Bjorn
Bjorn had rebuilt three engines before lunch and couldn't remember a single bolt he'd tightened. That realization irritated him almost as much as the reason behind it. Normally the shop settled his thoughts. No matter what else was happening in his life, work had always been the one place where everything made sense. Machines followed rules. Parts either fit together or they didn't. Problems had solutions. If something was broken, you found the cause and fixed it.
He had spent most of his adult life preferring engines to people for exactly that reason. Engines never lied. They never manipulated. They never expected him to guess what they were thinking or navigate emotions that changed without warning. You found the problem, corrected it, and the machine responded accordingly. Simp
