Jonah’s Env, Unit A, 20th floor, Woodlands Envplex, Woodlands, New Singapore
Thursday 12 December 2109, 10:15am +8 UTC
Picking up my Devstick I smiled thinking of the trip ahead. I couldn’t remember feeling this excited about anything in a long time. My smile faded as I remembered Gabriel’s thoughts again inside my head, ‘You are not Jonah’, and I remembered that the only thing of me that I really knew for sure was mine was my thoughts. The door to the Env swished open and I headed out.
I got on my Devstick and called up a map of walkys around the Envplex my Env was in, and planned a trip on the walkys that would take me around the edge of New Singapore to the main Lev ports that allow travel to Phuket. Taking a vac was unusual behavior for me, but I believed that my message to Sir Thomas and the little shopping excursion I was planning would allay suspicions. I rode the Lev down to surface and walked over to the nearest walky that took me to the main southeast walky from my Complex in Woodlands down to Tampines and Changi — the main Lev concourse and airship port. It was a sunny day but humid. Soon my cotton outer was soaking up the sweat tracking off me in little streams, but it felt good to be out and about as I traveled the walky with my hand on the rail as advised by the safety warnings.
At Tampines there was an old open air market where all kinds of things were sold and purchased. It was here that I planned to use my cred and buy some beach clothes. The morning’s late starters had all but gone by the time I entered Tampines. I got off the PSE1 walky and headed over to the Lev that would take me to Sun Plaza Park. It was just after ten and if I could get the shopping done quickly I could still make it to Tha Sala before lunch.
The Sun Plaza Open Air market was a mass of white sails and brightly colored banners, each proclaiming the wares of the stalls under the sails. I entered into a narrow aisle between the stalls and asked my Devstick to give me a layout of the market. The map came up and the clothes stalls were two rows over from where I was. I cut through the aisles selling fashionable teenage outers and footwear. A pair of white cloth shoes caught my eye, hanging from the sail of one of the stalls.
A fat Chinese woman, sat on a blue plastic stool which was placed on a low wooden table, looked down at me from within the stall. I reached up and touched the shoes with my hand and said, “Do you have these in a size 10?” She nodded and using a long plastic pole with a hook on it, extracted another pair and dipped the pole. They slid down to my hand.
“How much?”
“Twenty cred.”
I nodded. I could have bargained but that wasn’t why I was here. In my pro bono work with UNPOL the one thing I see time and again is how criminals are caught because someone else is caught. Your name comes up because you bought something or called the person who has been contained and as such you get tagged for surveillance. I assumed that since I was the last person to talk with Jibril, that no matter how innocent I may appear, I would be tagged. With my call to the Vacenv, my message to Sir Thomas and buying beach clothes on cred in Tampines market, I hoped to show whoever might be watching me that I was going to the beach.
I called up my cred and held up my Devstick, the fat woman held up hers and I checked to see that only twenty cred had been deducted from mine. “Thanks,” I said, and got a smile in return as I walked on.
Two rows over, all of the stores were selling clothing, inners and outers of all descriptions. About twenty meters down the lane, between the stalls, I spotted what I was looking for — the stall I had seen when I had been here before. I headed towards a sign saying ‘Life’s a Beach’, which had a smiling droopy mustached guy standing on a beach wearing nothing but a sombrero next to the name written in red on a white background.
The guy behind the stall was about one hundred and fifty cents tall and couldn’t have been older than nineteen, with a beard that refused to be and mustache equally struggling to define itself. He looked up at me and with a smile said, “Hi man, you need some threads for the beach?”
He had a very high toned squeaky voice and, stifling a laugh, I said, “Yeah.”
“Awesome,” he replied, smiling even more broadly. He had braces on his teeth. “So where you headed to, dude?”
I returned his smile and said, “I’m heading up the coast to the Thai Geographic for a few days.”
“Cool.”
I spotted a pair of black knee-length swimming shorts and asked, “How much?”
“Oh those, they’re great man, super-fast dry and the color never fades. Only fifteen cred and I’ll throw in a ‘Life’s a Beach’ T-shirt.”
“I tell you what, I’ll give you thirty creds for the shorts and that white cotton — that is cotton right? — shirt hanging there, and that bag,” I said, pointing first at the shirt hanging on the wall of the stall behind him and then a ‘Life’s a Beach’ white cloth bag on the side of the stall.
His eyes suddenly got older and wiser and dropping the beach bum slang he said, “I’ll tell you what, forty creds and it’s a deal.”
I looked at him, smiled and said, “Deal.” He climbed up on a stool to get the shirt and grabbing the shorts and my free T-shirt stuffed them into the cloth bag and handed them to me with another smile. I held up my Devstick and swiped the transaction.
“Stay loose dude,” he said, dropping back into his beach character now the deal was done.
I retraced my steps out of the market and back to the Lev that had brought me here. Twenty minutes after I’d left the PSE1 walky I was back on it. Mission done, my thoughts turned to the travel that was ahead of me, and especially the fact that within a couple of hours at most I’d be by the sea on a white sandy beach.
Reaching Changi ten minutes later I headed for the Lev port that would take me to Phuket. The massive domed concourse of the Changi Lev and airship port was as busy as any place that operates on a continuous time cycle with zero downtime. In the cool muted echoes of the concourse I checked the times for the Levs to Phuket and saw that I had at least twenty minutes to spare before a Lev with an empty seat was available.
I was hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat that day and I’d been awake for over four hours. I headed down a short walky to the lower level of the concourse where travelers of all Geographics were taking a time out. Just off the walky there was a small cafe set by a fountain with a violinist entertaining the people while they ate.
I took a table near the fountain and studied the Devscreen set into its surface, selecting a croque monsieur and a latte as I confirmed the deduction from my cred. Three servbots were serving food and taking orders, their squat white bodies shining and bearing the blue Panasonic logo. One of them dispatched itself from the serving hub and propelled itself towards me around the edge of all the tables. With a polite 'thank you for your custom' it deposited the toasted sandwich and latte carefully on my table and left. The violinist was playing a jaunty tune with her eyes shut and swaying to the music. She looked young and was probably a student picking up extra cred doing a double.
I had left the Dev on and the screen was scrolling through suggestions. This perfume, that timepiece, toys for kids… Suddenly my eye caught a suggestion that sent a thrill through me. I hit pause on the Devscreen and the feed stopped scrolling. The suggestion was for travel to the Moon, but what had caught my eye was the particular resort which was being suggested. ‘Buy two, get three free nights at the Nineveh Hot Springs Resort.’ The word ‘Nineveh’ seemed to get larger and more focused the more I looked at it. I quickly glanced around me, but no one was paying any attention. Gabriel had said that Jonah was vomited out onto the shores of Nineveh.
Was this it? Was this the sign? Gabriel had said that a sign would come and when I saw it I would know it and do the right thing. A quick find on the Devscreen mapped out the route to the Moon travel port which was situated in the right of the Changi concourse. Did he mean literally do the right thing, meaning go to the right?
I was in a dilemma. I’d spent all morning thinking about being normal and now I was confronted with doing something very abnormal. I had never been to the Moon. Never even thought about going to the Moon. Not only that but my actions in the morning would look doubly suspicious. Shit! OK, think. I checked the Dev again for the departure times for the Moon. My message inbox light was flashing red on my Devstick. I had ten mins before the next flight took off for the Moon and after that an hour’s wait. I opened my inbox and saw that there was a reply from Sir Thomas. I opened it.
Dear Jonah,
Have a good trip. I like that Mekong whiskey, a bottle of that would be wonderful, thank you.
TBO
I hit reply, my mind made up.
Dear Sir Thomas,
Change of plans. I’ve decided to travel to the Moon. Never been in space. Want to see what it’s like. I’ll bring you back some moonshine instead of the Mekhong.
Best wishes,
Your nephew,
Jonah.
Jonah James Oliver
Arbitrator at Law
Coughington and Scuttle
I was decided. If they were watching me, then they’d stop me at the security zone, but I wasn’t hiding anything, I’d already told the Director of UNPOL where I was headed. There was just enough time to catch a ship to the Orbiter, travel to the Moon and be back again before my self-time was up on Thursday. After a quick gulp of my latte I rose and, with croque monsieur and ‘Life’s a Beach’ bag in hand, hurried my way over to the Lev.
Exiting the Lev corridor I walked into the Moon travel port and found myself a seat. Other Moon travelers were sitting around, reading, talking, and in some cases standing, waiting patiently for the Lev that would take us to the ship. I had been just in time as the door opened and we all filed in an orderly manner into the Lev.
“Four and a half minutes to Virgin Galactic Moon Port,” said the Lev once we were all seated.
I looked at my Devstick. No urgent messages, no recalls and I hadn’t been stopped as I’d passed through the security zone. I had never been in space before and I was excited. Most of my fellow travelers looked as if they contributed to Ents or Corps and my outers marked me as a tourist.
The Lev docked with the ship and I followed my arrows to my designated seat on the right side of the ship just aft of the wings. I sat down and a screen set in the headrest of the seat in front of me took me through the safety procedures. I glanced over to my left and watched what the guy in the seat next to me was doing. He looked like he’d done this before and he was wearing coveralls with the Broken Hills Mining Ents logo over the breast pocket. Removing all detachable objects on my person and changing my footwear for the pair in the locker by my feet was about all there was. The door closed and we taxied out. I could see over our wing to the cockpit of the mother ship. A warning sign in the headrest screen told me to sit back and have my arms at my side as the seat restraint emerged from the modified Siteazy I was in. The inflatable cushion pressured me lightly into my seat.
With a powerful thrust we were quickly using up the spaceport runway at Changi and then we were airborne, banking left over the open sea. The autopilot kicked in the thrusters and we hurtled through the sky at just over mach one. As we reached the apogee of flight for the mother ship, there was a loud clunk, which made me start and then smile sheepishly to myself. The last crash of a space ship had been more than twenty years ago. Space travel was statistically far safer than cars. With the release, I watched as our capsule dropped and the mother ship peeled away heading back to Changi, and then I was punched back in my seat as we went from mach one to mach three. Mach three is not a pleasant experience but it was over within ninety secs. I felt the inflatable cushion release me, and then my body floated to the confines of the seat restraint. I was in space.