'23kpc' Chapter 27: A Peek Inside Tyler Morton's Head

For "just a propulsion engineer," something of a (heartbroken) genius...

[A so-called “cabinet card” from 1878, capturing in a series of 12 photographs (by one Eadweard Muybridge) the stages in a racehorse’s gallop around a track. Note that as the horse ran, its feet and legs never seem to have been arranged exactly the same way twice. Also note that only in the third frame are all four feet off the ground at once — and yet, that it was ever in mid-air also remarkable, no? Most importantly: although these photos were taken at different instants, having them here in one card sorta-kinda makes them “happen” all at once… (Read more about this cabinet card here, on Wikipedia.]

What we learned last week

Guy, Missy, and Matty have gone down to the ship’s engineering deck to question Orono (“Orrie”) Jones about his late subordinate Tyler Morton. Shortly after their conversation begins, curious about the function of a mysterious blue button on Orrie’s customized v-com, Guy inadvertently creates something of a flap among the engineers. The button ostensibly just calls up Orrie’s contact list on the screen. But pressing it a second time seems to send out a signal of some kind, which gets the attention of Orrie’s Pooch, Lolly. And pressing it a third time summons a large number of engineers — including deck chief Bel Za — in apparent response to an emergency signal.

Although clearly fighting his anger, Orrie explains to Bel that — as Guy himself puts it — Guy is just an idiot who didn’t know what he was doing. Bel dismisses everyone behind her who’d come running, and Orrie subsequently dismisses Bel herself.

At which point Guy’s narration resumes…:

Chapter 27: Just a Shutter-Click Away

When we came down here this morning, before the door to this room first opened, all I could think of was the imagined enigma of Orono Jones, monster or mere man. Apprehensions aside, though, we had just two presumably simple questions we hoped to answer — maybe and maybe not interrelated.

One: what, according to chief engineer Jones, had happened to his subordinate Tyler Morton after he showed up on E deck on the night his lady friend crushed him?

And two: what, if anything, could communications engineer Jones tell us about the mysteriously misbehaving wikon¹ the ship had crossed paths with during the recent dorm-cycle, befouling our news feed with “scripture” and who knows what else?

My little confrontation with Lolly and Bel Za, be-minioned or otherwise, has made me reconsider our mission priorities. Maybe we should be looking into whatever it is that appears to be infecting E deck’s culture — or at least its v-coms and wireless data network.

Still, first things first, right? Especially if, as seems likely, those first things are just matters of fact, more or less easily disposed of…