Dear Jim,

I was surprised when I found several messages from our dear Cluster Coordinator Reginald Pollak this morning. They gradually got more and more unfriendly and impatient, but of course I did not read them while I was asleep. The nights are long now and I didn't think I had anything urgent to do. From what I could understand from the rather erratic writing, there was something wrong with the heating system of the pod which he shared with his wife. They were cold and I had to come over and fix it NOW, or even better, yesterday.

I sighed, filled a thermos of tea, packed two nutri bars into my tool box and put on my warm puffy orange jacket and white winter boots. Before I had walked even half of the stairs down from the pod I went back to grab my orange wool hat with the mission logo.

The sun was just a white disc behind the clouds and ice crystals were lying behind bushels of grass and in small depressions on the ground, where they could not be blown away by the sharp wind. The soil was frozen hard under my boots.

There was a light on in Peter's shed, but the only other people I saw outside were Laszlo and Arthur discussing something in front of Arthur's and Maia's pod. They went back inside rather quickly, though. I walked down to the lake once I had crossed the bridge. There was a thin film of ragged ice along the shore.

I could already see the Pollaks' pod. I haven't been invited there yet, I knew they had set up a tent in front of the pod in summer. This tent served them as an outside living room during warm weather, as others have told me. I heard it is quite nice. Of course I saw said tent as I approached. It was large and rather high and looked quite sturdy from the outside. It also blocked the entrance to the pod. Therefore I guessed I had to pass through it to get inside.

When I opened the zipper of the entrance flap and pushed it aside I saw that if I just crossed the middle of the tent I would reach the stairs to the pod with just a few strides. I however stopped and looked around first. It was the fanciest tent I had ever seen, but it was also the most frozen tent I had ever seen. The whole inside of the tarpaulin was covered in a thin layer of ice, which had painted intricate floral ornaments on the whole surface. The chandelier on the ceiling had small icicles hanging from the coloured glass crystals. There were glasses of frozen water on the tacky fake marble folding table with the shiny gold-painted legs.

Next to the table there was a half-deflated blow-up sofa with a wine-red, fake-leather covering. Text to it stood a similar chair – I would not say comfy chair, as it didn't look comfy at all. It probably looked good on pictures. Nobody was there to see the face I made at it.

At one end of the tent there was a large bed. No, it was huge. Easy to get away from your snoring partner in one of these, I guess. A curtain-like mosquito net flowed down from the ceiling onto this bed, half obscuring what looked like hundreds of cushions.

Opposite the bed, at the other end of the tent, lay on the ground what probably surprised me the most.. It was a blow-up jacuzzi which had burst in the cold and could now only hold water – or rather ice – about knee high. (That's my knees, probably someone else's calves.) In the middle of this frozen pool stood a robo-maid household bot. It was very obviously frozen stuck but it also did not look like it would have worked otherwise. These things are usually not built to stand in a pool of water, so I guess its trip into the jacuzzi resulted in a system fault. It had just stayed there and slowly froze. Looks like the Pollaks will have to do their own housework until I get it to work again. Who knows, it could take me a looong, looong time to fix it, you know? Maybe never?

Anyway, I could already conclude what must have happened, especially as I had to step around a large heater when I crossed the room. I took a deep breath and walked up the stairs. The door was immediately opened by Mr Pollak. He was wearing a thick-patterned turtleneck sweater under his uniform jacket with the golden tassles. He had very fuzzy slippers on his feet.

'Finally, you are here. What took you so long?' he greeted me, while waving me inside. He quickly shut the door behind me, presumably to keep the cold outside. It was already quite cool in the pod, but I was still ordered to take my shoes off at the door. The floor was indeed quite cold. There did not seem to be slippers for guests.

'Crystal almost had a nervous breakdown, she had to lie down to rest,' he went on. 'Yo'du better not disturb her.'

I refrained from rolling my eyes. I instead looked around the room, which I noticed did not have the standard furnishings of a pod. The whole interior was kind of shiny; everything was chrome and beige. There were glittering glass crystals around the windows and at various other places like an elementary school kid went crazy with a sheet of stickers. It was the kind of tastelessness you can only achieve with lots of money.

'Well, do something! The heating is off! I tried all the buttons. It doesn't do anything,' Mr Pollak commanded, waving at the main console.

'Am I right in assuming that you tried to heat that tent of yours with your pod's heating system?' I asked.

'Of course! How do you think we live in there without any heating in this weather?' he said waving his hands in frustration. 'And it still didn't get warm enough!'

I sighed and nodded.

'You see. . . that just doesn't work. You can just as well try to heat the outside area around your tent,' I tried to explain.

'It's a faulty system, that's what I always told Crystal. The people who designed these systems never actually had to live in a pod. They had no idea what is needed,' Mr Pollak stated, nodding to himself.

'Like. . . heating a tent, right?' I asked ironically – which Mr Pollak missed completely.

'You get it. Exactly. It's not like anyone can actually live in these tiny boxes, right? I mean, that's just inhuman. How should anyone do that for a prolonged time? I have a boat back home that is much bigger than this,' he explained, like it was the most normal thing.

I had meanwhile studied the log of the heating and cooling system, and things didn't look good. There had been alerts – not for days, but weeks, which someone had manually dismissed every time.

'Well, I have bad news for you here. I will have to get to the bottom of your pod and open the outer hatch. I don't know yet what I will find exactly, but the logs tell me that there are maybe a few fried parts. I am not sure if I have replacements for all of them immediately. I may have to request some from the Zephyrus. I might be able to get your heating work well enough so you don't freeze in your pod tonight. Great, right?' I didn't wait for an answer and tried to overlook the deep frown in Mr Pollak's face, while I shut down diagnostics mode on the main console. I wanted to be sure nobody was meddling with it. And by nobody, I mean Mr Pollak.

I put my shoes back on and went outside. I had to exit through the tent and walk around the whole structure to get to the bottom of the pod. As soon as I opened the flap in the tarpaulin, the icy wind blew into my face. I knew that this was not going to be any fun. On the other hand, the weather was in my favour, as it kept Mr Pollak from standing next to me and giving 'helpful' advice.

Fortunately I found a ladder nearby, so I climbed up and opened the hatch of the heating system. I rummaged around in the innards of the Pollaks' pod. As I could not wear my gloves while doing this, my fingers were soon freezing. I was glad for the thermos of warm tea I had brought with me, but still after a while my fingers seemed completely numb. Retreating to the tent for a little while seemed like a good idea. I sat on the sagging sofa, holding a cup of tea and felt my fingers going from numb to tingling. The tea was beginning to cool.

Suddenly Crystal stuck her head out of the door of the pod, screeching something about being cold and how I should get off my behind and do my job and how nobody was ever doing their job and that's where all the problems come from. It made me very angry, but I decided to just finish this and get away from there as fast as possible.

It took me another hour to patch up the system enough so the Pollaks would have a halfway warm interior. There wasn't more I could do at that moment. I had to take some parts of the heating system with me and try to repair them later at my pod, when I could actually feel my hands. The Pollaks were both not happy about this news and Crystal had a screaming fit when I told them that if they tried to heat up their tent again their heating system would be dead for good and there was nothing I could do. After this I retreated as fast as possible.

On the way back to my pod I walked past Gerald's barn. As I was already in the area, I decided to check whether everything was alright with the incubator. I opened the barn door and was surprised to see a small light inside the otherwise empty room. There was also faint music. In front of the light sat a person crosslegged on the floor. I soon realized that it was Yang. The music was coming from his wrist pad. As I walked past him to the incubator I saw that his eyes were closed. I was just connecting my pad to the machine, when he opened them. My fingers were tingling as it was a lot warmer inside here than out in the wind.

'What are you doing?' I asked.

'I lost my inner balance,' Yang answered, while closing his eyes again. He seemed to think it explained everything.

'Uh-huh,' I answered uncertainly.

Suddenly Yang jumped up. I immediately took a step back.

'He threw my food away!' he suddenly screamed. Then he took a deep breath and sat down again.

'What?' I asked with a racing heart.

'Dough. He said it smells funny. I had prepared it for two days,' Yang answered, his voice shaking.

'Oh. That's. . . ' I managed to say before Yang jumped up again.

'I almost struck him with my favourite pan!' Yang shouted again before sitting back down.

'Please go ahead. Does that pan of yours work for the whole family?' I asked.

Yang opened one eye, then patted the floor next to him.

'Tell me about it,' he said. 'Maybe we can find inner peace together.'

And that's how I ended up sitting on the floor of Gerald's barn for a good hour, listening to Yang's music and searching for peace, balance and whatnot. I am still uncertain of the result.

Love,
Sarah

Tavaron

13.05.24 Front Page

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