Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight:
We moped off into town and started towards home. Tom, however, steered us to the town coffee shop. It was Sunday and not terribly busy. I had a feeling he was going to try to get us to drown our sorrows in hot chocolate. Just what we needed: a sugar high. great. My enthusiasm cannot be contained. Joy.
We went inside and ordered up some hot chocolate and pastries. Jackie had a kefir and carrots instead. Tom more than doubled up to make up for the perceived threat of healthy food near him. I tinked an image of him growing horizontally as well as vertically. He smirked and tinked back he could stop any time he liked, with the tinge of irony and snark. I just had a hot chocolate. And other than tinking, I just stared at the hot chocolate. Given its cost, I needed to drink it, but...perhaps I shouldn't have ordered it.
We were tinking back and forth, quietly and softly, mere mental murmurs, allowing us to mourn our present friendship disaster. And then, and, of course there was an 'and then!' old man Jose showed up.
Jose was one of the only old people in town. Immigrating out to the colony worlds was more a young or middle aged person thing and the towns out on the frontier were not noted for the elderly. Life was far from tough, but the frontier was a place of constant change, and many after a certain age liked their life a certain way. Many middle aged often moved to Monte Cello on Jefferson if they did not have strong family ties to a town. Even then, people often found the change not to their taste and moved to more stable surroundings.
Jose wasn't one of those. He was a kindly older guy and he liked to talk. He could tink, but wasn't really into it. He'd always said he'd prefer to talk just to know it was really real. Whatever that meant. He was also what Dad called an 'old guy magpie.' Jose was louder and loved to talk. If he knew you, he'd come over to talk and the longer he talked, the louder he got.
I pointed out to Dad one day he was going to be an 'old guy magpie.' He winked and 'cawed' at me. Incorrigible my father was.
Jose knew us. Shadwell was small enough everyone at least knew of everyone else. We were friendly to him and we were the only ones in the coffee shop other than him, so...we were going to be his evening social interaction it seemed. Any other time, it would have been fun. He's an interesting man and has seen a lot. He'd lived on Earth, grew up on coastal Alabama, lived in San Francisco, on Caerus (another world) and served in the US Space Navy as a Marine. He was also an expert story teller and a great teaser knowing when to back off and when to shove the knife true.
Jose joined us with a steaming cup of tea and wanted to talk. We tried to push back at that, but he would not let us. He was bound and determined. I suspected he saw us in a funk and minus two and he was not going to let us leave in such a state.
He initially sat down at our table and put on the most dour face he could. An exaggeration and caricature to such an extreme we had to let the tiniest crack of smiles as he blew on his tea below those massively bushy furrowed brows and mushy sagging face. He faux glowered at his and a corner of Tom's mouth actually raised. In response, Jose turned his head and offered a skeptical side eye. His eyebrow even raised and he pursed his lips in skepticism. Exaggerated, of course.
Tom was grinning. The adorkable idiot. What would I do with him?
That made Jackie slightly smile in return. I felt I was duty bound to hold my blue face at that point. How dare they ruin my wallowing! My existential angst was all! Fiends! Daemon spawn!
Tom grinned ear to ear and began to chat up Jose. Jose was delighted. Thankful there were no other patrons to irritate with corvid calls of their conversation.
I phased out of the conversation for a bit. I wondered what we would do without the other two friends. Veena and Rosa were unique and helped us a lot in our adventures. Their knowledge and experience with the virtual and robots was invaluable. And we had been friends since we were kindergarteners. They were a gaping hole in our star shaped Merry Pranksters.
Perhaps they were right. Perhaps we were not kids and this was far, far more than we ought to be taking on ourselves. Could my snarkastic self be so bent on being an Immie hero I was doing really dangerous things?
I dwelled and wallowed and tortured myself until I heard Tom mention robots to Jose and my brains spasmed in panic! It was bad enough I had just lost my friends, but now if I wanted to continue the adventure - TBD, BTW - Tom was wildly endangering our chances! The saying was the way two people could keep a secret was if one was dead. Tom was seriously tempting me at that second.
Depression passed the emotional marathon baton to rage.
Except, as my face warmed up to explosive levels, Jackie tinked me crazy quick and told me to calm down. How dare she! However...Tom wasn't talking about anything of our adventure. He had engaged old man Jose about something Jose had seen once before.
Jose had been a Marine ages before when the internet was young and dinosaurs wandered the world and Immie and boosters didn't yet exist and people passed notes in class on actual paper. Or so I felt.
At the edge of human space back thirty years ago, Jose had been part of a Marine squad sent from the USS Chesty Puller to investigate what happened to a the Tomol Exploration Station. Named for the Chumash tribes' unique planked canoes, the station was the point where explorer probes were built and sent off to see what the local conditions were for the planets discovered by astronomers on Earth and other locales. For some reason, Tomol Station had stopped responding. The Puller was sent in to investigate.
Was it because the station had malfunctioned? Was it because another nation had boarded the station? Had someone hacked it? The US government didn't know and needed to know what the automated base was doing: even telemetry had stopped.
Jose was delighted, but cautious. The Puller sent over a shuttle. Tomol seemed to be powered, but did not respond to commands. It didn't open airlocks or give any telemetry. Jose and his squad jumped from the shuttle to the surface of the station. They worked their way over to the airlock and manually opened it: as in cranked it open. In powered armor, not too hard, but even so. Manually. The horror.
They went inside and had to bust, break and shove their way through door after door, seal after seal. What they found in the end was bizarre. Bots were scuttling around tearing up the station. They were assembling...something. Many somethings. Other bots were trying to tear those down. Others were trying to repair the station. it was a disastrous mess and the station was going to fall apart.
The marines attempted to contact the central intelligence, a faux artificial intelligence intended to run the facility, they found it was gone. It didn't respond and there was no sign of its code on the systems when diagnostics were run on the neural system.
The marines were told to evacuate and the USS Puller would destroy the station. On the way out, the marines were attacked. Bots appeared to be trying to dissemble them or at least their equipment. It was unclear if the bots were trying to prevent them from leaving by removing their equipment or just were going to dissemble them altogether.
The bots were not combat models and despite what is shown in movies, the marines handled the situation just fine, if in a very excited fashion. They started using explosives and blew doors they had tried to preserve before. When they reached the exterior of the space they leapt from the surface, thrusters screaming, to the shuttle. Then the shuttle zipped away and the USS Puller destroyed the station.
The marines had some data from the diagnostics run, but there was no real hard proof about what happened. The Tomol Mystery is still a mystery to this day.
However!
The point, I realized, was Tom had remembered the story and wanted to point out a few things. The bots may or may not have been intentionally dangerous, but it was only because the marines were ready and prepared they could easily handle the bots.
Point taken, Tom. Point taken.