Ned Naylor grappled with the graphs on his spreadsheet when a sudden outburst of laughter erupted from the adjacent apartment. Exhaling slowly, Ned shook his head in silent resignation as he gnashed his teeth with near-tectonic force.

Ned's wife Norma barged into the study oblivious to her husband's frustrations. "Our new neighbor Ian from the Cygnus Sector is having a get-together and invited us over. Care to join us?"

"I'd love to dear, but I've got to validate these numbers for the engineering inspection next month," he said impatiently. "You'll have to go without me, I'm afraid."

"It's the weekend for crying out loud. Oh Ned, why do you have to be such a stick-in-the-mud? But if you insist, I'll just go and have a good time without you." She closed the door quietly behind her as she left.

Regaining his focus, Ned returned to his defiant matrices and their elusive eigenvalues as he struggled to mend the frayed thread of cause-and-effect relationships that he had laced together just minutes earlier. The planetoid's hydroelectric dam desperately needed this upgrade if the colony was going to accommodate a new wave of settlers in the coming months, and Ned knew that the success of this project hinged on a thorough and unyielding attention to detail.

Ned slowly began to regain lost ground as he meticulously double-checked his double-checks when another volley of snickers sideswiped his concentration -- giggles grew to chortles, chortles escalated to guffaws, and guffaws crescendoed into howls of unending mirth. Once distracted, he could easily pick out his wife's distinctive cackle in the cacophony.

The scene repeated itself with Sisyphean-like regularity every ten minutes or so, each salvo of laughter tugging at Ned's mental linchpin just a bit more. On and on it went, well into the early hours of the morning.

Norma returned home when the gathering eventually disbanded only to have her high spirits deflated by Ned's pleas for quiet. "You should have made it over Ned," she admonished. "That Ian is quite a character. He's lived all over this part of the galaxy and he's got tons of delightfully interesting and funny stories to tell. It's amazing how he just nimbly springs from situation to situation and effortlessly tackles whatever obstacles life offers."

Ned frowned at the unnecessary interruption. "Please, Norma, I'm trying to concentrate here," he implored.

"Oh, lighten up Ned. You've been scouring over those numbers all night. Why can't you be more upbeat like Ian?"

Jim Alford poured a cup of industrial strength coffee when he ran into Ned in the breakroom. "Say Ned, how's it going?" he asked.

"Good as always," Ned grinned. "And you?"

"Hanging in there," Jim quipped. "I'm sure glad those preliminary maintenance reports are behind me. How 'bout you -- bracing for the final inspection right around the corner, eh?"

"Naw, we determined that we had accomplished all that we were going to accomplish, so we bumped up the inspection to the end of last week," Ned sniffled. "It wasn't overly stressful, but the long meetings and the occasional odd hours did take their toll."

"So the inspection was last week, huh? So soon?" Jim asked as he took a sip of his coffee and winced. "That's certainly an unexpected surprise...but how'd it turn out?"

"It was a cake-walk," Ned replied with a dismissive wave of the hand as he glanced at his watch. "Say, I've got to run...I'm talking some time off for the next few days. Take 'er light, Jimbo."

Ned hummed a tune and waved at his colleagues as he waltzed across the parking lot and into his hovercraft. He pulled out and began his return commute south along the interstate when the piercing wail of a civil alert siren jarred him out of his seat like an overcaffeinated pole vaulter in a tailwind.

Ned frantically fiddled with his radio tuner to get the latest news, but all the stations lacked any specific information. With his fist pounding repeatedly on the dashboard and his foot pressing firmly on the accelerator, Ned's imagination raced as it quickly worked to fill in the missing details. Ned darted along the interstate and back to his apartment to meet up with his wife. "Grab whatever essentials you can, Norma, then we've got to head for the southern hills quickly," he said in a panicked tone.

Unfazed and seemingly unconcerned, Norma stretched on the sofa and rolled her eyes.

"You can hear the sirens, can't you?!?" Ned huffed. "Any idea what it is?"

"Oh, the television said something about the dam being breached," said Norma nonchalantly. "Or something along those lines, anyway."

"Damn!" Ned cursed as his worst suspicions were confirmed. He knew full well that he should have scrutinized his calculations more thoroughly -- but now was definitely not the time for self-castigation. "Hurry, we've got to evacuate immediately!"

"Don't sweat it -- it's no big deal," Norma yawned. "I'm sure that we can ride out any flooding. Just relax, okay?"

Ned's jaw bounced about like a tangled yo-yo, dropping first in incredulous disbelief then abruptly reversing direction and snapping tight as he stifled a violent, teeth-rattling sneeze.

"Oh, quit your worrying, Ned. Why can't you be more laid back like Ian next door?" Norma sighed with a odd, glazed look in her eye. "He's got such a buoyant, vibrant personality -- and that Cygnian optimism of his is absolutely infectious."