Moon Trek - The Misadventures of Alexis Calderon-Bigglesworth III
Page 3
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Back in my room I dumped the girl's bag out on the bed. There was a notebook and what appeared to be an old fashioned microchip. When I say notebook I mean the type made by the ancients with paper. The microchip looked as ancient as the notebook.
The notebook contained text in what appeared to be some old earth script. It certainly wasn't Esperanto, Mandarin or French. I sat staring at it. I couldn't imagine a time when someone would actually pulp up a tree simply to write things down on.
I had visited a tree zoo in New America when I was a kid. It was pretty macabre to think people would have chopped them up while they screamed. This must have been made before the central government had created the New Fauna Protection Act.
I had seen paper-books and other documents sold on both the Overnet and the Internet. But the paper was from off-world unintelligent flora.
This much paper would be worth a fortune and I was even more sure that the woman would be back to get her purchases as soon as she discovered her error. Not to mention the opportunity to speak with me and allow me to seduce her.
Placing the book carefully back into the bag I pulled out my neocomm unit and accessed Overnet information on all travellers to Luna. It was too much of a task to look through everyone who had travelled to the moon recently so I did a search on all citizens who had been within a 10 kilometre radius of the city centre during today’s ceremony.
The neocomm unit responded and I carefully refined my search looking for women aged eighteen to twenty-five from earth and on Luna, but didn't manage to make a match.
I'd had MU implant turned off for the last three months in an attempt to learn to live dis-engaged from the Overnet. While this was preparing me for life on a more primitive planet it was very difficult to access information with just a neocomm instead of just thinking a question to the MU chip in my head.
I had one of the latest MUU units implanted. A Mental Usufruct Unit which had been renamed to MU because peasants kept calling it a MOO.
I put the microchip unit into the neocomm and scanned it. It turned out to be an old fashioned memory chip from a primitive computer used back in the late 21st century. It only held about 1 gigaflop of information.
Access to the binary information contained on the chip was beyond the capability of my private neocomm, and I decided to leave this puzzle for tomorrow and to go down stairs for some food.