"Would you like fries with that?" What a waste of air, this guy wouldn't stay alive five minutes without someone wiping his nose for him.
by Mark Goll
CHAPTER 1 LIFE IN THE GRID
"Would you like fries with that?" What a waste of air, this guy wouldn't stay alive five minutes without someone wiping his nose for him.
"Uhh, naa."
"Please pull up to the next window. Thank you." Eighteen years of the best education in the Grid and here I am flipping burgers for a bunch of pathetic morons. At least the shift is over and I can get out of here, go home and try to get the smell of burgers off me.
"Isaac, You're scheduled for 4 PM tomorrow, but get here early, I expect a rush for the weekend soccer tournament."
"Yes Mr. Fusaki." Not only do I have to serve morons, I work for one too. Actually that's not fair, Fusaki is a pretty good guy, and he's been great about working around my class schedules, but he sees this burger stand as his whole life. Worse, he expects me to see it as my whole life too! Uuuuugh! What a horrible thought. Just the kind of dead end, mind numbing, sole destroying job my mother would like to see me stuck in for the rest of my life. Mental note, find something interesting to do with your life.
I change clothes at the service station bath room so that I don't have to wear the silly Mcdingles costume all the way home, my friends might see me. Then it's up to the tube station and there's time to think before the retrograde shuttle arrives. I hope it's not late again, I have to work on my celestial navigation research paper tonight, and yes, I'm behind schedule again. Maybe I'll go to work late tomorrow, that should really warp Fusaki's mind.
A moment of greatly savored quiet. That's what I like about this part of the day. Nobody's moving around at this time of the day, and I get to sit and think alone for a few minutes at the shuttle stop, and again on the shuttle home.
A shudder, barley noticeable except for the fact that I'm sitting quietly. Birds take off form the trees, a squirrel dashes for his hiding place in the overhead girders. Mental note, there aren't supposed to be any squirrels in this hull. I sit up, suddenly alert, and look around. No one else has noticed. It's that strange feeling of knowing that something very bad has happened, but your the only one who knows. The question is what should I do now? The shuttle arrives. I get on.
The ride home is normal enough, first I have to go retrograde three stops then transfer to an inbound tram. They move much slower and you directly control them. The tram takes me to dad's AG office, but as usual he's out in the green houses checking on the plants and equipment. I grab a mask and head into the maze of green houses. This is a zero gee CO2 area, and all the green houses are oriented to face the sun. Each greenhouse is isolated by a lock from it's neighbor to control pests, so it takes a while to weave my way to dad's location.
"Hey Dad!"
"Isaac, hand me that feed water tubing. The transfer valve's plugged again."
"Did you hear that Fred might get a part time job at the chemical transport terminal?"
"Nope. Turn on that main valve for me will you."
"Sure."
"Nice of Fred's dad to get him a job where he works. Maybe you could ask him if he has a spot for you too. Unless of course you'd like to help out here in the green houses."
"Weekends maybe, but I want to get something that will give me a chance to get out into Space."
" Ah, Space. A young man's fancy turns to the stars with dreams of glory and wealth."
"Ah come on Dad, it's what I've been studying for."
Dad smiles through the O2 mask, that dream was once his too. He enjoys agriculture, and finds a lot of joy in making things grow, but he still remembers his dreams of the stars.
"well, gotta run, say, did you notice a strange vibration about 20 minutes ago?"
"Nope."
"Felt kind of strange, but I haven't heard anything on the news. Oh well, see you later."
Getting back on the tram, I head back to the shuttle stop. The tram line continues outbound to the industrial areas, but I avoid that area if I can. Most of the plants are run by AIs, and when there is an atmosphere it's usually poisonous. I get back on the shuttle. Two more over and four south. The shuttle mates with the tube station hatch, and the hatches open. I cross the foyer and flash my pass card to get into the colony hull. Ahh, back in Affluencia, the air always smells better at home. Of course the town council is always paying high fees to air management companies to test the air anytime someone complains about smells, but on the whole they do a good job. I guess that's why they get reelected. If things were to get bad, everybody would just leave, bad colonies loose people, good colonies attract people. with four million colonies in the grid, there's always a better colony somewhere.
I take a drop shaft to second level, recover my bike from the rack, and peddle the kilometer to home. Mother's car is gone, which means she's either picking up Cindy from school or shopping. She works four days a week now that Cindy has started school. With the house empty, I drop down the shaft, go to my room, change into my swim suit, bounce up the shaft and get on my bike to head to the first level lift near the community pool. Fred and Jim are there as usual. At 0.1 gee, the water is mostly held together by surface tension, my high arcing belly flop doesn't produce much spray, but the waves are tremendous. Jim gets lifted right up onto the edge of the pool and sits down pretty as you please. The life guard gives me a dirty look, and blows his whistle. I swim over to talk to Mary Beth Winestein.
"Yo, babe."
"Buzz off Isaac."
"Hey, is that any way to talk to the best runabout pilot at Polk University."
"Right."
"Wanna go to the school dance next Wednesday?"
"Sure, call me later, I might have something interesting to tell you."
Mary swims off with her girl friends, I swim over to Jim who is still sitting on the edge of the pool.
"Did anybody feel a vibration this afternoon?"
"Nope.""No"
Jim logs on to the net and checks the news feeds. Jim has the latest in neural implants. A universe of stories come pouring in. Three industrial plants, two hulls, and an AG section were hit by meteors large enough to get through the protective layers. There were no major injuries, and the leaks in the hulls were sealed before any noticeable pressure drops occurred, but the legislatures are up in arms. The Degree Governor has called on the President to declare an emergency and to call for a full investigation. The impact I felt was two hulls north. THAT'S CLOSE! I feel a little shaken. A real rock big enough to punch through the twenty foot radiation shield and punch a hole in a colony hull. I thought that all the loose rocks had been picked up in this part of the solar system. I tell Jim and Fred so-long and head home.
Congress is debating who is responsible, or who to blame for the fiasco, but mostly it's all posturing and trolling for sound bites. One Senator is calling for a new detection system to be armed with nuclear weapons, to destroy the rocks before they enter the inner solar system. The scientific community wants new missions to study the rocks and opposes the destruction of any rock before lengthy studies are completed. The only real information is coming from the traffic control radars, the deep space comm. systems, and the radio astronomy dishes. The meteors are part of a long stream of rocks, bits, and larger asteroids that probably originated in another solar system. They are from very deep space. The main part of the stream would be crossing the solar system for the next one hundred years. The President has directed the Space Rescue Service to deflect the larger rocks that are on collision courses with the grid, which seems to remove the situation from most peoples interest level. The flow of mundane celebrity media gibberish resumes and the rocks are no longer in the public eye.
No one seems to understand my feelings about the subject. I felt the impact of one of those rocks! To a person who has grown up in the safe secure controlled world of the grid, that's a real shock. Sure piloting a runabout is dangerous, but inside a colony hull you expect to be safe. There is now a lingering doubt in the thin walls of the colony hull. I spend an uneasy night.
Early the next morning I get a call from Fred, it seems there has been a lot of activity behind the scenes. Fred's job at the transport terminal puts him in contact with a lot of space transport people. They know his dad has contacts in the chemical industries. As of last night, there is an almost desperate search for anyone willing to sign on for rock hunting expeditions. While the military, the politicians and the media have been debating the problem of what to do with the rocks, the entrepreneurs have been analyzing their composition, and putting together expeditions to hunt down and harvest the most valuable items. It would seem there is a very silver lining behind every eclipse.
Fred is recruiting a crew for a space jockey by the name of Captain Ron, a somewhat shady but knowledgeable character who under short notice is trying to glue together the components of a deep space ship. Fred says that there will be ten to twelve people in the crew, and enough equipment and supplies to make a run into the richest part of the stream. A gamble for riches, the adventure of a life time, a way to get out of the burger business! Without so much as a second thought, I sign on.
Maybe it was part of the effect on me of the impact. Maybe it was just an opportune time for me to make a break with the world. But here was an opportunity for me to do something about the rocks, and I acted. Of course my parents didn't see things that way at all! Life in the grid tends to tie you into a rut of living. A safe secure rut. Mother couldn't see why I had committed to go out into space, or why I wouldn't back out. Fortunately Dad could understand, but he wasn't thrilled about the expedition leader. Captain Ron did have a few black marks on his record. By ten AM Fred had emailed a partial list of the crew, which had made things look a lot better. A short notice expedition like this has to make do with whatever people are available and at loose ends. Life in the grid means that pickings are few and far between. Half the crew would be Fred's friend, young adults who hadn't settled down to home and family life. Jim and Mary Beth would be the computer wizards. Allison and I would be the runabout jockeys. That made up the younger half of the crew. It was the elder half of the crew that revealed Captain Ron as a savvy spacer. He had chosen wisely and well. John Dryfuss a senior mathematics professor at the sector university had taken a leave of absence to sign on as First Officer. Hilmar Mueller a retired chemical engineer would be in charge of ships engineering. Mary Smith a research biologist until recently convulsing after a disastrous trip to Earth would be the medical officer and general den mother. Nine people, four over the age of seventy, five under the age of twenty five, and three AI duplicates. An odd crew indeed, but a good blend of ability and experience.
The next week was a whirled wind of activity. I called up equipment lists of every deep space asteroid mining expedition for the last twenty years. The AI's did a huge amount of the leg work of hunting down the equipment and arranging for it to be delivered to the docks, but the human touch is always needed to get the odd items here and there. The ship itself had to be assembled and checked out. A finer a collage of bits and pieces as one would ever want to see. A maze of tanks, cables, girders, reactors, supply bays, and habitat modules. Only an AI could love it. Finally the day arrived for us to leave. We were not the only or even the earliest expedition to head for the rocks. It was a land rush of every conceivable type of craft headed into deep space. Hundreds of ships would be in the hunt. Once we were reasonably sure we had everything we needed, and that the ship would hold together, we left.
There are many different flight paths to the rock stream, depending on how much energy you want to expend, and which part of the stream you want to intercept. Some of the first ships boosted on chemical rockets to catch the head of the stream. That was a risky strategy. If they used up too much energy, or spent too much time prospecting, they might not be able to get back to a colony or planet. The Space Rescue Service would try to pick them up if they could, if they had enough air to stay alive. We were in the later part of the pack. Ion engines slowly pushed us along our flight path. Captain Ron was going to use every bit of gravity assist to try to gain velocity on the ships that had left ahead of us, but many others were also on this path.
Having left in a hurry, we now had a lot of work to catch up on. We weren't actually traveling in a space ship, we were traveling in a collection of parts from which we would build a space ship. We had six months to complete the task before we went into hibernation for the rest of the trip. From our cozy little cocoon inside the propellant tanks, (for radiation protection), we spent long hours in VR suits assembling the hardware we would need when we got to the rocks. Then we had to suit up and run final checks on the equipment. It was eight hours a day of hard work. In the cramped quarters of the cocoon it was actually a good thing that we had so much to do, between working, exercising, and doing chores, there was little time to get on each others nerves. After a couple of weeks I got tired of listening to chips, and watching vids, so I spent a lot of my valuable free time listening to John, Hilmar, and Mary tell war stories about there many travels around the solar system. This was not their first long trip.
Mary of course had the best stories. Traveling to Earth was a rare event for anyone, and she had been there several times. Earth was now the World Park of the solar system. Nobody actually lived there, just Park employees, researchers, and tourists, limited to about one billion tops. A trip to Earth involves several weeks in a LEO station getting inoculations and mostly getting sick from exposure to returning passengers coming up from Earth. It's called an acclimatization process, but it's also what puts most off of the idea of going down the mother planet. But to be under an open sky, sure the colony hulls are big, and some of the Martian domes are huge, but to have nothing over your head but open sky and the stars at night must be a wonderful experience. Almost enough to compensate for the gravity, the weather, the animals, the insects, the disease, and all the chaos of a wild planetary surface. Maybe someday I'll go, but for now it's back to into the VR suit.
More endless weeks of work preceded our gravity assist turn at Earth. Coordinating the flight path around Earth required contacting Earth Orbital Control to assure that we flew under the rings but missed the stations. Venus had been fascinating, but Earth was spectacular. The vids can never compete with the real thing. We spent hours glued to the portholes soaking up the experience. Even the Moon was a great sight. The Moon of poem and legend where Armstrong first set foot on another planet. Shortly after Earth we went into hibernation. Like most of the ships headed for the rocks we were going to use Saturn to make their final turn for the rocks.
When you go to sleep or into hibernation, you have a certain expectation of when your going to wake up. Getting rudely yanked out of a deep sleep is always a shock. We had only been in hibernation for three months when we aroused from our slumbers. Captain Ron called a meeting.
"I'm sorry to have woken you up so rudely, but we took an alternate course around Jupiter."
That was a shock to say the least. We were supposed to be headed for Saturn. When the rest of us had gone into hibernation, Captain Ron had increased engine thrust and changed course for Jupiter. That had used up all the propellant we had loaded on board when we left the Grid. We were headed in the wrong direction, with no propellant on board, and no way to change course to get back to safety. After the first rush of fear, then anger, then surprise and relief, we had work to do. Tankers were being catapulted off Ganymede to match our velocity. They were filled with water ice and heavy water ice, propellant and air in massive quantities which we were going to be transporting to the rocks. By burning up all our propellant going to Jupiter, we were going to arrive in the rocks about the same time as the rest of the pack, but with our tanks filled with the most valuable commodity you could wish for, propellant and air. It was a gamble for sure, but if it paid off we would have our pick of the rocks, and someone else would do all the work of prospecting them.
When we left Jupiter we were heavy but also completely refueled and eager to get to the rocks. We were smiling when we climbed back into the hibernation tanks.
To insure our position in the propellant market the probes were directed to scan for fissionable materials, and claim those rocks first. We spread our probes deep into the stream, tracking particles from radioactive decay. At this distance from Sol power could only come from fission or fusion, and we wanted to control both markets.
While the probes and the AIs did the hunting, the human members of the crew started the long arduous task of contacting each of the ships and opening negotiations for either outright purchase of valuable claims or partnerships. Our AIs had already surveyed and claimed hundreds of rocks, some of which were quite valuable, so our position was already excellent, but we could do even better. We had enough equipment on board to herd about a billion metric tons of rocks back to the solar system the question was which ones. This required a lot of surveying work, some sampling and analyzing, and some hard bargaining. I got stuck with sampling the disputed rocks. This involved long flights between rocks which always seemed to be at the far side of the stream from wherever is was currently at. When nothing was going on, I would dig into one of the softer regolith balls to catch some sleep and shield myself from radiation. Only my radio antenna would be sticking out. Mary insisted that we spend as much time as possible out of the radiation, which was easy since most of the softer rocks were useless for anything else. It was during one of those rare sleep periods when I was abruptly awakened by a call from Captain Ron.
"Issac, wake up!"
" Huh, Whatsa matter?"
"We've lost contact with Allison."
"Maybe she's taking a nap somewhere."
"No, she was headed for one of our rocks in sector 3GAh."
"Did she call in with any problem?"
"No, she's over due for her next contact, and we can't raise her."
"I'm on my way."
John had been very strict with maintaining a radio contact schedule. Allison was either in trouble or would be in trouble for not keeping schedule. Whatever, it was my job now to find her. The search area was not far from my current location and I started my scans as soon as I was in range. Most of the rocks in the area already had tags in place, and I had the last part of Allison's telemetry tracking log to follow. Unfortunately, Allison was not where she was supposed to be. Her transponder did not respond when I interrogated it's frequency. Allison had vanished. That was not supposed to happen. I started a wide field scan, interrogating each radio tag in the area. Some of the tags had memory which recorded each interrogation, maybe I could track Allison that way. It was during this process that an anomaly appeared on my tracking screen. Several of the tags that we each carried on our runabouts were headed off in very odd directions. They specifically tags which were on Allison's runabout. The tags were not activated when onboard, only when launched into a rock. I quickly plotted the reverse course from each tag. The computer quickly revealed that each tag had originated form a course line headed out of the stream. I plotted an intercept course, Allison was obviously dropping a bread crumb trail. It took several hours for me to over take her. What I saw when I arrived was unsettling. Allison's runabout was in the grip of a search probe, hard docked to her access port. The probe manipulators had cut off all of her long range antennas, ruined her manipulator arm, and the probe was pushing her into deep space. Allison was very glad to see me, that is when she wasn't rechristening the owner of the probe. She was fit to be tied. I disabled the probe after a bit of arm wrestling. then started to push the whole mess back to the ship. Allison needed the time to cool down, the probe was valuable to us, and it was also evidence against the ship that had directed it to attack Allison's runabout. Attempted murder was a very serious charge in deep space.
We currently had a controlling interest in half the ores in the stream, the other half spread out amongst twenty or thirty other ships. With that resource base we were able to contract for tankers from the Grid to begin shuttling more water ice out to the stream, to return loaded with refined ores. That increased our position as the controlling interest in the rocks, not of course to detriment of the other ships. Everybody was soon to be rich, we were just going to be richer than anybody else. And I mean really rich! Bill Gates rich!
The operation had taken on a life of it's own. Lawyers and managers in suits were setting up a major corporation. We, the crew that had taken all the risks were being patted on the back, hailed as heroes, and quietly escorted out the door. Ten years ago I had been flipping burgers, now I was one of the wealthiest people in the Grid, and with my stock in the corporation, there was no possible way I could spend money faster than I would accumulate it. I took return passage on one of the returning ore ships, more time spent in hibernation, but this time surrounded by a wealth of ore.
I spent a few quiet weeks at the new house my parents had bought in an exclusive neighborhood, but really couldn't settle down. I still wanted the stars, and now I would have them. The expedition to the rocks had been only a first step, like Neil Armstrong's first step so many years ago. Now free enterprise had made it possible for me to take that giant step to the stars.