This is But One Fragment Five Hundred Words Long Constituting Part of Something Much Larger, With At Least One New Episode Per Week, And May Be What We Call A Serialized Novella.

Part 1

Just before lunchtime, Timo inverts a logic circuit on one of the new models and the whole lab is evacuated to let the hazard crew do their clean up.

Essence is tricky like that.

Timo feels really sore about it so Nacks, Ving, and I tug him away from a scene that seems to be increasingly panicked and we eat our meals at Epsie’s. It’s not our usual spot — and few more skrip than we are accustomed to paying — but we all swear up and down that it’s a rare occasion requiring increased extravagance, despite Timo’s protests. We take an extra half an hour but still, there is no need to rush back, and we spend another forty-five minutes sitting around on the cold, stone benches in front of Building Three before they will let us back inside.

Timo disappears for an hour or so after that, and when he comes back to the lab he is really quiet and “doesn’t want to talk about it, so shut the fids up!” Ving tries to cheer him and clocks an old Model Four to sneak up on Nacks and pinch up her skirt. Nacks gets angry and kicks the bot’s arm clear off, sending it sailing into a gear rack Everyone finds it funny — even Nacks in the end — but Timo mumbles something about needing to get his work done so Ving cleans up the mess from the toppled equipment, and we are all pretty quiet for the rest of the day.

The Rankers must have gone at him pretty hard this time. Deliberate or accident, there is no such thing as justice for a Clocker.

A couple seasons ago the Rankers had circulated a personality survey with a few dozen cryptic questions purportedly meant to divine unstable aspects of every employee. They claimed it was anonymous, but no one believed them, and we still assume they are all coded into a core somewhere. We had filled them in, sharing answers and unsettled laughs at the weight those mandatory questions. Number fourteen, seemingly innocent, asked each of us to “name three topics outside work that you would like to know more about” but was clearly there to be later presented as evidence of our low job satisfaction. But blanks were not an option so Ving had written:

1. airship design
2. the chorus arts
3. the inner workings of Asgarthan politics

which was something of a ruse because he knew more than most people about airship design. He rationalized this by explaining (to us anyhow) that his father, formerly a traded airship Tinker, told him repeatedly that he “didn’t know nothing about no fid-damned airships” and that he had chosen the wrong profession. We hadn’t pressed the topic any further.

I had answered:

1. life outside of Clockers
2. home cooked meals
3. life outside the Southbend

all of which are as true now as they were then, I reflect. As usual, I walk home from the lab alone.