Tag: call of the moon-beasts

A double helping of wordcount, today.

Abbie was a better codesmacker than Tobias was, so he let her navigate the barely stable mess that was their current electronic mail system. He also pulled in Ward, for reasons he tried not to think about. The good doctor had a certain viewpoint that was proving increasingly helpful for… anomalous cases. It made sense to have him along for the ride from the start.

It wasn’t that easy. Grabinski hadn’t logged into the system in the last twenty-four hours. But he had been checking his mail before that. He had even sent a message. The message file had been thoroughly corrupted, to the point of making the recipient unintelligible, but at least it was a sign of some activity.

“Why didn’t we think of this before?” grumbled Abbie. “Are we just assuming that a crazy person’s too crazy to even use email?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ward snickered. “We weren’t even wrong. Nobody on base these days sends an email when a face-to-face meeting will do. I’ve been encouraging it, actually. Too many neverwokes happening to people who stayed in their rooms and never saw anybody. I’m hoping bunking up two to a room will help with that in the future.”

Accomodations!

“Only none of them have seen hide or hair of the man.” Tobias scowled at the tablet. “He’s not drawing rations anywhere, either. That concerns me more.”

“Because it means he has a food source we don’t know about?”

“Exactly. I don’t care if he’s living on thrown-out shipping nuggets; we need to know where every calorie is.” He scowled. “Hell, we need more shipping nuggets. They’d be perfect for the Lifeboat.”

“Hmm. What does Asenath think?” Lillian smiled at Tobias’s startled look. “She may just be a manifestation of your current mental state, but you do have the advantage of being a very smart man. I assume that would extend to your hallucinations. We have to use everything we can.”

Tobias decided — not for the first time — that Lillian was very smart herself. Well, Asenath, what do you think? Oh, and sorry about Lillian…

There is nothing to forgive, Commander. She does not dislike or even disapprove of either me, or our working together. She simply believes that I do not exist. This hardly makes her unique. Dr. Peters is also better at making you practice self-care than I am, sometimes. It is in my best interest to maintain a good working relationship with her, even by proxy.

Starting to finally figure this one out.

“I’m sorry to say that Marcin was rather good at puzzles,” Lillian told him. Tobias had decided that reading her into the situation was safe enough; he trusted her, Asenath trusted her, and there wasn’t anything else for a lunar geologist to do right now. Besides, she knew Marcin from Dee Station.

“He enjoyed working out old collisions from the asteroid tracking data,” Lillian went on. “He always said it helped him quiet the part of the brain that kept him from painting. He was good at those, too. Not a master, mind you, but he could have made a go at it if being a lunar researcher hadn’t worked out.”

“Was he one of the, ah, interesting ones at Dee Station?” Tobias asked her as he studied what images existed of Grabinski’s work. He had been a neo-graffitist, so most of his work obviously was back at the abandoned British facility.

“Interesting-interesting, or interesting-barking mad?” Lillian shrugged. “The former, I’d say. He had his little ways, like the rest of us, but he would sit with people at meals and come to parties. I think he had a fellow, back on” — she waved up, all the while keeping her eyes resolutely anywhere but in the direction of Earth — “You Know Where. I know he took it hard when everything happened. Even when we still talked about it, he chose not to talk about it. I suppose he never saw the point.”

Skating around the issue!

Tobias could dimly remember a time when he liked to be proved right. Those days were as dead as… a lot of things. Anyway, he found figuring out the right answer considerably less pleasant when all of the potential answers had been horrible anyway. He also purely hated making Abbie have to process the impossible. It felt like a betrayal, or possibly even an attack. But what could he do? Gravitational and environmental anomalies were an engineering issue. Somebody would have to deal with this intrusive mess.

He told himself later that it could have been worse. Abbie didn’t vomit, have a panic attack, or start bleeding from the nose or ears. She just wouldn’t make herself look at the anomaly, once she had worked out the exact dimensions of the effect. She also stopped bothering to use her scanner, after its first attempts to analyze the area produced nothing but feedback and cacophony. “Forget about shutting it down, sir,” she told him. “I can’t know how.”

Tobias understood her word choice perfectly. He was already restraining himself from giving the room another long look, or visit. Or maybe he would just move in, and ignore the universe until it finally got around to killing him. Keeping his distance was the smartest answer. “Understood. Is the effect, ah, fluctuating at all? Getting bigger, getting smaller?”

Lack of art!

He looked around, blinking unconsciously at the strain of standing up suddenly. Grabinski kept a neat room, even by the standards of the increasingly resource-starved lunar colonies. He had a bed, a perfunctory shower/bathroom combination stripped down to the fixtures, and a desk. There were no personal touches. Not even a toothbrush.

There was also no art. “Check me, Asenath,” Tobias wheezed. He could feel his entire upper respiratory system loosening up under the sudden humidity, only it wasn’t actually pleasant. “No sign of Grabinski drawing on the walls themselves, right?”

Correct, Commander. Do you see the discolorations on the wall?

“Yeah. Grabinski must have been hoarding sticky tape.” He bit down on the sudden spike of white-hot, murderous rage the thought had triggered. “Or maybe he had something else. Anyway, either he didn’t do any painting here, or he took it with him when he left. When was the last time he was here?”

Needed some action/drama.

“Fine. I’m in shock.” Clumsily — too clumsily — Tobias pushed himself up to a sitting position on the bed. “Or maybe it’s a stroke too small for you to deduce. It’s suddenly hard to move. Like I have to push harder to get my arms to respond.”

.Interesting. How is your fine motor control?

Tobias rubbed his fingers. “Huh. That’s not so hard.”

Excellent. Pick up something, and drop it.

Tobias eyes’ widened as he realized what Asenath was implying — but he grabbed a pillow on the bed, brought it to eye level, and let go. It fell fast. A little too fast.

I estimate twelve feet per second, squared. A bit less than the gravity of Mars. Asenath’s voice had a certain… hesitancy to it, almost as if she didn’t want to tell Tobias. I suggest that you instead concentrate on the air temperature and humidity, Commander.

Getting into it.

I do not understand people sometimes, Commander. By now Tobias could hear the emotional overtones in Asenath’s voice. He supposed she had finally automated those subroutines, which was nice. Did she not understand that you are in an existing relationship? 

“She did,” Tobias muttered. “She just didn’t know how seriously I took it. Now she does. — So, next up is… Marcin Grabinski, yes?”

Yes. Painter and mathematician. Refugee from Baza Heweliusza. Technically the highest remaining POLSA representative who remains accessible to us. Tobias found Asenath’s pauses considerably more ‘natural,’ now. I do not understand why he and the other Commonwealth refugees did not throw in with the Europeans.

“I’m not,” Tobias muttered. “I’d tell you to remind me not to bring up the subject, but I don’t need you to. Anyway, he was doing stuff with asteroid mapping, if I remember. Nothing theoretical.”