A Major Issue
Lt. Sophie barely noticed the date at all. She had things to do, important things, that could not wait. As usual, she had taken too many jobs and ended up working on several projects at once. Her hand already felt kind of sore from all the drawing, empty tea mugs with the bags slowly rotting inside them were spread all over the place and she hadn’t eaten anything but Toylent in days. Worst of all, the Gaming Marathon was drawing nearer each day, and there was still so much to prepare…
Startled by the beeping of her communicator, she almost fell off her chair. “What the…?” It was Sergeant Dutch.
“Good day, Lieutenant. I haven’t seen you around in days. Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes. I am. I am just very, very busy.”
“Ah of course. Well, you need to get out though. You cannot work 24/7.”
“But there’s no time -”
“Shush. People start to believe you’re dead and I keep receiving weird questioning about hot dogs and such. Meet me for lunch, or I’ll drag you out of your bunk.”
She sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
After carefully saving all her progress and putting all the scattered mugs in the sink for further cleaning sometime later, she took Major and made her way through the bunker corridors to social life.
It was already a bit late, long past lunch time, when Lt. Sophie and Major made it back into their room. As the door slid open, the Lieutenant felt something was strange. Had somebody been in here? Nothing was missing as far as she could tell from a first glance, but still… She shrugged it off as natural paranoia due to lack of sleep and free time, and then decided to take a long, hot bath to relax from all her duties before going to bed. Tomorrow would be a new day, and a productive one. The Lieutenant realised that Dutch had just come in time to give her one short break she’d really needed. She did, however, not realise that the air vent in her bunker room had been opened.
While Lieutenant Sophie was in the tub, Major sat in the bedroom, enjoying a little treat of natural oil, as the robot’s sensors were triggered by a sudden movement in the room. Something small, and fluffy…
Sophie could not hear the tapping of tiny little feet on the bunker floor. The sound of the latest episode of ‘Ancient Aliens’ covered the hushed squeaking and beeping, as if a heated debate was to be had in the other room. For five, maybe six minutes the scampering and whispering continued before the bedroom fell silent again. All the while Giorgio Tsoukalos was discussing the possibility of ancient alien hovercraft sports on earth.
“Major?” Wrapped in a soft bunker bathrobe and with her hair still dripping wet, the Lieutenant looked for her pet robot. The oil was only half gone. That was unusual, to say the least. Major loved natural oil and never left any of it untouched. She picked up the leftovers, and something weird caught her eye. A golden bottle-cap and a tiny piece of silverish tinsel on her bed. But no sign of the robot…
