Well, it would’ve been funny if everybody wasn’t so ticked off at me. Donahoo had been sent by corporate headquarters all the way from Vesta to Ceres to pick me up and turn off the distress call Forty-niner had been beaming out on the broadband frequencies for all those weeks.
It was only a milliwatt signal, didn’t cost us a piffle of electrical power, but that teeny little signal got picked up at the Lunar Farside Observatory, where they had built the big SETI radio telescope. When they first detected our distress call the astronomers went delirious: they thought they’d found an intelligent extraterrestrial signal, after more than a century of searching. They were sore as hell when they realized it was only a dinky old waterbot in trouble, not aliens trying to say hello.
They didn’t give a rat’s ass of a hoot about Forty-niner and me, but as long as our Mayday was being beamed out their fancy radio telescope search for ETs was screwed. So they bleeped to the International Astronautical Authority, and the IAA complained to corporate headquarters, and Donahoo got called on the carpet at Vesta and told to get to JRK49N and turn off that damned distress signal!
And that’s how we got rescued. Not because anybody cared about an aged waterbot that was due to be scrapped or the very junior dumbass riding on it. We got saved because we were bothering the astronomers at Farside.
Donahoo made up some of the cost of his rescue mission by selling off what was left of Forty-niner to one of the salvage outfits at Ceres. They started cutting up the old bird as soon as we parked it in orbit there.
But not before I put on a clean new spacesuit and went aboard JRK49N one last time.
I had forgotten how big the ship was. It was huge, a big massive collection of spherical tanks that dwarfed the fusion drive thruster and the cramped little pod I had lived in all those weeks. Hanging there in orbit, empty and alone, Forty-niner looked kind of sad. Long, nasty gashes had been ripped through the water tanks; I thought I could see rimes of ice glittering along their ragged edges in the faint starlight.
Then I saw the flickers of laser torches. Robotic scavengers were already starting to take the ship apart.
Floating there in weightlessness, my eyes misted up as I approached the ship. I had hated being on it, but I got teary-eyed just the same. I know it was stupid, but that’s what happened, so help me.
I didn’t go to the pod. There was nothing there that I wanted, especially not my cruddy old spacesuit. No, instead I worked my way along the cleats set into the spherical tanks, hand over gloved hand, to get to the heart of the ship, where the fusion reactor and power generator were housed.
And Forty-niner’s CPU.
«Hey, whattarya doin’ there?» One of the few humans directing the scavenger robots hollered at me, so loud I thought my helmet earphones would melt down.
«I’m retrieving the computer’s hard drive,» I said.
«You got permission?»
«I was the crew. I want the hard core. It’s not worth anything to you, is it?»
«We ain’t supposed to let people pick over the bones,» he said. But his tone was lower, not so belligerent.
«It’ll only take a couple of minutes,» I said. «I don’t want anything else; you can have all the rest.»
«Damn right we can. Company paid good money for this scrap pile.»
I nodded inside my helmet and went through the open hatch that led down to JRK49N’s heart. And brain. It only took me a few minutes to pry open the CPU and disconnect the hard drive. I slipped the palm-sized metal oblong into a pouch on the thigh of my suit, then got out. I didn’t look back. What those scavengers were chopping up was just a lot of metal and plastic. I had Forty-niner with me.
The corporation never assigned me to a waterbot again. Somebody in the front office must’ve taken a good look at my personnel dossier and figured I had too much education to be stuck in a dumb job like that. I don’t know, maybe Donahoo had something to do with it. He wouldn’t admit to it, and I didn’t press him about it.
Anyway, when I finally got back to Vesta they assigned me to a desk job. Over the years I worked my way up to chief of logistics and eventually got transferred back to Selene City, on the Moon. I’ll be able to take early retirement soon and get married and start a family.
Forty-niner’s been with me all that time. Not that I talk to him every day. But it’s good to know that he’s there and I can ease off the stresses of the job or whatever by having a nice long chat with him.
One of the days I’ll even beat him at chess.
DUEL IN THE SOMME
The frontier in this story is a frontier of technology. Virtual reality is the name commonly given to an electronic method of presenting sensory inputs to a person. A VR user sees, hears, even feels a simulation of the real world. VR allows you to experience a scene, instead of merely reading or watching or listening to it, a scene that actually exists only in the circuitry of the virtual reality system.
Although VR technology hasn’t gone as far as it is presented in «Duel in the Somme,» the day is coming when virtual reality systems will offer a complete digital hallucination; the user will not be able to tell the difference between the VR simulation he (or she) is experiencing and the real world.
Which opens some intriguing possibilities …
The crisis came when Kelso got on my butt in that damned Red Baron triplane of his and started shooting the crap out of my Spad. I mean, I knew this was just a simulation, it wasn’t really real, but I could see the fabric on my wings shredding, and the plane started shaking so hard my teeth began to rattle.
I kicked left rudder and pushed on the stick as hard as I could. Wrong move. The little Spad flipped on its back and went into a spin, diving toward the ground.
It’s only a simulation! I kept telling myself. It’s not real! But the wind was shrieking and the ground spinning around and around and coming up fast and I couldn’t get out of the spin and simulation or not I puked up my guts.
I knew I was going to die. Worse, Kelso would get to take Lorraine to the ski weekend and tell her all about what a wuss I am. While they were in bed together, most likely. Rats!
How did I get myself into this duel? All because of Lorraine, that’s how. Well, that’s not really true. I can’t blame her. I went into it with my eyes wide open. I even thought this would be my best chance to beat Kelso.
Yeah. Fat chance.
I mean, it was all weird from the beginning.
There I was, taking the biggest risk I’d ever taken, sitting at my workstation and using my BlackBerry to text message sweet Lorraine: GOT RSRVS FR ASPEN COMING WKND. JOIN ME? EL ZORRO.
I mean, everybody in the company was after Lorraine. She was beautiful, smart, elegant, kind, beautiful, sweet, independent, and beautiful.
Me, I was just one of the nerds in the advanced projects department, a geekboy stuck in one of those cubicles like Dilbert. Not that I was repulsive or tongue-tied. I mean, I wasn’t as slick and handsome as Kelso, but I didn’t crack mirrors or frighten babies with my looks. Lorraine always smiled at me whenever we passed each other in the corridor. I sat with her in the cafeteria a few times and we had very pleasant conversations.
She even called me Tom. Not Thomas. Tom. I mean, even in school everybody called me by my last name, Zepopolis. The few friends I had called me Zep. When I first started working at the company guys like Kelso called me Zeppelin, but one glance from Lorraine and I started dieting. She even complimented me on how I was slimming down. Talk about incentive!
But I didn’t have the nerve to sign my real name to the invitation I sent her. I thought it might add an air of mystery to the invite, maybe get her thinking romantic thoughts and wondering who her secret admirer might be. Zorro, the masked swordsman. The dashing hero. Yeah, right.