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Family, Chaos, and Realizations

Ahfl_icon Author: THX 0477 Attempting NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, 2011. Wish me luck! Dr. Tim's Neurotic Rules of Ficly Life [Disclaimer: This is not intended to be binding nor in any way an expectation of general members of Fic... Read Bio

With a nod and a worried look, Gefel from swing shift sat at the adjacent com station. Within a minute, Largo from night shift was to my left, taking a data station from one of the protocol nerds. Two more minutes and Midshipman Hurald was on the other side of the bridge hammering out code, not a true carto, but a recreational coder who filled in at times.

Separately, I found each of them rather annoying, tiresome, or just weird. At that moment, our collective coding struggling against a wave of error logs and malware, I loved them like family.

Somehow out of the pyrotechnic chaos, a pattern emerged, one of which I wasn’t fully aware at first. Subconscious recognition became gestalt ideation became gut-based hunch.

“I know where he is,” I muttered, more to myself, an expression of honest surprise.

“Whazzat, carto?”

“I know…” A panel exploded cutting me off.

The fire extinguished, the query came again, “You were saying?”

“The saboteur, I know where he is.” The bridge seemed oddly quiet.

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  1. Avatar Shu Sam Chen

    Again, my critiquing skills fail me. I can only say that the slow realisation section defies any attempt to describe. Excellent work.

    Also, I couldn’t find a definition for “gestault”, did you mean “gestalt”?

  2. Ahfl_icon THX 0477

    Yes, I meant gestalt. Sheesh, that’s an embarrassing one to misspell.

  3. Avatar Shu Sam Chen

    It was a very intensely literate (?) phrase… I’m quite embarrassed to say that I still have no idea what it means.

  4. Avatar Luke Nicolaou

    That must have been a tongue twister of a sentence :D I love it, even though I don’t understand the meaning behind it :p

  5. Avatar Jim Stitzel

    Beautiful series, fellas. I love this stuff.

    And for the record, I completely understood that sentence. :)

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