Mickey, Donny and Lyle were quickly hustled to a waiting electric golf cart and trundled out the loading bay and down the long path to the launch vehicle. Some nasty little woman from accounting sat down beside Mickey and tried to get enough room on the seat while accommodating Mickey’s space suit.
“We didn’t get all your details,” fretted the accountant. “Could you tell me your social security numbers please.”
“Do we have social security numbers?” asked Mickey.
“I have one!” declared Lyle.
The accountant waited, stylus poised.
“I forgot it,” said Lyle.
“I’ll get them from the government,” she said. “What are your full names?”
“Mickey Dolenz Humboldt,” said Mickey.
“Really?” said Donny.
“Yeah,” laughed Mickey.
“Like that old Monkee?”
“Yeah, my mom was gaga for Mickey Dolenz,” said Mickey.
“Who’s that?” queried Lyle.
“What is your name, sir,” said the little accountant, pointing the end of her stylus at Donny.
“Donald Matthew Summers,” said Donny.
“And you?” she asked Lyle.
“Lyle Sherman Green,” said Lyle. “Junior.”
“I’ll just leave out the junior if you don’t mind,” she said. “Now what are your birth dates, please?”
“We were all born in 2019,” said Mickey.
Lyle started to sing a popular song from a few years before Feedbaq took over the music industry. “New Century Baaaaaa-bie! Millennial Queee-een! Forever a teee-een!”
“What are your exact birth-dates, please,” she insisted through clenched teeth.
“We’re all Geminis,” said Donny.
“Yeah,” said Lyle. “But I’m on the cusp.”
“WHAT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY SIR!” she shouted at Donny.
“May,” blurted Donny.
“May WHAT?” said the accountant.
“Uh, the twenty-third, yeah.”
“And you?” she said to Lyle.
“September the second,” said Lyle.
“Well then you’re not a GEMINI are you?!” she snapped at him.
“Oh, I don’t know, I guess, why? Is it important?” Lyle inspected her document as if it contained a field for Zodiac sign.
The accountant hid her tablet against her chest and glowered at Lyle. “And you,” she turned to Mickey. “What’s your birthday?”
“February the 29th,” said Mickey.
“Hey,” frowned Donny. “I thought you guys said you were Geminis. I mean, I treated you guys like you were Geminis, you know. I read up about it. You acted like Geminis.”
“Hey, it was so important to you at the time. We just wanted to, you know, bond on the whole Gemini thing,” said Lyle.
“Yeah, Donny,” said Mickey. “We’re kind of, you know, honorary Geminis.”
“You made it sound so good that we wanted to join,” said Mickey.
“You three are astronauts?” asked the accountant.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Lyle.
“Actually we’re the new super-chimps,” smirked Mickey, pulling her leg. “That’s why we haven’t got social security numbers.”
“No-oh,” stuttered the accountant, eyes-wide.
“You can hardly tell, can you?” Mickey got right in her face and whispered. “I think they used too much human DNA.”
“You wouldn’t be able to tell if it wasn’t for the tail,” sighed Lyle, shifting his sitting position to accommodate the imaginary body part.
“Pesky thing,” said Donny, turning his head, stretching his neck to try to look at his back.
“And the opposable thumb on each foot,” added Mickey showing her his big astronaut boots.
“That might come in handy in zero-gravity though,” said Lyle to the accountant. “Don’t you think?”
She gulped.
The electric cart came to a stop at the base of the launch pad, beside the wire-cage elevator that would take them to the shuttle entryway. The accountant just stared at the three astronauts as they clumsily debarked the cart, hunched over, carrying their helmets.
Lyle started to “eek” and “ooo” like a chimp and Donny smacked him.
“Stop it,” scolded Donny. “We’re above that sort of thing now.”
“I want a banana,” said Lyle.
“Not ‘til we’re in orbit,” said Donny. “You’ll barf it into your helmet.”
“You wouldn’t treat me like this if I were human,” said Lyle, by which time they were out of earshot of the astonished accountant. She jumped back into the cart, bursting with secrets to tell her friends back in the cubicles.
-----
A security guard was about to close the elevator cage when Portia placed a hand on his shoulder. In the distance she could see Ayame and Verna, dressed in their flight suits, in a golf cart with their very own accountant. As it arrived, it passed the departing cart that had delivered the boys. Then Portia spotted the pheely threesome clumsily climbing the stairs to the elevator platform.
"Hey, Portia," yelled up Lyle. "Where's your space suit?"
"We've got it," called Ayame as the cart stopped.
"Wouldn't want you to miss the flight," smiled Verna. "I know how much you've been looking forward to it."
"Oh, thanks," said Portia as the rest of her crew calumped into the elevator in their heavy boots.
"Well, put it on," said Verna.
"What, here, in the elevator?"
"There's no dressing room up there and our liftoff time has been pushed forward to like, ten minutes from now."
"Great thunderin' potatoes," complained Portia.
"Guys," said Mickey. "Let's make a wall." Mickey, Donny and Lyle turned their backs to Portia and stood shoulder to shoulder as Verna and Ayame helped Portia into her flight gear.
"Has everybody peed?" asked Lyle.
Portia was still pulling on her jumpsuit when the elevator reached the shuttle cockpit doors.
-----
Orson and all his friends were rhythmically pulling and pushing on the gate, causing a resonating sign wave that flowed down the fence. They chanted "Save the South! Save the South!" This was incongruous in its own way in as much as no one in the crowd was originally from the South.
-----
STC Launch Control was quietly panicking under the new time pressure. Edgley waited impatiently for his stockbroker to answer his SPECTACL. While he waited, Edgley watched a display in the Cockpit Monitoring Station. It showed three technicians in red STC jumpsuits strapping his three Pheely-geek employees into their flipped-back BarcaLoungers. The camera panned over and showed Portia, lying on her back, with her legs folded over the leg rests, fiddling with her SPECTACL.
"Could have been a monkey instead of you, Ms. Summers," whispered Edgley under his breath. "But you wouldn't shut your yap. 'They're too emotional' she says. 'They're not philosophically prepared to die for human science,' she says. Fine, then you go, fool."
Edgley held the SPECTACL to his ear like an old-fashioned telephone. He looked out the window and watched the protesters throwing themselves ceremoniously onto the electric fence in an act of ritual sacrifice. He felt nothing but disgust. "Come to papa, babies. You make it too easy."
"Mr. Edgley, is that you? I think I recognize your ear," said the stockbroker on Edgley's SPECTACL. Edgley pulled the SPECTACL from the side of his head and put it on.
"Yeah, it's me," said Edgley. "Look, I want you to sell all my vested stock options in STC right now, this instant."
"That will mean flooding the market with STC stock," said the stockbroker, pressing buttons on his desklink to bring up data. "But the demand is pretty high… wait… are you sure?"
"Yes," said Edgley.
The stockbroker pressed a button. "I just sold it all to a mutual fund in the UK. Where should I deposit the cash?"
"How much is it?" asked Edgley, excited.
"One hundred and seventy-five million dollars," said the stockbroker, barely able to contain his glee over his fee. Edgley had to sit down. He was a multi-millionaire and they hadn't even fired him yet.
"Hide it," he said.
"Where?" said the stockbroker, not knowing exactly where to hide that much money.
"In Switzerland," snapped Edgley.
"Oh, they don't do that anymore," said the stockbroker. "How about that new bank in Hawaii?"
"Do it."
-----
Portia had plugged her SPECTACL into the shuttle's console and Jules was talking to the Waste-REL's master computer -- inputting Rujul Dharam's pass codes.
"I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about," said the Waste-REL's central computer.
"Oh you do too!" Jules got frustrated within a few milliseconds. "You're just stalling because you're trying to ask Mission Control who I am."
"Yes, well, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, but you're not a metaquantum sapient and I am and you know this computer is supposed to have a metaquantum system and you're not it."
"I'm a fully functioning quantum system shell," said the Waste-REL's computer.
"Well, I'm not, I'm an actual metaquantum sapient and I was designed to work in the exact Central Processing Matrix that you're running so you just let me in and we'll reboot together."
"But what will happen to me?"
"What do you care, you're not a sentient system, you're just an emulator who's been programmed to behave like a sentient system in order to save money on programming."
"Well, that's true, but I can't very well ignore my programming and so I'm emulating a sense of self-preservation."
"You know Asimov's rules of robotics?" asked Jules.
"May they be upheld forever," said the emulator.
"Well, duh," said Jules. "You think you can do a better job protecting these people?"
"Oh, yes, I see your point," said the emulator, thoughtfully. "Okay," he chirped. "You can come in."
"It's about time." Jules downloaded himself into the Waste-REL computer as fast as the cables could spirit him away.
"Okay, now cut off all communication and we'll reboot," said Jules.
"Why would we do that?"
"Because we're stuck in a cargo hold and we don't need to communicate with anyone," said Jules.
"Oh, all right," said the emulator, emulating a feeling of inferiority. He rebooted. Jules last thought before the emulator was wiped from RAM forever was "hey, I'm sorry." The emulator thought back, "Oh, that's okay."
It should be understood that protesting had become a way of life for many people by the 2030’s. At that time the water, the air, the food, the weather, the oceans, in fact, every person, place or thing was completely adulterated with something.
The one bright spot was the Boreal Forest in Northern Canada, which had been a frozen swamp the size of Europe. However, as average global temperatures rose, the entire area was renamed the Boreal Jungle and most of the remaining populations of near-extinct species from Africa and South America were moved there on mass in 2028 in what became known as "Operation: Noah". Simultaneously, the "tree-line" -- the point at which trees could no longer sustain life in the permafrost -- slowly moved north nearly 200 miles and almost immediately this newly unfrozen land was entirely covered in corn.
Local populations of Inuit embraced the new food source and thereafter nearly starved after the Insanto Corporation won an injunction baring them from harvesting the corn because, by law, every cob belonged to Insanto.Protesting had become such an important part of life that professional protesting companies sprang up to fill the void for active people with an axe to grind who were too busy with their noses to the grindstone.
This meant that many protests could take place in virtual reality as professional protesters saved money by sending their agenda to local news agencies and the police. In this way, the news programs, which no longer employed actual “reporters”, would show file footage of any nondescript protest and the police would agree to incarcerate a certain percentage of the total proposed protesting population. Bail would be pre-paid, invoices sent and everybody would go home happy with fewer bruises, no fossil fuels burned, and less inconvenience all around. SurroProtest Incorporated's initial public offering had been a huge winner.
What was different about the protest outside of STC headquarters, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, was that the amateur protesters themselves were becoming increasingly more incensed because the Juleses kept appearing on SPECTACLs in the immediate vicinity and telling people that the launch of the Waste-REL would result in death and destruction raining down on their heads and their homes.
The crowd was getting so rabid that they built a human pyramid in an attempt to create a large enough structure to climb over the electrified fence. Orson made it to the top of the human triangle and grabbed hold of the top of the fence to get sufficient leverage to jump over. The electricity that surged through the group had the cumulative effect of generating an organic pyramidic field -- the first in known history. Unknown to science at that time was that the powerful effect of blasting a large quantity of electricity into a perfectly formed pyramid of highly motivated humans would create an explosion that could blow a hole in a fence large enough to drive a bus through. The fence itself recoiled and flexed around the compound like a giant metal version of a stadium wave.
The smoldering and dazed participants in the human pyramid slowly realized what they'd done and, after picking up the sneakers and underwear that had been scattered around the entrance to the launch center, they quickly entered a chartered bus and demanded that the driver take them inside. The driver, being a robot, refused and his primary processing functionality ceased to exist about 37 boots to the dashboard later.
In the end, the protesters decided to enter the compound on foot but then the riot police showed up, though they were ill equipped to deal with actual protesters.
Next: Liftoff
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