A Time yet to Come

Chapter 1

     His alarm audibly clicked on.  Loud, raucous music poured out of its speakers.  "Kill your daddy, your daddy, your daddy, your daddy...”, then a scream like a person being killed.  "Do your dog next, your dog next, dog next", then a musically generated growling noise came from the speakers.  The song went on in the same vein, with the same caliber of lyrics.  Mike wasn't paying too much attention to the player though; his head still ached from the stims he had taken in the party the night before.  He scratched his head, no maybe it wasn't the stims, maybe it was the whiskey.   Then again, maybe going to bed at 4 after stims, whiskey, and what else...  He couldn't remember, but it seemed like there had been something else he had been playing with in the party.  Maybe that was what the problem was.  Now that he thought about it, he had taken a counteract- ant for the stims before he had gone to bed.  That should have negated the effects of the stims, but since he had been taking something else, which he still couldn't remember the name of, it had probably cancelled out the counter-actant for the stims.  Stims are notorious for giving you a whopping headache when you came off of them normally.  That was probably it.

     The song on the player was coming to its fairly predictable conclusion in a musically organized cacophony of explosions.  Mike stretched and got out of bed.  Yeah, predictable, predictable, but then again he'd heard the song over and over again when he'd been a teenager.  It was an oldie, about a kid gone psycho who killed his dad, his dog, his girl friend, and then was tried for the murders.  The courtroom scene in the video had been funny.  All those old Holys looking down their noses and shaking their fingers at the kid, when all he'd done was listen to his own 'inner voice' the way schools taught you was right.  In the end the kid had pulled out a heavy pellet-thrower and blown everyone in the courtroom away. 

             He crossed the room to the player and hit the off switch.  He didn't think the violence was funny, he just thought the whole pointing your finger thing and saying the guy was 'wrong' was done in such an exaggerated way it emphasized the stupidity of saying there is such a thing as right and wrong. 

     He stepped into the shower.  The shower's sensors detected his body temperature and adjusted the water temperature to the correct coolness.  It was cold enough to wake him up a little since most nights he stayed up too late, but not cold enough to totally chill him.  He sloshed himself down, paying special attention to his armpits after he noticed a definite odor.  How did he get that stinky?  He rarely went out into areas that were not climatically controlled, except when he absolutely had to, which was never.  Oh, never say never.  He remembered he had had an assignment interviewing a leader of the Tubers who was hinting very heavily about initiating a strike if the government didn't stop 'infiltrating' them trying to break their union.  All Tubers pride themselves at being able to handle all the different kinds of temperatures you could conceivably encounter in the tunnel systems, or on the outside of the city.  They really were a stinky lot.  All the while he had interviewed the guy he couldn't help but notice the stench each time the oscillating fan blew his way.  Oscillating fan?  They hadn't made those things in over a hundred years; it should have been in a museum instead of blowing the Tuber's stink his way.  But, in any case, that was how he had gotten stinky; the guy had the climate control turned off in his room for some unknown reason.  Mike had been sweating like a pig.  Try doing an interview when all you can think of is a nice tall glass of cool water and wrapping your whole body around a thermo-draw plate and letting it suck every last bit of heat out of you. 

            He stepped out of the shower and stood in the air blast for a few minutes.  Of course, there was one good thing about being a reporter, if you were good, which he was, you could never tell where you would be assigned.  Take for instance the massage artist assignment, it had definitely been a fluff piece, non-intellectual, very low brow.  Still it was a funny thing how well the viewing public had received it.  Then there was the hermaphroditic clan up in the mountains.  How his boss had heard about them he still couldn't figure out.  Some scientist had gotten the crazy idea that making humans hermaphroditic would help man to 'evolve' more quickly, so he had done some serious tweaking with some genetic material he had taken from himself and created a hermaphroditic clone.  That, of course, was a major violation of existing laws, but in the last fifty years, a lot of the old laws had been flagrantly violated and everybody in the government and law enforcement just winked at it and let it happen.  They had more serious things to take care of with the terrorist and ultra-nationalists problems. 

            He opened the mirror, grabbed a brush, and started working on his hair. 

His brown hair quickly fell into place.  He had a 'reporter' haircut, which was a left-parted, short cut in the tradition that the ancient newscasters, like Dan Rather had worn, in the time before the first interstellar probe had been thought of, let alone built.  His blue eyes twinkled.  Now wouldn't that have been a fine time to be a reporter, during the time of exploration, the time of great hopes.  He applied his antiperspirant and paused.  He'd never been good at paying attention in history class, but he vaguely remembered that it had taken a long time for the first probe to find First Hope.  Now, the first few years would have been fun, but after that the interesting stories would have been few and hard to find. 

            He put the antiperspirant and comb away, then walked back into the bedroom.  As he entered the room, he spoke, "Lights".  The bedroom lights went on, revealing the contents of the bedroom: a rumpled twin bed with a light blue plastic backboard.  Mike liked the color by itself, but as several girlfriends had pointed out, it didn't match the walls, or the tile floor.  The walls were blue, but a different shade of blue than the bed.  The ceiling was a standard white, and the floor a plain gray with some random scratchings in it that had once been some kind of design.  Against the right wall was a closet, dresser, and a small bookcase with an assortment of Mike's favorite books in it like, ‘The Philosophy of Journalism, Tell 'em What They Want To Hear’, there had been some good humor in that one, ‘The Journalist in a New Age’, interesting twists on investigative reporting which never failed to be helpful, and also an assortment of 'fun' books, like ‘The Whales of Farshore’, about the race of whales that lives on Farshore that had enough intelligence to have figured out how to communicate between other races of cetaceans who inhabited that world.  Mike had had a love of the sea since Junior High.  He loved the beauty of it, its creatures, and above all else the tranquility and peace it emanated.  Seeing the book prompted Mike to start his daily pre-work ritual. 

            He sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the left wall.  "Play it, Sam".  Sam was the name for the cheap household AI that came with the apartment.  A viewing panel that had been opaqued in the left wall unclouded and a beautiful scene from a high cliff was displayed.  It was just after a big storm had gone by and the ocean waves were rolling and crashing against the base of the cliff.  Every time you thought the waves would die down, then they would thunder and roar again.  Blasts of spray spurted up as high as the cliff top and plip-plopped down for seconds of time.  Mike could almost smell the salt from the spray when it did that.  There was a pause, and then the waves crashed again.     Thundering spray squirted out from between the cracks in the lower rocks, most of it falling back into the sea. The deep, roaring thunder of the wave crashes filled the apartment, shaking it and the bed on which Mike sat.  He could feel the boom in his chest, then the hissing of the water on his hands and his arms, slowly dribbling off in volume.  It came back again, and then again.  Mike smiled a little and breathed in deeply.  He knew what was happening right now, the rhythms and sounds that the waves made resonated with deep, primal memories in humans, from very long ago when they had been a sea dwelling creature, swimming in the sea.  It caused a synchrony to occur in the mind that made certain restful brain waves to become stronger and more dominant.  In the end, it caused a person to mellow out.  Despite knowing all that, Mike couldn't help but imagine he heard the waves speaking to him, speaking to him of strength, peace, and order in the midst of disorder.  It was important to Mike to listen to this recording; it made the rest of the day go more smoothly.   He stretched a little, and then spoke, "Stop recording".  The view panel opaqued again and the wave sounds quickly receded.  He always regretted leaving the peace behind, but he knew he had to get ready for work. 

            He went quickly to the dresser, grabbed the things he needed and started getting dressed.  His choice in clothes was purposeful, based upon unspoken rules of what a 'respectable' reporter wore; dark pants, light colored shirt that went well with his dark complexion, and a tie that coordinated the shirt and the pants together.  The shoes were black tennis shoes, a concession in the unspoken dress code that was acceptable at all times except when a reporters feet could be seen, at which time it was expected that dress shoes would be worn.  He took his e-pad from the top of the dresser and stuck it in his pocket.

            He moved back in front of the viewing screen and it became fully reflective.  He looked himself over.  Fully presentable.  Jerry, his mentor, would have been proud of him.  Jerry had taken Mike under his wing when Mike was just a gopher, showing him how to dress, how to talk to impress, and how to kiss up to the bosses and not be too obvious.  They had spent many hours on the handball courts, the pseudo-mountains, thank god for the safety nets, and partying.  Yeah, Jerry was 30, but he was, to use the old vernacular, 'cool'.  Several times when Mike needed advice about girls, like how to get one, or how to keep one, he'd go to Jerry.  Jerry was always good about taking the time to listen and help.  Jerry was just a great guy.  He had been Mike's friend for the first five years of Mike's time at the Petaluma Station.

             Mike headed towards the apartment's front door.  He had been a great guy until recently.  Two months ago Jerry had gotten a job in Canada and just disappeared.  Even that fact Mike wouldn't have known except that a friend who had been surfing the net, had run across him doing a webcast from out of Quebec.  Jerry was the anchorman, which was good, but still the guy hadn't even left him an email to explain what was happening.  He had said nothing at all, not even hinted that he was looking for a job somewhere else. As Mike opened the door and headed out of his apartment, he hissed out a quiet cuss-word.   Maybe he would contact him later, maybe he wouldn't, he hadn't really decided yet, he was still pretty honked off about the whole thing.  

            He headed down the hall outside of his apartment, and punched the down button when he got to the elevator.  Naturally, he still had friends from the office and some people he knew from the party circuit, but they were less trustworthy and not as dependable as Jerry had been.  The elevator arrived and he stepped into its crowded confines.  It was really crummy what Jerry had done.  One day he was a friend, the next day he was gone.  No reasons why, no excuses, and no explanations.  Now who did that remind him of?  Mike smiled angrily. He knew who it reminded him of, his old man.  The little scuz was always taking off and leaving his family behind at the drop of a hat.  He was always chasing some new cult, pseudo-religion, or fad.  He almost never told anyone where he was going; though there was several times he did call up and say where he was after he had been there for a while.  How much money had he cost mom over the last fifteen years in inter-city tube costs and space transport fares to bring him home after the latest thing hadn't panned out?  Mike didn't want to even think about it.   He knew for an undeniable fact his father didn't really care for anyone but himself, all his father cared about was 'finding himself'.  Mike counted on his one hand the number of birthdays his father had shown up to.  Even when he was home, what did he do, but shut himself into a deep-immersion unit to surf the net looking for another new way to find inner peace.  He genuinely wondered what motivated mom to stick with him through it all.  When was the last time his father had held down a job for any length of time? 

            The elevator stopped and the door opened.  Mike was one of the first ones out since he had been the last one in.  No, come to think of it, his dad was on a roll.  One month as a historical research assistant for some college that was trying to put together a new 'History of Man' using a new twist on all the old twists for telling about what had happened in the past.  Mike walked down the ramp towards the train entry stations. He should probably stop thinking about the subject, after all, mom was the happiest she had been in three years.  She had actually started putting on some weight, which was encouraging, she had been too thin for too long. 

            Mike approached one of the entry stations and stretched his arm out over the identification plate long enough for it to read his watch code.  He smiled towards the cameras at the entry station, "Hello Jacko, any delay today?”  The identification plate flashed its approval and the entry station's gate opened to let him into the eel.  Mike had no idea why the AI that ran the train was called Jacko.  Lots of different rumors on that subject had been discussed in the office, but nobody really knew.  One rumor was that Jack O. was the name of a human engineer who had run one of the trains back two hundred years ago when the trains had still used rails.  One time he had drank too much, fell on the middle rail, and toasted himself.  Mike laughed every time he thought about it.  Too many toasts and you're toast.  As amusing as that story was, it still didn't explain why they would name the railroad after the guy.   Another person claimed it was the name of the primary train line that had formed the core of the Petaluma tube system 200 years earlier.  That was the most likely explanation, but it wasn't as funny as the first one, so Mike preferred to believe the first one was true. 

            Jacko responded back in a 'standard' Midwest male voice, "No delays expected today Mike, everything is on schedule.”   Mike grabbed a center post in the compartment he had entered, and responded back, "Thanks a lot Jacko, I was hoping we would get a slight delay today.  I have a bit of a headache, and I'm not much in the mood to work.”   Talking to an AI like it was alive was considered by many people to be gauche, if not eccentric. Jacko responded back, "Sorry to hear that Mike.  Might I suggest you take an analgesic to deal with your headache?  I don't know what would be best, but I'm sure some of the other passengers would have something that would help.”   Mike looked towards the other people present in the compartment to gauge their reactions.  They did their best to pretend they hadn't heard the conversation.  One man pulled his electronic reader glasses out of his pocket and put them on to make it even clearer he didn't want anything to do with Mike.  Mike smiled; he had gotten a good reaction from the people in the compartment.  He enjoyed messing with the people, and though there might be some psychological reason for what he did, he didn't care to know what it was.  Too much psychoanalyzing is what his father did, so he preferred to avoid it. 

     The compartment continued filling up.  Finally, after several minutes, it was completely full and the auto-doors closed.  The 'moving' light flickered on and a slight feeling of movement could be felt.  There are no windows in a standard eel train, this due to ancient design, in case an accident occurred so that no-one would go out a window or get cut by flying glass.  Of course, if there had been windows there wouldn't have been much of a view, all that would have been seen would be the featureless gray super-conducting material that the tunnels were made of.  A friend of his in college that had been taking physics had explained to Mike about the e.m. pulse that propelled and lifted the train through the tunnels.  He had also shown him the outside of the tunnel which was slightly more interesting, with its innumerable power control and sensory bumps located at even intervals on the tube.  It had reminded him a little of an eel, though that wasn't the reason why the transport tubes were called 'eel tubes', the 'eel' part of its name was an acronym derived from the fact that the train was electromagnetically elevated. 

            Mike could feel the tug of gravity as the train started accelerating.   It was not enough pressure to feel discomfort, but it was still noticeable.  Within thirty seconds they were at full speed and the pressure eased off.  They would maintain this speed for five minutes, and then gracefully decelerate for about thirty seconds afterwards.  Mike shook his head, the trip would get boring now, he regretted putting his reader glasses into his pocket, now it was too late to get to them with everyone packed in so tightly.  Oh well, he thought, you have to make do when you don't plan ahead. 

            He shifted mental gears and started thinking about work.  He had many things to do like writing up the story about the Tuber strike.  That was the most important thing he had to work on.  He had to download the notes for the interview, and work them into a story.  Yes, he could use an auto-template to drop the details into, but stories created that way lacked flair, and were an absolute guarantee of not getting a byline, or even better, the opportunity to have it put on the air.  For these reasons, he preferred to do the work himself, as did most reporters, except for total greenhorns who thought quantity was more important than quality.  The work could take several hours, and since there was an approaching deadline for the story, his aim would be to work on it the first thing in the morning.  There were other stories he had to work on also, but they were fill pieces with no definite deadlines that could be delayed till the afternoon, or even longer if anything came up.  In any case, you had to have fun at work, so he'd make sure to take a break sometime to flirt with the new photographer, Jill, to try and gauge if he might be able to get her to go out on a date.  He had been introduced to her the other day.  She had short blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and the cutest little face that just screamed, 'kiss me'.  He had spoken to her briefly in that polite, neutral sort of way you have to when you are first introduced to someone in the office.  He had found her to be a little on the timid side, but probably no more than was normal for a person starting a new job.  He figured he should give her a few chances before he blew her off.   

            He would have to check in with Rich to see how the office pool had done in the Martian lottery.  The chances were fair they hadn't won anything.  As a matter of fact, it had been two months since the last win, and even that had not been a big one.  It had only been enough, after everything had been divided up for everyone to go out and party that evening.  Not too bad, but no one expected to win big since it was all just for fun anyway.  The train started its deceleration and Mike who had unconsciously leaned into the g force when it started, countered his stance as that force lessened.  His right knee ached a little, but that was the norm in the morning.  His kneecap had been crushed and re-grown after a college football accident, but it had been a less than perfect job due to negligence by a bio-tech who hadn't been watching things as closely as he should have been due to too long of a party the night before.  He had been assured it would just be a matter of time before the body corrected the situation on its own.  He hoped so; he knew he didn't have the money to have it redone. 

            The train slowed to a stop and the doors opened.  He had been in the middle of the compartment, so he had to wait for a short while as people exited.   The crowd thinned out enough and he finally exited the train.  Ahead of him all he could see was an almost featureless sea of people getting off of the train he had been on.  Proper manners dictated that no-one elbowed or pushed here on the offload platform, so the flow was very orderly, like streams running downhill after a rain.  One stream went one way, towards a biotech office building, another towards the Mercedes-Benz offices, another towards the Petaluma Net Services building, and others towards the other buildings in this little node of the office districts in Petaluma.   It was also considered bad manners to cut in line, or do anything that slowed the line down.  It was one of the few taboos that was never broken, even by the more rebellious people in the city.  You just didn't do that sort of thing.  You keep moving quickly, you don't gawk at open tube-holes, and you don't slow down to chat with someone.  The end result was that everyone moved quickly, and there were never fights because things were moving too slowly.  

            Mike was now as the entrance to his building.  There usually was a few seconds of delay as people were okayed for entrance into the building by the building AI.  As he waited his turn, he glanced up at the outside of the building.  It was a featureless white-gray calcrete building, without windows, which were unnecessary in the underground part of the city.  He could see numerous tubes and conduits pouring down the sides of the building in a very unaesthetic way, and the shimmering black of heat outflow bumps.  He suspected at the top, where the penthouse was, there might be some ultra-low frequency transmission dishes, or quantum transit devices, for the encoded messages which were a necessary part of the net, but it was hard to see much of anything beyond the first handful of stories due to the ever present twilight of the underground business district. 

            The line lurched forward, and Mike presented his wristwatch to the scanner and waited for the AI to clear him.  The scan consisted of the standard pass security checks such as a bonescan, to check for weapons crafted to pass as parts of his body, a scan for accidental pathogens that might have been picked up from a party or wherever, and a 'reading' by the AI of all the internal and external cues that might indicate a potentially 'postal' employee.  The last check was notorious for its inaccuracy, but considering the quickness of it, even a human being couldn't be expected to do any better.  The scanner station flashed out its ok and let him into the building.  

            He passed through a small atrium with innocuous looking, evenly spaced pillars all around its perimeter.  Everyone who worked in the building knew what the pillars were, but it was hoped that a terrorist entering the building would be fooled into thinking they were only decorative pillars.  Mike continued walking towards the central elevators.  As he did, he could smell the ionized air from around the pillars.  Special machines constantly maintained pre-defined ionized pockets throughout the atrium which allowed the pillars to throw their electrical bolts out to whatever area the building AI said contained an anti-government force, or crazy employee.  Mike wished it were wintertime.  Sometimes during the winter, the office AI would get sloppy, or the humidifier in the atrium wouldn't work right, he wasn't sure which it was, but in any case, sometimes you could work up quite a static charge on the carpet.  You could then touch the pillars and watch the spark go back for five feet, sometimes more, as it followed the ionization paths.  If you timed it right you could spark onto someone.  He had done it a few times to Rich, and had listened to Rich let out a stream of cussing that would have made a Tuber proud.  He got to the elevator and entered in. 

            Speaking of the devil, Mike thought, and there he is.  "Hey Rich, we win anything?” Rich was a short, red-haired kid who had a funny looking pointy noise.

            "Don't know, Mike, haven't had a chance to check the number yet.  Let me get set down and see what's waiting for me to do.  If I can, I'll get back with you this morning.”  Mike punched the button for his floor.  "What about those Reds, aren't they the pits?"  The Reds were Petaluma's baseball franchise.  Five years before, Petaluma had only had a minor league team, but several entrepreneurs, including a Gates clan member who had gotten tired of living in the Northwest and settled down here in Petaluma, had decided it was time to have a team here.  They were still trying to hire, persuade, or blackmail some good players to join the team.  Unfortunately, until that time came, Petaluma had to put up with some really lackluster ball games.

             "Yeah, Mike, they really do suck.  But what can you say, they're better than what we used to have."

             Mike laughed.  When he was growing up, his mom would take him to the minor league games during baseball season.  It had been like watching episodes of the old black and white keystone cops movies, incredibly slapstick, one guy bouncing off a wall and missing an easy catch, the first baseman bending over to tie his shoelaces right when a slow ball arced over where his glove should have been, and on, and on.  The only good thing about watching the team had been waiting to see how they screwed up next.  The elevator arrived at his floor and the door opened.

             "See you later, Rich.”  Mike got out of the elevator along with a number of other reporters working for various departments on this floor, such as tech news, sports, scandal talk, and editorial writing.  Rich's response was cut off by the door closing too quickly.  Someone on the elevator was in a hurry to get to their floor.

             He headed down the hall toward his cubicle.  There really wasn't much to see along the way, intersecting aisles with an occasional person standing and talking to another person, cubicles with people sitting in them, clicking away, or talking to their monitor, composing a story, whatever the bosses wanted written about, or reported on that day.  Most of the people he knew, or at least recognized.

             There was the fat, old lady with white hair, Doris, who did the pet column.  Mike looked her way and smiled in a professional and totally neutral way.  She looked back at him, with a scared look like what a rabbit would have if it had seen a wolf walking its way.  Mike walked past her.  From what he gathered from the talk in the office, it wasn't anything personal in regards to Mike, she was generically afraid of all men, except the editor, who had a unique way of working with just about everyone, and putting them at ease. 

            A little further down the aisle he ran into Rachel. She was talking to the person in the next cubicle, Don.  Everyone thought Don was gay, but he suspected he was liked men and women since he and Rachel had been really hitting it off well over the last month.  He waved at Don and Rachel.   Rachel was a petite little brunette with the beauty and the build of a model.  He would like to get to know her better, but sometimes you had to wait your turn, so he never flirted with her too heavily, just a wave, or a few words occasionally.  You had to plan for the future.  Don had just ignored Mike.  Mike took a right at the next intersection.  Don was hard to get along with.  Most of the people on this floor had found Don to be hard to get along with, so it didn't bother Mike a lot to be ignored by him. 

            He saw some people from the party circuit, including lampshade man, the guy who did anything, including the ancient lampshade routine to get attention at a party.  Next to him was butt man, the guy who liked to pick up the almost wasted butts from cigarettes and re-smoke them.  Mike shuddered at the thought.  What a way to catch a brand new disease, or an ancient one like tuberculosis, which had resurfaced seventy years ago.  Most people in the party circuit shunned butt man in a very obvious way.  Unfortunately, he was part of that group of people who worshipped the AI's.  That sort of thing was a double dose of stupidity in Mike's eyes.  Being a religionist was stupid by itself, but to then worship something that everyone knew was a pre-organized piece of quantum-state circuitry was not only ludicrous, but arrogantly, hard-headedly ignorant.  Still those people were gaining importance, and growing in numbers.  They had their own, barely tolerated worship centers and their own political party.  The latter fact was the only reason a pariah like Suraly, was allowed near the party circuit, he evidently knew the right strings to pull.

             Mike arrived at his cubicle that abutted the eastern wall of the building.  He had high dividers that gave him a sense of privacy that was often necessary when he was working on a story and when he wasn't working on anything important, it gave him the privacy he needed to not be seen obviously goofing off.   

            He sat down in his chair and eyed his desktop.  On it was his terminal, presently powered off, and some paper mail sitting on a corner, delivered sometime during the night by the office delivery-bot.  He spoke to his monitor, “On”.  After it was on he opened his to-do list.  He didn't see anything new there, just the things he had thought about on the way here, plus all the other office work which ate up so much of the day.      

Mike paused briefly, as he had for the last twenty years of life whenever he sat in front of a computer and again rued the fact that he was one of the very, very few people that couldn’t use nerve induction bands to connect to the computer.  Most people could just put their induction bands on, think about what they wanted and voila, it was done.  The same wasn’t true for Mike, there was something slightly unique about his mental architecture which made it not impossible, but much more expensive to use an induction band.  Yes, if he had a big bucket of money, he could have himself custom scanned and then have a custom-made induction band created for him, but until then, he was stuck doing his data entry the old-fashioned way. He shook his head wistfully, and continued on with his routine.