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Teddy Roosevelt, Karma Star System, Cresht Region, Tolo Arm
October 3rd, 2037
For the first time, Terry was in a hurry to return to his quarters after doing his chores and giving Pōkole his morning feeding. He didn’t have a lot of time because he needed to get to his studies. Regardless, he was committed to spending some time with his new slate.
Her familiarity with the technology, as well as an understanding of some Union languages had enabled Tina to set up his slate in just a few minutes. It had been hard for him to sit on the little shop bench and wait; he’d clenched his hands under the table as she worked. Finally, she spun it around on the table and the writing was in English.
“I interfaced it with my own tablet and uploaded an English matrix. You can add other languages later.”
All thoughts of seeing where he could spend some more of his loot was gone as he began to explore the slate, and he quickly realized it wasn’t just a fancy computer. It was more powerful than the most capable Human-manufactured computer ever made.
He did make one more stop before heading back to the Pit of Occo. He went to the same kiosk he’d bought the slate from and also bought a carrying case designed to fit it perfectly. Thanks to the new slate, he didn’t need Tina’s help ordering, either. It cost him another five credits for the case, and one credit for an adjustable strap. At the same time, he dropped 100 credits into his Yack. Now he had some digital money to play with as well. US currency was less than useless out in the galaxy.
Comfortable in the cabin he shared with his mom, Terry linked the slate with Teddy Roosevelt’s computer, and through it to the GalNet. The slate instantly began an update cycle, telling him it was copying 11 petabytes of data.
“Oh, no,” he said, gawking at the number. He went into the slate’s internals and checked on available memory. The slate had four exabytes. “Exabyte?” he wondered, and accessed the ship’s computer for a reference base he’d understand. In a second he had the answer and gasped out loud. An exabyte was 1,024 petabytes, and of course a petabyte was 1024 terabytes. The little silver slate had 11.5 million terabytes of data. His old slate had 10 terabytes, with just 2 available for downloaded data. In short, the new slate was a beast.
“It isn’t even the best,” he said as he clicked around. He’d bought it from a kiosk in a tourist area of Karma Station. That must mean the really powerful ones were sold in other locations where serious customers could be expected. Tina and Doc had said Karma was only a minor trading hub, which meant they wouldn’t have the best computer technology available. Of course, he’d spent almost 200 credits, which on Earth would be $7 million.
He went back to the main screen and checked the download status. “Time to complete—65 hours.”
“Crap,” he said. It must be the Teddy Roosevelt’s computer causing the bottleneck. “So, can I just connect to the GalNet directly?” He tried. The slate informed him three GalNet nodes were available with a transfer rate of one petabyte a second, ten petabytes a second, and twenty-five petabytes a second. Of course, having his own connection would cost him. He checked how much, and grinned. Even the slowest, one petabyte a second, only cost two credits per day.
Terry pulled out his Yack and bought a months’ worth of access and got a discount to 50 credits. Money well spent, he decided, and resolved to put most of the rest of his credits on his Yack. He was beginning to understand what Doc had meant about the economies being different once you got off of Earth. His 1,000 credits wouldn’t go far.
With his own personal temporary GalNet node, the download took 11 seconds. Afterward he had a completely up-to-date and working slate, just in time to do his school work. Crap. He wanted to use the slate for the work, but he had some trouble getting the slate to interface with his tablet. It seemed the tablet was so slow, the slate didn’t think it was even working.
Terry went ahead and did his classwork on the old tablet, all the while chewing over how to get the new slate to behave with his old tablet. He was just about done when his mom floated in, yawning and half asleep.
“Hey,” he said.
“Oh, hi. I wondered where you were.” She slid over to their wardrobe and grabbed her towel and a clean pair of sweats. The ship never quite kept up with their laundry needs.
“Yeah, I wanted to work here. You’re back late.”
“The orcas are starting to show some negative effects of extended zero gravity,” she explained.
“I thought that wasn’t a concern because they don’t need the exercise we do.”
“Sort of,” she said. “They get their basic exercise from swimming around. There isn’t much room, but we’ve got all the cetaceans doing laps twice a day. The bottlenoses understand better than the orcas.” She got a curious look on her face. “Anyway, it isn’t physical strength or bone, it’s digestive. Something nobody expected.”
“What can we do about it?” Terry asked.
She smiled, glad he was so engaged. “Dr. Jaehnig’s working on it, but he’s worried there’s nothing we can do except get them out of space as soon as possible.”
Terry knew all too well that keeping them all supplied with fish was also becoming an issue. Kavul Tesh had been positively crammed with frozen fish, hundreds of tons. But they’d been in space for months. They’d managed to buy some fresh fish from traders on Karma Station, after extensive testing of samples to verify it would be edible by their charges. Even so, supplies were getting slim.
“What are you working on there?” She’d noticed his new slate.
“I bought it over on Karma Station with Doc yesterday!” He held it out for her to see.
“Holy cow,” she said, looking at it with wide eyes. She rolled it over in her hands, examining its build, then tapped on the controls icon to see capacity. “Damn!” she said. “This is 10 times better than our best ones. How much did Doc give you?”
“That one cost 198 credits,” he said. “I got a few extras with it.”
“Most of ours were under 20 credits,” she said, her mouth turning into a frown. “He gave you 200 credits.”
“No, he gave me 1,000.”
Her eyes went wide. “That’s like 30 million.”
“More like 35 million,” he said, but he was getting suspicious.
“Terry, we’re struggling to make ends meet.”
“I know, I didn’t spend it all. I thought a new slate would be a good investment. They practically last forever.”
“I know, ours are like 300 years old,” she mumbled under her breath.
“You’re not going to take away my money, are you?”
“No, you earned it.” she said, though he could see she’d thought about doing just that. “I think I need to talk to Doc about this, though. Take extra good care of that slate, ok?”
“You know it,” he said, breathing a little easier. “I got a custom carrying case for it, too.”
She made a face and headed out into the corridor with her clean sweats and a towel. She came back a minute later, her mood even worse. There was no hot water.
* * *
The next morning he ran into Doc and his team in Kavul Ato’s equipment bay. They were working on some kind of metalworking gear. Terry was there for a new seal on one of the water transfer pumps and hopefully a Union-designed electronics diagnostic tool. It would interface with his slate and help figure out why one of the pumps kept chewing up seals.
“Hey, kiddo,” Doc said as he watched Honcho and Peyto swear and fight with a fitting.
“Hey, Doc,” Terry said and floated to a stop. He watched the two big beefy SEALs struggle to get a good bracing in zero G, while also trying to apply force in opposite directions. “Did mom talk to you?”
“About your money and slate, oh yeah.”
“Uh, oh,” Terry said.
“Don’t sweat it,” Doc said. “She’s honked I didn’t tell her about the money I gave you.”
“What did you say?”
“I said what I gave you was my business, not hers.”
“Wow,” was all he could manage.
“You gotta keep ’em in line,” Tina said and winked.
Terry blushed, though he didn’t know why. “What did she say to that?”
“What could she say?” he said, and shrugged. “She asked me to tell her next time I gave you money, and I said I would. That much was her prerogative.”
Terry didn’t understand how that worked, but he did understand getting between grownups having a disagreement was a bad idea. Peyto let out a grunt, and the nut broke free. The huge man managed to not crash into the wall behind him, mainly through an amazingly acrobatic move. After he recovered, Honcho slapped him a high-five while Toothpick slid in and removed the bolt. It looked for all the world like they were working on a tiny spaceship.
“What is that?” Terry asked. Tina glanced at him and looked away. Was there a hint of a grin on her face?
“I can’t tell you right now,” Doc said. To make it worse, Piano moved between the thing, whatever it was, and Terry. Peyto already had a deck of cards out and was back to playing with his buddy Hutch.
Terry made a face and thought about trying to use his slate to get some pictures, then decided against it. Instead he gave up and went to the stores area to look for the parts he needed. The SEALs continued talking but kept the volume down too low for Terry to hear anything. He got what he needed and headed out the door. Doc watched him the whole way, nodding and giving him a half smile. Terry just frowned.
He returned to the pump room, floating down the corridors from memory without thinking about it. One of Kavul Tesh’s maintenance techs was looking over the technical manual on his personal slate, trying to make sense out of what was wrong. Terry took the diagnostic tool, connected to the pump, and linked it with his new slate.
“That’s an impressive slate,” the tech said.
“I just got it,” Terry said and loaded all 22 diagnostic subroutines. With a click, he ran them simultaneously. “And yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“I’ll say,” the tech said. “I can only run two of those at the same time; and it’s slower, too.”
Terry grinned as the machine worked. He had the results in only a few minutes, and the tech was able to adjust the parameters.
“I would never have guessed the pulse rate would cause the seals to fail,” the man said. “Thanks, kid.”
“No problem,” Terry said and went happily back to the hold to see how the bottlenoses were doing.
Because his duties mostly revolved around Pōkole, Terry seldom got to see the Sunrise Pod. Because there were so many of them, they had more space than either of the orca pods. All three holds within Kavul Tesh had been converted to tankage and interconnected to provide thousands of cubic meters of tank space. Water was purchased from a tanker—normally used for reaction mass—and loaded aboard. Converting it to the right chemical structure wasn’t difficult.
“Terry, Terry, Terry!” they greeted him in their traditional manner.
“Hello, Sunrise Pod. How are you doing?”
“Miss sky, miss beyond,” Skritch said.
“I know,” Terry said. “I miss the sky too.” Though I don’t miss hyperspace, he thought.
“How long?” Hoa asked.
“You mean how long have we been here?”
“How more long?” Skritch said.
“I don’t know,” Terry admitted.
“Understand,” Skritch said, and he went off to swim through the various tunnels connecting the sections together.
“They’re worried.”
Terry turned and saw Dr. Orsage floating by the door with his ever-present slate, taking notes. “About what?”
“Three of the females are pregnant.”
“Oh!” Terry said, surprised. “I thought they were getting drugs to suppress that.”
“They were,” the cetacean psychologist said. “It doesn’t seem to have worked. When a routine test showed the pregnancies, we discontinued the drug.”
“When are the babies due?”
“In about 7 months is our estimate.”
“They’re worried about having the babies here on the ship?”
“Yes,” Orsage agreed. “So are we, actually. Now, excuse me.”
Terry went back to his room after he finished Pōkole’s late feeding. The calf was growing at a phenomenal rate and showed no negative signs of zero G, unlike the adult orcas. In his room, he logged into the education network and checked for classes he needed to work on.
Several of the other kids were getting together to swim later. He wasn’t as interested as he would have been before leaving Earth. Yui wasn’t there, and he spent half the day in the water already. He thought he might go this time; it was usually fun to play with the bottlenoses. Then he found something that changed his plans for him. Messages from Earth!
* * *
Terry opened the packet from his mom’s account. There was a brief note attached.
“Terry, these came in a couple of days ago. We weren’t keeping them from you; we just wanted to be sure no virus or anything else was attached. If you want to wait until I get back to our compartment before reading them, I’ll be there on time tonight. If not, well, you’re grown enough to make your own decisions. Just know the Earth Republic has been intercepting our messages, just like we thought. This got through because we paid a trader to bring them. Love, Mom.”
He stared at the email packet for almost an entire minute. Eventually, he elected to open it. There were 32 messages inside. Terry yipped with excitement, until he realized only 11 of them were personal messages.
A bunch were from the middle school informing him he’d been suspended, and threatening disciplinary action if he didn’t report back to school. Those messages made him laugh. “Come and get me!” he said, and moved the messages to the archive. The next were more worrisome. The World High Court had tried the staff of the PCRI in absentia.
Terry used the Human internet and looked it up. It meant they had been tried without being present, something apparently allowed in the Earth Republic. Everyone on staff was found guilty of various crimes, ranging from illegal experimentation on an endangered marine mammal to destruction of evidence and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was mentioned prominently in the last.
While he hadn’t been directly tried because he was a minor, he was remanded into the custody of the state for psychological evaluation. Parental rights were stripped from his mother and father, and he would be tried in juvenile court once he returned to Earth. Apparently the ability to try people without being able to defend themselves didn’t extend to kids.
“We’re all criminals,” he realized. Attached were a slew of news articles dating from a month ago up to only a week ago. Huge banner stories proclaiming that “The Hawaiian Mad Scientists” were found guilty. “Bastards,” he said. The press had tried and found them guilty long before the courts, apparently. There was even a picture of him and his parents taken two years ago, long before all of the events that had led him hundreds of light years from his home.
One video showed the press trying to get into his old middle school to interview his friends. He had a second of video showing a teacher escorting Yui away as the staff tried to stop the press from getting to her.
They’d prosecuted Doc and his men, too. They’d gotten him on the same contributing to the delinquency of a minor charge—for him, of course. The other men, including the two who were now dead, were tried as traitors to the Republic and found guilty as well. They’d still been on active duty. That explained why Doc hadn’t been back to Earth in all these months, too.
Afterward, he went looking for personal messages. There were three, one from his father, and two from Yui. Just two messages in the months he’d been gone. He opened the one from his dad.
“Son,
I don’t know how to say I’m sorry. Everything just went wrong. I know people are telling you I hurt your mom, but I didn’t. Please believe me, I did it all for her. I just got carried away. Do you understand? Of course, you know the pinplants on the cetaceans were an accident. We should have waited and got outside help. Again, your mom was right, and I was wrong. I made more mistakes than I did things right. I only wish I’d been able to go with you. Please, write back?
Dad, I love you.”
He’d never really apologized for what he did, only how it went wrong. Terry could clearly see his dad trying to justify his actions and avoid the truth. It made his dad more guilty in Terry’s mind. He knew for a fact that Doc and his SEAL buddies had gotten the alien nanite treatment to his mom, and his dad wouldn’t allow it, so they did it in secret. Not allowing Doc’s friends to try, more than any other act, convinced him his father was lying on some level. Maybe on all of them. He didn’t write a reply. Maybe later. He opened the first message from Yui. It was marked only a day after he’d been spirited away.
“Terry, OMG, I can’t believe what just happened! It’s all over the news! There are like a million reporters all over Molokai! I tried to talk to you longer, but the phone cut out. I wanted to say...I wanted to say how much...how much of a friend you are. We know you’re on a ship and the Winged Hussars are taking you out-system. The government is pissed! It’s funny. LOL. Everyone at school knows you guys didn’t do anything wrong, so don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll write again soon, and hope you can, too.
Bye, I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” he said, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. He opened the second email.
“They convicted you guys in court. I’m sneaking this message out, but it’s the last one. My father’s forbidding me to send any others. I’ll try, but I don’t get an independent account until I turn 16. You know Dad’s a government contractor; if I get caught...well, he could lose his job. I wish you’d sent something, or someone came back to fight in court? I...goodbye.”
“No,” he said, “what?” He reread it, wondering if she’d put in a hidden code. No matter how he read it, the message came out the same. Goodbye forever from his best friend. He was still staring at the message when his mom came in. The look on his face told her he’d read the messages.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Terry said. He was surprised he wasn’t more emotional. Maybe there weren’t any more emotions left in him. “Maybe it will all get fixed down the road.”
“Maybe,” she said. The sad smile on her face told him the truth of it; she didn’t believe it would ever be fixed. Terry would never see Yui, or Earth, again. Terry went back to his school work.
* * * * *
