Neither Aaron nor Lucy decided to contribute any more personal reveals to the mix. Rather, actually, now that they had been firmly established as ‘being together’, Lucy and John didn’t try to hide their little flirts, kisses, or holding hands while they walked to go fetch more wood. The fact that Lucy suddenly wanted John to help go gather the firewood as they got further and further from camp to find material spoke to the kind of wood they might actually being trying to gather. He wasn’t jealous. Really. He was crazy jealous.
“How did I miss it. It seems so obvious thinking back now.” Aaron was still shell-shocked over his oblivion. Honestly, Alan was a little shocked as well. Of them all, Aaron wasn’t necessarily the smartest, but he was goddamned sharp. They all let him lead quite naturally, the guy was good at being in charge and making choices. He usually saw the angles that the others missed. He synthesized each of their strengths into a more cohesive whole, making the group so much more than they would be as a collection of individuals.
Shit, Aaron was one of those CEOs that actually earned their keep. That, more than John’s emotional airing of trauma, was what was really blowing Alan’s mind right now, now that he even considered it. His friends were downright incredible, really. It made him feel so much more out of place again, more of an outsider. That threesome thing though… ugh, goddamn Lucy. If he’d gotten in shape like John, might that have happened?
Would he even have wanted it to have happened?
Grumbling to himself, Alan followed Aaron down to the river. They’d partially built the smoking lattice, but John and Aaron had only brought back a few extra fish beyond what they feasted on for dinner. The issue apparently was carrying enough of them, so Aaron had brought the spear and Alan had a long stick. There was a big bundle of grass loosely tied onto the stick. They were going to use it to tie the fish on by their gills after they were killed and cleaned. The spear’s sharp blade made the cleaning process a lot better, even though the tip was chipped off and one of the two sharp edges was blunted a little from cutting up wood for kindling.
The trap was already full of fish, splashing. Dozens of them within a good sized ring wall of stacked rocks. Occasionally one jumped clear over and there was even a little part of the wall partially collapsed, probably from fish hitting it as they jumped. Mostly though, there were lots of fish ranging from as long as his forearm to as long as his entire arm. Aaron didn’t hesitate, he picked up a rock and went in clubbing fish in the head as well as he could, then tossing the now mostly still fish up to the bank for Alan to clean.
He hadn’t hardly ever gone fishing or cleaned fish since he was a kid. He’d had a friend who went with their dad all the time and he’d learned there. Alan’s parents had never really been big on fishing. In fact he knew his dad had talked about fishing as a little boy, but he might not ever have done it since then. The result was that Alan had to work himself up to really cleaning the fish properly. Cut the head off, slice down the belly, pulled everything out with your thumb, then place it to drain the blood while you did the next one.
It was awkward at first and the muscle twitches that still happened freaked him out to start with, but he’d processed some chickens and rabbits going up. Those were much tougher to deal with, they weren’t this weird scaled thing you got from the water, those were things you fed and cared for while they grew up from being cute little babies. So it wasn’t too long before they got a rhythm going. They worked up enough of a rhythm that they had enough big fish to burden them both within a few hours, then Aaron opened up an exit in the trap wall. No need to make any fish suffer if they had what they needed for the day.
Hell, there was maybe a hundred pounds of edible meat here. If they could smoke it right, they had enough to feast on for the better part of a week! It was goddamned haul. Thank the seemingly untouched wild. The fish were fucking prolific in the river right now and even their unrefined and shot in the dark trap had borne fruitfully. They ran into a bit of a problem, namely they had intended to hand the fish by the gills and Alan had cleaned them by removing the heads first… leaving nothing to string through. It was resolved by using a sharpened stick to jab a hole through near the tailfin and string them that way.
Aaron didn’t even grumble about the mistake at all, though Alan could tell the man was mildly annoyed. He realized Alan knew it was a deviation from their plan that had required extra work. Whether or not this was a better choice is something that could be debated, but in either case, Aaron knew a good leader didn’t need to brow beat anyone over something they’d already figured out on their own. Alan figured yet again it was one reason why Aaron had been a fairly successful CEO.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Not that… not that the companies he worked at were all successful. You wouldn’t find Aaron on a magazine cover or in the Fortune 1000 list. He wasn’t even wealthy by the lowest standard of the industry. Rather, however, each company he left was more stably profitable and with lower turnover than when he’d arrived. Slower growth in exchange for reliable growth. It wasn’t a popular mindset in the west coast tech industry, even having reached a point of semi-maturity and long past the wild-west days of the Silicon Valley. Those quick to IPO or quick to acquisition companies were high risk and not often high reward. In a hundred examples less than one was likely to be considered a real success.
On the flipside, the slower, stable growth companies that retained employees might never become multi-billion dollar names or have multi-hundred million dollar acquisitions just five years after their founding, but they had a very high success rate. Success being, they made a profit, they paid their people well, they kept their people, they delivered on their promises. They endured. Low risk, moderate rewards. When you averaged it out, these smaller, more stable companies actually made the bulk of the profits in the entire industry, though they were not newsworthy on an individual level.
A lot like small businesses, Alan supposed. Though those small businesses much and frequently lauded in political discussions often underemployed their staff, provided poor to few benefits, and were unstable employers. Small-ish to medium businesses built around long term reliable profit and good treatment of employees were the real success stories and sadly few in number and proportion to the national economy.
“You know,” Alan mused as they each shouldered one end of the stick and the spear, their load of fish-meat dangling in a dense row between them, “I was just thinking about the national economy. Is that crazy? We’re probably not even on Earth anymore. What does the national economy even matter to us?” Aaron had his back to Alan, having taken the front position. They started their way up bank, zig-zagging back and forth on the little goat path up the steep slope that was beginning to be worn into it by their passage.
“I dunno. I figure we’re not only not on Earth, but we’re not even in the same universe. Somehow the idea that we just got teleported doesn’t sit right with me. Afterall, there isn’t magic on Mars, right? Just leaving Earth doesn’t really account for this.” Alan didn’t respond until they got past the worst of the slope, too occupied with just not slipping or running out of breath.
“I guess. Who knows? Maybe we just never knew about it. Even though the monster beaver is all mutant terror looking, it’s still recognizably a beaver, right? The plants, even the small birds we see, the fish. It’s too Earthlike.” Aaron grunted but didn’t respond. They finished the rest of their return trip in silent contemplation. John and Lucy hadn’t returned to the camp and neither was there any more firewood stacked up, so they set their meat-sticks… got to figure out a better name for that… on a little stand that they’d setup by pushing sticks into the ground in a four position pattern and lashed to a square frame of other sticks to make a rectangle. This hung the whole row of fish over the now cold firepit, though the pit didn’t stretch the entire length.
“Damnit, we’re making this lattice and we could probably just smoke them this way!” Aaron was looking at the problem with new eyes and saw the same thing Alan had just noticed.
“I agree. Maybe we’ll widen the firepit? It will take more wood though, to keep it going.”
“We’re not trying to cook them with heat, we need to get mostly smoke going, lots of green wood, burning slowly, right? Something like that.”
“Hmm. Alright, let’s pull up a bunch more rocks from the river and make it longer. When John and Lucy are done fooling around and come back, hopefully they’ll have more fuel. We can all work on gathering more throughout the day. We haven’t seen any animals other than small birds and that beaver, which thankfully doesn’t seem to come this far.” Alan raised an eyebrow at the casual implication of ‘fooling around’ from the man who’d been oblivious to the ‘secret’ relationship just earlier but decided not to say anything about it. Aaron muttered something under his breath though about ‘birth control’, or so Alan guessed. It was actually something that was concerning Alan too.
Maybe being a lifelong virgin because you were afraid, afraid of disease transmission, afraid of unwanted pregnancy, afraid of feeling like you had degraded yourself or your partner or made light of something that you wanted to be very special and private… maybe these fears made him a lot more concerned than he needed to be. He hadn’t ever had a long term relationship that progressed to the point of sex, so he hadn’t exactly done thorough research. It was a real concern though. How would they handle it if Lucy got pregnant? How would that affect their survival?
She was a big girl, able to make the decision, true, but if the moment got away from them and it seemed like a good choice in the moment… Even adults make bad choices when their bodies are doing the talking. Hell, not ‘even’, adults make bad choices all the damned time. Alan was actually a lot more scared of the future than he let on. Aaron was the one that was outwardly concerned, doing the unofficial leader thing. He was worried about the group and the individuals, openly. Alan just kept that fear inside and trusted his friends, even though he was worried.