The Gaming Outpost

I took the bus, which was autopiloted, and went north along the Coastal Run (their name for a highway) to the Crucible. The bus was evidence of their great faith in their computer safety systems as it had neither running lights, nor substantial internal walls.

A 1950′s era runabout, if five-point seat belts and a helmet and neck rest were added to it, could have drive through the length of the bus without serious damage, to the runabout. The affair would have yielded a broken apart bus to be splattered in styrofoam and tri-layer balloons alongside the roadway, along with thirty dead bodies.

I could only hope no had a serious grudge against any of my fellow passengers, as I pulled out my air mattress that hung from a self-regulating harness attached to the styrofoam inner frame by foot wide belts. Because in my mind, it would be a lovely, simple way to kill your ex-spouse if you were a malignant homicidal sort, that is. A little computer hackery she would engage in, and buh-bye to annoying ex-hubby.

We passed what were called windsocks, but were something else entirely, every twenty yards up the Run. They were there to tell the bus and its peers how to steer against the wind so that any gust that made it into the ten foot deep cut into the grass would not smash us.

For my mind, this looked like asking for trouble, but the twenty-nine others on my bus seemed copacetic about it, so I got into matress, and drifted off on dreams of playing lead guitar with a heavy metal group called Led Bus.

In the morning, I arrived in Hanover College Station the usual way. Which means, I got into a small bathtub sized block of foam with a flexible wind canopy over me, and waited to be ‘bomb-dropped’ out of the back of the bus with two other folk in similar circumstances. For you see, the buses never stop running. If they have a problem, its just cheaper to replace the whole thing.

And so, I got out after my bathtub stopped and was rotated up. My first greeting was a glaring, blaring sign that seemed to use every color in the rainbow, and some that were illegal, to announce that I had entered ‘the Crucible! The top worldwide and Near Earth Orbit research and development zone, far exceeding Silicon Valley in its prime.!!’ Furthermore, the Crucible was called that because it was under the extreme pressures of Hanover College, and its visionary leaders that business and college and government partnerships were formed that led to wild economic success.

There is a word for business and government unity, I noted dourly, as I walked into the disembarkation tunnel, and up, and out into the sunlight. The word is fascism.

I took a slidewalk three miles, and arrived at the front door of Angstrom after passing a dozen and four different college research labs or factories or corporate headquarters. They all tended to look the same.

Upon walking in through the air curtain doorway (no crude physical doors here), I heard shouting. Looking around the collossal waiting area with its three story metal thingamajig masquerading as art, I tracked down the noise.

Tall, dark and glum was yelling most emphatically at blonde and cute who looked rather put upon.

“We, and by we, I mean you, failed to get the okays from the Medical Board. Now we’ve got a product coming out in two weeks, a factory making that product, two warehouses to hold things, a distributor to get it into the most stylish doctor’s offices, and a big fat ‘no’ from those clueless hacks.”

“Uh, yes, sir, but it might not…”

“Do not try to tell me it might not be all bad.” He snarled, and she flinched, and I moved forward across the glossy floor without thinking.

“Hey pal, back off. Leave the lady be.”

He turned to me, sneered, and spoke.

“Not that it is any of your concern, but she’s my employee…”

The woman frowned at me, and I realized she expected to take her lumps. But, I’ve been around, after all, I’m a verser. The subtext they were both trying to sell me was that this was the normal thing for a high stress environment for super-talented folk, and he said something about calling security, and how I was just not understanding.

“I understand that you like to yell at women too pretty for you to date.” I said, and his face turned red, and into her eyes there appeared a spark of understanding. Sometimes the human race is not very nice at all. And nothing ever really changes is what I’ve learned.

She cocked her head his way, and he just snarled and stamped off. She waited until he was good and gone, and then burst out in surprised laughter. Then she walked over to me with her mouth open, tasting the revelation with her tongue, and then she held her hand out forthrightly for me to shake.

“Hello, my name is Krista. And you sure tagged Rob’s button but good.”

She was pretty, and just a touch refined, and a touch wild, and I found it easy to smile at her.

“So what brings you to Angstrom?” She asked after we had introduced ourselves, and she had taken me off to a side room with coffee and a danish. We had the space to ourselves.

“I was hoping to be hired. I hear great things are going on, and I like to be in on such.” I said.

She laughed and shook her head.

“Well, in a way, Rob might be right. I have to find some way to get ten crooked doctors to agree to let me take away a couple billion dollars from them. This is not the time to be hiring. I, well, we will survive because we believe, but we’re going to have to let people go. Sorry.” She finished up with a sympathetic smile and then sat down across from me to nibble on her danish.

“What if I could solve that problem for you?” I asked.
She blinked, so I explained that I could get the Medical Board to agree. Well, if that was the case, why then of course she would hire me. She’d make sure I got one of the company cars as well.

Then she told me I was cute as we walked to the exit, and gave me a business card with her private number written on back, and the words ‘call me!’.

So, I had a mission, and a love interest. This world was looking up, I thought. How little I knew.