Critical Futures

Welcome to the 8th installment of the ongoing Station Keeping story. This installment will air in two parts. The first first part was entitled “Working Overtime,” and the second part is called “Evening Stroll,” and appears below. Thanks for reading.

Evening Stroll

Josh always imagined that the common spaces on the station would be more occupied then they were. Even though the station was mostly completed, it would still be a while before there was any regular traffic simply because of the way space travel worked. Josh tried to be more optimistic, but at the moment the station looked mighty dreary. “How do you are you liking this posting?” Josh asked when they stepped out of the lift.

“Oh, it’s alright. I’m a bit of a perfectionist with these computers,” she paused for a moment and looked at her left arm, on which, Josh realized, Julia was caring a mini-computer terminal. “So it’s nice to be able to organize a system basically from the get go. And besides all this gear is pretty high-tech–for the rim worlds–so that’s a plus.”

“Yeah, I felt the same about the construction management when I came aboard, but it kind of lost it’s glean after a while.”

“How long were you out here before the rest of us got here?”

“Few years, three and a half I think. I was on assignment a few worlds over, and being young and unattached, they moved me out here, because apparently I was the closest. Go figure.”

“And here you are. Spend a lot of time on the rim, then?”

“A little. I grew up core-side, but figured there was more to see. And Hanm has really grown on me.” Josh said.

“I grew up on ships, moving about every so often, we saw a lot of rim worlds, I can’t say they did much for me. Is Hanm really that special?”

“Particularly with this station, you bet. Most important rim world, the way I figure it.” Josh was almost baffled that she didn’t know Hanm.

“Everything’s so far apart, I totally don’t buy what the news people are saying about the Hanmists. The league’ll hold.”

“You know as well as anyone that core and rim are all relative terms, star-density is about the same, we just got to the ‘core’ first.”

“–that’s what I meant.” she cut him off.

“How familiar are you with the Hanmists, anyway?” Josh continued.

“Not much, just what I grazed in the reports.” she said, sounding a bit embarrassed. Hanm Centre was just a job for her, she was so used to moving around almost constantly that she had grown a thick skin for “settling in.”

“Look harder,” Josh said, stopping to turn to Julia “See what’s on the nets, I the Commander would like anything he can get on the subject”

“Do you think it’s a threat? Otherwise I don’t see the harm in letting people talk about whatever they want, didn’t the league learn that lesson the hard way a few centuries ago.” Julia spoke of the past as if it were only a few months ago, which it might not have been far off, Josh realized. He never checked to see when her objective birthday was: relativity screwed things up so bad. It gave him a headache, and he convinced himself that it didn’t really matter.

“I don’t know that I’d say ‘threat,’ but it’s worth keeping an eye on, and whatever happens this place,” he said, tapping his foot gently for emphasis, “is going to care.”

“I’ll say.”

“And what happens there,” Josh pointed to the mini-terminal screen strapped to her forearm, “is just as important as what happens out here.”

“You mean in ‘reality‘?” she said with mock amazement and horror. They laughed.

“Yeah,” he took a deep breath, “but, just one officer to another: keep your eyes open. Someone here needs to know what’s going on,” he pleaded.

“The nets are pretty cool, I’ll give myself–and them–that, but they’re not that good.” She said, hoping that she hadn’t overcommitted herself.

“It’s something. Anyway, lets keep walking, it’s a big station after all.”

Welcome to the 8th installment of the ongoing Station Keeping story. This installment will air in two parts. The first first part is entitled “Working Overtime,” and the second part will appear tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

Working Overtime

Josh undid the collar of his uniform jacket, he was supposed to feel grateful that the Navy permitted Hanm Centre officers wear the, only slightly, more comfortable field variant, but he didn’t. Josh sighed with relief at the idea that his shift was over. “Hey, Julia, are you going to work late, you should be done for today,”

There was a pause before she responded, and she didn’t look up from what she was doing when she said “um yeah, I’ll be right there, almost done with this file tree.”

Josh laughed. File tree, Josh thought that was an interesting way to conceptualize the data. He almost left the command center then but thought better of it. Though Hanm Centre was important in the grand scheme of things–which he had to keep reminding himself–and he loved interacting with so many different people, it wasn’t like there was all that much to do in the day-to-day, or that they were in the danger of running into anything in a space station.

“No really, you’re done for today. Come with me,” he said mustering as much authority in his voice as he could. He couldn’t, however, keep a straight face.

She snapped out of her haze just in time to process what she had heard and she chuckled. “I suppose you’re right.” She shut off her computer and slowly moved out of her chair. It took her a moment to stretch out to her full height. “I need to not get lost in work so much,” she pondered, “well whatever, I have priority to the computer core here, and what else is there to do?”

“Well, let’s see,” Josh herded the on-staff databases administrator and computer whiz into the elevator headed for the station’s poorly named, “common space.”

This is the second instalment of a Knowing Mars story from the third chapter. While many of our hereos are getting settled in on Mars, Thom Busby and his assistant Adrian Rathe continue to work on their investigation. Read part one here, and thanks for reading. Enjoy!

“Not really, I guess. I just I wish we could get a look at the report of that incident a year ago, that might help, forensics is sure sitting on this one,” Adrian said.

“Good luck getting stuff from them, the geeks over there are practically rebels.” Busby’s sudden venom almost surprised Adrian, but by now he was pretty good at covering it up.

“Quinn Dasen seems to be pretty approachable,” Adrian said.

“She’s the one that’s been sitting on that file for months! She’s squeaky clean and very approachable, unlike some of the rest of them. Beyond that they’re all the same.”

“But if they are telepaths, should it really matter in cyberspace? I mean, if they had a hacking gene mod or onbard processing implants, then yeah, but as long as we stay away we should be safe. Right?”

“You don’t know that.” Busby’s response was abrupt and unambiguous.

There was a pause in the conversation, and if Adrian had had anything else in the world to do he would have started doing it, but there really wasn’t work to be done.

“And don’t you go trying to talk or meet with them, we may be ISA, but we’ve not made a great deal of progress on this case, and we have no idea what they can do. I can’t have you going rogue on me.”

“I just feel like–”

Adrian was cut off by the alarm, and then by Busby. “Don’t feel. Get to.”

Something had set off one of the their units cyberspace alarms. This happened pretty often and usually it was just some kid hacker’s or some intermal long abandoned script gone awry. or another ISA team that had forgotten the operating standards; but false positives were the price of having a sensitive system that could detect even the most surgical attacks. Adrian reluctantly reattached his net teather but Busby was a bit ahead of him, but an instant later it didn’t matter. Their office disapeared and they were on the net.