Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
New Year’s Clouds
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
New Year’s Eve on Ganymede: we still celebrated it on Earth’s Julian time. Paulie would always make sure the link was good, so we could watch Big Ben, and then the Ball in New York, and the Firepod in San Francisco.
“Pretentious dirtniks,” Paulie would say, sniffing as the Pod burst over the Bay. He still says it. He’s never thought much of anyone who didn’t have the guts to leave Earth’s gravity.
“You smoke Lucky Strikes, though,” Ming pointed out to him on our second New Year’s.
“Yes, they use up too much oxygen. Strains the manufacturing rig,” I added, because it was time someone brought this up.
“Never a big one for small pleasures, our Stefania,” Paulie sniped, and took a long drag on his cigarette; he knew by then his sexist quips wouldn’t draw any anthrax from me. I had been through naut training before the lawsuits. “Anyway, we’re not going to have to worry about that much in a minute, right?”
He was probably right, damn him. We had chosen Hawai’i’s New Year, in honor of our chief scientist, Dr. Hana, even though—actually because—she hadn’t made it through planetfall. Sometimes it takes someone. Maybe like the gods of a new land demand a sacrifice. That’s superstitious, I know. I wondered, just the same, what Ganymede’s gods (if any) would make of what we were about to do.
We had seated the first canister and the master switch by her grave.
“If this works can I turn the manufacturing rig into a barbecue?” asked Paulie, stubbing out his cigarette at 11:06, Hawai’i time.
“If it doesn’t work,” said Ming, taking our suits down from their hooks, “it will turn all of us into barbecue.”
Paulie shrugged and looked at me. Everybody knew I had the final say, by then.
“Sure. But let’s wait a bit, first,” I said.
By 11:45 we were suited and through the doors, having learned from past mistakes to allow plenty of time for them. We felt pretty silly standing by the master switch for a quarter of an hour, but somehow it still seemed right.
At midnight we all laid hands on the switch together.
“For Dr. Hana,” said Paulie, suddenly solemn.
“For Dr. Hana,” repeated Ming and I.
We pressed the switch.
We weren’t barbecue.
After a while, when the sky started to form above us, each canister adding to the atmospheric mix, Paulie said, “You know what I’m looking forward to?”
“Smoking outside?” asked Ming.
“No. Well, yes. But no.”
“What, then?” I asked, when he kept on staring upwards.
“Clouds.”
“Happy New Year, Paulie,” I said.
Resolution
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
It had been a night of hard partying for Jeremy, as it always was on new year’s eve. He viewed the last night of the year as an opportunity to relive all the best parties of the past 364 days – and there were a lot of them – thrown together with the best of the present. With a little creative blending, his implanted processors could recall his best memories, relive the ups, downs, drunken shedding of clothing, face-plants into the jacuzzi, and stream it all through his shades for a monster party that he would blog about for days.
Only, this morning, head pounding, shades missing, he was at a loss for words. He tried to get out of bed, realized he was on the floor, and climbed shakily to his feet.
He walked around his rented Vegas suite naked and almost totally blind without his shades. Everything was blurry and low-res in reality. He squinted through the sun’s glare, and noticed the suite looked like crap without augmentation.
He sat on an exploded bean-bag couch and tried to focus. His shades had been on all night. Except for when Christina wore them while going down, Julie shoved them inside her bra, and some twins from Hong Kong did things with them that made Jeremy wash the lenses in the sink afterward. Oh, and there was that cat. It had been an awesome night.
Sometimes Jeremy wondered if he really needed augmented reality.
Still, he felt lost without his constant media update, and he did need to get some work done at some point today, so he stood and staggered around, calling for his shades. About to give up, he turned into the last room to find the cat sitting on the rotating bed, shades propped on his nose, headphones in his ears.
“My shades!” Jeremy said.
“Yeah, yeah,” said the cat. “I got your augmented reality right here. Shit’s dope, man. Do you have any idea what the market is doing this morning?”
“Man, I can’t even deal with talking cats right now,” said Jeremy. “I mean, I just woke up.”
“So happy new year, right?” said the cat. “You work on your hangover, and I’ll take care of things. I’ve got stuff to do.”
With that, the cat jumped from the bed and disappeared behind a sofa.
Jeremy sat down on the bed, and promptly fell over. As he drifted off to sleep, he heard the mixed sounds of stock market reports and feline porn drifting through the room.
He resolved to do things exactly as he had been doing them. It was going to be one hell of a year.