A Snapshot of Life on Kinesis

17 April 2017 | PG-13 | 3,777 words Karthal, an everyman engineer in the world's most boring job, has a thrilling day on Kinesis after catching the attention of the local Luminary.

A decade-long contract came with every post in the engineering wing of Kinesis, because the turnover rates would make the Judiciaries weep otherwise. Everyone here would pocket their first paycheck and run, and perhaps that common point of sympathy explained why the wing's inhabitants were the most dismal, most entertaining colleagues imaginable.

A case study: Faru and Mimsy. Two diminutive folk tasked with jointly monitoring Hbapp-N5 delivery flow. Presently five cubicles down on my left, hotly debating the merits of a 2:5:2 peas:slop:carrots ratio to a 3:4:1, having beautifully stacked twenty rolly chairs with the twenty-first en-route. Would their tower reach the ceiling? Or would it collapse first? The second that my interest graduated from anything but the idle, and I began finding merit in their debate, would be the second I could state with pride that I was a man of the engineering wing.

Two years had passed since I snagged this job. I'd already earned enough money to support my family – or nation – for millennia. Now was to bide for eight more years while preserving my ethos and sanity.

I preformed a ritual to ease my mind: sat at my cubicle, hands cupping photo frame, gazing at my three beautiful wives and twenty-nine pups. My fingers traced across their smiles – young Xell, the cheeky boy pulling on his brother Vasco's floppy ears, darling Venne who all boys would adore, infant Kemn who must have grown so big by now. I sometimes wondered if they'd remember me when I came home. A decade-long absence meant they had no father for a quarter of their natural lives. Were the salary for this job anything lower than what it was, I would've never chosen this life.

And so another day on Kinesis began tediously, and would end tediously, and begin tediously, and end tediously. The monotony, I mused, explained half of why this job required sterling fortitude to survive.

The other half was—

“Administrator Karthal!”

“Dhhauhhah!” I yelped, my fingers flailing around air rather than picture frame. Shit. My hands floundered to catch the picture before it could shatter against the ground, but no matter how I hurried it was too late: poor Xell and Vasco and Venne and Kemn were doomed to break their two-dimensional skulls on the office's metal floor. No! No!

I allowed my knees to buckle from under me and dove to intercept the portrait. My snout banged against the tile but I didn't care. I would sacrifice my nose a thousand times if that would save my family.

“Though I commend your initiative in prostrating yourself, I must wonder what is so appealing about the floor that you would prefer its visage to mine.”

I pushed myself back up, teary from the dull pain in my nose. I turned and discovered, hanging suspended in the air behind me in all defiance of gravity, my family: safe. And behind them stood a living miracle.

“A-ah, um,” I blubbered as I plucked the picture out of the air and into my arms, “w-wait, am I meant to, prostrate myself or not prostrate my...” Was I mad? Expecting sense from him was nonsensical. I cleared my throat. “Yes, sir, this is phas-link monitor Karthal awaiting your instruction. Is there some business you have for me, Luminary?”

Luminary Caph “Camillet” Clairescentcandesentchalleda—.

Clairescentcandescentchal-ce-dony-chatyo—.

Clairesecentcandorscentchalicementchastisementcarriagemancaboose aye carrumba.

Luminary Ca-tongue Ca-twister scowled at me the way gods scowl at ephemeral man, his eyes those of the morning star and hair a wreath of cosmic gold to crown him in nature-made halo. I finally registered the concord of scintillating bells that chimed wherever he went, placing him somewhere between celestial harbinger and symphonic belled cat. Half astonished that my brooding had commanded me such that an orchestra managed to sneak up on me, I confessed: his intoxicating tones and seraphic countenance nourished my mind with perfect beauty, and even the most dire of pessimists would tear their eyes from the floor to partake in his visage habitually.

“My initial business had been to wager with you whether Faru and Mimsy's spire of gyrating thrones will succeed in apexing this oubliette,” he said, sounding disgusted, “But vexingly, your martyristic commitment to paper sandwiched between glass and cardboard hounds my curiosity. My vassal, explain exposit explicate your fetish for these simulacra of dogmen.”

He spoke in a language foreign to me, but every melody out his mouth shone with comprehensible meaning. The essence of his request, oblique phrasing, and trifold redundancy all communicated clearly, which was both convenient and terrifying.

“Well, they're my family.” Surprised at how succinctly those three words explained the issue, I turned the picture around and tilted it up so the Luminary could see it. My fingers found themselves tracing over the darling face of my wife Zetteen, and before I could stop myself, a torrent of paternal mush burst from my lips. “There's my first wife. Twelve of the pups are hers—the ones with the cute white speckles around the eyes, that's from her. We met... eight years ago, now. It was the warm season in our hometown, and everything the air touched smelled sweet from the blooming bayflowers. But she found it all a little cloying. I took her to the high ridges where the air was crisp, onto hills overlooking our whole town, with the sunset on the horizon over the sea. We sat for hours, pointing out all the buildings we could recognize from up there, telling jokes to...”

I glanced up at the Luminary. His expression killed my monologue.

Specifically, his gaze was locked on me like a hawk, while focused and expectant like a schoolboy. The pause in my tale must have agitated him, since he waved his hand messily for me to continue: come on, what happened next?

 But rather than regale him with more of my life stories, his urging only made me feel like a dunce. I had completely overlooked one of the few facts about Terrans that fell under the category of 'general knowledge' and gone prattling on about something that he would surely never understand.

Courtship.

“Is this a contrivance to make me fan you with fluttering manus? Proceed. The purpose of your joke was...?”

“No, I'm not trying to—you can stop waving your hand.”

I didn't mean anything ill-spirited, but my comment either displeased him or kindled his rebellious spirit. He leaned forward to lie on air like an invisible bed, propping up his chin with one hand, fanning me quite deliberately with the other. Was he a child?

“Do my ministrations not elate you, Karthal?” he laughed. At least he was enjoying himself? “Or do you seek someone more suited to your stature as your lackey? Rest assured. By my beneficence, you will find yourself in possession of a dedicated gopher by the day's end. Faru! Mimsy!” he barked to the architects five cubicles down. Their complete lack of surprise, and the lack of disturbance to their 24-story tower, demonstrated their engineering seniority. “You are now competing to be Karthal's sycophant. Methods are yours to decide.”

The two of them nodded as if the Luminary's caprice was Heaven's edict. I watched them dash out of the office and down the cafeteria hallway in perfect concert, shuddering at this ominous vision of my potential future.

The Luminary, still perched on nothing, observed their flight with vague interest. A hope shone before me that some merciful god, or the Luminary's brain, would let Faru and Mimsy's showdown lure him away from me, but no. Foolish to hope.

“The purpose of your joke.”

“Right. Well... no,” I blubbered, barely audible beneath the Luminary's bells, “Is this all making sense? Am I explaining this in a way that works? For why I'd bang my head on the floor over, well, a picture frame?”

He rapped his fingers over his cheek, thankfully looking more thoughtful than insulted. “It ought to be sufficient, yes. Your yarn flows incontinent, unbridled, unfiltered. Yes. Ought to be.”

But he didn't get it.

Couldn't get it. Forget subtleties like romance or pair bonding, his species didn't even have sex – as a concept or a genetic factor. Terrans were automatons endowed with biology, custodian golems, which through some miscarriage of fate could bend the shape of the universe. No number of anecdotes about lovely Zetteen would drag him down to my earth.

My story would only devolve into a conversation with a wall, however rapt a wall it may be. But the only escape from the clanging in my skull would be to entertain it. Resigned, I took a breath and turned off my brain,

“Karthal, I do have a family,” chimed the voice of the Luminary, “I understand what it is to hold someone precious.”

Huh?

Do you? Camillet?

By a sane definition, and not a parrot's game of caricature?

“You are dubious? Am I callous? Are compassion and I so estranged?” He sat up while fiddling with the tails of his mantle. The only good thing about his sneer was the fact it was not aimed at me. “My siblings number to 2,499. Not merely by allegory; we share genetics closer tied than any two of your pups. What separates us from conventional kinship is a womb of pexiglass, substituted for flesh. My former steward, Amaran, is surely filial to me – to adopt an example more familiar to you, Vertiel is also my brethren. Regardless of his loathsome demeanour.”

BQ Quadrant Governor Zubenelgenubi Vertel.

The only Terran except the Luminary who I had seen in person, and until twenty seconds ago, the only other one who I knew existed by name. His inoffensive attitude made him somewhat approachable, but everything he did was vindictive. He scared me even more than the Luminary – because the Luminary was at least transparent when he hated you.

He visited Kinesis about twice a year for perennial pandemonium. Everyone would feign calm until he and the Luminary managed to find themselves in the same room, after which all employees would stealth away into bunkers and pre-emptively call medical services in the thirty-or-so minutes before slaughter. The metal chambers of Kinesis carried the screams well, and those screams were how I knew Vertel: as a manhandled banshee.

It was two weeks after I was first subjected to his morbid screeching, after the hospital discharged me, that I learned the Luminary had turned Vertel's skin into paper-thin glass that shredded him from every angle.

I was beginning to doubt the Luminary's conception of family.

“But I would not belt my head against metal surfaces for the sake of Vertiel. And I doubt he adorns his space with representations of me, either.” He glanced aside, running his gaze over a nondescript section of the office's harsh walls. Again I saw hope as some idea flitted through his head, hands clasped beneath his chin and fascination plain on his face—before he jerked back to me like a startled pigeon. “Your testimony states that, had he and I engaged in mountainside trysts, such an inclination may have been fostered in us?”

“No, not exactly...”

“Indeed not.” He sang a dry laugh. “Sentimentality serves us poorly, and both he and I are practical people. Perhaps that is the extent of the riddle.”

“I'm not sure,” I blurted. Crap. What I wanted was for the Luminary to go away and let my ears and mind get some relief, so why had I wound up interjecting on his two-person monologue? Now his attention was on me. I scrambled for words to not piss him off. “I think it's one of those, pair-bondy, romance, you know, that kind of thing. An impulse you have to make sure you have kids and look a-after th-th—”

What?

I didn't mean to stop speaking.

 But for some reason my mouth wasn't moving. A strange keen pierced through the silence—silence?—of the chamber, empty except for us, nothing to stop it from echoing and echoing and echoing on.

I thought of Vertel: an unassuming man shattered into shrieking viscera. His howls in my memory joined the shrilling in my ears, as if Vertel was here, right here, had stepped out of my nightmares and coalesced beside me to die.

But Vertel was not here, as flesh or phantasm. So when my throat strained for breath but only choked, and the howling stopped, I finally realised that the noise had come from me.

The time I spent gasping for air allowed me to regain some presence of mind and hurriedly piece together where I was and what had happened. My limbs: still connected to my torso. My posture: bent over on my hands and knees. Nothing hurt. I was shaken, and had puked over the floor, but unharmed.

The same couldn't be said for my family. A horrible crack sliced from one corner of the frame's glass to the other, straight across Zetteen's neck. I would have wailed again were my throat not already raw.

I reached out to the photo frame with trembling fingers, but flinched back. Red liquid oozed from Zetteen's wound, even though she was only paper, and my mind couldn't reconcile the sight. I needed to get out of here. I needed to see Zetteen. I needed to know she was safe.

But before I could panic in earnest, another droplet of blood fell to strike the photograph. I watched it spill into the fissure and seep into the image, relieved that my fantasy was fantasy, and reality was mundane. That relief lasted an instant: the same time it took for me to register the implications of what I was seeing.

I looked up. Camillet stood before me with his head bowed – which ineffectually placed his face directly in my view, or would have, if it weren't buried in his hands. His claws bit into his forehead, his temples, his cheeks, driven in as deep as they could go. They corked the wounds; the blood came from his lips, shredded open by his chattering fangs.

It terrified me.

Camillet was never anything but in control. Imperious, haughty, egocentric, but with all the competence and power that justified the attitude. I frequently forgot that he was not actually divine, not untouchable, and could be hurt.

It clicked. I knew what happened.

I had done what must never be done around Terrans, and survived. I understood from cultural sensitivity training that he couldn't help the reaction, but the fact that an utterly benign comment had almost seen me murdered did leave me with more than a little resentment.

It tempted me to promote Camillet above Vertel in my rankings for 'horrifying', but Vertel would have done the exact same thing in these circumstances. Vertel may have truly killed me. And he would have done it with that vapid, harmless smile plastered over his face.

Camillet wasn't moving. For a second I considered calling out to him, but it would be wiser to summon his supervisor, Jennis, who was likely already en route and would know how to deal with him. So I stood up, took my family in my arms, and found a safe-looking corner to stand in while I futzed on my communicator for Jennis.

But Camillet never liked doing things that others would appreciate. A wet gasp pealed from his throat and his claws dislodged from his face, though by the time he looked up the injuries were gone. Impeccable. Until he raked his claws through his hair, so violent that his scalp audibly ripped, and little clods of cosmic gold or natural halo or whatever pompous descriptor for it splattered sickly to the ground.

He noticed my presence a handful of seconds later, hands still bloody and matted with shimmering hair. I expected him to remove the evidence of his breakdown, or threaten me, or even panic. But he only sneered, contemptuous as ever, so unaffected that he may has well have been witnessed by a cockroach.

“Well?” clanged the carillon. “Well? Well? Are you entertained? Appeased? Gratified? Do you next desire my arms slit? Eyes gouged? Hands severed? Shall I degrade myself to your stature? To sympathize with your life? Will that be more convenient for you? Well, Karthal?”

Fuck.

I did not know how to communicate with Camillet without sending him into conniptions. My only options were to flounder with this trap of a question, irritate him with silence, or try to convince him that his actions sincerely scared me. But which was correct? The wheels in my brain span and span so fast they caught and jammed, leaving me to take the fourth option: pray for the existence of God.

“Get your tantrums out of the fucking office, Luminary! And fix your hair, unless you enjoy looking like a dead rooster's asshole!”

God existed and his name was Jennis.

He burst in from the cafeteria hallway with two trays of peas/slop/carrots lunchmeal cupped in one of his massive, meaty arms. I noticed how he strategically placed himself between me and Camillet, and knew: this porcine messiah would subjugate dragons.

He thrust the trays at Camillet, every single party steaming. “You don't plug your bullshit trap with one of these, and your prissy ass is getting spoonfed. And you won't get to pick what meal you get. Saying Karthal shits himself any more than this, you can bet the Governor’s eviscerating you up and down the courts for employee maltreatment.”

“I advise that no amount of feasting upon the detritus between Vertiel's toes shall impart you with telepathic connextions to his brain, sieur. Whatever you may speculate of Vertiel's thoughts, your supposition shall never constitute—wait stop—mmnfp”

The spoonful of peas that rammed into his mouth aborted Camillet's sentence. I could only watch on, eyes wide, not only at Jennis' titanium nerve to so flagrantly manhandle the Luminary, but at the fact the Luminary allowed it. Jennis, as Vertel's personal representative, obviously had some kind of authority—but I could not hope to untangle the convoluted network of dominance and submission that existed between the Luminary and the Governor.

The Luminary chewed his peas, sulkily, and accepted the tray, sullenly. He reminded me of my son Xell after receiving a scolding, and again I had to think: is he a child?

I knew that he was forty-eight, older than any member of my species, but also knew that the average lifespan for Terrans was four hundred. Did that correspondingly mean that he was twelve? He insisted that he was fully mature and a recognized adult, but I couldn't avoid suspicion that his behaviour was irregular, or impoverished for life experience.

Camillet glared at me as if he had overheard my musings, but could not spit venom owing to his mouthful of peas. Jennis grunted something that prompted Camillet to skulk off down the single corridor to both his personal quarters and engineering's psychiatric office, though I could not determine which was his destination. Once Jennis seemed satisfied that Camillet was behaving, he turned his attention to me.

“Got all your pieces where they're meant to be, Karthal? Everything square?” He snorted at himself. “Well, square as things can be, considering.”

I told him that I was fine, when I remembered that my picture frame was still broken. But it seemed absurd to trouble Jennis with something as trivial as personal commodities, regardless of their sentimental value. I glanced down, sighing—

“Oh!”

—To find the frame perfectly mended and the blood expelled from dear Zetteen. It was as though nothing had happened, and when I scanned my sights over the office, I discovered my vomit also absent. I had no questions as to what happened; that was obvious. But I did wonder just when Camillet had done this for me.

Jennis followed my gaze down to the photograph, his trotter at his chin, and nodded to himself. “Yeah. That'd do it,” he snorted. “Guy can get touchy about that. Misses them, the mushy sob.”

“Camillet does?” I asked. “Who?”

“Guy's head of human relations,” he said, voice hushed, as if every Terran in the world may be eavesdropping. Smart attitude to take. “Far as he cares, they're his babies. Other Terrans, too. It's why he's so fucking obsessed with the Governor.”

Thinking back on it, his train of thought did divert rather smoothly onto the topic of Vertel.

“Not sure if he realises he does it. Either way he's a pain in the ass. Too competent for his own good.” He tapped one of his sturdy tusks in agitation – tonk tonk. “Was a huge fuss on Terra when he was born, 'swhat I hear. Some kind of fuckup with their schedule. Like they can't even program dates into a fucking computer?” He snorted. “Well. Guess that's why it was such a big deal. Try and press the Governor about it, and he'll just spew some mystical crap about stars, or some other bullshit.”

Unsurprising. Stars held a vitally important place in Terran culture, which I always thought somewhat romantic. And the mysticism around them was attractively alien. Though should I really be hearing this gossip about him second-hand?

“Makes it easier to wrangle him when you know his shit. Just imagine he's a neurotic kid and let him piss around with his toys. Don't talk to him seriously.”

So my suspicions seemed confirmed.

“No, he knows exactly how much of a fucking nuisance he is. Thing is he has no reason to give a shit.” Tonk tonk tonk. Jennis soon batted his hand at empty air as if shooing away a poltergeist. “Enough jabbering about that prick. You should see the circus Faru and Mimsy have going in the cafeteria. Mimsy fit fifty—Look,” He spread out his arms as wide as they could go. He was a massive man, so this meant a considerable distance. “Fifty fucking sausages. In that pissy little mouth of his. Couldn't fucking believe it.”

I couldn't either. Neither could I have imagined that Faru would outperform Mimsy for a grand total of seventy-two sausages. Apparently he forgot that the reward for this contest was a place as my subordinate, considering the energy he put into it—though my first and final order to him was to resign as my choreboy and return to his former post.

It was just how life worked on Kinesis. Take buffoonery as blades against horror and boredom, and coast on the waves of the resident leviathan. Perhaps then, not only will you survive, but have fun.

I am Phas Reactor Admin Karthal Nierthiweek, the reason why family photographs are banned from the office, unabashedly a man of the engineering wing.