The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

  Annie laughed. I just stood there, like a statue, a statue that was thankfully not puking.

  “I can give you some lessons once we reach your room,” Lola said to us as she returned her feet to the ground.

  “That would be great,” Annie replied.

  “Are you just staying the one day?” Lola asked as we made our way, step by Velcro-ripping step, down the hall.

  Each pair of quarter-million-dollar tickets on the Space elevator included a one-night stay on board the Olympus. Additional nights would cost more, of course, but I didn’t even bother to look at any of that because the way Annie and I were burning through our five and a half million dollars was already making me slightly ill. I didn’t even want to think about having to spend any more insane sums of money just to stay up here. After all, we were here for one thing and one thing only. There was no sense in wasting any time in trying to get it done.

  It did occur to me, however, that it would probably be a good idea to spend at least a little time with Lola learning how to get around this thing. Just putting one foot in front of the other was proving to be much more difficult than I originally thought it would be. After that, though, we’d really need to start making our way right over to the STU and see about getting up close and personal with the thing.

  34

  We got our little lesson from Lola on zero-G locomotion and, much to the surprise of the two women, I actually got the hang of it pretty quickly. I guess you wouldn’t know it to have watched me up here upon my arrival, but on the ground, I was actually pretty coordinated. I just needed some time to secure my stomach in place and make sure it wasn’t going to come up my throat or out my ass before I did anything too crazy. Plus, the hallway in which we were practicing didn’t have any window views out to space or down to Earth, so that was also a pretty huge help.

  “So, I’d really love to get a look at the spacewalk experience,” I said to Lola as I came flying, literally, down the short hallway that ran alongside our compartment.

  “Well, you’re going to need to go to orientation first,” she said. “But did you sign up for it ahead of time?”

  “No,” I said nervously, because I hadn’t even thought to do that.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Lola said, seeing the look on my face. “Almost all of the staff on board the SS Olympus are capable of transferring the required spacewalk skills to you, so there’s no danger of the adventure being unavailable. You’ll just want to select your time as soon as possible, unless you don’t mind doing it in the middle of the night or something like that.”

  “Any chance we could see the STU room or where the spacewalk takes place before I sign up?” I asked.

  “We don’t normally let people visit that area unless they’ve booked the spacewalk experience,” Lola replied tentatively.

  “I think Mr. Queasy Stomach up here just wants to get the lay of the land before he commits to anything too exciting,” Annie said from an upside-down position on the ceiling.

  “Okay, we’ll see what we can do,” Lola replied, her bright and professional smile returning to her face.

  Orientation took one hour and forty-five minutes. It had to be the slowest one hundred and five minutes of my entire life. Not that what they were saying wasn’t actually fascinating, amazing, and something anyone else down on Earth would be dying to hear, but I wasn’t actually here on vacation. I was here to find the portable STU, or its replacement parts, somehow get my hands on the tiny little chipset I needed to fix the unit we had stashed in a locker at Grand Central Station, and set about changing the world for good instead of greed. So, yeah, the orientation was brutal.

  Lola apparently noticed my fraying nerves after the session was over but fortunately just chalked it up to the queasiness I’d been exhibiting since the moment she met us at the Space elevator.

  “You sure you’re feeling okay, Mr. Rojas?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I replied with as much confidence and as straight a face as I could muster. “Did you manage to check on the spacewalk experience for us?” I asked.

  “Whether you can preview it first?” she asked rhetorically. “Yes. I can take you up to the STU room and spacewalk jump-room at any point, so long as another experience isn’t going on when you’d like to visit.”

  “Great,” I said. “Can we go now?”

  “Um . . .” Lola hesitated. She had clearly not anticipated my immediate fixation on this task.

  “He just won’t be able to stop thinking about it until he sees it for himself,” Annie said to Lola.

  The two women exchanged one of those looks women give each other when they are engaging in female-to-female mental telepathy and smiled at each other knowingly.

  Lola removed her PCD from her pocket, glanced at the screen, and said, “It does actually look like the area is unoccupied right now, if you’d like to head up there.”

  The SS Olympus was shaped, to my eye, like a big dumbbell you’d see at the gym tipped up onto one of its heavy ends. The lower dumbbell, the one we’d spent all of our time in so far, was mostly for housing and logistical stuff. All of the living quarters were on this area, along with the room that was used for orientation, the largest room on the whole station, where the Elevator entered and docked, along with a number of other administrative and storage rooms. Apparently, the room with the STU in it was up on the other end of the dumbbell, where all of the recreational space was. If I had to guess, I’d bet that the backup parts for the unit were down here on this level, but it was finally time to do some exploring, so we could actually find out for certain.

  “This part might feel a little funny,” Lola said over her shoulder as we approached the center of the lower level, where access to the upper level was situated. “You’re just going to kind of, walk up the wall.”

  As she said this, Lola pulled her left foot off of the ground and stuck it onto what was at my current perspective, the wall. Instead of the current floor and its relative ceiling being separated by a ninety-degree angle, this part of the structure was curved, making it easier to manage the transition. Lola then unstuck her right foot from the current floor and stepped up onto the relative wall. Just like that, she was perpendicular to both of us. She took a few more steps, which looked like they were going up the wall, and then she made room for us to do the same. First Annie and then I followed, and the next thing we knew, we were inside what looked for all intents and purposes to be a hallway. That is, if I could somehow forget that I’d just had to adjust my entire existence a full ninety degrees to access it. It was pretty damn cool, though.

  We got to the end of the hallway and were walking down the floor-wall to reorient ourselves to the new floor when another SS Olympus employee, this one a short Asian man, lined himself up at the start of the hallway and pressed a large yellow panel on the wall. When he did this, all of the lights in the hall turned from their previous soft white to a kind of muted yellow.

  “Oh, watch this,” Lola said.

  The little man removed his traction shoes one at a time, then he squatted down as low as he could go and sprang forward, launching himself into the hallway. It wasn’t very fast, but it was very awesome. Lola, Annie, and I watched as the man looked like he was flying from one end of the hallway to the other at only a very slightly upward angle. When Lola, Annie, and I had been practicing this move in the hallway outside of our room, we were only going maybe ten or twelve feet at a time. This, however, looked like it had to be about thirty yards, and the man had done it perfectly. As soon as he got to the other end, he grabbed on to one of the ceiling rungs, pressed a button that returned the lights in the hallway to their original soft white color, then attached himself to the “ceiling” via the Velcro on his butt, strapped his traction shoes back on, and then walked out of sight.

  “That looked fun,” I said.

  “Takes a little practice to navigate zero G like that, but once you get the hang of it, it is pretty fun,” Lola said.

  “Can you do th
at?” Annie asked.

  “I can,” Lola said with as much modesty as one can muster when admitting they can fly.

  “Do you personally offer up the spacewalk skill as well?” I asked as we used our Velcro shoes to start walking away from the connector hallway.

  “I do,” Lola replied.

  “But, after you sell the skill, do you have to go right back down to Earth?” I asked.

  “No,” Lola replied. “Not right away. Our rotations up here are for six days at a time, and no matter what point during my rotation I sell the skill, I can still perform my duties on board the station until I go back down Earth-side and can learn it all over again.”

  “Losing your spacewalk skills doesn’t affect your work on the station?” Annie asked.

  “No. The skill set for the spacewalk is pretty specific.”

  “So how long does it take you to acquire the skill again?” I asked. “Are you unable to come back up here until you re-learn it?”

  “Well,” Lola replied, seeming slightly hesitant, “they don’t generally have us advertise this, but, since you’re asking, I can learn the skills needed for the spacewalk in just a couple of days. It’s not really all that difficult. It’s just kind of specialized. In fact, I think I spent more time getting my scuba certification than I do re-learning the spacewalk skill.”

  I half laughed, half spit, which was plainly evidenced by the fact that actual spit left my mouth and floated its way over to a wall, where it kind of just stuck there. Annie laughed too, but not nearly as wildly.

  “What’s so funny?” Lola asked.

  “Nothing,” Annie replied, getting a hold of herself before I could. “Just an inside joke. We were literally just talking about scuba certifications a couple days ago.”

  I finally regained my composure, realizing that I’d somehow made my head begin spinning just by laughing and said, “A hundred grand just for two days’ work? Where do I sign up to get that gig?”

  “Well,” Lola began to reply, “you’d have to become a qualified astronaut first, but besides that, I don’t actually get the hundred grand when I sell the skill. I don’t even get a percentage of it. I’m just on salary. We all are. But, anyway . . .” We stopped walking, and Lola turned to face an open doorway. “Here we are.”

  I looked in and could see the portable STU sitting right there on an austere table no more than ten feet away. I picked up one Velcroed foot from the ground and took a step toward the open doorway.

  “Hello,” a squat man in a staff shirt said, almost literally scaring the crap out of me.

  “Whoa,” I said out loud. One moment the doorway was open and I had a clear shot to the STU, and the next, this short Samoan-looking dude was just there, right in front of me.

  “Hi,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. My name’s Von.”

  “Co-cool,” I said, stuttering a bit and trying to regain my composure. “I’m uh, uh . . .” Damn it. What was my current fake name?.

  “He’s easily startled,” Annie said, rescuing me, as usual. “I’m Mariana, and this is Sebastian.”

  “Bash,” I said, to mostly quizzical looks. “And my bad. I just wasn’t expecting anyone to be in here. Lola told us the STU room was vacant.”

  “Oh, well, no one’s using it,” Von said. “But we don’t usually just leave three hundred million dollars’ worth of STU technology sitting around unattended.”

  He laughed slightly, and Lola joined him in the chuckle.

  As the two of them shared in the little joke, I exchanged a look with Annie and tried not to throw up in my mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to make it seem like I also knew how silly it would be to leave this thing completely unattended. “You wouldn’t want some kid coming by and spilling a soda on it or anything.”

  “Well,” Von said, returning to all seriousness, “we don’t exactly have any open beverage containers here on the Olympus, nor do we have any real gravity to cause a traditional spill to happen but, yeah, something like that.”

  Lola explained to Von that Annie and I were just looking to scope the area out before making a decision on buying the skill and the experience. The two of them showed us around the room a little bit and gave us all the basics on how a skill transfer works and what you actually get to do on the spacewalk. I was only half listening, but I was taking in my surroundings, hoping some idea would come to me.

  “So the next skill transfer is going to take place in just a couple of minutes,” Von said. “And we’ll all need to vacate the room momentarily.”

  “You’re not staying?” Annie asked.

  “No,” Von said, the beginnings of another smile touching his lips. “What did you think, I’m just a Space Security Guard?”

  He and Lola exchanged another polite little laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, seeing our confusion and possibly mistaking it for offense. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little punchy today. But no, I’m not a space security guard. I just sold my spacewalk skill about an hour ago and only have to stay put in this little room until the next client comes in. Then, I’m free, and it’s up to the next staff member to hang tight until they do it all over again. Me? I’m off to the cafeteria, and then ready for some sleep.”

  I breathed a long, weary sigh, which I quickly realized was weird, so I then had to pretend I was getting dizzy again.

  “Are you okay?” Lola asked, as Von stepped closer.

  “Yup. Yup. I’m good,” I replied and smiled, hopefully not too weirdly.

  Knowing that someone was going to be standing in this room all day every day was certainly not the type of access I’d been hoping for. Then again, if Annie’s original suspicion of Von being a Space Security Guard had been right, that would have been a lot worse. As I turned to walk out of the room, I decided to think positively, telling myself, Just one staff member in the room at a time? One who is not trained in security? I can work with that.

  35

  “So you want to sign up for the spacewalk skill transfer, go into the room, have some sort of klutzy spasm, and accidentally on purpose knock into the portable STU that’s sitting on the table in hopes of knocking it over and damaging it so they’ll have to leave the room to get replacement parts?” Annie asked me with a heavy dose of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “But when you say it with that tone of voice, it sounds stupid.”

  “It is stupid.”

  Lola had walked us back to our room and said we should probably be good to get around on our own from now on but that we could call her at any time. Our quarters were tiny. The literature had said that the room came with a “Space Queen” bed, which is absolutely nothing like an Earth Queen bed, and much more like an Earth Full, and it was jammed up against two walls. There was no dresser, no desk, and no nightstands. There was a tiny little closet and a little miniature table that Annie and I were sitting at right now. The plastic chairs we were on did actually have the rare luxury of some padding on them and were set up next to a long, thin window that ran the length of the entire room, all ten feet of it. There actually was no en-suite bathroom. Instead, every sixth door along this habitation level of the space station led to a public bathroom. It was basically first come, first serve, except for the fact that your PCD was issued one “shower credit” for every two days you were staying on the station. Since Annie and I were here for just the one night, we would not be partaking in the luxury of cleaning ourselves. Instead, we were sitting around this tiny little table with just enough room on it for maybe two saucer plates and one beer glass, trying to come up with a way to get our hands on the STU chipset I needed.

  “After I knock it over, they’ll need to go get the spare parts to fix it. If they leave us alone in the room, I’ll have the perfect opportunity to steal the little chipset or, at the very least, I could ask them where they need to go in order to get the spare parts, and then I’ll know where they keep them,” I said, continuing to plead the merits of the plan I was trying
to formulate.

  “Okay,” Annie said, with an infinite amount of patience in her voice. “I know you’ve been handling all of the planning so far, and you’ve been doing an amazing job at it. In fact, I’m pretty sure we’d either be dead or in jail right now if you hadn’t been taking charge, but I think I might have a slightly more workable plan for this.”

  It was super nice of her to couch that statement with her faith in me, but honestly, it was a relief to hear that she had a better plan. My head was starting to hurt from all the mental gymnastics I’d been putting it through trying to figure out how in the hell we were going to pull this off. Actually, I think that half of the headache was from all of the thinking, and the other half was coming from this view. If I looked to my right, I could see our Hobbit-sized room. If I looked straight ahead and tried really hard not to use my peripheral vision, I could see Annie. If, however, I turned left—oh God, I almost threw up trying to do it yet again—there was the planet Earth below us. I’d been avoiding looking at it for almost the entire time we’d been sitting here, but as I had just glanced down, I finally caught a glimpse of something I thought I recognized.

  “Is that . . . North America?” I asked.

  The couple other times I’d glanced out the window I pretty much just saw white puffy clouds, a lot of blue ocean, and some blobs of land I couldn’t recognize.

  “Yeah. It is,” Annie replied with awe in her voice.

  I wasn’t great at geography, but I did my best to transpose what knowledge I did have of the globe onto what I thought must be New York, Florida, the space in which I assumed Cuba must be, and then sat up straighter in my chair to try to look down at South America. I wasn’t quite sure where Colombia was on that part of the continent, but it was weird to look at all the places on Earth where people wanted the two of us either captured or dead.