Omen

 Month 12 Day 17

1944 Hours

Abdulla

Abdulla sighed in the silence. “Well, that’s disappointing,” she said as they all stared at the steaming pile of goo inside George’s delivery cage. “Granted, it was goo to begin with, but it was a gelatinous cube of the stuff, not the steaming, oozing stuff we’ve got now.”

“I’ll get the beaker it was originally in, and find something to clean it up with,” Ivy volunteered, turning back to the table near Joe, where the testing samples were lined up.

“Why is it steaming?” Smythe wondered. “What could have happened to raise the temperature while it was... transporting?”

“Wait, wait, let me think,” Mac requested, and a moment later, she got up and raced out of the room.

“Is she giving up?” Ivy asked, surprised by the other woman’s disappearance. “That doesn’t sound like Mac.

“I think she’s gone to double-check something,” was Abdulla’s guess. “Something Kolla said in a letter, possibly. As much as those 2 have in common, you’d think they’d find things to talk about other than transportation units and how to build them.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Smythe stated.

“Every time I ask Mac what Kolla said in her last letter, all she ever reports is more details about the inner workings of these machines. It’s how Mac stays at least a step ahead of the rest of us. I just wonder if they ever talk to each other about something more personal. Anything more personal. Or are those letters only about work?”

“They are 2 different people, Abdulla. They didn’t even know each other existed a few months ago. And frankly, other than an interest in engineering, I don’t see that their lives are that much alike.”

“Well, we may never know,” Abdulla returned. “If all they ever talk about in their letters is engineering, their lives could be virtual twins of each other, but they’d never realize it.”

Ivy scraped as much of the goo off the floor as she could and placed it in the beaker, then set it down next to another beaker, whose contents were still in a gelatinous cube. “That’s as much as I can get. There’s probably still a thin film of the stuff on the floor.”

“Weigh the sample we transported. See if we’re missing a large chunk or only a thin film on the floor,” Smythe suggested.

“And there was a vapor,” Abdulla reminded him. “We lost some of it to that.”

“Or it might have been water vapor from the air that came over with it? Wait, does it transmit some air with it? Or just the thing we send through?” Ivy asked.

Smythe considered the question. “We left the parameters wide to be sure we included the entire cube, so there should have been some air included.”

As they conducted observations of the sample they had sent through the machine, making notes in an electronic notepad, Mac raced back in and slipped a memory chip into the viewer on the Joe end of the table. “One of these letters mentioned something about elevated temperature when something is sent through the machine. What kind of adjustments need to be made if it happens.” She slid another chip down the length of the table toward the other viewer. “Here, you can practice your Yukoskian, Abdulla, since I haven’t bothered to translate these letters. I’m not sure which letter it’s in, so I’m just going to have to skim looking for ‘temperature’.”

That left Smythe and Ivy to finish their observations on the results of their first test.

Abdulla tried skimming through the letters, and found plenty of odd bits and pieces of personal information inserted at odd intervals, sort as if writing the letter was a long endeavor, and whenever Kolla came back to writing it, she would start with the news of the day. Her mother’s birthday. The beautiful korshtaka—a type of flower, Abdulla surmised—that they saw on a walk through the park. A romantic dinner with S’thyme, where she told him— “Wait. What? Mac, is this right? Am I reading this right? Kolla is pregnant?”

Mac never even looked up from her view screen. “What? Oh, that letter’s about a month old. So far, she hasn’t succumbed to the never-ending ‘I’m so pregnant’ mantra, but she does mention it from time to time. Trouble is, I can’t remember if what we’re looking for is before or after that revelation.”

“Maybe their lives aren’t so much alike after all,” Abdulla muttered, and began skimming once again.

“Got it,” Mac announced a few minutes later, and then her face fell. “Oh, there’s 3 different things that could be off, and they all have to be dealt with and tested separately. If we try to correct all 3 things at once, we might only confuse the matter. I can’t tell if she means ‘matter’ as in the test object, or ‘matter’ as in our understanding of what’s going on.”

“Whichever way she meant it, it means we make one adjustment at a time,” Smythe stated.

Mac frowned in frustration. “But we won’t even know if we’ve done any good by the time we finish our tests. I mean, if we make the adjustments one by one, doing a test after each adjustment, we could still come up with a steaming pile of goo for each of our remaining 2 tests for tonight.”

Ivy gave the redhead a lop-sided grin. “Sounds like engineering to me.”

“Well, it is a disappointment,” Smythe stated. “Or it will be, if we continue to get steaming piles of goo and then have to give up for the evening. But we’ll never know until we’ve tried.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky, adjust the first thing, and have it work perfectly,” Abdulla suggested.

“That’s not the way it usually goes, with a new piece of technology,” Smythe reminded her. “Of course, we don’t usually have an already-written technical manual for a new piece of technology, either.”

“Okay, what piece do we start with, and where is it located?” Ivy asked, eager to get started.