My absence has been inexcusable, so I'll cut to the chase. Here's the latest chapter, I hope you all enjoy.

There were three things that surprised Larry, two he was just receiving surprised emotions from, the third he found himself opening both happy and concerned files over.

The first two:

He was in space.

He recognized where, in space, he was.

The last one:

Otto was curled around his footcuff, pale and making noises that meant he was scared and/or worried according to Larry's data on the relations between human audio-activity and emotion.

Larry, conflicted on whether he should give in to his want to enjoy the data that said he was needed for a job other than talking to an out-of-date computer or be worried about what was bothering Otto, froze up.

Tuddrussel, thankfully, focused on his pint-sized compadre, and pried Otto from Larry's leg. The kid was shaking and Tuddrussel could sympathize with his fear, though it had been some time since he himself had felt it as badly as Otto was feeling it now.

"Larry, we gotta get him to the infirmary."

The robot's head swiveled, the ball holding it twisting awkwardly in its socket, making the front of his head lean forward. His eye lights flicked off, then on again. He rubbed his overheating forehead, closing his emotion files for the first time in ages. Time for work.

Larry pulled up maps of the space station the stood in, opened files on current doctors, staff, the janitorial schedules, lunch menus, lists of supplies that were aboard and had been sent away for. There were one and a half thousand and five living beings, not counting single-celled bacteriums, aboard the station. There were provisions enough for the next three earth years, should they lose contact with outside life. The life-support systems working at that moment were the primary system, there were three others, along with three other generators. Everything was up to code.

"Lawrence!"

Larry jumped, /Shock opening. He recognize Tuddrussel's voice and snapped back into working order.

"What?"

"Infirmary, for God's sake! We need to get Otto to the infirmary!"

Larry looked at his partner, scanned Otto as he hung from Tuddrussel's hand. His vitals were irregular, heart attack symptoms, nothing Larry understood well enough to fix.

He was never programmed to work with medical authorities and wasn't compatible with updated medicbot software.

"This way!"

His Hart-Chip, the small piece of machinery that linking his emotion files to his main processor, took over control of his usually logical circuits. This extreme new feeling would have made him feel human if he had still been robot enough to look at himself logically. However, as he legged it down the glass walled hallways of the space station, he was too human to think like a robot.

Tuddrussel had had a pet pig, who was simply named Oink. Oink had stayed out in the rain when he was still very young. Tuddrussel, coming home from the nearby river, had grabbed the animal and run into the house, wrapped him in a blanket and feed him warm sow's milk for a week before Oink had been restored to health.

Running down the hall, holding onto Otto, he felt his hear beat against his chest the way it had when Oink had been shivering in the rain.

As he kicked in the door of the infirmary, he felt sick for comparing his little buddy to a pet pig.

The medicbots looked up from their stations, stiff and hard and scanning the intruders as the big one ran toward the doctor on call, while a robot sent out a signal saying they were harmless.

The medicbots conferred on the idea that a giant who could kick in a solid metal door being harmless was oxymoronic, while that self-same giant held Otto out to the doctor.

The doctor, an unassuming and timid semi-human with poor eyesight and purplish skin, squinted at Otto, ordered one of the medicbots over, and linked the boy to the robot's screen.

"He's had a heart attack." The doctor smiled, happy to be over service.

"Well-well, fix him!" Tuddrussel didn't know what else to say. He couldn't fix this was blankets and milk. He hated that fact.

The doctor toddled over to a row of drawers on the far wall of the infirmary, pulled out a small box and a facemask that could be hooked up to one of the air tanks lining the wall.

The medicbot took Otto over to one of the bed along the wall, Tuddrussel and Larry rushing up behind the robot and making it glide awkwardly past them as it returned to its work elsewhere. The purplish doctor come up beside Otto, held the facemask over his nose and mouth, linked it into the tank beside the bed, and held the small box over the kid's laboring heart.

A screen over the bed lit up and mapped out Otto's vital. An electric blue light spiked up and down to show his mental activity, a hot red line showing the flip-flopping of his heart.

The doctor held the box over Otto, making it emit a high pitched 'Eeeeeee' noise that gave Tuddrussel a head to beat the band. The sound dissipated, however, as Otto's body calmed down, his heart and head returning to normal patterns. As his impromptu parents looked on, Otto went from green to white to his usual pink. He groaned with his eye still shut, then fell into a deep, placid sleep.

Larry's Hart-Chip released his central processor, and he collapsed on the floor.

Tuddrussel, as the surviving Squad member, told the doctor some lies about his uniform and their purpose then. He flashed documents that were designed to look important and linked to being fired if the reader did something they dictated as wrong. The doctor backed off, deciding that curiosity certainly had killed the cat, and went meekly about rebooting Larry.

Tuddrussel pulled a chair up to Otto bedside and remember the first time he had looked, unprepared, into the starriness of deep space. He's fainted dead away, for the first time in the life.

Man was not meant to move around in space the way he did these days, Tuddrussel figured. And with glitzy stations like this one, with wall treated so they looked like glass, it was no surprise that someone who'd never been surrounded by space would have a heart attack.

Larry woke up feeling horrible. He back and side hurt where he had landed, his emotion files had gotten all jumbled up when his Hart took over. His head hurt.

Easing back the emotion files, though not turning them off, Larry himself up. As he did so, saw the meek doctor who had rebooted him. The security camera in his eye circuits had recorded the purply face.

"Thank you, doctor…?"

"Mathews." They shook hands. "Your friend has already told me about your mission, I'll keep out of your hair."

Larry thanked Doctor Mathews again, this time trying to sound official, then looked at Tuddrussel.

The Texan was folded in on him, big shoulders pulled around him, fingers close to the lip as he stared at nothing in particular.

"Tuddrussel?"

The man didn't move.

Larry reached out and gave his shoulder a push, not wanting to call him 'Buck.'

Tuddrussel didn't jump, which surprised Larry. He only looked over at the robot, acknowledging the fact that he was there. The man didn't go back to looking at nothing, but instead stared at Larry with disinterest, the way he might look at a toaster as it did its job.

Larry was offended.

"Don't look at me like that."

Tuddrussel ran his hands down his face, brushing his visor out of the way so he could rub his eyes. He felt the bags under his eyes, the scar on his left cheek where he had fallen on a rock when he was still a kid, the bump where his nose had healed over from where it had been broke the first time, his stuble, his lower lip.

"Not now, Larry." He rubbing his eyes again, blinking hard to clear them. He didn't feel like dealing with the robot's drama.

Larry, having never seen Tuddrussel without his visor, was too surprised to be angry with the cop's very mild irritation. He had brown eyes.

Larry had always figured he'd have blue eyes.

"Sorry." He didn't know he was talking until it happened.

Tuddrussel growled an 'Uh-huh,' pawing his forehead. His head felt like it was in an iron clamp. He leaned his elbow on his knee, feeling the bump on his nose again.

"I actually thought we was gonna lose him."

Larry shook his head, thought Tuddrussel's eyes were closed.

"No, he was always safe, Tuddrussel."

"But-no. He wasn't. What if I hadn't grabbed him? What if he had been bigger than he is? What if you jumped, seein' him like that?"

Larry, having laced his fingers together to keep his hands from shaking, heard the clatter of their continued movement before Tuddrussel. Every question made his brain make up, logically, a most possible outcome. None of them were good.

"What if we'd made a wrong turn or somethin'? What if-"

"Tuddrussel!"

The medicbots looked up from their work, wondering what had bothered the strange robot with the two humans. His voice still banged against the walls as they returned to work.

Tuddrussel looked up from his hand, not respecting Larry enough to be sorry but not disrespecting him enough to act like he hadn't said anything.

"Don't. Don't ask those questions. What happened happened. And that's that." Larry put his shivering hands in his lap. If he could breathe it would have come in gasps.

"You talk like he kicked it."

"You make me feel like he did."

Tuddrussel scratched the side of his face, though it didn't itch.

"Sorry." He offered.

"Thank you. I'm sorry I yelled."

The doctor came back to check on Otto, even though he was doing fine. He explained to the remaining Squad members that Otto would be sedated for a day or so, then he would be just fine.

Larry and Tuddrussel realized that, however reluctant they were to leave the one person who had made their lives together bearable, they had to get to work. Larry printed off a copy of the records of what happened on the station and gave it to Tuddrussel.

"It's just a peace negotiation. One of the last loose ends of the Knull-Earth treaty, it's centered around bandits that Knull believes are Earthling invades. They're actually just a rogue sect of humans but do not tell anyone. They don't learn about that until next year."

"That don't make sense. How can Earth not know what's theirs?"

"The bandits shanghaied a fleet of old but still used spaceships. Wherever they are, they have clearance. So nobody really knows what to look for, because the descriptions of the ships fit with so many other fleets. Earth can't discontinue usage like that." he snapped his fingers.

Tuddrussel nodded.

"So, I go, make sure things is goin' well with this treaty. Then, tomorrow maybe, I come back here to switch places with you and you go keep an eye."

"Uh."

"What?"

"I don't think I can do that."

"Why not?"

Larry pointed to his blueprint on the forms he'd given Tuddrussel.

"I'm here."

"What's that even mean?"

"It means that I could run into myself. And that could stop time."

"How?"

"I don't really understand it. I think it's basically two things being in the same place at the same time."

"Then… Why hasn't time stopped yet?"

"I haven't met myself."

"But you're here and you're also here. Jesus this is weird."

"Well—I don't know. It's a paradox. There. Now, I don't think I should leave the infirmary, just to be safe."

Tuddrussel wanted to call bullshit on that. He knew that Larry wanted to spend the whole time with Otto, for whatever reason he had. It wasn't like they had anything in common, the way he and Otto did. Tuddrussel could think of a million things he could teach Otto while they were then. Larry probably just wanted to pamper him with his robot wussiness.

The Texan grit his teeth, rubbed his bumped nose, took the papers and went to find the negotiations.

He didn't feel like dealing with Larry.

Larry sat and thought for a long time.

He and Tuddrussel had never talked that much without yelling.

He had never yelled back.

Did it feel good?

No, not really.

Why did Tuddrussel do it so much, then?

They were strange questions, especially for him. They were questions that didn't ask for logical answers. Emotional questions. The worse kind.

Otto didn't so much a budge in his sleep, even as the lights in the infirmary dimmed to simulate night. The infirmary, Larry remembered, was one of the only wards of the station that didn't boast see-through walls. Instead, they were the common shiny metal, constructed in bulbous outward curves to give the residents of the ward a feeling of clean, mechanical safety.

As the lights dimmed themselves, a medicbot came up to Larry and asked him, in binary, to leave the infirmary. It was policy.

Larry looked at his reflected in the one big, glass eye of the medicbot. The things all had weird, angular heads and necks that came out of trashcan bodies.

"You're obsolete." He told the eye.

"Does not compute." The medicbot replied.

Larry told the bot, this time in binary, that he was authorized to stay on the ward as long as he pleases. He flashed a code not unlike Tuddrussel's special documents, and the bot left him alone.

In the darkness his eyes glowed. He pulled himself up, plugged into the wall, and stayed up the rest of the night, thinking.

What do you think? Are they A) Merely tired B) Mildly flirting, or C) Other (please specify)

Interesting sidenote: writing for Larry is like writing for a mechanical Abe Sapien.