Invisible Deck
An unshaven man with bifocal-style glasses was bending strings on an old-fashioned electric guitar by Marry
Tuesday morning began late. I had neglected to set a wake-up call on my terminal. I had been distracted. I rubbed at the bristle on my face, as thoughts of the day past flooded my mind. Oddly, no matter how I added it all up, I came out feeling pretty good, with just a little bit of guilt on the side. It had been a day to mark time by, a day of premier exploration, disaster averted, and unexpected encounters.
I pushed myself out of bed, went to the terminal and called up my personal duty roster. My shift was supposed to begin at 08:00. It was 08:15. I had informal security audits of several engineering areas scheduled for 09:00, but that had been on the calendar from before our encounter with the alien ship. We were probably well underway by now, and those inspection areas would be bustling with activity from the jump to light. Besides, I had an appointment with Doctor Pacell, a medical appointment that for once needed to be kept. A continental breakfast would have first priority. I stuffed my blanket away, hit the button to put the bed up, grabbed a clean gray-black flight suit and headed for the shower.
On my way to the mess hall, I stepped into the corridor and crashed into someone traveling at a high rate of speed in the opposite direction. Clayton Pell, the ship’s internet loner, was wearing a pair of music-video optics, the wire-frame type with tiny, button-sized, tinted lenses. You can see through the image projected into your eyes by MVOs, but charging down a hallway while using them is not recommended. He had to grab onto me to keep from falling down and then began profusely apologizing.
Pell is an odd character who is more a ship’s ghost than a real crew member. He haunts many of the seldom used access corridors within the habitat module in a never-ending quest to keep the internet working. When you try to log on to your personal computer terminal and the ship’s icon cursor freezes solid, you call Pell. Although everyone inevitably gets to know him, he has never been close to anyone that I know of, which may be part of the reason everyone calls him ‘Pell’ as though it were his first name.
He is unusually tall and lanky with stilty legs that end in size twelve shoes. He has short-cropped, sandy-bond hair except for the bald spot in the middle, and a sandy-tan face that reflects a quiet personality. He has an unusually long, narrow neck partly covered by sandpaper skin, and big hands that he keeps well manicured. Pell seems to have a blind spot for rank. He inevitably fails to notice or acknowledge it, and because even the highest of ranks so fear not having the network, no one ever challenges him about it. It takes an event such as crashing into someone in the hallway to get him talking. His only real weakness for social intercourse comes on occasions when he unfolds his electric guitar to join in impromptu blues/jazz sessions that sometime take place in the cafeteria.
“I’m really sorry, Adrian. I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve been chasing the net for the entire third shift. It’s acting up like I’ve never seen it.”
“Funny, I haven’t noticed anything.”
“Yeah, well staff terminals are logging on all by themselves, files are disappearing and reappearing, and people are getting cut off in the middle of E-Mail. Every time I get there the damned thing has cleared. We’ve got some kind of noise getting in the system somewhere. I’ve seen it before, but never this bad. I sure hope its not bleeding in from the engine sensors. I sure don’t want to go crawling around way back in the damn tail tunnels. They woke me up around 01:00. I’m gonna give up and try to get some sleep.
If it’s still going on when I wake up, I’ll just have to start all over again.”"Better you than me, Pell. I’ve had my share of adventure.”
“Yeah, so I heard. Hey, take a look at this music. It’s really something.” Pell peeled off the light weight optics he was straining to see me through, and handed them over. It was not my thing, but you must remain on good terms with Pell. I looked them over and carefully put them on. The music instantly cut in slightly too loud, giving me a tingling sensation behind the ears where the transducers touch skin. It was an ancient-styled blues band. An unshaven man with bifocal-style glasses was bending strings on an old-fashioned electric guitar that had a cord and tuning keys. He wore baggy-looking brown work pants, and big, brown, heavy work shoes. He kept lifting his left foot slightly off the floor as he wrapped himself around his instrument. His voice was raspy and pitch-perfect. I could see Pell nodding enthusiastically at me through the image.
“It’s Clapton, can you believe it?”
I took off the optics and handed them back. “Sorry, never heard of him, Pell.”
“Clapton, …you know. He brought the blues into the twenty-first century. Studied under the best blues players in the world. They’re taking all these old videos and converting them to surround-sight. You get to see the real masters as though they’re right in front of you. It’s incredible. It just kills me.”
“Well, if you keep speeding down the hall wearing those things, it just might.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I’m half asleep. Well, I’d better get where I’m going. See you later.” He hooked the optics frames back over his ears and headed off, clanking along the grated section of corridor floor that led to his stateroom. I smiled to myself, shook my head and headed for the mess hall.
The Commissary is one of those cartoon-like places that are designed in fine detail by architectural engineers who were born to care about cost and efficiency and nothing else. They lie in bed at night entertaining fantasies about ground breaking designs in food dispensation. They design plastic rooms, with no detail, and no sharp edges as though the room was intended to prevent five-year olds from harming themselves. They generally top it off with a picture of a boat on the wall to show the depth of their symbolism, which it does.
Unbeknownst to them, as soon as the mess hall is activated, it is completely taken over by a strange group of space bound eccentrics who use it for a dozen different things for which it was never intended. They are the people who become walking outhouses on Halloween, Santas at Christmas, gigantic bunnies on Easter, off-key karaoke singers and flat comedians backed by too frequent, synthetic rim-shots during thinly-populated talent nights.
Understandably, Halloween is the favorite. On that particular evening, if you come to the mess hall, you are likely to be served brain salad by someone dressed in a big black helmet with the sound of heavy breathing.
There are no seasons in deep space, but there are seasons in the mess hall. It snows there in winter, flowers bloom in the spring lasting through the summer, and pines needles and corn stalks are gathered in the fall. R.J. does not really need to slay his invisible windmills in the cause of preserving humanity. The atypical people, who stalk designated human prey relentlessly, dragging their captured victims to the galley under false pretense only to bellow choruses of happy birthday to them while forcing them to blow out tiny, flaming sticks stuck into oversized pastries bearing their names, will do that for him.
Feeling lazy, I took an elevator up one deck and stepped out into the wide corridor that leads to the mess hall. A little alarm of awareness suddenly went off in my head. I stopped and listened. The faint echoes of dishes and trays could be heard clamoring in the distance, but other than that there was nothing. No sound at all. The plan had been for us to back away from the alien craft at 03:00, bring her around, and make the jump to light thirty minutes later. But there were no waves of superstructure vibration coming off the walls and no subsonic resonant drone from the Tachyon drives.
We weren’t moving. I hastened my pace.
To my surprise the place was packed and noisy. It should have been nearly empty with the first shift people all at their stations. Instead, they were here celebrating another unexpected break in routine. Even more surprising,
About the Author
I’m Marry, which offers quality products such as Dual SIM Quad Band , SDXC Memory Cards, and many more. Know more , please visit Wifi+GPS Mobile Phone .
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