A light wind blew across the frozen slopes of Aspen Mountain, sparkling white in the full moon. Rig, trudged up the staircase of boot prints to Casa Bonita. Pausing at the door, listening to the raucous conversation inside, they took a deep breath. 

The Cat recognized Rig before they even turned the knob to the door, barking loudly. Rig smiled, opened the door, and was nearly bowled over by 60 lbs of Humane Society mutt. Laughing and scratching his ears, The Cat — their illicit dog, so-named to hide its existence — rolled onto his back tongue lolling to the side. 

“I shit you not, the Intern walks over and takes the control out of my hands.” Ocho drank lustily from her beer. “The kid doesn’t even know how to hold it, but they confidently say “I’ll take it from here.” Jesus and Slow are rapt, smiles stretched across their faces, knowing what comes next. 

“And then…” Ocho can’t keep her laughter in, “the kid just drives the drone directly into the side of the building. Just… slam.” Ocho is crying now. “And the piece of shit couldn’t blame me, since the guests and the manager were watching the whole time. So,” and she takes another drink, “the kid is pissed, but whatever. At least I don’t get a write-up or anything since it was clear as day I was trying to fix the damn thing.”

“So, what happened to the intern?” Jesus asked, mock concern in his voice.

“They were assigned to front desk duty for the rest of the month. Didn’t get another chance to pilot a drone again. Served them right!” exclaimed Ocho.

Jesus looked satisfied with that.

“Rig!” yelled a noticeably buzzed Slow. “You’re late! Time to catch up.” Slow tossed a beer to Rig, who caught it one handed, flicking the cap off with their thumb. 

“Rough day?” asked Jesus. “You’re quiet.”

Rig, then proceeded to string together enough curse words to make The Cat blush, who was chasing his tail in the kitchen. Ocho, Jesus, and Slow stared open mouthed.

“Care to elaborate on that?” said Jesus, “we’re all ears.”

“These god-damn rich tourists don’t know their ass from their mouth, and yet somehow they come here and act like they deserve constant catering and pampering.” Rig paused lips pursed. Then, took a big gulp, and kept going. “Today, I was inside the Mothership —”

“Hive” corrected Ocho, but instantly regretted it.

“Not tonight Ocho… “ Rig paused, then continued, “Sorry. This was just a lot. I was at the Mothership, and I was troubleshooting a security patch on the X11 drones — the old set from last year. They’re constantly drifting south, and I was deep in the pattern recognition subroutines to try and figure out what was going on. Management wanted to save money last year, which they did by buying the X11s. But now I’m spending most days trying to get them to stay on course. Anyway, I heard a slam on the side of the doorway — which was scary because I thought something fell over. The last thing we need is an electrical fire in Mother and have the whole fleet of seeders toasted.” Rig took another drink.

“I go down the ladder, and see this platinum blonde couple, Barbie and Ken, glaring at me. Barbie launches into a tirade of how they pay so much money to come to this resort — more money than I’ll ever see they make sure to point out — and that when they’re here, all the runs had better be covered in feet of powder. The Ken doll was just standing there… arms crossed with a smug, annoyed look.”

Then Rig adds, “But, I am standing there.. and…  I’m confused, right? Why would they be saying this to me? I mean, I’m just the Cloud Seeder tech, I’m not in charge of deciding which routes have snow. Then I see that there’s an intern walking back into the lodge, and I realize that the dumb kid didn’t know what to say so they just blamed the issue on me, and sent them to talk with the technician. So, I put on my best polite face.” 

Ocho laughed, but Rig grimaced, continuing. “So, I asked them to explain which run they were talking about, and they pointed south, out past Bonnies. It looked snowy to me, but they said check the scan. So I did. Sure enough the scanners from earlier in the day indicated that the snow depth was less than a foot. That was odd. I asked them to wait a sec, and I started hammering away at the keys. The glaciogenic seeding had worked throughout the rest of the park with nearly 100% efficiency. All except, that one patch. Technically, the seeding was statistically successful, given that >99% of areas fell within the range of success. But I knew that wouldn’t fly with the guests. So I apologized.”

The whole group groaned.

“Yes, I know.” said Rig, “As soon as I said sorry, they smelled blood and started ripping into me. Every personal attack you could think of. I’m fine with them questioning my technical capacity, because that’s a laugh. I know I’m a genius with this stuff. But you want to talk about me?”

“So… what did you do,” said a worried Slow.

“Well…” started Rig, “I thought about knocking them out.” Slow’s eyes went wide, but Rig said, “Don’t worry. I’m not on the run from the sheriff. The Manager showed up — it was Bob.” 

Ocho, Slow, and Jesus all nodded uniformly that this was a good thing to have happened. “Can’t do better than Bob” said Ocho. The Cat comically barked along as if in agreement.

Rig went on, “Right. Bob somehow hypnotized them into following him back up to the lodge for complimentary upgrades or whatever. He glanced back at me with a curt nod, and that was all I got.” Rig paused and looked down, deflated. “I wish — just once — that they’d actually stand up for us, just once. I could run circles around any of these jerks when it comes to reprogramming glaciogenic swarms, or debugging ancient nav code that hasn’t been supported for years. But because these rich pricks have money, they can walk all over us.”

“Rig —” Jesus started to say, “remember the time I rescued that little girl?”

Ocho interrupted, “not this again, Yes we know.” Ocho continued robotically, “They were so shocked that you came back with that little girl in your arms after search and rescue had called off the search two days prior. They said “Jesus” out of shock, and the name stuck…” Ocho smiled as if to say “did I get that right?”

Jesus smiled, but went on, “That’s true. But … Do you know what that girl's parents said to me?”

None of them knew this part of the story.

“They said, ‘How could you?’ As in “How could you do this to our daughter?’” Jesus stared at them in turn, including The Cat. He continued, “As if I had been the one to lose her! As if I had been the one to be negligent out skiing in a seeding storm, and not attach her sat-beacon! As if I hadn’t gone out-of-my-way to step in when the contracted Search and Rescue squad gave up after a half-assed attempt.” Jesus paused, then went on. “I know what you mean when you want to punch these A-holes.”  

Rig nodded and clinked beers with Jesus. They both drank deeply.

Ocho, “As long as we’re sharing our collective bullshit — I’ve got one, too.” 

Jesus, “Is this where you tell us that you lost a life when you got buried by that avalanche? Because that’s not —”

“Fair play, my  Lord and Savior, but no.” Ocho said smiling, “It's what the Manager said to me when I stalked back into the tech lodge at the base of the mountain, after the avalanche.” 

Yet again, somehow none of them knew this story either. 

“I limped in, bruised, battered, and hungry. SO hungry.” Ocho sipped her beer. “The faces around me were uniformly in shock. And rightly so! I must have said something dumb like, “I guess I only have eight lives left”, but then I heard a curse from the back of the room. Then, this Manager comes toward me swearing that I just lost the park 2 million.”

Jesus and Rig looked to one another confused, but Slow got it, “The insurance.”

“The god damn insurance.” Nodded Ocho in agreement. “The Manager was pissed at me, since I had been worth quite a lot of money dead — that is until I walked through the door.” Ocho sat back. “You better believe I looked into the SkySeederPersonnel insurance agreements that were being signed on my behalf after that little ‘accident’. I haven’t signed any more of those policies, no thank you.”

“Nearly the same thing happened to me,” said Slow, “Well, sort of.” He leaned forward, “I was screaming down the mountain…”

Jesus sighed, “we get it, you’re fast…”

Slow smiled wryly, but went on, “... I was helping guide a crew of snow-penetrating drones through the forest. We needed to find out how well the seeding had worked despite the tree cover. Then, all of a sudden one of the drones shot up the column toward me and nearly took me out.” 

Rig looked offended, and Slow interrupted, “Not to worry. This was before your time, and not the fault of the Queen Bee — oops, I —”

Rig looked fit to burst, but Ocho spoke up holding up her hands, “That was the nickname of all the Hive techs.” 

Rig scowled, “Yeah, fine. I know you don’t mean anything by it, Slow.”

Slow smiled, “Sorry — I know you hate the name. Either way, it wasn’t the fault of the Hive tech. I swatted the drone down, and packed it away. And when I got back, I went straight to the Hive tech, who then marched with me straight up to the main lodge. Turns out one of the Managers had let an Intern into the Hive, on a ‘training tutorial’. Those two dumbasses nearly took my head off when they tampered with the drones. The manager chuckled to the intern that I would have been worth more dead. They didn’t think I could hear, but… man.” 

Rig sighed, even further deflated, “why in the hell are we sticking around? Why do we keep putting up with —” gesturing around at everything, “— all of this?”

Ocho, Jesus, and Slow looked at one another, then to Rig. Jesus spoke first. “Where else would we go? Here, at least, we get paid to do what we know, and we can be on the Mountain. The bullshit is the bullshit. There are rich assholes everywhere. But the snow is here. And if you want that, well, we don’t have much choice, do we?” 

Rig, grudgingly agreed. 

Ocho stood up, holding out her beer, and exclaimed. “To the bullshit!” 

They all stood up, Jesus and Slow loudly declaring, “To the bullshit!” They all drank.

Slow shouted, “To our Casa Bonita!” They all drank again.

Jesus shouted, “To living another day, despite working for psychopaths!” They all drank. Then, looking to Rig, they waited. 

Rig sighed, then smiled,  “To the powder!” And they all drank deeply.

The Cat suddenly stood up, his tail wagging, tongue hanging out looking at the four faces. They looked at their illicit pet dog, and laughed, collapsing down into their old, musty couches.