by Pete Gustin
“Better than—” She cut herself off. “Better than a lot of the other stuff that’s been going on.”
“True,” I admitted.
As Antonio left us and climbed back up into the van, another attendant came walking up and checked our PCDs.
“Ah, Mr. Rojas. Ms. Ortiz,” she said with a big plastic smile.
Her outfit was more in line with what I thought Antonio was going to be wearing. It was a little bit more space-themed, though, to be honest, it looked more like flight attendant meets air force pilot meets moon suit.
“My name is Victoria,” she said. “And it looks like you’ve got about an hour and a half until liftoff, so please, feel free to enjoy the park in the meantime, and if you’d like to set me a tether, I can come find you when we’re close to departure time.”
Geez, why does everyone wanna tether me today?
“I actually have to the use the facilities,” Annie said to Victoria. “If you could just show me where those are and where we’re supposed to meet, we’ll be sure to get back there on time.”
“Of course,” Victoria replied.
This place was quite literally a theme park. It had apparently started as just one building that served as support for the Space Elevator, but the more interest that popped up about the technology, the more the investors thought they could capitalize on the site by adding rides, attractions, simulated zero-gravity rooms, and even movie theaters showcasing the latest 3D tech on various space-themed movies and documentaries. The amount of people actually riding the elevator each day was just a tiny fraction of the total number of people who came to the location. The elevator only went up twice each day. First at 10:00 AM local time and again at 4:30 PM. There was only one elevator running on one Nano tubule chord, and that big box only had room for thirty people.
We wandered the park for a little while, until Annie caught a glimpse of me in direct sunlight and did a double take.
“Gross,” she said, her eyes fixed on my shirt.
Apparently, no amount of bathroom hand soap was going to truly remove dumpster sludge from a T-shirt. The brown stain was still there, drier if not any lighter in color.
“We need to get you a new shirt,” she said.
Every single shirt in the souvenir shop said “Space Elevator Bogota” or something to that effect all over it in giant letters.
“No way,” I said to shirt after shirt.
Fashion wasn’t really my thing, obviously, but I still didn’t wanna be the big dorky American tourist wearing the shirt from his vacation destination while he was still at said vacation destination.
Finally, Annie found a white short-sleeved Polo that simply said “Space Elevator” in one-inch letters on the right sleeve and “Bogota” in similar letters on the left. It was the least conspicuous and least gaudy shirt we could find, so I bought the dumb thing.
“Cute,” Annie said after I put it on, though I’m pretty sure she was being sarcastic.
A short-sleeved collared Polo. Yeah, I hadn’t worn one of these since grade school.
I dumped my sploogy black tee and ruined white button-down in a nearby trash can, thankful that my wrists looked a heck of a lot better than they had just yesterday. The cuts I’d suffered from wrenching them around on those zip ties weren’t nearly as deep as I’d originally thought. Turns out I’m apparently a bit of what you might call “a bleeder,” I guess.
Time for our departure was coming up, so we made our way over to the building Victoria had indicated and got ready to—I almost couldn’t believe it was actually happening—go to space.
32
The Space Elevator was, as you might imagine, a large metal box with a cable running through it that went from its anchor point on Earth to as far up as the eye could see. Actually, it went farther than that. It obviously went all the way into outer space, but no one’s eyes could actually see that far, so I guess the expression didn’t really work in this case.
At any rate, the Space Elevator looked pretty much exactly like you’d expect an oversize elevator to look, with one exception. There seemed to be two strange little vehicles attached to two of the four sides of the Elevator.
“What are those?” I asked Annie.
She shrugged her mutual ignorance and turned to ask the people behind us in line.
“Do you know what those two things are, on either side of the Elevator?” she asked a younger woman behind us, who was standing alongside a much older man.
Instead of answering the question herself, the woman just looked to the man she was standing next to.
“Those are the Space Flyers,” he said with a very entertaining Australian accent.
“What are those?” Annie asked.
Apparently, neither of us had seen anything about these Space Flyers in any of the videos we’d been watching.
“If you don’t feel like riding the Elevator back down to Earth when you’re done with your visit to the Space Station,” he said. “Or if you feel like returning to a different location on the globe other than Bogota, you can hop on board one of the Flyers, and they’ll take you to pretty much any major city in the world.”
“Holy crap, really?” I asked.
“Really,” the man replied with a smile directed toward the younger woman on his arm.
“Is that like a part of the package?” Annie asked. “I didn’t actually see information about that anywhere.”
“Nah,” the man replied. “It’s extra. One and a half million dollars.”
“Whoa,” I said, aghast at the price.
“Well, that’s Australian dollars,” the man said. “It’d be less in American dollars, I think. You’re from the States, right?”
“Yes, we are,” Annie replied, as I grabbed my PCD and called up a monetary conversion app just out of sheer curiosity.
“It’s about a million American,” I said to Annie.
“Oh, is that all?” she replied sarcastically.
“We’re taking it,” the woman said, her first words thus far.
“That we are,” the man replied, leaning down to receive a rather wet and intimate kiss on the lips.
Oh, gross.
I had originally thought they might be father and daughter, but that disgusting kiss made it obvious that this was much more likely a Sugar Daddy situation.
“When we’re done with our trip, we’ll be taking one of the Flyers on over to Bora Bora,” the man said.
“It’s beautiful there,” the woman added.
“I bet,” I said lamely, not really knowing what else I could add to the topic.
“Mr. Rojas. Ms. Ortiz,” I heard from almost right next to me.
Annie nudged me in the ribs when I didn’t turn to respond.
“Oh, right,” I actually said out loud. It was getting harder and harder to remember what my fake name was.
“Yes, Victoria?” Annie said, replying to our personal assistant. She was still wearing her flight-attendant-air-force-pilot-astronaut outfit but had added what looked like a Navy sailor’s hat to the ensemble. I really had no idea what they were going for here.
“Since you two will be traveling in interior pods, we’re going to have you board first.”
“Oh, that’s brave,” the Aussie butted in.
“What is?” I asked.
“The interior pods,” he replied. “I tried that once and almost threw up on my shoes. I had to keep the shade drawn for almost the whole trip and didn’t even get to enjoy the view.”
“What is he talking about?” I asked Annie.
She gave me an, I-don’t-know look and started to follow Victoria toward the Space Elevator.
“G’luck,” the Aussie called after us. “And cute shirt, by the way.”
Damn it. I deserved that . . . obviously, but still stood there for a second feeling dopey in my Space Elevator tourist Polo.
Recovering, I took a few quick steps to catch up to Victoria, who, for someone nearly a foot shorter than me, was a surprisingly fast walk
er.
“What was all that about him not liking the interior pod?” I asked her.
“I’m guessing he didn’t like the view straight down,” she replied.
I probably looked as perplexed as I felt.
“You two chose interior pods, no?” Victoria asked, starting to look a little confused.
“I, uh, I guess so,” I replied.
She gave the faintest shake of her head. I think she had to catch herself from making it even more obvious, but she was clearly thinking, What is up with these idiots?
“Exterior pods,” she started to explain, “have windows on the exterior walls. If you choose to pull the shades up, you can look out them at the horizon as the Elevator ascends to space. Interior pods, like the ones you selected, have a window on the floor. I believe the literature refers to it as a God’s-Eye View, giving you the feeling of standing on top of the world and ascending to Olympus. I’m told it’s very exhilarating, though apparently, some people”—she motioned with her head back to the Aussie and his jail bait—“don’t have the stomach for it.”
I looked at Annie and grimaced a little. My head would literally start to get that spinny feeling when I got on a Ferris wheel, and I was pretty sure that this thing was going to go a lot higher.
Victoria must have caught my look because she added, “If you don’t like the view, you can just close the shade, and all you’ll see is the interior of your pod.”
“Oh, that sounds magical,” Annie said sarcastically. She had never really had a lot of sympathy for my queasiness when it came to amusement park rides. I think the phrase, “My four-year-old niece is tougher than you,” had been thrown about on a few different occasions.
We approached the entrance to the Elevator, and Victoria stopped to turn and face us. “The Elevator is set up in four rows of four compartments. You are in Pod ten. It’s the third row back, first door on your right. You can just follow Emmanuel.”
Emmanuel was apparently the rather short gentleman, almost as short as Victoria, who was standing right in front of us at the opening to the Space Elevator. Along with being short of stature, he was also very short on words because he didn’t use any, but instead, just turned and started walking into the big metallic box.
We followed him in and saw a rather Spartan interior, at least here in the hallway. I didn’t know a lot about this technology, but I did know that lifting things all the way into outer space was expensive. Doing it the traditional way with rockets was extremely expensive. The amount of fuel you needed to burn to lift anything out of Earth’s orbit was pretty massive. The whole point of the Space Elevator, apparently, before it got turned into a rich person’s plaything, was to drastically cut cost on getting things into low orbit. Doing it this way was a lot cheaper than using traditional propulsion, but it still wasn’t truly cheap. I’m guessing that’s the reason they didn’t bother decorating the inside of the Elevator with anything extra. For every ounce of decoration they might have added, it probably would have cost a few thousand dollars in energy to lift the extra stuff up to space. The austere décor continued right on into our pod. Emmanuel walked us up to it, gestured in with a hand, then turned and walked away. Annie stepped in first and turned back to give me a highly raised eyebrow.
“Wow,” I said, a little surprised at the underwhelmingness of it all.
“A half a million bucks and all you get is two white, plastic chairs in a little white room,” Annie commented.
And she had the right of it. Two plastic chairs, four white walls, one white ceiling, and a floor with a little cut-out on it that I’m assuming was the handle to be used for retracting and closing the floor-shade in order to reveal the window below.
I bent down to test this guess and, sure enough, sliding the floor-shade back revealed a glass window below with a view at some dark metal, or something like that, below.
“You gotta really like the person you’re traveling with,” Annie started to say. “If you’re gonna spend three hours in the equivalent of a white padded room with them, without the comfortable padding.”
“You won’t even notice the walls,” came the voice of the Aussie as he popped his head into our Pod, causing my heart to skip a beat. “Once we’re up in the air and you look down out that window.” He laughed, winked at each of us, then backed out of our pod and disappeared.
“Our ascent will begin in five minutes,” came an extremely pleasant female voice from . . . I don’t know where—I couldn’t see any speakers in the room, but I knew they must be there somewhere. “You may choose to stand or take your seats.”
That was another thing I guess I hadn’t thought of. For some reason, I guess I was expecting to be strapped in for our ride to outer space, but seeing as how this thing was apparently quite literally just a big giant elevator to space, I guess there was no need. I mean, I certainly didn’t buckle my safety belt when riding elevators in Midtown so, no need to strap into one here.
Five minutes later, I felt the slightest and most gentle of bumps as our ride began. Five minutes after that, Annie had our floor shade pulled back wide open, and I literally had to put my hand on the wall to even attempt making an effort at getting my head to stop spinning.
“I know a certain little four-year-old girl who would love this,” Annie said as she gently poked me in the stomach, which almost made me puke, by the way, as she sat down on the floor cross-legged to watch Earth retreat from beneath us.
33
I was in space. I was in outer space, and I most definitely and absolutely wanted to throw up all over myself. Annie insisted on leaving that floor shade open for the entire three-hour ride up, which meant that I spent most of the time either staring at the white ceiling or just standing there with my eyes closed. It’s not that I didn’t want to look out the window. I did. It was actually killing me that there was this once-in-a-lifetime view right below my feet, and my stomach was doing everything it could to not let me look. I caught a few glimpses here and there, enough to stick ’em in my memory bank, I guess, but in the moment and as they were happening, they were just nausea-inducing instances of near terror.
“Your boots, sir.”
“Huh?” I asked.
A petite redheaded woman wearing white pants and a white-collared Polo shirt similar to the one I was wearing but with the word “STAFF” across her chest was holding out a pair of slipper booties to me.
“Oh, right,” I said, finally noticing her presence.
We’d been told all about this during the last half hour of our trip up here. They played an optional message within our compartment that we chose to hear all about gravity, or the lack thereof, up here on the SS Olympus. They gave us this whole spiel about how artificial gravity could be simulated in outer space by rotating a habitat. They said it was possible, but caused a lot of strain on the occupants of the habitat, including limitations on how fast you’d want to do things, like stand up or even turn your head. Turns out, surprise surprise, that the human anatomy wasn’t really meant to live within an artificial gravity system, and if a habitat was spinning at a rate of just six rotations per minute, even trained test pilots would have difficulty performing simple motor tasks.
So, booties.
Well, technically, they were calling them “traction shoes,” but they were slipper booties with Velcro along the bottom and a little ways up the side. They were all black with some silver trim, similar to the décor in the Space Shuttle Van, and went higher up over your ankle than a pair of high-top basketball sneakers but not nearly as high as a pair of cowboy boots.
Somehow, Annie had already gotten her booties—I mean, traction shoes—on, while I must have been staring at the ceiling, but now it was my turn.
“My name is Lola,” said the diminutive redhead who was holding the pair of traction shoes in front of me. “Just hold on to this railing,” she said, gesturing to a silver bar on the wall. “I’ll remove your sneakers and replace them with the traction shoes.”
Great, I th
ought. I don’t even remember the last time I changed my socks.
Lola first squatted down, then completely sat down on the floor in front of me. In watching her wriggle a couple of times to get into the proper place, I heard that trademark Velcro sound of ripping, and I realized that the butt of her pants must also have Velcro on it, which was allowing her to stick to the Velcro-coated floor. We had been informed that the entire station had Velcro floors. It looked like that was the soft side of the Velcro. The part on our traction shoes was apparently the rougher, grabby half of the Velcro.
“You can follow me to your room,” Lola said as soon as she finished strapping on my traction shoes with enough force to come just short of cutting off the circulation to my feet, which was apparently just enough force so that I didn’t step out of them every time I tried to walk. “We can go as slowly as you need to. Is this your first time aboard the Olympus?”
“It is,” Annie replied.
I said nothing because I was pretty sure if I opened my mouth, my breakfast from earlier in the day was going to make its way up and out.
The corridors were narrow and had vertical metal bars set on them at about torso level every two feet or so. Even with your feet sticking to the ground, locomotion was still bizarre and ungainly, so Lola suggested we could hold on to these bars as often as we needed to.
“In no time at all,” Lola said, yanking both of her feet away from the Velcro floor and hovering in mid-air right in front of us, “you’ll be able to zoom around the station like a fish in water.”
After saying this, she grabbed one of the bars and used it to propel herself to the far end of the short hallway.
“It’s really fun,” she said with a big smile.
She then used one of the metal bars as leverage to bring herself close to the ceiling, and I noticed for the first time that there were other smaller metal bars up there. She grabbed on to one of those and then somehow managed to make herself parallel with the ground. From there, she kicked off of one of the ceiling bars, using it to launch herself right at us like she was Superman, or uh, Supergirl, I guess.