by T I WADE
VIN first removed his jeans sheepishly; put on a pair of shorts handed to him to hide his embarrassment, sat down, and was helped off with his plastic limbs.
First the metal upper legs were fitted to his stumps and snugly connected; they felt tighter, snug, and more secure than the military legs; the metal was cold, and he felt the chill of naked metal against his skin. He was pulled up into a standing position by Suzi; the mid-section of the body suit was wrapped around his waist with soft cloth belts and straps tightening the whole device around him. He even had straps around his shoulders, like seat belts. It took a long thirty minutes, but then he was ready. The three men dressing him stepped back and one picked up what looked like an open-faced motorbike helmet and strapped it on VIN’s head.
“Don’t worry VIN,” Suzi said. “This is your new lower-body control system; it works from nerve impulses your brain sends to your legs to make the muscles work. My impulse control system is already matched to my thought patterns. The controller is the size of your small fingernail and already been implanted in my lower neck. VIN, you must think you have legs again. You must send the same orders through your body to your feet, telling them to walk like you did all your life. If the helmet matches your brain impulses correctly, your new metal feet, knees and hydraulics should make the exact same movements. A man will stand on each side of you, and you try to walk, like this.” And she easily walked around the stage as if she had her real legs back.
She walked as perfectly as she must have done at one time; swinging her legs forward, and not like he had seen most of the modern robots on television, ungainly clomping around. Suzi then climbed into a baggy pair of trousers, and pulled them over her exoskeleton to hide it, and to show her maneuverability as she moved around the stage. It looked like her real legs were doing the walking. What surprised VIN was that there was very little noise from the metal at all. No sucking of hydraulics, no motors driving something, almost no noise at all, apart from faint metallic clicks.
He watched and waited for her to finish as two men gently took his elbows in their palms and got him ready to move. He thought about moving his right foot with all the strength he could muster and suddenly his right foot shot out at a rapid speed and he would have done the splits if he wasn’t being held up.
“No, no, VIN, just walk gently and lightly,” stated Suzi laughing. “Watch this!” and she knelt and then jumped, going at least eight feet high into the air, completing a back somersault, landing back hard on her metal feet, and her knees bending to take up the jolt from hitting the floor. She landed like a gymnast, her arms outstretched in front of her. She expertly completed the move, and the power of her hitting the wooden stage they were standing on made his teeth jolt.
“Gee whizz!” exclaimed Jonesy, now his mouth hanging open and not believing his eyes, at the height the girl had nimbly reached. VIN just watched, his heart racing. This was exciting!
Slowly he got the hang of it, and after several minutes, the two men left him alone, and he began to walk around the stage. First he walked slowly, and then faster and faster, his brain telling his new limbs what to do. Finally, after repetitive laps walking fast around the stage, he ended up next to Suzi, who was patiently waiting for him.
“So, what do you think?” she asked.
“Fantastic, these legs feel so strong. How did you do that back flip thing?”
“Easy, I thought about what I wanted to do, and jumped.” She bent her legs, shot up, completed the full somersault and landed hard, the exact same way she had done the first time. “You try it, VIN.”
He closed his eyes, and thought about the move she had made. He pictured it in his mind, bent his legs, opened his eyes, and jumped. VIN’s legs felt like rockets propelling him up. He arched his back, dropped his head and let his legs follow his body over the top of the somersault. His eyes played tricks on him; he looked so high as his body slowly revolved, and quickly dropped. The front of his feet hit the ground first. He couldn’t keep his balance and was about to fall forward. He froze for a split-second, before his brain naturally corrected his landing, bent his right leg and placed it forward, under his about-to-topple-forward body. He froze waiting for something to break, or snap, and let him fall, but he didn’t. He stood up and looked at Suzi, then over to Jonesy, who was looking at him in shock.
“Kid! You must have gone up ten, twelve feet. You nearly doubled the height of the girl!” he exclaimed, not believing what he had just witnessed, from a kid with no legs. “That’s impossible!”
“I used to agree,” added Ryan. “These metal limbs and exoskeletons have been designed to help my spacewalkers, and miners work in the vacuum conditions of space. It’s coffee time; let’s go to the canteen, grab a hot cup of coffee, and I’m sure Suzi has some of her German triple-chocolate cake somewhere. She makes one every other day for me.”
VIN felt a little apprehensive suddenly seeing the three stairs he had to get down. Suzi grabbed his hand, looked at him and smiled as she led him to the stairs. She stepped lightly down, showing him how to think about it, and he followed suit. Descending the stairs was like going to heaven, just in the wrong direction. He had this beautiful blonde angel watching over him, and keeping his confidence up. Still holding hands they followed the others into the canteen.
Just like in a European café, Suzi and VIN, the two semi-metal characters sat at one high round table, and on bar stools they chatted, while the others looked on.
“Don’t worry about them watching you,” suggested Suzi as two cups of coffee and two large slices of cake were brought to their bar-height table. They perched on the two barstools, but VIN kept one foot on the ground for support. “They are analyzing every move you make, to see if they can add something here and there to make it easier for you. My full body spacesuit is nearly ready and yours will be ready a couple of weeks after mine. They will cover the exoskeleton with a special fabric from NASA to allow you to be protected from radiation in space. These suits, VIN, will be the suits that you and I will wear to go out of the spacecraft and do spacewalks.”
VIN sized up the weight of the lower-body equipment on him. It wasn’t that heavy, but this piece of cake made it feel like it had added a hundred pounds or more to his body weight. Suddenly what she had just said struck home. “You and I are going to spacewalk?” he asked her.
“That is if your old pilot friend can fly us up there,” laughed Suzi.
“Watch who you call old, Superfraülein,” responded Jonesy, still quiet and now pondering what they had got themselves into.
“I just can’t believe it,” stated VIN.
“Believe what?” asked Ryan enjoying his cake.
“One day, I’m beating up Nebraskan rednecks in a bar, then I have to pull my partner out of losing all his money in Las Vegas, and then I’m suddenly Rocket Man about to head off into space. I just can’t believe all this stuff.”
“That’s fine,” laughed Ryan. “Rocket Man, you are not, but heading off into space is still several months away, and you will have lots of time to practice jumping around in space. Now let’s get you out of this suit; the guys will perfect things they have noticed, like putting softer pads under your feet, and we can head over to Hangar Six.”
Chapter 8
Maggie Sinclair
Colonel Maggie Sinclair was just leaving the hot C-5 Galaxy on the simmering asphalt apron when she received a call from her superior, the colonel in charge of the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center that the commander of Nellis Air Force Base wanted to see her.
Maggie’s parents never wanted her to fly airplanes. Her first memories were of a nice comfortable house in a happy, pretty suburban area of San Francisco. She had been born in the late 60’s, just missing the flower-power era, but was still a 70’s and 80’s music junkie at heart. Her parents—her mother a computer analyst and her father a software engineer—worked at one of the new and fast growing companies in the area. They had initially met at university studying the same new computer subj
ects which had just been accepted into the university’s curriculum. They fell in love and were married soon; and both received advanced degrees, her father a PhD and her mother a Masters.
Their only child was born a few years later and she grew up in a world of computers, geeks, and DOS terminology.
Her initial years of school were in San Francisco before her father received a promotion and they moved out of suburbia and closer to Silicon Valley. The Sinclair family found a nice small house in the country with an acre of garden. Life was quiet, serene and for a young girl, totally boring. The only interest she had, apart from helping her parents tend the garden on weekends, was the small aircraft which flew overhead from a local airfield.
Often she watched as these little noisy wonders of flight came and disappeared over the hedge around the house. In the canvas swing chair, she watched while her father barbequed or mowed the lush lawn, and her mother tended the full rose garden or large vegetable garden, her only passions.
As Maggie grew into a teenager, she realized how geeky her parents really were. She began to learn about the “birds and the bees” from other knowledgeable girls at school and, as every child thought, found it impossible to think that her parents could ever do such a thing. So much so that she began to worry she might be an orphan they had adopted. Never once did she see them kiss, or even touch each other, unless it happened by accident.
They were both pretty good-looking people to Maggie, but to each other, the only time they ever showed affection, was when, as Maggie called it, they talked Gibbery Geek.
Always bored, she watched the aircraft fly over every weekend. Often the same aircraft came over several times and one day she asked her father why some airplanes came over more than others. He replied that some might be training pilots to fly while others had places to go.
At sixteen, Maggie finally had enough of the endless mowing, weeding, and pruning and asked her father to take her to the airfield. Reluctantly, he sighed and told her to get their sweaters, and he would get the family car out. This breaking with their weekend routine was a new development for him.
He drove her down to the airfield three miles away, where for two hours he sat there going over notes from work while she sat on the porch of the flying school and watched aircraft. Some, as her father said, took off and disappeared. Some came in to land and were put away in hangars, and two of them just went around and around for long periods, often with different people flying them.
On her third visit a few months later she met one of the instructors. Her father, now prepared for a possible airfield visit, brought work home and sat in the car jotting notes on paper.
“How do they stay up?” asked Maggie, and the young man, maybe ten years older than she, sat down and gave her a ten-minute lesson on flight.
She was rather interested that nothing but a sort of wind-vacuum, as she understood it, invisibly held the aircraft from crashing to the ground.
Two weeks later the same instructor noticed her sitting on the porch again and went over to talk to the teenager. She was quite pretty, but seemed very conservative, protected, and introverted. She had straight, long brown hair around a pretty round face. The girl’s eyes were a hazel green, bright green in direct sunlight, and when she looked at him, he felt as if those eyes were lasers going straight through him.
When he extended his hand to introduce himself, Maggie stood up, and he was surprised by how tall she was. He was five foot nine and she about the same height, her graceful body dressed in a simple black on white polka-dot dress and an open cardigan. She was tall and very lean.
They discussed flying for a while, and she asked him what it would cost to go up in an airplane to see what it was like.
He replied that a 15-minute test flight would cost $20.00, an hour of instruction, $75.00. That sounded like a lot of money to Maggie, so she shyly said that she would think about it, and ask her father.
A few days later she brought the subject up over dinner. Her mother was quite shocked that her daughter wanted to do such a thing, her father asked what it would cost.
“Well, I suppose your mother and I have never given you any pocket money, plus you haven’t asked for anything before. We should think about giving you something of your own, and as long as it has to do with engineering, or computers, I would allow you to go on a test flight.”
He went with her onto the porch the next weekend, met the young instructor, signed a few papers, handed over twenty dollars and went back to the car to work, happy once the instructor had explained to him that aerospace engineering was one of the fastest growing courses at university these days, and one day fancy new computers might control, and maybe even fly aircraft.
The instructor placed her in the right-side front seat of the Cessna 172, and got in the left door. He showed her how to put on a set of headphones so that she could hear his conversations with other aircraft while he began to complete pre-flight checks.
To Maggie, the dials all looked interesting. She jumped when somebody spoke over the radio, and watched as the instructor started up the aircraft. The propeller disappeared in front of the windshield, the revs increased, and suddenly they were trundling over the neatly cut grass towards the nearest asphalt strip.
Slowly the excitement rose in her as they neared the end of the runway, and again she jumped as the pilot spoke to the other aircraft in the area. It seemed to her that he was speaking to a very select group of people that the rest of the world, including her father sitting in his car, wasn’t part of. The instructor turned the aircraft onto the runway, gunned the engine, and they began to surge forward.
Suddenly the nose picked up, and the ground disappeared from below the aircraft. As the aircraft rose, she watched the runway disappear. The pilot handled the craft while speaking on the radio at the same time. He stated something about leaving the pattern and heading over to the coast. She saw her house and swing chair before it disappeared behind them.
“Maggie, we can just get to the coast and back in the time allocated. Would you like to go?” She nodded, the airplane rose into the blue sky, and the rocky coastline came up to meet them.
“Would you like to try to fly her?” She nodded and after telling her how to press the rudder pedals to bank left or right, and keep the aircraft straight and level with the joystick, he let go of the controls and told her she was flying. The aircraft stayed straight and level; he showed her how to turn left, then how to turn right. He was impressed how calmly she operated the small plane.
It all ended far too quickly, and for the first time in her life, Maggie Sinclair knew what it felt like to be in control of something. She thanked the instructor, said that she would work on her father, and hopefully she would be back.
Her father hadn’t seen her take off or land the aircraft. As she returned to the car, his complete lack of interest made her adamant to come back and learn how to fly.
“I want to learn to fly an aircraft,” stated Maggie over dinner that Sunday evening.
“Why is that dear? That is a job for men, not young girls,” retorted her mother serving the meal.
“It is so exciting mother,” Maggie returned.
“Oh, I don’t think so!” replied her mother handing Maggie a plate of steaming food, mostly grown in their garden. “How could flying be exciting? I dislike flying. I had to go up to Seattle for that conference last year and hated the idea of sitting in a small place without fresh air.”
“Flying is for our feathered friends,” added her equally exciting father. “It would cost a lot of money, money we haven’t got. I think you should get this silly idea out of your head young lady and think about your courses coming up. You are a rising senior with one more year before you go to college. You are already a year ahead. How that mix-up of putting you a year ahead ever happened in your elementary school, I just don’t know, but you must ready yourself for your higher education.”
“Yes, in aerospace engineering, father. That is what I want to do, and
I’m sure a pilot’s license will help me when I need to apply to engineering universities. The instructor told me that a pilot’s license might even help me with an additional scholarship into certain universities.”
“What’s wrong with what your mother and I learned Maggie?” asked her father. “Computers are a vast industry and ever-growing. Look at the new Apple Company, And Microsoft with that Gates fellow, both situated pretty close to us.”
“I have no interest, father,” she replied bluntly.
“Oh dear!” stated her mother. “We have saved up since you were born, to put you through college, Maggie. I certainly don’t want to see that money go to waste.”
“Did the instructor say how much it would cost?” asked her father.
“I need a total of forty flying hours of which thirty hours will cost about $75.00 per hour with an instructor; then I need ten hours at $50.00 per hour flying solo, plus some test and license costs. About thirty-six hundred dollars, father,” Maggie replied.
“Well, dear” he stated to his wife “that’s about ten percent of what we have put away for college. I’m sure that if it would help her get a scholarship, it might all come out in the wash.”
Her mother wasn’t happy, but her parents relented to save unnecessary family arguments, which were discouraged in their family, and the next month she began her lessons.
The instructor was surprised how well she flew. It seemed that she didn’t have an interest in the science of flying, but flew the aircraft exactly as he showed her how to. The first twenty hours passed in six months as she rose to become his best pupil to date.
She was very pretty with her long brown hair and striking green eyes, but to the instructor, her total lack of character and excitement kept him from learning more about her. He had met her extremely boring excuse for a father, saw her father’s way of life reflected in her, so just did his job and taught her to fly.
