The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernández Page A

even yelling or throwing stuff or anything. A little while later I heard him leave, and I didn’t hear him come back that night.
    He told me the next night at dinner that he’d been busy all day with the new post-docs. He said he wasn’t mad any more, and that he’d had my asiBro checked out, and that it was fine, no harm done. So, if I wanted, I could have him back. But only if I promised not toshoot him any more.
    7.
    Besides getting my asiBro back, my dad took me to meet all the new post-docs to show me he wasn’t mad. They were all eating together in the mess when I came in. When I saw they were human, I was really relieved: I thought a “post-doc” was some kind of new alien creature they had discovered. Turns out they’re just Ph.D.s.
    But they were pretty knife. A lot younger than my dad and Grisget and Malloy and all the other scientists on the space station. And funny. They were always fragbagging around. My dad said they have skrat for brains. I said they do not, they just like to have fun. He said you don’t go on a scientific space station to have fun. I said you can say that again and he said what? and I said never mind.
    I hung out with them pretty much all the time. I knew the space station, so I showed them around, and they said I could be their mascot. They gave me a Ph.D. in Space Station Knowledge and Etiquette and called me Doctor Randy and took me with them everywhere, even into the Macrobe Lab without my dad.
    Their first real day in the lab was a week after they came, and I went with them. Dr. Grisget was conducting an orientation for them in the lab. He kept congratulating them and telling them what a great honor it was to have been selected for this post-doc. Maria Centas, who was the same height as me and was always laughing about something, said to me, “This guy is really full of himself, isn’t he?” And Inodded yes, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want Dr. Grisget to notice me and tell me I wasn’t allowed to be there.
    But then he did something really knife; he opened one of the incubators. All the post-docs huddled around it, so I couldn’t really see. He said, “Ladies and gentleman, this is the reason you are here. The Macrobe Conservation Project is dedicated to saving macrobes from extinction, thereby helping us to preserve the ecosystem we discovered when we first landed on New Hope.” And then he said the whole history of the whole project, how when settlers first came to New Hope they cut down a lot of trees, only they didn’t know the difference between the different kinds of trees, and they didn’t know that they were cutting down brain trees because they didn’t have that name back then. They didn’t know that brain trees were basically trees with brains, and that they had a symbiotic relationship with macrobes, and with the trees getting cut down the macrobes started dying off. Plus a few people had been infected by macrobes, and the macrobes started taking over their brains, and that scared a lot of people, so they started killing macrobes like crazy. And since a macrobe is basically just a big squishy gray-and-green blob of toilet-water, it was really easy to kill them. Dr. Grisget said, “Now they are almost extinct. We are all that’s left to protect them from total annihilation.”
    I finally squirmed through the post-docs so I could see inside the incubator. I’d seen glimpses inside them before. Mostly they shaved the cadavers’ heads and had them in those green paper outfits they give you in hospitals that don’t close in the back. But this one was awoman, and you could tell because she had long curly woman’s hair, and an earring in the ear I could see, and she had a dress on with flowers. Earth flowers.
    I wasn’t tall enough to see her face, but I knew the dress was my mom’s. She had the same hair as my mom too. I couldn’t figure out why my dad would take one of my mom’s dresses and put it on a dead lady. My mom would be so