Chronos' Christmas
Page 5
slot. The screen lit, and on it, with the tip of finger, she wrote out Gyp's full name, the one he'd adopted--Gypsy Crawler. The image on the viewer blurred, cleared, and red letters appeared in the right hand corner of the screen.
Her brother was piped into an expensive Gamm and had won a lot of money. The total blinked at her. Gyp was number twelve in the top twenty players of the evening. If he continued to do well, his Gamm would come up on the lounge dish-screens. That meant more points and more money. The stats told her it was his first play of the evening, a warm up. The betting was good, but not good enough. There wasn't enough for two fares back to the moon.
The image blipped to a drop-another-token-in-the-slot message, then to black. A quick search turned up a few more tokens. She slipped them into the viewer, requested an outline, then comlink to the moon. A digital voice told her the tokens would buy her sixty seconds of linktime.
Jing's hands shook as she typed in the code and her real name, hoping, after so many years, her mother would recognize her face. A snowy image appeared on the viewer. "Mom!" she said, more to herself than to the image. "It's me--"
Rhea Rose