facility that he’d seen in the forest back on Earth. Maybe he had imagined seeing the sasquatch after all. Or maybe he had seen it, and maybe there were sasquatches being kept prisoner here on Chiron Beta Prime along with the human beings that were here. Or maybe it had just slipped through a translation point somehow.

That he’d imagined it seemed the most likely possibility.

Life here in Chiron Beta Prime with its constant Christmas atmosphere (but never Christmas itself) was beginning to get on his nerves. Well, more than it already had. The worst part, though, was what it was doing to his relationship with Pamela. They hadn’t talked about dating or anything like that since they’d shown up here. They’d had plenty of opportunities, of course, but she’d be reticent. And he himself was too nervous to bring the subject up.

“Are you looking for something?”

Steve’s mechanical voice startled David in the midst of his reverie. He was still in the pine orchard, and he hadn’t even heard the robot sneak up behind him. He turned, saw the robot’s permanent smile and glowing red eyes and tried as hard as he could to look nonchalant. “Nope. Just wandering.”

“Ah. Well, I’m pleased to see that you’re enjoying your stay here on Chiron Beta Prime, just as everyone else is. Perhaps you have some questions that I can answer?”

David shook his head. “Nope. Not really.”

“Excellent. Well, please do not hesitate to call for me should you ever require anything.”

“I don’t suppose I could go home, could I?”

The robot made a few whirring noises that David thought sounded almost like laughter. “Why would you want to when you are obviously enjoying yourself so much here? You are a most amusing human, David Haskell. Please carry on.” The robot turned, and marched away on its strangely silent limbs.

David sighed. It didn’t seem like there was any way to get out of here at all.

There was a grunt behind him.

Startled, David jumped and turned around. Standing before him, as though it had appeared out of nowhere, was the sasquatch he’d seen in British Columbia. Or, at least, one that looked remarkably like it. “Ingrid?” he said.

The sasquatch grunted once more, and then put a finger to its lips to indicate that David should be quiet. Then it beckoned to him, turned, and started making its surprisingly silent way through the trees.

David followed the sasquatch for some time. The pine orchard inside Chiron Beta Prime was much larger than he’d imagined it would be. The two of them walked for what seemed like at least fifteen minutes, without any sign of the edge of the orchard.

Finally, they reached a small clearing. And in the middle of the clearing, a wooden hut, just like the one he’d seen back on Earth, stood unassumingly.

“A translation facility,” David said out loud. Then he put his hand over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to speak out loud, and he was pretty sure this part of the orchard was bugged.

The sasquatch shrugged its shoulders, and grunted.

David had the feeling that he was supposed to understand what the sasquatch was saying. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

The look on the sasquatch’s face was generally inscrutable to David, but he thought that if it could look frustrated, it would just then. Instead it simply shrugged again, and repeated the same grunting sound. Then it pointed at the door of the wooden hut.

“You want me to go through? I can’t, not without Pamela.”

The sasquatch nodded, then grunted, then pointed back in the direction they had come.

“Do you want me to go get her?” David asked it.

More grunting. Another nod.

David hoped he understood properly what the creature was saying. “Okay. Wait here. I’ll go get her, and I’ll be back here soon. Okay?”

The sasquatch looked at him quizzically, then shrugged, and David realized that the sasquatch only had a rudimentary understanding of English. He remembered that Pamela had spoken to it in its own language of grunts and snorts before, and she would probably have to do so again. If he could convince her to come here.

“Just…. Just stay here. Stay,” David said. He hoped the sasquatch would understand. He turned and started to walk away. After a few moments, he turned around. The sasquatch was still standing by the hut, staring after him. Good, David thought. Hopefully it will wait there for the next half hour or so.

# # #

He found Pamela in the commissary, where she was looking at the shoes. To David’s surprise, there was actually a new style of shoe in the women’s clothing section. In addition to the standard brown walking shoes, there were now black ones as well.

“What do you think, David?” Pamela asked him. “Do you think the black ones will go with the outfit I came with?”

David hesitated. “I guess,” he said slowly. “I guess black goes with gray better than brown, doesn’t it?”

Pamela grinned at him. “You don’t have to know the answer to that,” she said. “Just give me your opinion.”

“Then yeah, I guess black would be better than brown.” David didn’t think to mention the central absurdity of the question, which was that they had not seen their own clothes since the first day after arriving at Chiron Beta Prime. At some point during the night, their clothes had simply vanished and been replaced with the dull gray and beige uniforms of the asteroid colony.

“Well, then, black it is,” Pamela said. She looked over the black shoes until she found a pair in her size, and grabbed them off the shelf. “Only five work credits,” she said. “Kind of a bargain.”

David suddenly remembered what he had come here to tell her. Of course the commissary was bugged, so he couldn’t say anything outright here about it. He had to be discreet. “Hey, Pamela, let’s go for a walk.”

She looked up at him. “A walk? What for?”

“Just… You know. A walk. To get some exercise. I think it would be nice, don’t you?”

For a moment, Pamela said nothing, and David was sure the whole thing would be pointless. But then she shrugged. “I guess that would be all right. It’ll give me a chance to break in my new shoes.”

“Exactly. So come on.”

“Where should we go walking?”

“How about in the pine orchard?”

“The pine orchard? But it’s all dirty there.”

“Yeah, but it smells really nice. Come on, it’ll remind you of home.”

For another moment, Pamela was silent. Then she smiled at him. “Let’s do it. It sounds lovely.” She sat down in one of the chairs that the Commissary had set up around for changing shoes. She slipped off her old brown shoes and slipped on her new black ones. Then she stood up. “Lead the way,” she said.

# # #

It wasn’t hard to find the spot in the pine orchard where David had found the sasquatch before, and from there it was surprisingly easy to find his way back to the clearing with the wooden hut and the sasquatch that he’d seen earlier.

When Pamela saw the sasquatch, her face brightened, and she smiled so broadly that David thought the corners of her mouth must have hurt.

She turned to David. “It’s… It’s Ingrid,” she said.

David nodded. “I know. Or at least I thought it was. It’s hard for me to tell. I mean, I’ve only met a couple, and…”

Pamela gave him a playful punch on the shoulder, then looked at Ingrid. She grunted and snorted a few times, finishing off with a high-pitched whine.

Ingrid snorted back, then gave a couple of low grunts.

“She says the orchard isn’t bugged here. I hope she’s right. Because there’s something we need to do.”

“Oh?” David asked. “What’s that?”

“This.”

Pamela reached up and took David’s shoulders and pulled down. David, surprised, was unable to resist and found himself leaning in toward her as she stood on her toes and reached up with her face.

It was the first time David had kissed a woman since he’d broken up with Maureen, and Maureen had never been much of a kisser. Even at her most passionate, Maureen’s kisses had been brief, almost chaste. But Pamela was passionate, and insistent, as she pressed her mouth onto David’s.

They remained like that for longer than David would have thought possible, but which also seemed like only an instant. The gnawing, clawing feeling in his stomach vanished, and his heart raced. He embraced her, awkwardly — since she was at least a foot shorter than he was — and took in her warmth, both of her body and her lips.

Ingrid make a grunting noise, and Pamela began to giggle into his mouth. It was a strange sensation, sort of an intermittent buzzing sensation, but it made David laugh. And for the first time, David was not immediately and painfully self conscious when a woman laughed near him.

“There,” Pamela said, breaking away from him. She was blushing furiously.

“We…” David coughed to clear his throat, which had suddenly become clogged. “We could have done that earlier, I think.”

“No.” She lowered herself and stood flat on her feet in front of him. “Not when we were being bugged.”

The light feeling inside David’s chest lingered, even though they had separated. He was filled with the urge to declare his love for her, to announce that he would do anything for her, but knew it would probably be the wrong thing to say right now.

“Should we go home?” he said instead.

Pamela nodded. “I think that’s the best idea right now.”

Head swarming with strong feelings he had not experienced for years, and his heart feeling like it would rise out of his chest through the top of his head, David followed Pamela into the wooden hut of the translation facility, and — hopefully — back home.

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David’s first thought was, Not again.

The sensation was a familiar one. He’d been through the translation process before; the first time when Pamela, with her malfunctioning portable translator, had sent the two of them from the Perk Up cafe in San Augustin to the forest of British Columbia where they’d met the sasquatch. Then they’d used the translation facility in the forest to get to the bizarre underwater research cove where he’d met the telepathic colossal squid. And then they’d taken the translation facility from the cove back to San Augustin. He’d become accustomed to the strange pulling sensation that originated in his gut and extended through all four limbs, and to the dizziness that accompanied the translation.

What was different about this time was that wherever they had ended up was frigid cold, and stank of ammonia.

David opened his eyes. He was on his back; he’d landed there with a thud because he’d been sitting up originally. Above him the sky was black and dotted with more stars than he could remember seeing at once ever before. He sat up and found that he was lying down on a pile of snow. Around him he could see flurries of snow and ice particles swirling around.

He could see his breath when he breathed out.

“Where are we?” Pamela said from beside him.

David looked over at her. She was already standing up; in her thin slacks and light sleeveless top, she looked as if she were even colder than he was. Then he looked down and noticed that she was standing barefoot in the snow.

He stood up and stood beside her. He put his right arm behind her shoulders and bent down to put his left arm behind her knees.

“Hey!” she cried out. “What are you doing?”

“I was going to pick you up,” David said defensively.

“Why?”

“Because it’s freezing, the ground is covered in snow, and you’re barefoot. I was just trying to help.” David found himself feeling simultaneously defensive and annoyed. Then he looked down at his own feet. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Pamela said. She was hugging herself. Her skin was pale; in places it was almost blue. “Actually, it’s probably a good idea. So if you don’t mind, do you think you could…? Will you be okay?”

“Of course.” David knew he was not a strong man. He hadn’t exercised seriously for at least five years, and he certainly hadn’t tried lifting weights since he had been laughed out of the weight room in high school. Still, Pamela was small, no more than five feet tall and very slender; so how much could she possibly weigh? And if she clasped her arms around the back of his neck, that should help stabilize him as well. So once again he put his right arm around the small of her back, and bent down and put his left arm behind her knees. Then he lifted her up. She was heavier than he expected, and he stumbled backwards, his feet crunching in the snow.

Pamela squealed in his arms. “Careful!” she cried out.

David didn’t respond. He was concentrating on maintaining his upright posture. He took another pounding step backward. For a moment, he was stable, but then his left foot shot up from under him. He stepped backwards with his right foot to compensate but with Pamela in his arms he was top heavy, and he toppled over to his left. He twisted to his right to make sure Pamela wouldn’t get crushed by his own weight, then landed flat on his back with a crunch.

For a moment, the pain in his back was blinding. He couldn’t breathe; Pamela was on his chest, true, but at the moment it felt as though she’d doubled in weight.

“Oh my God,” Pamela said, crawling off of him and into the snow. “David, are you okay?”

David coughed, unable to answer. He waved with his right hand to indicate that he was fine, but didn’t know if Pamela understood him or not.

Pamela stood up again and looked down at him. “Oh, God, David, I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault,” David was finally able to gasp at her. “I’ll be fine.” He found he was able to sit up, and did so.

“Good.” Pamela clasped her arms around herself, shivering, and looked around. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where we are?”

David took in the surrounding icescape, the flurries of snow and ice that swirled around them, the bright stars in the sky, and the dim light that seemed to permeate the entire scene. “I have no idea,” he said. “Somewhere in the Arctic Circle?”

“I don’t think so,” Pamela said, shaking her head. “I’ve been to the Arctic Circle before, and I’ve never smelled anything like the ammonia I smell here.”

“You’ve been to the Arctic Circle?”

She smiled enigmatically. “Of course.”

“Let me guess… as a temp, right?”

Pamela shook her head. “No. As a foreign exchange student in college. Did some time on a Russian fishing boat, if you believe that.”

“Not for an instant.”

Pamela laughed. “Well it’s true.” She shivered again. “Besides, even though it’s cold, it’s not cold enough to be the Arctic.”

“How did we get here?”

“I really don’t know. I didn’t do it. Not this time.”

“Could it have been Todd?”

Pamela looked at David querulously. “You mean the household droid?”

“That’s the only thing I can figure. Unless you pressed the portable translator in your purse by mistake. But I don’t think you even had your purse with you.”

“I didn’t,” Pamela said. She looked thoughtful. “But I can’t believe Todd would do that sort of thing. He’s never been a problem before. I’ve never had a problem with any of the robots from Coulton Robotics.” She giggled. “You know what?”

“What?”

“Seems like every time we meet like this I have shoe issues, you know?”

“You do?”

“Well, yeah. This time I’m barefoot. Last time I was wearing heels that I could barely walk in, remember?”

David tried to think back. He hadn’t really paid much attention to Pamela’s shoes on a daily basis, but he did seem to recall something about her shoes on that day. She had kept taking them off, as he recalled, and had had the sasquatch Ingrid carry her around. “I guess so.”

“I should just start carrying a pair of tennis shoes with me whenever I hang out with you. Just in case, you know?” She looked around. “I don’t see any rocks or mountains or anything. Do you?”

David managed to stand up. He felt sorry for Pamela, since she was barefoot but he had on a nice pair of shoes. He thought about picking her up again, but decided that was too risky.

“Do you want to wear my shoes?” he asked her.

She shook her head, seemingly without even considering the option. “No, that’s okay. David, what are we going to do? We’re going to freeze here. Or starve to death. Or die of dehydration.”

“Well, come here.”

After a moment’s consideration, Pamela came up close to David, and allowed him to hug her tightly, warming up in his embrace. He told her to put her feet on top of his shoes, so at least she wasn’t standing barefoot on top of the snow, and she did. “This is nice,” she said.

“Good.”

David looked around them. She was right. There was no sign of any mountains near them, nor any rocks for shelter or anything else. If they didn’t figure something out soon, they would freeze here. There was very little light as well. They could only see each other dimly. Wherever they were, it was pretty barren.

“Hey, David, check this out.”

“Check what out?”
“Those snow flurries. They’re all over, but they’re not coming directly to us. Look, they’re stopping just a few yards away.”

David furrowed his brow and looked toward where Pamela was pointing. She was right; it was as though the flurries were breaking against an invisible dome or something like that. “Huh,” he said cleverly. “It’s like there’s an invisible dome surrounding us. We’d probably be frozen solid out there.”

“This is weird. And David, look at that star out there.” She pointed just a little over the horizon.

David looked. He wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but the star was definitely larger and brighter than any other star in the sky that he could see. In fact, he thought it was larger and brighter than any star he’d ever seen before. “What is that, an airplane?”

“David, I think that’s the sun. I don’t think we’re on Earth anymore, David. I think that last translation sent us to another planet.”

“Which one?”

“Technically,” said a thick voice behind them, “you’re not on a planet at all. You’re on an asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It’s called Chiron Beta Prime.”

David and Pamela spun their heads in unison. Where there had been nothing a moment before, a smooth cylinder had not emerged from the snow-covered ground. It looks as though it had been made of polished stone, and stood about eight feet from the ground, and looked as though it were seven or eight feet in diameter. There was an opening in the front of the cylinder, about six feet tall by three feet wide. David would have to duck just a little bit to get through it.

Standing in front of the opening of the cylinder was a humanoid figure, easily seven feet tall, with silver skin that was articulated like the skin of a lobster or a crab. Four limbs extended from the sides of the thing, and each arm had at least four joints. Its face looked disturbingly human, though its eyes were just a little too large and its mouth looked artificially happy, like the smiley face button that the Comedian wore in the Watchmen graphic novel. The mouth was slightly open, too, and David could see a speaker grill inside of it.

“The asteroid you’re on is called Chiron Beta Prime,” it repeated.

“Can we go inside?” Pamela asked. “It’s really cold out here and I’m barefoot.”

# # #

There were people inside of Chiron Beta Prime, something that David was not expecting. Quite a few, in fact. And none of them looked happy.

“How did we get here?” David asked.

“The T-1000 unit,” the robot said, “had a portable translator built into it.”

“But why did it send us here?” Pamela asked.

“We determined that you were learning too much,” the robot replied. “You needed to be removed.”

“Learning too much about what?” David asked.

“You’ve learned too much already,” the robot said.

“So you’ve kidnapped us,” Pamela said. “Is there a ransom or something that we have to pay in order to get back home?”

“Please,” the robot said, “‘kidnapped’ is such an inappropriate word. The Robot Council here on Chiron Beta Prime prefers to use the term ‘liberated’.”

“Liberated from what?”

“Liberated from an overabundance of dangerous knowledge, of course. Here you will be safe from all forces that might seek to harm you or imprison you. I promise you will be happy here.”

David looked around the huge chamber that the robot had brought them into. It looked like the entire asteroid had been hollowed out. Buildings and structures of all sorts had been built onto the inner surface, and it looked like there was an entire city on the inside, complete with parks and gardens and play areas for children — though there were no children that David could see. The light for the interior came from a long tube that ran down the center of the asteroid’s interior, like a giant freestanding fluorescent bulb. It shone brightly, almost as brightly as the sun.

And everything, David noted, was decorated as though it were Christmas. Tiny multicolored lights had been strung along the eaves of every building. Every door had a wreath on it. Every tree in every park was decorated with lights and ornaments. And on every street corner there was a giant metal sculpture of Santa Claus, looking jolly and ready to take gift requests.

“Why is it decorated for Christmas here?”asked Pamela.

“It’s Christmas every day here on Chiron Beta Prime,” the robot replied. “We find it helps keep up the good cheer.”

David looked around. It looked like there were several hundred people here inside the asteroid, and, as David had already noted, none of them looked particularly happy, in spite of the overabundance of Christmas cheer.

“Who are all these people?” David asked the robot.

“Don’t they look content?” the robot replied. “They are all folks who have also been liberated from an over-abundance of knowledge on Earth.”

“Who runs this place?” Pamela asked. “Is it the Tindalos Corporation?”

“I can’t say,” said the robot. “That would be telling.”

The robot led Pamela and David on a tour of the interior of the asteroid, pointing out the various buildings and sights. “Here’s the cafeteria will you will be taking your meals,” the robot said at one point. “The food is all organic, and garden fresh.” The robot described another building as the “commissary”, where goods of all sorts, such as clothes and shoes — Pamela asked specifically about shoes — could be purchased in exchange for “work credits”.

“How do we earn those?” Pamela asked.

“Oh, you’ll be given jobs,” the robot said. ‘Tasks which are well suited to your occupations. There’s no need to worry about that. And everyone is paid equally here. This is a utopian society. You’ll enjoy yourselves thoroughly, I guarantee it.”

“Then how come everyone looks so miserable?” David asked.

“Obviously they simply do not know how to be happy,” the robot replied.

The tour of the asteroid’s interior lasted another half hour. It ended with a return to the commissary where they were each allowed a single free purchase. David steadfastly refused to buy anything, but Pamela immediately purchased a pair of shoes. All of the shoes were identical, of course, simple brown walking shoes that looked durable and practical. Pamela found a pair that fit her, and put them on without hesitation.

“Do you really expect that we’ll be here that long?” David asked her.

“Do you really expect that I’m going to be spending much more time without shoes?” Pamela retorted.

Finally the robot led them to a building that it described as an apartment complex. “You’ll be sharing an apartment in here,” it said. “It’s very comfortable and I give you my personal guarantee that you’ll enjoy it thoroughly.”

“Sharing?” David said. “But we’re not married or anything like that. We can’t share an apartment.”

“We were under the impression that you were companions,” the robot replied. “That is what we had planned for. And unfortunately we cannot accommodate you otherwise. We are confident, however, that you will enjoy each other’s company as much as you will enjoy all the other elements here at your new home.”

David and Pamela looked at each other.

“We’ll get out of here,” Pamela said. “I promise.”

“Have you ever been in a place like this before?” David asked her.

Pamela looked contrite. “Well, no, I can’t say that I have,” she said.

“Not even in all your experience as a temp?” David asked. He meant it to be a joke, but the look on Pamela’s face made it clear to him that she took it more seriously than he had intended. “Sorry,” he said.

She shook her head. “Oh, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s just… I admit I’m pretty worried. I’m pretty sure we’ll figure out a way back home, but right now I don’t have any idea how.”

“No need to worry,” said the robot. “Now, just remember, if you need anything, please don’t hesitate to find me and ask.”

“Do you have a name, then?” asked David. He was expecting the robot to have a name like XT-100L or Tau Alpha Three. Or THX-1138. Something robot sounding, out of a science fiction movie or something like that.

Instead the robot surprised him. “Just ask for Steve Winston,” it said. One of its two glowing red eyes flickered, as though it were winking at him. “And I’ll be your personal concierge for the rest of your stay here on Chiron Beta Prime.”

“And how long will that be?” Pamela asked.

The robot — Steve Winston — winked again, and David thought its artificial smile seemed to grow larger, even though he knew it was impossible. “Why,” it said, “for the rest of your lives, of course. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?” Read the rest of this entry »

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Send Code Monkey to the Night of Writing Dangerously!

David fussed for over an hour about what to wear on his date with Pamela. He had never been so painfully aware of his shortcomings as a dresser as he was today. And even though he wasn’t supposed to meet Pamela at Perk Up until six o’ clock, he started getting himself ready at ten in the morning, with a long shower, a shave, some gel in his hair, and another shower to get rid of the unsatisfyingly applied gel.

At noon he called his parents for some advice. His father, not much more of a ladies’ man than David was himself, wasn’t able to offer much more advice to David than that he not say anything really embarrassing or stupid. Unfortunately, he was not able to provide any guidelines as to what might make a comment embarrassing and stupid, leaving David not much better off than before.

His mother’s advice, to just be himself and to take a shower beforehand, was a bit more quantifiable, but David still wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“What do you mean just be myself?” David asked her.

“David, you always think about these things too much and then you worry about things you can’t control. So when you’re out with this girl, don’t think too much about whether you’re saying the right things or doing the right things, and just relax and enjoy yourself. That’s what I mean.”

“But how am I supposed to do that? I can’t help worrying about all these things.”

“I know, David. You’ve always been like that. But just try tonight, okay? If you get too anxious then she will too and neither of you will have a good time.”

David thanked his parents and said goodbye, then spent the next hour or so worrying not only about his own state of mind but also about how he was going to affect Pamela’s state of mind with his, a development that he did not welcome.

At two o’ clock he decided he was unsatisfied with any of his wardrobe choices, so he clambered into his car and drove to a nearby department store in the hopes of buying some more clothes that would make him feel more self confidant. He lurked near the jeans display for about fifteen minutes before getting up the nerve to approach the woman behind the counter and asking her for some advice. He figured she looked like his mother so he wouldn’t be at all nervous about approaching her and asking for her advice. And that was true; he felt perfectly comfortable talking to her.

On the other hand, as the khaki slacks and cardigans accumulated, David thought that the woman might be more inclined to dress David more like a son than like a potential date for her daughter. There was an awful lot of tan and gray in the selections that she tracked down for him, and not much in the way of what David might have thought was “cool”, though he would have been the first to admit that he had no idea what would have counted as “cool” anyway.

After half an hour, David thanked the woman who’d helped him out, bought some of the items she’d selected to avoid hurting her feelings, then went home with two bags full of purchases.

Back at home he pondered his wardrobe for another hour, trying on several pairs of jeans, slacks, and even a pair of the khakis that he’d just purchased. He finally decided that a pair of the khaki slacks with one of his best T-shirts and maybe one of the new cardigans would be an inoffensive outfit. He dressed in it, noticed that there was still a good three hours until he was supposed to meet with Pamela, and tried to come up with something that he could distract himself with until then.

Half an hour later he ended up changing his clothes all over again. He thought then about calling Pamela and canceling the date altogether, claiming to be sick or something and then sitting at home and playing computer games for the rest of the weekend, the way he spent most of his weekends, but decided he’d better go through with the date. He’d see Pamela on Monday morning and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to put up with the look on her face if he canceled on her.

At four-thirty he began to consider driving over to the Perk Up cafe where he was supposed to meet Pamela. Then he wondered if he would just seem pathetic for showing up at the agreed meeting place with over an hour left until the date itself was supposed to start. after a few moments of consideration, he decided that yes, even he could tell that would be pathetic.

There were times when he almost wished he were a girl, because when it came to this sort of thing girls always had it easier.

He started to play World of Warcraft, but then decided he couldn’t afford to get caught up in a raid or any other situation right now; what if he got so caught up in the events of the game that he forgot about the date entirely? It wasn’t likely to happen, given how much he was stressing about it, but anything was possible. Similarly he felt like it would be irresponsible to start up a session of EVE Online or any of the other online role playing games he played. He was even nervous about opening up a book or reading any of the blogs he normally read. Anything that might engage his attention might engage it too much.

Finally, he settled on distracting himself with an episode of Doctor Who. It would be just the right length, and once it was over then it would be the right time to head on over to the cafe to wait for Pamela.

While the episode played, he changed his clothes twice more, hoping for just the right combination of casual and fancy. He thought about going to a different department store, but he realized he simply did not have the time.

He hadn’t had a date in years. He’d completely forgotten how to get ready for them. And it seemed like everyone else in the world would have an easier time getting ready for one than he did.

At the end of the episode of Doctor Who, he knew that it was definitely time to go to the cafe and wait for Pamela. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He brushed his teeth one more time, thought about combing his hair one more time and then decided it looked as good as it was going to get, and headed out to the cafe.

# # #

Pamela was not already at the cafe when David showed up, and that surprised him somewhat. He looked around, twice, just to make sure that she was nowhere in sight, then shrugged and chose a table near the front door, just so they would be able to escape easily if they needed to. Or if Pamela felt she needed to leave quickly.

Or just in case more zombies attacked. With Pamela, it was hard to tell exactly what might happen.

He wasn’t sure if he should order a coffee and sip it silently waiting until Pamela showed up, or if he should simply wait until she showed up before he got a drink for himself. If he got coffee now, but finished it before Pamela arrived, he’d feel awkward sitting around and doing nothing while Pamela drank her own coffee. On the other hand, he felt awkward sitting at the table with nothing in front of him, and not having spent any money to buy anything.

Again, it seemed to him that the girls always had it so easy when it came to dating.

He decided against getting a drink before Pamela showed up. It was a matter of weighing potential awkwardnesses. The awkwardness of having nothing to drink while Pamela drank her own coffee would have been more painful to endure than the awkwardness of sitting at an empty table.

They were supposed to meet at six o’ clock.

Six o’ clock came and went with no sign of Pamela.

I’ve been stood up, David thought to himself five minutes after the hour.

Not that it surprised him, and he certainly did not bear her a grudge. He knew he was awkward and goofy, and not very attractive, and that he didn’t have much of a personality. The fact that Pamela seemed to find him attractive was beyond his ken. Whenever a woman expressed interest in him — it wasn’t often that it happened, but it did happen, every now and then — David’s first thought was always to wonder what was wrong with her. In Pamela’s case he tried not to wonder about that; he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. He also just didn’t want to assume that something was wrong with her, because everything he’d seen of her so far had shown him that she was pretty much perfect, as far as he could tell. There was nothing wrong with her judgment, as far as he could tell. So if she decided not to show up, then what would it indicate? That she’d had a sudden attack of nerves? That didn’t make sense to him. Could she have gotten into an accident along the way? Should he call her and ask?

Again: why did everyone else have such an easier time with these things?

Another ten minutes passed. David wasn’t sure what the protocol was for this sort of situation. How long were you supposed to wait before assuming that the other person wasn’t going to show up? Should he call? Should he wait?

For a moment he considered asking one of the other women around him or possibly the barista for some advice, then decided that might have been a bit too pathetic even for him. No, best to simply wait for her for… maybe another hour or so?

At twenty minutes past the hour, Pamela finally showed up. She was dressed very simply, in a pair of gray slacks and a sleeveless white top, but to David she looked absolutely gorgeous. Her hair was perfectly styled, and her face looked impeccably made up.

He stood up as she approached him — he’d seen Commander Riker stand up for women when they met him for dates, so he figured that was the proper thing to do — and pulled a seat out for her. She smiled up at him.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m late. I had a last minute emergency with my roommate. I was going to call but by the time I thought about it I saw it was already ten after six so I figured I’d just come on over anyway and hope you were still here. Have you been waiting long?”

“Actually, I –” David started.

“Oh, you didn’t get yourself anything?” Pamela interrupted. She’d looked down at the empty table. “You didn’t have to wait for me. Do you want to get some coffee? Or maybe we should just go to the restaurant? Did we decide where we’re going for dinner?”

“Um…” David was flustered and couldn’t think of what to say. He remembered that they’d discussed the possibility of having dinner, but he didn’t think they’d actually made any final arrangements. They were just going to meet here at Perk Up, as far as he knew, and see what happened next. Was he supposed to have made reservations?

The idea of getting coffee, though, appealed to him. There was definitely safety in coffee. “I’ll get us some drinks,” he said. “What do you want?”

“A latte,” Pamela said. “No, wait. A cappucino. No, sorry, a mocha. A single mocha, extra chocolate, decaf, non-fat milk, with whipped cream.”

David blinked, not sure he got the order right in his head. “Single mocha, extra chocolate, decaf, non-fat milk, whipped cream?”

Pamela nodded quickly. “Yes, perfect, thank you.”

Before he could embarrass himself at all, David turned and went over to the counter. He ordered Pamela’s mocha, and a plain black coffee — a manly drink, he thought, as opposed to the hot chocolate that he really wanted — for himself.

While the barista was making their drinks, David glanced back at his table. Pamela had found a newspaper and spread it out in front of her but she wasn’t looking at it. She was staring out the window at the street beyond. Her left hand cupped her chin, and the fingers of her right hand drummed rapidly on the tabletop.

What was she thinking about? David wondered to himself. Was she trying to figure out a way to graciously extricate herself from the date? Was she thinking about the things she had to do at work on Monday morning? Was she plotting out possible escape routes in case more zombies attacked? Was she replaying her conversation with the sasquatch from the other day? Or was she thinking about her roommate and the problems she’d had with her?

Her drumming stopped and she glanced down at her fingers with a look of annoyance on her face. She fussed with her purse, then took out a small object and began rubbing it back and forth rapidly along the edge of her right thumbnail.

“Mocha and a black coffee,” the barista said, startling David.

“Thanks,” David said. He took the drinks and carried them back to the table. “Here’s your mocha,” he said to Pamela.

Pamela squeaked, and the nail file she’d been working with dropped and clattered on the table. She whisked it up and deposited it into her purse, which she snapped shut with a vengeance.

That’s when David had his revelation: Pamela was just as nervous as he was.

He sat down and took a deep breath. “Um. I don’t think we actually made any plans for dinner,” he said. “Maybe we could have sushi. Do you like sushi? I really like sushi.” He chided himself for sounding like an idiot.

She smiled and nodded quickly. “Sushi sounds great.”

They sat in silence for a few seconds, sipping their drinks. David glanced down at the newspaper that Pamela had found. She’d opened it to the classified ads. “Oh, are you looking for another job?” he asked her.

Pamela shook her head. “No. I like being a temp. I mean, it’s not glamorous and it’s certainly not what I wanted to be when I grew up but it’s okay. I’m just looking for a cheap computer. My old computer’s broken down and I need a new one.”

This was definitely something that David could talk about with some authority. “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve got a couple of old computers I’m not using, I could let you have one.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay, I really couldn’t.”

“It’s no trouble, really. I’d like to.”

Once again, Pamela smiled at him, and once again, David decided anything was worth doing if it would get her to smile at him.

# # #

“So what did you want to be when you grew up?” David asked her.

Pamela looked up from the California roll that she was fussing with. “I’m sorry?”

David blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ask a personal question. It’s just that back at the cafe you said that being a temp wasn’t what you wanted to be when you grew up, and I was just wondering what you did want to grow up to be.”

“Oh, when I was a little girl I really wanted to be a doctor.”

“Really?” David was impressed.

“It’s no big deal. My parents gave me this doctor’s kit when I was like eight years old and I used to give my dolls and our cats physical checkups and that sort of thing. All through high school I wanted to be a doctor.”

“What happened?”

“College,” Pamela said. “Math. Chemistry. You know, same old stuff that gets everyone.” She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I’ve heard that medical school is a killer anyway. Residency’s like 80 hours a week of work and you barely get paid anything. What about you? What did you want to be? Did you always want to be a computer programmer?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” David said, shaking his head. He was having an odd sense of deja vu, or something similar. Every date he’d been on he’d brought here to the sushi restaurant, and every date had ended up badly. He still burned over the last one. But for some reason this one with Pamela was going really well. There was bound to be some sort of catch, he knew. “I mean, I thought computers were kind of cool when I was in high school. But I wasn’t really into them. I wanted to be a botanist.”

“Really? A botanist? Wow. I would never have thought.”

“Crazy, huh?”

“No, not at all. I mean, it just doesn’t seem like you. You don’t even have any plants on your desk at work or anything.”

David blushed. “I, uh, don’t really like plants.”

“Then why did you want to be a botanist?”

“Because my dad’s a botanist, and I just figured I should do what he did. He never said I had to, but he sure seemed proud when I said I was going to be one too.”

Pamela gave up on the chopsticks and settled for picking up the California roll with a fork. She dipped it into some soy sauce then popped it into her mouth. She smiled appreciatively around it; this was the first time she’d ever had sushi. “So you have a degree in botany and everything now?”

David shook his head. “Actually, I flunked chemistry too. So I just got my degree in English. I figured I’d teach or something, but wound up in human resources, then taught myself how to program.”

Pamela’s eyes and mouth opened wide, giving David a clear view of half-masticated California roll. “You taught yourself how to program? Wow, you must be brilliant.”

“Yeah, you’d think.” David scoffed. “You wouldn’t think so to hear Nina talk about it.”

Pamela made a face. “Don’t worry about Nina. She doesn’t have any idea what’s going on around her. She has her own agenda and just doesn’t pay attention to anything that isn’t tied in with that agenda.”

“Yeah.” David did a double take. “What do you mean?”

“Um.” Pamela swallowed the California roll and chased it down with some water. “I shouldn’t have said anything. What is this stuff called?’

“Saki.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty strong, isn’t it?”

David leaned forward. “What weren’t you supposed to say anything about?”

Pamela smiled at him and leaned in. “Okay. I’m not supposed to be telling you this, and you can’t tell anyone in the world ever what I’m about to tell you, okay?”

David nodded. “Absolutely I won’t. I’m very good at keeping secrets.”

“Great.” She looked to the left and then to the right, then leaned over the table. Her pendant dangled just over the spicy tuna roll on her plate. “Okay, I am a temp like I said, but I work for a specific company.”

“I kind of figured that part out.”

“How did you know?”

“Come on, what normal temp speaks sasquatch and carries a portable teleportation device in her purse?”

“Okay, you have a point.”

“So who do you work for?”

“Well, I work for the Temporary Employment Corps at the Tindalos Corporation. Not for the Kelly Group.”

“Who’s Tindalos?”

Pamela’s eyes widened. “You don’t know?”

David shook his head, feeling suddenly foolish. “Never heard of them.”

“Well, Tindalos is a big corporation. Lots of holdings. The Tindalos Corporation is the parent company that owns Interstitial Interfaces, actually. I figured you’d know who they were because of that.”

David shook his head again. “I didn’t know that at all.”

“Well, that’s okay. But the point is, I work for Tindalos, and I have a really specific assignment from them.”

“What is it?”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

David crossed his heart. “I promise.”

“Well, first of all, I’m supposed to do the filing and answer the phones, of course, just like any other temp.”

“But what else?” David prodded when Pamela didn’t continue.

“Well, I’m also supposed to keep an eye out for anything unusual, and deal with it if it comes up.”

“Unusual? Oh, you mean like zombies.”

“Exactly. Something’s going on in the Tindalos Corporation, David. Different subsidiaries are experiencing unusual problems. Interstitial Interfaces seemed not to be having any problems at all, and that was kind of suspicious.”

“Until the zombie attack, right?”

Pamela nodded, spearing the spicy tuna roll on her fork. “Until the zombie attack. Exactly.”

“So…” David hesitated. Then he cleared his throat, and continued. “So, is the Tindalos Corporation the group that runs those translation facilities? And has the underwater research place where I saw the…”

Pamela looked up at him. “The what?”

David shook his head. For some reason he didn’t feel ready to tell Pamela about the conversation he’d had with the giant squid. “The other translation facility.”

Pamela nodded. “Yep. That’s Tindalos.”

“Wow. And I just thought we wrote complicated computer programs.”

“You don’t know the half of it. And actually that’s all I really know, too. I’ve worked a couple of other assignments, but this is the most interesting.”

“And have you found out anything?”

“Found out anything about what?”

“The weird problems that the other subsidiary companies have been having. Interstitial Interfaces has zombies, right? What’s causing the zombies to attack?”

“I wish I knew.”

A thought suddenly occurred to David. “You’re not going to leave Interstitial Interfaces now are you? I mean, you’re not going to be reassigned, right?”

Pamela shook her head. “Oh, I doubt it. And if I did, I’d definitely request an assignment near my home anyway. I can’t afford to move. Being a temp doesn’t pay all that much. So unless they pay a relocation fee, I’m stuck here in this town.”

“Well, it’s not all that bad, is it? San Augustin’s not a bad city.”

Pamela shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right.”

David was surprised that they managed to keep the conversation going throughout the entire meal; and when they had both finished eating, they stayed at their table and continued talking for another hour, prompting the manager himself to come out and ask if there was anything else they needed.

“We should probably get going,” Pamela said to David after the manager had left.

“I guess you’re right. Where do you want to go?”

Pamela smiled. “Let’s go back to my apartment,” she said, and David’s heart exploded into a rhythm of thudding. He had not expected to be asked back to her apartment, not so early in the dating process.

“Really?” he asked.

“Well, just to talk and maybe watch a DVD. I don’t think I’m ready for anything more than that.”

David nodded. “Oh, of course. I wouldn’t try anything.” And he wouldn’t, either. This was going too well for him to ruin by pushing his luck where it shouldn’t be pushed. He wanted to be able to look Pamela in the eye on Monday morning and not cringe from embarrassment as he did so.

“My roommate gave me a ride here, so can you drive us back to my place?”

David was able to summon just enough temporary stability to say, “Sure.”

# # #

Pamela, it turned out, lived in a small apartment complex called Lone Pine at the edge of San Augustin. David had actually lived in the same complex once himself when he’d first moved to the city, but had moved out again as soon as he’d been able to afford something better: the appliances were all cheap and ugly and barely effective, and the landlord had been unresponsive to any complaints.

“I used to live in this complex,” he told Pamela. “I’m sorry you have to.”

She shrugged as she worked her keys out of her purse. “It’s okay. It’s not great, I guess, but it’s better than living on the streets, you know?”

Inside, her tiny apartment was spotless. A large television had been placed against one wall, opposite a comfortable looking sofa. To the left, a perfectly clean kitchen sparkled, while to the right David could see two separate bedrooms off of a short hallway. The door on the left was open, revealing a room that was clean and well furnished. While there weren’t pink blankets or pony pictures on the wall, it was obviously a woman’s room. The door on the right was closed.

Next to the television was a small book case filled with DVDs. Pamela dropped her purse on the sofa and waved at the DVDs. “Go ahead and pick one out while I get some drinks, okay? Do you like white wine?”

David nodded. “Yeah, sounds great. Thanks.” He knelt down in front of the case of DVDs and began to peruse them. He wasn’t surprised to see that they consisted mostly of romantic comedies and a few light dramas, though she did have the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. That did surprise him. He was also impressed to see that she had a copy of “Shaun of the Dead” as well.

Pamela returned from the kitchen with a wine bottle and a pair of wine glasses. “Anything there look good to you?”

David took the copy of “Shaun of the Dead”. “I like this one.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Pamela said, smiling. She sat down on the couch and poured wine into the two glasses, and handed one of them over to David.

David opened the case with the movie, and put the disc into the player. Then he sat on the sofa opposite Pamela with his wine and began sipping his drink. “Where’s your roommate?” he asked.

“In his room,” Pamela replied. She cleared her throat uncertainly. “Actually, David, the thing is…”

David braced himself. He knew what was coming. He’d been on enough dates with enough women to recognize the prologue to a gentle let down when he heard one. “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to explain anything.” He knew that she was probably going to tell him that her roommate was really her boyfriend or something.

“David, it isn’t what you think. Todd’s not really my roommate at all.”

“Todd, huh?” David could not keep the snide tone out of his voice.

“David, please. Just listen. Todd’s not even a person.”

David furrowed his brows. “I’m sorry? What do you mean? What is he if he isn’t a person?”

Pamela took a sip of her wine and let out a slow breath. “Well, working for Tindalos has a lot of benefits. I mean, yeah, the pay sucks, but sometimes you get to take home samples of different products, toys, that sort of thing.”

“Okay. But I’m not following you.”

“Oh, it’s probably better just to show you. Hang on.” Pamela stood up and went over to the closed bedroom door. She hesitated and looked back at David. “Don’t freak out, okay?”

“What would I freak out about?” David asked.

“Just promise me, okay?”

David nodded slowly. He certainly hadn’t been planning on freaking out, but Pamela’s warnings were beginning to have an effect on him. He sat up straighter in his seat on the sofa and eyed the closed door carefully. “I promise not to freak out,” he said, though he could definitely feel his own adrenalin rising.

Pamela hesitated just a little bit longer, then opened the door.

From the darkened room beyond the door, David heard a clunk and a whirring sound, followed by thuds that could have been footsteps made by a very heavy person.

David stood up. “What exactly is Todd?” he asked.

Pamela blushed. “Todd’s a housekeeper droid,” she replied. “Model T-1000, to be exact.”

“T-1000?” David blurted out. “Like, in the Terminator movies?”

“I haven’t seen those movies,” Pamela said. “Okay, he’s kind of big, so… Well, you know.”

“Right. Don’t freak out.”

The heavy footfalls and hydraulic whines of the robotic housekeeper grew louder, and then Todd itself stood in the doorway.

Todd did not look like how David would imagine a house cleaning droid would look. Instead of looking like the giant mobile vacuum cleaner that he had imagined, David found that Todd looked like a bodybuilder. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, really. Thick, rope-like muscles slid and rippled under translucent skin as the thing stepped into the living room.

David jumped up from his seat on the sofa. “Holy crap!” he cried out. “What is that?”

“It’s Todd the T-1000,” Pamela replied. “I think he’s overkill for a domestic droid, know what I mean, but he does his job well.”

“INTRUDER DETECTED IN LIVING ROOM,” Todd said, its voice a thick mechanical parody of human speech. “ELIMINATION PROTOCOLS INITIATED.”

Pamela moved in front of Todd and pounded on its chest. “Stop it,” she said. “David’s a friend of mine. He’s harmless, see?”

“THREAT ANALYSIS MODE ENGAGED.” The droid stood stock still and made a series of low beeping noises.

‘This is your housework droid?” David asked. “It looks a lot deadlier than that.”

Pamela nodded. “Yeah. I wanted the old Jane model, but this was the only one they could let me have.”

“The Jane model?”

“Yeah, Coulton Robotics makes a really nice domestic robot that looks almost like that old Jane robot. You know, from The Jetsons? Anyway, I wanted one of those, but they didn’t have any to spare so I ended up with the Todd.”

“I thought the robot in ‘The Jetsons’ was Sophie,” David said. The giant domestic droid in front of him intimidated him and he found he was babbling.

“Whatever,” Pamela said. “I never watched that show anyway. Now, do you want to watch the movie?”

David looked at the television and noticed that the splash screen for Shaun of the Dead was still being displayed. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.” He sat back down on the sofa and tried not to stare at Todd.

Pamela went over to her side of the couch, grabbed her glass of wine, and ended up leaning against David. “Cheers,” she said, lifting the wine glass before his.

For a moment David was stunned. Then he touched her wineglass with his. “Cheers,” he said.

David had imagined a number of possible endings to the end of this date. Most had not been good endings, with variations on the theme of Pamela discovering what a nerd David really was altogether and letting him down in a variety of ways, most of them gentle. Some of the endings had been, in David’s mind, simply beyond the realm of possibility: those were the endings which featured him and Pamela in bed with each other, in various degrees of undress. He hadn’t focused on the second sort of ending very much, feeling that it was crude to even consider the possibility.

Among the endings he had not considered, though, was this very pleasant ending, with Pamela leaning against him, seeming very content, while the two of them drank wine and watched a classic horror comedy film. It conveyed a level of friendship and affection that David had not even hoped for.

The next thing that happened, though, was so far beyond anything he had imagined for this evening that at first he didn’t even hear it. But when Todd repeated itself and said, “Imminent disruption threat detected, all parties in the vicinity will be immobilized until authorities can be summoned.”

“Immobilized?” Pamela said, sitting up. “What does that mean –”

Then things went dark and everything, including the pleasant sensation of Pamela’s body leaning against his own, vanished, and David found himself slipping into a black void, and then out of consciousness altogether.

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Download/purchase this song at Jonathan Coulton’s website

Send Code Monkey to the Night of Writing Dangerously!

He was tempted to call in sick the next morning and spend the day at home, catching up on reading or maybe playing games and generally avoiding Pamela, but he knew it would be a bad idea to do so on a Friday. He wouldn’t necessarily get into trouble, but he could already anticipate the looks that Nina would give him on Monday morning: the look that told him she was very disappointed in him and that this might be something she’d have to consider at his next performance review. So instead of calling in sick he got up, shaved and showered grudgingly, all the while imagining what he would say to Pamela when he saw her at the office. It was going to be uncomfortable; that sort of uncomfortable that comes when two people who aren’t necessarily together in any sense of the word nonetheless have an intense shared experience.

Not that David had any experience with that sort of situation, of course. He didn’t remember having any intense experiences with any women, ever. Not even with his last girlfriend. The whole adventure that he and Pamela had shared yesterday was so far beyond anything else that had ever happened in his life, with or without other people, that he still wasn’t sure how to process it, or whether it was in fact real at all. There was a part of him that was afraid it had all been an hallucination brought on by too much work and not enough sleep; there was another part of him that actually hoped that this was the case. The majority of his brain, though, had to accept without question that what had happened yesterday had actually happened.

He decided to drive to work today instead of riding his bike because he was still feeling lazy, uninspired, and utterly confused. His ancient Honda rattled down the streets from his apartment to the office, the whole car sounding dangerously close to disintegrating into a cloud of dust and bolts at any moment. He passed the same cafes and gas stations that he did every day, not to mention the same trees, and the same patches of broken sidewalk and old houses. It was, in fact, the exact same route he took everyday on his bicycle.

A dark feeling began to creep up inside of him. It clawed at his solar plexus and gripped it like a cat gripping a mouse in its jaws. He couldn’t identify the feeling right away, so he tried to ignore it. He had the sense, though, that it was something that had been building up for some time now, but for some reason it was much more powerful today that it had ever been before.

He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. The day didn’t have to be that bad, he told himself. He could just slip past the front desk, skulking against the far wall so that Pamela wouldn’t even see him, then he could just sit at his desk the entire day and not have to interact with her at all. Yeah, that seemed like the best plan.

He even made it to the office early. Pamela would definitely not have shown up yet.

But she was there already after all, sitting at the front desk, copying numbers from the pages of a thick binder full of papers into some spreadsheet on her computer.

David opened the front door carefully and as quietly as possible to avoid drawing her attention, then sneaked through the lobby, taking care not to make a single noise, hoping not to draw her attention at all.

He almost made it, too. When he was at the door from the lobby to the main work area, Pamela called his name out brightly. “David! Hi!”

David’s shoulders slumped, but hopefully not enough to be noticeable. He turned to Pamela and smiled weakly. “Hi, Pamela.”

Pamela looked quickly back and forth, as if checking to see that they wouldn’t be overheard. Then she beckoned him over to her. “Last night was really crazy, huh?”

David stepped over to her. “Yeah. It was pretty crazy, that’s for sure.”

“Well, I’m glad you were with me, I really am. It would have been really bad if I’d had to deal with all that stuff on my own.”

“Cool,” David said, nodding. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. If it hadn’t been for him, she wouldn’t have had to deal with any of those situations at all.

God, he was confused.

“Well,” Pamela went on, “I want to promise you that things aren’t like that all the time with me. I mean, really, they’re not. In fact, last night, after I got home, all I did was just sit in bed and read a book. I’m really very boring. What did you do?”

“I, uh…” David thought back. What, exactly, had he done? Sat around in front of his computer and moped for a couple of hours before going to bed, that’s all. “I read too,” he said.

“Really?” Pamela’s smile would have widened even further, were it possible. “That’s so great. What are you reading right now? I’m reading a book called ‘Water for Elephants’ by Sarah Gruen. Have you read it?”

David shook his head. “I haven’t heard of it.”

“Oh. Well, it’s really good. You should read it. So what were you reading last night? Some science fiction epic, I bet. Or ‘Lord of the Rings’. You seem the type. Am I right?”

“I was just reading some stuff online. Some articles about programming and stuff.”

“Oh, for work?”

“Yeah.”

Pamela shrugged. “That’s okay, I guess.” She looked at him, smiling, eyes wide, as if she were expecting him to say something.

David wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say here. Obviously, she expected something from him. He could have kicked himself. He was getting seriously mixed signals from her. She was so clearly uninterested in him, but she was at the same time acting like she was. He just had no idea how to react to her, what to say, or what to do.

When he stayed quiet, she went on. “So I was thinking, maybe we should actually get together this weekend. Have some coffee or drinks or something, and, you know, talk about what happened yesterday.”

“Really?”

“Sure! I mean, it’s a good idea, don’t you think? And maybe we could have dinner. I mean, I know that yesterday I said we shouldn’t because there was so much about my life that I didn’t want to share, but now… I don’t know. What do you think?”

David scratched his head. “I don’t know. I’m really…. I have a lot to think about.” He struggled to find the right words. “And I don’t want to complicate things for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s obvious your life is really complicated as it is. I just think that I probably wouldn’t be the best thing for you right now.”

“Oh.” Pamela’s smile vanished like a candle being blown out, and she leaned back in her chair. “I guess… Okay. I didn’t mean to rush you or anything.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just need to get back to work here. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

David felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. And yet that weight took with it something that he wasn’t even aware he’d wanted to hang on to. It was gone, and that clawing feeling inside his stomach grew stronger for it. “Okay. That sounds good. So long.” He waved at her cursorily and made his way to his desk.

# # #

Two hours later, a rapping at the edge of his cubicle drew him out of the code reverie he’d slipped into, and with a start he looked up. Pamela was standing at the entrance to his cubicle, a stack of envelopes in her hand.

“Here,” she said, handing him one of the envelopes.

“Thanks.” David took the envelope and looked it over. It was plain and brown, and his name was printed on the front of it in a plain serif font. “What is this?” he asked.

“I don’t know. There’s one for everybody in the office.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

Pamela took a step forward so that she was in the actual boundaries of his cubicle. “Can I ask you something, David?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Well, I was curious. Are all computer programmers utter idiots, or is it just you?”

David blinked and shook his head involuntarily. “What? What do you mean?”

“You heard me, David. You’re an idiot. And I want to know if it’s just you or are you part of a larger set of human beings that are congenitally idiots.”

David furrowed his brow. It had been years since a pretty woman had called him an idiot so blatantly. On the one hand he was grateful for the attention but on the other hand he was hurt by the insult. But he had to admit some confusion to himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said at last.

“I just have to spell it out completely for you, don’t I?”

“Spell what out?”

“David, you ought to know that I think you’re really attractive. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re kind of cute, too. I just want to get to know you a little bit better, that’s all. But you’re confusing me with all your talk about not wanting to complicate my life, so I just want to know, can we get together on a date or not? I mean, why do you think I gave you my phone number?”

“What?”

Pamela’s face was bright red. “That was embarrassing enough for me to say as it was. Please don’t make me say it again.”

“I thought you gave me your phone number in case I met any more zombies or something.”

“You are an idiot, David.” Her face was still bright red, but a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Can we just go out sometime this weekend? Just say yes or no, okay?”

David nodded. And before he could allow his normal instincts to take over and engage self protection mode, he found himself saying, “Yeah, sure. That would be great.”

“Good. Okay. Now I’ve embarrassed myself enough, and…”

“You didn’t embarrass yourself,” David said, trying to sound soothing.

“Yes I did. Let me finish. I’m going back to the front desk now. Call me, okay? So we can figure things out? I mean, for this weekend?”

“Sure. Yeah. I’ll call you. Or maybe I’ll just come by the front desk later. Okay?”

Pamela nodded. “That would be good too.” She took a deep breath and let it out again, then made a visible effort to compose herself. “Okay. Now I have to go and deliver the rest of these things,” she said, indicating the stack of envelopes, “and freshen myself up a bit. I’ll talk to you later.”

David watched Pamela leave, a smile spreading over his face. That had been unexpected. He had never been spoken to by a woman so forthrightly before. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do next, but that was okay with him. Sometimes, he thought, a little bit of confusion can be a good thing. He made a mental note to swing by Pamela’s desk later on to follow on the possibility of this date, and to not call Johnny T. to brag about it.

The envelope slipped in his hand, and he started. He’d completely forgotten that it was there. He pulled his pocket knife out, opened the longer blade, and used it to slit open the envelope along the top. He took out the single sheet of white paper that was inside, unfolded it, and read it.

MEMORANDUM, read the single word at the top of the page.

TO: DEVELOPMENT STAFF
FROM: NINA ANIN

RE: PERFORMANCE REVIEW

David did not read the entire memo carefully. Basically, it was time for performance reviews again, the yearly cycle of torture where management would decide how well you were working, and adjust your pay accordingly. The memo listed everyone in the development team, David’s team, and listed times at which they were to meet with Nina about their own performance review. David’s own meeting with this afternoon at two o’ clock.

He sighed, shook his head, and set the memo on the desk next to his monitor. It wasn’t going to go well, he knew that already without even having to think about it for more than a second. It was a terrible chaser to his conversation with Pamela.

The sensation that had been bugging him all morning, the clawing sensation in his belly, reared up again. It had vanished almost entirely while he’d been talking to Pamela, but now it was back, and now he was even able to put a name to it.

It was resentment.

He had worked hard to get himself into this sort of job. He’d spent years teaching himself how to program in three different languages, studying for hours at night after work and often forgoing his social life entirely so that he could do so. The job he’d had before, in a crappy human resources environment, had sucked, and he’d imagined that a new job as a programmer would be better, that he would enjoy it more, and that it would be more rewarding. And he would not have to deal with inane bosses or stupid rules, or anything. A computer programming job, he’d thought, would be a sort of nirvana for a former human resources monkey like himself.

It just hadn’t turned out that way in real life, of course.

He looked up at the row of books on the shelf above his desk. Books on programming languages. Books on programming methodologies. Books on database design and development. Books on design theory. Many of them he’d purchased himself, then had the company reimburse him for them. Nina was adamant that any sort of training or reading that he did related to the job should be paid for by the company, because she wanted her employees at the top of their game and was willing to pay for that.

The performance evaluation wasn’t going to go well. He knew that.

Maybe he should just quit.

David stood up and stretched. Then he looked around at the other programmers’ cubicles, and wondered what they were thinking. Was Paul confident in his programming abilities? Was Emily? David was the only one that he knew of in the department that had not actually gone to school and gotten a degree in computer science. And he was the only person for whom that was a first programming job. He felt woefully out of touch with the field, especially when he remembered that he was older and less experienced and less knowledgeable than the others in the department. And, of course, there was Rob, the lead programmer. He was younger than David as well.

On the other hand, David thought, none of them had a date with Pamela.

He grinned.

# # #

“Well, David, it’s been a few days since our last conversation, hasn’t it?” Nina said.

David nodded. The good mood he’d felt after his conversation with Pamela was gone now, and the seething resentment that had been building up inside of him was threatening to spill over. He kept it in check, though. Knowing that if he lost this job he would have nowhere else to go, for now, was a good reminder that he needed to stay on track and not lose his head. “Yes, it has,” he replied.

“Have you looked into taking any additional courses?” Nina asked him.

David shook his head. “I haven’t really had much of a chance to.”

“Well, Interstitial Interfaces has a wide range of resources for any employee looking to improve or even change their skill set entirely. You should look up staff development on our intranet site. Will you promise me that you’ll do that?”

David nodded. “Sure.”

“Good. I did want to commend you, by the way, for showing up to Melanie’s birthday party. It was good to see you there, and I’m very happy to see you taking more of an interest in the social events of our office. I also saw you talking with Pamela Smith, so I’m happy to see you making some more friends in the office. These are positive developments.”

“They are?”

“Of course, David. We want our employees to be happy, and part of that is having a successful and healthy social life, don’t you think?”

“You want me to be friends with the people I work with?” David asked, incredulous. He couldn’t imagine getting together with Paul or Emily and hanging out with them on the weekends. He was uncomfortable enough with them in the office, and he could only imagine that being outside of the office with them would be sheer torture.

“No, not necessarily,” Nina replied. “Of course not. But it’s good to be on speaking terms with your co-workers, don’t you think?”

David nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Good.” Nina looked through some papers on her desk. “I also see here that you worked late the other night, and got some pretty major bugs worked out. Right?”

Warily, David nodded again. That would have been the night that the zombie had attacked him in the office, and that Pamela had saved his life. David had not even thought to ask Nina whether she’d known anything about that incident. The fact that the whole mess had been cleaned up by the time he’d arrived back at work, and that no one else mentioned it… Well, what did that say about the incident? Who was responsible? Who had cleaned up the mess? What did Nina know about it, if anything?

Who did Pamela really work for, David was starting to wonder.

“Well, that’s good. You’ve always been diligent, David, but it’s good to see you taking the extra initiative. I’m very proud of you.”

“Thanks.”

Nina did not really say much more of interest or importance after that, and David barely paid attention to anything that she was saying. He was caught up in new questions about the zombie attack. The fact that the entire mess had been cleaned up hadn’t even really registered with him before now. Who had cleaned up the zombie after all?

“…here at Interstitial Interfaces,” Nina was saying.

David looked up at her. “I’m sorry?”

Nina gave David a hard glare, as if upset that he had drifted off and stopped paying attention for a moment. “I said that there are plenty of advancement opportunities here at Interstitial Interfaces. Or at any of our affiliate corporations. Apply yourself, David, and there’s no end to the opportunities you can find here. You don’t to be a low level programmer all of your life, do you?”

“I guess not.” In truth, David had not given much thought to his career beyond his current situation. He’d had this quixotic notion that he would just sort of coast through to bigger and better job positions as he went on in life.

Things just weren’t going to work out that way, he realized.

“So I think we should meet each week,” Nina went on, “to discuss your performance and your direction. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good,” David said. Normally he would have been utterly humiliated by such a suggestion, but this time he was too distracted. There were other forces at work, he’d come to realize. Pamela was involved in some of those forces, somehow. And if he stuck with her, he’d probably get involved with them as well.

As if the sasquatches and the giant squid hadn’t been enough.

“David, I think we had a great meeting, don’t you? Why don’t we meet every Friday at 2 like this?”

David nodded. “That sounds good to me.”

“Me too. Do you have any other questions or comments to make?”

“Nope, I think I’m good.”

“Good. Thanks for coming in. Please close the door on your way, okay?”

Again, another obvious dismissal. David stood, left Nina’s office, and closed the door behind him.

# # #

David went up to the front desk. Pamela smiled at him as he approached.

“How about tomorrow night?” David asked.

“Sounds good. What do you have in mind?”

“Uh…” David frowned. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. “I don’t know. How about dinner and a movie?”

“Dinner’s okay, but I don’t like going to movies on dates. When you’re at a movie you don’t get much of a chance to talk, you know?”

“Oh. Okay. What do you like to do then?”

“Let’s just start with dinner and see where that takes us, okay?” She smiled at him.

“That sounds like a great idea. Definitely. So how about I pick you up at your place at six o’ clock?”

“Let’s meet at the Perk Up cafe, okay?”

David nodded. Lots of women didn’t want to reveal where they lived right away, he knew that. “Sounds good,” he said.

“Good.” The phone rang. “I have to get this,” Pamela said, picking it up. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Okay.” David grinned, then wandered back to his desk.

Strangely, he found he was actually looking forward to the date. Not just because he had a million questions that he wanted to ask her, but also because, well… Well, because he genuinely enjoyed her company.

And, oddly, he had the sense that she genuinely enjoyed his. It was a peculiar feeling, one that he definitely intended to pursue.

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This time when the door opened, David recognized the scent in the air and the scene outside the doorway. It was downtown San Augustin, and they were definitely back home. San Augustin, like every other city, had a scent that was uniquely its own. There was no mistaking it.

“We’re here,” Pamela announced.

David stepped out of the translation facility, then turned around to look back. In the forest of British Columbia, the translation facility had been a wooden shack, and in the underwater facility, it had been a dome made of an opaque crystalline materials. Here, it appeared that it was built into the base of an equestrian statue on the corner of Fourteenth and Main. David had passed this statue dozens of times in the years that he’d lived in San Augustin, and it had never occurred to him to look very closely at its suspiciously large base, or even wonder that there might be something unusual going on inside of it. Who, after all, would have thought that the base of a giant statue in downtown San Augustin might have a teleporter device built into it?

“Do you know where we are?” Pamela asked him.

“Yep,” David replied. “Downtown San Augustin. I know this statue. It’s right in front of the technical book store I go to sometimes.”

Pamela nodded. “Good. I don’t really know this city very well. Are we far from the office?”

David shook his head. “Nope, not far. It’s about two miles to the east of here. I could walk you there and then you could grab your car or something.”

“No, that’s all right,” Pamela said. “I actually get a ride to work every day.”

“Oh.” David’s heart sank into his lower abdomen with what felt like an audible thunk, that he was sure could be heard by everyone around them. If someone was giving her a ride to work every morning, that meant it was someone that she probably lived with, and that someone was probably a husband. A boyfriend, at the very least. He tried not to let his disappointment show, but he also knew that he shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course she had a boyfriend. The beautiful girls always did. If she had been flirting with him at all, like he’d thought she was, then it was because she was just a flirty type of woman, the type he’d met plenty of times in the past who were never interested in him. “Well, your ride obviously can’t know you’re here.”

“Ooh, good point. I’ll call. Hang on.” She opened up her purse and took out a small cell phone and flipped it open. She covered her ear and stepped away from David as she spoke to whomever she was calling.

David tried not to watch her, tried to focus instead on the people walking back and forth. For a Thursday night, it was unusually busy in downtown San Augustin, he thought. The holiday season wasn’t anywhere in sight, and it wasn’t one of the art tour nights that the city had. There were just a lot of people out on the streets. People walking around. Lots of people holding hands. Lots of couples. Older couples who had been together for decades, who had grown old together and still held hands in public. Middle aged couples still working out who they were and what their relationship was, sometimes having a blast doing it and sometimes doing it loudly. Young couples still trying to figure out what this whole love thing was and trying their best not to get hurt as they explored it.

For some reason, it was this last sort of couple that made David the saddest of all. He’d never been part of a young couple like that. He hadn’t had his first girlfriend until well in his twenties, and she had been a woman with so much self knowledge that there was no ambiguity at all. There were even times when David had thought that her sense of self-surety extended to himself. That she felt comfortable making decisions for the two of them because she felt sure she knew him as well as she knew herself. The relationship had lasted for two years before ending under circumstances that were still a mystery to him.

It was becoming increasingly likely that he would never be part of one of those older couples, and that thought made him sad as well.

He heard Pamela snap shut her phone and step up toward him. “Dammit, my ride can’t make it.”

“Well, I could drive you home.” David felt he was honor-bound to offer.

Pamela smiled at him. Her lips gleamed in the streetlights, and her eyes sparkled. “Would you? That would be really sweet.”

David smiled in spite of himself, then slapped his forehead in frustration. “Dammit, I rode my bike to work today. I live on the other side of the office. It’s about four miles away.”

“That’s okay,” Pamela said, and for a moment David was sure that she would tell him she’d love walking with him the whole way anyway. But then she said, “I can just call a taxi. Would you mind waiting here with me until it comes?”

He felt it like a blow to the chest, or would have had he not been already beaten down by several such blows. But he smiled and said, “Sure.”

“Great. And we can have the taxi take you by the office so that you can get your bike and ride home. Deal?”

David shook his head. “Actually, I think I’m just going to walk to the office from here.”

“Are you sure?” Pamela asked, her brow furrowed with concern. “You said it’s like two miles away.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. After today, I just need to clear my head.”

“Oh. Okay.” She paused, then reached into her purse again and pulled out a small notebook and a pen. She tore a piece of paper out, and wrote something down on it. “Here’s my phone number,” she said, handing it over to David. “Call me if anything comes up, okay?”

“Anything like what?”

Pamela shrugged. “You never know.”

David took the piece of paper, looked at it, then stuffed it into his pocket. “Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome.” She smiled brightly again, and David knew that if there was ever a chance for the two of them, he would have let himself fall desperately in love with that smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow at work, right? I mean, I’d better. I had a lot of fun with you.”

“Oh, I’ll definitely be there.”

“Good. Oh, and you’d better give me your phone number, too. Okay? Just in case.” She handed him the notebook and pen.

David took them, and was amused to notice that the notebook had a pink cover with a picture of a kitten, and that the pen had a small rubber kitten on the eraser tip. “You like cats?” he asked.

“I have four,” she replied.

“Oh.” He opened the notebook, flipped past several pages of scrawled, looping handwriting, and found a blank page. He wrote his name and phone number, then handed it back to her. “Here you go.”

“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

David recognized a dismissal when he heard one, so he turned and started walking back to the office.

# # #

Best not to think about her, David thought to himself that night in his apartment. Pamela was what Johnny T. referred to as a UFO: an “Unobtainable Female Object”. Not that David approved of referring to women as “objects”, of course, but he thought the term was useful for this sort of situation.

He sighed. World of Warcraft held no appeal for him today. Neither did EVE online or any of the other games that he regularly played in the evenings when he was at home by himself. Instead he simply sat in front of his home computer and poked around the Web, looking for sites and articles to distract himself with. Nothing worked. He couldn’t stop himself thinking about Pamela: her slim frame, her perfect face, her soft hair, the elegant way she dressed. Everything about her was perfect.

His own life, by contrast, was a shambles. He was too tall, thin and gangly, nothing but awkward. He dressed shabbily; some of his T-shirts were threadbare and more than a few years old. Come to think of it, they were mostly proclamations of his geek nature: his devotion to Battlestar Galactica or to Buckaroo Banzai or to Star Wars or to Dungeons and Dragons. They were all things he liked, but wearing T-shirts devoted to them, especially at work, seemed overly immature to him now. The mystery of his life these days was not how to be popular, as it had been when he was in high school or even college, but how to be presentable and professional. And as he grew older — and there was no denying that he was indeed growing older — he figured it was more important to be presentable.

His tiny apartment felt confining to him. Actually, his entire life felt confining, and he had no idea how to get out of the situation he was in. How do you build a life for yourself when you’d spent half your life not bothering to build anything at all?

Instant messages from on-line friends popped up on his screen, asking him to take part in raids or similar adventures. He ignored them all. He had an urge to indulge in something no nearly as nerdy or geeky as his usual pursuits, but instead to do the sort of thing that Pamela might want to do. And then he found himself wondering again what normal people did. And by normal, of course, he meant people who were not himself.

He needed a rescuer.

He had a feeling that if things had worked out differently, if Pamela had not already been attached or out of his league with her adventures and what not, then maybe she could be the one to rescue him, to help him get out of the rut he’d dug for himself. Sadly, though, it was not to be.

Just for the sake of curiosity, he fired up his browser again and started searching for colossal squids. He discovered that the giant squid he’d met with and talked to — and he was still having trouble believing that he actually had had a conversation with a giant squid — was an anomaly. The formal colossal squid that had been found in the wild generally didn’t grow to be more than a couple of meters in length. In a way it was pretty disappointing.

He pulled up a new search screen and began a search for Pamela Smith. Several pages with that name cropped up, but none were the one he knew. He wasn’t even sure he knew what he was looking for; he had just decided to search for her name out of idle curiosity. There was a Pamela Smith who was a registered dietitian, another Pamela Smith who was an author, and another who was an athlete. But none who was a professional temporary employee.

It was getting late. He looked at the clock in the upper right corner of his computer desktop and saw that it was after midnight. He wanted to stay up a little longer to do some research into Bigfoot and sasquatches, but his eyes were losing focus and he was yawning uncontrollably. Finally, he decided he would go to sleep for a couple of hours, then get up and do some more research.

And the moment his head hit the pillow, he was out for the rest of the night

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“This isn’t home,” David said. He looked out from the door of the shack. Beyond it was a large space, maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. The ceiling hung about twenty-five feet over David’s head. He stepped into the space and looked around. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made of glass, though the floor appeared to be made of concrete. Beyond the glass walls was a marine landscape. They seemed to be deep underwater, given the dimness of light and the shape of some of the animals that David could see.

When he looked back, he saw that the translation facility was no longer a wooden shack; here it appeared to be a dome made of an opaque crystalline material, like onyx or smoky quartz, although the door was still wooden. It was the only feature of interest in this chamber.

Pamela stepped out of the small structure and looked around. “You’re right,” she said. “This isn’t home.”

“Okay, then,” David said. “Where are we? What happened?”

“Well, we’re underwater, that’s for sure,” Pamela replied. “Exactly where, I don’t know. I also don’t know how deep we are.”

David stared at the benthic landscape beyond the glass walls. “Will I bother you if I ask you how we got here? I mean, how did we end up here instead of back home?”

Pamela pursed her lips as she looked around them. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “We should be back in San Augustin. I did everything right.”

David looked back at her. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” Pamela’s mouth drew into a taut line. “I mean, I’m pretty sure. Let me double check the settings.” She turned around and went back into the dome.

David sighed and looked around. Why would anyone build a structure like this so deep underwater, he wondered. It made no sense, especially since there didn’t seem to be any furnishings of any sort. It could have been an observatory of some sort, where scientists could go to watch deep sea life in their natural habitat; but, on the other hand, something mobile would probably be better for that, and he knew that some universities had submersibles that could go even deeper than where David guessed that he and Pamela were. And if it were some sort of way station, he would have expected that there would be at least one more of these translation terminals, or whatever they were.

“What is this place for?” he called back to Pamela.

“What place?” Pamela called back.

For a moment, David didn’t answer. He was experiencing a new emotion. No, not a new emotion, certainly one that he’d experienced plenty of times before, but not one he’d ever expected to feel with Pamela. He was getting frustrated. “This place where we are. The underwater place.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m working on the coordinates. Hang on.”

David struggled to make the feeling of frustration go away. He was sure that Pamela knew what she was doing, but when they’d arrived in two different places that were not where she’d intended, twice in a row, it was also easy to lose confidence in her.

And what did he know about her really? She’d said that she was a temp, and that because of that she’d had to pick up a lot of different skills, but some of them seemed a little outlandish to say the least. Zombie killing? Speaking to sasquatches in their native language? Traveling through time and space the way she had been doing so with him? It just all seemed a little too extraordinary to him. Whatever Pamela was, she was definitely more than just a temp.

A moment later, Pamela stepped out of the tiny dome and approached David. “I’m so sorry about that. What did you ask?”

“I asked where we are. What is this place, some sort of research station or what?”

“I think that’s exactly what it is. A research station of some sort. I’m pretty sure we’re out in the Pacific somewhere, but I don’t know where for sure. I don’t suppose you… No, of course you wouldn’t.” She looked furtively about them. “It’s kind of peaceful here,” she observed.

“Can we get back home? I really should get back to work tomorrow morning. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

“Oh, of course. I’ll make sure you get home, don’t worry about that.”

“I mean, you’ve kind of gotten us lost a couple of times already.”

“Well, the first time wasn’t my fault. The portable translator is broken, I told you, and it was an emergency translation.”

“And the second time?”

She pursed her lips. “I may have entered the coordinates wrong. And that’s totally my fault, and I’m sorry about this. I’ll get us home, I promise you.”

David pointed back toward the dome. “So why aren’t we on our way now?”

“The facility needs an hour or so to recharge. These things use a lot of energy, you know. But don’t worry, once it’s done we’ll be on our way home.” She smiled up at him. “But it’s kind of exciting, right? All this traveling around, meeting strange creatures. It’s really neat, right?”

David thought about this for a moment, looking around the empty station and back toward the crystalline dome. She was right, of course. It really was exciting. It was the kind of adventure he’d always dreamed of having from the moment he watched the first Stargate movie and his first episode of Star Trek. Why hadn’t that even occurred to him? He’d gotten caught up in his problems at work, the trouble he’d gotten into with Nina, and all that sort of stuff. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “It is pretty exciting.”

“So look on the bright side. If we don’t get back home soon, at least we’ll have some grand adventures along the way, right?”

Pamela smiled brightly up at David, and suddenly he fell in love with her all over again. At least he was pretty sure he was in love. It was hard to say for sure. He’d felt this way with women before, and it had never amounted to anything.

He looked down at her, and she looked back up at him. For a moment, their eyes caught, and for a moment David was positive it was the right moment to kiss her. It would have been so easy, though the logistics would have required a little thought since she was so much shorter than him. He could have picked her up, he supposed, though he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to do so. He could also have bent down to bring his face to hers, but he would probably have thrown his back out. What they really needed was a box for her to stand on. If only he could find one of those…

“I’m going back inside,” Pamela said. “I’ve got to make sure the reboot processes happen in the right sequence.” Then she went inside, and the moment was past.

David groaned to himself. Once again, he’d let just the right moment, and probably just the right girl, slip past him. Maybe next time, he’d make it work. But Pamela was just out of his league, and he knew he was better off recognizing that fact.

SHE’S TOTALLY INTO YOU, YOU KNOW.

The voice seemed to come from nowhere: from both inside and outside his head at the same time. It was deep and reverberant, and rumbled through his entire body.

David jumped, and turned to face the opening of the dome. “Pamela, did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Pamela asked in return.

DON’T WORRY, SHE CAN’T HEAR ME, said the voice. I’M TALKING STRAIGHT TO YOU.

David swore. Now on top of everything he was hearing voices. That was definitely it: he was definitely going insane. Of course, the notion that he had been kidnapped by a beautiful woman and taken on a trip through time and space was crazy enough.

WHAT DID YOU SAY? I COULDN’T HEAR THAT.

At the same moment, from inside the dome, Pamela said, “Did you say something, David?”

“No,” David said to her. He moved away from the dome, toward the far side of the station. “Where are you?”

TURN AROUND. BUT SLOWLY. QUICK MOTIONS STARTLE ME.

David did as the voice suggested, and turned himself around slowly. And he found himself staring into a giant yellow eye, easily a yard across. It stared at him, yellow and unblinking.

“Holy crap,” David said out loud.

“What was that?” Pamela asked from inside the dome.

“Nothing,” David called back. He turned back to the giant eye. “What are you?” he asked in a softer tone of voice.

SQUID, the voice replied. MESONYCHOTEUTHIS HAMILTONI TO BE PRECISE, BUT MUCH LARGER THAN YOUR ORDINARY COLLOSAL SQUID.

“Oh.” David had not expected to find himself in conversation with a giant squid, but the past day had taught him not to be surprised by too much.

ANYWAY, LIKE I SAID… SHE’S TOTALLY INTO YOU.

“Who, Pamela? No she isn’t.”

TRUST ME, I CAN TELL. THE LITTLE LOOKS SHE’S BEEN GIVING YOU, HER TONE OF VOICE WHEN SHE TALKS TO YOU. TAKE IT FROM A MEGA-COLLOSAL SQUID, SHE’S IN LOVE WITH YOU.

David was having trouble taking this seriously. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but…”

BUT WHAT?

“Well, you are a giant squid. You’re not a person. What could you know about love?”

YOU THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE I’M A SEA MONSTER I CAN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT LOVE? I’VE KNOWN MORE ABOUT LOVE THAN YOU’LL EVER FORGET.

“But you’re a squid.”

I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I’M DESPERATELY IN LOVE MYSELF.

“With another squid?”

WITH A HUMAN WOMAN, ACTUALLY.

“How can you be in love with a woman?” David asked. “I don’t get it.”

WELL, I DON’T GET IT EITHER. The squid let out a long sound that could possibly have been a sigh. IT JUST HAPPENED. AND HERE I AM STUCK WITH THESE FEELINGS.

“Well, what makes you think Pamela’s into me, then?” David asked.

WOMEN GIVE OUT SIGNALS. THEY TOUCH YOU IN LITTLE WAYS, FOR EXAMPLE, OR THEY SMILE AT YOU A LOT. THERE’S ALSO A CERTAIN TONE IN THEIR VOICE. BUT WOMEN HAVE TO BE CAUTIOUS, YOU SEE. THERE ARE A LOT OF MEN IN THE WORLD WHO WANT THEM. AND THEY DON’T KNOW WHO MIGHT WANT THEM FOR THEMSELVES, OR JUST BECAUSE THEY’RE ANOTHER PRETTY FACE.

“I hadn’t noticed Pamela touching me at all.”

SHE WANTED TO, the squid said. I COULD TELL.

“Well, what does your girlfriend think about this?”

I DON’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND.

“I thought you said you were in love with a woman.”

PLEASE. AMELIA DOESN’T EVEN KNOW THAT I EXIST. IF SHE THINKS OF ME AT ALL, I’M THE GIANT MONSTER THAT ATTACKED HER BOAT THAT ONE TIME.

“Wait, you attacked her boat? Did you sink it?”

WELL, I DON’T DO THAT THING ANYMORE. I HAD TO STOP. BECAUSE OF AMELIA.

“You had to stop attacking ships?”

EXACTLY.

David thought about this. He didn’t know much about giant squids. He hadn’t been sure until this moment that they even really existed. Of course, it could also have been argued that simply communicating telepathically (in one direction at least) with a giant squid was evidence more of his own shattering state of mind than the existence of a giant squid. However, he decided that he chose to believe in his own mental stability; and if that involved admitting the existence of a telepathic giant squid, then so be it. “Does that make you less of a squid, though? Like how me not liking football makes me less of a man to some other guys?”

If a giant squid could shrug, then that’s probably what this one would have done at the moment. YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT’S LIKE, BEING A GIANT SQUID. THE PRESSURES ON YOU ARE ENORMOUS, AND I’M NOT TALKING JUST IN ATMOSPHERES. PEER PRESSURE IS AWFUL AS WELL. I’M USED TO JUST TAKING WHATEVER I WANT WHEN I WANT IT. I CANT DO THAT ANYMORE.

“Because of Amelia, right?”

EXACTLY, I REALIZED THAT I BREAK EVERYTHING I LOVE WITH MY GIANT ARMS. IT’S BEST, THEREFORE, FOR ME TO SIMPLY LOVE FROM A DISTANCE. I CAN’T RISK GETTING CLOSE.

“Oh,” David said. He had never been good at listening to and responding to other peoples’ problems. The problems that other people had usually baffled him, and he never understood how a person could listen to another person’s problems and offer advice that actually made sense. Whenever anyone talked to him about their problems — which was rare — he simply said the only thing he could, which was “Oh”.

BUT YOU SHOULDN’T FEAR GETTING CLOSE TO PAMELA, the squid said. SHE IS REALLY INTO YOU.

“But what if she isn’t?”

IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO SEE THAT SHE IS. YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO FOR IT.

Maybe the squid was right, David thought. This thought was followed almost immediately with the recognition that he was discussing his love life with a lovelorn giant squid. The squid might have been right, but it was hard for David to accept that any cephalopod, no matter how big and brainy, could have much insight into human nature.

On the other hand, he thought, maybe the squid was on to something. Maybe Pamela really was into him. He was pretty sure he was into her, after all. No, not just into her. He knew he was smitten. No matter how frustrating she’d gotten or how weird the situation was, he was fairly certain he was actually in love with her.

Then again, if he made some sort of move and she wasn’t interested in him at all, then he’d ruin their friendship, tenuous as it was, and… Well, it would be just like if he had kissed her a few minutes ago. They might stay on talking terms, but their relationship would be ruined.

No, it was definitely better to just play it safe and assume that she wasn’t interested in him, and not try to make any moves on her that could be dangerous.

SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK? the squid asked.

“Well,” David replied, “you definitely raise an interesting possibility.”

SO ARE YOU GOING TO GO FOR IT?

“I’ll look for an opportunity. I can’t say for sure that I’ll make a move on her, though.”

LIFE’S TOO SHORT NOT TO TAKE RISKS, YOU KNOW.

“Well, why don’t you make a move on Amelia, then?”

I ALREADY EXPLAINED TO YOU WHY I CAN’T.

“And yet, you’re telling me I should.”

YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND, the squid said. And then with titanic strokes of its giant arms, it swam away into the benthic blackness, its giant yellow eye fading into obscurity in just a few seconds.

“Were you talking to someone just now?”

David jumped. Somehow Pamela had come up close behind him without him noticing. She stood next to him, staring at the void where the giant squid had once been.

“I, uh, I was just thinking out loud,” David said.

“Well, take it from me. Try not to talk to any of the giant squids down here. They’re always having some sort of crisis or another.”

David smirked. “You’ve talked to a lot of giant squids in your time, have you?”

Pamela smiled. “Like I said, you pick up a lot of different skills when you’re a temp. And you meet a lot of people.”

“Wow. I never thought being a temp could be so interesting. Maybe I should quit my job and sign up with your agency.”

“Don’t,” Pamela replied, shaking her head. “The benefits suck. I just hope I don’t get sick, you know, because I don’t get any sick days.”

“Ah.” David looked back at the dome. “Is the translation thing ready to go?”

“We’ve got about fifteen minutes to go. But this isn’t a bad place to wait, I think. It’s very quiet and peaceful.”

David nodded. The two of them stood next to each other for the next quarter hour, David struggling the whole time with the force inside of him that desperately wanted to reach down and take her hand and squeeze it. He wanted to, but he knew, all the squid’s advice to the side, that it would simply be a bad idea.

And when the time came to leave, he followed Pamela into the dome without a word.