Samuel was washing the dishes one October morning when he first felt a strange, out-of-place feeling, as if he had left the place in which he belonged and could never return, as a man does in the first days of a life sentence. The feeling would stalk him as an unseen predator for the remainder of his life. At the time he recalled being twenty-one. He had recently finished his mandatory stint as a conscript for the Republic -- lasting two years. His father was important and his mother was irrelevant, so he managed to land an easy position in the engineering corps instead of training as an infantryman. If worst came to worst, he would be assigned to a tank or air corps as a repairman for the duration. Easy, bloodless work.

The unsettling feeling lasted some minutes and passed without warning or trace, as he would come to realize it was wont to do. His father often told him that the news was not good, that the company for which he worked was in the wrong area of the country, and that he should move at once. As usual, he treated his father's advice as sage and useless. He went on washing his dishes. Soon they were all done. Samuel lived alone and had lived alone since he graduated from the Service a couple of months ago. It had taken him some time to get a job on his own merits, mostly because of his accent. Most companies were somewhat hesitant to hire anyone who was a member of 'his kind'. It always seemed rather arbitrary to him, but soon his father's pull came to bear. He was an intern with one of the terafirms. What, exactly, his work did, he was never entirely sure. But for the week or so he had been at work, he had the same job.

He was to use the Zone 3 Mainframe to compute data using predefined formulae.

Samuel was mostly part of the Conico Conglomerate -- a part as tiny as a mite, they seemed always to remind him -- for the Zone 3 Mainframe. He had moderate experience with computers, and he liked them. Liked to mess around with them a little. His job was to make sure the Zone 3 Mainframe, a persnickety yet extremely modern thing, remained in good and working order and gave whoever Conico was contracting for the numbers they wanted. It was not difficult work. He had good hours and they paid him well. And for the most part, he liked doing whatever it was he did. At times he did wonder, though -- was he making cars? trains? steel? missiles? candy? He settled with the unsettling but generally amocable conclusion that he would never be privy to the knowledge of exactly what was heading through the Z3M, why, and for whom.

He had a good job with good pay and good hours, doing something he liked doing. Why did he feel so out-of-place, then? Again, he realized that he'd probably never know. The feeling passed, and he realized at once he had missed a single black porcelain plate on which rested, almost ridiculously incongruous, six or seven lumps of old noodle. Samuel was a bit of a perfectionist, so he realized he couldn't leave the black porcelain plate undone. He scraped at it for some time, but the noodles, for the most part, would not budge. For some minutes he would pick at them with his fingernails, and they seemed after a fashion to be baked into the plate itself. While his ministrations gained fervor, he felt something warm and fuzzy brush up against his left leg.

It was Nicky, a black shorthair which he had adopted upon leaving the Service. A cursory glance at the area Samuel had set aside for the cat revealed water which seemed reasonably clean but a distinct lack of food. Setting the plate aside for a moment, he turned around and opened the wooden cabinet immediately next to him (as was the custom at that time, kitchens tended to be notoriously small), and found no canned food particularly cat-oriented. With a bit of a sigh, he closed that cabinet and opened the refrigerator; one used to less cramped surroundings would have been impressed by the fact that both could not be open at the same time, but Samuel was not such a person. He extracted a half-empty can of Proseham from the top shelf and a spoon from a nearby drawer, and with no particular effort served Nicky two generous spoonfuls of the canned meat. The cat seemed momentarily offended, as he always did when not given cat food, and proceeded to eat it with great relish.

In a moment of personal abstraction, with the can of Proseham in one hand and a dirtied tablespoon in the other, he reached fruitlessly for the telephone, intent on calling Annika to arrange dinner, and was suddenly and rudely interrupted by a tremendous explosion which knocked him into the refrigerator, the cabinet, the sink, the bartable, and finally the kitchen floor. The explosion was soon accompanied by many increasingly closer ones, which ran along a line he later surmised to be the C rail, stopped at a spot he later surmised to be Threeblack Railhead, and then continued gamely on. The shattering of windows and the shrieking of shells, men, and animals rung in his ears for a time until he heard little save a ringing surge. It occurred to him that he had left the black porcelain plate unfinished, and as soon as the blasts passed his house he rose, intent on scrubbing it clean.