if you have children someday | Glowfic Constellation

He looks at it a bit despairingly. "Well. We'll be rich."

"Yes sir."

"If you're going to pretend you should probably stop that."

Silence.

Sigh.

They walk. He tries to mentally reconstruct physics and engineering and the Internet.

The baby wakes up and wails. Shasali squeezes cucumber juice into her mouth.

Babies are supposed to get a lot more nutrition than that and they don't know how long she was out there.

"Let me know if you want me to take a turn."

She looks skeptical.

"Easier to believe I'd do that to everybody else? Or did you not believe me about that either?"

"I don't know you."

"We can trade life stories if you want. Some plumbers camped out in my office during the snowstorm but I guess they can't vouch for me. You know Isel."

"Not personally."

"Of her. She didn't feed you all the roboticist's location, did she? I didn't think she knew."

"I don't know anything about that."

He glances curiously at her. "I can't hurt you here, you know."

"I don't know how we got here or if we'll stay here, but I don't know anything anyway."

"I don't blame you."

Walking. Walking.

With a baby who is slowly starving to death on a planet that might not have invented indoor plumbing. He tries to remember if he has ever been this miserable. Maybe when the Voa thing broke.

This is probably less bad than the Voa thing, it was unlikely he'd do that much good with his life.

The baby gets most of the cucumber juice down. Shasali eats the pulp. The baby rejects tiny crumbs of bread.

A strange whirring noise presages a contraption rolling down the street towing wagonloads of grain sacks. The contraption doesn't appear manned.

Wrong about the tech level, then - maybe they had some kind of disaster, have tech they no longer know how to make? They get out of its way.