Imminent Brouhaha

Samantha Prosser mumbled something and turned to stop in the hallway and look over her shoulder at the atrium. Two men in dusty A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. jackets were sitting, cross-legged and straight-faced respectively, on the brown velvet couch farthest from the door. They waited silently, looking like cardboard cutouts. Hotshots. Astronaut’s astronauts. Serious and throttle-happy and tactically rebellious. Void vets. Samantha wondered why they were sitting in the atrium. Ostensibly, Griggs had called them there; actually, they had determined that the brown velvet couch farthest from the door was the ideal place to wait. But neither explanation gave any indication to their purpose. It wasn’t a social call, though; both were immersed in blue-jacketed briefings that were as bloated and circulatory as the men weren’t. 

A bright red dust-coated pickup was parked right outside the doors, where a truck never should have been parked, at least according to several unspoken rules, and several written and posted ones. There was nothing but sidewalk and lawn in front of the atrium, and a few pieces of statuary and chunks of topiary. The hotshots had obviously interpreted the “No Parking Ever” signs as an invitation to park there. Astronauts were precisely the reason why the A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Rulebook spanned 2,175,238 pages of terse, joyless regulations and restrictions. No printed copy existed, for spatial reasons, and the codes ranged from embarrassingly obvious (“astronauts are not permitted to set fire to A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Property”) to embarrassingly specific (“astronauts with an IQ over 100 and blood-alcohol level over 0.1 should not engage in ship to ship ping pong tournaments if the collective age of the participants equals less than the total number of players on a standard basketball team (as defined by the eNBA) plus the number of years between enlistment and initial qualification, divided by the number of collective years spent in the A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. test pilot program or an equivalent service. See: Test Pilot Membership, on page 1,515,624. Ping Pong, on page 124,149. Permissible Diversions, on page 2,048,283.”). For its vastness, nobody could remember the entire rulebook. Even robots could take minutes to surf through the rules when attempting to detect an infraction, enforce it through the proper channels, or simply recall the correct and official procedure for removing gum from the floor (“In a clockwise direction, while wearing disposable, non-permeable gloves, sanctioned and sanctified by the second-nearest branch of the clergy”). And despite its vastness, there were many loopholes and contradictions, many of which were passed from astronaut to astronaut, until the rulebook was rendered essentially useless for keeping them in check. Even code 187265.1983581q123, which forbid the transfer of information pertaining the rulebook between A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. employees, was circumvented effectively by code 159.23511, which stated that information pertaining to the rulebook should be accessible to all A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. employees from all possible sources. And both were rendered moot because the Rulebook itself was programmed to transfer itself onto all available storage devices. This programming, incidentally, is not addressed only any page of the Rulebook.

Samantha didn’t bother to mention the truck, did her best to pretend not to notice it, which was difficult because it was very red and covered in rhinestones, and went up to Jonathan Griggs’s office, which was difficult because there were lots of stairs, the elevator was broken, and three of the two Customs checkpoints stood between the atrium and the admin wing. Since Customs had fired her, Samantha no longer knew what in the hell they were doing at a rocket launch facility; but that was no different from when she worked with Customs, because nobody told anybody anything in Customs, except where to go and when, and who to detain until they were released on the grounds that there was no evidence to support the unspecified charges leveled against them. Customs was a silly outfit, and Samantha Prosser was glad to be done with it, though she’d never allowed herself to think so before, because that would be disloyalty of a marginal magnitude, and would never be stood for. Also, Customs wore silly outfits that made her look frail and pale and short, which she was, instead of willowy and fair and petite like the sale’s rep at John & Johan’s Secretarial Wear claimed her new Secretary’s uniform made her look. 

She prodded her glasses back onto her nose. They were new, in place of contacts which didn’t really help her to read and only partially fit. The glasses only partially fit, also, but that only helped to give her a tremulous air and something to do. She was constantly prodding them back onto her nose, and it was the only thing she was doing constantly. Her job was not otherwise demanding; Griggs could go days without requiring outside help. 

“Well?” Griggs demanded, at 76.3% authority.    

“There are two men to see you.” Samantha said crisply. 

“Send them up.” 

Samantha Prosser went back down to the atrium, through three of the two security checkpoints again, down the stairs again, down the hallway, etc. She stopped sharply at the doorway, and kicked a wastebasket carelessly. 

“He’ll see you now. Up the stairs, and up the stairs, and through the first security checkpoint, then left, then up the stairs, the right, then up the stairs, and up the stairs, then up the stairs, then thought the second and third checkpoints, the left, then left again, and left into the stairwell. Go up three flights, turn right, go up the stairs, skip the last two steps because they still haven’t cleaned off the adhesive, and the door should be fifth on the left. The one without the handle, numbered 415.” 

The astronauts nodded, started off, and promptly became lost. 

Amateurs, Samantha thought. She liked her new job. It gave her a chance to spend large amounts of time in charge of nothing whatsoever, without sacrificing the false authority of a supervisory position. And she could get people lost, and feign incompetence and never be fired because she was the only person who understood both how the phone system worked and how to unjam the snack machine (several people knew how to do either one, but she was uniquely positioned near a phone and the snack machine, and therefore was liaison to both disciplines). Samantha wasn’t incompetent, but it was a nice change to pretend to be, and lowering everyone’s expectations provided a much easier way of exceeding them than hard work and discipline did. And because she seemed incompetent, people liked her; she was no longer a threat, or a hardass, or even a valuable employee and colleague. People valued her for herself, and not for the work she did. Which was good, because she didn’t do much work. 

She went to help the astronauts through security, bobbing with inexperienced coquettishness at their elbows, leading them up flight after flight after flight of stairs. (The stairs were doing wonders for Samantha’s health and her quads. She hated them fiercely.) They reached Griggs’s office after the better part of half an hour, thoroughly prodded and exhausted. Samantha did not know why Customs was still present in the building, because Griggs was keeping his reasons confidential. He liked making people go through more security than was supposedly present, she supposed, because it weakened their resolve significantly, so that by the time he had visitors, they were softened and yielding, often obliging. The two astronauts were neither such thing. They flustered and blustered and postured for several minutes while Griggs waited with all the patience a robot can manage (lots). Then they sat down because Samantha told them quietly that they should sit the hell down and shut the hell up. Then she had exited, her shoes (which she hated because they had buckles) clicking subserviently on the uniformly tedious tile. 

She went back to her desk, sat down, stood up again, poured a cup of coffee from the carafe sitting on the break table, sat down and drank the coffee quickly, unpausing, answered two phone calls, and crunched on two complementary dinner mints from the bucket on her desk beside the little brown and red cactus she never watered. There was nothing else to do. 

The astronauts came out raggedly, glancing over their shoulders into Griggs’s office. Their faces were lit with confusion, their postures had been robbed of confidence. Jonathan Griggs had that effect. 

“Samantha, right?” One of the astronauts said, glancing at the placard on her desk. The larger, wider one. Blond-haired, broad-shouldered, withered to sinew. 

“Sam.” She corrected, hazarded a giggle. 

The astronaut stared at her. She straightened soberly, and stared back, cold and professional now. 

“Samantha. Yes.” She said briskly. 

“Do you know what he was talking about? Missing station? Who the hell lost a station? We’re new here, just graduated, in fact, and he called us in to talk about a missing station, but I can’t even tell what it was about, or what the hell we’re supposed to do about it. Do you know if we were brought here for any particular reason? ‘Cause this is starting to seem like a big practical joke. I don’t even know if you’re the person to ask. Is there someone else we can ask? Jesus this base is quiet. What the hell do you do here?” 

Samantha picked up a phone, said “hold please” into the senseless receiver, stood up and walked away, dropping her empty coffee cup in the trash on the way to Jonathan Griggs’s office. She pushed the dull door open. It swung away on its predictable hinges with a solemn woosh. 

“Mr. Griggs, what is going on?” 

“It’s routine.” Griggs said. 

“Those astronauts don’t know why you told them about what you told them about.” 

“It’s routine.” Griggs said. 

“But do you want them to do anything about it? They don’t understand what you’re asking them.” 

Griggs was silent. He slammed his head on the table. Once, twice, upsetting the still-full carafe of tea Samantha had brought in on her first day, when she had introduced herself to Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker and almost felt like a proper human being deserving of respect and courtesy that wasn’t faked to cover embarrassment, or faked to sell her a car. 

Samantha had become somewhat wary of compassion and deference and politeness, because compassionate deferent, polite people tried to sell her things constantly, and rude, obnoxious, unfeeling clods didn’t want anything from her except to be left alone, which was fine with her; she felt and acted the same way and wanted the same thing, usually, and felt a measure of empathy for all the assholes in the world. Like Griggs, poor, sad Jonathan Griggs with his old-fashioned suit, sharp features, and over-sophisticated sense of humor, who never received compassion or interest from his fellow humans, and therefore, Samantha assumed, never sought compassion or interest, because a rightful and precedented fear of rejection held him back. She felt for the misers and crooks and hermits and recluses, and mistrusted the nice guys and happy people and yes men and sunny women and cheery folks with family commitments and one vacation a year to some crappy beach where they would pretend not to be miserable with all the other happy people who were pretending not to be miserable and one or two grouchy bastards who sat there in the sand hating most of it, but thinking: “Hell, this isn’t so bad.” Samantha was a massive cynic who wanted nothing more than to believe in the proverbial institution, and did, because her fragile sanity depended on the misconception that order was the only possible way to make sense of her desperate world. 

And there was poor, sad Jonathan Griggs, banging his head on a table because he couldn’t answer a simple question he wasn’t allowed to answer. Jonathan Griggs had been programmed such that no single purpose and function held more weight and value than any other. His designers thought they were being egalitarian, which they partially were, but it led to difficult conundrums, when Griggs was torn between the rules, which stated for no particular reason that he couldn’t tell anyone about anything that related to Calamity #1516, and logic, which suggested that everyone should know about Calamity #1516 because somebody might know how to fix it, and his functioning purpose, which was to memorize stupid bureaucratic information so that he could answer stupid bureaucratic questions. In most situations, robots are happier than humans, because their purpose has been ordained, and is constantly repeated to them in the soft whisper of their programming; whereas humans just have to stumble around wondering if sucking air and blowing carbon dioxide is a good enough reason to stay alive. In other cases, though, robots have it much worse off, with split loyalties tearing them one way and the other, and relative lack of bias dragging them around in logical circles and spirals without end. If they weren’t programmed right, with proper priorities, they ran a chance of falling into complete confusion. 

Samantha stared at Griggs. She had done quite a lot of staring that day. “Sir. You should at least tell me what the situation is. My security clearance is high enough, and we’ll all find out sooner or later.” 

“This far through is a PR disaster.” 

“I’ll keep it hush-hush. I’ll manage. Now can you please explain what the astronauts are here for so I can tell them, so they can leave now?” 

“They’re the rescue. The misfits are gone. We don’t know where, and it’s just a matter of time before some amateur with a fancy telescope doesn’t see Mortimer Station.”

“Mortimer Station is gone? You’re saying it’s gone.” 

“Since January.” 

“What? And nobody’s been told?” 

“They have an FTL drive on board. It’s top secret. Nobody can know that, at 0937 on January 19^th an experimental FTL drive was activated, carrying off a crew of eight expensive astronauts. You have now been added to a short list of people who do know, people who will be put in prison for grievous breach of contract if anyone learns about the incident. We are currently preparing rescue operations, but the likelihood of success is effectively zero, seeing as we don’t know even remotely where they could be.”

“And nobody’s been told.” 

“It’s routine.” Griggs said.  

“You didn’t even tell the rescuers.” 

“They don’t need to know.” 

“Why are you sending a rescue mission if you’re not worried about PR?” 

“It’s routine.” 

“Routine is getting in the way of routine.” Samantha noted incautiously. She stared at Griggs, feeling a sudden urge to rush to her car and speed home to see if her daughter, who wasn’t home from school yet, was safe and not missing. She would wait by the door with hot chocolate and a frantic expression. “Have you told their parents at least?” 

“It’s routine.” 

“You’re kidding.”

“We’re well within the law here. Legally and contractually safe.” 

“Screw the law. Screw contracts.” Samantha said uncharacteristically. 

“You will be put in prison if this information is released without my say-so.” 

“Say-so away, then. The public has a right to know.” 

“The constitution says otherwise.” 

“I know what the constitution says. Screw it, too.”

“I don’t know where this attitude came from.” Griggs said, in a voice not unlike Samantha’s father’s. 

“Neither do I.” 

“You can leave now.” 

“You can’t just not tell parents that their children vanished into thin air.” 

“Samantha Prosser?” 

“Sam.” She said. 

“You’re fired.” 

She took the bus to within six blocks of her crappy, moldy apartment, and walked all six blocks barefoot, carrying her uncomfortable buckled shoes in her left hand for three blocks. She left them in a scraggly bush on the fourth block. At her door, in the dimly lit apartment corridor with the glimmer of city light pricking through the faded venetian blind over the too-small window at the end of the corridor, she paused, and leaned back on the wall so she could slump to the floor. Samantha sat breathing for a minute or two, then looked left towards the window with its grimy windowsill and grimy panes, and sighed: 

“Oh well.” 

Liza was reading on the couch when Samantha went in and sat down at the wobbling dining room table with the knife slashes on the corner closest to the door. She fell forward onto their wobbling table with the knife slashes, nearly upsetting a mug of hot chocolate. 

“That’s for you.” Liza said. 

“Mommy lost her job again today.” 

Liza looked up from her book. “You just can’t help your natural impertinence, can you?” 

“Evidently not.” She lifted her head of the table. “I don’t want you to worry, though.” 

“I’m not worried, Sam.” 

“Good. How was school today?” 

“Autocratic and boring.” 

“No trouble with the other kids?” 

“Nope.” Liza said, then looked at her parent brightly. “It’s your birthday today.” 

“I know.” 

“I baked a cake. It’s in the cabinet above the sink.” 

Samantha could not reach the cabinet above the sink. “I can’t reach the cabinet above the sink.” She said. 

“I know. I can.” Liza was a full six inches taller than her mother already, lanky, and clinging to the last vestiges of her baby fat. She might have gone by Elizabeth, Eliza, Lizzy, or just plain Liz, but used her pet name out of respect for her mother’s persistent inclination to treat her like a six-year-old. “But you have to ask.” 

“Liza, will you please get the cake down?” 

“Why?” 

“Because you can reach it.” 

“Okay.” Liza snapped her book shut with a crack, tossed it against the other arm of the couch, and bounced off to the kitchen to get the cake. 

“Did you finish your homework?” 

“Yeah. And I started on tomorrow’s reading.” 

The cake was placed gingerly in the center of the wobbling table with the knife slashes. It was slighly dry. A deep rich chocolate color. Frosted inexpertly with white and green. There was a wax thirty-three in the center. Liza went back into the kitchen to get a knife and a lighter. 

“Three plus three is six, right?” Samantha asked. “I’m turning six, right?” 

When Liza was six she had wanted to be a viking. She was thirteen now, and still wanted to be a viking. When Samantha was six, she wanted to be seven. She was thirty-three now, and wanted to be thirty again. She wanted a job, too, but finding stable employment seemed almost more difficult than becoming three years younger. 

“I’m reasonably sure that’s how math works.” Her child said patiently, and came back with the knife and the lighter. “But I wouldn’t know. I only have 97% in algebra.” 

“Really? That’s wonderful.” 

“No, it’s boring. Have you made a wish?” 

They bypassed the tedious formality of the candle with practiced swiftness. Liza whackedit in half. 

“You need to get some weight.” She told her mother, pushing a chunk of cake across the table. “And go outside more, you’re never going to get any dates with your complexion. Maybe we could go to the beach.” 

“Since when is my love life within your jurisdiction?”

“Since there should be two people with jobs in this house, and you won’t let me get one.” 

“You need to keep your grades up.” Samantha explained through cake.

“I know.” Liza said, also through cake. 

They stayed awake very late. When Samantha woke in the morning, Liza had already made breakfast, gathered her things, and raced downstairs to the bus. She was gone. Liza was obedient and argumentative, clumsy and exacting, timid and confident, and very, very certain that everything in the world was broken. She was alright, though, because it didn’t matter that everything in the world was broken, because she was broken, too. 

Samantha slurped a mug of sour coffee, and went to look for a new job.