It was getting to be the time of year that the gnats came out in clouds and drove everyone inside. Where the gnats came from was a mystery, but since most things on this planet were a mystery, nobody much cared about this one. Except Marla. She wanted to know. She was tired of playing in her dome and wanted to go out to visit the marsh toads.
Marla was quite motivated to solve the gnat mystery because of her father. He had been a database programmer on Solus IV in the last half of the 25th century, where her parents were from originally, before the relativistic effects of time travel had landed them on this colony world several centuries later (although only a decade or so older). They decided to move not only because of the high tax rates on Solus IV, but most importantly, because her father continually wanted to drive nails into his skull to distract himself from the pain of explaining data normalization to the natives, who were not much more advanced than very clean chimpanzees. No, her father would yell, not even chimps. Donkeys! Chimps at least you could teach to spell short words!
Occasionally he would suffer from flashbacks, and scream in agony about primary keys and referential integrity. He would toss and turn in his sleep and yell out ”NO, YOU JUST DON’T GET IT!” and then whimper about how sorry they’d be if they ever tried to get data out of that table and how they would come crying to him and he would, well, goddamn it he would fix it, because that was his job. And then he would start wailing, until he finally tired himself out and fell back asleep.
All in all Marla referred to avoid being present for these episodes. She also tried to avoid the long lectures with neatly labelled charts of tables and fields and arrows delineating one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships between data types. She was not a chimpanzee (or a donkey). She shared half the genes of a brilliant database programmer and had understood it all quite well several years ago. But her father, suffering from a condition only recently added to the DSM-XVIII and labelled as “Intelligence Disparity Stress Syndrome”, was unable to encode new memories of people actually understanding and following along with his train of thought. The syndrome affected the ability for the sufferer to encode new positive memories, and instead the mind replayed an endless loop of intellectual frustration. There was no known cure, although some therapies looked promising. Sadly, none of them were available on their little colony world.
Marla, therefore, was eager to solve the gnat problem.
She wanted to resume her normal routine of trumping through the forest, chatting with the birds and munching on miner’s lettuce and seepa grass. She found the local flora to be quite tasty. Unlike her father’s cooking, which was less than toothsome. She didn’t think that had to do with his IDSS - he was just an awful cook. Her mother had been a good cook, according to her father, but she had dyed in the voyage and Marla could barely remember her anymore.
[Author’s note: I feel tired. I don’t know what to do with the gnats. Perhaps she finds a way to avoid them by smearing a special paste on herself that she learns about from the birds, who yes, speak Common quite well. Or perhaps she develops some psychic ability to communicate with them and asks them nicely to please go buzz somewhere else. Maybe her mom isn’t dead after all and somehow figures in. Maybe … <sigh>. So many possibilities. But I chafe at the obligation to finish the story and wish to abandon my nascent plotline posthaste. So I will leave it in your hands, dear reader, to determine how Marla shall be delivered from her gnat problem (and her father problem).]