Tangentens and Alphans

Okay it’s been decided.

Look, in a way Alpha and Tangent are our children, and I know parents are not supposed to have favorites, but let’s face it, Tangent is no one’s favorite, well no one from the original simulation team at least. The Greystle folks are just giddy about Tangent actually.

You know this is just another example of what has become a really awkward work environment. We’ve gotten to be like one huge clique. We exclude Greystle consultants from our lunch tables, our conversations change when one of them comes near (even when it doesn’t have to). Some of the old group has taken to calling them Greys (okay – almost all of us. Sally started it and it just worked so wonderfully). Unfortunately the new scientists and engineers that we’ve brought on are probably feeling a bit left out. But we don’t know who to trust, so we only trust ourselves.

So maybe Tangent just doesn’t feel like one of us. It does feel like a violent hopeless place. War is constant on the north continents with the inventions of war occurring at a quick pace. Luckily the spirit of warmongering hasn’t seemed to infect the lizards. That said though, they don’t seem to be the same as the guys on Alpha. They seem a little less interested in intellectual pursuits and are migrating farther south on the continent than they are on Alpha. It’s like they are scared of those apes up on the northern hemisphere (not to be too worried though, their ship building abilities seems to have been stuck at raft stage ever since the battles that occurred during the divergence).

We’ve taken to calling the primates on both Tangent and Alpha as Tangentens as a way to describe our disgust with them, and the lizards are now officially named Alphans. We are so very proud of them. We love our Alphans – The Tangentens make me think of the Greys. Not a nice way to think of our benefactors, but I’m beginning to think of them like I think of the Tangentens – that they are primitive, greedy and brutish. Even if their greed is symbolized only be their patent grabbing and their brutishness symbolized by the guards, whose presence I resent yet I must admit I am happy to feel safe in this day and age. Though the campus is safe I can tell from others in different departments that the actual feeling of safety is a rare commodity.