Zero G Lindy Hop - Chapter 3

Zero G Lindy Hop is a science-fiction novella told in several parts, posted serially if unpredictably by me, your grappler-beam jockeying host, Cheeseburger Brown. This is the third installment.

Chapters: 1|2|3|...

Connected Stories: Simon of Space, The Christmas Robots

The story continues:

CHAPTER THREE

The corridor is wide, its sides dotted with doors, the middle dominated by a larger than life sculpture of a pelvis whose anatomically precise details form the works of a fountain. Various fat glowing fish sashay back and forth in the pool below, changing colours as they turn.

Mistress Glittervale gestures triumphantly, framing the door to the left of the fountain with a pose of presentation. "Blammo!" she grins. "This is it."

"What's with him?" asks Tas, shifting from one foot to another.

With a flourish Mistress Glittervale puts her hands on the shoulders of a robot standing at stiff attention beside the door. "This is your steward!" she squeals. "Due to massive issues right now I'm not actually able assign you a staff signal, so I've ultra-proactively moved forward with the next best thing -- a fully authorized personal guide. And with that I'm so utterly forced to leave you in his completely capable hands? I know you understand? You know: issues. Massive issues."

Tas squints at the thing. Gaudy purple carapace accented with iridescent swirls, masque fixed in an expression of saccharine gaiety. She looks over at Mistress Glittervale. "It'll show me safe through the maze?"

"Fully totally, and so much plus," Mistress Glittervale assures her and then, with a terrifying squeak she rushes forward and embraces Tas. "I'm so stoked. Tell me you're stoked, darling!"

"Stoked," mumbles Tas, keeping still until she is let go.

The door to the suite slides closed with Tasfoliana inside, cutting off the noise of those cavorting in the corridor and the authoritative clack of Mistress Glittervale's retreating footfalls. Tas closes her eyes and rubs her temples, relieved to be released to comparative peace if slightly dispirited to note that she can still feel the pounding of the music through the soles of her boots. She sighs, then looks up to see the purple robot staring at her with its plastic grin. "Oh," she says.

"Hi, Miz! Is this your first stay aboard a Capsheaf cruise?"

Tas cringes against the robot's high-pitched, sing-song voice. "Well, yop..." she admits.

"That's super! Let me tell you about some of our amazing --"

She holds up her hands in protest. "Reckon I'd just like a bit of quiet, see. Can you help me there?"

The robot steps aside and gestures to a door. "Miz, perhaps you would care for a relaxing rest in one of our critically acclaimed bedrooms, your frame cradled by what the Epsilon Indi Diversion Report calls 'an unparalleled mattress experience' and your every desire satisfied by a --"

She nods wearily as she pushes past him. "Yop, fine. Thanks and spanks."

"Miz, would you like me to accompany and assist you?"

"Nop."

She steps into the bedroom and seals the door behind her, leaning against it and taking a shuddering breath. The lights are dim in here, the only sound the hiss of ventilators. She pries off her boots and sits on the edge of the giant, round bed and then allows herself to lie back and sink into its softness. Slowly moving patterns of glowing dots undulate soothingly across the ceiling. She takes another deep breath. Maybe this won't be so bad after all.

She unzips her coveralls and kicks them aside, then squirms under the covers. She checks her watch, but neither her alpha nor beta have reported any errors. She dials down the adhesion and her watch drops off, leaving a little smelly circle on her wrist.

A third sigh. She is almost relaxed. Exhaustion makes her cheek bones hurt. She can feel sleep knocking at her mind's door.

And she can feel a soft pressure between her legs, gently probing.

Tas shrieks and leaps out of the bed, scooping up a boot as she rolls across the floor and then brandishing it over her head. A second figure stumbles out of the bed, trips over the bedding and ends up in a twisted heap of sheets on the floor. She rushes over the clubs the moving lump repeatedly with her boot.

"Come on!" protests the lump. "Hey!"

Tas whisks away the sheets. "Who are you?" she shouts. "What are you doing here? I've got another boot and I'm not afraid to use it, see!"

"Please don't hit me!"

Tas takes a step back, letting the boot sag in her hand. "Who are you?" she growls again.

He carefully gets to his feet, palms up and eyes wide. He is tall, brown skinned and naked, his lithe but muscular frame shining with oil. "I'm just your cunnilinguist, okay?"

"My what?"

"I'm on the bedroom staff, Miz! I'm provided for your satisfaction and satisfaction plus."

She shakes her head, cheeks colouring. She bends down quickly to seize her discarded coverall and then presses it to her chest, hiding behind it. "Don't need satisfaction now. Not today. I'm all for sleeping. That's all."

"I can help you relax," he says, reaching toward her.

She shakes her head again. "You have a uniform or something you could put on?"

He nods sadly, tries to smile, then wipes at his eyes as he dons a red thong and a sashless silk robe. He crosses his arms across his chest awkwardly. "I'm sorry if I've done anything to detract from this enhancement, Miz. I can fetch my debit stone if you want to dock me."

Tas flees the bedroom, hopping as she jams herself back into her coveralls. She dodges the steward and thus finds herself backed into a corner by the floor to ceiling curtains. She yanks them back, eager to lose herself in the stark and bottomless void of space. Instead she finds herself confronting a view overlooking decks and decks of unfettered celebration -- pulsing lights, undulating crowds, crawling words, flashing numbers, obscene displays. The infernal windows are internal!

Her shoulders droop. Slowly she turns around again. The sad cunnilinguist and the merry purple robot stand there expectantly.

"Miz, how can I best service you?"

"You're not going to give me a bad review are you, Miz?"

"Miz, shall I jingle for room service?"

"I could just rub your shoulders a little, if that's what you're into."

She waves them to silence. "Spot of peace," she says quietly. "All I want. Out of here, that's one. Back to my tube, that's two. Now which of you characters can help me? Either or neither?"

"Miz, I can guide you to any appropriate part of this vessel," says the robot cheerfully. And then, "The cargo hold is not appropriate. I cannot guide you there."

"What do you mean? I'll need to get there sooner or later, nop?"

"Miz, for the purpose of serving you I have been temporarily granted special read-only access to this vessel's full authentication and scheduling systems. You are not cleared to begin set up in the auditorium until next cycle. Appropriate access criteria will update at that time. On behalf of Capsheaf, I'd like to assure you that any inconvenience you experience is for your own good."

Tas grimaces, fists clenched. "Need to get out of this madhouse," she growls. "And you, cunnilinguist?"

"Just call me Flank."

"Can you get me out of here, Flank?"

"Well," he shrugs sheepishly, "I know where the hold is, but while I'm on duty -- um, technically -- I'm pretty much not authorized to leave the vicinity of your thighs."

Her head snaps up, eyes narrowing on a small facet of an authentication brooch embedded in the robot's breastplate. She looks over at Flank again. "What if we could fix you up some credentials?"

He frowns. "Pardon me, Miz?"

The corners of her mouth twitch. "Robot!" barks Tas. "Remove your outer carapace."

The robot and the cunnilinguist look at one another uncertainly.

Shortly thereafter the poor robot, its works exposed, has been forced to stand aside while Tas helps Flank close the seams on the purple metal plates enclosing his glistening skin. "It's a bit tight in the middle," Flank complains nervously. "What am I supposed to do if I have to bend over?"

"Hush," she says, lowering the helmet onto his head. Finally she snaps the masque in place over his features. His eyes blink behind the clear lenses. She knocks on the chest. "It's alright?"

"It's alright," he concedes gloomily. "But if anybody asks, you tell them this really turns you on. Right? Otherwise I could lose my job."

"Yop yop," she agrees. "Let's go."

He sighs. "Okay, Miz. Follow me."

They enter the bedroom, the naked robot slinking at their heels. Flank tries but fails to bend down to pull away the covers, so Tas does it for him. At the foot of the bed is a small, soft aperture. "We'll have to crawl down here, back to Arousal Dispatch," he explains. "From there we'll be able to grab a service trolley to get us to the nearest spoke."

Tas seems to be hesitating on the verge of the aperture. Flank furrows his brow. "...If that really is what you want to do, Miz."

"Just a sliver," she says, climbing off the bed and grabbing at her belt. She stops in front of the steward, a ratchet in her hand. "Don't take this personally, but we've got our needs, see."

The steward cocks its head. "Miz?"

She unscrews his glowing eyes and pockets them, then unhitches and removes a joint from his shoulder assembly. "Thanks and spanks, robo."

Flank straightens indignantly. "You're a kleptomaniac?"

"The show must go on," she mutters, pushing past him into the hole. "Let's move."

The staff serviceways are a welcome relief: industrial, utilitarian, barren and comprehensible. The lights are buzzing fluorescents, the walls scratched and nicked. Tas and Flank manoeuvre through a constant stream of robots and service personnel, each concerned only with their own particular duties. Eventually the pair comes to a rude little alcove next to a dingy tunnel.

Flank taps on the glass and reads the schedule. "Twenty minutes," he says, sagging against a bulkhead.

Tas sniffs. "Nop." She unhitches a tool from her belt and pries at the edge of the glass until the divider draws aside with a hiss. Her ears pop. She winces against the sudden rush of wind at her back as air floods into the comparatively atmospherically spartan tunnel. She reaches a control box, flips her tool, and uses the new end to make a few quick adjustments before drawing back and closing the barrier again.

Flank shivers. "What did you just do?"

"Made it look like there's a fault in the signal box," she says, replacing the tool on her jingling belt. "Should call up the service trolley faster, see."

A trolley grinds to a stop beside the alcove. The barrier draws back and they step inside the cramped cabin. Tas tilts her head and listens as little repair robots scuttle around outside, investigating the signal box. Finding no need for repairs they lock down and a second later the trolley shoots onward.

It slows at a second alcove for a gang of waste workers who, seeing there is a lady present, apologize for their odour. They get off just before the trolley switches orientation and begins its journey up a radial shaft toward the ship's airless spine.

"It would've been faster to take the passenger trolley," mutters Flank.

"Quieter this way," replies Tas, arms crossed and eyes closed.

"What -- you actually like being bored?"

She smiles without opening her eyes. "Let's just say I'm not afraid of it."

Compared to the phantasmagoria of the rest of the ship the cargo hold feels like home. Within seconds of their arrival the eyes of the Lagrangian cargo crew are peeking out at them from behind the storage capsules. Tas grins as one long-limbed fellow floats gently into plain sight. "It's Miss Tap Girl back for another whirl!" he croons.

She grins. "Couldn't stay away, see. Not when I know there's a hot milk and good fire down here in the quiet and the cold, skinnies."

"Our cold hold is your cold hold, Miss Dance and Prance! Come, pinch off a sac."

"A milk for me, please, and for my friend."

"Your tool cares for milk? It's a weird, wild world."

Tas and Flank follow the loaders back to their nooks where they keep their pretty things and hammocks, their pets and their clothes, a sort of colony of loader kipple squeezed in between the bulkheads. The revelation that Flank is in fact a young man and not a robot strikes them as entirely hilarious, and to celebrate they break the seal on an extra spicy udder and let flow the sharpest milks of all.

After much coaxing Flank is induced to try a sip, but he winces and shakes his head like a wet dog. "That's horrible stuff!" he cries, grabbing at his tongue. The loaders laugh even harder.

The Lagrangian nooks hang next to the staging area before the cargo hold's outer doors. On either side of the massive aperture are two great round portholes, and on either side of the portholes are turrets for controlling the grappling beams that manoeuvre cargo in and out of the spaceliner. When the cargo crew is good and milked up they kick off from the bulkheads and gather around the turrets, eyes glued to the darkness through the portholes.

"What bobs, skinnies?" asks Tas, pinching off a fresh sac for herself.

The foreman waves her closer. "Flotsam and jetsam," he says, putting one pale arm around her shoulder while pointing into space with the other. "Cruising lanes are stuffed with old stuff, if you follow my tumble -- garbage and treasure, crap and prizes. Navigational deflectors out there on the prow smack it all aside, and then it runs past us before being forgotten again. Look."

Tas steps closer to the glass, meeting her own reflection. Through it she spots a tiny, tumbling bit of something winking in the dark. One of the loaders drifts over beside her and calls up a magnification circle on the porthole, then dials the image up large: a small asteroid, potato-shaped and irregular. "It's only rock and roll," he sighs. "Let it free, jockey."

They sip their milks in silence for a few moments, then someone points out another few bits of scrap drifting back against the apparent motion of the spaceliner. The loaders peer at it through the magnification circle. "Tech!" they cry. "It's tech!"

"Time for fishing," says a young loader sitting atop one of the turrets. His long fingers flash over the controls and then he jams his hands into a set of waldoes. The grappling beam emitters swivel, mirroring his motions. "I wish I wish I wish to catch a fish!" he sings, actuating the beams.

The beams emit no visible light, but Tas can hear the projection system humming as it powers up. She watches as the bit of stuff outside the porthole begins to change trajectory, veering in toward the cargo hold.

Everyone leans in closer.

The foreman begins to nod. "Escape capsule," he declares, wiping a milk moustache away. "Triton class, wagering."

"Wager taken. Seven and a half."

Tas turns to look at the foreman. "Could somebody be in there?"

He shakes his head. "Tritons are a century obsolete, Miss Flat Feet. Not worth its newtons in reclamation."

The youth working the grappling beam nods in agreement. "Worthless as gills in a vacuum. Watch this toss!" He cranks back on the waldoes and pitches hard to aft. The projectors whine. The antique escape capsule zooms away, quickly exiting the liner's floodlights and becoming lost to darkness.

The loaders hoot. Flank kicks over to Tas, his unmasked face melancholy. "This is what you want to do all night? Hang around lobbing space trash?"

"Seems some fun," says Tas. She looks up. "Mind if I give it a try, skinnies?"

The youth disentangles himself from the turret and gestures to the chair gallantly. Tas climbs aboard. When the next bit of flotsam is spotted she inserts her hands into the waldoes and brings the beams online with a trigger squeeze.

"Catch it on the downswing, sweep it right in!"

"Attagirl, you've got the touch!"

"Easy, easy now..."

As Tas grimaces at the turret controls the loaders press their white faces to the porthole. "It's surely tech," mumbles one. "It's big," observes another. "I think...I think it's a -- ship. Angle the floods!"

Loaders scramble to refocus the exterior lamps as the wildly spinning object is drawn ever closer by Tas' deft working of the waldoes. She eases up on one beam as she slacks off on the other, then carefully does the opposite, each carefully timed reversal slowing the object's rotation by degrees. Gradually the derelict vessel comes into plain view, its pitted bronze hull reflecting the floodlights in winks as it turns.

"Miss Lubber is an ace jockey! It's true treasure, skinnies, treasure!"

"What do we do now?" asks Tas.

"Tuck it in closer, Miss Fancy Fingers. Let's bring it inside."

The crew jumps to action. Blue lights begin to rotate around the outer doors, the works clanking and hissing as the atmosphere exchange starts cycling. The youngest Lagrangian shimmies up to a control booth and slinks behind the controls, fingers flying over the console. He calls down that he's about to take over the grab with the inner-airlock's grapplers. "Let it free in three, two, one: mark!"

Tas relaxes her fingers against the triggers. She hears the inner-airlock grapplers buzzing, then a hollow boom as the loading doors seal. The airlock cycles with a chuff of pressurized gas, releasing the tinny, metallic smell of space into the hold.

Twin microgravity forklifts arrive to catch the ship as it passes inside, the doors drawing tight behind it. Mooring tethers snake out of the ceiling and connect to the hull with a series of dull thuds. The blue lights stop spinning and the projectors whine down, leaving the cargo hold in sudden silence.

The derelict ship leans into the tethers with a metallic groan.

The foreman whistles. "What a catch!"

The small spacecraft seems ancient, its design simple and its fixtures scarred; a central, bullet-shaped fuselage with three thruster armatures curled up against it, the top dome too grimy to see through. There are markings across the belly but Tas cannot decipher the script. "Anybody reckon that?" she asks.

The foreman nods. "Old letters, them. If I remember my kindergarten straight, she's called Variable."

"What'll you do with her?"

The loaders all turn to look at her quizzically. "Us skinnies?" echoes the foreman. "No, Miss Modestly Honestly, no. This here's your catch, right as up is forward."

The others nod. "Up is forward, what's yours is yours."

Tas swallows, looking between them. "You're yanking my tether, you skinnies who love a laugh. You are having a laugh, I reckon. Good fun, good fun..." She trails off as she takes in their earnest expressions. "Wait -- really? It's mine?"

They grin and nod. "Finders keepers."

Her eyes go wide as they rove over the captured ship, her mouth practically salivating as she spots part after part she's longed for. "The parts," she mutters, kicking forward numbly. "Oh Pop, the parts..."

Flank snorts. "I've never seen anybody get to excited over a hunk of junk before."

But Tas isn't listening. She's arrived beside the pitted craft and is already reaching for tools from her belt to start work on opening the hatch. The loaders pinch off fresh sacs of milk and toast her find, giddy as can be.

"Hold on, Miz," calls Flank. "You can't just barge right in -- I mean, you don't even know what's in there!"

"I know what's in there alright," she says without turning around. "About a million parts my performers have needed hard, and needed long." She grunts and something gives. The seal on the hatch breaks with a hiss. "I'm in," she says breathlessly.

On Recapturing Momentum

It is well known that writing is not a lucrative path. Just ask all those people you've never heard of. (Ten cents per what? I'm insulted. Thank you very much, sir. May I have another?) Heck, even ask most of those people you have heard of -- dollars to doughnuts the lion's share have the same trouble paying the hydroelectric bill as you or me.

Typographic mega ultra superstars aside (your Kings, your Rowlings, your Suesses), writing is basically something you give away. Even when there is money involved it's usually a loss when the dust settles. The work is a donation.

(The local magazine I write for wants all the contributors to get together for lunch, but it's hard to agree on which soup kitchen is most convenient for everyone so the actual date remains a perpetually uncollapsed waveform.)

So this is why I have a day job.

I brown bag it into the Big Smoke in a two-man commuter-pod carpool, eighty kilometers each way. Each morning under a pink sky we watch country turn to city, tree to pole, hill to stair, sky to smog. We take turns plugging our playlists into the dash, and also with who steers.

The office is across the street from the airport, nestled in a barracks-style row of similar offices separated by parking lots and rows of withered, skeletal trees. Windows rattle as a commercial airliner accelerates overhead, its giant cruciform shadow squirting over rows of salt-stained cars parked cheek-by-jowl.

"F," I say. "The guy from nextdoor parked too close, I can't get out."

"S," says my carpooling colleague. "Hang on, I'll repark."

It's winter and everything's sloppy. We trudge up metal steps which bounce because they're missing a support. I hold the door while he meeps the thing. My desk is beside a drafty loading dock door. I complained about the draft so they cut holes into the door and installed windows, apparently working under the premise that seeing natural light would induce a psychosomatic response and make me feel warmer. I guess it kind of works.

(My assistant sits closer to the door than I do. That's how you can tell I'm the boss a' him.)

We work in the field of event management. That is, people have big events (like award shows or corporate summits or profit-paloozas or mass firings) and our company takes care of all the details (flights, hotels, food, staging, speeches, A/V and PowerPoint, lighting and effects, skills enhancement workshops, strategic team-building game-like activities, special guest star speakers/coaches/consultants or performers/comedians/hosts). Also, at dinner, we festoon the tables with elaborately folded napkins -- and that's where I come in.

Napkin topology is the sort of thing a lot of people take for granted -- crown, crane, diamond, whatever. But if one of the folds I'm responsible for fails to conform to spec, it could mean an executive or lauded achiever having to face taking the stage wearing a blotch of shrimp sauce. My professional reputation and potency as a breadwinner rides on those very important shirts being clean.

(To be completely candid I should say that my day job may not specifically involve the folding of any actual dinner napkins, but that the reality is so negligibly different in substance that it scarcely matters. Other details have been changed or obfuscated for the sake of my ongoing employability.)

I am exceedingly fast at what I do. That is my "thing." We all need something to sell. That's mine. I do what other people in my field do as a matter of course, but I do it more quickly. If someone were designing an eye-catching brochure about Cheeseburger Brown's day job skills, it would no doubt feature a colourful call-out singling out the rapidity of response.

My ability to juggle especially challenging topologies in complex luncheon-dinner combination programmes functions in inverse proportion to the number of other things I'm expected to mind. This means that when the going gets very thick in my day job I lose the ability to pay attention to...well, anything else.

At this time last year I was folding for three simultaneous shows and it just about killed me; this year I was folding for five.

...So, that's why the story stream's been so dry.

"Brown -- your folding simulation failed on the edit workstation!"

"The catering company called and said the double-stitch serviette service they quoted you can't be hypoallergenic if it's deployed in Texas!"

"I'm a chicken with my head cut off, running around! Wharrgarbl!"

We enter the office to a scene of chaos. Telephones ring or chirp or buzz, skittering across table tops propelled by their vibration engines. The Technical Director is swearing a blue streak at someone via speakerphone, the Vice President of Getting Shit Done looks like a zombie on the verge of tears, and the Production Assistant has quit.

Bollywood Producer nods wearily at me. "Are we winning?" she asks.

"I don't know," I shrug. "I'm numb to the world."

I go to sit at my desk but am confronted by the face of our resident ITiot at my crotch. I leap up. "Morning," says the long face under my desk; "I was just recharging the Bussard collectors with an additional fifty thousand kilojoules of warp plasma in case we go critical on the impulse manifold, thereby insulating the shared printers against damage in the event of a cascade failure in the isolinear compumatrix."

"Um, okay. Is that why email is down?"

He blinks. "Email is down?"

We play pool in a carpeted field between wastes of empty cubicle farms. (There used to be a lot of people working here, but they've all been let go (an expression that over-exerts itself to produce a vague but entirely dishonest aura of "set free").) While Technical lines up his next shot he grumbles to me in a way as French as profane about his difficulties with such-and-such supplier being a fornicator of such-and-such unconventional orifice, and so on. "Tabernac!"

I nod sympathetically. The pool balls crack loudly against one another in the empty space. I sit on a disused printer, a bottle of beer balanced in the paper feed. "That sucks, Tech. What'll you do?"

He squints over the balls. "With utmost the professionality," he says Frenchly, "I will go at his office to show him both goddamn bills side by each, okay, and to take him through the line item one by one for highlighting some discrepancy."

"Yeah?"

"And, after that, I will very calmly pull down my pant and make a shit right on his keyboard."

Sure. Accountant plays winner. I wander off through the semi-lit corridors of empty offices. Desks with clean spots where computers used to be, walls with unfaded rectangles where art hung, carpets with pressed down bits showing where they used to hold lamps and end-tables and shit. There are one or two dead plants. In one office is a broken picture frame. In the junior boardroom at the end of the hall is a sea of high-backed executive chairs, because my kids piled them all in there last weekend when they wanted to play chair hockey or chair olympics or chair planet or something.

(So this is what an Unprecedented Economic Downtown looks like.)

My pocket rumbles. Email's back up. Things start cooking again. I return to the napkin studio to review the incoming client notes with the in-house staff and freelancers. Everybody's age-age pocket-telephones are chiming and beeping as the client emails pour in. "Did somebody go ahead and use English spelling on the Managing Director's remarks?" asks Bollywood Producer pointedly. "Remember: they're Americans. They want everything spelled the other way."

A freelance hipster furrows his brow. "There's another way to spell centre?"

Perky Producer loses her perk as she scans her Blackberry's wee display. "They want a bear. An actual bear. On stage. Oh my God. Will the show's insurance even let us do that? What if it mauls an executive?"

"Well, there'd be one less PowerPoint deck to format," says my carpooling colleague philosophically.

"The Rutles' manager is demanding SUV limousines, brunette escorts and blow for the Tuesday rehearsal, but only regular limos and just blow for the Wednesday show itself. Is there room in your budget for that?"

"Just do it. I threw the budget out a week ago. It has nothing to do with reality. The show costs what it costs."

"Also, they're asking for a brunch in the ballroom -- full business session over eggs, with rear projection and toasted bagels."

"F me. Okay, Cheeseburger: can you fold me something for that?"

"Hell. I guess so." I lean over to my assistant. "Call the hotel and find out when the laundry cycle ends. If we're lucky we fold pre-fold dinner for brunch before we crash." He nods and kicks off against the mandatorium table, his chair coasting him away toward the drafty loading dock.

"Client X is on the line!"

"Which Client X?"

"What?"

"US or Canada?"

"Shit! I don't know!"

"If it's US I'll take it, but if it's Canada tell me them we're unavailable. We're totally, retardedly F'ed on Canada. Stall 'em. We have to figure out our angle on this whole bear thing."

Perky Producer: "I'll Google bears."

Technical: "Tabernac, you bimbo, that's not going to help."

President of the United States of Signed Paycheques: "I really feel that the napkins should reflect the overall decor theme of the experience in a dynamic, unique way. You know?"

Cheeseburger Brown: "I canna fold the laws of physics!"

One client wants their pharmaceutical education programme to look "more like Avatar" and another client wants to know if the comedian they've hired will read alternative versions of all his jokes, just in case the CEO can't make up his mind about what's funny until the eleventh hour. The receptionist apologetically tells me my shipment of serviette rings won't be here until next week.

"Fie!"

The worst part? It's Sunday.

But this is when burgers such as myself really shine. This is when the air is dirty with grit and horror and I remain poised at my post, calmly moving the effort forward to assure complete victory over the next awards banquet on the horizon. This is when, amid all the flashes and explosions and screams, my employer often stops, cocks his head, and says, "Well now those really are some finely folded napkins!"

Except this time he didn't. He said, "I'm really disappointed in the team. Why is X and Y so F'ed up? Why is everybody grouchy and tired? Why aren't rays of sunshine spontaneously bursting forth from my bum? We need to debrief on balancing our workloads better."

And I, like an idiot, told him why X and Y were so F'ed up, and why everyone was grouchy and tired, and why his rectum was not a locus of atomic fusion. I mean, because he asked.

So then the President of the United States of Signed Paycheques freaked out and yelped, "I won't be challenged in this way!" and, in a fit of inspirational leadership, fled the office.

"H'mm," I said. "Am I fired?"

Bollywood Producer shrugged. "Maybe."

The President avoided me for a day -- disappearing behind filing cabinets, turning around in doorways, and so on -- and then wrote me a short and cryptic email about having given me a micro-raise. People are weird.

The copywriter for an opening session wrote a terrible script so I wrote a new one and he got paid for it. People are dicks.

Whenever I forget about my assistant for too long at a stretch he reverts to losing himself in instant messaging conversations. People are lazy.

When I fail to check, cross-check and double-check every last thing a freelancer, contractor or junior has done, errors of the stupidest kind make it to the show. People are mistaken.

When I try to gently show people how they are mistaken, more often than not they get in a huff. People are fragile.

Over lunch I listen to iTunes U podcasts about the ancient world and work on my child-appropriate version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. My world may be a tornado but there's one font of narrative that isn't allowed to run dry -- my kids are expecting to hear about Gilgamesh and Enkidu's battle with the cedar guardian Humbaba before they go to sleep. (The school must go on!)

On the way home I rehearse tonight's episode in my head. It's a blizzard and it looks like we're driving through hyperspace. The blurry nebulae of the city glimpsed through fogged windows falls behind us, a golden smear in the rearview. Up ahead, nothing but inky darkness and twisting streams of snowflakes...

It's 11 degrees C in the washroom. (I can see my breath. Bloody pioneers. Would it have killed them to invent and install a furnace?) The last steaming kettle is poured into the giant iron tub. The kids climb in and I follow them. "So Humbaba looks like a lion?" asks Miss Six.

"Well, he's got a man's body and the face of a lion, but it's a lion's face made out of an ever-changing spaghetti of snakes and intestines."

"That's gross."

"And he breathes fire."

"That's awesome."

My wife sings. We can hear it while we stew in the bath. The schoolhouse is small and the interior walls are largely composed of wishful thinking plus some wood. The telephone rings, and we hear her sigh and grumble as she breaks focus to tend to it. It's not easy getting five minutes when you're Mom. "Everyone is driving me crazy!" she shouts at nobody in particular. A minute later she starts singing again.

"I got soap in my eye," objects Mr. Three. "No, not that eye -- my dudder eye!"

I pause in the middle of my sword thrust to dab at his face with a towel, then resume the re-enactment with a swirl of Enkidu's mighty axe. Water splashes everywhere. We flail our arms as we call for the help of the sun god Shamash. This degenerates into hysterical giggling and more splashing. This escalates until my wife stands at the door.

"Uh-oh," says Miss Six. She points at me. "Papa did it."

"I see."

"Come closer," I call to my wife. "I've enrolled you in a wet T-shirt contest."

"Looks pretty sopping over there. Think I'll stay here."

I sigh. "You'll probably still win."

The children are tucked in, left to the glow of their Solar System mobile, listening to Johann Sebastian Bach and asking what to dream. All I can think of are napkins, so my wife fills the gap: unicorns, flying cars, pixies, secret caves, magic powers. "My magic powers mean I can even fly?" asks Mr. Three. He is assured that the interpretation is indeed sound. "In your dreams, you can do anything. Just remind yourself that you're dreaming and you'll be free."

Miss Six smiles. "I could even ride a pegacorn. I'll just pinch myself in my dream to tell me that I'm not awake. That's a very usual thing to do."

"And I'll just pinch myself too," adds Mr. Three.

When we get back downstairs my space-age pocket-telephone is doing a jig across the counter. It's now the turn of people in more westerly time zones to take their stabs at being weird, lazy, mistaken and fragile. My wife doesn't like the look on my face. "I thought I was going to get a chance to write tonight," I explain.

"Soon," she says.

"All momentum is lost," I complain.

"You'll get it back again."

"Fie."

We curl up on the sofa and are soon accompanied by my wife's retinue of woodland creatures -- rabbits, cats, dogs, rats, what have you -- and the fireplace flickers and there's frost on the tall schoolhouse windows. She reads, I reply to emails. Things purr. I fade.

Parked in the back of my mind my next starship lies in wait to fly.

My Time-Travelling Son

It is rumoured that my son can, or rather has, travelled in time.

(Certainly, the first thing that gets sticky is tense. English is notoriously Chauvinistic when it comes to accommodating temporally wobbly states of action like would be ifs, could dids, or any of the various clades of feasibly constricted co-probabilities you might encounter in a day to day chat occurring in a chronologically nonlinear context. Like a café, maybe.)

It hasn't happened yet, of course, and it likely won't. My son is just three years old. As far as I'm concerned, the only direction through time he falls is forward. He does so in the proper, traditional way: one Planck after another, positive T.

If he does make the odd nonlinear excursion, he does so in such tiny increments as to be beneath the threshold of detection for macroscopic objects like gold bullion, the Hamburglar or myself. I am reasonably satisfied in concluding that my son is not routinely skipping entire moments, or even seconds. (Beyond that I'm uncertain.)

The point is that it is extraordinarily likely that my three-year-old really is not travelling through time in any but the conventional sense. Never the less, the rumour persists.

Don't ask him about it. If you want to pin him down, if you ask, "Do you travel in time?" you won't like the answer.

"No," he'll say. And just when you're about to relax and smile he adds, "Not now."

You furrow your brow. "What do you mean?"

"I do it when I'm a teenager," he says, turning back to his toys.

There's an accident, naturally. It's a skateboarding accident. My teenage son is trying to impress his droogs at the skate park by nailing the half-pipe; he falls. He's wearing padding but he still takes an awkward blow to the head. "It's blooding," he tells me seriously. "My head bloods when I'm a teenager at the skate park."

I ask him, "Have you ever seen the movie Donnie Darko?"

"No," he replies carelessly. "But I got Backyardigans on Mama's iPod. Watch this: my truck can fly."

I am not concerned. As a parent, I accept that there are some aspects of my son's life over which I have no control; I can no more stop him from becoming unglued in time than I can unilaterally decide his university major or force his taste in music to conform to my own. I mean, face it: sometimes kids pursue a general liberal arts degree or worship terrible music or rebel against the geometry of spacetime. If you're lucky, it's just a phase.

Another reason I am not concerned is because I believe it is well nigh impossible. I don't mean that to sound closed-minded, but there you have it. When it comes to translating across time via unconventional vectors, I'm a sceptic. (Extraordinary claims, et cetera.)

Now, don't get me wrong: I enjoy a good time-travel yarn as much as the next fellow. Isaac Asimov's seminal The End of Eternity, Robert Zemeckis' zany Back to the Future, Terry Gilliam's visionary Time Bandits -- each of them choc-a-bloc with predestined paradox pretzels, comic causal inversions and at least a dash of historical hanky-panky. You'll get no argument from me that time-travel is a good bit of fun.

Also fun: fire-breathing dragons, spaceships that rumble through a vacuum, gamma rays that confer superpowers. Telekinesis, prophetic visions, talking animals. Atlantis. Ultima Thule. Planet X. Shangri-La.

Fun fictions. Imaginative inventions. Harmless poppycock, and -- as a science-fiction story wallah -- my stock in trade.

But not real.

My son is not a time-traveller, but he might be a natural-born storyteller. Like all children he is a keen observer of adult reactions. It is not lost on him that his superstitious Old World grandparents take his observations from the future very seriously.

I see the grin threatening to curl the sides of his mouth. He's not temporal flotsam, he's an imp. He works to hide it, his face pinched and resolute as he lets drop with apparent reluctance just one more highly ambiguous tidbit about his future self. His grandparents go wild.

"Zhis is a big deal, ja -- it could be a varning!" declares his grandfather.

"He's definitely connected to something beyond the physical plane," reasons his grandmother. "That's clear. I've read all about it. Cases just like this, where children know things they couldn't possibly know any other way."

I shrug. "You think there's no other way for him to guess that he might have a skateboard when he's a teenager?"

"It's not what he knows, it's how sure he is about it."

"Ah."

"It's the details," she insists. "No child would just invent details like that for no reason."

Grandfather nods. "He is my father reincarnated, ja. Of zhis zhere can be no doubts, no. The proof? When he talks in his sleep his mumbles are in Latvian."

"He could have no way of knowing Latvian," opines Grandmother.

"But you speak Latvian around the child all the time," I point out.

"No no no," says Grandfather, shaking his head. "He doesn't understand a word of it."

So you see it really is very easy to find evidence of what you want to believe, so long as your standards of evidence aren't terribly strict. To be sure the picture is clear to those who want to be seduced by the story. They are mystified that I do not share their thrill. "You are an imaginative man, ja," Grandfather says to me, "so I cannot understand vhy you persist in being so closed-minded about zhings vhich are really quite obwious."

I'm forced to wonder: is imagination the same as open-mindedness? Is my reluctance to believe in this story simply a biproduct of an inability to properly conceptualize it? Why is a creative personality also assumed to be a credulous one?

From the corner of my eye I see my son stir. "When I'm a teenager," he announces, "I drink beer."

"Teenagers aren't supposed to drink beer," says Grandmother.

"I know," he agrees. "That's why I got in big trouble, and had to do a punishment, and couldn't ride my skateboard at the skate park because I was bad and drank beer even though I was just a teenager. But that was before I hurt myself and started blooding on cement."

I watch him relish their anxiety. He's the star of a very dramatic one man show.

At Christmas I tell the story to my own father. "Have you heard how Mr. Three has come unstuck in time?" I ask, aping Kurt Vonnegut's famous description of Billy Pilgrim's temporal predicament in Slaughterhouse-Five since my father understands most history, politics and science exclusively through the lens of speculative fiction. "He's haunted by memories from the moment of his death," I explain. "It's like The Reincarnation of Peter Proud except without Margot Kidder."

"That's weird," says my dad.

"I'm fairly sure that it isn't," I reply. "He's just playing with them. He's an imp. After all, it's not like he's actually receiving knowledge from the future."

My dad raises his brow and then gives me a strange sort of wink. "But he could be. Right?"

"Well, we can pretend," I concede. "For shits and giggles."

"But it could be true," he presses, giving me that strange wink again. "I mean, you never know. Right?"

I cock my head and frown. "I'm being serious."

"So am I," he says. "Nobody really understands enough about this universe to say with any authority what is and is not possible. Anything is possible."

"But not probable," I parry; "Occam's Razor, Dad. What do we gain by entertaining absurdly improbable explanations when much more probable -- maybe even testable -- explanations exist?"

"It's important to be open-minded," he tells me.

It is at this point that is begins to dawn on me that in our contemporary Western culture uncertainty is a virtue. North Americans especially have become deeply suspicious of anyone who seems too confident in their grasp of a subject, especially if the subject is a complex one that may seem esoteric or even bizarre to the uninitiated (like, say, Special Relativity). So averse to even the scent of dogma is the modern Western individualist that it seems safer to sit on the fence in most cases -- in this view, the wise man draws no conclusions. It's Socrates turned inside out by hyperbole.

Science becomes confounded with sophistry, and critical thinking becomes a self-serving exercise undertaken only by sad, lonely people with no appreciation of wonder, magic or exultation. The incredulous. The closed-minded. The party-poopers. Those who would deny themselves the transcendant epiphanies to be found on all sides when one cultivates a willing sense of giddy mystery.

Being "open-minded" in this sense is synonymous with being uncritical. Even the most ridiculous idea is par for the course so long as one can find the room to insert the narrowest edge of an epistemelogically greased wedge, the mantra of the anti-intellectual: proof exists only in mathematics.

(...Which is true, strictly speaking. But seldom helpful.)

If we're to define the terms according to usage in the herd, I have no doubt that being closed-minded (dogmatic, inflexible, impervious to new data) has negative ramifications, but no less so than the examples of open-mindedness I've seen (gullible, unnuanced, laid bare to manipulation). It seems to me one would be better off failing to believe in ghosts than credulously putting stock in snake-oil and spiritual scams.

The self-described open-minded people I know are the same people who routinely get suckered by abject bunk: dietary supplements with no nutritional value, magic belts and insoles that heal via the invisible powers of magnetism, biologically meaningless detoxification regimens, chocolates that cure cancer, nightmarish myths about the dangers of microwaves, vaccination, aluminium and milk. They believe violent crime is on the rise, and that the theory of evolution teeters on the precipice of collapse. They think Nostradamus knew things.

And they are convinced that my son is a time-traveller, propelled out of spacetime by the tragedy of his own untimely death.

A living omen. A message from the other side.

Is this what happens when there's no central authority guiding popular notions of the afterlife? Would these people be so willing to believe in hookum if they had a spiritual leader to remind them that souls don't just drop out of Heaven willy-nilly, invading the corporeal realm with their destiny-thwarting whinges and forbidden knowledge? Has our civil-rights motivated desire not to discriminate caused us to inadvertently validate any and all worldviews, no matter how sloppy, unsavoury or unsound?

Or is the converse true? Could this kind of fuzzy thinking be the result of gifting too much deference to existing spiritual authorities? Would it be a better world to live in if someone influential called a spade and spade and declared convictions rooted without evidence to be mere artifacts of our all-too-human cognitive biases?

"I can do big boy tricks on my skateboard when I'm a teenager," says my son, scooting his die-cast cars along the hardwood. "In the future that's when I do them, and my friends at the skate park say my tricks are awesome."

"What year is it in the future?"

"It's tomorrow."

"Do you have a job?"

"No. I just live with you and Mama and watch cartoons. Plus I can run really fast because I'm big, so I'm always like zooooom! I say that all the time in the future."

I pause, then venture, "What happens after you bump your head?"

"I just go in the bambulance and it takes me to a hospital and then the doctors give me ice cream."

I'm relieved. Was I worrying just a little? Surely not. Of course not. Naturally not. What, me? I ask him what flavour the ice cream is but he doesn't care anymore -- he's moved on to pretending the stairs are a series of cliffs. His die-cast cars tumble or leap depending on whether they're good guys or bad guys. "The bad guys aren't good drivers," he explains. "Because they're bad. Only good guys are good drivers."

"Is that why the Decepticons can never catch the Autobots?"

He nods. "Yup."

It's good to know there is an underlying order to it all.