I poke around the small fridge, deciding what to eat. Hmm, sandwich for breakfast? Sure, why not. I open the paper wrapping and take a bite of the banh mi sandwich. According to my index, having them for the morning meal is a normal thing here. It tastes good and fills me up, so I can’t complain. I should still have a while before Andrea’s music starts. I settle in at the table and check mail while I eat.

Lin is so cute. I don’t mean physically. I mean, she’s that too. But her letters are always so clever and funny and have this special innocence to them. A side effect of being a genius mostly raised in quarantine, I guess.

I’m a little stumped on what to tell her about this morning. Other than the family drama involving Chad, which I don’t really want to spill her way, yesterday was pretty uneventful. We built things, we dropped them in the river. Then we did it some more. Instead, I scrape through the index entries I put together when I visited my grandparents and tell her more about my life growing up. I’m still spewing text into the tablet when the beat starts throbbing from Andrea’s boat. I wrap up my message and go see if my brothers want to join in today.

Evan’s already getting dressed when I go to grab him. I don’t take Marc’s no for an answer today, and drag him along to exercise with us. He doesn’t protest too much once he’s out of bed. Everyone from yesterday is out again today, with Stan along from the boy’s boat as well. If this picks up any more, we’re going to have to make some kind of expansion to the deck that we can all fit on.

Stretch.

Pose.

Hold.

I can tell which of my sibs never did this before this week. The first timers are clearly hurting, but to their credit, they’re all sticking with it. It’s hard to argue with Andrea’s encouraging expression and smile. She’s just so good at making this look easy and fun, and for people like Stan that can’t seem to get the poses right on the first try, her floating outlines of where your body parts should be make it easy to see exactly how to get it perfect.

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Stan is staring at Keeya and Lucie again. I’m not sure what his fixation is. I don’t have anything in my electronic memory about him being creepy with the nannies or staff back home. Of course for all I know, maybe he was and I just didn’t write anything about it down. One more time a real memory would be nice to have again. Not sure what to do about it though. Should I pull Chad into morning exercises? I don’t think Stan would dare to do it if he were around. No, I don’t want to reinforce Chad’s weird possessiveness. I’m trying to figure out what to do about him when I feel a cluster of bots swarm past him. I turn on the identifier overlay just in time to see that they belong to Louise. I’m not sure what she did to him inside that personal space bubble where I don’t have my bots go, but whatever it was causes him to lose his balance and fall face-first onto the deck.

To Louise: Nicely done.

She gives me a smile and a nod. Stan gets an embarrassed look on his face. When he gets back to his feet, he cuts it out.

I’m not surprised that Stan is totally objectifying them. Honestly, with the way my brothers were raised and who they were raised by, I’m more surprised that they’re not all total creeps.

Andrea lets us go and I take stock of where we are on the collectors. Looks like we got a ton done yesterday. We’re down to just a few more crates of control boards, so we’ll be done with them by lunchtime if we keep up the same pace as yesterday. That should give us a good chunk of the afternoon off before we need to split up to install the first set of filters.

I should build with the Geologist girls on their boat this morning. I still feel like I barely know some of them and this is a good opportunity to spend some quality time with them.

The quick rinse in the shower is refreshing, though with the humidity I’m not sure if it’s even worth the effort, since I’m sweating again right away anyway. I hope I get used to this constant mugginess one of these days.