flash fiction "Outpost"

Aloha poets,
Jungle nectar inspires today's emergent flash fiction from my EcoSciFi novel, "The Outpost." Enjoy!


The Horizon Event Reader (HER) was operational when he got back.
Suzi flashes a smile and glances up. She says, "Are you back already? I'd wished to have these done by now." Cooper does not speak, at least not to Suzi. He hears the sound of his own thoughts in her voice..
Cooper turns to Suzi, "You can stop working on that." She was glad to see Cooper. They look at each other through the screen.
"This place is always so quiet," Suzie says, and as she speaks she appears aware of her own words, their natural timbre. He's only my programmer, she thinks, but then again, after this amount of scanning, after all these hours of raw data, she wants to elicit in Cooper a special appreciation. She wants him to think, "This one's really on task, isn't it?"
Cooper is not feeling the proper mood right now, and there is no changing that, but at least by the end of this conversation he'd have gotten a few straight answers. He follows his instinct as he approaches Suzi, and as he passes the window that views the jungle he feels the urge, briefly, to look, as if to gain a glimpse of the tigress. But he stays focused. Raising his head, he enters Suzi's lab zone. Suzi will be his window, his design, his slice of the natural world beyond human, the space where hot desert intelligence meets cool rain forest beauty.
He touches Suzi, gently, on the shoulder.