The Off-Worlders

by George Willson

  “Did you driver mention anything else out there?” Blake said. “Like a bigger ship?”

  “No, and we talked about that for a bit as well,” Jaleri said. “He’s a good guy, my driver. Got a family here. He’s from Sarakis, originally, but met some girl here and settled down. It’s crazy how your species is all over the galaxy while some of us seem confined to one world, but I’m just a guy who wants to make his way in this world and many others if I can. I didn’t know he was a criminal. Please don’t deport me.”

  “Jaleri, your candor is above reproach,” Blake said. “Did you say you accepted local currency?”

  “I do, yes,” Jaleri said. “I am afraid to put this charge through now, but I need the money.”

  “I’ll cover it,” Blake said, “as a thank you for assisting us. You’ve helped to get a dangerous man out of the heavens and into a cell. You should be commended.” Blake handed over his unlimited credit card. Jaleri looked at it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Blake Williams,” Jaleri said. “I shall not soon forget it.” He printed out a copy of the invoice he had for Pingrit’s ship move. “Here is the information I have for him. I wish you all the best in catching him.”

  “Jaleri, I will ensure that anyone I speak to knows how honorable the Enkonchomo are,” Blake said. “Humans have a fear of many things, and it is unfortunate you resemble one of them. Do not hold it against us. We will learn.”

  “I hold nothing against you, assuredly,” Jaleri said. “In our first encounter with humans, we were equally aggressive for you appear similar to something we also fear. I understand we look like nightmarish insects to you. Your species resembles a creature we call the faustrum - a supernatural entity who can kill with a look. We were understandably frightened coming face to face with what we saw as evil. We greatly regret those days.”

  “Today is brighter than yesterday,” Blake said as he left the room. “Take care, and I wish you the best.”

  “Thank you very much,” Perry said following him out. Blake looked at the paper he held in his hand and considered them very lucky to have hit upon a vendor who valued his freedom and position on Earth more than any kind of confidentiality. This was the future he remembered five hundred years in the past. In an ever-shifting galaxy, what will always remain is every creature for themselves. All they have to do was threaten the poor person, and he folded instantly. A non-Federation world was too risky a place to take chances and pop off to law enforcement.

  “What did you call him?” Perry asked as he caught up to Blake.

  “HIs species?” Blake asked. Perry nodded. “Enkonchomo. Even in my time, they are one of the scariest looking species we know, but the funny thing is that they’re very easy-going. They want out of life what everyone else wants: to live in freedom and survive day to day. Nothing more. They’re no different than anyone else on this planet, but I guarantee you that he stays in there because he knows human reaction, especially those who have never seen an alien before .... that they know of.”

  They reached the end of the hall, and there they met up with Turner and Michelle who revealed what they knew about Talkisan. With Blake having the delivery location of the hunter ship and Turner learning this was in roughly the same place that he was told Talkisan’s main ship was and that it was an Orleng Class Cargo Freighter.

  “A freighter of that class isn’t small,” Turner said. “Ilderoy said something about it having an invisibility shield. Do you think you can see through that?”

  “Maybe,” Blake said. “I find it unlikely we’ll get what we need here. I’m pretty sure the scanner will be able to see the ship regardless of its shielding. It exists, and it is putting out a power signature of some kind. We’ll be very close to it. Can we see through the shield to get inside? That is less certain, but I’ve pulled off some interesting things with this little device.”

  “I don’t know how he does it sometimes, to be honest,” Perry said.

  “Let’s just say I was trained in its use,” Blake said. “It’s complicated, if you follow me.”

  “Yeah, I follow,” Perry said.

  “Then let’s head out to this location, and see what we can find,” Turner said. “We know it’s a big ship, but we also know we won’t see it. I’ll need your eyes glued to your magic box to help us out.”

  “No problem,” Blake said.

  They left the Holy Life Church a little wiser than when they entered and got back in the car. Everything in this adventure was very point to point, but that seemed to be life in this era anyway. You go one place and then travel to another followed by another. History had it that they never sat still for long. That actually did not change much in the intervening years. Turner pulled out of the parking lot, and they were on their way north of the city again, a fair distance from Turner’s headquarters, but only about ten miles or so.

  Blake settled in for the drive and stared at the city, that he considered to be ancient, flying by his window.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The car traveled to the north side of town where Pingrit’s ship had most likely landed and remained. Blake stared out the window in the front seat with Turner while Perry and Michelle rode in the back like the children. Michelle often wondered if they considered her a child due to her inexperience in all of this. She certainly felt like one most of the time, especially when dealing with so many things that were beyond her. It often left her questioning exactly what kind of contribution she was supposed to make to their missions if most of their time was spent explaining the world to her.

  She gazed out the window to twelve years into her future and saw nothing but night. In fact, throughout this entire experience, with the exception of car body changes and only the talk of the pervasiveness of cell phones, she saw nothing that would have told her she was not in 2004. The world had not physically changed very much at all. The buildings were the same. The cars worked the same. All of the development must be something less obvious to the average bystander.

  The only real difference appeared to be things she had never seen and never known existed. In fact, it seemed that if she looked around back in 2004, she might even find an off-worlder hub now that she knew what to look for. She was not sure she would, but knowing what to expect certainly let the mind wander on it.

  “So tell me, Blake,” Turner said, “what sort of job did you do with Earth as part of the Galactic Federation?”

  “I actually lived on Earth,” Blake said. “I never left it. I could have, but even then, off world travel was reserved for the very rich or the military. Us normal people weren’t given the opportunity. We have to stay home and work.”

  “So all the talk of overpopulation and such that you all put out now? I would have assumed you all would have settled some other planet,” Turner asked.

  “The population continues to grow,” Blake said. “Medical technology gets better. People live longer. Little by little, houses get closer together. The world has plenty of space in this time, and truly, it still has space in my time, but less of it. The house where I live is four stories tall. Each floor is its own independant home and owned by someone. I am in the secondary plot, which is to say the second floor of this structure. When it is built, it can be customized, and some customization is possible when you buy it as a second or third owner. It’s about a thousand square feet, and I lived alone.

  “When people talk about the future today, they think of flying cars and all kinds of things in the air above us. All kinds of virtual this and that taking up everywhere. Well, while there are some air type cars, they really still don’t fly for the most part. The self-driving car did take over the market eventually, and no one in my era drives at all. We get in and tell the car where to go, and it does it. Because there are no human drivers, the cars all interact with each other on the road, so every one of them knows what the other is doing, and there are no auto accidents. None. Hasn’t been a car crash in a century.

  “But you know my experience isn’t all wine and roses. Detec
tive Turner, one thing about the three of us and the device that lets us travel is that all three of us had all reached such a point in life that when the choice to leave that life was offered, we all instantly took it. Me? I wanted to go to space. I wanted to see other worlds. I wanted to be out there. The rich were leaving constantly. We saw other places in movies filmed on other worlds. The military participated in trans-world campaigns which were mostly for show because there was no war at the time. The presentation of the great expanse above us was awesome and appealing. I wanted to be there.

  “I wasn’t rich though. I wasn’t even well off. I had a class in high school over spacecraft, and that’s where I learned about the starter links. I never saw another ship again after that. Not up close. I applied for the military, but they are very selective in that time. With no wars to fight, they won’t pay just anyone to galavant across the galaxy. I was rejected. I’d been saving money for years, and then … then I messed up.

  “I worked in the city sanitation department. No, I didn’t ride the trucks around. No one does that anymore. The trash collectors are all robotic and automated. The trucks drive themselves round the clock from door to door to pick up trash receptacles. There is no schedule for this. You just take your trash to the curb, press the button, and you’re put into a queue that gets sorted by who is closest. It might be five minutes. It might five days depending on where the truck is, how many people are between it and you on a direct route, and if it needs to take a trip to the dump to empty. Granted, most of it is incinerated in the truck itself.

  “Almost everyone on Earth in the future is in some facet of programming. Robots can do just about anything, but people still have to tell the robots what to do. So when a bot goes wrong, it is someone’s fault. Well, a sanitation bot went wrong one day. No one knows or can prove whose fault it was, but a truck picked up a receptacle, dumped the trash and put it back down on some kid’s head who ran under it. Don’t worry, it was a nice sized bump and it knocked him senseless for a new minutes, but he was fine.

  “Well, he was fine, but all hell broke loose. You hit the wrong person on the head, and they will cry and scream to highest levels of everywhere for justice. Why did the receptacle come down on the kid’s head like that? What should have prevented it? Who is in charge of the obstruction protocol?

  “Ah, that last one. That was me. I wrote, reviewed, and tested obstruction protocols. It’s boring to detail, but what is supposed to happen is the system checks the drop point for obstructions and sets the receptacle down if it is clear. Well, what I did was note the lift point of the container and make sure that the distance between the lifted container and the original lift point was consistent before dropping it. Well, what I didn’t take into account was the possibility of someone holding the container when it was lifted and then expecting to catch it when it was dropped. Or that’s what I think happened.

  “Because it was being held, the lift point changed. Then the little idiot sat under it to try and catch it on his hands as it put it down. It saw his hands which in that critical moment were exactly the same height and they were when he handed it off, lowered it, and which point he dropped his hands, and released. It hit him in the head.”

  Blake sighed and shook his head as he recalled this. He pursed his lips, and closed his eyes.

  “Well, the bottom line was that it hit him in the head. His mother freaked out completely and blamed everyone she could get her hands on. The protocol was revised by someone else. I lost my job. She sued the city. She sued me personally. I didn’t have the money for that. I lost my secondary plot house. I lost all my savings. I had no job. I didn’t even have family to turn to. That’s a long story in and of itself. I was destitute.

  “Of course, we don’t have homelessness in the 26th century. If you have nowhere to go, you live in public housing, which is free and exactly as good as one would expect for free. Think about that warehouse with endless rows of fifty foot high ten-story oversized bunk beds. These were called bunk pods. They actually had lightweight lifts to the various levels so you could climb into these probably seven foot square rooms that were about four feet high. It was a hard floor with a mattress pad on one side of it and that’s it. People lived in them for years.

  “More than that, if you owed money to someone as the result of a lawsuit, you were forced into these as a sort of debtors’ prison with check-in points and everything to make sure you were doing your duty. That was what I was expected to do until I paid off what I owed.

  “I quickly realized it would never happen. Ever. There was no way that in my lifetime I would ever have enough money to pay this woman off. Every job I took would result in 100% wage garnishment. After all, there is free food in this housing so you can ‘afford’ to make nothing, and under the debtors’ laws of the time, that’s what they did. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live like that. That wasn’t life. That was death every day. I saw the lottery on the screen in the common room. It was up so high that I could not only pay this woman off but live like a king … if only I had any money to buy a ticket. I didn’t even have enough for a stupid worthless lottery ticket. I couldn’t even lose with dignity.

  “So, I figured if I couldn’t win, I’d try to get out of there and make a new life elsewhere. I don’t know what I was thinking, since you couldn’t leave without checking out, and we are permanently tracked by everything we are, but I had nothing to lose. Since these technically aren’t prisons, security is next to nothing, so I snuck out. I was immediately spotted, so I ran.

  “The police were called and within moments of this brilliant idea, I’m ducking through alleys and hiding behind trashcans. And our police aren’t gruff old guys chasing you; the police are drones who can fly anywhere, and they stun you and carry you off to their local jail to be processed. Clean, efficient, and hard to escape.

  “So I’m hiding in the dark hoping that one of these things doesn’t spot me. I know I have no chance of escape. They can read heat signatures and spot my footfalls and everything. No way am I getting away with this.

  “The portal that opens for us is manifested as an elevator, and it was the strangest thing in the world to see ancient elevator doors suspended on the other side of the alley from my hiding spot before they opened. I literally had nothing to lose, and I could hear the drones getting closer, so I walked in. Next thing I knew, I was somewhere completely new getting a whole other perspective on life. I can’t say it changes my opinion about my specific situation, since a positive outlook certainly wouldn’t have paid this cash-grabbing woman off any quicker, but hey, I’m alive and free.”

  “Do you ever go back to where you were?” Turner asked.

  “Eventually,” Blake said. “When the machine decides we’re ready or something along those lines.”

  “I don’t know what to think about your future, Blake,” Perry said. “Robots are cool, but I was really hoping for the abolishment of money and free space travel for all.”

  “You and me both,” Blake said. “It works that way on other worlds, but corporate greed knows no bounds for us.”

  “We’re getting close,” Turner said. “You want to try your future-scanner to see what’s out there?”

  Blake pulled out his scanner and changed a few settings to look for the ship. Turner glanced at him as he was driving.

  “Well, no wonder I didn’t notice that thing when we searched you. I thought it was a smartphone.”

  “I think that’s the idea,” Blake said. “It’s small and blends in easily. The smartphone design actually persists for a very long time. It’s a very convenient size and shape.” Blake looked at the screen as it changed and his expression dropped. “Well, that’s something.”

  Blake seemed to go over the various settings he had on the phone as Turner kept glancing over.

  “What is it?” Turner asked.

  “You may want to pull over,” Blake said. Turner complied and looked over to Blake. “So do you know how big an Orleng Class Cargo Freighter is
? It’s a little before my time.”

  “I can’t imagine it’s very big,” Turner said. “I’ve seen ships referred to as cargo freighters and be no larger than a semi truck.”

  “Well, it’s bigger than that,” Blake said. “I mean, it isn’t massive, but it’s still 270 feet long, 170 feet wide and about 80 feet high. That’s like parking a seven story building on the side of the road and hoping that no one is paying attention.”

  “How is that possible?” Perry asked.

  “Terrans are oblivious to anything not directly in front of them that they have any stake in,” Turner said.

  “Actually, humans in general are like that,” Blake said, “but he must have done a heck of a job hiding it though. That invisibility field must be impressive. Eventually, someone notices though. Someone always notices.”

  “Where is it supposed to be?” Michelle asked.

  “About a mile or so further up the road,” Blake said. “A ship of that size usually has a crew of more than one. Often, a navigator, pilot, and engineer at least. If he isn’t the engineer, that would explain why he’s stuck.”

  “By the descriptions of him, he’s probably not the other two either,” Perry commented.

  “Well, let’s get over there to see what we’re dealing with,” Turner said, and he pulled back onto the road. Blake continued staring at the screen as the shape on his scanner grew closer. He looked out the front windshield at the dark road ahead of them. It could be right off the side of the road in the dark, and they would never see it.