Chapter 2. - untitled sci fi (mitchie).

2.

I dressed up nice for dinner. My goin' out clothes. I wore a proper shirt with a starched collar. I wore slacks and a vest. It was my first time taking Mitchie out in public, and I was nervous. Self conscious. 

I know it shouldn't have mattered, but it did. People were going to see me with a service animal, and I was embarrassed. I felt stupid for being embarrassed, but I was. 

What should I care if people looked at us? They're gonna look at someone.

It's what people do.

Get a hobby.

But I cared. So I dressed nice, and I checked myself in the mirror. I looked good. Capable. Alert and sharp. I belonged here just as much as any of those people. This was my deck, too. I worked. I carried my weight.

There wasn't much I could do to spruce Mitchie up, though. What you saw was what you got. I scratched him behind his ear, and he sat there and tolerated it. I was experimenting with acts of affection. It made us both uncomfortable.

I stepped out into the hallway, and held the door until he followed. The sushi restaurant is on this crew deck, but it isn't close. I've gone on foot, though. In the past. After a bad day, when I needed to prove to myself I could do it. And it was still early. I might have tried tonight, too. But Mitchie was having trouble keeping up with me. 

I walked slower. Even then he kept stopping to catch his breath. 

"You okay?" I asked him. I should have brought a bowl and some water. It didn't even occur to me. But he didn't seem that thirsty. I think he was making a point. He stopped sometimes just to stop. Just to show me that he could. If he wanted to lick himself? Then I could damn well stand there and watch him lick himself.

"You're the boss, huh?" I said. He looked up at me, like the question wasn't even worth answering, and then he went right back to chewing on the inside of his hind leg.

Eventually I scooped him up in my arms and carried him to the train.

Marlene was waiting there. Her bat clung to the neck of her shirt, looking dead asleep.

"Charles!" she said. "Who is this? He only has three legs. And one eye. Well, he has two eyes. Mitchie, it says Mitchie. Hello Mitchie! This is Prom. Prom, this is Mitchie." The bat didn't move, but it opened its eyes a crack. "Don't be rude." She took the bat off her shirt, and it clung to her hand, eyes still closed. "Sorry, Prom is shy when he's sleepy. Or he pretends to be sleepy when he's shy. Sometimes it's hard to tell. He's clever. When did you get Mitchie? He looks weird. Everything is weird today. Afoot. Did you notice anything strange at work? Oh, I got fired!"

The words spilled out of her in a rollercoaster of emotion and tones of voice. She was talking fast, but every idea and sentiment was given its proper delivery. Just faster. Excitement, concern, reflection, sly insinuation. Her words all tripped over one another, but still managed to be understood in their rush. 

Marlene did something with computers, I'm not sure what. Above my pay grade, I figure. She was the one who had told me that residents could take jobs, could volunteer. She always knew what was going on.

"They called me a tourist. I'd like to see them find a polymorphic self encrypting squirrel virus. Their minds are so sharp? They're digging in the dirt for worms. Doesn't even occur to them that the virus is leaping from branch to branch with a big bushy tail up above their heads. I could catch that in my sleep. Squirrel virus. Ha. Kids and their pranks."

"Kids?"

"Oh that was weeks ago. Off topic. I didn't snitch. It's like that nursery rhyme. 'If you see something, you get shanked.' Did you know I spent five years in prison. Don't tell anyone that either! I spent five years in prison for writing a computer virus when I was seventy. There's no record." She cocked her head. "You would do okay in prison, probably. You're quiet."

Mitchie was sniffing Marlene's hand now. Still clinging asleep, Prom was ignoring him. 

"Don't bite him, Prom. A tourist. And this was while the whole analyst department wasted hours looking at the engine logs. The logs! Ridiculous. I tried to tell Jo that the temperatures on every system were one and even sometimes one and a half percent higher on average. Have been since we swung Jupiter. Distributed processing. It's obvious. She said oh, look, these temperatures are lower than average. Like I was new. What are you, new? Look, these temps are lower. Uh yeah, because the monitoring software is more granular during high workloads. It is hiding. You have to know when to hide, obviously. Just wait it out. Come back when you can get away with one or two percent."

Mitchie was watching her attentively. I could hear the small, two car train coming down the track toward us.

"What was hiding?" I asked. I wanted her to keep talking.

"Jo treats me like a tourist, Mitchie. Because I volunteer for the job. Like your Charlie does! We're old, not dead. I know how to hide a very big program. Trust me, I know. But Jo didn't even look at my work. She said, maybe I should take my bat down to the woods. Flap around a bit down there if I wasn't going to stick to my assigned tasks." Prom looked up suddenly, at the word flap. Or forest.

Marlene shook her head at him, and he gave a little bat sigh, and closed his eyes again.

The train cars arrived and we stepped on. There was a man holding onto the pole, partly blocking the doorway. Marlene hissed at him. Shooed him away, so we could stand there.

"Show some respect," she said. "Do you want to get bit?" She wasn't clear on who would do the biting. Prom was gone back to sleep, as far as I could tell. The man looked annoyed more than frightened, and moved over to one of the seats. "Anyway, I'm being rude. Mitchie I am not always this rude. Where are the two of you going, looking so handsome?"

"Handsome?" I laughed and looked down at the scruffed and misshapen Mitchie.

"Yes, handsome." Marlene said. "That's a nice vest. And oh my god look at his fur. A silver fox. Dog. A silver fox of a dog. Don't even joke about that. They have feelings too, Charles. And Mitchie is handsome. Look at him. Have you ever seen someone more handsome? He's probably even more handsome than handsome. He's prettier than pretty!"

Mitchie's tail was wagging now. 

"Oh now you know how to wag your tail," I said. "You're a little lady's man, huh?"

"The ship is awake," Marlene blurted out. She spun on the man in the seat, eyeing him up and down. "You mind your own business," she told him. She turned back and leaned close to me. "The ship is awake," she said again, this time under her breath. "I think. I mean I'm pretty sure. In any case, I'm doing wildly illegal things based on this assumption." She reached up and gave Prom a scratch behind his big ears. 

"What does that even mean?"

"Awake? You don't know what awake means? How do you get out of bed in the morning? Are you asleep right now? It kind of seems like it, Chuck. Keep up. Sorry that was a joke. I mean awake. Alive."

We were almost to the stop where the restaurants were. Shit. 

"We're going for sushi," I told her. "You and Prom should come with us. We're going to the cranky place. You could tell me more about the ship." I realized how badly I wanted her to come with us. This was the most we'd spoken in weeks, usually it was a few sentences and then she would vanish again. I was having fun. 

"That's really kind," Marlene looked genuinely touched. "But I have to sabotage the venting systems. I have to do it now while everyone is distracted with the ship being off course.  It was Prom's idea. I wasn't really going to bite you," she told the man who was standing up now. Then she looked suddenly worried.

"Oh fuck. I'm fired. I'm just a resident again. Are they going to take away my crew cabin? No. I can fix that. The trust chain. I can find a way into the cabin assignment files. I have to get in the system to delete all the poisons anyway. I don't want them making any bug spray when I open all the cages. It's my destiny! I might not have a job, but I have a purpose! Human beings love their bug spray, don't they? Or zapping. Bug zappers in the vents. Zap. Wait til they figure out we're the bugs." The door was going to close. 

I wanted to stay.

"We've got to go," I said, and Marlene turned and hugged me. She was strong. I didn't even hug back, I was so surprised. I hadn't been hugged in a long time. Human contact.

She gave Mitchie a pat on his rump and he wiggled his whole backside excitedly. 

"Later, gator," she told him.

"You look great, Marlene," I said.

"Big things are happening!" she said, as I exited. "Big things! You look good in that vest. It matches your eyes. You probably know that. I'm going to let all the animals free. It's their ship too. It was nice to meet you, Mitchie! Chuck is one of the good ones. Don't let him go near any airlocks for the next seventeen hours please."

As Mitchie and I watched the two train cars pull away, I gave a small wave.

"You shouldn't encourage her," It was the man Marlene had threatened to bite. "Her family sent her here for a reason. She shouldn't be out wandering, raving like that."

"She wasn't going to actually bite you," I told him. "She's good people."

"She's not people," the man said, giving me a long look. "She's cargo." He was maybe thirty years old, and he was wearing a uniform for one of the fabrication decks. Out here working a long shift to make some money to take back to his family on Earth, no doubt. "She should be in her hospital bed, letting the rest of us do our jobs." He looked down at Mitchie disapprovingly.

"Your mother must be very proud," I said. 

"My mother is dead." 

"Well. I think she made the right call."

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