Miranda

Miranda’s office is a mess and has been since about 3 months ago and is not going to stop being a mess for, if we’re being honest here, at least another 3 months and, again, to be perfectly honest here, Miranda is fine with that, because Miranda’s job, despite being one of the most significant command positions in EPRN, involves as much EPRN bureaucracy as it does real command, judged per unit of time anyway, and how the hell, really, is she supposed to get around the injunction to file a report on every detected heteropneum when they detect literally an average of one per hour without building up some clutter. You know?

Miranda is, on some basic core-personality level, okay with bureaucracy. Life is enough of a swirling and inchoate void, most of the time, that she can deeply sympathize with the urge to organize it in any way, even if it doesn’t really accomplish anything. Filing reports gives her a sense of “official understanding,” however ill-founded, that would be sorely missing from her life otherwise. Heteropneums being, after all, beyond complete human understanding pretty much by definition.

What really frustrates Miranda is not so much the necessity of filing these reports, say, as the kind of whimsy with which the founding codes of EPRN’s bureaucracy were written. Which, Miranda tends to think, is entirely incompatible with the sort of pretend-organization-of-a-lawless-universe idea that she uses to justify stuff like filing reports to begin with.

For instance: the mandate to give every heteropneum a name. Who the fuck came up with that? Why not numbers? What, after all, would be wrong with the pseudo-precision numbers allow, in this of all contexts? Miranda would love to be able to rattle off designations like “number 4436” as though the texture of that number, its particular role in a sequence, meant something chilly and clear and rational, even if it transparently didn’t. But no: she has to come up with a name, in words.

She had started with human names, because that seemed, at the start, like a pretty much inexhaustible reservoir of quickly accessible possibilities. Jake. Serena. Madeline. Herbert. Fatima. Will. Liam. Li. Olga. Eventually this became both boring and, surprisingly, somewhat difficult. It was hard to remember which names she had and hadn’t used before, and there were only so many names she actually knew, anyway.

To solve that problem she had started going with the most outlandish or downright silly words she could think of. Cupcake. Mandible. Heliotrope. Budweiser. Toast. Earwax. This ran into its own pathetically predictable-in-advance subtype of problem, which was that some of these heteropneums turned out to be either scientifically interesting or destructive in ways no one wanted to remember. Earwax was one of the latter. Once Miranda had seen and hugged a good friend, curled fetally, mumbling a set of words including “earwax” in between sobs—knowing that she, Miranda, was solely responsible for the queasy and entirely unnecessary but unfortunately unignorable comedic aspect of this completely sincere display of grief—she knew she had to go to a new system.

That had been several systems ago. By this point her system is roughly: no system. She just writes down whatever comes out of her head, and does a quick check to make sure it hasn’t been used yet.

The latest one, though, deserves a little more thought. This is the biggest one in weeks. Field amplitude over 5, which is pretty rare—anything over 3 is considered dangerous, and 5 is well into the range where things start to get interesting from a purely scientific perspective, because humans don’t even know how to make a field that strong. In fact, it has been proven by Hermes Cept—godfather of pneumatech and now resident ancient insufferable curmudgeon on the EPRN Governing Board—that using the standard soul-coherence axioms, a field that strong was impossible. Well, so much for the axioms.

Maria—my girl—had demolished that thing in under three minutes.

Miranda smiles, sips the first sip of this floorday’s fourth cup of coffee, sits back far enough to make her desk chair creak discordantly, and, after pushing some fat stack of paper off the edge of her keyboard and onto the splayed pages of Progress in Boltzman Ethics Vol. 17, types in the name of the latest heteropneum:

“Nice Try.”