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"How are your little men?" Trishell asked. "What?" Sean had just woken up. He hadn't even had his first cup of coffee yet. Trishell was already smartly dressed in her work clothes -- skirt, silk blouse, and smart jacket. She looked great. "The little men who live inside you," she asked, and smiled her maddening, morning-person smile. Sean had an inkling of what she was talking about, but it wasn't anything she might have guessed. It would be impossible for someone to guess. He opened the refrigerator, took out the half-and-half. "What little men?" "The little men who live inside you, who run you like a robot or a machine," she said. "The ones you think about when you can't sleep." Sean poured himself some coffee and sat down. "Oh," he replied. "They're fine, I guess." Trishell began making up her lunch. Sean sat at the kitchen table and slurped his coffee. "When did I tell you about them?" Trishell shrugged and made a noise that could have been "I don't know" said very quickly, and kept busy with her lunch. # The little men were something Sean had been imagining since he was a child. He supposed lots of kids imagined such a thing, that their bodies were enormous machines, driven and maintained by tiny versions of themselves. They lived and worked as a submarine crew might, communicating by speaking into tubes, and traveling through his bloodstream by using blood cells like tiny cars. On nights when sleep was particularly elusive, Sean's fantasies became more elaborate: he saw a Captain on a command bridge buried deep inside his own head, readying his body for sleep, and ordering the crew to adjust legs and arms for better comfort. Sean imagined the crew that drove him as microscopic versions of himself; when he was a child, he had been operated by children, and as a teenager, the crew had been teenagers. Now the crewmembers were all 28 years old, and they looked exactly like Sean, save for their orange jumpsuits. The only crewman who wasn't a Sean was the Captain of Sean: a grim paragon of authority loosely based on Burt Lancaster in his role from Run Silent, Run Deep. If he could, Sean tried to fall asleep with some part of him touching the headboard. He did this because he knew that at the close of their shifts, when they had succeeded in guiding Sean into a deep sleep, the little men would travel through is skin into the headboard, where their off-duty quarters were. Released from duty, the Seans, being Seans themselves would amuse themselves in the same ways Sean himself always did. In their quarters were video games, televisions, movie theatres, and even a few books. There were also scores of computer workstations there, as the Seans were always eager to explore the intricacies of the latest design software. Some crewmen slept. There were no women. A skeleton crew would always remain behind, ready to pilot Sean to the bathroom if he woke up, and also to police the vessel. Sean sometimes fell asleep imagining hundreds of tiny sailors emptying a million tiny wastepaper baskets in a million tiny rooms, or mopping long, darkened corridors, the wet floors glimmering in the low light of a vessel at rest. Sean had never told anyone about the little men. Fantastic even as a child, what would such a fantasy mean at his age? Sean was closer to Trishell than he had even been with a girl -- they lived together, a first for him -- but even so, Sean still hadn't admitted his fantasy roll-playing habit to her, too afraid to reveal that twice a month he assumed the role of a medieval knight, relying on the tallies of exotic dice to determine how well he defended his wholly imaginary kingdom. Trishell still thought Sean was playing poker with the guys. Given his reluctance to disclose even this unusual habit, Sean didn't think he had rattled off the particulars of the Little Men, and certainly not in such detail. Could she have guessed? Sean looked Trishell over, in her crisp jacket and blouse, modest earrings and new shoes. Trishell was sharp: no doubt about that. She managed the human resources department for a large software company downtown, a tough job that she did well. He knew better than to underestimate her. Trishell leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. It was too early in the morning for Sean to disguise his emotions, and he looked suspicious and doubtful as she said goodbye. He decided that he had never told, would never tell, Trishell or anyone else about the Little Men. The very idea was ridiculous. # The Captain of Sean looked over the enormous breakfast vista offered by Sean's right eye and wiped sweat from his brow. "Read that last part back to me again, sailor." He commanded. "She asked about his little men," replied the sailor, a Sean who stood near the Captain with a long sheets perforated printer paper in his hand. "Little men…" the Captain began, before letting the thought trail off. No. It was impossible. He always had a hard time understanding the one called Trishell, so this must be simply another instance of misunderstanding. The Captain of Sean put the matter of the woman's odd comments out of his mind and turned to other, more pressing tasks. "Return to your post," he said, and the Sean moved gratefully away. His duty was simple in nature but often complex in practice: orders came to him from Sean's mind, and the Captain ensured that they were carried out. In truth, the orders from Sean usually weren't very demanding. Personally, the Captain thought Sean to be a little lazy, and to lack any real ambition, but the Captain of Sean was a sailor: his job was to follow orders, not to set policy. He had an easy command, he knew, and he did his best to enjoy it while it lasted. In the last twenty-four hours, however, things had begun to change. Simply put, crew in various sections of the vessel claimed to have received orders that the Captain of Sean had not issued. It was too early yet to know how critical the trouble was, but the Captain took every possible threat to his ship seriously, and he had ordered a complete review of all communications equipment: a long, tedious job that had set the millions of Seans under his command into a chorus of complaints.
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