=Polar Nights=

It was a small Arctic village, the kind of claustrophobic burb where you can't help knowing everyone else's business, not because you're particularly interested, but just out of sheer boredom. That Jim was a spy passed for common knowledge among the fishermen, gold hunters, and oil riggers down at the Ice Floe who regularly drank themselves blind just to get through the day. No one cared; no one had anything to hide and if they did everyone knew what it was already. Consequently, it wasn't any secret about Paula. She was an android. She'd been designed by Gilbert, a video game programmer who'd run off to the Arctic in order to avoid any unpleasantness with the law back in California where  some questionable porn had been discovered on his computer. Gilbert had developed a less-than-technical passion for Paula that she felt under no compulsion to feel for him, creator or not, such feelings having not been written into her code. Instead, she'd fallen in love with a penguin. It was difficult to form an opinion over such an unforeseen liaison as no specific laws had yet been written to either condemn or allow it, but among those who still considered the Bible an authority, it certainly was un-Biblical. Still, as one geologist explained it, survival under Arctic conditions could be catch-as-catch can. Everyone understood that; they were inclined to live and let live. The whole situation was so preposterous that Jim thought the villagers must be putting him on, or that maybe the  assignment itself was a training exercise designed to test his mental endurance. Perhaps the village was just a stage set and the villagers fellow agents. If that were the case, they wouldn't want Jim to challenge the very grounds of the experiment, even if he were onto them; that wasn't how things were done. So Jim decided it best to play along, to be a good egg. He bided his time, filed his reports, waited patiently, observed. Surely someone would be along presently to debrief him. The Paula-Gilbert-penguin love triangle ended badly, as anyone could see coming the proverbial mile off, snow-blind or not—a double-murder-suicide that rendered all further philosophical and legal debate about such relationships moot. Jim thought that might signal the end of the experiment, or test, or whatever it was. But no, things went on, just as before. Disheartened, Jim eventually went to live among the indigenous peoples on the outskirts of town. "Going native," they called it back at the spy place and they all got a good laugh out of it. That's what Jim imagined, anyway, on some of the darker of those interminable polar nights, the snow wrapping itself around his cabin, blanking out the windows, the wind screaming like a rollercoaster and Jim huddled in his sealskins by the fire, waiting for someone to come, waiting waiting waiting for the mission to end, whatever it was, unable to tell one day from the next, growing ever more bitter, ever more cold.