Sarek's eyes shifted between his calculations and the current listing of accessible Federation telescopes. The long-range systems at Io Station would be the most logical choice for his needs. As he prepared to send a message to Giannina to ask her to contact the necessary personnel at Io Station to schedule time, his keen ears detected the sound of his name in the distance.
He shifted in his seat and noticed Vedek speaking with Petra. He only moved his eyes but despite this, they both seemed to sense his gaze had fallen on them. Petra looked directly at Sarek, smiled, and offered a small wave with her fingertips.
"Good morning, Sarek," Kyla exclaimed, plopping down in her chair in the adjacent cubicle.
Sarek turned his attention from the conspiratorial glances of Vedek and Petra and back to his computer. The small clock at the bottom of his screen read 0918 hours. The beginning of the traditional workday was eighteen minutes ago, but since beginning at Cary Cartographic the week before, he had yet to observe Kyla report to her place of duty prior to 0915. Punctuality among humans seemed to be a flexible concept but for Kyla Perry, it appeared to be utterly optional.
Rather than immediately begin work in penance for her tardiness, she leaned back and took a bite of a circular piece of bread with a hole in its center. Sarek was unclear whether this was a doughnut or a bagel—humans had such a fondness for shaping breads in this fashion—but he supposed the specific label didn't matter.
Why had she not taken her first meal at home? What could she have been doing to make her not only late for work, but also unable to set aside time to consume a morning meal? But then again, she was hardly the only person to eat at her work station. In fact, this seemed to be the rule rather than the exception.
With a mouth still full of partially-chewed bread, she swiveled in her chair and asked, "How's your Monday?"
Why should she be so concerned with the progress of his morning? He was about to explain that he could not offer an assessment of his day when so little of it had transpired when the bright, sing-song voice of the company's receptionist pierced his train of thought.
"Good morning, Sarek!" Alicia called.
Sarek blinked and replied with the traditional response to such a greeting. "Good morning."
"Can I get you anything?" she asked, gripping the tops of his cubicle and leaning into his workspace.
"Clarify."
Alicia's eyes met Kyla's and they both smiled. Alicia said, "Can I get you something to drink?"
"I had thought you worked as the receptionist," he replied. "I was unaware you also functioned as a domestic servant."
After a false start of fluttering choking sounds, both women erupted into laughter. Sarek uttered a little sigh, grateful it would never be heard over the squeals of their mirth. When they calmed sufficiently for conversation to become possible once again he asked, "Why am I so often an object of amusement?"
Alicia's demeanor changed into something more serious. She took in a deep breath and blurted, "We're not making fun of you. You're just very different than anyone we've ever worked with."
"Yeah, it's actually really nice," Kyla added, stuffing another bite of her first meal into her mouth.
"Uh anyway, no, I'm not a servant, I was just trying to be friendly because I was already on the way to the replicator to get myself a coffee," Alicia explained. "It would be no trouble for me to get something for you while I'm there."
Sarek set his hands on the desk, sending the figurine of Zefram Cochrane with the oversized, wobbling head into a flurry of barely perceptible nods. Ingesting anything at his workstation was so contrary to Vulcan custom, yet approximately two-thirds of the office staff—the ones he could see, anyway—were currently either eating or drinking something. Based on his experiences the previous week, this almost ritualistic snacking would continue until it was time to consume mid-meal. Perhaps humans had a greater demand for constant caloric intake.
"So," Alicia murmured, accentuating the vowel sound at the end of the word. "Can I get you anything?"
Sarek briefly pondered the idea of requesting a Vulcan breakfast tea and wondered whether the replicators could manage his preferred first meal drink, but Alicia continued talking in her quest to coax him into a beverage. "I could get you tea, juice, coffee. The replicators make a pretty smooth macchiato if you ask me."
Sarek wasn't sure what a macchiato was, but her mention of coffee for the second time made him think of the superb saccharine concoctions he shared with Amanda.
"Is the replicator capable of generating a beverage called a mocha latte?" he asked.
"A mocha?" A wide smile swept over her features. "Can do. Coming right up."
Sarek nodded and then remembering humans had an almost constant need for appreciation and validation called after her, "Thank you."
Interacting with this species was a constant source of exhaustion and discomfort. All the questions and prying. Perhaps the only time he'd felt even moderately at ease conversing with a human since his relocation to Earth had been with his so-called girlfriend, or woman acquaintance, Amanda. Why was that?
"Morning, Sarek!" Garrett's voice bellowed over the wall of his cubicle.
Sarek's eyes flicked upward in his direction. "Yes, it is morning."
"How are you settling in?"
Sarek sat back from his desk, folded his hands in his lap, and studied his boss. "I have accomplished very little."
Garrett delivered an expression that looked strangely both like a smile and a frown. "Is something wrong?"
"No," Sarek admitted. "It is merely that I have experienced an almost constant barrage of social interaction since my arrival this morning."
Garrett threw his head back and howled with laughter like a pack predator calling others to a hunt. "That's just how Mondays are. People do stuff over the weekends and then they have to come in and talk about it. Welcome to Earth."
"It is customary on Earth to sacrifice productivity in a professional environment for the sake of social engagement?"
"It sounds weird when you say it like that, but I guess so."
"Then why not instruct the staff to arrive at work early, so that they can debrief each other prior to beginning their duties so as to not impact efficiency?"
"Because efficiency would also take a hit if I turned into a slave driver."
"Slavery is illegal within the Federation."
Garrett pinched bridge of his nose and laughed silently to himself. "What I mean is that morale is also important to efficiency. Socializing makes people happy, happy people do better work. If the folks around here want to blow off the first twenty minutes of work and catch up with office friends, I'm okay with it."
"Is participating in this custom mandatory?"
Garrett laughed again. "Not mandatory, no."
Their conversation and Garrett's amusement drew Vedek's attention. He strolled in the direction of Sarek's cubicle, asking, "Having a good morning, Sarek?"
"Hey Sarek, got your mocha!" Alicia said brightly, trotting up behind Vedek.
His eyes closed for a brief moment as he tried to mute his frustration with the increasing size of the impromptu gathering forming around his desk.
"Mocha, huh?" Vedek grinned.
Sarek inquired, "Is something amusing?"
Vedek shrugged. "It's just a little early, don't you think?"
Alicia set the cup on his desk. "It's coffee. Most people drink coffee in the morning, don't they?"
"Sure. It's just that mocha is choc—" Vedek faltered, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Uh, chock full of vitamins."
"It is?" Alicia scoffed.
"Is it inappropriate to drink mocha lattes before a certain time of day?" Sarek asked, wondering if he'd inadvertently broken some human custom.
"No, no," Vedek replied hastily. "In fact, drink up. I just didn't know you liked mocha lattes. Might go get one myself here in a minute. Gotta get those…vitamins."
Sarek reached for the drink, took a sip, and paused a moment to enjoy the pleasant warmth that rippled down to his extremities. He was pleased that his new preferred drink was not only tasty, but also healthy.
Garrett turned to Vedek. "How'd your weekend go?"
"Pretty good. Met this amazing girl on Friday. I actually met her at a bar with Sarek." He shot Sarek a small wink.
"Really?" Garrett asked. "You'll have to bring her to my barbecue next weekend."
"I just might."
Garrett turned back to Sarek. "Speaking of which, I have a Federation Day barbecue every year and the whole office is invited. You should come. Bring your family."
"My family remains on Vulcan," Sarek reminded him.
"Oh, right. Well, bring a friend, bring a girlfriend, or a boyfriend or really, bring whoever you like."
"Sarek's single," Vedek laughed. "But we're trying to get him to meet people."
"I'm still looking for a plus one for the barbecue," Alicia sighed. "But there's no shame in going alone."
Sarek wasn't entirely sure what a barbecue was but it was obviously some kind of social gathering. He knew so few people on Earth and almost all of them currently worked in his office, but he did have a girlfriend. Or was she a woman acquaintance? They never had settled on a preferred term. "I will invite my girlfriend, if you require I bring a guest."
Alicia coughed and Vedek's eyes grew large. Garrett smiled. "It's not required but more the merrier."
Vedek held up a hand. "What? Since when do you have a girlfriend?"
"I met her on Friday night and it did not seem necessary to inform you who I associate with."
Vedek crossed his arms, a huge smile brimming on his mouth. "Wait, are you talking about that woman with the brown hair you ditched me for at the Tiger?"
"Could you explain the function of the word 'ditched' in your sentence?"
"You left the bar without me. You ditched me."
"I see. I did leave you, but you appeared quite occupied with that woman with the orange hair and I—"
"Wait, you took him bar hopping to troll for college girls?" Alicia interrupted, slapping Vedek's shoulder in open disapproval.
"What? I thought he could use a night out after his first week and besides, it seems like it worked out for him," Vedek replied, slinking forward to tap Sarek on the shoulder in a playful motion.
Like so many other human expressions, the looks on Garrett and Alicia's faces were impossible to interpret but distinctly different. Garrett seemed amused, Alicia seemed hurt. Moments later, the informal meeting around his cubicle adjourned and Sarek found himself free to resume his duties. Unfortunately, his mind was now occupied.
He wasn't entirely sure what the precise function of girlfriends were or why Garrett wanted him to bring one, but it appeared appropriate to invite them to his employer's barbecue, whatever that was. He did not object to spending an afternoon in her company—she was so much easier to converse with than most other humans he knew—but there was a problem. He did not have Amanda's contact information. They parted ways at the coffee shop on Friday with a simple goodbye. Amanda had even gone so far as to wish him luck at his new job, which was illogical because luck was illogical, but he sensed she meant well.
He had no way to conveniently message her and extend the invitation, but that did not mean he could not find her. A recent memory of the coffee shop drifted into view in his mind's eye, of Amanda leaning over the bar and declaring that she frequented the establishment "a lot" and Sarek explaining that she had already implied as much and estimating she had made at least 756 visits to the place. The coffee shop was on the way to the learning center where she worked in the evenings: he could look for her there.
With that settled, Sarek returned to the business of scheduling the telescopes at Io Station. He sipped his mocha, pleased with the way the drink soothed and relaxed him. Much to his surprise, few people bothered him throughout the day. It was impossible not to notice the rest of the staff discussing him, but he had no interest in illogical chatter and gossip. When he entered the lunch room to consume his midday meal, he overheard Shannon from the information technology department lean toward her friend and mutter, "Did you hear Sarek has a girlfriend?" to which the friend replied, "What? Who?" He could not discern Shannon's answer, but it did not matter.
By 1645, half of the office had already left work for the day, despite the well-published fact that the workday ended at 1700 hours precisely. Sarek was tempted to do as the others did and leave early, mostly because he wasn't sure when Amanda would make an appearance at Pete's Place, but he continued working until the appointed time out of a rigid sense of duty. The instant the clock read 17:00:00, Sarek rose from his chair, donned his coat and scarf, and quickly strode out of the grand lobby of Cary Cartographic, mildly caught off guard by the sudden realization that he was actually looking forward to something for the first time since relocating to Earth.
The lines of text started to morph into a nebulous blob of nonsense. Her stomach grumbled and an alkaline taste permeated her mouth. Was it getting hotter in here? Why was it becoming so hard to breathe? Amanda closed her eyes and clutched her hands into tight fists, desperate to get her breathing under control.
Just as she started to calm herself, her PADD dinged and a pleasant voice drifted through the earpiece in her right ear. "There are ten minutes remaining on your exam."
Her heartrate spiked into the stratosphere, her eyes wrenched open to stare at the questions that could allegedly pass judgement on her understanding of physics concepts. It might as well have been written in Klingon.
"Calculate Earth's mass given the acceleration due to gravity at the North Pole is 9.830 m/s/s and the radius of the Earth is 6,371 km from center to pole."
"The mass of the Earth? What?" she hissed under her breath.
The girl next to her shot her a disapproving, quizzical look. Amanda almost felt giddy with despair and swiped her finger over the PADD, broken to realize she was only two-thirds of the way done with the exam.
She skimmed the other questions and upon deciding they were just as impossible to answer, went back to the question about calculating the planet's mass. She picked up her stylus and tried shuffling some numbers around on the page to see if she could get an answer that even remotely made sense. When the voice told her she had five minutes remaining, another shot of panic ricocheted through her mind, hampering her ability to think clearly so much that she doubted she would even recognize her own name.
"This completes your exam," the earpiece tyrant proclaimed.
The screen went blank, a little spinning wheel faded into view, indicating the device's algorithms were considering the worthiness of her answers and soon a new screen appeared, heralding the delivery of her score. Amanda nearly threw up. Confirming the words scrawled on the PADD, the pleasant voice began to read along.
"Your score for this exam is 46.92%. If you have questions or comments concerning this exam, please contact your professor within three standard days. You are prohibited from discussing this exam with—"
Amanda ripped the tiny bud from her ear, too distraught to listen to the droll instructions she'd heard dozens of times before. She grabbed her bag and fought through the crowd of students in the auditorium. The teaching assistants were waving and urging them to turn in the secured testing PADDs and Amanda dumped it unceremoniously into a bin on her way out, ignoring the guffaws about being gentler with the devices.
She was going to fail physics. The computer would drop her lowest of four exams but because she only scored an abysmal 53.02% on the first midterm, she had been counting on doing better from then on, not worse. Even if she got perfect scores on the rest of her exams and assignments, the best she could get in the class was a B.
She drifted back in the direction of her dorm on autopilot, fighting back tears and trying to find any positive thought swimming around in the gloom and panic of another bombed physics midterm. Before she knew it, she was standing at the door to her room. She hovered there for nearly a full minute, staring at nothing in particular.
She had studied so hard. Maybe she had gone out Friday night but the rest of the weekend had been devoted to physics. Why couldn't she just learn this stuff?
All the fears she had about school as a child crept back into her mind, the years of struggling with words that seemed to move around on a page and classmates that would call her stupid and well-meaning teachers who told her she just "learned a little bit differently than everyone else." Intensive tutoring really had made a massive dent in her learning disability but the old anxieties and lack of confidence never went away. Oh how she was feeling them now.
When she finally mustered the energy to open the door, she found Mara sitting in the disaster that was her side of the room, applying a layer of makeup.
"Hey," she called coyly.
"Hey," Amanda mumbled in reply, glancing at the clock on the opposite wall. If she didn't get dressed for work and leave in the next twenty minutes, she would be late.
"I had the best weekend with Vedek."
"Who?" Amanda asked, kicking off her shoes.
"The Vulcan guy from the Tourmaline Tiger."
"Okay." Of course she'd wondered where her roommate had been all weekend but hadn't invested too much time in worrying about it. Mara found new guys all the time and frankly, the room was quieter without her there.
"Do you have any idea how hot it is to have sex with a Vulcan?" Mara gushed, smacking her lips together. "I swear, I'm never going back to humans."
"Uh huh." Amanda wasn't sure what else to say and to be honest, she was only half-listening. Mara talked this way about every new guy who wandered into her life.
"He did this thing where he touched my face and it was like a whole-body orgasm. Do you have any idea what that's like?"
"Not really."
"Lourdes said you left with that other Vulcan guy," Mara said, winking at Amanda in the mirror. "I thought you might have—"
"Yeah, we went out for coffee," Amanda interrupted with a sneer. "No incredible whole-body orgasms for me."
Mara shrugged. "Anyway, we had this hotel room and spent the entire weekend in bed. He's such an attentive lover."
"Did you just say he's an 'attentive lover?' That sounds like something out of a trashy holonovel."
"I know!" Mara giggled. "But it's so true. He spent so much time trying to make sure I felt good. It's like he really cared, you know?"
"Great."
"And he knows how to treat a girl too. We emptied the mini-bar on the first night—hey, did you know Vulcans get drunk on chocolate?"
"No, sure didn't," Amanda sighed, grabbing her bag and throwing it over her shoulder. "Anyway, I'm going to be late for work."
"We should go out again soon!" Mara called after her. "But not tonight because I'm seeing Vedek again!"
Amanda rolled her eyes, wondering how long it would be before she dumped Vedek and moved on to some other shiny new toy. Poor Vedek had no idea the broken heart that was in store for him.
She walked briskly, cutting through campus buildings to shave several minutes off her walk. A coffee shop run was just what she needed and if the line wasn't too long, she should have enough time to grab a blended smoothie and still be on time for work. It wouldn't do much to improve her physics grade, but her mood definitely needed a boost.
When she turned the corner of the street where Pete's Place was located, her eyes were immediately drawn to a dark-clad figure standing in front of the entrance. She almost wondered if he was some kind of security guard but then she experienced a spark of recognition. The Vulcan guy from Friday. Sarek. She put on a cautious smile and approached him.
He noticed her when she was about twenty paces away and nodded in acknowledgment, giving her the impression he'd been waiting for her. It became a very long, awkward walk to the front door of her favorite coffee shop.
"Hey, Sarek," she finally said, unsure if she should stop and actually talk or keep walking inside. "How are you?"
"Hello, Amanda. I have been waiting for you."
She lurched to a halt, his declaration gluing her feet to the sidewalk. It was a very creepy thing to say but for whatever reason, she wasn't all that unsettled. He was odd, but he wasn't putting off stalker vibes. Not yet.
"Okay," she stammered. "What's up?"
"I have a proposition."