The Pike: Ships In The Night by Erik Schubach Read Free Book Online

and hobbled off the ship as they started loading the few cars that were heading back across to the city.
    I made my way to the bus stop for the last leg of the journey home.  I know I could save a half hour in my hour and a half journey by bussing around through Tacoma and up the coast, but I love the water, and the extra time was worth the ferry ride every day.
    As I sat, I watched the girl, still wrapped up in her reading as she walked, about a block away.  She stood at a corner up on Second in front of a little restaurant in a strip mall.  There wasn't a sign on the storefront except a handwritten one that proclaimed they had “Island Cuisine”.  She stuffed her papers into her bag then pulled out her cell and just stared at it.  Then her head bobbed like she was counting down.  She reanimated just as the bus pulled up at my stop, and she smiled at herself and strode into the restaurant.  She was sort of an odd platypus.
    I showed my pass to the driver and made my way to the back of the bus, not too terribly excited to go home.  I just watched the other riders on the bus to keep my mind off of the lunch conversation with Trip.

Chapter 4 – So Close
    I watched the seconds tick down on my cell waiting for precisely six forty.  That's when I went into the Kusina Ni Tala.  I pocketed my cell and stepped through the door of the little restaurant in the little strip mall.  My smile bloomed when mom called out to me in Tagalog from where she was placing plates of food in front of some customers seated near the corner, “Ligaya, ang aking magandang Anak.”
    I stepped up to her, blushing, and looking around to the customers who had turned to look at me.  “Mooom, English, please.”  Then as a direct inverse to my request, I asked in a small voice, “Mano po?”  I took her offered hand and pressed the back of it to my forehead.
    She switched to English as she responded with what I think was a sly smirk, “God bless you.”
    I'm not sure since I've never been really good at identifying emotions and verbal cues of social conventions.  But I believe she always enjoys saying that to me because she knows that I cannot prescribe to the worship of any entity I cannot quantify using the available data set and empirical evidence presented to me to date.
    I always felt like a little girl around my mother, and I just scurried off to the back kitchen to work on her books.  Most emotions are beyond my grasp, but I did know I loved my mom and dad with all my heart.  Well if a muscle which precipitates the flow of blood throughout the body, to oxygenate the cells, is the source of that particular emotion.
    I paused on my way to the little desk in the corner and sighed.  We must have lost another kitchen assistant.  The dishes were piling up and not a person in sight.  I went through the list of assistants in my head.  This last one was Lisa Ives.  They only stuck around a month or two before moving on to more gainful employment opportunities.  I really wish we could afford to pay them more than minimum wage and mom would have more help.
    I set my things on the little wooden chair by the desk and grabbed some rubber gloves and started working on the dishes and pans.  Mom didn't need to try doing everything herself.  She stepped into the back to prepare some orders and paused to see me scrubbing at the particulate matter off a plate.  She shook her head at me and smiled.  Weren't those contradictory and mutually exclusive actions?
    She asked as she started scooping some rice from the steamer, “How was your day?  Have you made that breakthrough you've been hoping for?”
    I shook my head as I washed the soap off the plate with the sprayer.  “The day was satisfactory.  We are progressing nicely on the hardware.  We've been able to successfully predict and duplicate the quantum superposition of a pair of qubit states in virtually any quantum superposition of four states.”
    I continued excitedly, “We are