Chapter Two
Kaem was walking from campus to work, again enjoying how effortless walking was nowadays. The late morning heat took a little of the joy out of it, but still…
His earbud chimed, telling him he’d received a message from Arya. When he checked, it wasn’t a message but a video file. Why’s she sending me videos without explanation? He wondered.
He watched it. Holy crap!
Arriving at Staze, he made a beeline for Arya. “Jeez! I’m a little late to work and you guys staze a human?”
Arya glared up at him. “Not funny, Kaem. This morning was agonizing.”
“Sorry,” he said, chagrined. He looked across the room at Simone’s Stade. “Is her… Stade staying here?”
“No,” Arya said. She explained how she had Norm working on a Stade record box to be welded to Simone’s Stade. She said, “We need to stop just talking about attaching that kind of stuff to every Stade and start doing it. I thought it’d be a good project for Norm.”
Kaem looked contemplatively over at the engineer, “He’s the kind of engineer who might overthink it. I’ll go talk to him. See what he’s been considering so far.” He stood back up and started toward Norm.
Arya stood, saying, “Wait.” When Kaem turned back to her, she explained Norm’s suggestion that they staze his dog.
He nodded, “I think that sounds like a great idea.”
“Do you think we need legal consultation about this?”
Kaem shrugged, “What legal problem do we have?”
“That we carried out an unapproved experimental procedure on a human. There’s probably a law against that somewhere.”
Kaem shrugged again, “There’s nothing experimental about it. We staze things all the time.”
“You know what I mean. Not people.”
He frowned, “Stopping time isn’t going to hurt her. The cancer would though.”
“And maybe someone’ll say that it was the stazing that killed her,” Arya said.
“You guys can staze me. That’ll both prove we think it’s safe, and that I don’t come out weird.”
Arya drew back as if alarmed, “For God’s sake Kaem! Let’s at least do Norm’s dog first.”
“Okay,” he said, “but I’m completely confident it doesn’t cause harm.”
She rolled her eyes. “It wouldn’t prove much. You’re already weird, so when you’re still weird afterward, people might—”
He interrupted, wide-eyed, “You’re making a joke at my expense?!”
Sheepishly, Arya looked away. “At least my jokes are funny.”
“Are not!”
She gave him a little smile but didn’t say anything.
Kaem took a knee beside her and said, “Thanks for handling that this morning. It must’ve been stressful, but I think you did an awesome job with it.”
The smile that spread across Arya’s face gave him a warm fuzzy feeling. She said, “You should thank Lee too.” She explained about the journalists.
Kaem stood, realized from watching the video Arya had sent of Simone’s stazing that he should thank Gunnar too and went to do that first.
Gunnar brushed it off as inconsequential, but Kaem thought he enjoyed the appreciation.
~~~
He went to Lee next, pulling up a chair beside her where she sat at her big engineering screens. “Hey, I hear you’re our new PR person?”
She turned and glared at him. “You need to hire a real PR person!”
He gave her a wide-eyed look, “Why? I hear you’re awesome at it.”
“You don’t know that. Wait until you see what those people say. They’re going to be quoting me out of context and saying all kinds of terrible things.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“Pretty much the same stuff you told them in the talk last Friday. I just amplified and answered questions.”
“Well, thanks. As soon as Space-Gen makes a payment, we’ll hire someone to take over that role for you.” His eyes strayed to her screen. “What’s that?”
Her eyes went to the drawings.
“I just got Space-Gen’s final CAD for their first Stade rocket. It looks pretty good, but I’m worried they’re going to have trouble with assembly.”
“You want me to have a look?”
“Sure,” she said, sounding relieved. “That might almost make up for me having to do PR this morning.”
Kaem scooted closer and put his hand on her trackball. He didn’t notice the look she gave him over his presumption. Also, over his assumption that he could find his way through the drawings without her guidance. Though he still would’ve insisted on running the trackball himself. He knew where he wanted to go in drawings and didn’t like waiting for other people to take him there. Also, controlling it himself, he knew which direction he was scrolling and tilting, whereas when someone else moved through a drawing for him, he had trouble knowing what’d just happened.
Focused on the screen, he said, “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. The assembly table of organization has them stazing things they won’t be able to reach. Also, they need ingress to this area here so they can repair or replace the valve actuators. The Stade valve is gonna last forever, but the actuators are gonna fail at some point and they seem to have forgotten they can’t cut their way in through the wall of the rocket to replace them.”
Kaem leaned back in his chair. “Couple of general comments. They’re working too hard to make everything just a millimeter thick. Made of vacuum Stade it’ll have negligible mass so they ought to just make it thicker so they don’t have to worry about stazing failures where Stade doesn’t form because the mold was a teensy bit too thin.
“Next, they should start by casting that big block with all the engines in it.
“Then they should assemble all the plumbing to the engines so it all fits. They seem to think that they can assemble all that stuff separately and drop it on the engines en-bloc. That plan might work with metal because
