Page 16 of Eat My Moon Dust
Pride washed over me. Maybe the weekend was real shit, but today would be a core memory. I hoped it would overshadow the pain and loneliness they felt over time. It fell on my shoulders to make their new home a positive place so it could outshine what they’d left behind.
A thought that instantly made me feel inadequate the moment I opened the door to my unit.
Stale air billowed into the hallway, the thermostat having just turned back on after three days in stasis. This was technically my unit, but I didn’t reallylivehere. I groomed. I cleaned my clothes in the wardrobe. I slept. But every moment of my waking day was spent working, coordinating, reviewing, approving, repairing… If I wasn’t working as the sole domestic engineer for the three home towers and over a thousand residents, I was maintaining surveillance microdrones for Imani James, the human woman in charge of security. I left the hangar at the “end” of the workday, but then spent most of the evening filing reports, checking in with Imani, and generally justnumb.
Which was real fuckin’ obvious by the state of my unit.
As in, the plas film was still stuck to the chrome front of the cabinets despite the pile of dirty coveralls draped over the counter where I usually stripped down to my briefs. I motioned to the spats’ shoes, and they toed them off by the door, the glimmer in their eyes dulling with disappointment.
“This is a temporary unit,” I lied, desperate to salvage their excitement. “We just need to stay here a few weeks, then we’ll be moving into a family unit.”As long as Zufi renews my contract.“All the luggage will arrive soon, so let the drone in, and eat whatever you want from the food bay. There’s also human media streams on the main holoscreen.”
“We can’t go out and play? There are human spats playing with a ball,” Tahavir asked, opening the balcony to the late afternoon.
“Maan would let us play in the neighborhood by ourselves,” Ladh added.
“Yeah, well, me too,” I said a little too forcefully. Taking a deep breath, I continued more calmly. “Just not until your vaccine course is complete. Ezra will stop by tonight to check, then tomorrow, you can go out and play. If he clears you.”
“What about you?” Reha questioned.
“I have to work for a bit. Your room is the first on the right, by the way.”
“As in we’re all sharing?”
It’s not like I’d known they’d be living with me, soyeah,they were sharing. “For now.”
“Great.”
Reha collapsed onto the sofa beside Ladh, and Tahavir dragged a rug out onto the balcony to soak up the jungle air and sunshine. He was also preemptively escaping any bickering the other two might get tangled up in.
Smart spat.
I left with a half-hearted wave, called the lift, and slumped into the corner as its doors closed.
There was so much to do. I needed to stop by the clinic to get coil withdrawal meds, add the spats’ biometrics to the access panels, get them fobs for the home tower entrances, and check for emergency work orders. All before dinner in three turns.
I groaned into my hands as the lift slowed. The exhaustion was so much more than the work I had this afternoon. Bigger, scarier, just now sinking in… I suddenly had to be a father, every day, every night, all the time. The visitation was permanent.
And I had no idea what I was doing.
05
?TINSLEY?
“So you do twinkle lights too!” I gasped.
Naitee giggled, sitting on my sofa with reindeer antlers perched on her head. She was struggling to cut a snowflake out of a folded piece of glittery white plas as her shoulders shook. “Of course! Have you ever met an Indian thatdoesn’tuse every excuse to put up colorful lights?”
Omi tossed a glittery blue snowflake on our growing pile and downed the dregs of her coconut pineapple rum drink. I’d gotten pretty good at making her fake cocktails, but I stayed away from them myself. All the juice tasted too smooth, as if it all came from concentrate. Which it did, since food bays manufactured cooked foods a lot like a 3D printer.
The Santa hat dutifully balanced on Omi’s large topknot of box braids flopped in her eyes as she set the empty glass down on the floor by her chair. “Yeah, Tinsley!” she hiccuped in her syrupy Jamaican accent.“Ah course,everyone likes colorful lights. You can’t go wrong.”
“Samridve has a festival of lights too,” Piro added. He wore a headband with a little present on top like a fascinator, carefully nestled between his tendrils, and stuck his tongue out one side of his mouth in concentration as he cut his own snowflakes, one for each pair of hands. Thanks to him, we’d been able to make a big dent in our quota for the home tower lobbies and the school pod. “Actually, I thinkmostspecies have some sort of festival of lights.”
Omi and Naitee both gestured at him, their eyebrows raised as if to say,see?
I bit my lip to keep from laughing and shrugged. “Hey, how would I know? I’d never left Ontario. Total homebody, guilty as charged!”
“They don’t look like that though,” Piro said, motioning to the strings of colorful lights adorning the outside of Danny DeVito’s home inDeck the Halls,a festive classic about neighborhood dads duking it out. When I was a teen, my dad and I would watch it every year to get jazzed up before hanging our own lights outside the house. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen lights on a rope.”
