'23kpc' Chapter 40: Mail Call!

Surprises arrive -- not all of them in neat packages

[I’ve played around with AI image generation for a few months — and 40 chapters! — now. And I find my prompts to the programs fall into two categories, what I think of as “figurative” and “literal” prompts (and corresponding results). My least favorite are the literal ones, like this: more or less realistic depictions of something which actually happens in the chapter. In fact, I throw away far more of them than of the figurative variety: images which simply hint at what takes place, often in some metaphoric way. But I got genuinely stuck this time around.]

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

Last week:

After their chaotic escapade in — and escape from — the Tascheter’s “Pooch Garage,” Guy, Missy, and Matty were safe and sound (and still a little bit rattled) in a spare cabin adjoining Daina and Idris’s diplomatic quarters. Durwood seems to have returned to its normal behavior patterns. D&I themselves were on to the next phase of the investigation: interrogating Orrie Jones and Bel Za about the engineers’ role(s), if any, in the various electronic glitches which have recently been interrupting “normal” shipboard life.

Meanwhile, D&I said, the Landises, Matty, and of course Durwood were to just sit tight. And D&I surprised Matty with a job to do right here — to make a new friend. At which point they introduced him to the friend-to-be: a Pooch named Gretl, something like a miniature Doberman.

Pooch-averse Matty objected to this apparently random assignment, for which he was so ill-suited. But before leaving to interrogate the engineers, D&I explained Gretl’s important position among all the puzzle pieces: Gretl had been Tyler Morton’s Pooch. Yes, the late Tyler Morton: the propulsion engineer whose disappearance (and mysterious death) had kicked off the current investigation.

Guy had never known or even suspected that Tyler had had a Pooch. But then he started thinking about the web of “things gone wrong,” like Tyler himself, of course, and his weird and apparently fatal “Muybridge” experiments as well as — most recently — Durwood’s disappearance and (obviously different) return. All of which led him to a weird, out-of-the-blue question to Matty: who might they consult for information about EVA suits?¹

Guy now continues his narration…: