Proper Entertainment

29 min

The airlock hissed, rousing us from slumber. Tohwalt put down the breaker he was mending to watch the suited figure step inside. Occasional visitors weren’t uncommon in the off-season: some people came to Atull to taste the surfer’s life without having to deal with the sand. A sightseer, perhaps, or a geologist who followed the five-star reviews to escape dry rations.

“Kewt,” Tohwalt shouted to the kitchen out of habit. “We’ve got a customer.”

Kewt sat up from the VR rig, disturbing the dozing keagon in his lap. Noll croaked, protesting at being lifted, but the boy scratched the feathery neck in just the right spot, and the keagon relaxed.

The usual choreography commenced. The boy scrambled to his feet and pulled up the hood. Swaying, he carried the groggy keagon to the nook between the bar shelves. Once on his perch, Noll shook himself awake, sending an emerald wave of stirring feathers along his long, supple body. In the front, Tohwalt swiped the tuner to change the music. We never liked the lulling voices or the off-beat rhythms, but that was what people expected to hear in a cliffside diner.

The visitor moved from the airlock into the suitroom and pulled off his helmet. He was an older man, his short hair almost completely grey, but fit and quick in his movements. He undressed with the methodical precision of a spacer, thumbing safety clasps into readiness, shelving pieces the right side up for quick access. His suit was old, the enamel on the shielding plates scraped down to the metal. Still surf-worthy, but from the man’s rigid posture, we could see he wasn’t a surfer. Rented gear, then, from a shop up in the port.

Kewt grabbed the apron and scowled at another frayed corner: Noll had been bored again, chewing on things without noticing. The keagon sat now in his attentive, almost avian pose: front legs hidden in feathers, head tilted so only one eye stared at the door. Finally, entertainment. Kewt threw the neck loop over his hood and hobbled to his hideout by the stove. Tohwalt already stood ready behind the counter.

The door creaked open, and the new man walked in. He ignored Tohwalt’s prominent shape and directed all his attention to the room itself. He gaped openly at the scrapped breakers on the walls like he wasn’t sure what those were. A clear view of the vertical drop behind the triple glass elicited an audible gasp as if he hadn’t seen the same vista on his way to the diner. He chuckled at the overturned supply rocket stages that served as tables. Even the sand on the floor amused him, as though the pea-sized glass spheres were an artistic choice instead of a pesky inevitability. We couldn’t get a grasp of the man. A first-time tourist would react like that, only less ostentatiously. Was he acting?

The man finally met Tohwalt’s eyes and smiled back. His face fell into the well-defined lines of someone who smiled easily and often. We noted the wide, sinewy neck and bulging chest muscles beneath the quality underlayer. A retired forcer? There was no need to get alarmed. We had had forcers dine here before.

“Welcome to the Puffin Nest,” Tohwalt said.

“Heya,” the customer said and looked up, searching the wall for writings. “Can I please see the menu?”

“There isn’t one. The meal is a burger with fries and a soda.” A typical first-timer interaction.

“A meal, then,” the man agreed, grinning.

In the kitchen, Kewt fired up the grill. Tohwalt bent down to grab a can of coke from the bottom shelf. Noll shifted imperceptibly on his roost.

“Lovely place,” the customer said, stealing a stool from the nearest table and settling at the counter as if it were a bar. “Is it always so quiet?”

“Only in the off-season,” Tohwalt said, passing him the drink. Whoever the man was, the conversation took a predictable route. “In four months, when the tide changes and the clouds rise up, this whole cliff will be swarmed with surfers. Everybody gets hungry. It will be pretty busy then.”

In the back, Kewt grabbed a pack of pre-cut fries and dumped them into the magfryer. Behind Tohwalt’s back, the keagon was moulding himself into a different pose, his movements too slow for the eye to notice. The customer turned the can in his hands as if trying to remember how to open it. Definitely a spacer.

“How long does the season last?” the man asked. A question common enough and delivered amicably, yet we spotted a tingle of falsehood in it.

“Two months, if you’re sensible,” Tohwalt said. “Some cranks squeeze out four. With the right gear, you can descend an additional half a kilo. That’s only if you’re not afraid of getting stuck down there and having to come back by rock climbing. And if you’re ready to sacrifice your breaker.” He jerked his chin at the scorched board in the corner he had been trying to resurrect.

The man raised his brows in mild surprise. “What happened?”

“The heat from friction,” Tohwalt said with a nonchalant shrug. “The clouds are dust—silica, mostly—hot already from all that atmospheric pressure. When you surf, your breaker coasts on what is essentially molten glass. Spray condenses into beads.” He pointed at the floor. “That’s not a decoration. This shit is everywhere. Gets carried in from the airlock.”

The man bent down to roll his guest slipper over the glass pearls. Noll watched him in a hunting stance: head down, back arched and feathers smoothed out, tail slightly raised for balance. In the kitchen, Kewt threw the protein on the grill and checked the bread box: the dough had defrosted and begun to rise.

“The galaxy is full of wonders,” the customer was saying, shaking his head in elated disbelief. “Who would have thought people would surf the upper layers of a gas giant for fun—”

“Waves and gravity are free energy,” Tohwalt pointed out. “People have been using them for entertainment for ages.”

The man didn’t seem to hear him and went on with his gleeful musings. “—Jump off into the abyss from a cliff, hoping a board of plastic—or whatever it’s made of—”

“It’s layers of metal and heat-resistant polymer,” Tohwalt tried to interject again.

“—would keep them afloat. Bet their life on crazy skill.” The man took a deep, expressive breath. The permanent smile he wore felt out of place, unrelated to the conversation, as if he was giddy about something else entirely. “How do you master a sport when losing your footing means falling all the way down?”

He waited now for Tohwalt’s answer. A predictable misconception, and one that Tohwalt was usually happy to correct, but today, with this man, we had little appetite for sermons.

“You have retro rockets for backup,” Tohwalt said dryly. “And you won’t fall all the way down. There is an altitude where you begin to float. That’s how our islet works.”

“The islet, yes! Who would have thought people would set foot on a floating rock, a piece of a broken planetary ring or an asteroid or whatever it was before it deorbited—”

This time, Tohwalt made no attempt to clarify.

“—Put a permanent structure on it.” The man gestured at the room with a well-rehearsed swipe. “Build a diner on a cliff. A two-hour hike away from the nearest landing lot.”

He paused. We had a bad feeling about him. That mask of constant cheer was a wall we couldn’t peer over. A lot of practice must have gone into it to make it so efficient. Kewt flipped the sizzling protein and prepared to chop a tomato, the knife handle slippery in his grasp. Noll’s feathers started to puff.

“Living in such an isolated place,” the spacer continued, “nine out of twelve months almost completely deserted, must take a lot of dedication.” He squinted at Tohwalt. “Are you a passionate surfer yourself?”

“I surf a bit. Like I said, it gets busy once the clouds rise.”

The man stared, his smile bordering on a sneer, as if the answer didn’t satisfy him.

“It must get boring,” he said at last. “How long have you lived here?”

Tohwalt put his weight on the other foot, enduring the scrutiny. Did he know? Were we discovered? Noll morphed into a tight, nervous ball. Back in the kitchen, Kewt willed the bread to bake faster, but the crust needed a deeper shade of gold.

“Eleven years,” Tohwalt said. It was public record.

“Eleven years,” the man repeated. Was he trying to catch us in a lie? His sneer lingered a moment longer before thawing into an easy grin. “A lovely place to retire.”

He leaned back and made a point of staring out of the window. The faceted rock, its texture visible in clear weather, extended both up into the yellowish sky and down into the haze of the drop. The unbarred pathway that clung to the cliff face was but a flimsy ornament on the brutal expanse.

“A lovely, lovely place,” the man repeated.

Finally, the patina of falsehood gave way. We got a tinge of longing and the kind of weariness that comes from permanent frustration. Noll’s neck relaxed and began its journey up. Kewt shut off the grill and pulled the bun out of the bread box.

“No retirement for me yet, I’m afraid,” the man said, and a flash of default smile shut the door on us. Lifting a finger to point at the ceiling, he added, “True Dedication Blossoming still needs me to tie up a few loose ends. I’ll have to settle for a short leave and a five-star meal.”

We were right about him being a spacer, but what kind of starship was True Dedication Blossoming, a lawforce warship? Did it come here to seize us? Was this an indirect threat: don’t try anything; the assault unit is standing by?

The man gave Tohwalt’s stocky frame an appraising look. “Have you served yourself?”

What other confirmation did we need? Kewt palmed the bread knife, hovering over the bun. The keagon’s head tipped forward, the dark beak drawn like a dagger.

“No, sir,” Tohwalt said, his voice surprisingly steady. A forcer at the diner didn’t automatically mean he came here for us. It was too soon to call this a crisis. “Did my civic duty in sanitary service.” Another public record. “Nine months in the forests of Sinue, the rest in various mobile tidying teams.”

“Very commendable,” the man said. “People imagine we, the lawforce, do lots of flashy fighting, but in truth, most of the time, we do what you did—clean up. Let me tell you a story.”

He scooted closer, crossing his arms over the counter, his grin almost impish. An entertainment, sure, but one we could do without.

“Around a star far, far away,” he began, “on an ordinary planet, Coalition public funds kept disappearing: a library never built, welfare never distributed—that sort of thing. Turns out, there’s a dark habitat in orbit with some unregistered traffic. The Coalition sends a unit up there to investigate. What kind of establishment would you hide, right? It turns out, it’s a lab.”

Tohwalt’s shoulders tensed. The man knew. Noll let out a soft hiss. Kewt shook the fries out of the magfryer, his fingers trembling over the serving basket.

“Illegal lab,” the forcer went on. “Ugly, unethical setup. Cages and cages of lab animals. Human subjects. Unsanctioned clones: little kids grown in vats, brought up with minimal interaction, just to be experimented on. Room after room of weird equipment. So of course the personnel starts destroying evidence before the lawforce even docks: slaughters the living, crushes the machinery, takes the suicide pills. By the time the forcers come in, everything’s in shambles. What else is left if not mop up?”

This was a crisis all right. Whether suspicions or evidence had led the forcer to Atull, he was here for us. The keagon watched the room with one unblinking eye. Kewt hastily smeared onion jam over the bun. Tohwalt could do nothing but attentively tilt his head.

“So the lab’s gone,” the man continued. “The scene is documented, reports are submitted, your kind gets called in. The planet gets its library built and welfare distributed. End of story, right? Well, no. When forensics look into it, they discover that the facility was working on a quantum manipulation weapon.”

Tohwalt’s left eyelid twitched. A weapon? Perhaps the forcer came here blindly, following breadcrumbs he didn’t understand. Nothing was lost yet. In the back, Kewt plucked a fresh lettuce leaf from the planter pipe. In the nook, the keagon’s body strained from all that effort to remain motionless.

“The Coalition scientists spend years going through the retrieved debris,” the man went on, “combing through shreds of records. There’s not enough to reconstruct the research, but a recovered fragment of experiment protocols shows that the lab had a breakthrough with something called Spec-84.”

Kewt’s knife slipped off a pickle he was cutting and landed perilously close to his fingers. Tohwalt tilted his head to the other side, his neck betraying its tightness with a crack. Noll shivered, about to lose his cool. The forcer knew. The grin he wore was a gloat of victory. He had us cornered.

“I’m not saying the end justifies the means,” the man said, “but imagine if we had it. A tool to reach into the very fabric of the cosmos!”

He sighed and looked out of the window again. Noll used the moment to change his pose, darting to stand upright with the front talons extended. A lightning-quick move, but the blur of green feathers must have registered in the forcer’s peripheral vision. The man jerked his head to look at the shelves.

“Is that—” he asked, peering into the shadows, “—a live keagon?”

With his cover blown, Noll fluttered and let out an annoyed gronk. In the kitchen, Kewt began to hurriedly assemble the burger.

“A kea dragon!” the man said, grinning at Tohwalt, his tale forgotten. Now that he was sure he had us pinned, he could allow himself a detour. “I remember when they were rare. Such a successful crosspec: smart, curious, resourceful. I hear their natural urge to explore and manipulate makes them an excellent subject in behavioural studies. And I remember when they almost overran a planet. Cunning and fearless and unruly creatures. Good thing they have legs instead of wings. Aren’t keagons banned and considered pests on at least four worlds?”

“They aren’t banned on Atull,” Tohwalt said. “Nothing survives outside without a suit.” He turned to glare at the keagon, and Noll sat back down with a discontent croak. “Noll is my son’s pet.”

“Your son’s? So this is a family business?” The man craned his neck to look into the kitchen. Kewt tried to shrink to fit behind the exhaust hood. “Come out, boy!”

Tohwalt clenched his jaws. The forcer might think he had won, but there would be no easy capitulation. He would not bully us into a confession with veiled hints and suggestive stories. Noll bent into half a pretzel to ruffle an itchy feather. In the back, Kewt crowned the burger with the top bun, his fingers stiff. Normally, Tohwalt served the customers, but today, Kewt would have to do it himself.

“Don’t be shy,” the man boomed, rummaging in his underlayer’s pockets. “Come. I have something just for you.”

This was a game to him, but we could play games, too. All he had was talk, and we could handle talk. Kewt grabbed the self-heating plate and limped to the front, ducking when stepping over the threshold.

“Gosh, you’re tall,” the man said, his gaze slowly travelling up the boy’s gangly figure. “One might think you grew up in microgravity.” He let out a self-congratulatory chuckle.

“Give the boy a break,” Tohwalt said while Kewt habitually retreated deeper into his hood. “He’s as shy as one can get, and puberty hasn’t been too kind to him.”

He took the plate from Kewt and placed it before the forcer. The man barely even looked at it. He watched the boy with triumphant fascination. Kewt shoved his hands into his pockets, slouching.

“Didn’t mean to be unkind, kid,” the man said with genuine sympathy. “Teenagers are awkward. You’ll grow out of it, eventually. How old are you?”

“Thirteen, sir,” Kewt said, his voice husky. Noll stretched towards the boy, and Kewt allowed the keagon to climb onto his shoulder.

“Thirteen,” the man repeated slowly as if doing sums in his mind. “Let me have a good look at you.”

He glanced between him and his father. He would have a hard time finding similarities. Tohwalt was a bull of a man: compact and chiselled and sturdy. A fair-skinned ginger, to boot, with a full head of hair. Kewt could hide his bald scalp and his bronze scarred skin in the shadow of his hood, but that scrawny body betrayed itself from under any number of layers of baggy clothes.

“I’d never suspect you two are related. Are you adopted?” The forcer snickered unapologetically. “Your mother’s genes must be strong.”

“I never knew my mother,” the boy said. Noll settled around his neck like a boa scarf.

“We lost her in childbirth,” Tohwalt explained. Also public record, if only a little forged.

“Tragic,” the man said insincerely. “Ah, but I promised you something.”

His hand dived into his pocket and we tensed in anticipation. What would it be, an incapacitator? Noll sank his talons into Kewt’s collarbone, making the boy wince. Tohwalt eyed the nearest bottle. A good blow to the head could knock the forcer out. We could put him back into his suit. People tripped walking up that narrow pathway all the time. Surfers didn’t want a railing on it, and innocent tourists were the ones to suffer. But how long before someone else from True Dedication Blossoming came down to try again?

The man’s hand reappeared from his pocket, pulling out something long and lightweight. It came out in white, knotted strands, each node dragging the next until the entire foot-long structure was out. A fibreglass meshwork, or fragile thread woven into a net, hung from the man’s pinched fingers over the counter. What was it, a snare?

“Here,” the man said, offering it to Kewt. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.” It didn’t look dangerous.

“It’s a toy. A puzzle. Let me show you how it works.”

He shook the netting, trying to spread it out, turning it and pinching different knots. The structure was circular, or perhaps a cylinder, with a denser cluster at one side. In it, the forcer finally found the knot he was looking for. A quick twist, and the strands between the knots stiffened into rods, and the netting expanded into a dome of stretched diamonds. The man placed it carelessly on the counter. It stood on rigid points of bottom eyelets with the twisted knot on top. It looked like an overturned fruit bowl or a bizarre fishnet hat.

The forcer pointed at the top nodule. “There’s a button here that lets in a single photon. It encounters a beam-splitter and can travel into one of these tubes.” His finger touched one of the immediate rods, and it turned from translucent white to dull grey. The change of colour brought a tinge of familiarity. The man’s finger travelled to the next knot and lingered there. “It meets another splitter, and the laws of randomness decide where it goes next: left or right. Always down and never back where it came from.” He slipped down to the next crossing. “And then again and again all the way to the bottom.” As he moved, the impacted rods greyed out, and a zigzagging line of his progress remained visible. “Guessing which path the photon will actually take is about zero point one three percent. That’s the goal of the puzzle—to guess its path.” He tapped the top button, and a different zigzagging line lit up in blue. He frowned at the results. “See? I didn’t get it right. Here, you try.” He tapped the top button again to reset the game and pushed the dome towards Kewt.

Crisis or not, this thing looked interesting. The boy took an awkward lunge forward, but Tohwalt stepped in before him. He stooped to study the dome, deciding which of the twelve top-most rods to select. Noll slipped down to nestle in the apron pocket to have a better vantage point.

The forcer, almost losing interest in the entire affair, reached for his meal.

“The toy is actually based on some restored equipment from the lab,” he said, snatching a golden fry. “There were variations and variations of those things. Forensics were sure they were a part of the weapon, something working on the same principle as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester.”

Tohwalt’s fingers froze above the first knot. “Is this a bomb?”

“No, no,” the forcer said, chuckling. “It’s just an idea that you could, with the right setup, know if a bomb is real or a dud—in half the time when you don’t blow yourself up, which is also a fifty-fifty chance.” He pointed at the net. “The scientists thought this must be some even cleverer setup to test things without direct access.” He shook his head, and his gaze landed on Kewt. “But I think they were wrong. I think Spec-84 wasn’t an object at all.”

The man surely knew more than we were comfortable with. But did he have enough evidence for a direct accusation? Tohwalt poked the toy, submitting his guess. The blue line flashed on the opposite side of the dome. Kewt hovered over Tohwalt, impatient to have a go, Noll’s green head poking out of his apron.

“I think,” the forcer went on, and we caught a twinkle of stale resentment—there and gone again in a flash, “all those poor clones weren’t just consumables to test the weapon on. They were the weapon. And those things—” He gestured at the toy without looking. “—were the measuring tape. It’s possible someone from cage number 84 could solve that puzzle.”

“You mean,” Tohwalt said without a flinch, “predict the future?”

“No, not to predict the future. Direct the photon. Decide which way it goes in the splitter. Keep up with the speed of light and manipulate superpositions.”

“Move matter, then?”

“Eventually, yes. Commanding elementary particles is a long way from moving objects. But it’s a crucial first step.”

Kewt used Tohwalt’s distraction to elbow his way to the net. While Noll squirmed under the cloth, trying to break free, the boy touched the rods in rapid succession. When he tested it, the grey and blue paths intersected, and one common rod glowed green.

“Too bad everyone in that lab died,” Tohwalt said, keeping his eyes on the forcer. The crisis was not yet a disaster.

“Well, maybe not everyone,” the forcer said, arching an eyebrow. “You see, there are a few discrepancies in the reports. Some records are missing, like which sanitary unit was assigned to deal with the lab. There are flight logs of trips the shuttle pilot doesn’t remember, and starliners leaving the system early and without passengers. It’s like someone has concealed their journey off the orbiter.”

The man was good. Tohwalt watched him, his chin inching closer to his chest. Kewt tried a different line and got another partial match at the very bottom: the photon, darting around all the wrong eyelets, ended its journey in the predicted knot. The keagon broke free, his talons scratching the counter, but the boy caught him before he reached the toy.

“You want to hear my theory?” the forcer said, lowering his voice. “I think someone in the cleanup team found a surviving clone. A little kid, hiding somewhere under the debris. Who wouldn’t rescue the poor thing? I would.” Would he, really, or was this a bluff? “I wouldn’t even report it, or it would go straight into another lab. No, I would smuggle it off. Maybe fabricate an adoption or fake a paternity test. Go somewhere quiet where nobody would bother us.”

He grinned again, triumphantly. Shamelessly.

“It wouldn’t mean the surviving clone was Spec-84,” Tohwalt said, ignoring the provocation.

“Oh, but it would. If anyone could survive the carnage, it would be the breakthrough specimen. I don’t know how he did it—maybe his powers blossomed under pressure, and he could arrange a micro-crack in the cage metal that would shatter on impact, or maybe a sympathetic staff member couldn’t bring himself to kill the miracle—but I can see Spec-84 survive. Maybe even rescue a friend, a cute pet rat from the neighbouring cage, or a keagon.” He didn’t even look at Noll stirring in Kewt’s hands. “Who better to find a perfect hiding place than a clever pest and a weaponized toddler? And if anyone could hack the bureaucratic encryption to forge records, it would be Spec-84.”

We marvelled at the man’s confidence. One didn’t have to hack anything if one was persuasive enough. Noll hissed, demanding freedom, and Kewt yielded, releasing the impatient keagon onto the counter.

“Interesting theory,” Tohwalt said grimly. There was little amusement in crises.

The forcer sighed, his smile slipping away, and a gash opened in his careful armour, revealing tiredness he had been nursing.

“Let’s make a deal, son,” he said, turning to Kewt, “You solve this thing, and nothing changes here, in this nice little diner, except your dad having to hire a new cook. What do you say?”

Kewt darted a scared look at Tohwalt.

“You’re joking, right?” Tohwalt said.

“No,” the forcer said with finality. “No more jokes.”

Tohwalt and Kewt exchanged glances. This was a full-blown disaster: denial or violence would only postpone the worst. Our best chance was to use the crack, however small, before the man wiped it out with his smiles.

“Play the game, boy.” The forcer gave the toy a little push. “Unless you prefer to do it the hard way, with the three of you in cages.”

We did not: dealing with one man was better than facing the entire True Dedication Blossoming.

“You’re wrong, you know,” Tohwalt said, stepping aside. “He can’t do it.”

“We’ll see.”

Tohwalt tried to pull the keagon out of Kewt’s way, but the sleek body slipped away and back onto the counter. The boy bent over the netting, perspiration misting his hooded brow. We concentrated, falling through the fissure and pulling on the available thread. The ghostly twine unspooled into a web of paths and nodules. We touched the knots, feeling the signals zipping around in a frenzy. So many to unravel. So many to tame. With an unsteady finger, Kewt marked out a meandering path. The blue line flashed, scoring him a single matching section.

“There’s a lie scale in the stats for this puzzle,” the man said wearily. “I’ll know if you try to lose on purpose.”

We peered deeper, focusing on the knots at the ends of the threads. Some swelled into megahubs of traffic, others were mere specks, barely visited. A step further, and the flocks of messengers bridged the chasms between the hubs. Deeper still, each courier broke into easy-to-nudge pinpricks. We began to work.

Kewt constructed a new grey path and the blue lightning crossed the dome in all the wrong places. Tohwalt bit his lip. Noll crept closer, his tail almost touching the forgotten meal.

“Try harder,” the man said. “Win and nobody else has to leave but you.”

We were out of practice, too comfortable in our triumvirate setup. We forgot what a mess a new mind was. The man was too old, too set in his ways, too sure of himself. Unlike the pilots or the clerks, he was too invested and determined to be persuaded to let go, to omit, to forget. Definitely too annoying to be assimilated.

Kewt picked a new route, his fingers trembling, and scored two matches. Snot stretched down from under his hood, and he sniffled. The forcer twitched, an emphatic flash crossing the oft-used pathways: failure, and helplessness, and anger at those who refused to believe him. And above it all—the fog of chronic exhaustion of keeping up the façade. This was our way in.

“I can’t do this,” Kewt pleaded, dragging the back of his palm under his nose. The motion triggered more tears, and he cowered in embarrassment.

“Stop it!” Tohwalt growled, reaching to protect the boy.

We tickled the opened-up knots. That mind was too stiff to change, but even stiff could settle.

“Whoever you think he is, whatever you want him to do—” Tohwalt began, but a lump in his throat cut his speech short.

We rode the words, aiming for an overworked juncture: he had been right. He, whom nobody on True Dedication Blossoming took seriously, who had to don the mask of a jester to keep his unhinged ideas, was right about everything: the nature of Spec-84, the surviving clone, the altered records. A cathartic wave washed the fringes of his mind. This was our chance, or we’d only have made things worse.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tohwalt said, finding his voice again. “Can’t you see? The boy can’t do it.”

Kewt mopped up his cheeks with both hands, and his hood slipped down. The dark scars that crossed his scalp looked like stripes on the hide of an animal. He stood there, a hunched, bawling creature. Noll cooed at him from the counter. We tickled a gateway, and the forcer looked down. That poor, poor thing. The circuit closed: he was right about everything, except one thing—whatever the breakthrough powers were, the boy no longer had them.

Some loose ends were too frayed to be tied up.

The man reached for the plate and bit into his burger. We nudged a speck, and the signal found a shortcut, bypassing the habitual channel of chronic anguish. With each motion of the man’s jaw, his face relaxed. The new flare persisted: even if it changed nothing in the end, he had been right. In an old, exhausted landscape, a satisfaction groove was forming.

“It’s a damn good burger,” he said. “Five stars, indeed.”

We retreated, letting the settling tangle go.

The crisis was over. After an awkward moment of indecision, Kewt hobbled back to the kitchen to drown his sniffles in the rumble of a dishwasher. Tohwalt stood about, ready to hold the fort if the conversation sparked back into life, but the man chewed in silence, completely engrossed in his food. Eventually, Tohwalt shuffled back to the corner and picked up his breaker. Only Noll kept the forcer company, watching the man with his head tilted, using one eye and then the other. The man didn’t stare back. He finished his meal, paid in Coalition credits, and stood up to leave.

“Your toy,” Tohwalt shouted after him when the man was at the door.

The man just waved his hand without looking back.

The keagon stretched up to stand tall and see the visitor off. When the airlock swallowed the man’s suited figure, Noll shook himself off and hopped to the toy. Careful in his aim, he pecked out a giant, regular rhombus: two diverging lines, taking their origin in the neighbouring rods at the top knot, turning inwards in the middle of the dome, and meeting at the same point down at the counter. It cost us little effort to persuade the beam-splitter to let the photon travel up. The keagon reached to poke the submit button, and all grey rods flickered to glow green, the photon bouncing in a loop. Noll croaked in content. Now, this was what we called proper entertainment.