Chapter 6

After a few days, the shock and novelty of working with a pair of huge lizards eventually subsided, and the labs went back to its standard operating routines, slightly dazed but otherwise normal. You’d expect an awful implosion when you had a volatile mix of humans and educated pack animals, maybe a bite here, a scratch there, or a decapitated head everywhere, but it never happened. Turns out I was the sole winner in Isian-inflicted injuries. Lucky me!

I’ve never actually seen them leave the premises. They breathed, ate, and lived right inside of Summit with a range that extended no further than the southern engineering labs to the maple in the courtyard. This sometimes led to conflicts. In the grand scheme of evolution, Isian progenitors must have interbred with felines at one point, because they were prolific nappers. And like scaly cats, they confiscated any territory available for their own narcoleptic pleasures. Supercomputers, lunch counters, bathroom stalls (both male and female), workstations, prototype engines, multiple varieties of desks, maintenance closets, elevators, elevator shafts, and damned everything else. Once, one of them caused an incident when he or she decided that a ventilation shaft was a cozy place to snuggle up in. The spectacle of the maintenance crews investigating the blockage and surprising a grumpy and groggy lizard was something precious. You just had to hope neither of them thought your terminal was a comfortable bed when you came to work, because good luck trying to get them off.

Meanwhile, I’ve kept a civil relationship with the Isians, the cornerstone of which involved small lunches. Like clockwork, they would beg for me in the morning to bring them food the next day at the exact same time. What could I do, really? Refuse? I didn’t have the nerve for that. Surely at this point, the lizards wouldn’t actually attack me, but inciting their ire wasn’t something I wished to press either. Fair enough, they were entertained with the simplest of entrees. The most expensive meal I ever brought were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I made it from stale raspberry jelly and years-old peanut butter that I was about to throw away. The Isians thought it was the best thing ever.

The twins continued work on their Sigma project in SE-2. Tetra brought in a top-of-the-line NTX supercomputer into the lab for their use. The NTX apparently wasn’t colorful enough though, and they refused to acknowledge its existence in favor of the Alie. No problem, the rest of us were glad to make use of it if they didn’t. Not content to leave well enough alone however, one of the compulsive tweakers in the lab juiced it out of spec until our terminals ran like lightning dipped in nitroglycerin.

Most of us didn’t pay attention to the Isians’ work, not from lack of interest but paranoia. Because the less we knew about the project, the less trouble we would get into if something went awry. I did sneak a peek here and there, though. As the project progressed, I could see that it was, indeed, an aircraft. It had long, swept wings and a curving, streamlined body like a fish. But it had a certain pernicious aura about it, something vindictive and menacing. This was less a trout and more great white. No, it wasn’t a bloated jetliner that spent its days cramming irate passengers inside its fuselage. This thing ate jetliners.

Frankly, it made me nervous.

I wasn’t surprised in the least that Sigma had them build a military aircraft. It was just something else that disturbed me. The twins seemed just so cheerfully ignorant that they were creating a warplane. I questioned whether or not they understood what it really was. It’s one thing to know what guns do, but it’s an entire new realm of comprehension to understand what war is. Humanity is well versed with the concept, but I didn’t know about Isians. I doubted that they truly grasped what they were designing, and it didn’t seem fair them.

There was only one Isian in the lab this morning. When the twins chose different resting spots, it would often take a bit of time for both to converge at the lab. But it had been an hour already with no signs of the missing lizard. The present Isian was taking its usual morning stretch while the Alie warmed up. I wasn’t sure which one it was. Despite Arlene’s explanation on how to delineate between the two, I still couldn’t tell them apart for the life of me. Tails, claws, spines, or whatever, they all looked the same. And to be sure, I wasn’t about to lift their tails for a peek

The lizard started coming up the stairs with its talons scraping the floor in tinny taps. It came up to my station and stared at me with its eyes opened in wide, blue orbs. It tucked its lips up into a smile. I tried to wait for it to speak so that I could tell whether it was the brother or the sister, but it just continued to give me a toothy grin. The game required me to guess.

“Hello…” I started. It bobbed its head to cajole more words from me. I tried to examine it and come up with justifications for selecting a particular sex. Forehead? Body shape? Perfume? Gah, impossible. I went with alphabetical order. “Basil?”

It clapped its claws together and whistled. “Nope!” it said with a little hop.

“Ah Tia! What’s up?”

“Electrical lines, data links, and dust mostly. They should really replace the rafters. They don’t hold my weight that good.”

I smiled and nodded. I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know.

I starting going back to work, but Tia snuggled underneath the table and propped her slender head in my lap and between my hands, preventing me from using the terminal.

“Whatcha doin’?” she said.

“You know what I’m doing. I’m working. And you should too.”

She scoffed. “No, my brother isn’t here yet.”

“Where is he, anyway? I haven’t seen him all day.”

“In the industrial district.”

“What?” The city’s industrial district was several kilometers away. “What’s he doing there?”

She folded her arms on my lap and rested her head on them. “He slept in a maintenance vehicle last night. It took off with him still inside, I guess. They’re bringing him back now.”

Well, at least one of them finally got a chance to get out from Summit, I thought. Tia closed her eyes and snuggled herself on my lap. Even just a few days back, I would have been the most terrified son of a bitch in the world. But this was fine now. Nice even. I kept working with my right hand and used my left to scratch behind her ears, which she expressed appreciation for by purring like a big pussycat. A big, hairless pussy-cat. With mountains of razor-sharp teeth.

After a few minutes, the Isian slipped off my lap, moved beside me, and propped her head on my shoulder to watch with reptilian tranquility. I felt a bit self-conscious of the attention, much like how you’d feel when your teacher looked over your shoulder when you struggled with an algebra test, but I kept working. Eventually, I noticed she wasn’t even looking at the screen but to my hands, strangely. Her head began bobbing to the rhythm of my typing, as if she couldn’t keep her eyes off of them. Yeah, they were a bit dry and chaffed, but I didn’t think it was that big a deal.

“You have nice hands,” she said rather absentmindedly

“Thanks.” It was a strange compliment.

She bent to the side and moved her muzzle close to my hands until the warm breath from her nostrils tickled my skin. She yelped when she discovered something.

“Oh! You have thumbs too!”

My thumbs?

Before I could press another key, she grasped my right hand and pulled it around, the action of which forced my body to swivel on the chair until I rotated in front of her. I sat dumbfounded while she examined my hand as if it was some sort of artifact. Her long tail swished around with excitement and struck the other desks, much to the irritation of my coworkers.

“Oh, your thumbs are beautiful,” she swooned across my hand.

Beautiful thumbs. She thought I had beautiful thumbs. You could compliment a man with many things that would fill him with pride. Telling him that he had “beautiful thumbs” was not one of them. And you would think that being around hundreds of humans in Summit would let her discover the wonders of human thumbs, but no, she seemed genuinely surprised at mine.

She took my hand and molded it flat upwards. Then, she pressed her left claw onto it. “See?” she said. “I have a thumb too!”

And she did, a long, bony thumb extending from her thin wrist. I took the opportunity to explore her hand as she did mine. Besides the thumb, she had only two fingers. Although her palm was slightly smaller than my own, her digits were quite a bit longer and sleeker. Sharp nails, hiding against the white of the skin, tipped each finger. They pressed gently into my flesh.

I had expected a frosty, cold-blooded touch, but her hand surprised me with its warmth. The smooth scales of her palm rubbed its heat against my hand like a warm bottle of milk, a feeling that wasn’t unpleasant at all. Actually, it was… soothing.

Finally, after a few minutes, she took her hand away. I didn’t want to admit it then, but deep inside, I wanted to feel her hand just a few moments longer.

“Aren’t opposable thumbs great, Ly-lee? They’re oh-so-useful.”

“Yeah, they are,” I said. I went back to my work.

She lay on the floor next to my chair. “So Ly-lee, how did you get your name?” she asked, not minding the abrupt subject change.

“You gave it to me, remember?”

She shook her head. “No, no, no, no. I meant your other name.”

“My last name? Ivano?”

“Yes, yes! That one.”

“It’s my family’s name. Everybody in my family has it.”

“Then, how did your family get it?”

“It’s a boring story, actually. You probably won’t like it.”

Under the insistent shaking of her head, I relented.

“Well, our family’s name actually used to be Ivanovitch. My great-great-grandparents were Russian immigrants. They came to this country to start a new and better life, and everything else. Anyway, they didn’t want to be too ethnic, so they changed their names when they had children. My grandparents weren’t exactly the creative type, and just chopped off the end and formed the name Ivanov. Later on down the line, someone got lazy on a birth certificate and missed a ‘v’ and we got Ivano. I guess, eventually, someone would get even lazier and we’ll just have ‘Ivan’ as last names. Lyle Crazy Ivan, right?”

The lizard seemed to have lost interest halfway through my story. “I told you it was boring,” I said.

“Oh, not boring,” she said. “Just… not very interesting.”

She leapt on the desk and craned her head between my face and the screen. “Do you know how I got my name, Ly-lee?”

“Someone in Wyvern gave it to you?”

“Yes, but do you know what it means?”

“I think Arlene told me it was an ancient sea serpent or something like that.”

“Close but not quite, Ly-lee. Tiamat means ‘bitter water,’ and she was a great dragon of the oceans and queen of the universe.” She whistled and pranced in pride of the origin of her namesake. “Would you like me to tell you the story of Tiamat?”

She clicked with delight when I agreed. I listened to her story while I worked.

“In the beginning, there was no earth, no sky, and no animals or people or lizards. There was just Apsu, the river, and Tiamat, the sea. Because there was nothing, they could sleep. Together, they mingled their waters and created their children.”

She clasped her hands together and intertwined her fingers to illustrate the bonding of the deities.

“Then their children had children, and then they had children, and so on, and it became terribly noisy. Tiamat couldn’t sleep anymore, so Apsu wanted to stop the noise. His servant Mummu came up with an evil plan to kill all their children, so they could sleep again, and Apsu agreed.

“Because Tiamat was his mate, and the mother of their children, Apsu went to ask for her approval. When Tiamat heard the plan, she got furious. When she calmed down, she said, ‘These are my children, and I will not help you destroy them,’” She recited the dialogue in a dramatic voice. “Unfortunately, Mummu convinced Apsu to go with the plan without her help.

“But one of their children, Ea knows all and sees all. When he found out about the plan, he decided to stop them. While Apsu and Mummu were distracted, Ea put a sleep spell on them, and then he bound them with magic. And then…”

She trailed off and stopped.

I thought she was just merely recollecting her thoughts, but then she remained silent for several minutes. I looked away from the screen and found her on her back fixated on the ceiling, her tail rolling on the floor.

“Well?” I called to her.

She snapped back looked at me with surprise. “Well, what?”

“The story. What happened next?”

“Story?”

She had completely forgotten about it.

“Yes, you were telling about the story about Tiamat,” I said. I really did want to know what happened next.

“Oh. Well, some things happen and she dies.”

“That’s it? You gave me all that stuff just to say she dies?”

She shrugged and hummed.

“I feel bit cheated by the end of your story.”

“Well, you can ask my brother about his name, Ly-lee. His is much better anyway.” She stood up on the table, stretched her back and legs, and jumped off down to the arena to poke around the platform.

When Basil finally arrived, I asked him about his name. He simply answered that he was named after “some sort of stupid poisonous lizard thing or something” before joining his sister on the mainframe.