Chapter 11
Tia’s dedication to the plan drove deep, apparent when she scribed for me a surprisingly detailed plan bludgeoned on both sides of a large napkin. Here, an Isian demonstrated how shrewd she could be when she’s motivated enough, especially when I observed her slathering on a cakey concoction of flour, water, and thickeners underneath her eyelids. The mixture, which she mixed together earlier in the morning, dried into sickly crusts that infested her face. This was step four on the napkin.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked her.
“Oh it’s fine. You eat this stuff, don’t you? Besides, I have to make myself look really sick.” She dipped a finger into the bowl to collect some paste and circled it around the insides of her nostrils, all the while examining her handiwork on a vanity mirror I didn’t even know I owned.
“No, I mean going out there by yourself. I’m still not comfortable with it.”
The action of clicking her tongue broke apart some of the crusty flakes on her face. “You know what your problem is, Ly-lee? You’re too nice. Sometimes, you have to stop worrying about others too much.”
“Well I’m sorry. I’ll try to work on being mean next time.”
“Oh no, don’t ever change. A nasty Ly-lee would just make me so sad. How’s my face? Do I look sick enough, yet?”
“Positively noxious.”
She whistled and slapped the finishing smatters of goop on her cheeks and the corners of her lips. She took a final glance-over on the mirror and chirped. “So, you know what you’re going to do at the park with Basil? You read my list of things to do, right?”
“Yeah, a little.” A white lie. My morning eyes found it difficult to focus on the text condensed on the napkin, so I didn’t bother to strain them.
“All right, then. The tram will come to pick me at nine, so you should leave around eight-thirty. I’ll be back at four-thirty, and you should come back at five. That should be plenty of time, I think.”
Steps ten, eleven, fifteen, and twenty. I nodded. It was a simple plan. I’ll take Basil out for a day of sunshine and activity at the park, she’ll sneak out and come back before we get home, and her brother would be none the wiser. That was the basic idea. Good thing “basic ideas” were always optimistic bullshit.
A dull thud followed by shrill scratches of claw-on-porcelain sounded from the bathroom; the sounds burrowed out of the wall in hollow shells, but kept distinct enough to perk up Tia’s ears.
“He’s waking up!” she said. “Come on, let’s get ready.”
She grabbed my hand and led me to the bedroom. When we came next to the kitchen table, she dug her talons into the floor and shrieked.
“Where’s my bag? I swore I left it here.”
“I put it away,” I said. “It’s in the closet.”
“Oh, whew! I thought I lost it somewhere.” She eyed me with a crooked look. “You didn’t take anything out, did you?”
“Oh no. I just put it away, that’s all.”
I took out her knapsack from the closet and handed it to her. Leaving nothing to chance, she opened the bag and dug her head inside to rustle through her possessions, an action that filled me with no small amount of nervousness. Shit, please don’t bite off my tail, I thought, clenching my butt tight. I relaxed when she chirped an approval.
“Oh good, it’s still there,” she said. “It would be horrible if I couldn’t show it to him.”
She slung the bag over her shoulders and retook my hand. Just outside the bedroom, she stopped me and scampered in. She closed the door and left a crack just large enough to let out a few last minute words.
“So you got this handled, right Ly-lee?”
“Yep.”
“You’re going to take good care of my brother, right?”
“Of course.”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely.”
She gave one last nod and shut the bedroom door closed just as the bathroom’s clicked open. A foggy-eyed Basil staggered out with his coordination still lost in some sleepy wonderland. He rubbed and blinked his eyes open just enough to pull out a vague, head-wavering recognition of my morning greeting. He tumbled from a misstep, jerked his arms out to steady himself against the wall, and then turned his back against it. His shaky legs propped him up for a few seconds before allowing his body to slide down to the floor. He padded his head against the wall and groaned. It was almost eight.
“Bad night, little guy?” I asked.
“It was pretty cold,” he said. Using the wall against his back as support, he leveraged his tail and pushed himself back up on wobbly legs. He locked his limbs straight and clawed his hands into the plaster. “Kinda cold. Sorta cold. Pretty cold.”
“Cheer up, buddy. Some hot breakfast will warm you right up.”
The mention of the sacred ritual vitalized him. “Oh yes, breakfast. Let’s make some eggs before Tia wakes up.” He shifted his weight onto his feet and peered to the kitchen and living room. He whistled. “Where is she anyway?”
“She’s asleep in my room,” I said.
He gave me a curious raise of a scaled brow. “She slept with you last night?”
I quickly shook my head. “Oh, no. I let her sleep on my bed after I woke up. She was feeling under the weather.”
“What?” He scampered back into the bathroom and perched atop the bathtub’s rim to look out the window. “The weather’s fine!”
“No, I mean she doesn’t feel well. She’s in my room right now and she looks quite sick.”
A look of concern gummed his face. “Sick? Is she all right?”
“I think she’ll be fine. She just got a little bug, that’s all.”
“I’ll go and check on her.”
“You don’t want to do that. She looks pretty awful. You might catch it too.”
“I still want to see.”
Unable to drive away his insistence, I stepped aside and let him enter the bedroom. He cracked the door open and turned his head sideways to probe through the crack. The space widened, and he slunk into the room. A moment’s hair after he closed the door behind him, an eardrum-punching shriek seared from the room, followed by thumps of things falling to the ground. It all ended with a room-shaking crash on the door that startled me back a few jumps. The door swung open, and Basil rushed back out. He bashed the door shut and froze his back and limbs against the door to seal in the monster beyond.
“I told you she looked pretty sick,” I said.
He shook his head several times and swallowed a softball. “You think maybe we should call a doctor or something?”
“Oh, she’ll be fine. It’s just a cold.”
“You… sure about that?”
“Yep. Come on, let’s get washed up and I’ll take you someplace. I don’t want you to catch the bug too.”
We got to Allester Park half an hour later. And boy, what a park it was. Even I was surprised how lazy the city got with that place. It wasn’t so much a park than a patch of dirt and grass for the concrete pillars of the train station wipe their feet on. The pillars outnumbered the few scrawny trees that grew in puddles collected underneath the shadow of civilization above. I saw the place hundreds of times on my way to work, but I would’ve never guessed the city would be so clever as to designate it as an actual park. But sure enough, I found a metal placard that spelled “ALLSTR PK.” bolted onto one of the pillars like a deputy badge. It was a recent ornament, maybe less than a month old considering how the dime paint was still intact and legible and poisoned pigeons hadn’t piled around it yet. A thirty dollar sign and handful of steel rivets—the city sure spared no expense in its “Being Green” campaign.
Basil and I weren’t the only ones to appreciate the city’s fiscally responsible city beautification projects. Besides a small flock of wayward birds and a scraggly squirrel or two, a hot dog vendor made shop next to one of the support pillars, along with a vending cart that seemed half his size. He slumped on a plastic stool that elevated only his closed eyes and grizzled sideburns above the cart. The dark woolen cap worn on his head only made him look like a hobo, a bum who got lucky and stumbled upon some poor sap’s lunch cart. While Basil entranced himself with a squirrel chewing on a piece of copper wire, I went to the vendor to buy some breakfast.
The vendor snored underneath a yellow umbrella attached to the cart, positioned just so to catch its shadow. The station above overshadowed the umbrella into redundancy, and it became clear to me that this was truly a bum practicing the honed bumming arts. I waited for a few minutes, hoping his hobo senses would stir him up, before I shook the cart. The umbrella swayed to the disturbance, and the man mumbled underneath his slumped head and jiggled his body to keep with the dancing shadow. I cleared my throat and called out, “Excuse me? Hey!”
He jerked up and grabbed the seat of his stool. “Eh, wut! Wut, I dinna do nothin’!” he spazzed with his head bucking in a paranoid blur. He rubbed his eyes fully open and found me with yellow-spotted eyes. Even his bristly beard couldn’t hide his irritation. “The hell you want? Can’t you see a guy tryin’ ta get some sleep ’round here?”
He roused up and towered over the cart, and when his belly met the car and butted it, I stepped back in the fear that it might tip over and crash atop me. He clenched a gloved hand and waggled a naked figer at me.
“Whaddya want?” he asked again, sounding like he had spent a lifetime ingesting gravel.
“Hot dogs, sir,” I said.
“The hell you wanna buy hot dogs for?”
“Well, I’m hungry and would like some. And I saw you had a hot dog stand and I figured I’d buy them from you, if that’s okay?”
He pounded his fist on the cart. “The hell you trying to buy hot dogs from me for? Whadda I look like?”
I just grumbled underneath my breath and shook my head. Clearly, this bum hadn’t lived in the civilized world long enough to understand capitalism yet. “Look,” I said, “all I want to do is to give you some money. And, in exchange, all I ask is just some hot dogs. That’s all. If you don’t want to do that with me, then I’ll gladly find someone else to trade with. Money, sir. That’s all I’m trying to give you.”
The vendor jostled his cart back and forth and gritted his teeth in bumly concentration. After he mulled over my proposal for a minute, the vendor grunted and spat on the ground. He then punched his hand through the top the cart and jiggled out a handful of franks, which he slapped onto the soiled griddle. He pounded a power switch and the machine hummed to life. Another compartment flipped open, and he buried his arm shoulder-deep into it with curses. Finally, he pulled out the rest of the ingredients and slapped them haphazardly on top of the cart just as the franks began to sizzle.
“People tryin’ ta buy hot dogs for breakfast,” he mumbled. “What the hell is goin’ in this world?” He shuffled the materials onto the stove with a surprisingly clean pair of tongs and singed them on the fat seeping from the franks. “One special comin’.”
“I’d like two, please,” I said.
“The hell you want two for? One ain’t good enough? You only need one, you fat bastard. One is plenty!”
“One just for me and one more for my friend. Besides, you get twice the money.”
“Eh? There’s more than one of you punks?”
I pointed over to Basil, whose interest in his fuzzy rodent friend had reached a dangerous intimacy. These were hardcore city park squirrels though, and he quickly found he was out of his league. The fuzzy-tailed bastard, not yet willing to make the commitment, snapped at a soft chunk of Basil’s nose when he tried to sniff it. Basil bleated a surprised shrill and shook his head until the rodent flew off. He leaped away and found a pillar to rest against and nurture his bruised nose and ego. The squirrel, which had landed on its feet, continued gnawing its wire without a goddamn in the world.
The vendor dropped his tongs onto the frying foodstuff. “The hell is that! Is that a big fuckin’ lizard? Dinosaur?”
“He’s a pal of mine. He’s a big fuckin’ robot lizard, actually.”
“Eh?”
“I’m an engineer at Tetra Corp. He’s one of our advanced robot prototypes, designed to mimic a real-life organism down to the lowest detail. Very high-tech, hush-hush stuff, you know.”
“Uyh. Military stuff?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone, though.”
He retrieved the tongs and continued stirring the hot dog ingredients in between disapproving grumbles. “Damned government conspiracies, the whole lot of them. Like the world needs more of these goddamn robots. First they take our jobs, then they take our animals, next they gon’ take all our women. It ain’t right, I tells ya. This country needs more HELP Acts, not more damned lizard robots.” Something then caught his mind, and he shook his tongs at me. “Hey, wait a minute. If that thing’s a machine, why the hell does it need to eat one’a my dogs?”
“It’s powered by biomass fuel cells. It needs to feed on organic material to synthesize the hydrogen reactant to catalyze.”
The bum looked at me with a confused gaze before saying, “Ah, fuck it. I’m jus’ a hot dog man. That science stuff is too much for me. Two specials comin’.”
He cradled a pair of buns on one hand and stuffed them with sizzling franks. He was about to drop the rest of the ingredients onto the dogs when I interrupted him.
“Hey, can you just hold off on all that stuff? I’d just like some ketchup on mine.”
I quickly regretted the request when he drilled a stare into me as if I just called his mother a whore.
“What? What! The hell did you say, you son-of-a-bitch?”
“I said I just wanted ketch—”
He slammed his free fist onto the cart and shook half the toppings off the griddle. “Listen buddy! I only make one hot dog in this joint, and that’s the special! And that’s all ya gonna get! There ain’t no ketchup on the special, I don’t have any ketchup to put on the special, and if I find you puttin’ ketchup on my special, I’ll beat the ketchup outta you, got it?”
I brought up my hands to placate him. “All right, no ketchup then, fine. Whatever you say.”
“Damn right!”
He finished dressing up the dogs and shoved them to me with an irritated growl. I couldn’t see the franks themselves underneath the cavalcade of toppings that looked like a pile of alien entrails dripping greasy dollops. I fished my pockets for something to hold the dog with and found a napkin, which I used to wrap the hot dogs. They didn’t look at all appetizing, but under observation from the vendor, I took a cursory bite. The sizzling taste burned my taste buds. My God! The bum took notice of my approval and nodded with a winning smirk.
“Ya believe me now?”
“Hey yeah, it’s pretty great!” I took another bite as fast as my mouth would allow.
“Yeah. Now gimme my money.”
While I sat down the dogs on his cart and pulled out my wallet, I asked, “You know, you can make a killing out from these things at the right place. Why are you shacking up here?”
“Hah! You kiddin’ me? I moved here a week ago from a shitdump in the Southside. Heard a park just opened near the trains, figured I’d take advantage of everythin’, you know?”
“That doesn’t seem like an upgrade.”
“Listen buddy, I’m a lotta things, but I ain’t dumb. This is prime real estate here. Look at this place! It’s perfect. People going in an’ outta the trains and plenty of shade. Got everythin’ I need to sell hundreds of these babies. And no competition yet. Settle here, work it up, and own the entire hot dog business for the entire block. That’s how it’s done.”
I handed him my cash.
“So it’s working out for you here?”
He eyed me with a knowing twinkle and took my money. “Heh, I just sold a shmuck two hot dogs for breakfast. Whaddya think?”
I took back the hot dogs and walked away. I thought about what he said. It became clear to me that this wasn’t a bum after all. Bums were too busy being slovenly to be ambitious. The man was an entrepreneur. I kind of envied him and his little plastic cart.
Basil was still rubbing his nose with his back against the pillar when I came to him. The squirrel had disappeared with its wire for browner pastures. I handed the poor lizard his morning meal, which he eagerly accepted. He held out the hot dog in front of him and examined it for a while, first with his eyes and then with his nostrils. After he made sense of it, he burrowed his fingertips into the hot dog, slid the frank out, and tossed the rest. He shook the wiener clean and slurped it like a popsicle.
“Good?” I asked. He gave me a nod of content.
We began to explore the park underneath the station. The civilized world above us, seeming like a jealous girlfriend sensing our unfaithful path, screeched and tore a fit timed to shrieks of incoming trains, and it awoke the slumbering passengers. The world throbbed and rumbled and the pillars seemed likely to crumble apart as the horde scrambled into the cars, but silence quickly came when the trains ferried the world’s temperament away from our peace. I finished the last bits of breakfast and wiped my mouth clean with the soiled napkin.
“So what’re we going to do here?” Basil asked.
“There was some things I figured we could do.” I poked back into my pockets in search of the list, but it seemed to have disappeared. A spark of inspiration hit me and I opened dirty napkin I had crumpled in my hand. I found Tia’s mackled writing, rendered illegible with translucent blotches of grease stains. I tossed it away and said, “On second thought, maybe we’ll just find some other things to do.”
“Eh? There’s not much here, unless you think we should look at trees all day or something.”
“Well, that’s a good start, I guess?”
He cocked a look back at me and smiled, saying, “Sounds great!” before bursting ahead to the nearest tree. I kept a leisured pace behind him as he crisscrossed through the park from tree-to-tree. After he rummaged through a dozen twig-like excuses for trees, knocking, scratching, and sniffing each, the top specimen presented itself in a mammoth twig that stood twice as tall as I did. Its bark was aged like burnt skin and broke off in chunks when Basil thumped his tail on the tree’s trunk. He leaped onto a branch and scaled to its peak. He whistled and waved me over.
“Ah, this is a good one,” he said.
“You sure about this one? It looks rather small and rotten.”
“It’s the best one here. And besides, you can always make a tree better when you climb it and love it a little. See?” He jiggled on his perch and ruffled off some brown leaves. “It’s twice as good already. Four times better if you come up too.”
“It’s fine down here, thanks. I’m not much of a tree person.”
“Come on, Ly-lee. It’s a good tree. You look like you could use a good climb. Don’t be shy, it doesn’t bite!”
He began begging with chirps and whistles in bird-like insistence. The pained swaying the tree made when Basil thumped his tail against it didn’t inspire confidence, but I contemplated for a moment and thought, fuck it. I took a tentative feel on the tree’s skin and brushed off loose pieces of the bark to find a solid patch to grip on. A deep, unfit breath, a one, a two, and I jumped and grabbed the lowest branch. The tree took offense and stabbed a piece of bark into my palm. With my hands quickly losing traction, I pulled a leg up to stabilize myself against the trunk and strained muscles I didn’t even know I had. I gulped in a breath and scissored my legs up, and after a few moments looking like a paraplegic monkey, I finally pulled myself up to the branch. I curled up five feet off the ground, limbs wrapped upon a limb.
I almost flipped around and fell when I tried to push myself up to a sitting position, but Basil brought his tail down and steadied me back onto the branch. It nudged me to the trunk while I grabbed onto it for dear life. When I could reach the trunk, I wrapped my arms and legs around it and breathed. Basil looked down at me from his perch and chuckled.
“You don’t do this a lot, do you?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. At least you’re doing it now. Fun, isn’t it?” He patted the tip of his tail on my sweaty forehead. “Why don’t you climb up here and join me?”
The branch creaked and bowed lower, and I tightened around the trunk. “Nah, I’m good here.”
“If you want. You look like you have a good branch anyway. The first branch is always the best. It’s not as good as the one as the one in Summit, but it still looks pretty good.”
“You know, Basil, I’ve been meaning to ask. Why are you so fond of trees, anyway?”
“Eh?” He scratched his blue chin and thought about it. “Well we just do, I guess. Trees are good things. They’re good to climb, good to sleep in, sometimes grow good things to eat. All trees are good, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I said. I pressed closer to the trunk when a breeze swayed the branch.
“You know, Ly-lee, you should really have a tree in your house. I would love it so much if you did. The world would be so much better with more tress. Like, if the world was just a giant tree or something and you could just living on a tree forever. That would be the greatest thing. You humans wouldn’t fight so much with each other if you had a nice tree to sleep in, I think.”
I could only smile at Basil’s treatise on the human condition. Maybe he was right, though. Suspended in that dinky branch that swayed when the second round of trains pulled into the overhead station, my body relaxed to the dance of the tree. I released my grip on the trunk, twisted around, and sat against the tree with my hands curled in my lap. “Yeah, not bad,” I said to Basil after finding a comfortable balance. He didn’t respond. I looked up and found him curled up in his cradle of branches, steadfast asleep.
After the last batch of train left, I rested back and tried to clear my mind. It wouldn’t take. Finally unaccompanied, a fierce little niggling kept biting at me and wouldn’t let go. I tried to shake it off and ignore it, that stupid petty thing. But I couldn’t do much to escape it, stuck up on that tree while it pecked and pecked at me. It repeated the same word between its numbing bites: “Tia.”
I told myself that there wasn’t anything to worry about. That consolation burned apart immediately. I then tried to convince myself that it was a noble concern. It worked for about minute before reality bit into me again. There was nothing noble or responsible perched up in a tree in some dank city park hellhole fretting over something that wasn’t my business. Say what you will about human nature, but I was too astute for that. No, in my own delusions, it was my business. That pecking niggling repeatedly reminded me in sharp, biting bursts.
God, what was wrong with me? So she met a new friend, big fucking deal. That’s what Isians do. That’s what everyone does. Right? Nothing wrong with that in the slightest. Her doings were hers alone. That was the correct notion, and I was raised damn well enough to know this. Right? Then why did it bother me so?
Maybe I was concerned about her safety and well-being. That was it. She’s alone among untamed beasts and vicious predators, looked over only by a throng of clueless, khaki-clothed know-nothings. God knows what could happen? Right? Irresponsible!
I sighed and knocked my head back onto the tree. Whom was I kidding? I wasn’t concerned about her safety in the slightest. I was worried she was having too much fun.
I clunked my head against the tree again but the muddled indecisions that overfilled my mind cushioned against the pain. I thumped it a few more times. I couldn’t knock out the dredge, and it continued drilling into my skull. Eventually, I surrendered and fell asleep suspended in the tree. The niggling flew away to more exciting pastures but left behind pecked holes.
We woke up a little into the afternoon, driven up by hunger and driven out by another round of trains rumbling through the station. The hot dog vendor had since disappeared from the park and left us on our own to forage. We sat around for a bit and tried to decide where to eat in a fruitless exercise of bouncing thoughts back-and-forth without forming a coherent idea between the two of us. Being the unimaginative dorks that we were, we finally settled on boarding a Summit-bound train to eat at the employee cafeteria.
We arrived at the tail-end of lunchtime for most of the Summitites, and the cafeteria only offered leftovers picked cold from the crowd, but we at least we had the place to ourselves. Basil spared no time hopping atop the counter and scooping up meals for two in large globs of mish-mash. I took a seat at the corner of the room away from the few gluttons that lingered. I leaned on my elbows against the table and rubbed in my temples. My stomach moaned but my appetite was fairly dead.
Basil hobbled over with his arms barely containing the trays of food and plopped down on the table. He took a few moments to savor over the Frankensteinian mass, sprinkling it with piddles of drool, and burrowed his snout into the pile. By the time I scooped up a bite to taste, he had gobbled half his lunch down. He licked his snout clean after a breather and looked at me curiously. He poked my arm.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You don’t like it? I got the best stuff I could find.”
“It’s fine. I guess I just don’t feel that hungry after all.”
“Oh?” He twisted his head slightly and frowned. “You seem kinda wrong. Something wrong? Maybe you can tell me and I can help you.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Well, mostly. But it’s nothing important.” I took in a few mouthfuls to try to look normal, for all the good that does. He pulled the tray from me as I was about to take another scoop.
“I don’t believe you.” He tapped the tip of my nose. “You’re bothered about something, I know it. What could it be?”
“You’re imagining things.”
His squinted eyes bored into me and then flew open with a squeal. He jumped atop his chair and waved his tail behind in wild arcs.
“Aha! I know! It’s about Tia, right?”
I choked on a rogue bit of Tuesday Tacos and dropped my spoon. Basil took it and shook accusingly at me.
“It is, huh?” he said. “I knew it! You’re awfully bad at lying, Ly-lee. You shouldn’t do it.”
“Maybe I’m a little worried,” I admitted.
“Don’t be shy about it. I’m worried about her too, you know. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, sure! I wish I was back home to look after her. I never get to, though. Every time I get sick, she takes care of me and everything, and then she gets sick too. But she never lets me get near her when that happens.”
I blinked a few times before I remembered Tia’s faux illness. Recollecting her ploy filled me with inexplicable annoyance. “Don’t worry about it, Basil,” I said. “I’m sure she’s just fine. In fact, I think she’s having a grand old time right now.” I could barely hold back a sarcastic tinge.
“Yeah, see? Much better already. So eat up and be happy. She’ll be fine. Fine, just fine.” He waved the spoon, dug it into to the food, and pushed the tray back to me. “It’s nice that you care so much though, Ly-lee. I had to learn to trust her and hope she gets better by herself. You should too.”
Trust her, he says. I took a distasteful bite.
He clicked his tongue and chirped, and he was about to dig back into his plate when he looked up with a thoughtful expression. “But, you know, I’d like to check up on her a little bit. Just to make sure.”
“No can do, little guy. Can’t get you sick too.”
“Yeah, I know. But maybe we use her tracking module. I think the new one she got has a biosensor. We can check her vitals and stuff remotely.”
“Let’s not do that. It’s probably—” I struggled to think of some excuses. “It’s probably not even accurate. Or maybe she took her collar off because it’s stuffy. It’s best to not waste our time.”
He shrugged. “You’re probably right. It’s probably not even the right model. Oh well, I don’t know what I was thinking. Still,” he said with a sigh, “I just wanna know if my big sister is all right. I’m not being silly am I?”
“No, you aren’t.”
Some guy I was, right? Let’s just lie to someone. Why not? As painful as my goose-stepping felt, I already committed myself to the march, to go through these robotic motions until my legs break down. Either continue to lie or break a promise. Nothing entitled me to select between the lesser of two evils. I wanted to have it all.
But something struck me. It was an inspiration, a dark one from the turbid depths of human ingenuity. It was something that would solve everything and leave my conscious free to corrupt myself for another day. Yes, that was the answer!
“Actually Basil, never mind,” I said. “I take it back. I think it’ll be a good idea to check the sensor. A great idea.”
“Huh? You think so?”
“Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s check out on your sister, right now. It’d be pretty irresponsible for us not to, don’t you think? After all, we’re the ones out here having a good meal while she’s alone by herself and miserable.”
A wrinkle of understanding formed on his face, and he clapped his hands together. “Yes, yes! Let’s!”
Basil proceeded to scarf down the remainder of the tray, and after the business of lunch was complete, he took the lead to Secondary and endangered passersby with an animated tail. My own spirits followed in kind. I was looking forward to it a little too much.
SE-2, winding back up after gorging on lunch, left us undisturbed. In the arena, our prolonged absence allowed three days’ worth of cruft to accumulate on the holo platform, which scattered to the ground when Basil swept the platform with swipes of his tail. He showed the same amount of care clearing out the folders and documents piled on the control terminal. I picked up a donut box that had emigrated from the platform to the floor and found a lemon jelly of unknown age. I offered it to Mark when he came down to investigate.
“What are you two doing? I thought you were on vacation,” he said after declining.
“It’s a little project of ours. We’re investigating the measure of truth.”
“So you came here to use company time and resources for random bullshit?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Sounds fine to me. Turn everything off when you’re done.” He picked up a breakfast bagel from the floor and left us to our wiles.
The Alie whined to life and flickered the lights dim for a few milliseconds with its waking power hunger. The attached projector warmed up and glowed on a minute later. Basil hopped to the control terminal after the systems came online. A short series of finger-taps on control panel the later, he proceeded to pull up various schematics queried from the Kanid Technologies database. The datasheets cycled through in ordered rows, and after sifting through a few dozen specs, he clicked his tongue and pointed. The projector isolated a spec and zoomed in, exploding the schematic into a multiple viewpoints. Basil whistled and pointed again.
“That’s the one, I think! IMD-86A, it looks like? That should be the right one.”
It sounded familiar enough. I nodded. “So, do you think you can plug into it?”
“Oh sure. It’s a standard protocol and we already have the data transceivers here. Easy-peasy. I just need to get the authorization codes. Hold on, I think Ushi should have them. Lemme ask.”
He keyed away at the terminal and wrote a message. “There!” he said, punctuating with a final tap. He hummed and waited for a response, which came not more than five minutes later. He read the reply and groaned.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“He’s not sure that I really need the codes I asked for.” He snorted and rolled his eyes. “Every time I ask him for something, I swear.”
“Can you convince him? It’s for something important.”
“He already gave it to me. But in return, he wants me to clean up the barracks whenever I get back to Wyvern.”
“That can’t be that bad, right?”
“You never lived with my brothers.”
He tapped in a long series of keys. A program branded with Kanid imprints came up on the projector after the system verified it.
“Ah, there we go,” said Basil.
An icon resembling the IMD-86A blinked red a few times and then turned green. After a pause, the program announced it had received a lock and proceeded to filter data onto the screen, a jargon of numbers and values displayed in blue highlights. An interface panel to the right contained a map with a small red blip pulsing its center. Basil squealed and shook my shoulder.
“Everything’s working peachy, Ly-lee! Just have to filter the right data and we’re set to go.”
Then let’s go, little guy. I took a bite of the donut. Let’s unravel the truth.
“I have Tia’s vitals now,” he said. He waved his finger excitedly to the readings and chirped. “Hey look! They actually look normal! She seems to be all right now!”
“Yeah? Are you sure?”
“Sure is! The system says the accuracy is ninety-seven percent, so it should be good. She must’ve got better already. Oh, what a relief!”
“That’s great, Basil,” I said. And the truth shall set us free, we just have to pry a little further to find it.
Basil hopped onto the projector and surrounded himself in the diagrams. He twirled around and pointed to each figure. “Temperature, thirty-seven degrees. Heart rate, eighty-two BPM. Conditions normal. No system malfunctions. Everything’s fine, even the location tracker. Look, there she is! Hi, Tia!”
Just a little further.
“Hi, Tia! Hi, Tia!” he repeated, dancing with glee atop the platform and pointing to the map. “Hello, Tiamat, sleeping good and healthy in Ly-lee’s place! All well in Ly-lee’s place, right here. Right… here?” He stopped in mid-step and stooped down to study the map. His face twisted into confusion. “Huh?”
Bingo! I took another bite from the donut and broke through the gooey lemon center. It was the warm taste of truth and vindication, and it clung to my tongue in a gelatinous mass. It was delicious. My words came out through the smirk of a winner. “Something wrong, Basil?”
He seemed to disavow my existence. “That’s… not Ly-lee’s place at all. Wait a minute, I know where that it is. I know where that is! It’s—”
His expression contorted into a knowing look of horror.
The look quickly mutated into a beast even more terrifying, and it quickly ate my smile. A deep, unsettling hiss slithered out from between his rows of bared teeth. He doused and lit his next few words in a pure vitriol that burned the ears.
“That… that fucking whore!”