Jonathon Stachem woke up slowly, eyes red. Too much grass last night, he thought. He closed his eyes, attempting to return to a quite wonderful dream that involved several women and beer. An excellent combination. His eyes opened again, but not of his own will. He had been late to work several times in the past few weeks. His employer had ordered him to get an alarm implant that would automatically open his eyes at the desired time and keep them open until he stood. And once he was standing, Jon could never get back to sleep. No implants were needed for that.
A few minutes later, he was out of the shower and making coffee while fixing some quality eggs and bacon. He turned on the holovision, and watched a cartoon while making his breakfast. The characters danced and laughed and played in three dimensional high definition glory. Jon had saved for four months to buy the HV; all he had a couple weeks ago was a wall panel two dimensional television. He finished cooking and sat down in front of the HV, thinking that the amazing humor of Willy the Wallaby is just that much better in three dimensions.
Once he had fished eating, Jon walked out to his porch to smoke a joint. He missed smoking cigarettes, but those had been made illegal a couple years before. Sipping what little remained of his coffee, he took in the view of Washington D.C. from hundreds of feet up across the river. D.C. was nicknamed the “Short City” because it retained its law, through much political and public strife, not to build anything in the city higher than the Washington Monument. It was called the “Midget City” before the “Short City,” but the city’s politicians urged the changing the nickname for fear of offending midgets across the galaxy, although no midget had complained and had in fact enjoyed their claim on the city. Nothing makes any sense anymore, Jon thought. I wonder if it’s always been like this?
Once he dressed himself and cleaned up the kitchen (he was saving up for a robot to do that; one day he hoped to get an android), he walked up the stairwell to the roof. On the roof was the mode of transportation that would get him to work, teleportation. It was actually called warping, but most people who weren’t scientists thought teleportation was more apt a name for it. It was possible with quantum power, enabling atoms to exist in several states at once. At first, quantum was used to power computers in the early twenty first century. As it was researched more during the twenty first through twenty second centuries, quantum engineers developed the technology for people to exist in several states at once. The tricky part was getting people to exist in only two places at once, and across vast distances (say 20 light years). It was now possible, and the starship that the United Galactic Council (UGC) was building in orbit around the Earth would be capable of traveling to nearby galaxies.
In the early days of deep space exploration, probes were warped to different areas of the galaxy, searching for possible inhabitable planets. Destroying all expectations, it was found that nine in ten systems had the potential to support human life, although other intelligent forms of life had yet to be discovered.
Making his way up the stairs, Jon readied his WarpCard that he used to pay for the transportation mainly for convenience. It was better than carrying change around. I wonder why they don’t just get rid of the paper bills and just use cards to pay for everything? Jon thought. There’s an idea I can sell. A few minutes later, he was on Mars on his way to his office. The underground of the red planet was now riddled with crisscrossed tunnels that led into the buildings that rose hundreds of feet into the air. The only exits to the surface were for emergency purposes only; the only thing on the surface was metal and sand, anyway.
Walking through Jefferson Tunnel on his way to his office, a man approached Jon. He was carrying several pamphlets, sweating with the exertion of an overweight man walking great distances. Reaching Jon as he walked, the man said, “Good morning, sir. I’m with a group called Ban the Barriers, or the BBs for short. Have you heard of us?”
Jon said nothing. He continued walking, but with a more brisk tone, more determined. Stiff.
“I know you’re not an android. I saw you scratch yourself when I was on my way over to talk to you. If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine, but don’t be an ass about it.”
“Right, alright,” Jon said, realizing that he had been rather rude. “Yes, I’ve heard of you. Who hasn’t? And you wouldn’t like who I work for.”
“I doubt that, sir. Anyway, did you know that since the inception of the barrier law a few months ago, many teams have seen their profits fall by over ten percent? Because the teams are making much less money, the leagues themselves are affected, including the Galactic Boulders League. We won’t see the effect on the economy for another few months at least, but it will trickle down with a huge impact. I have a pamphlet here with our full report.”
“So you say profits are down? I saw another private report issued by the Economist a week ago that stated profits are way up since the barrier law.” Jon himself agreed with the barrier law; no more brainers spoiling the sport with their psi crap. Not to mention the fact that he worked for the largest psi barrier in the galaxy; his paycheck had nearly doubled after the barrier law was passed through the UGC.
“Sir, we BBs have challenged that report, based on the fact that the editor-in-chief of that magazine is a former rockhead himself!”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. He played in an amateur league for a year. Not even a year! A few months, maybe. Even if he was a former full-time rockhead, he would have no incentive whatsoever to falsify a report like that. None!”
The BB’s face was getting redder every second, which made Jon glad that he could see his office entrance from where he was. The man’s embarrassment made him feel bad. “Sir, if you could just…”
The voice died away as Jon walked through the front door. Barriers were used to block psionic energy in sports, and could be adjusted to allow all energy to pass it or just a little or, in the case of boulders, none. Boulders was the only sport in which it was a law that the athletes (called “rockheads”) had to wear barriers. The barriers were inspected three times before a race and three times after a race by six different people. Each barrier could only be used once, and was stored in a facility on Saturn’s moon, Titan, should any further investigation be needed. Jon was one of those who helped in the programming of the barriers.
Walking into his office building Jon said, “Good morning, Alice,” to the beautiful secretary. “I missed you at the party last night.”
“That’s because I didn’t go,” she replied. She didn’t look at him at all, only stared at some work she was doing on the computer. There had been experiments with interfacing computers with the human brain through implants, enabling people to see what would be on a screen over their own vision. However, it never took on the market, and the main difference between computers now and in the early days was that they were much smaller and instead of a keyboard and mouse, you could wear a headset that would take your thoughts and input them as commands into the computer. Basically, what you thought, the computer did, but only if you wanted it to.
“I see…” Jon said to Alice. Confusion struck him as to what to say, but he carried on, “Not really leaving me much of an opening there, are you?” All smiles.
Not so much with Alice. “No, I’m not.”
The first and only time I ask her out, and she has to be a bitch. I should have seen this coming from someone who puts the toilet paper in against the wall. I know it was her… “Well, it’s been great talking to you, Alice dear, but I’ve got to get to work. I won’t see you later, apparently. Tata for toodles!” With that, Jon left the entrance lobby and took the elevator to the second floor, where his office was. He took the elevator because all the big-wigs of the company worked on the higher floors. He wasn’t looking to make an impression or start a conversation that could lead to a promotion with any of them, although some people did. Jon just liked passing gas when one of them hopped on with him.
“What’s that smell?” Jon heard as he stepped off the elevator, chuckling to himself. He walked into his cubicle and sat down, opening his bag and emptying his food into the refrigerator underneath his desk. His cubicle was, for the most part, undecorated. The one picture he had was a poster on the wall to the right of him. Portrayed on the poster, racing down a dangerous mountain crevice on some distant moon or large asteroid, was the famous Richard Nepolis, more commonly called “Rocky Ric.”
After setting everything up and getting a cup of coffee from the lounge room, he put on his headset and started his work. Using his thoughts to directly input commands into the programming made for a much faster process than the old mouse and keyboard. Each barrier that the company made had to be programmed individually to completely eliminate the margin of error. Programmers, like Jon, (called Heinrich & Associates, Quality Psionic Signal Barriers) were encouraged to take breaks as often as they wished, so long as they weren’t late in arriving there, so long as they met their meager quota for the week. It wouldn’t due to have a programmer get tired and have his thoughts wander, possibly entering some illegible code thereby destroying an expensive piece of machinery. Once the code was placed, it could not be deleted, such were the security measures.
The revenue from boulders itself took up over ten percent of the stock market. Add the many hundreds of businesses (like the one Jon worked for) connected to the sport, and you had over a whopping thirty percent of the economy. This was the galactic economy, not just Earth’s or any other single planet’s. The reason for this was how the sport started which, of course, involves deep space exploration.
Anytime a deep space probe discovered an inhabitable planet, which was very often, governments would send volunteers to physically scout said planet. The scouts drove all over the planets in vehicles called All Terrain Interplanetary Scouting Vehicles (ATISV). Seeing as how calling the vehicles by their true names involved intense concentration (scouts weren’t the brightest people, it took a certain type of crazy to scout a planet where no intelligent life had ever touched), the scouts nicknamed their vehicles “boulders.”
It became customary for the scouts to race each other down mountainsides in their nearly invincible vehicles, with the winner gaining money from the rest. Over time, boulders became a professional sport. With still more time, it became an extremely popular and profitable sport. This was around the same time that Earth governments started asking for civilian volunteers for deep space colonization.
As one could imagine, very few civilians volunteered. Who wants to leave what had been their home for millions of years to go light-years away to a place that they had never seen? Even with instant transportation going both ways available and Earth’s obscene overpopulation, most people were hesitant to colonize. So, Earth governments started building at least one boulders stadium in each system marked for colonization. As there were only two stadiums in the Sol system and the only real way to watch boulders is actually being there and ticket prices were so high that government officials were put in jail if they used taxpayer money to buy them, people jumped at the opportunity.
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