[Progress]

[I haven't been publishing as frequently as I planned to and wanted to acknowledge that. Rather than get into the explanation (which might sound like whining!) let me say that I plan to publish 2-3 more stories before the end of February, then take a month-long hiatus as I work on a novel. Many thanks to those who took the time to write comments. NOTE: just because I don't yet republish the blog entries, doesn't mean I don't take the feedback seriously.]

Second Half of the Truth

Today’s discovery notwithstanding, it had seemed like a splendid idea: spend a month with her son in Long Beach, California, while icicles weighted down her adobe in Huntington, on Long Island. Statistically, in the third week of January temperatures dipped into the lowest of the year. She couldn’t have picked a better week to be in warm Southern California.

But with what she found that morning while putting away her twenty-three year old son’s laundry in his closet, only four days into her stay, maybe this visit wasn’t exactly a blessing.

When Simon returned from the construction gig in Ventura, she managed to keep quiet about it for a whopping three minutes. Looking at her through the reflection in the window over the kitchen sink, as he finished rinsing a glass, Simon asked what was wrong.

“I found your collection,” she replied head down, noticing bread crumbs on the light-gray kitchen tile, and doing nothing about it. Eye contact while discussing such dirty matter discomforted her.

Just as Simon was putting the glass away onto the drainer, he pulled both elbows close to his torso, turned the tap on again, and re-rinsed the glass. In the brief silence that ensued, only the refrigerator and the water running could be heard.

“And today I signed off on a shipment from FedEx… From a company called—” But she couldn’t bring her lips to speak such name. She squeezed her left fingers with the right hand, then switched, as if occuping the fingers would keep her anxiety down, make her happy.

Now facing her, Simon blew air off, rolled his eyes. He rested the glass down on the drainer, in a calculated descend, almost as if stating that everything felt comfortable with this exchange. “We’ve been through this—”

“I’m not talking about the, you know... your sexual preference, or whatever you call it,” she replied with resignation. Though it shocked her when Simon told her he was gay three years before, she eventually came to accept it was better for him to live in honesty. No, it wasn’t the gayness, but the risk of the deadly infection that troubled her the most.

Yet, she never mustered the courage to confront him on the issue, and that troubled her. How could a mother sit back quietly while her son might spiral into disease? Now, she figured, her son’s addiction could toss him into risky sex.

“Five hundred?” She asked and declared, in one stroke.

“You counted?”

“Oh for chrisesake Simon, I wouldn’t touch them.” To her the VHS tapes and DVDs were already diseased. She raised her voice. “What do you do with so many dirty movies?”

Simon’s matter-of-fact response might have amused her if the matter hadn’t been about her own son, “Same as the next guy. Watch them!”

There was half a truth in that response, and she wasn’t going to pursue the other half. “It’s a hobby”, he continued unwittingly, “everyone should have a hobby.”

"Spectator hobby? Find a hobby to make you happy, something to keep your hands busy,” she said, herself immediately regretting the choice of words.

Indeed, that second half of the truth was now in the open. Perhaps she begun to accept it. While fiddling more with her fingers, a cultural voice at the back of her head reminded her: Busy hands are happy hands.

Baker's Dozen

Maggie spotted them before mom did: storm clouds forming in the west over the ocean, beyond San Diego. She dropped Josephine, her plastic Barbie-like doll, onto the dry dusty soil so typical of Alpine, California in November, and screamed towards the kitchen window.

“Ma! Rain! Ma!”

A light eastward wind blew her long brown hair over her face as she pointed behind her, to the west. Rain meant dad would come home soon. (Yet another pine cone to the collection.) “Ma! Ma!”

Mom, looking out the kitchen window, smiled then crossed herself. The fire east of Julian mountain had raged for seven days and there had been no relenting. The dryness had turned the paradise east of Alpine to a firefighter’s hell.

Their residence was at least half a mile from any other house. Dad treasured nature. Rescuing forests from fires fed his professional pride the most. He brought Maggie a burnt pine cone from each forest fire he helped extinguish. She couldn't count them, but her mother told her she had a baker’s dozen cones, so far.

Over the next three hours into the afternoon Maggie entertained herself at the yard west of the house, monitored by her mother in the kitchen, as Maggie monitored the clouds all the time.

She could no longer see San Diego, the view now obstructed by the rain falling. The clouds had now moved inland almost all the way to Alpine. Once the rain would move over the crest, the work of the firefighters would become easier. Another one for the collection! What number comes after baker's dozen?

Maggie heard the thunder a split second before she heard the shatter from the kitchen—a plate, a glass, or the vase her mother relished from her wedding? Unsettled, she let go of Josephine onto the dry dusty soil.

Out through the kitchen door, covering her mouth, mom stumbled down the stairs.

Maggie heard thunder once again. In the driveway, half-a-mile downhill, a police car left a dust cloud trail as it slowly approached.

[Writer's Digest Submission]

[No Astrapomythe today. Instead, I worked on my submission to Writer's Digest "Your Assignment". Unwittingly imitating Oscar Wilde, I spent hours adding and subtracting the same three-word sentence in a piece of no more than 75 words. The results will be published in June.]

Samantha's Solitaire

Was that the boss approaching? Samantha could discern his footsteps during a Spanish bull-run stampede, if she needed to. She clicked on the taskbar to hide her Solitaire. Nobody touches my Solitaire expertise after 22 years of gainful employment, she thought proudly. She swiveled on her seat 180 degrees just before the six-four boss towered the cube entrance.

“Hey!” she said preemptively, faking excitement. Relief! Two seconds late and he would have known why she made no progress writing the test plan for the 3.2 version of AccountAx™.

He scanned around her cube, looked at her PC monitor behind her, then looked at her. “You on track to have your test plan go for review by tomorrow, COB?”

“Working on it right now as a matter of fact,” she replied, aware how artfully she evaded answering his question. Neither “yes”, nor “no”. She could have won an Oscar for that performance.

Smiling, he nodded a couple of times at her, then left, but not before glancing at her LCD monitor once again.

Samantha turned around towards the screen. A window had captured most of her desktop, a window loaded with big yellow-magenta flashing letters spelling “Great Score!”

Solar System Crud

[Dependencies: Feb 3rd -> current entry]

“Contaminated. No other explanation,” Eugene Roberts said, not looking at Angela.

Though he was her manager at project Imperilov-Comb, as his chief scientist Angela felt strong enough to stand up to him. “Strict clean room procedures, Gene. Contaminated with what?” She had her palms facing up in desperation, shaking them as she spoke. “It’s not as if we have DNA from human-and-chimp ancestors laying around our offices, you know!”

Roberts gave her a glance, one of those I-wasn’t-talking-to-you glances. She stared back at him defiantly, aware of the other eighteen eyes in the room looking at her.

“Repeat the tests,” he commanded, a tone of anger barely disguised in his voice. “Look inside more dust samples.” He was now looking at her second-in-command, bypassing Angela.

The NASA conference room was long and narrow, the walls painted white, perhaps even freshly painted, judging from the strong disinfectant-like odor. Sitting at the end of the narrow conference table Angela felt uneasy, as if interviewed at an asylum—not as a caretaker, but as an inmate.

She was overwhelmed by the wild ramifications of her discovery: insider a comet she had found DNA belonging to a common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans. This would turn evolution theory on its head.

“The DNA must have left Earth about six million years ago,” she said. That was the simplest explanation. Occam’s Razor.

“Impossible!” Roberts jumped in. He stood up and begun pacing around, moving his arms uncontrollably as he talked. “Imperilov’s orbit does not intersect with Earth’s orbit.”

Angela knew Roberts was right. But the other alternative was even more wild: that evolution on Earth had been seeded with an intervention from the solar system. Not any intervention but one fully consistent with the life that had already developed on Earth. An impossible intervention made of solar system crud. Dust and water. Clay, she thought.

Something Inbetween

[v.2 posted 1105pm PT 2/4/06]

Though the video feed was low-resolution, twenty-three year old Angela could see Shane Truman’s five o’clock shadow, at only eight-fifteen A.M. Unlike her, the NASA Astrobiology scientist didn’t seem to care about good looks. If he would unexpectedly run into an exobiological party, his heavy stubble would unlikely ruin the affair.

“Odd hitchhikers you picked up,” Truman said.

“Mom wouldn’t approve. But flying through the tail of a comet we were bound to pick up something,” Angela said, leaning back into her seat at NASA’s JPL. With hesitation she added, “Or someone. It is DNA isn’t it?”

“Tell you what, I hear the dominoes crumbling down,” Truman replied, shaking his head in disbelief yet with a smile. “Textbook printers are warming up.”

He seemed both pleased and taken aback by the development. Angela felt likewise.

“Still looking for a match,” Truman continued, pointing to the monitor behind him, which displayed a yellow progress bar moving forward and backward, while text rapidly displayed and disappeared underneath, text too small for her to read through the little window on her PC.

The two had talked only once before, when she sent him the suspicious sample. She expected potentially organic material in the samples from the comet. But when a structure much like a chromosome showed up on Angela’s microscope, after she dissected a speck of comet dust, she was in disbelief. Now she knew she was on to something profound.

“Terrestrial life is really extra-terrestrial,” she said.

“Or, vice versa,” Truman countered. “Depends on the match.” He went on describing how he isolated the DNA and how his computer was searching for matches in various genome databases.

But Angela stopped listening. The monitor behind him displayed something that froze her breathing. Truman must have had the speakers off, or he would have been interrupted by dozens of exuberant beeps.

The progress bar had stopped its erratic redraw. Multiple lines of text, numbers, percentages populated the right half of the monitor. She couldn’t read those but—her heart beating thunderously—she could see the three diagrams on the left half, one of a chimp, another of a human, and a third of something inbetween.

Mismatched Socks

[Dependencies: Jan 31st -> Feb 1st -> current entry]

Cindy was losing her temper with him. Was he not understanding the upcoming medical bills?

“You must look for another job,” she said, telephone propped between right shoulder and head. With her hands she unloaded the remainder of the wicker laundry basket—socks, mostly—on the Formica counter by the washing machine. When she matched a pair, before stacking it on the shelf, she took a sniff of the jasmine fragrance but this time it had no comforting effect.

“If I jump ship, SMR dies,” Spence replied. His voice came across electronic, mechanical; it predicted impending disaster and betrayed a resignation to accept it.

Cindy had not heard that tone before, at least not since the death of Spence’s brother eight years back. That was the first time she saw Spence cry. Spence never cried. Always on top of his game, escalating the corporate ladder, slowly but always upwards.

“Well, you got to be CEO,” she said bitterly. You always wanted that more than you wanted the unplanned twins. You only wanted one, remember Spence? Which would you pick?

“Exactly why I must stay. After the babies are born—”

“Nicholas and Zachary,” she corrected him. Really, which one would you pick? Nicholas or Zachary?

“Nicolas and Zachary, yes. After they’re born, I can look for a new job then.”

They ended their conversation with married-couple niceties, which Cindy always wondered if any couple in the world actually meant. Not that she didn’t love him, but the telling of so at the end of each telephone conversation (when they talked four times a day) felt contrived.

In two months Nicholas and Zachary would arrive. Nothing in their lives would remain unchanged.

SMR couldn’t have picked a worse time to self-amputate.

She sorted through the remaining socks. Two gray socks matched, two black matched, and she stacked those pairs on the shelf. When she picked up the last two socks she held a brown-white checkered sock in the left hand, and a beige diamond-textured in the right hand.

A mismatch.

A man and a woman not understanding each other?

Twins fraternal, not identical?

But Dr. Fields was clear: the boys were identical.

It was then that she felt the first contraction.

Spence speaks to Beemer Guy

[Dependencies: Jan 31st -> current entry]

To lay off twenty four people was tougher than Spence had anticipated. Worse yet, the hatch still lingered. CEO Mike Devala (also known as “beemer guy” as only he owned a BMW in the SMR parking lot) was coming down to talk to him. Spence only had a minute to grab a cup of coffee.

He poured two spoons of sugar in his green marble mug. The kitchen today sparkled brighter in florescent lights, more sterile. It dawned on him then: the coffee carafe had gone virgin all day. Nobody ventured into the kitchen, everybody kept under the radar.

Cindy was expecting, in two months. Twins. He’d be a father! Even with a severance package, getting laid off would complicate their lives considerably. And there was no severance package.

Walking to his office dragged longer than usual; he tried hard (and succeeded) at avoiding other survivors. All those spared would meet in 15 minutes anyway.

But Devala wanted to see him now.

The bastard would fire him, too. Spence knew it!

There were only seven engineers left, six developers and one tester. How was he going to build and test a product with only seven employees? Nobody could be “VP” with just seven people.

Back at his desk, he took a sip. Today’s coffee was uninspiring. It was thinner than next year’s budget projection. Perhaps he had forgotten to add sugar, that would not surprise him. Whatever. He took another sip.

At almost 2pm he had not yet felt hungry for lunch. The thought of Thai or Chinese or Teriyaki churned his stomach.

Took another sip, looked at the photo on his desk. Cindy looked gorgeous in that shot at the skating ring at UTC Mall less than a year back. She was laughing hysterically while he was clenching onto the rail frightened but pretending to enjoy it. It was his first attempt at skating on ice. Today he felt the floor underneath him just as slippery.

Devala showed up at the far end of the hall across from his office door. Spence convinced himself he needed to remain calm but didn’t know what to do with his hands. He tried to pick a pencil on his desk with a feather touch but with his sweaty fingers the pencil slipped off easily.

Spence sunk in his seat despite his conscious attempt to keep his head high.

Closing the door behind him, Devala got to the point.

“Didn’t tell you the whole story,” he said. “The Board had determined that management had to be trimmed down as well.”

Damn. That asshole lied to him: used him to lay off all those people, then it was bye-bye. One look around and he knew it would be two hours packing all those belongings, then hauling that into the Nissan.

The two talked for five more minutes, then both joined the remaining engineers for the news.

From the CEO’s office, Spence looked outside into the parking lot as Devala placed the cardboard box containing his minimal belongings into the trunk of his beemer.