Work Text:
I glare at the overturned display. The boxes of soda exist at me, dispassionately. They do not care that I have a PhD thesis to edit. I wish, not for the first time, that I was allowed to leash the children that parents refused to control. Maybe in some kind of area where Security can watch them. Not like they do much anyway.
I eyeball this night’s security guard. Nevermind. Rocky’s fun, but he would be terrible at watching unruly children. He’s told me that he mostly just zones out working on engine designs for class during his shift. I wish I could do that.
Huh.
Could I do that?
I pick up the first box and slot it into place.
Microbial life on space stations is a fascinating subject. It’s currently unknown what makes microbes “win”, but it is known that if you have one strain, from, say, Earth, become dominant, that the entire station’s ecosystem will become Earth-sourced.
Another box slides into place.
The original widely accepted theory had been that it has to do with frequency of visitors and amount of residents from the planet of origin. But for all that is intuitive, newer survey samples have disproven it entirely.
The boxes are all but clicking into place pleasantly.
My current theory is that microbes from the same planet shared a similar chemical “language” for communicating with each other, allowing them to more effectively coexist. If an Eridian microbe uses a different signaling molecule than an Earth one, it may not receive the same signal, and therefore will be disadvantaged in an Earth-microbe dominant environment.
I hope that my experimental container populations support that. It would be a nightmare to have to rejig the whole thing.
“Grace?”
I yelp and drop the box I was holding directly on my foot. Owwwwwww. I curl up over my poor, injured extremity, then look up at my coworker. “What is it, Rocky?”
He’s tilting his carapace at me, something he started doing a few months after working here. “Grace injured, question?”
“Grace mildly bruised,” I grumble. “Grace train of thought derailed.”
“Apology.” He does not sound sorry. “Time to leave in thirty of your minutes.”
That’s another thing about Rocky. He hates leaving late, and as Security, he has to be the last one out. So if I start falling behind on closing tasks, he bothers the living daylights out of me until I’m going at a pace he likes better.
Sometimes I kind of wish I could slap him without injuring my hand. This is definitely one of those times.
“Rocky, I’m going as fast as I can,” I protest.
He doesn’t dignify my lie with a response.
I sigh.
“Fine,” I acquiesce. “Full focus on closing for the next thirty minutes. But in return, you’ve gotta tell me what you’re working on so I’m not bored out of my skull.”
Rocky warbles out a laugh. “Would do that anyway. Working on lowering heat from friction between curved sliding parts for theoretical applications to interstellar drives—”
His rambles make it easier to speedrun cleaning up the display, a quick clean of the store, and then locking up. It’s like having my own personal engineering podcast on demand. Not what I would personally have picked if I had a choice, but it's more interesting than 90%+ of what people usually talked about.
Maybe other people would be more interesting if they talked about their specialties rather than about hobbies. I don’t think I even have one. Unless breeding microbes is a hobby. But that’s for my thesis, so I don’t think it counts.
Plus, once I’d had an idea that actually helped him. That had been a hell of an ego boost.
By the time that I was clicking the key in the lock, I’d learned more about the limits of xenonite in terms of friction and heat retention than I knew was possible to know.
I grin at Rocky. “See you tomorrow?”
“See you every day for five months. Human memory that bad?”
I clutch my chest dramatically. “Rocky! You hurt my feeeeeeeeelings.”
“Not Rocky’s problem human feelings fragile like rest of human. Maybe human needs to be more durable. Cannot defend thesis if cannot defend self.”
“Hey!” I protest with more bite this time.
He does a flittering move of his vents I’ve come to equate with a raspberry, then promptly jumps away before I can retort. Yes, jumps. He can really move when he wants to.
I grumble, but start walking home. I’ll get him back for that comment tomorrow.