text: The button stood like an unhammered nail, a flourish of red amongst the blues and grays of the sleek console; an itchy mosquito bite unscratched. I looked around the cabin for a clue--some diagram or schematic that would, even tangentially, give me an excuse to push the button--but all I found was interlocking machinery patterning the walls, flush and smooth, a seamless mosaic of maddeningly unlabeled blinking lights and dimensionally-conflicting optical illusions that made my legs wobbly. I wanted to sit, but, lacking anything even remotely resembling a chair, I didn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be complicated, this temporary manning of the ship, and, to be fair, it wasn’t. Complicated. In theory. In practice, however, I needed to push the button. That was--I mean, that was it. The odds of getting a favourable outcome were slim, I knew, but what if it was a chair-button? What if I could sit at the controls of this spaceship like an adult while Captain Sleepyhead got his eight-to-ten hours of shuteye instead of pacing back and forth wildly wearing an anguished mask of indecision before slumping to the ground in a pile of jittery exhaustion? Or what if it was a button that *didn’t* immediately jettison me unprotected into the dark reaches of space, instead opening an unseen door behind which hid a fully-stocked kitchenette complete with overflowing jugs of crisp, hydrating lemonade? Wouldn’t I feel foolish if, instead of blowing up us up from the inside, the button only provided the gentle, breezy comfort of some much-needed air-conditioning? As I hovered over the button and pondered these, to me, increasingly plausible scenarios, the video-screen descended and dimmed all the cabin lights with its gravitas, leaving me to sweat silently in the crackle of flickering disconnect evident on the screen. ‘*yzzrt przzk zik kzuttin*’ My reflection flashed back at me in the interstitial moments of black between choppy almost-images before resolving into footage of me proper, leering at the camera with that smirk I use when I’m really trying to get under someone’s skin. Man--that is irritating. ‘*yzour pruzz ze bzuttin*’ I don’t look too happy on the screen. Oh, I’m smiling, in a way, but I know how it feels under that nasty grin--I’ve never made that face when I’m feeling, say, generous. Or compassionate. Or, you know, good. And I’m clearly saying something about the button, but beyond the static and interference obscuring whatever nuances the words contain, I must also necessarily decipher what’s coming out of the screen with a codex of my own idiosyncrasies. *You press the button*, question mark? *You pressed the button*, past tense? *You press the button*, command? He wants me to suffer, that me up there, but how far have I thought this through? I want me to stop looking at me like that, but I want me to push the button, don’t I? What happened to me up there that put me in that position? What if I wait it out--the captain will wake up eventually, right? Right? ‘*yzou prezkl the buttonzk*’ It wasn’t supposed to be complicated, this temporary manning of the ship, and, to be fair, it wasn’t. I would just wait. I would totally just wait and not press the button; I would stare back into my unforgiving eyes with confidence and not read too much into my subtle shifts in body language and demeanour and wait.