So… I was left feeling somewhat concerned about the Siliconoids, especially after my brief encounters with them when I first arrived. Blueneck had more than a few things to say about their behaviors. But a great deal of what he told me was blocked out by my Relative Profanity Filter, so I assumed he wasn’t really offering relevant information. I thought about lowering the setting to make his comments a bit clearer, just in case there was something in his stream of xenosexuallity focused invective, but at the time I decided against it. I knew my job well enough, I thought, the probably do too. Later, I realized I should have been a little less sensitive. At that moment. And perhaps for my entire time on the station, really.

I asked to see my duty station, and he showed me into the tight space behind the force field array enveloping the egg-shaped transferal chamber.

Inside were both the disassembly areas, where he would be working and the filtering area where I would be. I realized we weren’t alone.

There was a form, but it was even more alien than what I’d seen so far, amoeboid at best, compulsively shape-shifting at worst. It gave me a vertigo headache just looking at it. Blueneck introduced it as ‘Because’ a Gnarloshifter who’s job it was to keep the surfaces of the chamber from collecting a critical mass of supersymetrical particles. Yep, he was the guy with the mop.

Ah, a Gnarloshifter. I relaxed as the shape shifting imagery was all in my mind then. Gnarloshifters are a shifty bunch, telepathic by nature, fluid by inclination. The whole ambiguous nature of what I saw was actually in my own mind.

Hmm... I thought to myself, I must be more unfocused than usual. I also remembered the shifters were more sensitive than most about psycho-reflective perception defenses and tend to be a bit reactionary about it.

He, however, seemed friendly enough. For a perception twisting amoeboid, that was.

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Blueneck’s neck stump quivered as he showed me my filtering stall.

“Here’s *blank*where you do your *blank**blank*work,” he told me. “And as long as you can *blank*scrub the *blank*filters clear of their *blank*interdimensional spunk, no one will have any problems with you, even with those antennae and all.”

“I thought I’m cleaning supersymetrical residue,” I replied.

He waggled his thick neck.

“Yeah, you keep telling *blank*yourself that,” he offered. “Things get *blank*mixed. You gotta know that. You know your *blank*job, don’t you?”

I nodded, such was my life, antennae and all. I examined the stall, noting it was as sparkling as the rest of the chamber. I also noted there was some sort of closed porthole as well welded into the external, nonorganic wall.

“What’s that for,” I asked.

“You use that,” he told me. “In case you are *blank*claustrophobic. Or you get really *blank*bored.”

“Why would that even happen?”

“We had a couple*blank**blank* filterers who were a bit like that,” he advised. “Doesn’t really matter if you *blank*open it or not. Not like there’s much to *blank*see.

“Seems like a waste then,” I thought. “To have windows which open up to nothing?”

“Seemed to *blank*work for them,” Blueneck admitted. “Sfroga *blank*psychology, who can *blank**blank*figure it.”

“Isn’t It just black out there,” I was thinking of the Dark Cluster, full of black holes and black interstellar dust.

“As I*blank* said,” he repeated. “If you get really, really *blank*bored. Or go really, really *blank* crazy.”

Well, I wondered, I was only going to be here for a couple hundred phase shifts, how bored was I going to get? And how crazy was I going to get? How crazy could I possibly get?

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