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originaldetectivesheep · 8 years ago

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A Life of Riley Part 1 - The Problem With Grinckles ch 2

Chapter 1

I held up as usual at the door to the lab; the drop bars weren't down, but that in itself didn't mean there wasn't anything high-voltage operating at the moment, and from the low hiss under the whirr and grind of old, unbalanced computer fans and the half-there flashes and blips of blue light on the ceiling, it looked like someone might be welding something in behind the dismantled refrigerator that Riley used as an isolation station. I walked slowly around, craning my neck back; the more information you got about what was going on inside before you tried to butt in to the AP lab the better, and if you didn't want to get zapped, you did your information collecting with all your body parts well outside the doorway. "Hey," I said, raising my voice just a little. "Hey, it's Leo – is it ok if I come in? Riley wanted me to come by and check some harnesses?"

Carolína's voice answered from behind a stack of takeout boxes and random server rack parts. "Shush – not so loud. Yuping is sleeping." I scanned around, looking over the lab, as much as I could see, and finally saw his characteristic black brush of hair parked on the metal foot of a drill press. I nodded and lowered my voice to a stage whisper.

"Sorry – but is it ok if I come in? Am I gonna get zapped?" I was looking back over at where Carolína had to be sitting down behind that stuff – she was pretty short, but not that short – but still trying to keep a weather eye on the refrigerator in case Riley set something on fire.

Carolína stood up, her head just clearing the hoses on top of the uppermost pizza box on the desk, and waved me over with a hand. "It's ok – Riley is just welding, all the high-voltage stuff is down. But be careful – there is a lot of sims running, so you don' want to kick out a cord on anything."

"Got it," I said, crossing the threshold, carefully picking up my feet so that I didn't trip on anything. At least this was just extension cords instead of volatile coolant hoses or something. You never knew what you were getting in here. I slid gingerly along the wall, mindful of any taped-up notices or radiation monitors, but mostly trying to avoid the jenga tower of humming, wheezing, servers stacked on servers, all post-itted DO NOT TOUCH or SIMULATION RUNNING, DO NOT DISTURB or MOTHERBOARD HAS SEVERE GROUND FAULT, DISCHARGE STATIC BEFORE OPENING, and made my way around to Carolína's workstation, an alcove almost under some metal wall shelving that was barely big enough for her to turn around in. In the semi-enclosed corner the noise of all the server fans pressed in like the starting line at a drone race, and you couldn't get away from the baking heat and the way the whole lab smelled like welding flux and old barbecue sauce. I had no idea how in the hell Yuping could sleep in here.

Carolína pushed an old rubber-top library stool over my way, and handed me a packet of harness drawings as I sat down, turning back for a second to check or restart something on her own system, a slim modern netbook plugged into an ancient Sun monitor that looked like it had the power draw of a nuclear submarine and enough square footage to house at least three bearded banh mi artisans with labret plugs. I sat down on the stool, knees spread wide to hold the papers up, and started to flip through. "I'm sorry about the paper," she said, fingers plattering at her chiclet keys, "but we had to start some airflow simulations this morning that took up the last other thing we could connect to a monitor. And Riley wanted to check the plotter, in case we need to send anything out to be fabricated." The shops that the Applied Physics lab could afford to send work to, for stuff they couldn't make themselves in here by hand, sometimes didn't have email addresses to send CAD blueprints to, and certainly didn't have any computers on the shop floor that weren't shorted-out boxes full of iron filings.

I clicked my pen, squinting to make out the cable pinout. "No, it's ok," I said. "It's half my fault, I know I'm a little early. I certainly didn't mean to be over here at the crack of dawn – I don't know how you guys do it."

Carolína sighed. "Mostly, it is by Riley saying 'just a little more, just one more run, what if we change this parameter' – and then you end up sleeping on the drill press." She nodded over in the general direction of Yuping. "But you, what about you? You said you were early – what happened? Guilty conscience and you couldn't sleep?" She turned halfway around, a smile poking up at the corner of her mouth.

I shook my head. "Kicked out of bed is what happened." I marked a correction on the drawing to not swap the connection between the four and five pins and was about to turn the page, but Carolína was leaning in forward, turned all the way around, fingers tented under her chin, eagerly waiting for me to dish. Fine. "So if you have to know, last night I got together with… this dude" – I wasn't going to name names if I didn't have to – "that I'd been circling around for like eight months of us never being single at the same time, and we were supposed to mess around some more this morning, and then an hour from now I would take like a minute and grab the schematic from here on our way to brunch, but I say one word, one goddamn word about how I have friends in this lab and he's all gtfo, new phone who dis. I can understand not wanting to get attached, but jesus, there's a line here. Brunch, man, brunch." I shook my head again.

Carolína was leaned over to one side, smiling, head in one hand as she half-turned her chair back and forth. "Poor you, Leo, poor you. Or really, poor him if he decides that he doesn't want to sleep with you because Riley. Didn't you dodge a bullet with that, not getting involved with someone like this?" She stopped and straightened up, a half-glance back to the monitor to make sure that whatever was on there was still running. "I mean, one-night-stand; you can't get burnt up about it. What happened to Vera? I liked Vera."

I grimaced. "She did the math out and found out I had more ex-boyfriends than ex-girlfriends, and then threw a screaming christianiption fit about it. Nope. Nooope."

"Poor you, Leo, poor you." Carolína was turned all the way back around, tuning something in a config file. "Nobody going to cuddle you, nobody going to save you from the hell fire." Ahead of her, a fountain of blue sparks hissed up over the top of the refrigerator.

"At this point I would settle for being saved from the stomach growlers," I said, flipping pages to make sure that the same connector part was being used for both ends of the cable and checking it off. "Did you hear the part where I came over here without breakfast?"

"I heard that," Carolína said, still not turned around, "but I don' know what you expect us to do about it. You're like a cat with half an E-E degree – you only come to the lab when you're hungry."

"Or when you have work for me to do. I'm working now – doesn't that count for something?"

"It does, but there isn't no food in the lab right now." Carolína paused, fingers flying to make sure that she got the code values in exactly correct. "We started late – it's not like pizza crusts and spare fried rice happen by magic, we got to order it, and we didn't. There might be like some tater tots or peas in the medical fridge that you could throw in one of the microwave housings. Maybe."

I stood up. "It's better than nothing. I suppose I shouldn't ask why the food is in the medical fridge?"

"Because, you coddled goober, frozen foods make great icedowns for bruises and crap wherever you need to tape them across, unlike block ice or those blu-pack things that cost real money, and in a pinch we can feed randos out of them when they come mewling." Riley had stopped welding and was leaning over the fridge, mask up, torch nozzle dangling idly from one gloved hand.

I nodded and waved. "Hi, Riley; sup. Guess I'll see what you've got in terms of emergency ice packs. Thanks." I ducked around the shelves and stepped past what looked like a generator housing in the middle of the floor to get to the lime-green minifridge with the biohazard symbol peeling off the front. "Is this it? Is this the one? I don't want to open something that's going to like break biocontainment or arc out or something?"

"No, that's the one," Carolína said, leaning around to check. "There should probably be some nacho cheese in there too, if it hasn't gone off."

"Nacho cheese?" I asked, squatting down in front of the fridge, trying to see what of these freezerburned bags were normal Ore-Ida or Birdseye crap and what was maybe a deer liver or random lizard parts. "In the medical fridge? What the crap is that for, growing penicillin?"

"It's for putting on our ice packs when you get hungry, meatlord," Riley said from the other side of the room, bent over as if to make sure that the valve on the acetylene tank was closed off. "There's probably barbecue sauce and duck sauce in that pile of Chinese extras that hasn't gone bad yet if you want it."

"And I'm pretty sure that there's still coffee in the coffee pot the other side of the fridge," Carolína put in. "Unless it's got moldy."

I had the top off the cheese, and it didn't look any less healthy than any other jar of cheese sludge you might find. "In which case it's kombucha in there, right. Eh, it's ok – I'm going to be putting so much radiation through this breakfast it's barely going to matter. Can someone tear me off a takeout lid to put it in while I find a cup that isn't full of pencils?"

The coffee in the pot turned out to be fresh, and nearly warm, and not filled with a hideous mold culture (these are all independent propositions in the Applied Physics lab); someone had probably made a new pot a couple hours ago and then completely forgotten about it in the throes of sleep deprivation. It was only a couple of minutes to get it warmed up again over an open gas jet while the microwave emitter pulsed off at my breakfast, pointed into the corner that was supposed to be nonreflective, everybody looking away to make the shielding work, and as the rich coffee smell released again from the warming pot, everyone gradually stopped what they were doing, coming back to life and focusing in on the miracle elixir, even Yuping under the drill press, stretching himself awake and reaching around for his glasses.

"What I don't get, Leo," Riley said, gesturing vaguely around at the lab with a coffee cup that looked like it had once been part of something's carburetor, "is why a resourceful dude like you has to come around and mooch breakfast off of my icepacks with this huge campus all around you. Isn't this a thing, this whole urban foraging crap? Don't you know international students who could hook you up with a slingshot or a fishing pole or something?"

"I tried that out for about five seconds back sophomore year," I said, poking at my sludgy nuclear poutine with one of the lab's titanium sporks, "back when I still owned a pellet gun and didn't have enough money for a meal plan, but it's just easier to come in here and see if there's leftovers than it is to run around shooting squirrels in the eye. You haven't done it, so you don't know what a pain it is to skin those things, and then you've got to ditch the skin and the head and the guts somewhere that someone won't freak out and start a satanic-panic rumor."

Riley's eyes rolled so wide it was like they were going in two different directions. "Hurf bluurg, yes, duh – but no one was asking you to kill squirrels, or even do anything remotely resembling work. Grinckles, you know what grinckles are? You throw some bread in the water, you yank a grinckle out – they're all over the goddamn place, faster than all the Chinese freshmen in CS and MechE can fill their buckets."

"I know what a grinckle is, Riley," I said, even though I didn't really, not in more than the most general sense, "but I keep hearing bad things about them, too, and there's still work you've got to do to, like, gut a fish."

Riley let out a giant snort. "Shows what you know. Equipment, Leo, equipment; you get your equipment sorted out, and there isn't shit in this world that's actual work. Throw me that grinckle, the grinckle on the counter behind you, the flopping thing in the yellow Farmfoods bag. Carolína, turn on a hot plate and find me a steel slab to put over it. Yuping, da wo dao – dadao le!" Carolína started pushing drawers full of screws around to try to find the lab hot plate; Yuping turned back over to the tool chest with a clink and a clank and a rattle of metal on metal. That left me, and a plastic bag behind me that was still faintly spasming.

"Riley…" There were little holes in the bag that were twitching, an indicator of like spines or something on the fish, and water was leaking out onto the bench. I wasn't sure where to grab the bag, or how or why I was even doing this.

"Oh for crying out loud, stop being a baby and pick up the stupid fish wherever. It's just got spikes, it's not poisonous – or, at least, it's not poisonous to anyone who's gotten jabbed by one so far." That was hell of reassuring. "Just move, it's choking in there and if it dies before I kill it it's going to go bad. Yuping, dadao!" I gave up with a shiver and randomly grabbed at the bag, nabbing a tied-off plastic handle and hucking it through the air in Riley's direction.

Riley snatched the spinning, spitting bag out of its arc like it wasn't even a thing and slammed it down on an upside-down plastic tub that I guess was going to be the cutting board for today. One quick fingertip tear later, and I could see a lopsided, vaguely reddish fish with spikes all over its fins thrashing on top of the wet plastic, and Riley turned back as Yuping handed something up: a heavy foot-long blade, like one of those leaf-pointed African bush knives made out of a truck spring or half a lawnmower.

"Like I said," Riley repeated, holding the knife up, spear point to the ceiling, "you get your right equipment, and the problem takes care of itself. Like this." One hand turned the fish, and the knife hand stabbed the point down to chop through with a single cut from the top of the skull all the way down through the belly. "One cut like that, you've got your head off if the blade's strong enough to do the spine, and you've got most of your guts out." Riley turned the knife flat and made an outward thrust along the fish's belly, pulling it up by the tail and scraping gross, stinking scraps of viscera into the shopping bag with the point. "And like that, you're gutted, you tie it off, you throw it in the trash if you don't have Asian friends who want to cook soup with the head, you're golden." Riley put the knife down for a second to ball up the head and guts and throw it over at the trash; the clump came apart in midair, but at least it all went in the trash bucket instead of the recycling. I felt bad for the janitor.

"Now that you've got your grinckle cleaned, work is about over," Riley said, lining up the tail along the bucket and working the knife in to slide it along the backbone, bumping and cracking, to the head end. "One side, two sides; fillet 'em if you're a weenie, or you can just throw them on the grill like this." There was a random steel plate on top of the hot plate's heating unit, looking like an amazing fire and burn hazard, and Riley made sure to give it a once-over with a spray of Pam, not the bottle of WD-40 that was sitting right next to it on the shelf because of course it was. "Nice and fresh, just drop it on flesh down, let the juices stay cooked in." Riley laid the fish onto the plate flesh side down, and the lab was instantly full of a horrific stench like someone was burning old sweat socks made out of potato skins.

"That is a problem with the process," Riley said, arms crossed, looking at the rest of us ducking for something to cover our noses with. "The grinckle's kind of a survival fish unless you're super into rutabagas which yeah are kind of a survival vegetable in the first place. But if you're in here mooching breakfast off a physics lab, that's a friggin survival situation, so suck it up and eat your turnip fish. It'll be done in a second." I nodded in resignation, holding my nose shut; behind Riley, Yuping was digging through the "extra sauce" bucket for probably some way to not have to taste this when Riley served it up, Pistons hat over his nose and mouth, tears in his eyes.

Riley stood still for a second, watching and listening at the slabs of fish. "All right, that's it; soup's on. Grab a plate or a binder or something, everyone gets a share." Carolína winced as Riley clicked off the hot plate and flipped the fish flanks over with the point of the knife that had just butchered them; she obviously wasn't ready to deal with rutabaga fish this early in the morning. I took a deep breath and stuck my plate out; next to Riley, Yuping pushed out a cardboard box full of grimy, half-empty sauce containers and stray packets, with a look like he was telling us to save ourselves before it was too late.

Of course, though, it completely was. Everyone got their slab of grinckle, and Yuping and Riley must have done this before, collaring a bunch of mayonnaise and Chinese barbecue sauce to drench their fish in before Carolína or I could react. I picked up a couple packets at random and a nearly-full tub of duck sauce, but stuck my spork into the fish to start with without seasoning it: this was going to be godawful, but if Riley was going to cook a grinckle for everyone in the lab, I owed it to myself to know exactly how awful this fish thing was, exactly what I was going to be letting myself in for if I took the advice and started eating these things on the regular.

It was, somehow, worse than it smelled and worse than I expected. The texture was ok – there is nothing more vile than fish that turns out to be weirdly squishy or half-rotten or full of slime or some junk – but the taste, oh my god, the taste was like if the smell climbed down your throat and reached up to scrub the back of your tongue with a toilet brush. What the hell. What the pure liquid bleeding hell – how on earth was there a fish that tasted so much like a half-rotten reject turnip that fell through the grate on a barbecue and got half covered in charcoal? I did not gag – I was proud of myself for not gagging – and looking at the faces Carolína was making even with hers slurried with so much soy sauce to turn the off-white flesh of the fish brown, I couldn't imagine that mine were that much worse. I put my plate down and started to pour the duck sauce over the fish.

"So, what do you think?" Riley was asking like this was completely normal, but Yuping was chewing slowly and carefully like he wanted to go as slow as possible and throw out the rest of his ass fish the second Riley got distracted again. "If you season it right, it's not so bad, isn't it?"

Carolína nodded, wincing. "Yes, you're right – if you season this up so much that you can't tell you're eating fish any more, it's maybe almost nearly edible." She, also, had stopped with one forkful and was looking for something else to put over the rest of the grinckle in case Riley was going to force us to stay standing up until we ate all of ours.

"Yeah, but that's it," Riley said, pointing my way with a fork. "Sure, it tastes like crap if you don't fix it up, and when you cook it or dry it it smells like someone's burning rutabagas on a pyre made of gym socks, but if you can manage to eat it and keep it down it's good, nutritious protein, full of brain oils, perfect student food. Like three people have come in here so far trying to get me to get rid of the grinckles, but I've told them all to jump in a lake – they don't know where they're coming from yet, or how they get in all these ponds that aren't connected to anything, but I don't care. This fish is everyone's stupid problems solved, man – inexplicably abundant, ceaselessly sustainable, free for anyone with a line and a bucket while the friggin board of regents is trying to come up with a way to justify sidewalk user fees. Just watch – people will get over it in a couple weeks, and then everything in the cafeterias is going to be all grinckles, all night, and the homecoming queen's gonna be crowned Miss Grinckle U. I mean, really – not everything weird on this stupid campus has to be my problem." Riley took up another sporkful of grinckle, chewing reflectively; this was probably the first second bite that anyone in the room had taken.

I leaned back, thinking too. And also not eating any more grinckle if I could help it for the moment. Riley had a point – the garbage that people who had to buy a meal plan got shoveled in the dining halls wasn't much worse than adequately-treated grinckle, and if the state was going to be a punk and not fund the university, living on abominating quantities of stinkfish was better than going that much deeper into debt. But I was between a rock and a hard place, because as good as these grinckles were in theory, I still also had to live with the smell in practice – I was living in the Muttonbird Terraces, small apartments full of grad students and international students and other poor people who were going to be cooking grinckles full time as soon as this caught on like Riley suspected it would, and that would be the same thing as living inside a diesel smokestack or a permanent fart cloud. It had probably already started – thinking about how the lab smelled right now, some of the weird smells I'd smelled around the complex were maybe partway explained. And if those kept up, and if those got worse, I was going to have to find someplace else to hang my hat, someplace that didn't stink quite so bad like burnt turnips and fish guts. Someplace that would end up being a hell of a lot more expensive.

There had to be another way – some way to make the grinckles less stinky and awful, even if we couldn't make them any less prevalent so that first-year grad students from Shandong didn't starve to death. Nobody knew where they were coming from – maybe if we did, we could cut that off, and re-establish a new population that hadn't been entirely raised on the waste of a rutabaga farm. Or maybe if that didn't work, we could hack these grinckles and make a grinckle 2.0 that tasted less like garbage on its own – the hell anyone who was living off fish pulled out of the Horse Pond would mind if they were GMO fish out of the Horse Pond. (And actually, of course, there was nothing that said the grinckles all over the place weren't GM already, so what the hell.)

"Yeah, Riley," I said at last, "you're right, and not everything weird on this campus has to be your problem, or a problem for the lab. But this is a problem for me – I've got to see if I can't do anything about how bad these fish stink, let alone taste, if it's going to be all grinckles, all the time, all over campus. I might need some help later, but for the moment I think I can handle this by myself."

Riley shrugged. "The hell I care. Just finish your fish before you go, and don't get me legally committed to anything." I picked up the plate with a shudder, carefully sliding a sporkful out along the bones. One problem at a time. Deal with this stupid grinckle, and then by the time I finished forcing myself to eat it, Wilson would be awake when I went over his: if there was one person on campus I knew who could and would help me make this fish plague less plaguey, it would be Wilson. And if I knew Wilson, he'd be ahead of me, six grinckle fillets drying on a sheet on his balcony while he PCRed out the thing's genetic profile. And yeah, going into that, eating half a grinckle side for breakfast was the perfect way of softening myself up. I took a big bite, the whole sporkful at once, and immediately regretted it – immediately regretted everything. This was awful. This was intolerable. Something had to be done about these goddamned grinckles.

Chapter 3

#nanowrimo #alifeofriley #fiction

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