'23kpc' Chapter 39: Pooch Dancing

Matty is speechless

[This AI-generated portrait has alllllmoooost exactly the right feel to it: an absolute “WTF?!?” expression.]

Reminders:
(1) The ‘23kpc’ Reader’s Guide
(2) The complete ‘23kpc’ story to date

Last week:

Guy and Missy were joined by Matty in a late-night heist, of sorts, in their quest to figure out what makes Pooches (particularly their own Durwood) tick (particularly to tick erratically). They headed down to the off-shift Maintenance deck, to room number M1153: the so-called “Pooch Garage.” There they found one separate but adjoining room, labeled the PCLOSET, filled with Pooches on shelves all around the walls and on other shelves all across the floor: at least hundreds if not thousands of them.

And within that room, on one wall, was a vault in which were housed the original, archived “Persona” chips for all Pooches aboard the ship.

They had just managed to extract the Persona corresponding to Durwood’s ID from the vault, when Bel Za and Orrie Jones — respectively, the Engineering Deck Chief and the Chief Engineer — showed up, unexpectedly…

…and then, even more unexpectedly, suddenly the air in the Pooch Garage was filled with hundreds (again, maybe thousands) of Pooches, swarming out of their cubbies and surrounding the two engineers — herding them, it seemed, to a back wall so that Guy, Missy, and Matty could make their escape. Leading the the human trio out of room M1553 was (weirdly) the apparent ringleader of the Pooch swarm: Durwood.

Guy continues this week:

Chapter 39: We Gather Our Wits, and Lose Them Again

An hour later, with Durwood secured under my darling’s right arm, the two of us are safe, comfortable, and exhausted. We are seated at the moment on a sofa we never knew existed.

Oh, it’s a familiar kind of sofa; it looks and feels like our own sofa, in fact — like, I imagine, almost every other living-room sofa aboard. Ditto for the side chair in which Matty slouches. But we didn’t imagine that it — this sofa, right here — existed. Because until tonight, we didn’t know the “here” itself — this living room or even this cabin — existed.

In case it’s not obvious, I bow to no one in my self-regard as a PI. On the other hand, I can’t honestly say that I pay obsessive attention to all the nitty-gritty of spacegoing life. So this place’s existence is news to me, obvious as it is in retrospect: the ISS Tascheter has many more cabins than can be accounted for by the population at launch. And this is one of them, held ready for new occupants — once-dependent children now grown, partners from a broken marriage, hypothetical burglars fleeing a hypothetical crime scene down in some probably-doesn’t-exist maintenance shop, and so on.

Matty has brought us straight here, to this specific spare cabin on this specific deck, because it adjoins D&I’s luxurious diplomatic quarters. D&I aren’t normal passengers, after all: no one will bother us here, will even know we’re here in the first place.

And it is D&I who have taken over what seem to be the next phase of our operation.