Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2

by Various Writers

  Polly slaps my face. She whips out her favorite phrase: “This is a predicament, isn’t it?” I laugh so hard that I sneeze off some of the dust and cement covering my face and clothes.

  Then we’re running back to the farm.

  It’s Jimmy who sees the remote-controlled military vehicles first. They come lumbering down the rutted country road. We hide in the tall grass. I power down my lidreader—it’s still scrambled anyway—and whisper to Polly and Jimmy that they should do the same. Polly nods, and a moment later I can tell she’s no longer connected. A little sigh escapes her lips.

  Jimmy says he can’t and blinks. I ask him why not. “It’s just … I don’t want to.” He glances at the stub of his arm. “I’m afraid it’ll hurt so bad I’ll scream.”

  I want to tell him how stupid he was for not getting a new arm, but there’s no time. The military vehicles splutter and spit and belch along the road. Their weapons swivel this way and that as their sensors look for targets. The sun is off in the west now, but the heat is like a rabid beating heart in my chest.

  Jimmy nods toward the windmill. Some kind of bird sits atop it, singing. Jimmy whispers there are no birds in Phoenix. Polly takes my hand in hers. I look at her and, even though I know she’s just reaching out for something human, I feel really good about us all of a sudden—like maybe I’ve done something right for once, and she’ll forgive me.

  The military vehicles pass us slowly. They’re huge and armored. I hear more explosions in the distance. I’m thinking about what Jimmy said before, how we’re just blips on the screen, and it scares me.

  Once the road is clear, we set off again.

  The sun is almost down by the time we reach the barn, and there’s no light inside of it. Jimmy says it’s time to hurry, like I didn’t know that from the horrible sounds and bright flashing lights coming from the direction of the town.

  I get under the car. Jimmy’s accessing how to fix a fuel pump on his lidreader, which I think is a bad idea because it might lead the attacking forces right to us. He says there’s no other choice. “I lied when I said I knew how to fix it, is why.” Of course.

  Jimmy tells me what to do. I drain the fuel tank into the gas can with a connector. A lot of it spills out on the barn floor, and the room smells heavily of gasoline. Then I loosen the drive shaft with one of the drills Jimmy bought. Once it’s loose, I pull it off. “Thing smells like old shoes,” I say, but nobody’s listening.

  Removing the hoses connected to the tank takes longer than I expect. Jimmy tells me to remove the straps from the tank and I do. I grunt and groan taking the tank off and pulling it out from under the El Camino. It’s getting dark quick, and my hands get dirty removing the fuel pump from the tank. I look up at Jimmy, who’s smiling like a fool and watching me work. “You sure this takes two hands, Jimmy?”

  He starts blinking maddeningly fast. “Shit,” Jimmy says. It’s slurred. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Jimmy collapses on the barn floor. Polly gasps, kneels beside him. Jimmy is shaking like a bowl of jelly. “I think he’s seizing!” says Polly.

  I crawl away from the fuel tank to Jimmy and Polly. “Keep his legs from kicking,” I tell Polly. She does. I hold Jimmy’s head in my dirty hands. I really hope he isn’t biting his tongue, but I’m not sticking my hands in his mouth to find out. Jimmy’s moaning like a ghost.

  Not thirty seconds later, he stops shaking and his eyes roll back to the front of his head. He looks around wildly, confused. “What?” he says softly.

  “You were seizing, we think,” I say. “Probably some kind of malfunction with your lidreader.”

  Jimmy sits up slowly. He looks up at the ceiling of the barn. There’s only a little light left to see by. “Let’s keep at it,” he says, shaking his head.

  I put the new fuel pump in and replace the tank. Polly pours the gas back into it. Jimmy watches us doing this with a faraway look in his eyes. He doesn’t seem to be blinking at all anymore.

  “You all right?” I ask Jimmy.

  “I think so,” he says. “I feel weird is all.”

  “What happened to you out there?” I’m talking about his service in the war. Polly gives me a look like I’ve gone bonkers.

  Jimmy doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then, he says, “It’s nothing. My lidreader gets wonky since I stepped on the mine. Sometimes I get bad headaches, sometimes I seize. I’m fine.” He looks at me and Polly. “I’m fine. Really.”

  We stare at each other a little bit because I’m not certain and he seems to be. I guess we’re all a little broken. Then, finally, I break the silence. “Try starting the car?” Jimmy nods.

  I get in the El Camino and turn the key. It takes a moment, but the car coughs to a start. The three of us are grinning like kids.

  “We got to get the old man,” says Jimmy. I ask where the old man is, and Jimmy points outside the barn and says yonder.

  We go yonder.

  The old man is older than I thought he would be, but more than that—he’s really huge, pear-shaped. I would’ve said the old fat man; his weight seems to be more who he is than his age. He’s sitting on his front porch swing in overalls, sleeping. The porch swing sways in an invisible evening breeze.

  Jimmy says “Mister” softly. Then he says it louder, and finally he has to shake the old fat man’s shoulder roughly to wake him up. The old fat man is startled; his eyes are beady and scared. He asks who we are. Jimmy tells him, and reminds him of the promised thousand smackeroos. Says the El Camino is up and running, took us all day, we’re the down and out kind, and how about an extra couple hundred on top for our troubles. Jimmy also tells him about the explosions in town and the tanks on the road.

  The old fat man breathes heavily. When he stands up, he makes noises with his mouth and nose as if even the clean night air is too much for his body. He walks inside slowly, and the screen door slaps shut. Jimmy and I shrug at each other. Polly’s using her smokemifyougotem lidreader app, but everybody knows it’s not the same as the real thing, just like everything else.

  The sun’s gone down, and the stars are out now. And there, hanging like a pearl, of course, is the Moon: mostly pale white with splotches of bluish gray like a painter got careless. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s a perfect night, and I show Polly what a perfect night looks like.

  Jimmy says it’s pitch black over there. He’s talking about Phoenix again. Says you can’t see the stars because they’re so far away from that part of the world. Because even God’s given up over there. He points to the town, the smoke and lightning and little thuds. “Now God’s given up here too.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Probably.”

  The old fat man comes back with the money. He tells us his name is Phil, but all his friends call him Paper Thin.

  It takes us a minute to get the El Camino off the stone blocks, but we manage, and pretty soon we’re driving at high speed down the rutted road, away from town. We’re squished together, sweating in the night. I turn on the radio, but it’s mostly just static. Jimmy, on the other side, hangs his good arm out the window, catching the breeze. I tell Paper Thin I think he’s an angel. Jimmy shows me my cut of the dough, and tells me there’s your angel. Paper Thin laughs and shares his squares with us.

  Later on, we’re coming to the border. Polly’s passed out in her seat with an ashtray full of butts and ash at her feet. Her mouth is fixed in an awkward position, but to me—right now, just as she is—she’s beautiful, and I silently promise to make some changes on the Moon, to treat Polly better. No more stealing from her purse. Hell, I might even quit drinking. Probably not, but I’m glad Polly’s here.

  The road is getting curvy, and there’re orange and red lights in the hills, climbing all the way up the sky like a line of ants: the beanstalk. It’s a powerful image at night. Each one of those lights, I think, is someone who made it out. That one’s Bobby Johnson. That’s Clive Westbrook. There’s Cal and Calliope. And Connie Parkins, John Dursk and the Thomp
sons. And Gary Truski with his pencil-thin mustache.

  “That what I think it is?” Jimmy asks quietly.

  I slow the El Camino to a stop. “Yes,” I say. My lidreader is warning me not to take this route.

  More lights appear along the horizon. These I don’t like. Jimmy says, “Somebody’s army.” I can only nod.

  Polly says something in her sleep. It sounds like “mojito,” and it’s all I need.

  “Ready?” I ask Jimmy.

  Jimmy smiles and turns up the radio. Through the static, I hear a familiar Jimmy Page guitar riff. The stars are bloodless and stark in the sky. The heat’s worn off a bit, and the El Camino rumbles like a lion. This is the time of night, I think, where I’m at my highest. Anything can happen.

  The Night We Flushed the Old Town

  By Martin L. Shoemaker

  No, we can’t do anything about “that smell”. I knew you’d ask—everybody does. But you haven’t thought it through. Take a barstool and I’ll explain.

  And no, I’m no candy-ass for calling it “that smell”. You heard me down in City Engineering: I don’t exactly watch my language. But here in the Old Town, I try to be more circumspect. If you want to keep drinking in the best bar on Luna, you’ll do the same. Eliza—she’s the former drill sergeant behind the bar—kindly asked us in Eco Services to be a bit euphemistic when we talk about our work. She’d rather we not ruin any appetites. So, we talk about “that smell” and “liquid waste” and “sludge”, not … well, you know.

  Eliza, this is Wanda Meyers, my new Intern. Can you pour the rookie a drink? I need to teach her a bit about Eco, stuff that’s not in the Doctor of Ecological Engineering curriculum. Kid, let me tell you what really happened the last time someone tried to get rid of “that smell”, and why I drank free for a month here at the Old Town Tavern.

  We start straight from the textbook: there’s no such thing as a closed ecology. No control system is perfect. The limits of sealing technology, the inevitable last whiff of air out an airlock … Hell, even nonlinear dynamics and entropy play a part. Nothing is ever perfect. And past a certain point, the cost of near-perfection is higher than the cost of replenishment. Your professors will teach you lots of examples of “perfect” control systems and where they fail.

  We get as close to perfect as we can here within the limits of time and budget and technology. The Corporation of Tycho Under isn’t a closed ecology, but it’s as closed as we can make it. Our replenishment budget’s as low as any city’s on Luna. The Ecology Service’s unofficial motto is: “Nothing is wasted. Not even waste.”

  On Earth, many cities just vent their wastes in lagoons as part of the treatment cycle. Imagine that—Downside, with open sky and weather and everything—imagine just walking down your street, the wind turns the wrong way, and … there’s “that smell”. And they think we’re provincial!

  But every so often, some brass—usually some brass from Downside, who never grew up on Luna and just doesn’t get it—decides to do something about “that smell” and then we have to educate them. They usually hit on the same “brilliant” idea: put the treatment plant on the surface, in vacuum, so the smell can simply vent into space.

  They just don’t get vacuum, not deep down where it counts. The difference between “venting” and vacuum sublimation eludes them. They don’t realize that we’d lose a lot more than “that smell”. Just imagine all the water and other liquids and volatiles boiling out into space, and then we’d have to mine for more or fly it up. And they also don’t realize what havoc pure vacuum would play with the treatment units. Lunar equipment comes in “vacuum rated” and “not”. Waste treatment units fall under “not”. We’d have treatment vessels bursting from pressure differential, spattering the regolith with wastes.

  But what they really don’t understand is how “that smell” is an incredibly valuable resource and we’d be ecologically negligent to vent it into space. “That smell” is nearly 100% volatile organics—methane and hydrogen sulfide plus a stew of trace compounds. Do you know how much hydrogen sulfide Bader Reactor goes through in heavy water production? Do you know how much they pay per tonne for H2S? It’s also valuable in fuel cells. Plus, we can break it down to hydrogen and sulfur, and there are plenty of markets for both. Nothing is wasted.

  So, we don’t get rid of “that smell”—we use it. Every Lunar chamber has air recirculators with scrubbers, but we use super scrubbers in the treatment plant—the best in the industry. They’re energy intensive, but far more effective than consumer-grade scrubbers: nanofluidic hydrodesulfurization, molecular methane extractors, and a lot of other trace compound nanofilters. What’s left over is some of the purest oxygen and nitrogen you could ask for, and we pipe that right back into municipal air. In fact, since the Old Town’s right over City Engineering on Second Level, that air hits here first. Yeah, you’re breathing “that smell” right now, it’s just post-scrubber.

  Oh, now you gag? You breathed “that smell” half the day on your intro tour today. Now you gag at air purified out of it? It’s amazing to me how so many loonies never understand how closely we recycle materials here. We’re all taught in grade school that what we eat is grown in what we excrete, but somehow it never really sinks in. Then Interns see it up close and personal for the first time, and they gag.

  Get over it, Wanda, or you’ll wash out. With my twenty years’ experience, I can promise you this: someday, somehow, this job will have you standing shin-deep in liquid wastes and sludge, breathing in “that smell” as you try to fix a treatment unit or patch a leak. Keep your head about you. Keep your feet about you, if you don’t want to find out how it tastes! That story will have to wait, though, or Eliza will kick us out for sure.

  When that day does come, do your job—because Tycho needs you—and be glad Eco Services pays for full-spectrum immunobooster treatments at Watson Medical when that happens. The job may get filthy, but it won’t make you sick. Well, except for hydrogen sulfide itself. You get enough of it and it’s toxic.

  What you smelled today was probably less than 2 parts per million. Your body can process that easily. But if you ever see the yellow strobes go off, put your mask on immediately and then call in a leak. Those alarms will trip at around 5 ppm. Ten ppm is considered risky, and 20 is the outer limit per our safety guidelines. Fifty ppm is tolerable for short bursts, but we’ll send you to Medical afterwards.

  So the brass gets dumb ideas, but some brass has more say than others and Jack Brockway had a lot of say. He had just enough engineering knowledge to come up with an ingenious dumb idea, and when he decided to do something about “that smell” he had the clout to sell it to Admin.

  I was just an Eco Intern then, like you today, working days in CitEng and taking classes at McAuliffe at night. I was still two years from my Eco.D. You’ll find that Interns get two kinds of assignments: dirty or boring. Unless you screw up, and then I’ll make sure you get dirty and boring. But normally, you’ll either get to clean out scrubbers and treatment units or you’ll get gopher duty for someone in Eco Admin. The day I met Jack Brockway, I was on gopher duty, assigned as “Assistant to the Executive Assistant to the Director of Ecology Services”, and Jack Brockway was the newly-assigned Director, fresh up from Downside and looking to teach us “modern methods of waste management”.

  Look, Jack ends up looking like a fool in this story, and I don’t think that’s a fair picture even if there’s some truth to it. So I want you to know some things up front. First, Jack always treated me right. As an Intern, you’ll be lucky if I’m as good of a boss as Jack was. He was a know-it-all, but he never treated anyone as his inferior.

  Second, Jack really was a smart engineer and he won awards for his work on Earth. He just never realized that Earth experience loses a lot in translation when you bring it to Luna. Even something as fundamental as fluid flow rates is different because you can’t count as much on gravity helping to pull the fluid through the pipes. At least he was bright enough not to sug
gest treatment units on the surface. That alone makes him smarter than most brass.

  And third, you probably don’t realize just how messed up Eco Services was back then. Brockway had a lot to fix in a short time. This was just after the Archer administration—I’m sure you read about them in Lunar history class—and all of Tycho was a mess. That was the worst blend of patronage, corruption, and incompetence Tycho has seen since its founding, and Director Teller was the worst of a bad lot. He skimped on repairs and skimmed off the maintenance and replenishment budgets to line his own pockets. Tycho’s ecology wasn’t just compromised: it was failing. There are some who argue that Teller’s life sentence for mismanagement was too severe; but if Eco had been his jury, he might’ve gotten the death penalty. He could’ve killed everyone in Tycho Under.

  So Jack was fair, smart, honest, and earnest. That made us Interns a bit starry-eyed. He was restoring respect for our chosen profession. Heck, even a few Doctors of Ecology were star-struck. He was just what we needed after that crook Teller. He gave us back the pride we’d lost. We wore our uniforms out in public again, spit and polish, our tools and comps on our belts, as a way of saying, “We’re Jack’s crew. We’re here to clean up.”

  The Exec, Murkowski, had her hands full untangling Teller’s crooked books so it fell to me to accompany Jack on his Grand Inspection, as the journos called it. We looked at every single piece of Eco Services equipment in the city. It was “Photo here, Wayne” this and “Take a memo, Wayne” that. Before he was done, it was “Take a memo, Scott.” We knew each other pretty well by then. It took so long, it set me back a term in my degree program—but it was an education in itself. No book covers Eco Services in that kind of detail.

  And in my own small way, I educated Jack too. I showed him around Tycho, showed it to him as a native sees it. So naturally, one of the places I showed him was the Old Town Tavern. He took quite a liking to this place. “Scott,” he said, “look at this: mirror, fans, lights, stools, even an antique cash register. It’s like they picked up a neighborhood bar from back home, put it on a rocket, and launched it to the Moon. Except for the pressure doors, of course. Oh, and the beer: it pains my Earth pride to say it, but this is better and stronger than any I had at home.”