Chapter 9: Tael's Taxonomy

The question formed three days before he asked it.

He had not been holding it in the way one holds something deliberate. It arrived during the first hour of a morning shift, while he was working through a class two involving a regional water distribution report from an outer colony, and it settled somewhere behind his sternum with the particular quality of a thing that had always been there and had simply become visible. He completed the class two. He submitted the log. He opened the next case. The question remained.

He asked it on a Thursday.