Chapter 10: Moving Up

“Yemi!” Steven said, giving the little alien finger guns as he passed by the front desk. “Looking forward to that meetup tonight!”

“Good morning,” Yemi replied, seeming perplexed by the gesture. “Indeed – my schedule is clear. Your team was asking after you this morning. I believe they’re eager to see you.”

“I’m sure,” Steven chuckled as he passed through the automatic door and into the office. The flock had probably been pulling their feathers out all night, wondering if he’d gone home with Qimi and her friends.

When he arrived at their cubicle, they greeted him with a blend of relieved green and excited yellow, their emotions as readable to him now as flash cards. They immediately began to fuss and fret, rising from their seats to crowd around him.

“Steven!” Ezi chirped, clearly the most agitated of the group. He got the impression that she was burning with the desire to ask him very direct questions about his date but had probably been warned by Ipal to keep her mouth shut. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” he replied, glancing down at their scaly faces. “You guys seem energetic today.”

“How did your meal with Qimi go?” Ezi blurted, Ipal shooting daggers as she gave her a curt flash of red. The two had a brief exchange of low hisses in their native tongue, likely arguing about it for a moment.

“Oh, we had a great time,” he replied. “They took me out to a sushi restaurant over by the marina – it’s an Earth’nay delicacy – and we caught up on things.”

There were some flashes of worried purple, but as much as he wanted to reassure them that nothing had happened between him and Qimi’s flock, maybe a little uncertainty would work in his favor. If he let them believe that they had some stiff competition, that might improve their behavior.

“Oh, I’m ... glad to hear it,” Mima said with a flutter of blue that told a very different story.

“What does sushi taste like?” Tilli asked, ever the most curious member of the flock.

“It’s slices of raw fish usually served with a kind of sweet grain and wrapped in salty seaweed. I’m probably oversimplifying it – there are a lot of varieties and flavors. Apparently, Valbara’nay seem to enjoy it too.”

“That sounds good,” Tilli muttered, lost in thought.

“Speaking of food, I need to get some breakfast,” Steven added as he patted his stomach. “I didn’t have time to eat before I left for work.”

“What?” Ipal asked, tilting her head inquisitively with a surprised flutter of yellow. “How could you not have had time to eat? Did something disrupt your schedule?”

“Nah, I just stayed in bed a little too long,” he explained. “I guess I was pretty busy yesterday evening.”

“Hang on,” Paza added. “So, you don’t always wake up early enough to give yourself time to make breakfast before you leave for work? Don’t you plan your day around that? Surely you wake up at a specific time?”

“Usually,” he replied with a shrug, his response only seeming to confuse her more.

“If you fail to wake up at the specified time, all of your subsequent plans for that day would be compromised,” Paza insisted as though seeking some method in his madness. “You don’t have time to eat, you miss the train, you could be late for work.”

“I’m not gonna die if I skip breakfast,” he scoffed. “Why does it bother you so much? Have you never slept through an alarm or got the train schedule wrong?”

“Yes, but those are events that require us to reach a new consensus and develop a new plan for the day,” Paza continued. “I don’t understand how you can wake up late and simply decide to skip breakfast so frivolously.”

“Earth’nay just don’t need to plan the same way you do,” he replied. “We adapt, we improvise – it’s kind of our thing. I grew up in an environment where almost nothing was certain. Planning to take the train is all well and good, but if it breaks down or doesn’t run on time, you’re drifting with a dead drive. Quality food wasn’t always available, nor was clean water, and even the air filters could malfunction. There was a lot of unpredictability to deal with.”

“Of all the things you have told us of Ganymede, I think this is the most disturbing,” Paza muttered with a shiver of purple feathers.

“In Valbara’nay hell, none of the trains run on time,” Steven added in a mock spooky voice. “Everyone is always late for their appointments!”

“Stop teasing Paza, and let’s get you fed,” Mima insisted as she tugged at his sleeve to get his attention. “We need you alert today to work on your script.”

She gave her flockmates a few flashes of plumage, the meaning of which was hard to discern, then led him away from the cubicle. Just like she had in his kitchen, she was trying to get him alone – separating him from her flock so that they could speak without interruption.

“You should really make sure to eat regularly,” she began as they approached the vending machines. She reached out to select one of the seaweed wraps from the control panel, then stooped to retrieve it, thrusting it into his hands. “I know that mammals have very high calorie requirements.”

“Have you been reading up on Earth’nay?” he asked, peeling open the packaging and taking a bite to satisfy her.

“If you’re going to be working with us, then it’s important for us to understand your needs,” she replied.

“Well, I do like seaweed,” he added as he took another bite. “You remembered that.”

“We tend not to forget. I also wanted to ask if you’d like to come with us tomorrow evening to shop for clothes – maybe see some sights or get some food?”

“Oh, do I have a choice in the matter this time?” he asked with a smile. “The last couple of times, you guys have pretty much decided for me.”

“We’re a flock,” she replied with the feather equivalent of a shrug. “We form a consensus, then we enact our plan. We’re not accustomed to having a dissenting third party who disrupts the schedule.”

“I have my own stuff going on outside of work,” he continued, walking alongside her as she bobbed back in the direction of the cubicle. “If you want to involve me in your plans, then you can’t just spring them on me and expect me to bend over backwards to make it happen. I like you guys, but you’re not the center of my universe.”

“No, I know that,” she insisted with a flutter of purple. “We just ... didn’t realize that you had made so many friends so quickly. Yemi, Joseph, Qimi’s flock...”

“I do appreciate you asking,” he said, sensing that his point had been made. “Yes, I’ll spend the evening with you guys. The more you involve me in your decisions, the more I’m going to want to participate.”

“Okay, that’s good,” she said with a relieved flash of mint green.

“You guys can come over and watch some more of that show sometime, too,” he added. “Maybe we can make some more snack bars together?”

“I would enjoy that very much,” she replied with a hint of pink in her feathers.

“Steven,” Paza said as she bobbed over to his desk. “I’m trying to access the message database, but something is wrong. There are new subfolders that weren’t there before.”

“Oh, that was me,” Steven replied as he leaned back in his chair to speak to her.

“You did that?” she asked with a flutter of annoyed red. “For what purpose?”

“Well, you guys put me in charge of the message system,” he replied with a shrug. He leaned in again, his fingers dancing across the virtual keyboard as he pulled up a window to demonstrate. “Here,” he continued, pointing to the display. “I learned that each email that gets sent through the system is assigned a flag. These flags give them their priority in the inbox, specific tags, metadata for sender and recipient, and other things of that nature.”

“Yes, that’s how we find the specific messages that we’re searching for,” Paza replied with another flush of red. “If a message is marked as priority and it originated from a client or an executive, we need to be able to see it.”

“Thing is, the flagging system is really inefficient,” he explained. “Every time you search for a specific flag, the terminal has to send a query to the server – multiple queries if multiple flags are selected – and wait for a reply at the end of that particular cycle. Only then does the server send the requested data. It introduces a ton of latency and lag. I’ve changed the system to make calls to the server at regular intervals, download all of the messages, then sort them into these sub-directories based on their flag. This way, all of the messages are already available on the terminal. If you want to browse by tag or metadata, you only need to look in the right directory.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, but as she leaned over his console and navigated the new system, he could see her desire to remain angry slowly subsiding. Finally, she stepped back, clearing her throat as she straightened her feather sheaths like someone loosening their collar or fiddling with their tie.

“I suppose that this is a more efficient method. You did this on your own, without seeking consensus from the flock or any of the company’s programmers?”

“Well, Yemi has taught me enough about your systems to make these kinds of edits to the code, but he wasn’t directly involved. I can’t take too much credit, because it’s largely inspired by the way we used to handle internal messaging back at my previous job. I can revert the changes if you want me to.”

“No, no,” she mumbled as she gave him a flutter of green. “I am just ... surprised by your initiative. Most flocks would take some time to discuss and then implement such a change. Perhaps ... I underestimated your capacity to learn. Still, keep me apprised of such decisions in the future.”

“Understood,” he replied.

She began to return to her desk, then paused to look back at him.

“Good work, Steven.”

“Steven, I’d like you to take a message to an office on the third floor,” Mima said. “We need to cross-reference some of their code, and I’d rather you delivered the message personally.”

“Want me to put some sass on them?” he asked, balancing his chair on two legs.

“Something like that,” Ezi chuckled.

“Where’s this office?” he asked, pushing his chair back. “I’m gonna have to climb again, aren’t I?”

“I’ll show you,” Ipal said, hopping out of her seat. “I could use an excuse to stretch my legs.”

He followed her out of their cubicle, watching as she leaped effortlessly into the air, landing to perch on a raised walkway that was higher than Steven. She turned to peer down at him, cocking her head as though waiting for him to do the same.

“Alright, gimme a minute,” he sighed as he rubbed his hands together. “Gonna have to invest in some of that chalk the rock climbers use.”

He reached up and gripped the lip of the walkway, Ipal shuffling aside to give him a little more room, watching curiously as he lifted himself off the ground. He managed to get an arm over it and hauled himself up, using his knee to climb onto the narrow surface.

“That’s some upper body strength,” Ipal muttered, her plumage suggesting that she was impressed. “How much do you weigh?”

“About a hundred and eighty pounds,” he huffed.

“That’s as much as three female Valbara’nay,” she mused. “You can’t jump, though?”

“Not like you can,” he replied, brushing himself off as he rose to his feet. “You guys have springs for legs.”

“Fast-twitch muscle fibers,” she explained. “We can store a lot of energy in our leg muscles.”

“Yeah, it looks like it,” he replied with a glance at the dimples of muscle that showed through her tight shorts. “Half of your body mass is in your thighs.”

“We can also kick pretty hard, so watch what you say about the size of our thighs,” she warned with a flutter of yellow that suggested she was joking.

“I’m gonna have to set up a pull-up bar at home – I didn’t realize that working in an office would be so athletic. Where to next?”

Ipal leapt up onto a platform another level above them, scaling the jungle gym of an office with the same ease that he might navigate the quarry in microgravity. He followed behind her with far less grace, the muscles in his chest and shoulders starting to burn with the effort as he climbed up. He found himself on the floor beside a recessed bowl similar to those that he had seen in the office below, its pillows occupied by a familiar flock. It was Lotl and her friends, each of them lounging with a drink in hand, apparently on break. They paused their conversation, their scaly snouts turning in his direction.

“Well, look who it is,” Lotl chuckled as she leaned over the edge of the bowl to peer at him. “You seem to be having some trouble there, Earth’nay. Have you forgotten where your cubicle is?”

“He’s fine,” Ipal replied with a flutter of red. “He’s delivering an important message, actually.”

“Being a messenger boy is certainly very important,” Lotl said with a flash of orange that came off as distinctly unkind. “You should have taken our offer, Earth’nay. Maybe we’d have you doing something more meaningful than passing notes.”

“He was assigned to my flock,” Ipal replied, planting her hands on her wide hips defiantly. “You had no right trying to steal him away.”

“I merely offered him a choice,” she replied with a feathery shrug. “It isn’t our fault that he made the wrong one,” she added, sharing a snicker with her flockmates.

“Steven is actually writing a presentation for the pitch meeting with our Earth’nay clients,” Ipal added, gesturing to him with a feather sheath. “He’s going to be the one who lands us the contract.”

“Is that so?” Lotl asked, cocking her head at him and taking a sip of her drink. “Entrusting your professional future to a male, eh, Ipal? Maybe I shouldn’t be worried about that promotion after all. The private office is as good as ours if your consensus has become that poor. At this rate, you’ll be waxing scales or gutting fish down by the docks before the rotation is through.”

“I’m pretty confident in my abilities,” Steven replied. The desire to fire back was strong, but he had to remember that he was in a professional setting, and these people were technically his superiors.

“You should stick to fetching drinks and looking pretty,” another of Lotl’s flockmates added.

“Ipal’s flock is working hard, while yours always seems to be hanging around the vending machines,” Steven replied. “Maybe you should be a little worried about that promotion.”