The Wandering Island Factory by TR Nowry Read Free Book Online

He wasn't flooded with this kind of compulsion on the behemoth. He never flooded her with emails or phone calls. It must have something to do with proximity.
    He ordered another ice water with a lemon wedge and changed seats for one with more shade.

    He watched her drain a can of chickpeas at the mini sink in the room, then emptied it and some canola oil into a wok and stir it over their tiny burner. The oil started to sizzle.
    "Ten minutes until the movie," he said.
    "It's alright. It'll be done by then, promise." She sprinkled in the popcorn kernels, a few shakes of Creole seasoning, a pinch of salt, and put a lid on it. Giving it an occasional shake of the handle to keep it from burning.
    "Eight minutes," he teased.
    "Patience," she teased back.
    Pop. . . pop pop. . . pop!
    As she opened the lid a crack, a puff of steam emerged. Quickly returning the lid, she resumed the shaking, sloshing motion across the burner. "Just a few minutes more. It'll be worth it. Promise. It's like nothing you've ever had before." Then she hesitated with its delay. "I've never tried it with one of these before. I wonder if there's any difference between burner—"
    The wok exploded in pops for a full two minutes or more, then trailed off.
    She turned the heat off, poured it all into their biggest bowl, then drizzled a tiny bit of olive oil across the top before returning to the bed to watch their last movie before tomorrow's checkout.
    He reached in, more than a little dubious of what chickpeas had to offer to popcorn. The Creole seasoning gave the popcorn a little spicy kick of heat while drastically dropping the sodium count. He gathered his courage and sampled a chickpea. It was still warm in his fingers, a little hard like the flaky crust of a deep-fried fish, but it melted in his mouth like a cheesy puff. "Wow!" he said, skipping the popcorn and fishing for more chickpeas. "Oh my God! Why don't they serve these at theaters?"
    "Shhhh!!!" she said, "The movie's on."
    He turned out the light as they snuggled closer and prepared for their last night together. Chickpeas. . . who would have known how perfect they could be?

[Chapter 8]
    He picked up the phone and called the control room. "Yes, this is Jason down in the. . . yes, that's right, the 'to chilled air injector' is hovering near it's red line. . . No, no sir, that's not the number I see here. . . yes sir," he then reported the numbers off of each of his dials.
    Something had gone wrong with the calibration between the electronic and manual sensors. Maintenance would be there in a matter of minutes. It had happened before and was the sole reason for his eyes and patience over the many months.
    He surrendered his notebooks and they checked times and dates with those recorded in the computer logs.
    He even got praise for his diligence.
    As had happened once before, the electronic sensors lost their sensitivity. After much commotion, they were replaced, and his dull task continued as it had before.
    The bowels of the ship had given him hours of quiet time to contemplate life. Loud, sure, it was deafening down there, but the headphones protected him from the intense sound. To his ears, the squeaks were muffled to a distant rocking chair.
    He listened to MP3s of his favorite late-night show, mixed with music.
    Over the last year, he had become addicted to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. It seemed the perfect mix of paranoid insanity, conspiracy theory, ghost stories, and NASA scientists with PHDs as far as the eye could see. Both ends of the spectrum, and somehow the host seemed to balance it all perfectly. It came complete with people like Gina's mother who claimed to go fishing with Bigfoot and get abducted by aliens on a regular basis.
    If she was crazy, as her children believed, she was certainly not alone. It also helped put crazy into perspective.
    Diligently, he continued taking notes and reading dials.

    The dials changed, depending on what the behemoth was building. They had