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Everyone on Stratt’s Vat knew that bothering the boat’s namesake when she had that particular tightness in her lips was a bad idea.
Ryland Grace knew that it was a bad idea because it indicated she hadn’t slept in at least two days.
The thing was, saving the world, unfortunately, required said world’s cooperation. Which meant that Eva Stratt was on Zoom calls with the most powerful people from all around. Which, in turn, meant she was on them at times that were convenient for said powerful people. Which meant she was on Zoom calls at all kinds of hours.
Everyone on the Vat had long since gotten used to the arbitrariness of time. It was never sunrise when the clocks indicated morning and never sunset when they indicated night. The Vat was somewhere in the Atlantic — or the Pacific, nobody really knew anymore — and at first, the clocks were set for all kinds of timezones.
Very soon, by collective decision, timezones were declared public enemy number one and Amsterdam time was set as the ship’s one collective time zone.
Why Amsterdam, one might ask? (New people whom Stratt brought on did, and they never once got the same answer twice.)
Because it was Stratt’s Vat and Stratt was Dutch. No one really remembered whose idea it had been, but it was voted into existence with the help of Ilyukhina’s I Did Your Mom ball cap and some folded paper.
And the time was useful, because they did have quite a few meetings with European leaders, and Amsterdam was in the same time zone as Brussels, which Ryland Grace’s very American-education-system-influenced mind had designated Capital Of Europe™. But it was also extremely inconvenient, because, A, there were a ton of meetings with people from all kinds of other parts of the world and, more annoyingly, B, there was the fact that they were nowhere near Amsterdam. Which meant, as stated above, that the crew was very disconnected, biologically, from the concept of time.
How did that connect back to Eva Stratt’s lack of sleep? Well, she was the one in the most meetings out of all of them, probably combined and squared. Which meant she barely slept at all, because when you had consecutive meetings from 7 AM to 5AM the next day, sleep was a privilege unaccessible to you.
So, everyone knew not to bother Eva Stratt when she lacked sleep, whether they knew it was sleep that was the issue or not.
That did not stop them today, though.
You see, some technician that had administered the tests for the Coma Resistance Gene had peeked at her file when she got tested. And he’d learned that her birthday was on April, 1. Which he, of course, informed the rest of the technicians about. And, as was common knowledge on the Vat, if the technicians knew something, everyone else knew it within the next two hours.
So, a Joint Taskforce was set up within the six hours following Ilyukhina learning about this. Designated JTF Stratt, its mission was, as stated on the whiteboard Ilyukhina probably stole from one of the labs, ‘To create mischief and celebrate our one and only Dictator Stratt.’
Stratt's title was Director, so Ryland guessed it fit.
JTF Stratt existed for all of two weeks before the Day, and in those two weeks a seemingly impossible amount of things was done.
Phase One was about making sure Stratt was on the Vat on the Day. She held most of her meetings on Zoom out of her — tiny, a broom closet of a room — office on the Vat, but things like meetings with particularly influential presidents or particularly egotistical billionaires she needed money from required her physical presence at galas and gallery openings and dinners.
Ryland had been dragged along for a couple of those, and he’d learned, A, how horribly exhausting they were and, B, how much Stratt herself hated them. Stratt was a manager, a damn good one at that, the greatest, but she was not good at pretending to like people. She was not good at sweet talking and she was not good at stroking people’s egos. So the events were hard, and therefore she hated them, and therefore she was far more irritable immediately before and immediately after them.
So, Ryland and a computer tech named Fatima were assigned the job of breaking into her laptop and making sure there was nothing in-person scheduled for the three days in question.
Which meant that Ryland, as the practically only person whose presence Stratt tolerated no matter what mental state she was in, was to distract her while Fatima broke into the world’s most secure device to secure their boss’s birthday celebration. Which, in practice, meant that Ryland had to coax an overworked and exhausted and stressed Stratt out of her office and to the cafeteria, where he got her two coffees and her first actual meal in two days.
He’d asked her when she last slept and she told him she didn’t remember. Before the call with the Swiss President, she got a 30 minute nap in. That was.. five prescription painkillers ago, and took one every 12 hours for her back. The minimum permitted time gap between those particular pills. So, about 60 hours ago.
After that one — Fatima had successfully broken into Stratt’s computer and informed the rest of the JTF that there were, in fact, no offline meetings for Stratt on, before and after April 1 — Grace had suggested instead of an elaborate celebration, they put her into a medically induced coma and make her sleep for three days straight. But someone from the medical team pointed out that most patients, usually, woke up from such comas utterly exhausted and disoriented, so the idea was thrown out.
Which brought them to Phase Two, which Ilyukhina had titled Acquisitions.
That stood for everything one could need for a birthday party, give or take a few.. items.
You see, the people on the Vat were not exactly… ordinary people. They were the best of the best, of course, the most competent and outrageously dedicated and brilliant. But you couldn’t be all that without being a little… out there.
So some of the items on the Acquisitions whiteboard were:
A 3x4 meters map of Antarctica
A cardboard life-sized cutout of a nude Ilyukhina, because, and Ryland would never forget the words, “she needs something beautiful to look at every day in that depressing office of hers.” He started fearing Ilyukhina just a little after she said that.
A T-shirt with ‘The only ice caps allowed are the ones on my heart’
A set of VHS tapes with Joseph Stalin’s speeches on them
A book called ‘How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety: And Abstinence, Drugs, Satanism, and Other Dangers That Threaten Their Nine Lives’
A reversible darts board which had the Chinese and American Presidents on each side. The two men she complained about most.
Those were the ones Ryland could remember off the top of his head. In no particular order. They all traumatized him equally. (Though the Ilyukhina cut out would probably still take first place way above all else. That was just flat out insane. And maybe a little too suicidal of her. Though she was going out into space to die, so that tracked.)
Oh, there was also the ‘Happy Birthday, Dictator Stratt’ string banner. How could he forget.
The issue with these.. acquisitions.. was the, A, very specific nature of the gifts, which wasn’t insurmountable, and, B, the fact that they were in an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic of Pacific or wherever the fudge they were, which was far more insurmountable.
And, C, the most glaring issue, was that Eva Stratt was the one who handled the requisition forms.
She just.. did. She posted a spreadsheet in the cafeteria every Thursday where everyone could write down what extras they wanted. And then she made orders for next week. What was not on the Thursday Spreadsheets was on the Lab, Cafeteria, Housekeeping and other requisition forms. Which she approved and filed with the companies she had specifically diverted from their usual business toward the goal of feeding and maintaining the Vat.
Which created the issue of How The Fuck Do We Acquire The Acquisitions™.
Which was solved the following way:
Ryland, again, was bait. He was getting tired of that. But then, it allowed him to spend a little more time with Stratt, which he didn’t particularly mind. But why did everyone think it was him that was the best option?
Anyway, Ryland was to make sure she wouldn’t be in her office for at least three hours. Which was the estimated amount of time it would take Ilyukhina, Shapiro and a guy from Tech named Jafar to figure out how she did her requisitions filings and order all the things they needed.
And he could not for the life of him figure out how to keep the woman out of her office for more than 20 minutes, much less three hours.
So he did what he knew how to do. He had a crisis.
He really hated doing this, morality and all, hated the idea of making her worry when he knew she was stressed enough as it was. But it was for a good cause. Or at least, that’s what Ilyukhina kept telling him. He wasn’t sure.
He came into his lab. Worked. And then he.. created an emergency. Some spilled chemicals here, some improper technique there, and there was a fire. One of the lab technicians had been previously instructed to run and get Stratt when it happened. She was there within five minutes.
He really hated the look of worry on her face as she saw what, to her, looked like a serious fire and a piece of equipment from a failed experiment that fell on his leg. She was having people put out the fire. She was rushing towards him, lifting the heavy piece of equipment he’d had two techs place there off his leg. He remembered, as she did it, that she had a bad back. He remembered because she winced, and he felt a hundred times worse about this because she kept going despite it.
He really wanted to tell her it was fine. But he needed her to believe it wasn’t. Because he needed her to take him to med bay and sit with him for three hours.
She did. She helped him up and practically carried him to med bay, supporting his weight, thinking his leg was in too much pain. She never once even questioned how a fire caused a piece of equipment to fall onto his leg which was just conveniently there to be fallen onto.
In the med bay, a doctor who was, of course, in on it, because half the ship was in on it, ‘assessed’ him and told him he would need bed rest and IV pain medications while waiting for imaging results. Stratt stayed.
The IV drip was actually just saline, and as Ryland lay there, he couldn’t stop looking at the pained expression on her face whenever she moved even an inch. She was supposed to be the one in the hospital bed, with an actual pain medication flowing intravenously.
But the team would be close, and it was worth it, or at least he told himself so.
And then she was apologizing. Because apparently it was her responsibility to make sure nothing on the ship was hazardous and she had failed to provide him a safe working environment and this severe injury of his was on her. Which was complete bullshit. Which he told her. She just smiled her sad little smile and shook her head and told him she would make sure it never happened again.
Ryland realized this was far worse than any one of them intended. Once the three hours were over and the doctor said the imaging came back fine and there were no fractures and Ryland was free to go, once Stratt went back to her office, apologizing again, Ryland practically ran to the cafeteria, which had become the designated JTF Stratt meeting spot.
And he told them all about it.
And that was how JTF Stratt became JTF What The Fuck Is Wrong With Stratt.
Ryland had objected to the name but was ultimately outvoted.
That was also the beginning of Phase Three. Which was dubbed, again, by Ilyukhina, Acquisitions Two. Yes, very original, Ryland knew.
This time, they were not breaking into her office again. No one wanted to hear any more of Ryland Grace Traumatized By Stratt’s Seemingly Chronic Guilt™.
They took to arts and crafts.
It was a ridiculous sight, truly. Some days Ryland wondered if he was in a coma and this was a drug-induced dream. Because it was fudging insane.
On March, 31, at 1900 hours, the final briefing of JTF What The Fuck Is Wrong With Stratt took place in the cafeteria.
Well, it might have been the final briefing. It was, in reality, the beginning of a very long evening. Which was characterized by none other than baking a cake.
To make the depth of the ridiculousness of the situation clear, Ryland would be pointing out two things:
Thing One — they were not bakers. In fact, the only person who had baked a cake ever in their life before was, surprisingly, Ilyukhina. She told them, in an uncharacteristic moment of emotional vulnerability, that her sister had taught her to bake a carrot cake back when they were kids. So that was what they were baking.
Thing Two — they were scientists. Well, Ilyukhina was an engineer, and there were tech people, but a lot of them were scientists. Chemists, biologists, physicists. All people who had opinions on the impact of heat on certain substances, on the proportions of substances when mixed, on the interactions of substances between each other.
So, to put it lightly — and Ryland would allow himself this one time — it was a shit show.
The cake took them 4 hours.
It did not look it.
It was crooked and the frosting — they’d made frosting! — was lopsided. And Ilyukhina had, of course, insisted on dying some of the frosting black and writing on the cake. So atop the white carrot monstrosity was a grey-looking — because of course the dye ran out before it was black-black — ‘Happy Birthday, Stratt.’ And beneath it sat a smaller and even rougher-looking ‘(We’re sorry)’.
That was when the final step of the plan was to be enacted.
The gifts, which had been secretly received from a delivery boat by a very not-sneaky Carl and stacked in Ilyukhina and Yao’s respective quarters, were brought out into the cafeteria. The banner hung on a wall. There was confetti in everyone’s hands to be thrown at Stratt upon her entrance.
Ryland Grace was, now, to get her out of her office. ‘For a coffee.’
She was just off a Zoom call. She had another one in two hours. They knew that. They knew they would have to be rather quick. They didn’t know Stratt was planning a power nap for those two hours.
So when Grace came into her office with his wide smile and an his invitation to get coffee, he found her half-passed out at her desk.
And he still needed her to go to the cafeteria. So many sacrifices had been made for this. She had to witness it.
He had to practically drag a half-dead Eva Stratt to the cafeteria. Which was a sin he would atone for later. In another life. Or maybe she would balance it out by doing something like sending him to space against his will. He wouldn’t blame her, not after this.
She went, still. Like a prisoner to execution, but she went.
She clearly had no idea.
Because when they got to the cafeteria and it was dark, she looked around, frowned, and asked if there had been an accident with the lights that she hadn’t been informed of.
He motioned for the person responsible for turning on the lights to hurry. And then the lights were on and everyone was yelling “Happy Birthday, Stratt” and Ilyikhina was stranding side by side with her lingerie-clad cardboard version like a proud mother, cake in hand. Everyone was very careful to not throw their confetti towards her and the cake. She had made threats.
Stratt was staring.
Her mouth was slightly open as she took in the disaster they had turned the cafeteria into.
“Happy Birthday, Dictator Stratt” on the wall. A 3 by 4 meters map of the Antarctica she had previously nuked on the wall. Ilyukhina with her cardboard and her cake. The confetti all over the floor. All over her. Stuck in her hair.
She tilted her head very slowly. Then she turned it to look at Grace. Then back at the room. Then back at Grace. Until she very quietly, and in an uncharacteristically unsure and rather terrified tone said, “Thank you?”
And then people were coming up to her. And congratulating her. Nobody knew how old she was turning. Not that it mattered.
Ilyukhina yelled at everyone to back off. Eva almost let out a sigh of relief.
That was before she heard Ilyukhina finish her sentence.
“The birthday girl needs to blow out her candles!”
Oh, they were definitely getting murdered in their sleep.