I hear the throbbing of a familiar beat in the distance, though as I look around, the room seems strange. Where am I?

I feel a gentle rocking. I’m on a boat.

Vietnam. Right.

I get up and hit the head as I start reading my memory back in for the day. I know that beat now. I grab my workout clothes.

“Hey, brothers,” I say, loudly enough to wake up Evan and Marc. I ignore their sleepy grumbles. “You guys want to come for Andrea’s morning exercise party?”

Marc calls out a no from his room. Evan just groans.

“You sure, Evan?” I ask him. “You know Andrea’s going to have Valerie out there. Probably in yoga gear.”

That works. Evan is up and dressed in moments. I glance at my task list to see if there’s anything else I need to do before I go exercise. Just one more thing.

“Marc, you remember you’re on mosquito duty today?”

“Yeah, I got it,” he says, less groggy now.

“And don’t forget that you’re in charge of coordinating it from here on out this trip. You good?”

“On it,” he confirms as my overlay shows his cloud dispersing. A couple of mosquitos drop dead on the deck as we head out.

The walkways between the boats are still up, so I walk over to Andrea’s cat where she’s got a good sized group already starting stretches. Looks like she’s already recruited all the girls plus Stan, though from where his eyes are glued, I think that his participation has more to do with taking an opportunity to ogle Keeya and Lucie than anything else. Evan and I fall in line, stretching and posing and sweating as the sun climbs up the sky. It’s a great workout. I’m feeling physically exhausted and mentally energized by the end of it. Evan is smiling as we walk back, he had the spot right behind Valerie and enjoyed a good view the whole time.

My bot eyes pointing behind me see that Keeya and Lucie are lingering and talking with Louise and Valerie. Good.

I give Evan the first shot at the shower and grab some breakfast. I choose one of the sticky rice bundles from the fridge. It’s pink and smells fruity. Biting in, it’s sweet. Not bad. I chew absently as I grab my tablet and check email. The satellite connection isn’t great this morning, but it’s enough for moving messages as long as they’re just text. I skim through the standard junk that I get, the administrivia of running the Butler Institute. A message from Chuck updates me on the VR headset integration work. Sheryl loved the way the press event went. Alan’s message gets me current on all the regular business and needs a response for a couple of questions he had. I fire back a reply.

The email from Lin, which I saved till the end, clues me in on her life yesterday. I pop the last bite of sticky rice into my mouth and type out a response telling her more about what we got done yesterday and how excited I am to see her again. I’m almost done writing when Evan gets done with the shower. I wrap up and go get cleaned up. Once I’m dressed, I’m feeling ready to start the day for real.

Keeya and Lucie are still on Louise’s boat, eating and talking with her. I borrow Steph to help with launch duty since she seems to be the fastest worker in the Geologists’ class and the two of us head to Chad’s boat. My bots feel that he’s still in bed. A larger-than-king-sized bed that he must have custom built in there. Unsurprisingly, it’s the only bed on the boat. He’s so going to wreck all our plans. Steph waits on the deck while I pop inside the cabin.

I give his closed door a knock. “Hey Chad, ready to get started?”

“Yeah,” comes his groggy voice through the thin plastic of the door. “Just give me a couple.”

Stepping back out to the deck, I pull a couple of crates of control boards over and make sure the other boats are stocked. My bots reach out to the riverbanks on either side of us and start piling materials up on the deck. Steph sees the piles forming and joins in without needing any instructions. She’s quiet around me, which is weird because I know she’s usually chatty with other people. My index tells me that I suspect she’s intimidated by me, but I don’t have a good reason why. I try to make some small talk to put her at ease while we gather, but I can’t get more than single word answers out of her.

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We need to get more collectors out today than we did yesterday, so I send a portion of my bots out to the riverbank to self-replicate and bulk up my cloud pretty significantly. I don’t push to my capacity, because Louise says that’s a sure way to wreck my brain more, but I do get big enough that I should be able to build a lot faster today. Chad eventually comes out to the deck, a package of sticky rice in one hand. He sits and eats as he sends out bots to gather. The pile is growing quickly now.

“How fast can you unload the collectors?” I ask Steph.

“Probably as fast as you can build. I went and did unloading for Louise and Andrea yesterday and kept up pretty easily,” she responds in her longest answer of the morning.

“Great,” I say, and get started building. With my larger cloud, I’m putting out several each minute. True to her word, Steph is keeping up. Chad keeps the materials flowing in and we get more done in the first couple of hours than the boys and I did all day yesterday.

“Keeya and Lucie are over with Andrea and them?” Chad asks. His voice seems carefully casual. I think I was on to something thinking that he’d get jealous if he saw them getting close with any of our brothers.

“Yeah, I think they’re hitting it off. We all like them.”

“Yeah, me too,” Chad grins.

I don’t have a good response that won’t pick a fight, so we go back to working in silence.

“You have a chance to think about what we talked about the other day?” I finally ask.

“Yeah. Still thinking about it. Still need to talk to them about it. Father always believed in honoring his commitments, and they’ve had promises made to them.”

“Right, yeah, that’s fair. But the contract doesn’t put you on the hook to deliver, just gives you an option you can exercise. Unless you’ve made some additional agreements.”

“Let me talk to them,” he says. “I can probably do it today.”

“Please do,” I ask, trying not to sound angry at him.

Steph looks confused by the exchange. Probably better that way. I hope Keeya and Lucie will be prepped enough from their talks with the sisters. I hope things go the way I need them to when they have that conversation.

Another build, another, another, another. Splash, splash, splash.

“Mind if I put the shade up?” I ask as the sun climbs higher into the sky.

“Go for it,” Chad says.

I pull the canvas over the frame from the cabin, shading the deck.

Another build, another, another, another. Splash, splash, splash.

“So how has it been in Tanzania? And the other countries you’ve been working in? I’ve read the reports, and heard your stories at the restaurant, but tell me the rest.”

Chad starts regaling us with anecdotes from his travels. People he’s met, customs he thought were funny, the time his team messed up and didn’t prep a village and he ended up getting chased out. They let him back the next week once his people had smoothed things over, and they threw a big feast in his honor after he built them a well and a solar farm.

Time flows faster, and Mek brings lunch around. I grab a couple more crates of control boards over and resupply the Geologists’ boats. The afternoon rushes by with a steady flow of Chad’s stories. I talk about the Hawaii trip, describing the park that we built on the old strip mine, the run-in with Dorothy, the platforms we built. I leave out my dark time. I’m not up for that conversation with Chad. Besides, the urge to kill myself feels distant now. I still acknowledge that I’m a terrible person, but it’s not the same fixation that it used to be. Thanks Andrea.

Steph mostly stays quiet, occasionally asking questions. She almost looks star-struck when she talks to either of us. I wonder if she has Marc’s same hero-worship complex. Just as I think of my unfiltered brother, he ambles across the connecting bridge toward us. He stays and chats for a few while we build and deploy, then moves on to the Geologists’ boats. Chad grabs us some drinks from his fridge. He takes a soda this time. Good. It’s a little early in the day to start drinking. I’m glad his beverage choice isn’t exclusively beer these days, I was starting to wonder.

Keeya and Lucie come over the bridge.

“Hey, Chad,” they say in unison in a sing-songy voice. It’s clearly some kind of an inside joke as they giggle afterwards.

“Hey, babes,” he replies. “You two have a good morning?”

“Very good,” Lucie says, smiling. “Your sisters are so nice.”

“And Valerie,” Keeya adds. “So very nice.”

Chad’s eyes follow the two of them as they go inside the boat and step into the bedroom. At least he doesn’t try to go join them. And it sounds like step one in our plan to get them to solve my Chad problem worked out. I dare to start feeling some hope that we can resolve things without wrecking all my financial plans. And with the work we’ve done this morning and the production I’ve felt on the other boats, we’re actually ahead of schedule on the collectors. We’ll be done with them early tomorrow at this rate.

Must be a good day.